Tesla FSD by the End of the Year

Tesla had a dismal quarter and looking forward things look equally bad. Essentially the competition has caught up (or even overtaken) the aging S/3/X/Y product portfolio. On top of that the market is not rushing to buy electric vehicles (EVs) in millions. It almost looks like whoever wanted an EV, they already have it. The rest are just fine with so much more practical internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.

To rescue the company capitalization Elon threw a bunch of new ideas during the quarterly conference calls. But none of them are really convincing. To be honest they all sound like fairy tales. But the stock went up significantly. As The Register says - you have learned nothing.

So on the Full Self Driving (FSD) front we now have the robotaxi (relabelled as Cybercab). And it is coming on August 8th. It will be all smoke and mirrors. Sure the car will be displayed but it will be no different from the Optimus robot played by Elon's girlfriend dressed up as the robot.

The shift from FSD to the Cybercab also means the hardware will be different and most likely SAE Level 5 is no longer in the cards, replaced by the geofenced Level 4 taxi instead.

Then there is this story of the rapid progress of artificial intelligence (AI) which will magically solve the self driving problem.

The truth is, it will take years. Many years. The issue with AI is it must be trained and basically what it does - as we have learned from the Large Language Models (LLMs) - it averages things. While the real problem with AI-based FSD are millions of edge cases. These edge cases must simply be manually tagged. So no matter how much processing power you throw at the problem - it is human bound. The collected data must be tagged. And this tagging will definitely keep Tesla busy until the end of the year. We just don't know which year.

It has already been 8 years. Starting in October 2016 Tesla has been saying all the cars have the  necessary hardware and "just the software update" has been around the corner for all these years. Now we know this has not been the case.

So the new redressed promise sounds just like the old one. And somehow people think this time it will be different.