Posted by 01-_- 13 hours ago
[Edit to delete references to LIDAR]: Then front radar was disabled/disconnected https://www.carscoops.com/2023/05/tesla-is-disabling-radar-s...
Then he stepped into his problematic political role.
It is hard to imagine any technically competent buyer getting past either of the first two, given they trust the vehicle with their mortal shell.
I seem to remember one of the leaked images was rumored to be from Elon's own garage showing an odd item he owned at the time.
Have you looked at other car manufacturers' source code? AFAIK Toyota's source code got scrutinized as a result of the unintended acceleration lawsuits, and it was also criticized for sloppy coding.
edit: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
I can't think of another transport/medical/safety related software leak that left the same kind of impression on me. I was somewhat considering a Tesla back then, but the source code stopped me from that idea.
Radar, not lidar. Tesla cars never had lidar.
I recall Tesla having vehicles in their testing with Lidar and had no idea they never shipped it.
My 2015 towing VW has two radar sensors on the front for adaptive cruise and 5 cameras for lanekeeping. The cameras constantly come on and offline depending on visibility, cleanliness, and even weather. The radars have never once misperformed.
I can't imagine even trusting automatic cruise control to "vision only", much less what they are calling self-driving features.
Having driven plenty of cars with adaptive cruise using only one front radar, I can't really even suggest that - false positives are likely to happen to any driver that racks up mileage when the brakes can be fully applied based on single forward radar sensor covered in bug guts.
When conceived initially, it had some pretty interesting ideas. The thought process was probably like:
Hmm... What if we use stainless steel instead of regular steel and avoid all the expenses of the paint shop? But then we need to use thicker panels because stainless steel is not great mechanically. So let's double down on thickness and make the panels a load-bearing "exoskeleton", this will also help us to avoid the weight penalty of the frame! But we can't stamp panels that are this thick, we just don't have big enough presses. So let's try to do this "flat" design.
But they failed to achieve that. And now they have a regular boring body-on-the-frame car, with thick panels just adding useless weight and cutting down the battery range. And then there's this steer-by-wire gimmick because Elon really wanted the yoke to happen.
The only remaining true improvement is the 48V power-over-Ethernet architecture.
I ordered one on announcement day (11/21/2019). Yeah, I thought it was ugly, but the main selling point for me was its promised ability to go 500 miles on a single charge. (Apparently Musk has a habit of making promises he cannot keep.)
I really wanted that 500 mile range. My two homes are 300 miles apart, and I don't want to waste my time at a charging station while traveling between them. I also liked the idea of using the truck as a power-wall for my (4kW) solar plant.
I cancelled my order and got my $100 back (after inflation ate about 20% of it).
The Lucid Air (GT) offers similar range (512 miles), but it's not a truck, which I also really wanted. (I have enough cars already.) Also, the price of the Lucid Air was more than double that of the promised CT price. In the end, the CT price went up and the Lucid Air price went down, so they're now within about 10% of each other.
That sounds like a problem solvable by a 3rd home.
The uniwiper. The wheel-supporting bolts made for a much lighter vehicle. The glued on cantrails. The glue-installed light bar. The snow-collecting headlight shelf. The frequently jamming tonneau cover. The panel gaps. The sharp edges. The gear selector that likes to fall down from the ceiling. The weird discolorations and scuff marks the bed often has on delivery. The shitty cupholders.
People paid $100k for this. It's criminally bad at that price.
Scathing!
Then there's the long list of lies, like the predictions around self driving [0] and going to Mars [1].
And then you get to his decision to enter the political realm, take a chainsaw to government agencies without care or reason as to how they operate or what they actually do, and use his influence to self-deal.
He's a corrupt asshole. If he did these same things under a different party affiliation, he'd still be a corrupt asshole.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/dhi6l6/spacex...
His approach was not one of someone who had carefully investigated the situation, found real issues, and was sensibly trying to fix them.
It was an idiot with a chainsaw, chopping wildly at things, so that he could say that he'd made them smaller.
Curious, ain't it.
https://time.com/7298994/usaid-deaths-studies-estimates-fore...
Musk's political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the presidential election last year, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-cou...
I have a problem with the way DOGE went about it. Several problems, in fact. "Move fast and break things" is perhaps a reasonable startup strategy. It's entertaining with rockets. But when what's being broken is not just the government but the rule of law, I am no longer entertained.
He also supported the AfD in Germany; he also offered a million dollars to people before the election in a way that looked like a bribe even if it technically wasn't.
Also Musk's actions in support of Trump may have hastened the failure of the US government, because Trump is purging disagreement rather than incompetence, also the operation of DOGE was classic Muntzing strategy of remove everything and only put it back when something breaks which resulted in at least e.g. people involved with maintaining the USA's nuclear deterrant needing to be un-fired.
Demonstrable bullshit, given his actual actions. Doge was an idiotic waste of time that saved next to nothing, and cost the government significantly more via the IRS cuts. Come on, now.
He tried to frontrun the sexual harassment allegations by framing it as a red vs blue issue, making his own sexual impropriety somehow everyone else's political problem.
He could easily have deflated the controversy if he apologized and explained that it was unintentional and that he denounces the Nazi party. Instead he gave a speech to the AFD (the modern German Nazi party) about how white people shouldn't have to feel ashamed of their history like a week later. As far as I know, he has never directly apologized or tried to explain the gesture.
Things start to make a lot of sense w.r.t. Musk and Trump when you view them as bullies, and their supporters as wannabe bullies, and they're cheering for the greatest bullies they've ever seen in their lives.
> On Saturday, Musk spoke repeatedly about the importance of Germans taking pride in their heritage.
> "It's good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything," Musk said.
> Then, in an apparent reference to the Nazi era, Musk added that there is "frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that."
They do say that those who forget the past will never repeat it. Ah well!
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/27/nx-s1-5276084/elon-musk-germa...
If you're outside the US, take your pick of news sources and search his name.