I'm still convinced that it being called "full self driving" is misleading marketing and really needs to stop, since it isn't according to Tesla
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Humans are simply incapable of paying attention to a task for long periods if it doesn't involve some kind of interactive feedback. You can't ask someone to watch paint dry while simultaneously expect them to have < 0.5sec reaction time to a sudden impulse three hours into the drying process.
The much more likely hypothesis in my view is that he was helping Trump because of personal conviction (only in small parts motivated by naked self-interest).
You should expect rational billionaires to tend politically right out of pure self-interest and distorted perspective alone; because the universal thing that such parties reliably do when in power is cutting tax burden on the top end.
The problem here isn't that people think they don't need to pay attention because their car can drive itself and then crash. The problem is that people who know full well that they need to focus on driving just don't because fundamentally the human brain isn't any good at paying attention 100% of the time in a situation where you can get away with not paying attention 99.9% of the time, and naming just can't solve this.
Like also everytime let the downvotes rain. If you downvote, it would be nice, if you could tell me where I am wrong. It might change my view on things.
1. AEB brakes violently to a full stop. We experience shock and dismay. What happened? Oh, a kid on a bike I didn't see. I nearly fucked up bad, good job AEB
2. AEB smoothly slows the vehicle to prevent striking the bicycle, we gradually become aware of the bike and believe we had always known it was there and our decision eliminated risk, why even bother with stupid computer systems?
Humans are really bad at accepting that they fucked up, if you give them an opportunity to re-frame their experience as "I'm great, nothing could have gone wrong" that's what they prefer, so, to deliver the effective safety improvements you need to be firm about what happened and why it worked out OK.
All this demonstrates is the term “full self driving” is meaningless.
Tesla has a SAE Level 3 [1] product they’re falsely marketing as Level 5; when this case occurred, they were misrepresenting a Level 2 system as Level 4 or 5.
If you want to see true self driving, take a Waymo. Tesla can’t do that. They’ve been lying that they can. That’s gotten people hurt and killed; Tesla should be liable for tens if not hundreds of billions for that liability.
Blocking a technology is Luddism. Blocking a company is politics.
Also "All this demonstrates is the term “full self driving” is meaningless." prooves my point that it is not missleading.
The problem is not that the republican party used to be a conservative right party.
What I’m saying is this is not a sports competition where Musk is automatically an opponent of the Democratic party because he supported Trump. He supported Trump in order to improve his chances with the legal system because he knew Trump would be willing to be so corrupt.
Another world might be imagined in which the Democratic party was taken over in 2016 but that is not the world we live in.
The levels are set at the lowest common denominator. A 1960s hot rod can navigate a straight road with no user input. That doesn’t mean you can trust it to do so.
> Where did Tesla say FSD is SAE Level 5 approved?
They didn’t say that. They said it could do what a Level 5 self-driving car can do.
“In 2016, the company posted a video of what appears to be a car equipped with Autopilot driving on its own.
‘The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons,’ reads a caption that flashes at the beginning of the video. ‘He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’ (Six years later, a senior Tesla engineer conceded as part of a separate lawsuit that the video was staged and did not represent the true capabilities of the car.) [1]”
> Tesla is full self driving with Level 2/3 supervision and in my opinion this is not missleading
This is tautology. You’re defining FSD to mean whatever Tesla FSD can do.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5462851/tesla-lawsuit-a...
Oh! And also, moving within the lane is sometimes important for getting a better look at what's up ahead or behind you or expressing car "body language" that allows others to know you're probably going to change lanes soon.
Sending a bunch of scriptkiddies around and having them cut government funding and gut agencies is not really how you make evidence "vanish", how would that even work?
And, lastly, jumping in front of an audience at every opportunity and running your mouth is the absolute last thing anyone would ever do if the goal was to avoid prosection. But it is perfectly in line with a person that has a very big ego and wants to achieve political goals.
> U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, who presided over the case, said in an order that she did not find “sufficient evidence” that Tesla’s failure to initially produce the data was intentional.
What is your actual point? What would he stand in front of a judge for, right now, if Harris had won?
This is how conservatives keep people going 'both sides!' even though they manufacture whatever is required to be that way.
FSD cannot “do everything a Level 5 system can.” It can’t even match Waymo’s Level 4 capabilities, because it periodically requires human intervention.
But granting your premise, you’d say it’s a Level 2 or 3 system with some advanced capabilities. (Mercedes has a lane-keeping and -switching product. They’re not constantly losing court cases.)
It’s meaningless because Tesla redefines it at will. The misrepresentation causes the meaninglessness.
He used to be quite charismatic, I believed him up until about 2017 or so. Then I figured he was just a bit greedy and maybe money got to his head but still a respectable innovator. However during 2020 or 2021 (I don’t exactly remember) he started to get quite unpleasant and making obviously short-term decisions, such as relying only on cameras for self driving because of chip shortages but dressing it up as an engineering decision.
FSD doesn’t lull humans into a false sense of security, humans do. FSD doesn’t let you use your phone while it’s on. This alone is an upgrade over most human beings, who think occasional quick phone usage while driving is fine (at least for themselves).
I believe that if you replaced all human drivers in the US with FSD as it exists today, fatalities would go down immediately.
Humans are not a gold standard, and the current median human driver is easy to outperform on safety.
It needs to have a crash rate equal to or ideally lower than a human driver.
Tesla does not release crash data (wonder why...), has a safety driver with a finger on the kill switch, and only lets select people take rides. Of course according to Elon always-honest-about-timelines Musk, this will all go away Soon(TM) and we will have 1M Robotaxis on the road by December 31st.
Completing a route without intervention doesn't mean much. It needs to complete thousands of routes without intervention.
Keep in mind that Waymos have selective intervention for when they get stuck. Teslas have active intervention to prevent them from mowing down pedestrians.
> I also don't understand how one has trouble staying between the lines with minimal cognitive input after more than a few months of driving.
Once you have something assist you with that, you'll notice how much "effort" you are actually putting towards it.
I scrutinise beliefs and assumptions even if they are convenient, and you should, too.
I don't believe that Musks main motivation to participate in the 2024 election was to avoid prosecution, because his actions are not really compatible with this, and there is a much more plausible alternative hypothesis that he preferred (possibly no longer) the republican platform for non-prosecution reasons/personal conviction instead, which his actions are very compatible with.
> Labor violations, taxes, National Highway traffic safety administration investigation Tesla
Let me say it like this: Billionaires generally don't have to care about minor infractions like this at all. The whole system is set up to shield them from liability, and wealth is an excellent buffer against effective prosection regardless of who is president. There have been a plethora of infinitely more serious infractions with zero real consequences for the CEOs involved, and this is not because they participated in past presidential election campaigns. See: the VW diesel emission fraud or much worse, leaded gas in the last century (and what associated industry did to keep that going).
Musk’s assistant peeked back the muttered and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked.
“Yes, I want to say one thing.” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk.
“I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.”
The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist.
“Fuck you!” Musk growled.
I commute mainly on the highway about 45-1hr each way every day and it makes a big difference for driver fatigue. I was honestly a bit surprised. Even though, I'm steering, it requires less effort. I don't have my foot on the gas and I'm not having to adjust my speed constantly.
Critically, though, I do have to pay attention to my surroundings. It's not taking so much out of my driving that I can't stay engaged to what's happening around me.
There's plenty wrong about the FSD terminology and SAE levels would absolutely be clearer, but I doubt more than a tiny fraction of people are confused as to the target of 'self' in the phrase 'full self driving'.
You will basically never hear another CEO of another publicly traded company say this. I just don't believe that the same person who cares so little about his stock price that he sends a tweet like that (and the stock dropped 10% on it) also is making fraudulent statements to inflate the price. A better explanation is that he just says what he thinks without regard for the stock price, which is also something you won't see any other CEO of a publicly traded company do.
But it took him four months deeply embedded with the Republican party to come to this conclusion?
It's been blindingly obvious to anyone remotely paying attention to US politics for the last decade (or two, or more, but blindingly so, more recently).
How many juries and courts have ruled adversely against self-cleaning oven makers?
Tesla has absolutely lied about its software's capabilities. From the lawsuit that went to trial:
“In 2016, the company posted a video of what appears to be a car equipped with Autopilot driving on its own.
‘The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons,’ reads a caption that flashes at the beginning of the video. ‘He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’ (Six years later, a senior Tesla engineer conceded as part of a separate lawsuit that the video was staged and did not represent the true capabilities of the car.) [1]”
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5462851/tesla-lawsuit-a...
There is a pretty recent precendent on the other side of the political spectrum: Hillary Clinton. Republicans went on and on for how she belonged in prison. Anyone with half a brain was able to tell that this was not gonna happen, because there simply was no case. Republicans got basically absolute power since, and --surprise-- Hillary did not go to prison.
What makes you so confident that you are right about Elon, while the people back then were obviously wrong with Hillary (even without hindisght!).
I just disagree that any significant number of people anywhere have thought the 'self' in 'full self driving' refers to the driver.
It's always difficult to get a true read on what people believe, and that goes double for very powerful or wealthy people, who have professionals devoted to their image management.
Which, not coincidentally, is also where the idea of Musk as an "amazing, brilliantly intelligent man" comes from. After all, he doesn't have any sort of history of published work or intellectual breakthroughs to support that.
He seems to be good at investment, and at a certain kind of hype-based marketing, including of himself (up to a point.)
Look at the things he’s already been in court for: labor and environmental violations, safety problems. A really big one for him is the exposure to suits over his statements as the CEO of a public company: anyone who’s bought TSLA in the the last decade or so could, for example, claim that he was knowingly misleading investors about FSD’s readiness or safety record.
Each of those are areas where he absolutely does not want someone with government investigatory powers talking to his employees, demanding internal documents, etc. and in several of them he could have business activities blocked if, for example, they linked approvals to more comprehensive evidence (imagine if they couldn’t sell FSD for use on public roads until it was safer and had to compensate past buyers).
But that doesn't mean that there is no case against Elon. I'm not sure why you would draw an equals between the two. The SEC really does put people in jail, the stuff with Vlad is bordering on treason.
I think you may have forgotten that we actually used to have a government and there was rule of law.
Not urgently. FSD has time-sensitive intervention requirements. Waymo’s time sensitivities are driven by passenger comfort, not safety.
Are you saying you would sit in a Tesla without paying much attention, in the same way you're sitting next to someone you trust driving the car? Would you go do phone stuff or look for stuff in your bag while your Tesla is driving you?
I mean I guess people are doing that, but with all the reports and stories I hear, it seems to me it's quite tricky, and you better just watch the road.
So I wouldn't really call that fully self driving. It's kind of like an LLM, it does great most of the time, but occasionally it does something disastrous. And therefore a human needs to be there to correct it. If you would let it all go on it's own it's not gonna end well. That's not fully self driving. That's human assisted driving.
I’m sure things are very different out around the edges, as you note, but the majority of the time humans in cars kill people it isn’t because they were in an edge case - quite the opposite. They were just driving home from the bar like they do every night.
You can’t seriously think it’s just politics. Elon’s _entire_ fortune is built on these misrepresentations. A competent government that forces them to stop selling self driving, after a series of high profile lawsuits, is something Elon would pay very close attention to, probably even more than the day to day operations of the (mediocre electric car) company that he runs.
Elon is about the stock, the stock price, and the yarn he spins to keep it up. There is nothing else for him.