My father has a self driving enabled Tesla Model S which he paid a hell of a lot of money for that he doesn't have as he's in his 70s, living entirely off the remains of the house he just sold. He's convinced it'll be any day now that he gets full self driving and that it'll change the world. He tells me he loves the car and phones me daily to tell me about it. But at the end of the day there are a bunch of complaints hiding in his words. This covers everything from poor fitting, paint issues, weird bugs, massive safety and computer issues, lots of hidden costs and general battery life issues. He's hiding the true picture which is not the real experience.
Between Tesla marketing and the echo chamber Tesla forums, he's traded his entire cash pile and attention for what I can only describe as a prototype that is a ball and chain which limps between bouts of charging CPR and he can't tell anyone because it might damage his conspicuous virtuous electric car identity.
But Tesla will be introducing self driving any day now he tells me. All the time. For the last 3 years...
I'm not really a proponent or opponent of electric cars. I don't really care about the things as they don't factor into my life past the utility of a screwdriver. I myself drive a third-hand Citroen with a tuk tuk engine in it which was cheap to buy and run and takes me to the shops and for the odd weekend out. But from my vantage point, I can't see the return of investment that such complex technology can add to a simple problem. All it does is make it more complicated, less safe and less reliable while milking people for cash for promises which may never materialise. If there's anything I've worked out over the last couple of decades in the software industry is that this model really doesn't work - it's the marketing and development model that Microsoft uses.
Edit: he literally just phoned me to tell me how wonderful it is again. But it cost him 5% of the battery capacity to cool it down enough that it’s not going to burn his ass off (has sunroof) which means his next journey is going to have to end with a 10 mile detour to sit in a supercharger bay (which where he lives will be busy and he’ll have to wait) and thus probably cost a coffee at the same time.
I mean the worst of this is the Range Rover I hired for a wedding to drive the bride in. Headlights gave out due to an electrical problem with CANbus when I was driving it back to the hire return. Just give me some fuses, switches and relays thanks.
My iPhone has 100x better navigation, media and communications support than anything else I’ve used. So I just slave it to the car with BT. I don’t even use CarPlay because bugs (Ford, Land Rover, Citroen in particular).
Keep the software and hardware separate and keep the hardware simple.
I also bet on simplicity, both because it's much cheaper, and because it gives me less trouble. Fuses, switches and relays, as you say.
I simply don't trust a company who already has my money to maintain a software package on wheels, and I just don't trust software in general.
For the price of a Tesla you should be getting so much more inside especially at the S/X price level. Compared to the Mercs and BMWs I looked at a Tesla was more comparable to a nice Honda.
Look at what BMW offers for an EV. The i3, at $44k base. The i3 is basically a midlevel compact sedan. The Model 3, which you can get for $4k cheaper, is a way better deal IMHO.
As someone with similar car, you get to know it’s quirks and use it when it adds value.
And those aren't quirks; they are big stinking problems. Never write down a problem as something that isn't one. I owned a Merc 190E once that was a bag of problems. My life got better and I got happier the day I acknowledged them and got rid of it.
Toyota frames rust out. KitchenAid gears strip (and half the stuff they put their name on is just badged garbage to begin with). Snap On tools break. LL Bean stuff wears our prematurely. Being in a "good school district" fails to magically make your kid successful. The guy with the $2k fishing setup gets out-fished by the teenager with the $40 setup who knows what makes the fish in that spot bite. Fancy pans don't make you a good cook. But yet people do all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify the things they paid top dollar for as still being the best crap ever even when they fail them. Nobody expects stuff made at scale to be perfect 100% of the time but the owners of premium stuff sure act like that is the case.
You see this sort of failure denialism with all sorts of premium products. People actively refuse to believe that something else, something cheaper, could have been equivalent or better for their use case.
This seems to be a very 21st century phenomenon; product marketing gets replaced by cult membership. You don't buy a Tesla to experience a great car, you buy Tesla to tell everyone how great the experience is.
And before anyone calls this sad (which it might or might not be), consider that the alternative is either isolation by rejecting all forms of tribalism, or tribes formed around more harmful old school ideas (religious cults, violence-based tribes, tribes based on race/gender/etc.), or tribes we were born into and have no choice to leave because we can’t just buy the services of a farmer, a plumber, or a babysitter and have to rely exclusively on our tribe for those kinds of needs.
It's a worldwide phenomenon that motorcyclists in general wants to be open and inclusive. We wave to each other when we pass on the road, talk when we meet at gas stations and so on. But a Harley is not a motorcycle, it is a Harley. Most don't wave back, all frown if you try to talk to them if not out on your own Harley today but some Japanese bike and so on. Tesla and Apple users are very often in the same category of religious fanaticism for no good reason except brand loyalty. That is sad as one should be able to own a Harley, be part of a Harley crowd and not be religious about it but most (not all!) fall into this trap.
A tribe that is divided because of some businesses PR is always sad and harmful.
Secondary thing is that motorcycling is just a larger and looser consumer tribe than Harley or Yamaha or Ducati riders. Not quite as large as motorcycles + trikes, which is still smaller than bikes, trikes, and scooters. To some degree it is turtles all the way down in terms of how exclusive vs inclusive you want to be.
I personally don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with consumer tribes. The question is how does each one treat its members and newcomers and is it a healthy environment for everyone involved?
I'm guessing you are from the US, which I'm not, but I have never seen this in other bikers no matter the brand. Sure Ducati guys often hang out with eachother at a meet, as do other groups, but it's not like they don't greet other riders.
Heck, I even wave (end get waved at) when I drive my Alfa Romeo by both other Alfa drivers but also people in classic cars (and a few Ducati riders even). Totally different cultures than Harley riders, which I think is sad.
It really doesn't bother me whether it gets better or they add full self driving. Charging your car isn't a big stinking problem, it's an inherent feature.
Obviously we don't know GP's dad, but that was clearly the intent of GP's post.
I’ve heard more people describe it as “a computer with wheels” than I can remember.
I’m even more sharp with the description. It’s a no brand android tablet with wheels.
My Citroen feels better put together and it’s made of cooking foil.
But fundamentally the issues are flawed analysis rather than defective implementation.
I used to work in high-frequency equity trading. We would run simulations against tick-by-tick data from real markets. The simulations were of very questionable value. As soon as you trade once in your simulation, from that point onwards the whole run is contaminated. Your trade, if it had actually happened, would have been seen by other participants, who would have changed their strategy, often in complex and unpredictable ways, and the timelines would have diverged rapidly and irreversibly from that point.
Data recorded from driving situations is useful for one thing - testing out split-second decision making - stop or accelerate? Steer left or right? This is a limited use case. Most situations don't have critical decisions like this. The ones that do, it's often hard to judge what would have been the right answer. Even accidents - where the post facto desired outcome is "don't have an accident", unfold over several seconds, involving several stages of actors responding to each others' actions. No one can be sure how the driver should have approached the very first interaction - the only one for which the data is meaningful.
Actual road testing, and meaningful simulation which isn't just replaying what actually happened is much more useful.
Even they admitted fully autonomous vehicles most likely won't be a thing any time soon (maybe ever if we keep our current infrastructure)
https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...
I'd definitely pay a few bucks per hour for my car to drive me to Southern California while I read a book.
I have never been to US, but whenever I hear about self driving cars I think: why don't people just use public transport if they don't want to drive?
It has a terrible rail system if you're a passenger. Connectivity is weak, and even if you have a direct route, almost all the rails are owned by freight lines, so freight traffic gets priority and schedules are rarely met. If you have to make a connection, good luck. There's some exceptional routes in the north eastern US, where there's a lot of rail and some of it is passenger exclusive.
The question is more likely to be flying vs driving than take a train vs driving, because a train will nearly always take longer and be less convenient.
But there's no direct way to get from SF/SJ to LA/OC via train. There are buses, but they are considerably less enjoyable than the Pacific Surfliner line!
With your own car you can bring as much stuff as you want, stop where you want, leave when you want, go wherever you want at your destination, bring whoever you want, listen to what you want on the radio, stop where you want for side trips/tourist things along the way etc.
Like for instance with my own car instead of a shared train, I can bring my golf clubs, my dog, and my drone with me, and call my friend on the way out of town to see if he’s up for a spontaneous trip to San Diego to see what fun we could get up to there for the weekend. That’s not really possible on a train/airplane.
It’s just a totally different experience than arriving to a train station with some limited set of your things, possibly being late, then arriving somewhere else again without a car, and having to return again by doing all of this in reverse.
It also means spending time forced to socialize with people you don’t know, and almost definitely in a seat that is less comfortable than the one in your $100k luxury car.
US population density is typically low, even in many cities.
This means that any reasonable spending on buses and train routes ends up with relatively infrequent service to places not too close to you.
This is self-reinforcing, too. Everyone taking cars for all trips means you need lots of space for parking and roadways, which spreads things out and makes walking and transit less practical.
Also, you can get blocked in a traffic jam when you don't want.
This is self perpetuating: Changes in urban planning that would allow most homes in the US to be good residences without a car would involve not just demolishing most cities and starting over. This isn't even just about demolishing suburbs: Even downtowns are built in ways that optimized for the car. Go to your favorite mapping app, and look at, say, St Louis. You will find many buildings are just parking lots, very few storefronts, very wide streets designed to be driven at 60 km/h, and with very few pedestrian crossings... All the infrastructure that makes it easy for most workers to live 20-30 of wherever they work just makes building a useful public transport system unfeasible for a city, and even more so when most voters would be unable to use it.
The same problem is there in small cities, and even villages. A small town in Italy that lives from summer tourism is going to be easy to deal with even without using public transport, and just walking. The American equivalent is unmanageable without a car.
Those that want to avoid driving in the US end up either paying people to drive for them all the time, or live in the pedestrian friendly parts of a handful of cities. And if you haven't visited the US, you probably also haven't seen how expensive is to live in those areas. So, if anything, it's much easier to live without a car if you are a pretty wealthy tech worker than if you are a server at a restaurant, or work at a retailer. The less your job pays, the harder it is to not drive a car.
Imagine a couple of a bank teller and an insurance agent. If they need to move to Madrid, it's very likely that they will find living arrangements where it's easier to go to work via public transport, as most places do. If you do the equivalent in Houston TX, it's almost guaranteed one of them will have to drive to live a comfortable life, and most likely both.
The US has good train infrastructure for freight (far better than Europe), but rail service is not great. There's no good train route from the SF Bay Area to Southern California. But even if there were, getting around in the LA area practically requires a car, so you'll be renting one at the end of a train journey anyways.
So, the options to get my family down there look like:
* $100 roundtrip flight * 5 of us = $500 plus the cost of renting a car. Annoying airport logistics and luggage, and a few hours of time saved
* ~$300 of wear on vehicle and gas round trip, plus having to drive for 6 hours.
A good train would be something inbetween-- perhaps $30-40/person, but still needing to rent a car. Somewhat easier logistics, but still annoying luggage, etc. Time between that of a flight, etc.
But a self-driving car would take the worst suck out of the driving trip.
Going to the city near me, I have these options to take two adults and a child:
1. Train - 5 minute walk, 1 hour travelling including a change. Trains run once per hour, costs £16 while my son is under 5.
2. Bus - 25 minute walk (at adult speed), 45 minute travelling each way. Runs every 20 minutes I think, costs ~£8.
3. Drive - 25 minutes travelling each way, no walk. Costs ~£1 in petrol + £2 tolls. Technically costs would be higher if you include wear & tear on the car itself but not by a great deal.
This is probably the least fair comparison to the car as well. Most other places nearby have the same major issues with travelling, or worse. A trip to the beach would be a 10 minute drive with no tolls but the same 25 minute walk to the bus stop and then a slow bus.
Added to this the amount of stuff we may have on us (pram, bag of various things for changes, snacks, lunch, etc). If there's more of us, or once our kid grows up more the costs go up for everything other than the car.
Anyone still believing in fully autonomous cars as they are presented by Musk &co today (the real thing, not a cruise control that only works on California's highways on a sunny day) is 101% delusional.
We'll talk about it in 15 years as the "previous AI hype cycle".
Their marketing, however, is top notch, so whenever Tesla fails to deliver, people conclude that 'all selfdriving must be crap'.
Is there something called 'Law of inhibiting leadership'? In which an underperforming leader of a segment holds back the entire segment?
It has it's quirks but they are easy to get used to and after a few years, I know pretty much exactly where it is extremely reliable and where it will get it wrong.
The behaviour is extremely boringly reliable - which is exactly what it should be and doing a few hundrer km on a good highway is now much much more relaxing than before.
They are radically different experiences.
From the original description, my suspicion is it’s the regular (i.e. not advanced beta) “full self driving“ package, which I have on my model 3.
Truth is, it’s pretty limited, and you’ve got to learn the types of situations where it will and won’t cope. Through town, situations with parked cars, or weird lane markings, it will struggle.
However, the flipside is that on longer journeys – with mostly open roads, it does very well indeed. I recently did a three+ hour drive and the car drove for probably 80% of that time, and without any issues at all. Once you get used to its foibles and therefore understand when you can trust it, it really is a relaxing experience.
If I had a regular commute and self-driving was considerably beyond human competence I'd love to have it, but I don't see either one happening any time soon!