Reuters isn’t pulling punches anymore on the fraud known as Tesla. If only their reporting had looked more like this in 2016.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
Sasha Ostojic – a former driverless car engineer and software-development executive at Nvidia, Cruise and Zoox – said he believes it will take Tesla at least “three-plus years” just to match the level of autonomous driving Waymo achieves today. Ostojic now advises a Palo Alto venture capital firm, Playground Global, on technology investments.
“I don’t see Tesla converging toward truly ‘eyes off, brain off’” autonomous driving, he said, “on the timelines Elon Musk has been promising.”
Sasha what are you doing? You were so close to showing a clear point, but instead ended in smoke. This is called advising?
Silicon Valley used to be more honest and direct, referring to such “happy path” talk as a “no sh*t Sherlock” empty thoughts — stating the obvious. Reuters offers this shade on Sasha.
In 2016, [the Tesla CEO] predicted drivers would be able to summon their vehicles from across the country within two years. In 2019, Musk predicted Tesla would produce operational robotaxis by 2020.
An industry expert warning us in 2024 that Tesla won’t hit their promised 2020 deadline is a bit rich. But then throwing out a Musk-like prediction about another three years is icing on a sh*t AI cake. Such milquetoast parroting offered as “analysis” of Tesla is a good example of why the AI market has been so borked lately… but I digress. Sasha, just say never. Say that Tesla is fraud, which by definition means its loudly announced deadlines are just bait for victims.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang used the [Tesla product] description in an interview to describe the weaknesses of end-to-end technology, without specifically addressing Tesla’s system. […] The end-to-end technology… not always… makes the best driving decisions, said Huang, which is why Nvidia takes a more conservative approach. “We have to build the future step-by-step,” he said. “We cannot go directly to the future. It’s too unsafe.”
He can’t call out Tesla as garbage because he still takes Tesla’s money. But he still casts huge shade by calling Tesla strategy a dangerous fiction that is not science.
NVidia has been dropping hints to industry insiders like this for at least four years.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
For now, unlike its robotaxi competitors, Tesla only offers semi-autonomous solutions in its “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” features. The naming and marketing of those systems have sparked investigations and lawsuits over whether Tesla has put drivers at risk by overstating its vehicles’ self-driving capabilities.
A U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigation published in April found that 542 crashes, including 14 with fatalities, had occurred in Tesla vehicles with Autopilot or FSD engaged between January 2018 and August 2023.
Tesla robot deaths from the fraud of Autopilot and FSD are closer to 50, as I’ve explained here before. The NHTSA effectively was censored by Trump from 2016 to 2020, sweeping all the early warning deaths under a corrupt rug.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
…sole reliance on AI-enabled computer vision leaves [Tesla] with the challenge of eliminating a small but unacceptable error rate that could result in injuries and deaths if left unchecked, with no human driver, said specialists in autonomous-driving technology.
Unacceptable error rate.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
Missy Cummings, a robotics and AI professor at George Mason University and a former advisor to NHTSA, cited several studies that have shown computer vision… fails to recognize objects about 3% of the time. “What happens if it doesn’t see a pedestrian crossing the road or on the sidewalk?” she asked.
Fails to recognize objects.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
The former Tesla engineer who called its technology a “black box” said it’s never clear how the automaker’s system arrives at driving decisions. And that makes it hard to tell whether Tesla is close — and, if so, how close — to producing safe and fully autonomous vehicles. The engineer called it “impossible” for AI systems or their human engineers to anticipate every “edge case,” no matter how much data it analyzes.
It’s impossible for AI systems to succeed alone.
It’s impossible for Tesla to succeed, says the Tesla insider, like they have said since 2016.
Mobileye quit Tesla in 2016 (Hardware version 1) for a reason: ethics of integrity.
Shares in machine learning company Mobileye have fallen by 8% following the announcement it will be breaking ties with automotive innovator Tesla.
Fast forward to today and…
Mobileye is a major provider of ADAS (Advanced driver-assistance Systems) and supplies over 50 automakers (called OEMs which is short for original equipment manufacturers) worldwide. […] Mobileye sells over 30 million of these per year (for context about 90 million vehicles are sold annually). This equates to about 65-70% market share for vehicles equipped with ADAS.
Mobileye didn’t want to kill people. So they quit working with the deadly Tesla CEO, and somehow people didn’t get that memo… in 2016.
People will be killed by Tesla’s negligence.
NVidia likewise quit Tesla (Hardware version 2) for a reason: ethics of integrity. And NVidia, like Mobileye, became far more successful than Tesla.
This is very basic stuff for engineers who honor a code of ethics, but it obviously needs to be said more directly and clearly for Wall Street and Silicon Valley to predict better. Nobody who understands the engineering of robots on roads should allow the dangerous Tesla fiction to spread and continue to kill.
Consider the red flags in this company profile:
- Can’t keep its partners
- Whistleblowers say books are cooked
- Can’t keep a legal team
- Can’t keep an executive team
- Predictably killing hundreds of people
Without fraud, there would be no Tesla.
