There are multiple tells that this move, just like the removal of radar, is supply-chain and cost-driven and not actually driven by engineering.
If this were a planned move, the software would already be ready to replace it. It is not. Cars without radar still aren't at parity with the car that have it, although they "fixed" this a few weeks back by simply turning off the radar on the older cars.
The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this, and downright dishonest to characterize it as some kind of leap forward.
The cheapest bargain-bin cars have this feature. Your $100k+ Model S or X will not.
Even more concerning: some features simply cannot be replaced by camera. Tesla infamously does not have a front bumper camera, making it impossible to detect obstructions occluded from view by the hood. For 3/S, which are low, this means it will be impossible to detect low obstructions like too-high concrete wheel stops and similar obstructions. Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist.
Laughable that this is being done on cars from a high-end brand, and that the remedy for customers who are getting worse cars today than you would get yesterday is to wait for these features to "be restored" at some indeterminate time in the future.
With the removal of radar, they showed some pretty convincing data that the radar was too noisy to be useful, especially with discriminating things like highway overpasses vs. stopped cars. They showed that vision could already outperform radar.
With these parking sensors it's different. They have no current alternative and it will cause a pretty significant loss of functionality. Disappointing move.
> They showed that vision could already outperform radar.
important to note that much like there is a wide range from bad cameras (“filmed with a potato”) to high resolution cameras, there is a wide variety of radars with different capabilities.
the radar unit in Teslas was pretty limited (basically designed for adaptive cruise control), and they showed that vision could outperform that radar (and have no interest in exploring non-vision approaches because “humans can drive with just eyes”)
In fact, there are many many many more signals that your eyes give your brain than just a 2d grid of pixels, which is why cheap off the shelf cameras slapped all over a car CANNOT do what two eyes can.
Your eyes also give coarse distance info by having to adjust focus, slight parallax (which depends on a HUGELY POWERFUL and pretty good edge detection and object classification system), an ability to perceive distance by the slight difference in orientation your eyes have to look at something in 3D space, some information about YOUR OWN head's orientation and movement, and a brain with a rough approximation of a simulation of the world around you to constantly check/verify any info against.
The brain seems to make most of the resolution up, it seems the eyes really can see only a small area. The rest is made up by object permanence.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
Modern sensors combined with computational photography does seem to be changing this though.
For example, I now use my phone camera to see where I'm going at night if it's dark, and to read distant text. This is despite my (corrected) eyesight being better than 20/20 and I have better than usual night vision.
The eyes are fantastic organs, but the thing that makes them exceptional is the brain. Computers seem to be catching up with that.
Flashlight's have come a long way. I much prefer that to using my phone, especially on Android where opening the camera can be finicky and turning on the lamp requires a ridiculous amount of steps compared to the iPhones. Especially handy if out in the cold with gloves. Armytek prime c2 pro is pretty great.
I do love a good torch, and I keep one on me most of the time.
However, I meant non-illuminated phone camera. The new low light sensors combined with AI is incredible. They can see things when it looks pitch black to me.
Also not sure how opening a camera is finicky, just double tap the power button and it opens for me, and turning on the flash takes two taps - though I rarely use the flash.
Why do you have to open the camera in order to use the flashlight on an android phone? The button to turn the flashlight on is in the quick settings panel which can also be opened from the lock screen.
That's not actually the case, from what I heard. Most of our peripheral vision is smudged 720p at best, and we can only see a tiny focused area at slightly beyond 4K density. We also can't look at two things at once.
I'd love to see the convincing data RE: radar - they're using the same radars as every other car that has emergency braking from the car in front of the car that's in front of you. I've not heard of many "phantom braking" sessions from these other vehicles - I may have missed something.
Allow me to take you for a drive in my Volvo V90. I turned the auto-braking feature off entirely because it spits false positives like crazy. Parked cars, signs, birds, cars travelling through roundabouts across my nose, nothing at all - they all trigger it, and the car stomps the brakes extremely hard. The 2017 VW Golf it replaced was FAR better - maybe two false positives in 5 years. The Volvo? Daily.
I have a model X raven (2019) and model 3 awd (late 2021), both have radar and hw3, and both have the update that has disabled the radar.
Pre-patch there was maybe a phantom brake (hard brake) every six months, but lots of small slowdowns where you could almost sense the car got conflicting input (once pr 100 km maybe).
The latter is gone and I have not had any phantom brakes yet, but I've had a slow down where a bus went into my lane. The cars behaviour in stop and go traffic is also much better now.
The only regression I've found is that it's a bit more confused in a local spot where the road splits in two in a turn to the right. In the past it went into the right lane without much fuzz, but now it is confused for a second or two before it decides on the right lane.
Tbh, as a daily user of these cars I think the no radar update was an improvement.
Also, my experience with the Volvo one (on XC90 tho) was that it would happily plough into cars standing at a red light in front of me if I would let it.
Where do you drive? I feel at least some of it depends of driving style and culture... Rental MB I had in Spain had phantom braked few times a day until I eased off. Other cars in LT and NZ - maybe once a month or less.
And by phantom braking I mean emergency braking a bit too early - i.e. I am perfectly aware I am too close to a car in front, I have foot on brakes and I see how traffic flows, yet the car brakes.
In Sydney, Australia. I’d say I’m quite a conservative, safe driver (I have kids). I don’t tailgate, and actually I’ve never had it false positive on a car driving in front of me. It’s typically on stationary objects, or small moving objects. Or on nothing at all shrug
Hypothetically, Tesla would spin this story differently in no time if they are making great strides in a cheap solid-state radar.
For now, though, it looks like Tesla is building a case after they decided to do away with radar. I recall EM saying that it looks ugly and expensive too. I really got confused when Telsa came up with this patent though https://twitter.com/iamkellex/status/1534240730633236480?s=2...
No one sensor will work for all use cases; each has pros and cons. Radar really shines with depth sensing; it can cut through rain, fog, and snow like a hot knife through butter, much better than pure vision-based systems. At the same time, it seems to fail during harsh breaking and maybe a few other scenarios.
The ability to cut through rain, fog, and snow is precisely why so many companies use radar based systems - that's arguably when they are the most important and useful.
Leaning further into their vision systems when their vision systems cause their cars to slam into emergency vehicles that aren't even in travel lanes, and to rear-end tractor trailers, isn't encouraging. Musk is placing the rest of us at risk and I'm sick of it.
I get phantom forward collision warnings on my car quite often, a 2015 VW Jetta TDI SEL. There are a few places where it triggers ~1/3 of the time while driving on a clean road with no other cars around in either direction.
The system doesn't trigger breaking just a warning alarm beep and dash screen warning message, but all these systems are unreliable at this point, even the newer ones have these same false positives and false negatives.
It does make sense to err a bit on the side of caution for warnings. With warnings, a false positive is better than a false negative. It’s better to occasionally annoy the driver (within reason) than fail to warn for an accident.
This isn’t the case with braking. You want to have a high degree of confidence in that scenario because you don’t want to cause an accident. It’s better to react later to an impending collision than it is to cause an accident that would have never happened.
I got a ton of phantom braking just two weeks ago when I rented a 2020 Toyota Corolla with this feature. I've also gotten it in a 2019 Tesla Model 3, of course.
Anecdotally I've been driving a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid for around 2 years now and haven't ever experienced phantom braking. I have driven it all around Australia (Melbourne, Sydney, Coffs, Brisbane) and the driver assist features have been nothing except rock solid reliable.
I have noticed though that it is very timid when people are leaving their lane, and it takes a few seconds to decide that a car has fully left its lane. It will brake as though the car is still in your lane well after it is gone. I'm not sure I'm going to hold it against Toyota, because I'd prefer it to be timid in case the other driver does something unpredictable like change their mind. If you press the accelerator pedal lightly when you notice someone leaving the road, the software will cancel out the braking.
I drive a 2018 Hyundai IONIQ EV. The forward radar is hit-and-miss in heavy rain: the car will often barrel quite happily into stopped traffic when it’s raining hard, requiring a stomp on the brake pedal.
Just a couple weeks ago I was driving on the motorway around 4am, no other traffic for miles, and the forward collision alert sounded and the car slammed on the brakes for ~quarter of a second and then released as if nothing had happened and we merrily resumed our journey. Having the brakes slam on at a smidge over 100 km/h gave me a sore shoulder and quite the rush of adrenaline, quite the rush at 4am!
Not braking per se, but on all cars I've driven recently (ie some Seat Alteca, our BMW F10 5-series and maybe 2 more a bit longer ago) there is sometimes collision warning in situation where no collision is about to happen.
Seat was pretty bad in this, had it rented for 2 weeks in Sicily few weeks ago and first few times all screens start flashing like crazy in normal situations is very distracting (since I wasn't sure what the heck is happening, but it looked sinister). BMW is pretty subtle with this, and only happened few times in past year.
I imagine if this warning system would be also connected to breaks, bad things would be happening.
They were using the radar for lane guidance. That's why they had to have a whitelist of locations where the radar was false triggered by the roadside environment. It never actually worked properly and they just papered it over with a hack to temporarily blind their input.
Radar has a longer wavelength than visible light. Thus making it better at some stuff and worse at others. It's a crime to not be using as much of the EM spectrum as possible for an application like this.
Some pretty convincing data that they handpicked to make themselves look good and pretend they don't need a radar, a lidar and that vision only is good enough.
Perpetuating a pattern of lies from Tesla, ever since they started on self driving.
You don’t need to take Tesla’s word for anything. Their latest vision stack is in the hands of ten thousand customers, some of whom regularly post their drives on YouTube.
But that’s the thing. Tesla wasn’t able to tell when the radar was “uncertain”. So when do you trust one data source more than the other? If it was so easy to label misinformation as such, the misinformation would probably not have been communicated in the first place. Tesla explained this at AI day 1.
If the vision stack is just below its certainty threshold that a car is coming across at 63mph at some angle and can't quite decide to take action on its own, and at the same time radar indicates a car is coming across at the predicted angle and speed, it should push it over the threshold, even if it might get false positives from overhead bridge traffic Lining up with the vision estimate makes that less likely, and the vision stack itself can also be used to exclude data that might be from an overhead bridge by detecting that there is no bridge nearby.
No sensor is certain and can be blindly trusted - the data is going into a neural net anyway so the computer can be trained to understand what the most likely ground truth is given all sensor data.
> With these parking sensors it's different. They have no current alternative and it will cause a pretty significant loss of functionality. Disappointing move.
I'm especially worried by dark garages / parkings. Tesla cams have already enough problems when outside is too dark.
> They showed that vision could already outperform radar.
Except on emergency vehicles parked in a lane at an oblique angle, which Teslas did not recognize, and plowed into at speed. I wonder what unknown secondary effects this change will bring.
> Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist.
I have observed that this is how vision is currently implemented, but does it have to be this way? I can pull up to a concrete wheel stop in my Toyota without vision and without the sonar enabled even though my eyesight is occluded by the hood because I know where it was and how far I have moved. Concrete wheel stops do not flicker out of existence when you stop looking at them, they should be able to monitor the wheel speed sensors and shift the 3D map of the world into your camera blind spots, perhaps showing a "hidden" wireframe on the cameras.
It would be inconvenient if you were unable to pull forward because a tumbleweed or (more likely) plastic bag rolled through, but you could back up and try again or the human could decide to ignore the beeping.
Granted, I'm not a domain expert, but we do this in my field of industrial robotics when building models with 3D vision. The computer can composite multiple profiles into a single higher-resolution image, can return data about that model when the camera on the EOAT has moved such that the field of view is limited, and can provide faults when the model does not match a previous image because something has been added or removed while the camera wasn't watching.
The car parks and turns off, with no obstacles in front.
While parked a child/dog/bucket of concrete materializes directly in the front blindspot.
Next time the car drives, it has no knowledge of this obstruction.
This isn't a huge problem for a car driven by a human, since you can and should check around the car before driving, or will have other context clues that there is a child or dog or whatever running around your car, but this seems incompatible with the stated goal of making all current cars into Robotaxis.
Lol that's horrendous. I had a Mercedes with automatic parking assist back in 2016 that would do it perfectly 10/10 times, used it all the time too(narrow streets in the UK). What's shown in the video is just hilariously bad.
Old Tesla was using mobileye systems, that powers half of the automotive world. Tesla later started to abuse it, mobileye got angry and they stopped working together. Since then Tesla's tech is in house and in many aspects still behind 10 years old product.
I don't use the automatic parking, but I find the ultrasonics quite useful in my own parking, maybe I've been more lucky or just more hyper careful, but I've never scratched the front or rims on a curb. The feedback about the shape of the obstruction and the distance it is away from you is great, much better than my 2014 era vehicle. I would like to see some lower sensors, maybe a single pixel lidar to look for curbs or something, but I think that is going the wrong way with component count for them.
To just say that these features that are pretty standard on any other car at this price point are "coming soon" is laughable with Telsa's delivery cadence. I'll wait for vision based parking, I'm sure it's coming right on the heels of full self driving in 2019 (not here,) smart summon in 2019 (delivered in what, 2021, and the only thing I've seen it do is nervously back out of a spot then try to merge into a surface street instead of pick me up,) The Tesla Semi, Tesla Cyber truck, and now a robot, which is hilarious because they couldn't even get the million dollar industrial robots to work on their line, can't say I've got a lot of faith in some 20k robot from Tesla.
No, they overpromise and basically just don't deliver, why anyone would take Tesla's word for this I don't know.
Having slightly more than average (researched the industry as an outsider) knowledge of industrial robotics. It turns out million dollar industrial robots are kind of like enterprise software. You "buy" an ERP/CRM/etc but it doesn't just work out of the box, theres weeks and months of work-hours needed to try and get it actually integrated into a company, and it still might not work since software has bugs, humans are fallible, and huge software with endless features sometimes forgets which ones still work properly in combination with others.
Industrial robots are kinda like this too. You can buy an arm based on physical specs like how large it is, how precise it is with certain weights of objects (because it may be less precise with larger objects), how quickly it can move around, how quickly it can get from precision point A to precision point B (because precision and speed are a tradeoff once weight is involved due to momentum), how much power it uses, is it hydraulically powered or electrically powered, available off the shelf end effectors provided by the manufacturer... etc.
Then you have to install it, as in mechanically bolt it to the ground (which might have issues with load cantilevering), mark safety areas humans cant be in when its operating (that could require redesigning the entire floor plan of a building depending on how much spare room there is around everything because people still have to get around to other important things when the robot is doing its job), then you have to program the robot (which can in some ways be simple xyz coordinate motion, but also you need to tie it into some form of process control software so it knows when to do its job, and other things around it know when to do theirs, and process control systems are software, and may not be compatible, or have bugs, etc), then you have to maintain it (spare parts, breakdown rates, warranty turnaround times, industrial equipment built to be used, is sometimes used to do things that will wear them out, but its at a known rate that was planned for, but is not lived up to, requiring replanning or additional costs)
Its a web of complexity that can lead to what seems simple "just buy a robot to lift this thing from here to there and then buy another robot to weld it to the car" ... into a project that takes piles of money, months of work-hours by multiple different disciplines from construction to programming, and anything going wrong dominos down the line making it take even longer and cost more...
I wouldn't hold failing to get industrial robots working against them. Feel free to continue holding all the other opinions though :) everyone is entitled to our opinions after all... i just had something relevant to say about the robots.
As an insider of the automated manufacturing space, your ERP analogy is good but missing one detail: every other large company eventually gets an ERP working. Tesla is an outlier in regard to their manufacturing processes and even much lower margin industries tend to design new factories around the automation platform yet Tesla just...doesn't?
I've never worked with Tesla so have no inside info on their situation but their factory designs have always seemed strange to me - like they refuse to follow industry norms.
Not entirely invalidating your point, but it’s worth keeping in mind how many organisations will publicly declare an ERP project has been “finished successfully” in various PR channels, while staff will be stuck shouldering the burden to maintain duct tape and bailing wire hacks for a few years as the ERP that was “finished successfully” has in reality only met 40-80% of its original goals, the project having been either quietly rescoped or just “finished early to the satisfaction of all parties” or any number of other PR bullshit phrases.
I’ve personally witnessed a couple if “successfully deployed ERP projects” which were in reality complete shit shows to the point where lawsuits were considered, and it was only the good old fashioned grease of the professional consultants who started getting worried this might haunt them in the next job after they quit, that kept the gears turning and stopped things getting that far. One of these was barely 50% of originally promised scope, downscoped twice and “successfully completed” 5 years before the internal teams who took over when the consultants were kicked out, gave up and told management they couldn’t deliver and and a new solution should be put to tender.
Oracle and IBM and SAP and the like may be able to always end up delivering, but plenty of clients will walk away partially down the road due to going bankrupt or merging or any one of a number of outcomes because the massive vendors that will “always deliver” might take so long to get there that you can basically just call it what it is, a practical failure… if an ERP is installed in a company but no one ever uses it, was it even deployed?
More silly than that. It’s like saying they can’t get ERP from Oracle or whomever to work, so they are going to build their own ERP from scratch, it’ll do more and be 1/1000 the price.
This. In a previous life we were asked to install a motion platform for a vehicle simulator. Our customers had a small hangar-like building with a free corner, and a research budget that could easily afford the hardware required. But the installation required floor safety markings, physical barriers and interlocks so that bystanders couldn't get whacked and integration with the building fire alarm system so that in an emergency the sim would park in a safe position so that the trainees could exit. The latter required software development as well.
Thanks for this info about industrial robots, I suppose I can understand this difficulty. I have heard a rumor that when they were having trouble getting the line robots to work properly, Elon personally came and sat next to the people who knew how to program and run the robot, grew frustrated with them, and fired them one by one until no one on staff could program the robot… so the difficulty might have been magnified at Tesla. Who knows if that’s true, but I can definitely see that fitting his personality.
Does anyone expect anything else from any corporation? Of course they are not gonna say "I'm sorry, we had to make your experience worse", of course they will try to spin it into something positive. Almost every for-profit company does this. Not to take away that it's shitty, but it's reality.
> The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this, and downright dishonest to characterize it as some kind of leap forward.
My 4 year old Ford Focus doesn't show an outline of obstacles around the car, but still provides Park Assist and Autopark. Especially Park Assist is something that everyone expects from every reasonably equipped car nowadays. So yeah, maybe understandable if it's due to supply difficulties, but still a bad move...
It looks like they are transparently trying to raise their margins. I guess they are more supply-constrained than they thought. The "smart car of the future" from Tesla now has no sensors other than cameras, and not very many of those.
> It looks like they are transparently trying to raise their margins. I guess they are more supply-constrained than they thought. The "smart car of the future" from Tesla now has no sensors other than cameras, and not very many of those.
Don't worry, it won't be a problem as long as they can keep the marketing budget up.
Their marketing is mostly Elon Musk. He uses Twitter for this and it has cost him / them quite a bit. From fines by the SEC, to potentially 45 billion USD for the purchase of the platform.
> There are multiple tells that this move, just like the removal of radar, is supply-chain and cost-driven and not actually driven by engineering.
I like the idea of coalescing multiple sensors into one, but I can't shake off the idea that relying on vision alone when you can sense depth through US or LIDAR is a terrible idea. You can fake depth data from multiple cameras, but it takes more processing and additional input should be a good thing. Did anyone ever try to fool a Tesla using the Looney Tunes painted tunnel trick?
> Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist.
Any sensible navigation software should "know" objects don't cease to exist. I hope Tesla's does it.
People who have never driven a car worth more than $50,000 love the luxury feel of their Teslas. It's been really interesting to see how many people had a Tesla as their first expensive car.
We've had the complete opposite experience with our BMW->Tesla move. Sure, the BMW had a very nice interior, that complaint gets a tons of play online, and it's not inaccurate. But you know what just blows that away? Getting into a car on a 100 degree day, and instead of scorching my skin on the leather, like I would with our old BMW, the seat is cold because I tapped a button on my phone 5 minutes before when we were about to head out. That is real luxury, and I appreciate it so much every single time. I stopped noticing the interior of the cars maybe two weeks after I bought each. Maybe that's just me.
And the thing is just automatically at a completely perfect temperature when we get into it in the morning. The automatic seat warmers that work in concert with climate control are a newish software feature, but wonderful.
Recently, one of our tires developed a bubble in the sidewall due to a curb impact, Tesla sent out a truck and they changed the tire inside our garage a couple hours after we noticed it and told them about it in the app. Not needing to interrupt my day to deal with the issue was a real luxury.
Music that picks up right where you left off when you come back.
A really efficient heat pump that makes it almost guilt free to just sit in the car and leave the AC running. All the things it enables, like camping mode! AC temperature keep mode!
Voice commands that actually work well.
A unified interface that controls everything about the car, and allows the voice commands to do everything from temperature changes to music searches to activating child window locks because our toddler needs to stop rolling down the windows and I can't take my eyes off the road to hunt for a setting (the voice commands obviated my biggest worry, the loss of physical controls).
There are just so many nice little touches that just work, and add up to make the experience much better than a BMW with carplay. I miss the exhaust note, the hardtop, the nice leather, fit and finish, but I would still choose the Tesla 10/10 times. And that would be the case against any legacy carmaker vehicle, except to go the complete opposite direction with full physical controls, basic radio, and no infotainment system at all. The legacy carmakers are still quite good at bolting together the mechanical components.
Interestingly, all those features you mention are also available on BMWs from the last years. Your comparison is not fair if you compare against an old BMW.
On the other hand, on all the Teslas I’ve tried I missed basic things like proper traffic sign recognition, proper adaptive headlights, proper automatic windshield wiper activation, safe lane keeping assistant, etc. those were unusable and unreliable on all Model 3 and Model Y I’ve tried. Not to mention how helpful is the 3D view for parking, also not available in any Tesla.
Are they all standard features on a BMW, or available as a dozen optional, rapaciously expensive add-ons? Or a subscription like the seat heaters? ;-)
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the automatic wipers, but mine have always worked well, better than they did on my BMW. Maybe one of the software fixes in the past couple of years did it?
Unsure about the headlights, they seem to switch on at the appropriate times, but I’ve turned off auto-highbeams.
Autopilot’s been quite good for us, but we have a radar equipped model, can’t speak to vision-only, though my cousin has complained of phantom braking with their vision-only. The speeds listed have always been accurate, but perhaps you’re referring to a different use of sign recognition?
And it buzzes appropriately when it thinks I’m drifting out of the lane without a blinker.
So I guess I’ve just had a very different experience than you for whatever reason. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s the best I’ve seen, and I’d buy another if I needed a new car.
You should give the new BMW i4 a test, it's probably a much better car than the BMW you had. Built quality of BMW combined with the advantages of an electric car without the "features" of Elon Musk as discussed in here.
There was a fun stat that model S cars when then first came out had bay far the largest proportion of first-time-in-this-price range buyers. I can't fathom that someone coming from his/her 10th s class would characterize Teslas as luxury.
This is the thing people dont realize, as someone who has owned a luxury car before, the Tesla Model 3 is not what i would call a "luxury car" despite them playing in the same price space as the BMW 3 Series.
It's still one of the best cars i've ever owned but the fit, finish and feel are not luxury. My 2013 Ford Focus felt more solid than the model 3 i own.
When you have a several month wait list for your product, legions of devoted potential customers, if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this.
> if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this.
The hubris of Tesla is still believing this to be the case. I personally cancelled my cybertruck order from lack of interest. better competition exists in 2022 that wasn’t the case years ago.
Tesla's are outselling every other manufacturer (ICE or otherwise) in many countries for the last quarter and they are still severely supply constrained; your personal antidotal data point doesn't serve much purpose in the broader context.
But the best selling EV manufacturer in Norway is Volkswagen. Volkswagen has four EVs in Norway's top 10 sellers: VW ID.4, Skoda Enyaq, Audi Q4 e-tron, and the Audi e-tron.
The VW ID.4, Skoda Enyaq, and the Audi Q4 e-tron are different versions of the same car. Rather than selling just one model Volkswagen's approach gives you the choice of more options.
Add in ICE vehicles and it's not even close. Volkswagen sells 10 million per year globally across all of its brands (VW, SEAT, Cupra, Skoda, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, Ducati, Scania, MAN, etc.).
One of the weird things about Tesla is that, in general, supply side constraints are widely regarded as a flashing warning light that a firm can’t execute. Yet Tesla is just given an “I’m sure they’ll work it out.”
I've yet to be in a country were sales are not skewed toward local cars. Sweden lots more Volvos than anything else (and definitely Teslas), France, lots more Citroen and Peugeot than anywhere else, Australia: Holden and Ford, US: lots of cars that drive nowhere else (GM, Chevy...).
Regarding outselling most other car manufacturers: this seems to be the Tesla realitity distortion, it is likely true for electric cars but for all cars VW delivered ~5 M cars in 2021 vs Teslas 900k
Australia with its long drives if you leave a city and lack of infrastructure doesn't suit electric cars at the moment. Will change eventually, but likely lagging the rest of the world.
> Australia has no local car manufacturers and hasn't for some time. Toyota is by far the biggest car seller , followed by Mazda and Hyundai.
I know Toyota closed it's Melbourne plant in 2017 (Holden and Ford had stopped manufacturing even earlier IIRC). I would argue though that Ford and Holden (which I just read ceased operating in 2020) are still perceived as Australian car manufacturers by most. They definitely had some cars specifically for the OZ market.
"Car leases trough employers are only for German cars" - that is not true, as a German company you can lease whatever car you want for your employees. They are predominantly German cars for the obvious reasons. :)
While there is a preference for VW group in the corporate leasing market, theybare far from the only ones. Your first argument doesn't make any sense whatsoever so.
“In Q3, we began transitioning to a more even regional mix of vehicle builds each week, which led to an increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter. These cars have been ordered and will be delivered to customers upon arrival at their destination” - [0]
In other words, they said all of the cars had been ordered, although many were in transition at the end of the quarter.
I mean isn’t that the same thing for traditional dealerships? They order the cars and they’re waiting to be sold. A good amount of Teslas end up rejected for whatever reason and show up on the existing inventory page. You can often find new cars in socal with delivery that week. I got my model s that way.
I'm pretty sure you can't stuff your supply chain like that.. Sunbeam got caught once doing that so I'm pretty sure it's a major no no. If it's ordered then it's ordered by someone. Not by a dealer etc? Plus Tesla have no dealers except themselves? so at most it'd be bunch of rejects?
> The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this,
Perhaps the occupancy network is a good replacement? You're characterizing this as if Tesla Vision won't ever be able to replace it: "impossible to detect obstructions occluded from view by the hood".
What if the neural net persists where everything in the world is, and can extrapolate where objects are as the car moves? Then it's better than cameras, blind spots would actually be reduced.
I agree it's a dick move to remove it on cars that were already ordered though. Very Tesla.
What happens when a small object rolls into that blindspot? What happens when the car goes into deep sleep and the AP computer state is lost? Reloading all those nets takes like 40 seconds on startup from deep sleep.
It would be possible to use cameras instead of ultrasound, but that would require mounting a lot more cameras in the dead zones as you said. One of the coolest things I've seen was on a BYD, which has cameras mounted pointing downwards all around. It then creates a fake birdseye view when you are parking, or close to an obstacle. It looked really convincing, as if there was a drone above the car.
I mean damn that looks legit. I'd like to see how it performs at night when you're trying to park in some unlit parking lot, but otherwise that's a pretty amazing projection right there. The dream of driving in 3rd person view is finally here.
I had a Lexus ES 350 loaner the last time my (22 year old) Lexus was in the shop- it had the same feature you describe in the BYD. There was obviously some stretching/warping trickery being done to create the birds-eye image, but it was really impressive regardless.
So... your first sentence is very likely true. But it doesn't match your argument two paragraphs down:
> The cheapest bargain-bin cars have this feature. Your $100k+ Model S or X will not.
If cheap "bargain-bin" cars have these things, then there is no supply chain problem. In fact it's likely these parts aren't available in quantity anywhere right now and every manufacturer is having to deal with it. It's just not news when Ford has to rejigger options on a bunch of models to adjust to demand. But with Tesla, yikes.
It's just so exhausting the level of emotion this brand drives. Every decision they make is An Affront to All Sensibility to someone, it seems like.
FWIW: I like the parking sensors too, they're helpful. But good grief, maybe tone down the outrage?
Ford doesn't sell cars directly. Dealers get what they get, and if this month's new cars don't have Package A then they won't sell that. This happens all the time, just go to any auto manufacturer site and configure the car you want, then call your local dealers to find one. I all but guarantee you you'll find some option package that is supposed to be available but isn't anywhere you can buy it.
And that's my point. No one cares about that, it's just not news. It's "the way the auto industry works". Except for Tesla. Then it's an existential disaster. It's just exhausting.
My understanding is that people had already paid for a specific configuration and while they were waiting for delivery of that particular car/configuration, it got changed out from under them? This understanding of how this affects existing orders could very well be completely wrong... but if it's roughly correct, then it's more analogous to not finding the desired config at the dealer, then special ordering it, then waiting 3 months for it to arrive at the dealership, then you get in the car, then they say "oh by the way we didn't have X Safety System so your car doesn't have it."
I think people would justifiably throw a hissy fit about that.
> I think people would justifiably throw a hissy fit about that.
FWIW, that would be a better argument if the people throwing the hissy fit were the ones who actually ordered cars. Are you waiting on a Tesla, for example?
Instead it's the peanut gallery of folks who just want to flog a point about the manufacturer out of some kind of emotional response. Like I said, it's exhausting.
Elon attracts the attention he does, both positive and negative, because he's regarded as a pioneer. IMO the general public does have an interest in trying to ensure 1) unsafe cars don't proliferate across public roads and 2) irresponsible business practices aren't celebrated.
Do you think the only people who had a right to be pissed off about Lehman Brothers' collapse were actual Lehman Brothers customers? This is all well within the public interest.
This is exactly my point. We started from a discussion about the availability of ultrasound sensors that the overwhelming majority of new cars don't even have and now we're on to "Tesla is unsafe" ... "Making changes to car configuration is an irresponsible business practice" and (sigh) "It is in the public interest that I be pissed off about this".
It's just exhausting. Can't you find something more productive to be outraged about?
I don't know where you get the impression I'm outraged? I figure this link is posted on HN because people like conversing about fast-growing companies and their practices, not because it's actually Tesla Owners Car Club News.
It seems extremely odd to come into a discussion then complain about how exhausting the discussion is and then stay in the discussion complaining about how exhausting it still is.
Also note: Most companies don't claim their cars are fully self driving (even with a Beta tag attached), so the analog to other cars missing these sensors is pretty obviously disingenuous.
Not to be rude, but this is so far off base as to be laughable. You don’t have to understand much about how the system works (really no more than what is contained in the last ai day presentation) to understand why none of this is a problem (specifically the occlusion thing).
The Tesla Vision only was tested by some state agency and has a higher score then the radar one. But only in terms of safety, I guess the software does other aspect as well.
There should be Tesla blog post about it or something.
As a human that has only eyes, I've smashed the underside of my front bumper on many a curb over the years in various cars because just sight alone, blocked by the hood and front end of a car is a crappy way of judging things like that.
I say this as someone who absolutely loves his Model3.. but a step back is a step back, no matter how one spins it.
Radar-delete was a user experience negative for me as well. My autopilot experience today is far more 'jerky jerk' in terms of stop/go traffic than it ever was in the glory days of 'radar distancing data', so much so that AP is now banned on anything but 'smooth sailing highway driving' when I have certain motion sick vulnerable individuals in the car. Add on to that it's now (rightfully, given it's lost the radar available data) far more touchy about weather conditions before it'll even engage. :(
Your wording, especially the "Not true" puts it in your own voice.
Not to mention, just repeating Musk's statement in the context you did (as a response to someone explicitly disagreeing already) implies that you agree with it.
Your eyes are an incredible set of cameras. They have huge dynamic range, extremely accurate and fast depth sensing capabilities, huge focal distance range, and mounts that move incredibly quickly and precisely to point at details.
There are a lot of good reasons why you shouldn't think that today's cameras are equivalent to human eyes. There are a lot of good reasons to believe that cameras will never be equivalent to human eyes.
Critically, your eyes are connected to a human brain, which is by far the most capable visual-spatial computational system in the known universe. Also critically: even your eyes + brain get things wrong all the time while driving.
I love the "humans do it with only two cameras!" comment. It's so funny to see people disregard the human brain, as if any computer today can hold a candle the the visual processing prowess it contains.
I say this as a happy Model 3 owner: Elon is remarkably stupid (or perhaps outright disingenuous) sometimes.
Not really, both USS and Radar give unreliable output. The cars you mention would all have phantom beeping from the USS and unreliable adaptive cruise where the radar suddenly doesn't see the car ahead.
The Tesla vision on the other hand works like a more focused human driver. It can remember that wheel stop is there.
Agree they shouldn't have jumped the gun with production till it was ready though.
While the USS sensors are crap they probably should keep them for things like small children playing behind cars.
People arguing for just cameras in cars have never been outside near-ideal road conditions that California offers.
Good luck driving with cameras only in northern countries (Scandinavia, Canada) when the sun is hanging low over horizon and is reflected back at you from the road.
If this were a planned move, the software would already be ready to replace it. It is not. Cars without radar still aren't at parity with the car that have it, although they "fixed" this a few weeks back by simply turning off the radar on the older cars.
The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this, and downright dishonest to characterize it as some kind of leap forward.
The cheapest bargain-bin cars have this feature. Your $100k+ Model S or X will not.
Even more concerning: some features simply cannot be replaced by camera. Tesla infamously does not have a front bumper camera, making it impossible to detect obstructions occluded from view by the hood. For 3/S, which are low, this means it will be impossible to detect low obstructions like too-high concrete wheel stops and similar obstructions. Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist.
Laughable that this is being done on cars from a high-end brand, and that the remedy for customers who are getting worse cars today than you would get yesterday is to wait for these features to "be restored" at some indeterminate time in the future.