Some of the most common mis-conceptions I've seen include:
1. Level 5 Full Self Driving tech is right around the corner, with government regulation being the biggest show stopper. Elon promised "feature complete" of FSD by end of this year, and claims that within 6-12 months of that full level 5 self driving will be ready to ship to consumers.
2. Tesla is unique in their usage of computer vision in their FSD stack, and the rest of the industry only uses LIDAR. In reality almost everything Tesla does Waymo and others also do and very likely do it better, and on top of that they use LIDAR.
3. Since companies like Waymo employs pre-mapping and LIDAR, what they are building is a completely hardcoded solution to driving with very low degree of versatility and flexibility. I've seen Tesla fan suggesting that Waymo handles Stop Signs by hard coding the location of each stop sign in the map.
4. Because Auto Pilot, a level 2 driver assist system is being shipped in production cars and are racking up millions of miles, Tesla does not need any actual comprehensive testing of their FSD stack. I've seen many Tesla fans arguing this is why Tesla has done more test and gathers more "data" than companies like Waymo, when in reality Tesla's FSD system has seen almost ZERO actual testing anywhere, and puts them far behind competitors.
5. OTA updates makes Auto Pilot safer than competitors. In reality OTA very often enables less stringent QA and less rigorous regression testing. The Mountain View driver who was killed at the 85/101 on-ramp was the result of a terrible AP regression that failed to handle concrete barriers that it used to handle.
6. Auto Pilot is already safer than human driver because it has lower accidents/mile than the national average. This one is especially egregious since Tesla used active AP safety data compared against all motor vehicle accident data, which includes motorcycles and cars of all ages, driven by drivers of all ages, employing safety techs (or lack there of) of all levels, driving in all conditions. Where as active AP data is gathered by Tesla cars that's newer than 5 years old, driven by older, wealthier drivers, employs crucial safety tech such as automatic emergency braking, and only engaged during favorable conditions (mostly highway driving, clear weather, etc). When compared against data from cars with AEB, Auto Pilot has very comparative safety record.
Elon always had a tendency to be fast and loose with facts/predictions/promises, and usually I view them as entertaining at best and disappointing at worst, but with safety critical features like this what he's doing makes me feel borderline angry. A few major mistakes will set back the industry by years and as of now, Tesla is literally the only driver assist system that has a fatality count. I honestly cannot understand how any engineers with good conscious can still work on AP/FSD at Tesla and sleep well at night.
> 3. [..] I've seen Tesla fan suggesting that Waymo handles Stop Signs by hard coding the location of each stop sign in the map.
I'm sure you'll see uninformed individuals behaving uninformed. But in my experience does this not represent the average of e.g. the r/tesla community. It's surprising to have you specifically mention Waymo, since it was mostly others (especially German car makers) who usually bring up how important high precision maps (or more recently "5G", while we're mentioning buzzwords) is for self driving. My first google result right now was from Lyft [0]. I can totally understand how people less informed on the topic can get that wrong.
> 4. [..] when in reality Tesla's FSD system has seen almost ZERO actual testing anywhere
What? The usual argument I remember is Tesla outsourcing the testing to its customers and the many good reasons against it. But how can you in good faith represent the tesla AP as untested after it has driven millions of miles? Or are you specifically talking about whatever final L5 FSD solution Tesla might come up with one day? Since this obviously cannot be tested yet, since it doesn't exist.
> 5. The Mountain View driver who was killed at the 85/101 on-ramp was the result of a terrible AP regression that failed to handle concrete barriers that it used to handle.
Can you source that being caused by a regression? The best I've found [1] mentions someone else saying it got worse in a comparable spot, but I also remember reading the killed driver having specifically complained to Tesla about the location the crash happened, but not if AP behavior there had gotten better in between.
But yeah, a lot of Tesla's communication around that case was horrible and I also don't feel they do enough to stop their fans and customers from being aware of the technologies current limits.
[0] https://medium.com/@LyftLevel5/https-medium-com-lyftlevel5-r... [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tes...
According to Elon they will reach feature complete by end of this year, but somehow that's achieved without any real world testing and validation, and they are supposed to be shipping to customers by next year.
Uber had a fatal self-driving accident.
Elon says he thinks development cars will have FSD by the end of the year and you take it as a "promise" that they will have it and a "claim" that it will then be in production cars shortly thereafter.
He couched his predictions with a lot of caveats that you are ignoring while you engage in disingenuously calling the predictions "promises" and "claims."
If he "thinks" it is achievable with that short timeframe, he must have a project plan with milestones being predictably achieved in accordance with that schedule.
If instead there's no such plan, or the progress is not in line with prior internal expectations, he doesn't "think" it is achievable, he wishes it, and it is unlikely to be achieved by that time.
Whether it is a promise or not isn't the point!
Some of that difference could be accounted for in the types of miles customers choose to activate autopilot on vs drive manually, but it's certainly a positive sign.
People use Teslas cruise control in inherently safer situations. A proper comparison would compare identical road s - and would be done by a neutral body not involved with Tesla.
If I could warn anyone, I found our fellow 'highly educated' nerds, fall for marketing, similar to how we see the uneducated masses fall for populist politicians. I believe this is because these 'nerds', don't work in automotive and have limited understanding of 2019 automotive technology.
They're also wilfully misrepresenting the quality and safety of their technology to their customers, presenting intentionally misleading statistics to the media about it, and attempting to suppress all criticism by insisting it's part of some big oil / short seller conspiracy.