Banned From YouTube: Damning Video Details Tesla’s ‘Full Self Driving’ Claims Versus Reality

Nation and State ^ | 03/26/2021 | Tyler Durden

[SeekAndFind]

On Thursday, a video dropped on YouTube that laid out Elon Musk’s statements about Full Self Driving over the last 5 years, compared to what the company has actually been able to achieve and deliver. The 12 minute video laid out a blatantly obvious case for Full Self Driving to be, as one FinTwit user described it, “one of the biggest bait and switch scams in history”.

Noted Tesla short seller Montana Skeptic called the video “a truly superb 12-minute YouTube presentation on [Tesla’s] full self-driving promises,” noting that “almost every word spoken or written is by [Elon Musk], his carefully selected beta testers, or his legal counsel.”

In fact, the video made such an impact, some users joked that they were surprised it hadn’t been pulled from YouTube yet. And then, of course, by the end of the night Thursday, the video had been pulled from YouTube.

Lol this just happened.

https://t.co/zltHiv8dL5 pic.twitter.com/Oddb7XJTPK

— Rob Schmied (@rschmied) March 25, 2021

After being re-uploaded to Vimeo, it appeared the video was once again taken down. Finally, it was put on Veoh, where it now resides. It has also been posted in a series of 5 Tweets:

Elon Musk is aggressively going after the Tesla Self-Driving Scam video uploaded today and attempting to take it down everywhere.

I’ve split it into parts, so hopefully this stays up for this evening.

Special thanks to Pat for the copy

(12 minutes)

Part 1 of 5: pic.twitter.com/1CFypIZhF6

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) March 26, 2021

We’re guessing that copies may start to pop-up elsewhere once it becomes evident that someone is trying to scrub the video from the internet.

Regardless, the video starts by laying out all of Elon Musk’s claims about autonomy and Full Self Driving that he used to pitch the idea, while taking deposits for Full Self Driving, over the last half decade. For example, it shows Musk making claims of $30,000 “gross profits”, per year, for a “single robotaxi”, which, of course, does not exist.

“It’s financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,” the video shows Musk saying in April 2019.

The video also shows Musk in 2015 saying that Tesla will have autonomy in 3 years. It then shows Musk in 2018 saying that by the end of the following year, full self driving would be 100% to 200% safer than humans driving.

Noting that Tesla was in financial turmoil at the times Musk made many statements, the video swiftly debunks each of Musk’s points as it shows them, using footage of media reports and autonomous “beta testers”.

“We expect to be feature complete with full self driving this year,” Musk is shown again crowing in 2019. “I’m extremely confident of achieving full autonomy next year,” Musk is then shown saying in 2020.

The video then cuts to footage of numerous self-driving beta tests, repeatedly showing Teslas requiring human intervention. Recall, the company’s latest Full Self Driving beta v8.2 was absolutely thrashed by critics like Road and Track who called it “laughably bad” and “potentially dangerous”.

“If you think we’re anywhere near fully autonomous cars, this video might convince you otherwise,” Road and Track wrote about Tesla’s Full Self Driving feature about a week ago. The article referred to the feature as “morally dubious, technologically limited, and potentially dangerous”.

The 12 minute video debunking Full Self Driving appears to show the same.

GLJ Research’s Gordon Johnson said of the video in a Friday morning note:

“In a video released last night on YouTube, and subsequently erased nearly as soon as it was released, it is credibly alleged that TSLA’s full-self drive (“FSD”) function is a massive deception, which, based on tesladeaths.com, is alleged to have already killed people – in fact, the video alleges FSD is killing people “right now”. To the latter point, as has been documented for years here, “verified Tesla autopilot” deaths, again, according to tesladeaths.com, have been alleged a total of 6 times thus far…”

You can watch the whole video here.

[ctdonath2]

Liability should be akin to letting someone else drive. You’re just letting the legal person Tesla do the driving, as they legally own the software (as is the case for most published software).

Tesla hired actuaries with job descriptions hinting at addressing/solving this problem.

[ctdonath2]

Nobody is forcing you to, so relax. Drive what you want.

I’ve had an electric car, it was very nice and I want another.

“Is a self driving car going to know how to react to black ice and driving in the snow?”

Yes, actually. Modern electric cars have excellent control on ice and snow. Self driving still has some challenges with heavy snow, but is doing surprisingly well and improving rapidly.

[Steely Tom]

Saw this on Quora the other day:

Ok, now the biggest ones. Gonna stretch “big data” a bit but — the current investment wave in AI startups is going to have a really hard landing. Turns out that a lot of “AI startups” are just… using cheap labor behind an API:

The company claims its AI tools are “human-assisted,” and that it provides a service that will help a customer make more than 80 percent of a mobile app from scratch in about an hour, according to claims Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal, who also says his other title is “Chief Wizard,” made onstage at a conference last year. However, the WSJ reports that Engineer.ai does not use AI to assemble the code, and instead uses human engineers in India and elsewhere to put together the app.

This report (link at source) suggests that 40% of “AI startups” in Europe actually use… no AI whatsoever:

“In 40 percent of cases we could find no mention of evidence of AI,” MMC head of research David Kelnar, who compiled the report, told Forbes. Kelnar says that this means “companies that people assume and think are AI companies are probably not.”

Tons of “AI-first” startups have raised millions upon millions of dollars using this untried-and-untrue business plan:

• Raise money
• Spend money on interns who pretend to be an AI
• Wait for AI to be invented
• Profit

AI is going to come. But it’s going to come from research labs at Google / Deepmind or Baidu. Or maybe even some MIT research lab. But it’s not going to come from three dudes fresh out of Y Combinator, who split their time between fundraising, talking about AI, and fundraising again because they spent all their money on interns who get paid to pretend to be AIs.

But eh, I’m not going to cry for burnt VC capital. VCs should have known better, and sunk their money into hard, traditional research instead. Like blood testing. Can’t go wrong there.

Here's a link to the page this material was on: Who are some of the largest big-data frauds out there right now?

[Don W]

More of those deaths are caused by inattentive drivers. Texting, talking on the handheld, makeup applyers, and the like.

Impaired driving has fallen from #1 to #3 cause of road deaths.

Every day, about 28 people in the United States die in drunk-driving crashes — that’s one person every 52 minutes. In 2019, these deaths reached the lowest percentage since 1982 when NHTSA started reporting alcohol data — but still 10,142 people lost their lives.

[exDemMom]

I am not certain why people would want self-driving vehicles. Even if the technology could be perfected, what is the appeal of sitting in a vehicle staring out the window, when you could be actively engaged driving it? That would make car trips just about as unappealing as airplane trips, with the caveat that airplanes (at least for me) are unlikely to cause motion sickness if I do anything other than stare out the window.

[Nifster]

Uber and Lyft provide that already

[ctdonath2]

But then you have to go back and get your car later, paying someone else to drive in the meantime.
Vs just get in own car, tap “take me home”, done.

[ctdonath2]

Driving 1000 miles to visit family is painfully boring, worse when driving overnight. I’d rather drive manually onto the freeway, engage auto-drive, and sleep for a few hours while traversing hundreds of miles of dark roads.

[ctdonath2]

Interesting, but not relevant here. Tesla is in fact implementing a serious AI system a la Full Self Drive; it’s not a bunch of interns pretending to be computers. Exciting that it’s to the point of cars being able to mostly drive themselves under normal conditions at city & highway speeds.

[SgtHooper]

It’s called the stick shift! Which in fact, now is a security device! :-)

[Nifster]

Unless it crashes as many teslas have

[fremont_steve]

I help build semiconductor products for the auto industry. The next generation of electronics is going to have military grade cryptographic security and nasa level safety up and down tie line...from break controllers to engine control.

I own a tesla model 3. I am also a purchaser of full self driving...so I am waiting for them to deliver on the promise. The thing about Tesla..they constantly improve the driver experience. Consider the sentry mode security..something added years after the model S first shipped. No other manufacturer has such a robust car physical security system...and this was a feature added at no additional cost to the fleet.

As for resistance to the vehicle being hacked. It has been done. Tesla was quick to release fixes to the fleet over the air..it will likely happen again..My original point was that the security of vehicles now being taken very seriously by the entire industry.