Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers, And Now They Are In Serious Trouble

Engineers, raise your hand if you've tried to do good work despite your management's 'support.' Oh, look at all the hands going up!

This is true, but when safety is on the line it actually goes further than that. As an engineer you have an ethical duty to say no to making a product unsafe for end users or the general public.

It doesn’t matter if you get fired, if your boss goes to the media to removed about you, if your boss threatens to sue you, you as an engineer hold a position of public trust to keep the people that use your product safe. If you don’t respect that and take it seriously, well we see where oceangate ended up.
- The number of times I've rejected something because of security flaws (usually database injection), only to see other engineers later approve and merge the pull request is infuriating. There seems to always be an engineer who is willing to make an unsafe product.
- Yeah my boss has been going back and forth with me on this for months. Wanting to release unsecured products to the general public. I’m getting exhausted with him. I hold the keys and frequently I’ve told him no, and threatened to quit. Each time they just retreat back and hold a meeting how it will “stay on dev for now”. The features aren’t even feasible to release in the near future but I know they will force the issue. My resignation letter is on the table.
- That value is instilled in many types of engineering, but not as much in software engineering.
Tale as old as time.

Engineers: "This is possible but we will need to equip every car with an expensive sensor suite"

Management: "So you're saying we can just remove the sensors and figure it out with your engineering magic, you guys are really good at that, you got my iPhone connected to ICloud so you must be reeeally good with technology."

Engineers: "..."

Management: "Also, anyone not up to this task is fired."
- Also, we are shipping it next week.
- After the meeting a few of the smart ones asked for clarification over email to get it writing.
Management ALWAYS knows what's best! Obviously!

Hence why they constantly come running for us to fix it when shit goes as we say it will.

tl;dr: Autonomous driving uses a whole host of multiple and different kinds of sensors. Musk said "NO, WE WILL ONLY USE VISION CAMERA SENSORS." And that doesn't work.

Guess what? I have eyes; I can see. You know what I want an autonomous vehicle to be able to do? Receive sensory input that I can't.

We also use way more than just our eyes to navigate. We have accelerometers (ear canals), pressure sensors (touch), Doppler sensors (ears) to augment how we get around. It was a fools errand to try and figure everything out just with cameras.
- Also you can alter the vision input by moving your head, blocking the sun with your hand etc.
  
  This seems like a classic case of ego from Musk.
He’s such a fucking moron
What’s worse is it will be hard to reverse this decision. Tesla is a data and AI company compiling vision and driving data from drivers around the world. If you change the sensor format or layout dramatically, all the old data and all the new data becomes hard to hybridize. You basically start from scratch at least for the new sensors, and you fail to deliver a promise to old customers.
- If you change the sensor format or layout dramatically, all the old data and all the new data becomes hard to hybridize.
  
  I don't see why that would have to be the case if the new data is a complete superset of the old data. If all the same cameras are there, then the additional sensors and the data those sensors collect can actually help train the processing of the visual-only data, right?
How do we prove we're not robots? Fucking select the picture with traffic lights or buses, right? How was this allowed.
- “Honey, the car ordered itself new tires again!”
This news is months old. Honestly agree with musk on this one. We are able to drive with 2(sometimes only 1)low resolution(sometimes out of focus, sometimes closed) cameras on a pivot inside the vehicle with further blindspots all around. Much of our rear situational awareness comes from 2/3 small warped mirrors strategically placed to enhance those 2 low resolution cameras on a pivot. Tesla has already reverted to add some radar back in... The lidar option sounds like dystopia waiting to happen (just imagine all streets filled with aftermarket invisible lasers from 3rd world counties, any one of them could blind you under unlucky circumstances). The best way forward is visual, and if you watch up to date test drives on YouTube you can see they are doing quite well with what they have.

That’s because musk is a dumb narcissistic cocky asshole.

You can only get by on other people's laurels for so long

Capitalism. Nothing worse than a CEO for a product to be honest. Being able to overrule engineers and workers is literally the problem with capitalism. A guy with ungodly money vs actual boots on the ground professionals. Disgusting

it doesnt end at ceos. i can think of one prominent, and fairly recent, incident where a different automaker knew of a defect before the product launched, and overruled fixing it because it was cheaper to leave it be. and that directly led to people dying. yet gm cars are still sold around the world and most people have forgotten about the ignition incidents. afaik the ceo was never involved in that decision.
You mean one man with a sapphire spoon shoved up his ass from birth doesn't know more than an army of folks that have studied their entire lives, experienced worlds of issues around it, and are living and breathing this stuff everyday for this exact challenge? HUH! Well today I learned! /s

And when the lay offs come, who does it affect more? The billionaire douche bag? Or the people that warned him?
- Isn’t an emerald spoon more his thing?

It's the radar, lidar, cameras only story that's coming up every few months for the last years. A few years ago Tesla went cameras only to save money, assuming it would be good enough. Other manufacturers/cars have a higher certification for autonomous driving but they are also using more sensors than just cameras.

But even if these consequences don’t come to pass, this information still paints Musk’s attitude towards public health and how he views his responsibility to his customers as far from golden.

Why am I not surprised in the least?

If it weren’t for all the deaths and other negative impacts on consumers and the general public, I’d be glad this is happening to such an arrogant prick. I hope the DoJ throws the book at him.

I'm not sure what kind of serious trouble they are actually in. I have spent most of today being driven around by my Tesla, and aside from the occasional badly handled intersection and unnecessary slowdown it's doing fucking great. So I would Tell anyone who says Tesla is in serious trouble, just go drive the car. Actually use the FSD beta before you say that it's useless. Because it's not. It is already far better than anyone expected vision only driving to be, and every release brings more improvements. I'm not saying that is a Tesla fanboy. I'm saying that as a person who actually drives the car.

The thing is working good enough most of the time is not enough. I haven’t driven a Tesla so I’m not speaking for their cars but I work in SLAM and while cameras are great for it, cameras on a fast car need to process fast and get good images. It’s a difficult requirement for camera only, so you will not be able to garante safety like other sensors would. In most scenarios, the situation is simple: e.g. a highway where you can track lines and cars and everything is predictable. The problem is the outliers when it’s suddenly not predictable: a lack of feature in crowded environments, a recognition pipeline that fails because the model detects something is not there or fail to detect something there… then you have no safeguards.

Camera only is not authorize in most logistic operation in factory, im not sure what changes for a car.

It’s ok to build a system that is good « most of the time » if you don’t advertise it as a fully autonomous system, so people stay focus.
- My point stands- drive the car.
  You're 100% right with everything you say. It has to work 100% of the time. Good enough most of the time won't get to L3-5 self driving.
  
  Camera only is not authorize in most logistic operation in factory, im not sure what changes for a car.
  
  The question is not the camera, it's what you do with the data that comes off the camera.
  The first few versions of camera-based autopilot sucked. They were notably inferior to their radar-based equivalents- that's because the cameras were using neural network based image recognition on each camera. So it'd take a picture from one camera, say 'that looks like a car and it looks like it's about 20' away' and repeat this for each frame from each camera. That sorta worked okay most of the time but it got confused a lot. It would also ignore any image it couldn't classify, which of course was no good because lots of 'odd' things can threaten the car. This setup would never get to L3 quality or reliability. It did tons of stupid shit all the time.
  
  What they do now is called occupancy networks. That is, video from ALL cameras is fed into one neural network that understands the geometry of the car and where the cameras are. Using multiple frames of video from multiple cameras at once, it then generates a 3d model of the world around the car and identifies objects in it like what is road and what is curb and sidewalk and other vehicles and pedestrians (and where they are moving and likely to move to), and that data is fed to a planner AI that decides things like where the car should accelerate/brake/turn.
  Because the occupancy network is generating a 3d model, you get data that's equivalent to LiDAR (3d model of space) but with much less cost and complexity. And because you only have one set of sensors, you don't have to do sensor fusion to resolve discrepancies between different sensors.
  
  I drive a Tesla. And I'm telling you from experience- it DOES work. The latest betas of full self driving software are very very good. On the highway, the computer is a better driver than me in most situations. And on local roads- it navigates them near-perfectly, the only thing it sometimes has trouble with is figuring out when is it's turn in an intersection (you have to push the gas pedal to force it to go).
  
  I'd say it's easily at L3+ state for highway driving. Not there yet for local roads. But it gets better with every release.
This kind of serious trouble (from the article):

The Department of Justice is currently investigating Tesla for a series of accidents — some fatal — that occurred while their autonomous software was in use. In the DoJ’s eyes, Tesla’s marketing and communication departments sold their software as a fully autonomous system, which is far from the truth. As a result, some consumers used it as such, resulting in tragedy. The dates of many of these accidents transpired after Tesla went visual-only, meaning these cars were using the allegedly less capable software.

Consequently, Tesla faces severe ramifications if the DoJ finds them guilty.

And of course:

The report even found that Musk rushed the release of FSD (Full Self-Driving) before it was ready and that, according to former Tesla employees, even today, the software isn’t safe for public road use. In fact, a former test operator went on record saying that the company is “nowhere close” to having a finished product.

So even though it seems to work for you, the people who created it don't seem to think it's safe enough to use.
- My neighborhood has roundabouts. A couple of times when there's not any traffic around, I've let autopilot attempt to navigate them. It works, mostly, but it's quite unnerving. AP wants to go through them ready faster than I would drive through them myself.
- I think you and the author are drawing conclusions that aren't supported by the quote.
  
  The engineers stated it's "nowhere close" to being a finished product which is evident by the fact that it's only L2 and in beta.
  
  The DOJ is investigating but we know some of these crashes where from people disregarding the safety features (like keeping your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road) when they crashed, so what comes of the investigation is still up in the air and I think a lot of the motivation is driven by publicity from articles such as this and not necessarily because the system is unsafe to use at all.
  
  The truth is that nobody has achieved full automation so we don't know what a full automation suite should look like in terms of hardware and software. The Mercedes system is a joke in that it can only be used on the highway below 40MPH. I dunno what speed limits are where you're located but in my area all the highways are 55+MPH.
  
  Furthermore, the robotaxis are being used in places like Vegas where they're geofenced to premapped city streets in areas where the weather is perfect all year round. The entire industry has a long way to go before anyone reaches a finished product.

Hubris is having a heck of a month.

It's having a heck of a career. Motherfucker has a better space program than any country and the Model Y is looking to beat the Toyota Corolla as the highest selling car in the world this year. It was the highest seller in the 1st quarter.

How much success does someone have to have before people can admit he's pretty good at making good engineering decisions?

Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers, And Now They Are In Serious Trouble

The engineers are in serious trouble? Or Tesla?

This headline would be clearer if it followed the convention of companies being singular:

Musk overruled Tesla engineers, and now it’s in serious trouble

Dude! This is the News, you can't just write a clear and understandable headline, no one will click on the article! Amateurs... (/s if it wasn't clear)

Everyone already knew at the time that this decision was doomed to fail. They now even doubled down to actively remove sensors from older models, to avoid the inputs interfering with the new updates. When it comes to automating and especially autonomous driving in combination with safety, one should want as much input as possible. I doubt visual can compute faster than radar/lidar, I think it was just a cost saving effort. Gladly, Mercedes and BMW show the way to autonomous driving and are allowed to actually start using the first versions on European highways.

They now even doubled down to actively remove sensors from older models, to avoid the inputs interfering with the new updates.

Yes, I bought FSD a long time ago and even though I'm owed a hardware 3 upgrade, I've yet to get it. If I stay on hardware 2.5, my radar will be stay active and they can't do something even dumber like disable my parking sensors. I've driven vision-only cars and it's really worse at least for the roads around here. The FSD alpha is still too nerve-wracking to use for me to even consider installing it.

According to the report, Musk overruled a significant number of Tesla engineers who warned him that switching to a visual-only system would be problematic and possibly unsafe due to its high risk of increasing the rate of accidents. His own team knew their systems weren’t up to the task, but Musk believed he knew better than the industry experts who helped propel Tesla to the forefront of autonomous technology and ploughed on with this egocentric, counterproductive plan. He even disabled sensors in older models so that pretty much the entire Tesla fleet went visual-only.

Amazing, just amazing.

He's starting to sound like Elizabeth Holmes.

Every expert in the field insists that my idea is impossible? They're backing their assertions with cold, hard facts?! I'll show em!
- if you look back at the history of tesla theres lots of that where musk/tesla engineers actually succeeded. it sounds like that thinking finally bit him in the ass.

I have a Model 3 with FSD. It's fucking useless.

I really doubt you folks are members of that blog and read the story.

The reason his companies are so successful is because he does listen to his engineers and prioritizes their communication and decision making by having a relatively flat organization that keeps management interference at a minimum.
No leader makes the right call and decision every time.

Interestingly enough there was another article published very recently about how Tesla's full self-driving performed every bit as good as Waymo in San Francisco but with less hardware.
And I think it is pretty obvious which of the two is going to work better outside of San Francisco.

Published article:
https://www.carscoops.com/2023/06/teslas-full-self-driving-matches-waymo-skills-despite-far-less-hardware/

SHlurp SHLURP yes daddy Elon I refuted those naughty lemmy users of wrongthink