Thread by @maxrdlb

#twitterfiles #autopilot - Chapter 2: Postponed, Delayed, Deferred

"When I dropped off my son at the school parking lot, the car suddenly shot forward."

The complaints do not match the plans with which Musk regularly attracts attention. "I think we will be able to achieve truly autonomous driving in five or six years," said the Tesla CEO in October 2014.

In January 2016, Musk stated that autonomous driving was "essentially a solved problem". At the Tesla Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto in April 2019, Musk said it would be "financial madness to buy anything other than a Tesla. It would be like owning a horse in three years."

By 2020 "we will definitely have a million robo-taxis," said Musk. "We'll probably build cars without a steering wheel and pedals in two years."

Things turned out differently. On April 19, 2023, Musk presented the business figures for the first quarter of 2023. Net profit fell by 24 percent YoY, which was mainly due to the discounts that Tesla has been granting for months. The stock fell by six percent after the report.

The Tesla CEO made a new promise. The trend was "clearly towards fully autonomous driving, towards complete autonomy," Musk told analysts. Tesla was making dramatic progress. His forecast: "I hesitate to say this. But I think we'll make it this year."

Tesla encapsulates the future of mobility in three letters: FSD. They stand for Full Self-Driving. The electric car manufacturer offers the FSD software package to its customers for a surcharge of 15,000 US dollars.

The US corporation pursues a specific approach. Unlike its competitors, Tesla today only uses cameras for its autopilot. Their images are evaluated and interpreted by artificial intelligence.

Additional systems, such as radar or laser sensors, which virtually all other competitors rely on, were long rejected by Musk. Meanwhile, Tesla is experimenting with radar technology again.

Tesla's Autopilot is still a pure driver assistance system. Customers in the US as well as in Europe are legally required to keep their hands on the steering wheel and their eyes on the road at all times. This is also stated in the manuals of Musk's electric cars.

However, this does not prevent Tesla from marketing the most expensive version of the autopilot as "Full Self-Driving". Some critics therefore accuse Musk of misleading customers.

One of them is Tesla's founder, Martin Eberhard. He considers it "dangerous" to put an autonomous vehicle "on the road before it is 100 percent safe and reliable".

Engineer Eberhard founded Tesla in 2003 and was ousted from the company a few years later by his former investor Musk. Eberhard is not alone in his assessment of the autopilot.

Apple legend Steve Wozniak told in a CNN interview in May that Musk himself had convinced him early on to buy a Tesla, also with the promise that the vehicle could drive autonomously across the country by the end of 2016.

"I actually believed that, and it's not even remotely realistic," Wozniak said. Instead, customers should be afraid that the autopilot is trying to "kill them at every opportunity".

California billionaire Dan O’Dowd, with his company for mobility sector software, is effectively a competitor of Tesla - and at the same time a harsh critic of Musk.

O’Dowd has founded the initiative "The Dawn Project". It aims to expose safety deficiencies in systems from other providers. Its main target: Tesla and its autopilot. In February, O’Dowd paid seven million dollars for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl.

The final game of the NFL was watched by more than 113 million people in the US alone. The clip showed allegedly self-driving Teslas ignoring traffic rules, ramming a stroller, and a child-sized dummy on a crosswalk. Ending with: "Tesla's Full Self Driving endangers the public".