Elon Musk needs you to imagine Tesla is about to ship self-driving with none knowledge

There was one large factor lacking from Tesla’s autonomy occasion yesterday: knowledge. Elon Musk needs you to imagine Tesla is about to ship self-driving, however you simply must imagine him even if he has been mistaken about it yearly for the previous 5 years.

Yesterday, Tesla unveiled a cool-looking automobile, the Cybercab, that’s totally reliant on making Full Self-Driving (FSD) work, which was speculated to occur yearly for the previous 5 years, in line with Elon Musk’s personal statements.

Yearly since 2019, Musk stated that he expects Tesla to improve its supervised FSD into an unsupervised FSD, as promised, by the top of the 12 months.

At one level, the CEO claimed that his inaccurate timelines had been resulting from attaining “native maximums” within the software program, which they couldn’t see till they hit these ceilings. Regardless of this drawback, he retains giving new timelines and promoting the product whereas Tesla might nonetheless be working into native maximums.

What I needed from Tesla’s occasion yesterday was to know what makes this time totally different. Musk stated that Tesla goes to ship unsupervised self-driving on present autos in California and Texas subsequent 12 months.

Then, Cybercab will comply with when it enters manufacturing in 2026 or 2027.

However once more, why ought to we imagine Musk this time?

I used to be anticipating considered one of two issues that Tesla would announce on the occasion to construct extra confidence:

1. Tesla would share knowledge about FSD that reveals actual progress – one thing Tesla has by no means performed. Actually, it has by no means launched FSD knowledge past the variety of miles lined. No disengagement nor intervention knowledge.
2. A change in technique that may contain deploying degree 4 self-driving in geo-fenced areas – a enterprise mannequin nearer to what Waymo is doing.

Tesla did neither. As a substitute, it’s enterprise as normal with FSD, which presently wants a 500-1000x enchancment in miles between interventions.

The most recent disengagement knowledge crowdsourced by Tesla homeowners reveals that FSD is presently at about 123 miles between disengagement and the tempo of enchancment is way from spectacular:

Till Tesla reveals a transparent path towards 100,000+ miles between disengagmeeent, a steering wheel-less robotaxi is fairly meaningless, which explains why Tesla’s inventory is down by as a lot as 10% following the occasion.

As a substitute of sharing some knowledge about this system, which Tesla actually has after over 1.6 billion miles on FSD, Musk determined to once more solely reference direct private experiences that prospects have with Tesla’s Supervised FSD.

I’m not discounting that Supervised FSD could be spectacular, and if it was being developed in a vacuum with out Musk giving unreasonable timelines and promoting guarantees to prospects for as much as $15,000, I feel we’d all be speaking in another way about this product.

However proper now, though you may have a formidable 100-mile drive with out difficulty on FSD, it doesn’t translate into an unsupervised self-driving system as a result of the information reveals it could actually’t do it dependable 1000’s of instances like a human might.

Now, that’s primarily based by myself expertise with the system over the past 3 years and the crowdsourced knowledge. To be honest, the crowdsourced knowledge solely accounts for ~100,000 miles whereas Tesla has over 1.6 billion miles of knowledge, but when Tesla refuses to share that knowledge, I’ve to imagine that it doesn’t look a lot better than the crowdsourced dataset.

However Fred, what concerning the demonstration on the occasion?

The Cybercab demos on the occasion had been much less spectacular than FSD. Tesla selected the Warner Bros studio for a motive.

Whereas these roads seem like common public roads, it’s a personal studio set. Tesla doesn’t must ask California for a self-driving allow to drive there. Tesla has all the time resisted testing unsupervised self-driving autos on California roads, one thing all different corporations growing self-driving applied sciences are doing. Why? As a result of it could require them to share their knowledge about disengagement.

Due to this fact, Tesla tuned FSD to work “unsupervised” on these personal roads for the occasion. Additionally, I put “unsupervised” in quotes as a result of they had been unsupervised from contained in the car, nevertheless it seems like Tesla had workers monitoring the demo autos and controlling their departures and arrivals.

Electrek’s Take

Briefly, Tesla must launch its FSD knowledge to point out a transparent path towards over 100,000 miles between disengagement. In any other case, this entire factor is fairly meaningless. The Cybercab seems superior. I like the design.

The truth that it solely has two seats is a bit annoying, nevertheless it’s true that 90% of rideshare rides are for 2 passengers or fewer.

For larger quantity transit, there’s the brand new Robovan, nevertheless it has the identical FSD drawback as all different Tesla autos.

Optimus regarded to have had a significant enchancment, however it’s nonetheless methods from being helpful and as per many attendees, it appears doubtless that there was a minimum of a sure degree of distant management.

Total the occasion was very low in particulars and new info. It might have been an e mail. Appears to be like like Tesla needed to throw a celebration for its shareholders.