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, 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.
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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Hyundai is about to launch a new electric SUV in China. With its big debut coming up, Hyundai just dropped a sneak peek, and it looks like it could be the IONIQ 4. Check it out for yourself in the video below.
Is Hyundai teasing the IONIQ 4?
We caught our first glimpse of the new EV model last month after Beijing Hyundai released a few official “spy” photos.
Despite the camouflage, you can see a few design elements, like a light bar across the front, slim LED headlights, and a closed-off grille. At first, it almost looks like a smaller version of the IONIQ 9, Hyundai’s first three-row electric SUV, but with a much sportier, shaped profile.
Beijing Hyundai released a new teaser for the upcoming electric SUV this week. The video shows “a wave of high-end operations” as the vehicle dances across the snow.
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The video highlights features like real-time torque control, high-speed cornering, and the SUV’s impressive body control while driving around cones.
Hyundai’s new electric SUV is being called “OE” internally, according to The Korean Car Blog, suggesting it could be an IONIQ model.
All other Hyundai IONIQ EV models were also codenamed with an “E” internally, which is raising speculation that this could be the IONIQ 4.
Like most global OEMs, Hyundai is fighting to compete in an intense Chinese EV market, which is dominated by domestic automakers like BYD.
Hyundai teases new electric SUV in China (Source: Beijing Hyundai)
Hyundai opened its first overseas R&D center last year in China to spearhead its comeback. It will work with local suppliers and tech companies to develop EVs designed for Chinese buyers. The new electric SUV is expected to launch in China later this year, followed by three new energy vehicles, including EVs and EREVs.
Beijing Hyundai will release more information on April 16, with the electric SUV set to “challenge the limit of driving performance.”
What do you think of Hyundai’s new electric SUV? Is this the IONIQ 4? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Charge point provider char.gy has secured a £130 million contract to install 6,000 curbside EV chargers for Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC) – the UK’s largest installation of its kind.
London-based char.gy has also been awarded a 15-year contract to operate and maintain the charging network.
Installing Level 2 chargers curbside, where most drivers in the UK park, will enable more people to take advantage of cheaper charging rates while juicing up their EVs overnight. (charg.gy’s pay as you go night tariff, between midnight and 7 am, is £0.39/kWh, compared to its £0.59/kWh day tariff.)
John Lewis, chief executive of char.gy, said the project is “a huge moment for the UK and its EV ambitions. This partnership alone will empower thousands of residents to confidently make the switch to electric vehicles, knowing they have easy access to chargers.”
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Brighton and Hove City Council is among the first to tap into the government’s Local EV Infrastructure (LEVI) Fund, designed to help English local authorities roll out charging solutions for residents without off-street parking. Future of Roads Minister Lilian Greenwood said making EV charging as accessible as possible is “crucial to making the switch to electric a success.”
The UK now has over 75,000 public EV chargers, according to the Department for Transport—and it looks like the country’s on pace to hit its 2030 target. Back in December, the National Audit Office said the rollout is “on track” to meet the DfT’s estimate that at least 300,000 chargers will be needed by the end of the decade.
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