This is what happened. Tesla security received tons of bug reports that required root access to identify, yet they got a vanishingly small number of root vulnerability reports. This policy fixes that misincentive.
Yeah I think their early success with Tesla Vision was faster than expected, it went to their heads, and they underestimated the iteration and fine tuning needed to solve the edge cases. It's difficult to predict how many reps it will take to solve an intricate problem. That's not to excuse their public timeline -- their guidance was naive and IMO irresponsible -- but I don't think it was in bad faith.
I haven't closely followed which rides have drivers where, and what is driven by Tesla vs what is regulatory -- but I thought some "drivers" were still in the passenger seat in Austin?
At any rate, I don't think they are revoking their prior promises. I expect them to deliver L4 autonomy to owners as previously promised. With that said, I'm glad they are ceasing that promise to new customers and focusing on what the car does today, given how wrong their timelines have been. I agree it's shitty if they don't deliver that, and that they should offer buybacks if they find themselves in that position.
Yeah, Tesla did themselves no favors with how they initially marketed FSD, and all the missed timelines amplified the brand cost of that. I'm glad to see them focus on what it can do today. Better to underpromise and overdeliver etc.
As an aside, it's wild how different the perspective is between the masses and the people who experience the bleeding edge here. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed," indeed.
This is clickbait from a publication that's had it out for Tesla for nearly a decade.
Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises.
The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
It was successful at first, but ultimately we traded one set of problems for another (how novel, I know).
In particular, I underestimated the pain of troubleshooting the database itself. Riak was a new product, we were a small team that had never run anything on BEAM, and ultimately we lost too many days debugging and trying to make sense of Erlang stacktraces.
The Basho folks were great, and to this day I appreciate how quickly they fixed a number of bugs for us. But ultimately it wasn't enough -- we found problems faster than they could be patched.
I'd suggest Lost in the Funhouse. It's a collection of short stories and showcases a wide range of his authorial style. I'd suggest a paper copy for reasons that will be clear by page two (maybe page one).
Damn. He was my favorite living author. Got introduced to his "Lost in the Funhouse" in senior seminar in high school, was hooked immediately. His stories (and especially his writing style) changed how I approach literature and writing at large. RIP.
There's lots of research here in the Tesla hacker community. The car continues to function. The easiest (not trivial, but easiest) way to test it yourself is to remove the SIM and disable wifi -- the non-network features of the car continue to work indefinitely. There are even some third parties who support early Tesla vehicles, on stock firmwares, in part by fully blocking comms with Tesla.
This only affected pre-BLE models when the owner did not have the key. It's no worse than when an ICE vehicle owner loses their key; it's just that typically with a Tesla, you can start it from the app in that situation.