I recommend reading Alberto Savoia's book, "The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed"<p>One of the examples that Savoia provides in his book is especially helpful to recall here:<p>Back in the 1960s, IBM was trying to figure out if they should make a massive investment in building a speech recognition product. Rather than betting the company on an expensive idea without being certain of the market for it, they simulated the speech recognizer by putting a secretary in another room with a mic, leaving the test subject with the impression that their commands were going directly into the computer in the room.<p>By doing this, IBM figured out that even if they made a perfect speech recognizer, their customers wouldn't use it! They were concerned about privacy, found typing to be faster and more precise, etc. Rather than investing huge sums of cash on a dud, they were able to put it towards the System 360 line, which turned out rather well :)
Here is a good timeline (complete with Elon's tweets) for Tesla's self driving capabilities.<p>He has been lying about it for 5 years now and has been stringing on Tesla customers with statements like, "It's almost there!" and "Next version will blow your mind!" etc<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/n6nsmt/elons_tweet_does_not_match_engineering_reality/gx8kure/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/n6nsmt/elo...</a><p>It's stunning how he has gotten away with lies for so long.
> The Drive could not reach out to Tesla to verify or contest the claims, as the automaker dissolved its communications and public relations department some time ago. The New York Times says that neither Musk nor a top Tesla lawyer responded to requests for comments over several weeks.<p>I always thought it funny that Musk saw this as some sort of 4D chess move and not a tacit admission that his company's products/behavior suck so much, he had to effectively nail a "No comment" placard on the front door.<p>You know what would be awesome? Say negative PR about Tesla comes up, and someone from Tesla calls/emails/tweets a reporter to provide a statement...the reporter ignores them, or tells them to go pound sand, because given Tesla does not have a communications or public relations department, someone from Tesla couldn't possibly be contacting them in an official capacity to provide an authorized statement.
Is "staged" the right description here? I was worried we were looking at a Nikola type event, but that's not what this is.<p>Just because the route was mapped with lidar, etc. doesn't make this a non-self-driving car. It drove itself under the supplied conditions. It wasn't like they had plotted the route with the stops and starts, etc. From what I understand the system just had prior knowledge of the route. This is in comparison to any other self-driving which MUST have prior understanding of the route, vs Tesla's current product which apparently can make all decisions on the fly.