I wonder if there will be anyone that tries the same tactic with Twitter. People are so unhinged these days.

 

Wouldn't surprise me in the least. BTW Dan O'Dowd is on Twitter.

 

Why? Why do I need to know who the creator is? Why am I duped? And why is that relevant? I simply posted a video for discussion. Yes, I don't have a Tesla. Yes, I have zero experience with Tesla. But that's the whole point. Maybe I'm interested in Tesla and their autopilot so I post it to see how people with experience respond and if this video is valid. That's not reasonable? You think Tesla would let something like this float online if the creator has no back up for their claims? For that I feel bad for you. How about the below comment from a Tesla owner?
I sure know nothing about their SW but to have something like this available to the public amazes me.

 

My advice to anyone buying a Tesla...don't pay the $12K for FSD. It's still beta, it has bugs and it scares me personally to have an AI drive for you. Plus when you see the legal docs you have to sign, that should be enough. When I eventually get my Tesla, it's not going to have FSD activated

 

Given what's been posted this should all be extremely self evident.
Looks to me like you posted the most negative video you could find. At best you didn't do any due diligence to find out if what was being shown was credible.
There are THOUSANDS of vids on Youtube showing FSB beta, taking place in dozens of cities in the U.S. in Canada. You just happened to post the one made by a man trying to lobby Tesla out of existence as to benefit his own company.

Dan O'Dowd is on a platform owned by Elon Musk where O'Dowd trashes Tesla constantly. Does that answer your question?
I don't know if that was using FSB beta or the 4 year old software stack that only works on freeways.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what FSD Beta is. The people using it are vetted by Tesla and if they are found not to be paying attention their privilege is revoked. It's for people that FULLY understand the limitations and want to help train the neural net. There are at least 400,000 people using it.

 

The loaner I had was Beta based on what it said in the menu while I was looking at the options. Like I said, it may be better in other areas but where I was going (back to the service center) it was more aggravating than it was worth to the point where my wife told me to shut it off.

 

Tesla’s Big Gross Margin Advantage

Most of the world’s legacy automakers are slowly but surely raising their electrification games, and that’s good news for all concerned — car buyers need more choices, and the industry needs healthy competition. However, they still have a lot to learn, and some painful choices to make, if they hope to catch up to the industry’s trend-setter.

As EV sales volumes have increased, Tesla’s EV market share has — perhaps inevitably — shrunk from absolutely dominant to merely commanding, and many a pundit is predicting that this is the beginning of the end for the brash upstart. Such fears (or hopes) are overblown. Tesla has a few aces up its sleeve, and one of these is a much-misunderstood accounting concept called gross margin.

Gross margin is defined as the difference between the sale price of a product and the cost to produce that product. It’s the amount a company earns on each unit that it sells. Many of those who pontificate about Tesla’s prospects might be surprised to learn that the young company has by far the highest margins in the auto industry—and has for some years. Back in the days when Tesla dwelt in the Valley of Death, it was common for naysayers to write that the company “lost money on every car it sold.” This was false. Yes, the company as a whole was losing money, but that was because it was investing huge sums in building factories and developing new models. Tesla did earn a healthy margin on every car it delivered, and continues to do so. As other, better-informed pundits have , the company could have become profitable years before it actually did by abandoning its grand expansion plans and focusing on delivering the Model S in moderate volumes.

As explained in a recent Reuters article, and illustrated in an infographic from Visual Capitalist, Tesla earns more money for every vehicle it sells than any of its global rivals. A lot more. Reuters calculates that Big T earns an average of $9,574 per vehicle sold, compared to $2,150 for second-place GM, and $1,550 for plug-in powerhouse BYD.

This isn’t just a nice thing to brag about — like a material advantage in a game of chess, it’s a resource that the company can choose to deploy in different ways to defend its position and/or to attack its opponents. A couple of recent stories provide examples.

When Tesla recently announced substantial price cuts, many observers naively saw this sign of flagging demand as the beginning of the end. Other pundits (and the stock market) saw it as the normal working of the Invisible Hand of supply and demand, and a shot across the bows of Tesla’s rivals. Within days, Ford was forced to respond with price cuts on its own EVs, and other shoes may yet drop. And here’s the rub: Tesla still has plenty of room to make further price cuts — its rivals don’t. (According to Reuters, Ford already goes $762 into the red every time it sells an electric car.)

By most accounts, the main reason for Tesla’s superior margins is lower production costs. EVs are simpler machines than ICE vehicles, and inherently cost less to build, and Tesla is constantly finding ways to refine its manufacturing processes — for example, using giant castings to replace complicated assemblies of smaller parts. As Reuters notes, using production-cost advantages to fund price cuts has a long history in the auto industry. Toyota successfully weaponized its superior margins in the 1980s and 1990s.

Meanwhile, Chinese automakers have started selling their EVs in Europe, and domestic brands fear, with good reason, that they may steal a large part of the market for lower-priced cars, which European EV-makers have largely ignored. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares is just one of several industry execs sounding the alarm, and implying that governments need to ladle out more subsidies to help automakers meet the threat.

But there’s a pretty good argument to be made that Tesla is a more immediate challenge to European automakers. For a month or two in 2022, the Model Y was the best-selling car (yes, of any kind) in Europe, and that was before the recent round of price cuts. If demand should drop, Tesla could dip into its magnificent margin to drop prices further. Volkswagen (for example) has much less leeway with its margin of $973. And the Chinese? According to Reuters, XPeng and NIO are bleeding cash — their margins are each five figures into the red. (It’s true that China is still facing crippling supply chain issues, and furthermore, all these figures are for global sales, so they don’t take regional differences into account.)

As the legacy automakers produce more EVs, they’ll improve their EV-building chops and increase their margins. (Unfortunately, they’ll also be cutting costs via layoffs over the next few years.) Tesla’s advantage may not last. On the other hand, it may — for over a decade, we’ve been told that the dinosaurs would soon get their act together and stomp on the pesky little mammal running between their legs.



https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/20...gin-advantage/

 

You probably call what I'm going to say BS but I have not looked up a youtube about Tesla. I did see one about their roadster when it popped up but that was it. I admire what he has done but simply have no interest in his cars yet. The only thing I read/search about Tesla is TSLA. How long has this thread been active until I posted the video? 3 and a half years. You really think I searched this video up to post? I saw this video pop up on my social media and thought it'd be a good discussion topic as there was a recent fatal accident. "I don't do my due diligence". Lol. Do you/we? Do you know all the details behind this video? If we do, the CarChat is dead long ago.
Oh yes, they know. You're on your own. Just like something-that-we-can-not discuss here. Nice to hear from a Tesla lover. Not everyone sees the same way you see unfortunately.
How so when a loaner has it?
Does it ask you to consent before using it?

 

That shouldn't happen Tesla is dropping the ball here.
I try my best not to post deceptive content. Check out what happens when FSD encounters a child in the street.

 

FSD beta access is no longer limited. It's open to anyone who has purchased it

 

bias (or strong opinions, like you have) is not the same as fraud.

you're judging him based on his looks?

a link would have been helpful... https://ghs.com/products/auto_adas.html

so his company believes in secure rigorously developed safe software and obviously vehemently disagrees with tesla's "throw it out there and let drivers generate data to see if we're on the right track even though we know it's far from perfect" approach. i'm not against musk's approach though, because obviously they do their own tests and obviously consumers who want to be part of this grand 'experiment' (and pay for the privilege) have done so voluntarily, even though the risk is not only to themselves. it's very surprising to me this was not blocked for sale from the get go, but i'd rather live in a 'give it a go' country than 'the answer is always no with tons of red tape' one.

so dowd is against tesla... doesn't look he's made much of a dent.

 

You didn't put a smiley face when you mentioned I didn't like his looks

I'll be the first to admit that FSD is not ready for prime time. In fact I personally am going to skip it. But Mr. O' Dawd has alterior motives, including using this to run for office.

I know people here who have it, and it does glitch out occasionally, but they use it responsibly and love it. For people caught sleeping while using it, they should probably lose access. That said, I don't think it's as common as the media claims. At least I have yet to see someone asleep behind the wheel

 

Tesla does eye tracking. Thing is, people with FSD beta are highly motivated to test it out responsibly some would consider them fanatics. The hilarious thing is technically people are not allowed to post any vids on FSD beta, maybe Tesla finally changed that but it was against their TOS for a long time.

Tesla does publish safety reports, detractors will instantly accuse them of lying but I doubt that. Faking data will get them in huge trouble.
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

If you go back to when FSD was first available it was truly terrible progress has been incredible. Would have never happened without real world testing and data.

 

I'm not a fan of Electrek but this article shows why Dan O'Dowd is full of it. Pics are at the link with the rest of the article

https://electrek.co/2022/08/10/tesla-self-driving-smear-campaign-releases-test-fails-fsd-never-engaged

According to their test results, FSD Beta was activated at 40 mph within 100 yards of the dummy, and in three tests, it always struck the dummy between 24 and 27 mph:

These results would point to the driver failing to activate the FSD Beta, and the car slowing down to those speeds over 100 yards before hitting the target.

Sure enough, The Dawn Project’s own video of the test shows the driver “activating” FSD Beta by pressing on the Autopilot stalk, but we can clearly see that it didn’t activate because the course prediction line stays grey and the Autopilot wheel doesn’t appear on the top left:

 

Although Tesla never really left, welcome back to California?



Tesla is returning to California.

Elon Musk announced during a joint press conference with California Gov. Gavin Newsom that Tesla would be opening a global engineering headquarters to California, two years after a dramatic exit that saw the electric car company leave the Golden State for a facility in Austin, Texas.

Tesla will open up shop in the former home of Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Musk said. The facility will serve as the company’s engineering headquarters while the corporate headquarters remains in Austin.

The move returns Tesla to the world’s center of technology and innovation, and puts Musk in closer proximity to the headquarters of Twitter, which the billionaire tech entrepreneur purchased last year in a massive social media shakeup.

Musk called the move into HP’s old building a “poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla.”

Newsom applauded the decision to return Tesla to California, saying that the state remains on the forefront of “discovery and new ideas and innovation.”

“We say about our state, the future happens here first. We are America’s coming attraction,” Newsom said.

The governor, who has known Musk for decades, said it was a point of personal pride to have Tesla in California.

“Tesla is a California company,” Newsom said. “It started here first.”

Newsom added that California has been committed to supporting Tesla and other electric vehicle brands for years and has proven that through legislative policy and regulations.

But for Newsom, whom Musk said was one of the first people to purchase a Tesla Roadster in 2007, bringing back the electric sports car company was critical to secure California’s place as the nation’s automobile leader.

“We are able to lay claim to 44 manufacturing headquarter companies in the electric vehicle space, but none that dominate like Tesla,” Newsom said.

California is already the largest car manufacturer in America and Musk said Tesla’s Fremont plant is the busiest plant in North America with plans to produce more than 600,000 vehicles in the coming year.

Newsom has been a proponent of electric vehicles and revolutionizing America’s energy production, and said he hopes the partnership between Musk and California will allow the state to “dominate in this space and change the way we produce and consume energy in this state, and this nation and the world we are trying to build.”

Musk said he was excited for that partnership and hoped to do just that.

Tesla moved its headquarters out of California in late 2021 to set up shop in Austin. At the time of the move, Musk was in an ongoing battle with Alameda County public health officials over his desire to reopen the Fremont manufacturing plant in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

Daniel Ives, an analyst for multibillion-dollar investment firm Wedbush, said at the time that he believed Tesla’s move would be massively beneficial for the company due to tax breaks offered by Texas and the cheaper cost of labor.

Musk moved his residence from California to Texas, where there is no state personal income tax.

Musk did not specifically address the reasoning for returning Tesla’s headquarters to Silicon Valley. It’s unclear if the state offered any incentives for the company to return, or if Musk simply wanted to be closer to the Twitter headquarters, which is located in San Francisco.

Despite the spat with public health officials more than two years ago, Newsom offered nothing but words of praise for the controversial tech figure, saying Musk and Tesla is a major reason for California’s success in the electric vehicle industry.

“We don’t take that for granted and we appreciate the investments you’re making,” Newsom said.

The two also shared a laugh when discussing their own finances over the past several years.

Musk said that Newsom likely put down a $100,000 deposit for his first Tesla in 2007. Newsom countered that that purchase was made when he “had money” and joked that both he and Musk had similar net worths at the time.

“Your [networth] went negative, and I got a pension, so eat your heart out,” Newsom said.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

https://ktla.com/news/california/tes...usk-announces/