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E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
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10 Oct, 5 tweets, 4 min read
You know how I know Teslas will never be "Full Self-Driving"?

Because the cameras are easily blinded by sun, rain, fog, mud and snow. Even humidity and temperature changes take them out. Also, the radar unit isn't heated so snow and ice can take it out.

Level 5 secured.
Receipts:

reddit.com/r/teslamotors/…
reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/…
reddit.com/r/teslamotors/…
teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ca…
teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap…
teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ho…
teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ri…
teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/b-…
teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/bl…
This is just scratching the surface, there's an almost endless supply of these reports. Day time, night time, good weather, bad weather. Tesla's hardware suite doesn't have sufficient sensor redundancy/diversity, let alone automated cleaning/heating solutions that real AVs have.
On a driver assistance system, this is mostly just an inconvenience (assuming you're actively monitoring, as you should!) but in a real autonomous vehicle it's an absolute show-stopper. If you're asleep in the back and the car suddenly goes blind, you're gonna have a bad time.
I should add that this is only one reason that Teslas on the road today will never be capable of the SAE Level 5 autonomous capability that the company has been selling... there are others.

This one is so basic, it almost seems like Tesla put zero thought into what an AV needs.

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More from @Tweetermeyer

E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
11 Oct
Does it matter what you call a Level 2 driver assistance system? A novel study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety shows that it definitely does, further validating the concerns @lizadixon voiced in her influential #Autonowashing paper aaafoundation.org/impact-of-info… Image
Basically, AAA looked at user mental models and behavior when two groups used the same Level 2 system... with one group they called it DriveAssist and the other they called it AutonoDrive (it was actually SuperCruise lol). The findings were pretty conclusive: names drive behavior Image
Folks... this is not good. Basically, branding is more powerful than even our own experience using a system. Everyone is going to say "yeah, but I'm not THAT dumb" but scientifically speaking you almost certainly are. Image
Read 7 tweets
E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
9 Oct
It's kind of adorable when people who subordinate 100% of their critical faculties to blind faith in Elon Musk think they can be effective at persuasion. Like, if I were going to be convinced by his arguments that would have happened when he made them in the first place!
It's also adorable when the fanboys have no idea that their faith puts them at odds with the scientific consensus around autonomous drive technology, to no less of a degree than climate deniers are with climate science. Maybe slightly less so than flat earthers, but not much.
This is the fascinating contradiction at the heart of Musk's appeal: being a fan of his makes people feel smart in the "I effing love science" way, but the relationship he demands (or his community cultivates) is rooted in faith, not critical thought or independent learning.
Read 4 tweets
E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
15 Sep
Wow, this is huge: the safety driver who was behind the wheel the night Elaine Herzberg was hit and killed by an Uber self-driving test vehicle is being charged with negligent homicide. Whichever way this case goes, it's going to set an important precedent.
What makes this case so tough: on the one hand, this safety driver was hired to monitor a development vehicle during testing and ensure its safety... but on the other hand we know that this is an almost impossible task to sustain, and distraction was inevitable.
To flesh out the second half of that: Uber had this safety driver working 10 hours per shift, at night, all alone, with no driver monitoring. There's a good deal of scientific research that suggests this set her up to inevitably fail. More on that here👇
Read 8 tweets
E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
13 Sep
$4b in CapEx alone for <500k units/year manufacturing capacity for a single model is the worst program-level capital efficiency I've ever heard of... in an industry that is infamously capital inefficient. And that's just what Tesla spent in 2017!
Some of that 2017 spend may have gone toward opening new sales/service locations and Superchargers to support the higher-volumes planned for Model 3. Then again, a good deal of 2016's $1.44b and 2018's $2.32b probably went into Model 3 manufacturing as well.
It's also super-important to recognize what all these billions bought: not a competitive flexible/scalable manufacturing system, but labor-intensive low-to-no-automation general assembly in a freaking tent. This makes M3 a capital efficiency failure of epic-historic proportions.
Read 5 tweets
E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
25 Aug
Hilariously, this "demonstration" actually shows off more of this (fake) battery swap system's functionality than Tesla's first battery swap demonstration... and that earned them tens of millions of dollars (if not hundreds) in "bonus' CARB ZEV credits!
Musk claimed at the time that this battery swap process was fully automated... but revealed precisely zero about its actual functionality during the "reveal" event. Watch for yourself.
This "demonstration" (some might call it a dog and pony show) was literally all Tesla had to do to earn almost double the ZEV credits for every car it made. No proof it was actually being used, or was really automated required. More here: dailykanban.com/2015/05/27/ana…
Read 8 tweets
E.W. Niedermeyer Profile picture
19 Aug
>starts taking customer cash for "Full Self Driving" in October 2016
>expects training infrastructure to be set up by mid-2021

🤔
I really go out of my way not to throw the "f word" around casually, but either "Full Self Driving" is a conscious fraud or it's a well-intentioned but profoundly bumbling exercise in fake-it-till-you-make-it.

In either case, not something you want to trust your life to.
The legitimate AV developer space has learned some tough, sobering lessons over the last couple of years about the price to be paid for overhyping. Musk's decision to just keep doubling down on hype will eventually lead to the same lessons, at a previously unimaginable scale.
Read 8 tweets

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