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Elon Musk is praising data that he claims shows Tesla is on the verge of achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving, when in fact, it shows it is still years away and he is misrepresenting it.

It’s hard to take Musk seriously when it comes to self-driving timelines because he has been so consistently wrong for years.

Some argue that you can’t hold that against him, even though he uses his claims to sell cars and sell “Full Self-Driving” packages for up to $15,000, because it is such a difficult and important thing to achieve.

Even if you agree with this argument, there are clear problems with Musk’s claims regarding Tesla’s progress and timelines toward unsupervised self-driving.

The biggest one is data.

Tesla has consistently refused to share any data regarding its self-driving progress. That’s despite more recently starting to use “miles between necessary disengagement”, sometimes called “miles between critical disengagement”, as a metric to track progress and claiming x multiplicators in miles between critical disengagement in recent updates without any actual data to back it up.

A recent example was Musk hyping Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software updates 12.4 and 12.5 by claiming they will be able to drive “5 to 10x more miles per intervention“.

Again, Tesla never released any data to back this up, but we have some crowdsourced data that pointed to FSD 12.5 achieving 183 miles (all versions combined excluding testers with fewer than 50 miles) between critical disengagement. Musk never specified the “5 to 10x” improvement was compared to what version, but if we compared it against the last update, FSD 12.3, miles between critical disengagement went down from 228 miles.

There are no prior versions of Tesla FSD over the last 3 years that would add up to a 3x improvement in miles between critical disengagement. We can forget about “5 to 10x.”

Now, Tesla has upgraded to FSD v13 and Musk again claims that it will “blow people’s mind.”

The automaker claimed that v13 would bring “5 to 6x improved miles between necessary interventions” compared to v12.5.

That means that Tesla anticipated FSD v13 to achieve between 915 and 1,098 miles between critical disengagement based on the crowdsourced data.

Currently, after over 8,000 miles of crowdsourced data, FSD v13 is at 493 miles between critical disengagement:

That’s a 2.7x improvement. It’s significant, but it is also a significant miss compared to what Tesla predicted.

Now, Elon and Tesla fans like to claim that this crowdsourced data is flawed and that Tesla FSD is actually performing better.

The data is indeed limited, but it is the best we have by far since Tesla refuses to share its own data. I have often fought against this accusation both because it is undoubtedly the best data available and because Elon Musk himself referred to this specific crowdsourced data in the past.

Now, he has done it again and he did it to claim “exponential improvement” in Tesla’s FSD performance, but it is grossly misleading:

This data only refers to highway miles and Tesla has been operating the same highway stack for years. The city driving software stack is different and based on “end-to-end neural nets”. The automaker kept promising to update it, but it barely ever did – leading to the stagnation you see in this chart.

Tesla worked on this update for years, but it actually wasn’t released in v13. It came in v12.5.6.1. If we take all the v12 updates after this one, the average on highway was already 393 miles:

This is no indication of “exponential improvement”. It is merely Tesla finally releasing a long overdue update to its highway software stack after working on the city software stack for the past 2 years.

Furthermore, if we can take this acknowledgment from Musk that this data is representative of Tesla FSD performance, which should be the case otherwise it would be greatly misleading for him to share it, it shows that Tesla is still years away from achieving unsupervised self-driving despite Musk saying it will happen in “q2 2025”, which is months away.

Ashok Elluswamy, the head of FSD at Tesla, has previously stated that for Tesla to enable unsupervised self-driving, Tesla needs to achieve the average in miles per critical intervention “equivalent of human miles between collision,” which stands at 670,000 miles, according to NHTSA.

Therefore, based on this data shared by Musk, Tesla needs to go from 493 miles between disengegament to 670,000 miles between disengagement within the next 5 months.

Electrek’s Take

I’m no hater. I’m a realist. Without patting myself too much on the back, you have to give me some credit for predicting this with v13. After Tesla’s AI team released the planned improvements coming with v13, I reported that I could see it achieve close to “690 to 828 miles between critical disengagement.”

But then I reported that v13 would result in improvements but come short of that goal after v13 was delayed by a few months and then released with a somewhat dumb-down version.

Now, it ends up at 493 miles between disengagement. It makes sense. It is an impressive improvement, but it is also far short of what Tesla said would happen and still hundreds of thousands of miles away from what Tesla itself said it needs to be to achieve unsupervised self-driving.

Not only that, but Elon is now misrepresenting the data to claim Tesla has achieved exponential growth without no evidence whatsoever.

He is purposely only looking at highway data, which is misleading because the stack was barely updated for years.

I think it’s clear that Elon either lies about self-driving or he has no idea what he is talking about, which somehow doesn’t stop him from confidently making statements that happen to help Tesla sell cars. It’s not suspicious at all.

Again, I liked to point out that I believe that if Tesla was developing FSD in a vacuum without Elon Musk making claims about Tesla achieving unsupervised self-driving on x timeline, making “Tesla vehicles appreciating assets”, and then using this to sell cars and $15,000 self-driving packages, I think that Tesla’s FSd development would be celebrated.

Instead, it is vastly seen as a fraud by many people. That’s Elon Musk’s fault.

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Whisper Aero ultralight aircraft scores $500K for “UltraQuiet” electric jet motor tests

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Whisper Aero ultralight aircraft scores 0K for

Along with Tennessee Tech, Tennessee-based ultralight aircraft company Whisper Aero has secured a $500,000 grant to help advance the company’s innovative electric jet motor concept off the drawing board and onto the testing phase.

Earlier this month, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) announced plans to award $500,000 to Tennessee Tech and Whisper Aero through the Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative.

“We look forward to using these award dollars to place students in internships working directly with Whisper Aero leaders,” said Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham. “By learning from an electric propulsion innovator like Whisper Aero, our students will gain invaluable perspective and can take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it right here in Tennessee.”

The grant will see a Whisper Aero glider fitted with a pair of the company’s eQ250 electric-powered jet “propulsors” for UltraQuiet flight. Tennessee Tech faculty and students will carry out copper-bird ground testing to ensure the safe integration of engines, batteries, and controllers, and kickstart Tennessee Tech’s new Crossville Mobility Incubator.

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Those propulsors, by the way, are super cool.

UnltraQuiet WhisperDrive; via Whisper Aero.

Whisper Aero’s main claim to fame is its innovative UltraQuiet WhisperDrive (above). It’s effectively an electrically spun ducted fan jet engine that uses a large number of stiff composite fan blades inside a lightweight, acoustically treated duct. With so many blades, the Whisper Aero propulsor can push more air than a conventional prop while spinning much more slowly. As such, the “blade passage frequency” moves up to more than 16,000 Hz – outside the range of most human hearing but not, supposedly, high enough to freak out the beagles.

The Whisper Aero ultralight is effectively an Aériane Swift3 glider fitted with a pair of Whisper’s eQ250 propulsors, each capable of up to 80 lbs. of thrust. The Ultralight has a wingspan of over 40 ft with a maximum L/D of 35:1 and can be stressed to a design loading of +6/-4g, making it capable of some pretty impressive acrobatic feats.

The Swift3 glider is designed for a low speed, low power cruising speed of 45–55 knots with “just” 6.5 hp. Power-off glides from a few hundred feet showed a low sink rate, and a climb rate of 1,250 ft/min with full self-launching power (in other words: the Whisper glider doesn’t have to be towed by a launch vehicle, like a conventional ultralight glider).

Quiet cool

Dual WhisperDrive fans deliver ~160 lbf of thrust; via Whisper Aero.

Range under full power is about 109 miles with current battery tech, but it’s expected that range under the latest EPiC 2.0 energy batteries would rise to nearly 170 miles.

Nathan Millecam, CEO of Electric Power System, said, “EPiC 2.0’s leap in energy density and thermal performance has enabled a significant increase in range, a clear validation of our next-gen cell technology. We are impressed by what the Whisper team continues to achieve in advancing electric aviation.”

The press release concludes explaining that flight tests are expected to show that the Whisper Aero glider can be flown, “a few hundred feet away from neighborhoods without any disturbances, while carrying a 220 lbs. payload with full range,” which is all kind of ominous in today’s political climate, but still pretty neat from a purely tech perspective.

The TNGO grant follows a separate grant from NASA awarded last year, though that grant aims to develop the eQ250s – not as a propulsion system, but as a key component in future spacecraft ventilation systems.

Tennessee Tech announces TNGO grant

With support from TNECD’s Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative, Tennessee Tech University and Whisper Aero are partnering to advance next-generation propulsion technology in the aerospace industry. This collaboration will enhance aerospace research and workforce development, ensuring Tennessee remains a leader in cutting-edge mobility solutions.

TNECD

SOURCE | IMAGES: TNECD; via eVTOL Insights, New Atlas.


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Tesla Cybertruck owner gets stuck after beliving Elon Musk’s ‘river crossing’ claim

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Tesla Cybertruck owner gets stuck after beliving Elon Musk's 'river crossing' claim

A Tesla Cybertruck owner believed Elon Musk’s claims that the Cybertruck would be able to “act as a boat” and “cross rivers”, and he got his $100,000 stuck because of it.

Elon Musk has often made claims about how Tesla vehicles could float and briefly serve as a boat in the past.

We have never been taken too seriously because Tesla’s warranty states something different about taking the vehicle into water.

However, the CEO doubled down on the claim specifically for the Cybertruck.

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Ahead of launching the production version of the Cybertruck, Musk claimed the vehicle would be “waterproof enough” to serve as a boat and cross rivers:

Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.

The CEO added that the goal is for a Cybertruck to be able to cross the water between SpaceX’s Starbase and South Padre Island in Texas, which is about 360 meters (1,100 feet).

We have been taking the Cybertruck more seriously with water because we learned that Tesla built a ‘wade mode’ for the truck to be able to go into the water. Tesla says the mode increases the ride height to the max and temporarily “pressurizes the battery pack.”

The problem is that it is activated through the off-roading mode, which is not covered under Tesla’s warranty – so we are taking everything with a grain of salt.

Whenever Tesla’s warranty contradicts what Musk says, it is better to follow to the warranty.

A Tesla Cybertruck owner in Truckee, California, appears not to have received this sage advice since they activated the wade mode and attempted to get into the water.

The Cybertruck owner quickly got stuck. The local California Highway Patrol (CHP) shared some pictures of the aftermath (via Facebook):

CHP Truckee helped with the recovery and commented on the incident:

Cybertruck activated “Wade Mode”… and waded a bit too far… We’re all for testing boundaries… but maybe not the waterline. Remember folks, “Wade Mode” isn’t “Submarine Mode.” If your plans include exploring the great outdoors, make sure to know your limits and the terrain.

There’s no detail on the damage to the Cybertruck, if any.

As we recently reported, repair costs for the stainless steel electric pickup truck can increase rapidly.

This Cybertruck owner is also not the first one to get stuck in water. We previously reported on a Tesla Cybertruck sinking into the water when launching a jet ski.

Electrek’s Take

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is clearly more of a user error than a Cybertruck problem.

I think the verdict is clear: Cybertruck is far from the best electric pickup truck for off-roading.

However, in general, you shouldn’t expect a truck to get out of water on a muddy bank.

I think a lot of Cybertruck owners are new to trucking and off-roading, and they are making the truck look worse than it is at off-roading.

If you want to take your Cybertruck off-road, I recommend to first go with an off-roading guide that can help avoid some simple mistakes like this.

Also, in general, don’t take Elon Musk’s claims at face value when he says that Tesla vehicles can do something that sounds like an exaggeration. It probably is an exaggeration.

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Bang for the buck: Omoda 9 arrives in Europe, nothing cheaper has more power

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Bang for the buck: Omoda 9 arrives in Europe, nothing cheaper has more power

The latest Chinese EREV to arrive in the west, the Omoda 9 SHS crossover hopes to shake things up in the hyper-competitive class with a top-shelf tech package, more horsepower than a Porsche 911 GT3, and a €39,900 price tag.

Established in 2022 as an upscale electric sub-brand by the Chinese car giant, Chery, Omoda has global ambitions – a fact that’s underscored by launch of the new Omoda 9 SHS (for “Super Hybrid System”) SUV shown here. And, with up to 535 hp in the top EU-market trim, Spanish auto enthusiast site Motorpasión reports that nothing cheaper is more powerful.

To put those 535 hp into context, Porsche’s motorsports-focused 911 GT3 supercar generates “just” 502 from its 4.0L flat-six engine. The Omoda’s 535, meanwhile, are generated by a single electric motor powering the SHS’ front wheels and a pair of electric motors at the rear – good enough to rocket the SUV from 0-62 mph (100 kmh) in just 4.9 seconds.

Under the hood

Omoda 9 SHS under the hood; via Omoda.

The SHS version of the Omoda packs a 34.46 kWh battery pack that lets Omoda 9 SHS go 145 km (a little over 90 miles) on pure electric power. Once the battery is depleted, the 1.5 liter turbocharged ICE unit (shown, above) kicks on, providing an additional 935 km of driving for a combined 1,100 km of “range” from a full tank and battery.

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That said, this is a PHEV/EREV with more than enough all-electric range to handle all but the most extreme of edge-case daily driving needs – and, as such, Omoda expects the 9 SHS it to be used more like an EV. To that end, it’s capable of DC fast charging at up to 65 kW, charging from 20% to 80% in under 30 minutes.

Omoda execs, for their part, seem pretty proud of themselves. “The OMODA 9 represents a significant advancement for our brand, embodying modern living with its beautiful design, intelligent engineering, and usable technology,” says Victor Zhang, UK Country Director for OMODA. “Our SHS technology demonstrates the progress in hybrid vehicles, offering performance, range, and seamless integration into daily life. We believe the OMODA 9 delivers the comfort, power, and quality that today’s drivers expect.”

To meet those expectations, the Omoda 9 SHS offers drivers a dual 12.3″ curved screen display, a 540° rear-view camera, and a Sony sound system with HD speakers integrated into the front seats’ Nappa leather headrests. Those leather seats also feature fully electric adjustment, as well as heat, fan, and massage functions.

The 9 SHS is one of several new models introduced at this week’s Shanghai Auto Show, and is available for order in the UK and EU for delivery later this year.

Electrek’s Take

We can talk about tariff this and trade war that all day long. The real message here, however, is that China is objectively, unequivocally, and obviously years ahead of the US when it comes to American EVs in terms of manufacturing efficiency, battery and charging technology, and value. And, as long as they have a system that takes the burden of pensions and healthcare and other basics of life off the manufacturer, they’ll probably keep pulling ahead.

Head on down to the comments and change my mind.

SOURCE | IMAGES: Omoda; via Motorpasión.


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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.

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