Featured Fall of Tesla

Somehow I don't normally think of the Kalispell area as representative of all of Montana. It seems to have a higher fraction of vacation homes and retirees from out of state, such as my late grandparents. And from in state too, such as some surviving cousins.

 

It never occurred to me to look for Teslas at destination chargers. That would explain why I did not see them on the road.

As for the wonderful "OTA updates"... If I were in charge of such things, I'd prohibit any such update. Here's why. Dependability and predictability are two features that make cars safe. When you hit the brakes, you want it to show and stop just like it did the last time you stopped. When you hit the gas to cross an intersection, you don't want to find it accelerating significantly slower. Even a 1/2 second hesitation caused by some hitherto unknown software feature, for instance one that scans the area for emergency vehicles when a siren is detected, can be fatal if it happens as you are crossing a road in front of a car.

Seemingly innocuous changes can also introduce safety problems simply because they confuse, surprise or frustrate the driver. This distracts them and can lead to low speed accidents as easily as high speed ones.

 

I am not sure about the title of this thread. Most of the people I know want a Tesla car, it is trendy nowadays. If you ask a person which EV to consider the majority of them will choose this brand.

 

If you were hoping to hear back anything from the OP, don't hold your breath. Especially after the updated history - spelled out in the article below;

Tesla Model 3 Regains Consumer Reports Top Pick - Consumer Reports

So, when someone remains silent on the good news, but can't wait to say the bad news, it's pretty telling. Also telling, the effectiveness of a company being able to over-the-air shutdown radar and tweak camera sensitivity to aid in safety

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Tomorrow's Tesla's news should refute the above paranoid opinion.

Should go something like this:
Despite the global chip supply shortage, and despite transportation challenges in moving finished cars around every country to end-point delivery sites, and despite still operating the second quarter largely within the constraints of a COVID economy, Tesla reports their best quarter results in the company's history, Q2 ending June 30, 2021.

 

This is a case of projecting one's own predilections upon others and then judging them for not meeting expectations. If you are a Tesla fanboy, you will watch for every news report about your favorite car. On top of that a fanboy will find a way to make faux pas appear to be a good thing.

The reality is that some of us don't care about Tesla. Period. Full Stop. So when they make the news, we notice and may comment on it. When they fix whatever they broke and it does not make the news, there's no reason to notice or even to comment on it in many cases.

Personally, I don't see anything positive about the way that they handled the AEB and radar. A responsible and capable company would have left the radar running until they finished mapping all the video that they could in order to enable the camera based collision avoidance. There's no reason to turn it off (unless they were hiding a really harmful bug) until they had the vision working.

Also telling is the Tesla explanation that visual light cameras were so superior to LIDAR because lidar needs to map the surrounding area in real time and that it's too difficult to do. Then they took huge numbers of videos and fed it to a neural network so that they ended up with maps of what it looks like when you are about to crash. It would be sensible for them to have captured the camera view from the "independent testing" track too so that they would do exceedingly well on the test track.

I wasn't going to mention any of this, but since you brought it up, and made it sound like you'd won some contest by default....

 

Sure - right .....
[QUOTE ] ..... but since you brought it up, ..... [/QUOTE]
"it" ?
'it' being the OP's desire to claim car companies will meet their demise due to needed safety improvements? The beginning of the end? Really? Perhaps try reading back on the OP's prior posts - as that helps dispel the notion that anyone is trying to -

if, "making 'it' (another it) sound like" means calling out childish troll-like behavior? Yes. Mia culpa. But the same article i linked also points out that;

Following the OP's logic means that all these other car companies are facing the beginning of the end. So - defend the OP if that works, but if the OP had been around for any length of time he would have realized - a car company doesn't meet its demise simply because they have setbacks. The OP has previously & incorrectly condemed Tesla - maybe feeling that Toyota needs his help. That's okay, but critical reviews need to be regarding anyone of their number of actual issues - of which Tesla has several, which I have pointed out Ad nauseam.
When the Prius had issues of unintended acceleration many years ago - was it their demise? Was it the beginning of the end? No .... bashing the prius was the the childish taunting of a few here that had hopes of other companies out-doing the Prius. Were we who defended prius fanboys? Simply because we challenge the motives of a few Prius haters?

the "contest" is truth .... because in fact honest people contest impure motives, & contest BS.
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There are some people for whom facts don’t matter.

 

For someone that doesn't care about Tesla, you sure have strong opinions about them. Going as far as to hold onto them after having the error in them pointed out.

Do you have any evidence that this is not what Tesla did, that they turned off the radar before cameras were ready?
It has only been about a month since the Model 3 lost its top pick rating, and then regaining it.

I am not familiar with what Tesla specifically said about LIDAR, but I do know it is expensive, and has many of the same limitations as visual cameras. Does any car for sale now use it?

For not caring about Tesla, why the need to accuse them of cheating on a test?

 

I did not accuse them of cheating only because it's not considered cheating to learn what will be tested, and then tailoring the car's responses so that it does well when tested. It might, however, make the car appear much more capable than it really is.

But it will do real well if a cardboard cutout of a truck pops up on the freeway.

 

so - rather than being accusatory & oppositional at PC members, might it be best to direct the accusations & opposition at the creators of the safety standard tests themselves?
Consider how that kind of history worked as related to mileage. Under the old MPG standard tests - which were created/adjusted in part so that land barges' mileage didn't look so bad. Then along comes the gen II Prius, & using that standard test, it got 60 MPG.
What did companies like GM do? They wanted to make the Prius tests look bad so they helped in facilitating testing - adjusted it downward. 50mpg Prius - in stead .... more realistic. Of course the land barges' already horrible mpg - now look even worse. They call that "cutting off the nose to spite the face" .
So maybe the other manufacturers don't want to go down that road again, with safety - ultimately cutting off their noses to spite their competitor's face.

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No.

 

Is that not what Tesla did? They turned off the radar and used vision instead in their update.
The only thing that was missing was the official certification procedure that was then conducted to give them the high rating.
Is is a requirement to have the highest safety rating to drive a car on the road? No.

Mike

 

Shame VW didn't have you defending them.

 

According to the reports, they stopped using radar and then issued an update that downloaded the mapping needed to make the camera based AEB work. They talked about it in that 8 hour talk that was mentioned in one of the threads. There was a period when some portion of their cars had neither.


As for the troll's comment... I did not blame tesla because there is no proof of intentional wrong doing. We don't know if they used inadequate teaching data for their neural net. I only mentioned that it was a possibility. VW, on the other hand, deliberately fudged the tests so that it would not work as advertised.

 

They can stop putting radar in cars during production, which get the needed software for cameras only. Cars with radar wouldn't have the radar turned off until they got the software for cameras only.

 

A couple of questions:

• If we block the front of the radar unit with aluminum foil, do we get an error?
• If the software no longer used the radar input, how could we tell?

Bob Wilson

 

From reliable sources, my understanding is that Tesla has been moving this direction for some time.
Through software updates, they have lowered the reliance on the radar bit by bit until they could eliminate it completely.

The thing many people seem to miss, is that Tesla has their chips making decisions in 'ghost' mode. So while I am driving the car, without autopilot, the autopilot is still making predictions and learning.

 

Not a good way to word that. While your car is driving, with or without AutoPilot, it is not learning anything. It may be on a dataset collection mission, thouhg, and is sending data back to Tesla that is using this to train a future update that you'll get OTA after they have tested it.

Mike

 

Billions of dollars says you are wrong.

Mike