Tesla released a doctored video in 2016 claiming to have a fully-functional system that needed humans only for legal reasons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo...

Over the years, they repeatedly pushed this narrative to sell cars. Tesla promised on several occasions to have millions of fully autonomous "robotaxis" on the road in 2020, making their owners in excess of $30,000 a year. Currently there are, of course, zero.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

Take a look at this video for what Tesla describes as a beta for their "Full Self Driving" system. A beta is, of course, meant to be feature complete software in final testing. Does this look like it's nearly ready to be pushed out to every car on the road?

https://twitter.com/BS__Exposed/status/1449158254081290242

> Do you want to back that up?

A simple question:

Where exactly are the robo-taxis that were promised in 2020 alongside with Level 5 FSD for release in 2019? [0].

[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...

The AI people are doing solid work as far as I can tell. It is the marketing department and the twittering CEO that are scamming.

They continue to work on this project despite knowing it is fraudulent, which makes them complicit.

Besides, I don't see that they're doing solid work. It would be solid work if they ditched pure vision and moved to a system that works. Instead they are putting in heroic efforts on a dead-end technology. That is impressive in the same way that getting Doom running on a TI-84 would be impressive.

I don't know, it depends on what your goal is. If you want to emulate human driving, then pure vision is a viable way to go. After all, humans drive also using pure vision.

But your car has to drive a lot more cautious than with more sensors, like lidar. Can't be 100% sure this white blob is not a truck? Then you have to slow down. With lidar, you can be a bit more robust, but you still need vision to identify objects.

And if your goal is to build a non-human driver, that is one that drives "perfectly" and pushes the speed envelope perfectly, then I think lidar is also only a stop-gap solution. What you'd want is active components in the street and in other cars. In other words, a virtual rail. In that case, you can accelerate and brake as aggressively as the humans inside would tolerate. You could accelerate together with the car in front of you in traffic jams, etc.

> pure vision

Not really. Why are you blatantly drinking that marketing BS cool aid coming from a wack twittering ceo? That so called "pure vision" is backed by our brains trained over decades. This is exactly why you have to be 18+ to be able to drive without any supervision.

Obviously Tesla lies or is insanely optimistic regarding timelines - but they have made some progress with automated driving.

Even if we gave them more time, it seems that it still doesn't work and is still completely unsafe for Level 5. Compared to other competitors when tested, this is all Tesla has to show for progress? [0]

A very long way to go for the Level 5 'robo-taxi' readiness claim by Tesla.

[0] https://carbuzz.com/news/tesla-model-3-runs-over-kid-dummies...

Obviously they've made some progress. It would be hard for them to have accomplished nothing at all after all they've invested. It's still nowhere near safe for public roads and there's no reason to think it ever will be.

Even their driver assistance features work worse than the competition.