Keep hope alive: AP1 12 months hardware -> release. AP2 not yet 1 year

[calisnow]

October 19 will mark 12 months since Tesla announced that all new cars were shipping with AP2 hardware. I've said it before - but I'll say it again now that we are 4 weeks from being "1 year" post-AP2 announcement:

It was a full 12 months from October 2014's surprise AP1 announcement to the very first release of AP1's software. Tesla had the benefit then of using a pre-trained neural net from Mobileye for object recognition.

We are only 11 months post-AP2 hardware - in which Tesla has gone from totally zero to the current state of AP2. The cars are now uploading many GB each to Tesla - we are seeing incremental releases and updates roughly every 3-4 weeks.

Despite the missteps and overpromises I still have faith that Tesla's massive data gathering advantage over all other competition may result in it getting to a commercial FSD solution before anyone else does. They are orders of magnitude ahead of the competition in terms of encountering corner cases and building a huge training data set.

Again - I think the progress has been stunningly fast. Glass half full. Maybe I'm just crazy. 5 seconds into this song you can hear @Bladerskb shouting at me from stage left.

 

[xyeahtony]

i agree. Tesla has made quick progress from basically starting from scratch. But people are still in the ICE-mentality where what you buy is everything you get at once. Incremental progress is a whole different concept.

 

[bob_p]

When AP2 hardware first went into production - Tesla promised it would be working at AP1 levels by December. Missed that...

Several months ago, Musk promised a "silky smooth" AP2 release - and while the software doesn't jerk back and forth as much as it did earlier, it's still not ready for prime time - and we've given up on using it (we're still stuck on the .32 release).

Tesla's had a revolving door in the leadership for the AP group - which is always a concern on major projects, especially before the first major release is distributed.

And, we don't seem to be hearing much from Tesla the last few months on AP. They quickly introduced an AP2.5 release, including what may be a re-introduction of the rain sensor - which raises questions as to whether or not the AP2 hardware will ever work.

While we remain optimistic Tesla will get there, after spending over $100K on a new S 100D this year, including $8K on activation of EAP/FSD, we're not sure if we'll pull the trigger on our Model 3 (Q4 2017?), because a major reason why we wanted the Model 3 was to replace our old S P85 with another Tesla with EAP/FSD hardware.

While Tesla isn't alone in having a longer than expected delay in release major new functionality, we're about 9 months behind Tesla's original promise on AP1-level functionality, we still don't have the automatic rain sensors - and we don't have any information from Tesla about when they believe they'll actually provide what they promised for last December.

At this point, this project is so late, they'd be better off in just coming clean - becoming more transparent, admit this is harder than they originally expected - and be honest about how far they are from getting AP2 hardware from really working...

 

[calisnow]

@bob_p - you'd be a great remix dj. Or a writer for Cliffnotes.

 

[jlund]

As a Tesla investor, I'm really glad they are avoiding transparency about being behind schedule, reasons for employee turnover, and obvious challenges they are having trying to catch up to HW1's autopilot, let alone showing signs of enhanced autopilot. I don't even have to mention FSD...

As a HW2 owner...

 

[jlund]

Don't get me wrong, I get it. In another 12 months (a blip in time) the car's ability will be exponentially better. AI is mind blowing stuff.

But I get suckered into the marketing machine at Tesla and forget that they are selling you a future product, not a present one.

 

[whitex]

i agree. Tesla has made quick progress from basically starting from scratch. But people are still in the ICE-mentality where what you buy is everything you get at once. Incremental progress is a whole different concept.

Huh? Wanting all the features that you pay for to work is somehow related to wanting to drive an internal combustion engine? Care to enlighten us how you came to thing conclusion?