A Song of “Full Self-Driving”: Elon Isn’t Tony Stark. He’s Michael Scott.
The fallacy of the tech genius.
Hey fam: Supersized newsletter today. This Triad goes to four.
It’s about Tesla and Elon Musk and autonomous vehicles. It gets fairly technical at times. But it’s really about how we’ve turned over large portions of America to insanely rich people who have no idea what they’re doing.
It’s about oligarchy and technology. I hope you’ll take the ride with me—and share it if you are so inclined.
P.S.: If this edition ends abruptly in your inbox, click the title to get to the full version on the site. Like I said—it’s a long one.
1. “Full Self Driving”
For years, Elon Musk has been promising that Teslas will operate completely autonomously in “Full Self Driving” (FSD) mode. And when I say years, I mean years:
December 2015: “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
January 2016: “In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you’re in LA and the car is in NY.”
June 2016: “I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem. . . . I think we’re basically less than two years away from complete autonomy, complete—safer than a human. However regulators will take at least another year.”
October 2016: By the end of 2017 Tesla will demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from “a home in L.A., to Times Square . . . without the need for a single touch, including the charging.”
March 2018: “I think probably by end of next year [end of 2019] self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving”
February 2019: “I think we will be feature complete—full self-driving—this year. Meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention, this year."
I’m going to stop the litany here, but it continued. For a decade Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” has been a running joke. Every year, Musk says that FSD is months, or weeks away. Every year it slips over the horizon. And every year the media and the stock market pretend that Musk hasn’t failed.
But now Tesla’s FSD is really, truly, absolutely about to happen.
Maybe.
Tesla “Robotaxis” are coming to Austin in June and Elon Musk says they are the future of the company.1 Facing declining consumer sales, the company’s valuation is based on the idea that Tesla is about to transform the auto industry by turning car ownership into something akin to software-as-a-service.2
As usual, the details are murky. Fortune reports that as of this week Tesla still has not briefed many of the relevant authorities in Austin about what the company’s Robotaxis are, how they will operate, or how first responders and law enforcement are supposed to deal with them.3 And the cars that appear on the street aren’t going to be the “Robotaxis” Musk keeps promising. They will be modified Model Y’s.
Also, there will only be 10 to 20 of them.
You may be forgiven for wondering if this Robotaxi launch will be a real proof-of-concept for autonomous driving, or the Tesla version of Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology.4
Of course we already have full self-driving technology. It’s called Waymo, it’s run by Google, and it operates a driverless taxi service in a growing number of cities across America. Just a few days ago, Tesla’s head of self-driving admitted that Tesla FSD is “a couple years” behind Waymo, which in Elon-speak probably means a decade. Or more.
So in a sense, Musk was correct that autonomous driving is a “solved problem.” Just not by him.
We have been chasing the driverless car for a hundred years. During that time people have tried all sorts of paradigms. At the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors proposed a system of remote-controlled cars. (Put a pin in that.) At another phase, people thought that beacons on roadways could emit signals to guide cars or that “world maps” could give the car’s brain a detailed enough view for them to navigate on their own. Starting in the early 2000s the industry settled on the idea of making cars that navigated by “sensing” their surroundings.
This movement was kickstarted by a DARPA challenge (government intervention for the win) and only after university researchers showed that the sensing paradigm held promise did tech companies pile into the space.5
Google started working on self-driving cars in 20096 and it was a slog. Initially they focused on the use of cameras to understand what was happening around the vehicle’s environment.7 But no matter how smart AI got, the cameras weren’t enough.
Eventually, Google took a hybrid approach. Its vehicles still had cameras trained on mountains of data. But they also relied on incredibly detailed maps of the drive area and—most importantly—advanced active sensors such as radar and lidar. It was only by combining all three of these techniques that Google was able to build a Level 4 autonomous vehicle.
And they work.
Under its Waymo brand, Google has driverless taxi fleets operating in eight cities (so far). They use a custom Jaguar, fitted with cameras, sensors, and a fairly high-powered onboard computer. While Elon has been making FSD promises, Waymo vehicles have driven 40 million real-world miles.
What happened?
Elon Musk was stupid. That’s what happened.
2. The Avengers or The Office?
LiDAR (stands for “light detection and ranging”) is a technology that uses lasers to measure distance. It’s been around since the 1960s, but in the 2000s, lidar started making its way into automotive platforms to power what we now call advanced safety features.
Lane-departure detection, front-collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control, emergency break assist—all of these features are powered by lidar. Porting lidar into the automobile has been the most important car-safety advance since the airbag.8
Elon Musk hated it.
Musk began a crusade against lidar in 2019, calling it “a fool’s errand.” He called lidar “a crutch.” Over the years he doubled down on this assessment calling lidar “freaking stupid” and “expensive and unnecessary.”
What galled him about lidar seems to be this last part: the cost. “You have expensive hardware that’s worthless on the car,” the visionary tech genius explained.
Musk never allowed lidar to be integrated with Tesla vehicles, but early Teslas did have radar. Until 2021, that is, when Musk became obsessed with cutting production costs and decreed that radar should be eliminated from new Tesla vehicles. And not just that: Tesla disabled the radar units on its existing cars, too.
So it wasn’t just cost. It was ideology.
Some Tesla engineers were aghast, said former employees with knowledge of his reaction, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. They contacted a trusted former executive for advice on how to talk Musk out of it, in previously unreported pushback. Without radar, Teslas would be susceptible to basic perception errors if the cameras were obscured by raindrops or even bright sunlight, problems that could lead to crashes.
Musk was unconvinced and overruled his engineers. In May 2021 Tesla announced it was eliminating radar on new cars. Soon after, the company began disabling radar in cars already on the road. The result, according to interviews with nearly a dozen former employees and test drivers, safety officials and other experts, was an uptick in crashes, near misses and other embarrassing mistakes by Tesla vehicles suddenly deprived of a critical sensor.
What a singular genius.
Musk was committed to a “vision only” approach for FSD that relied solely on cameras to passively collect data and onboard compute power to crunch it. Here is his sophisticated explanation for why he believed in “vision only”:
“The road system is designed for cameras (eyes) & neural nets (brains).”
Like I said: Genius.
There is an actually sophisticated version of the “vision only” argument—but it’s rooted in business imperatives, not engineering.
To believe that “vision only” FSD can work is to believe that AI is the most important process and that data is the most important commodity. Which happens to line up nicely with Musk’s ambitions. Tesla, by dint of having so many cameras on the road, has more data than anyone else. So if Musk believed that data was his moat and that the future of his empire was xAI, then he would try to make FSD run on a camera-only platform, regardless of what the results were showing.
The problem is that even in this “sophisticated” theory, Elon Musk is less like Tony Stark and more like Michael Scott.
“People don’t shoot lasers out of their eyes to drive,” Musk said recently as an explanation for why Teslas didn’t need lidar.
You tell me: Is that The Avengers or The Office?
And yet, Tesla has quietly been spending money on lidar. Why? Unclear.9
I wonder if the Robotaxis Tesla puts in Austin in the coming weeks will be “vision-only” FSD or if they will be using lidar “crutches.”10
3. Remote Control
Speaking of crutches, I want to highlight the disconnect between Musk’s FSD promises and the Robotaxi reality.
Musk promised a robot car that could drive from New York to Los Angeles, by itself, in 2018.
In June 2025, Musk is going to put between 10 and 20 robot taxis on the streets of Austin.
These vehicles will be strictly geofenced.
And they won’t even be truly self-driving! Because buried in all of the Robotaxi talk is the fact that Tesla has been hiring “tele ops”—meaning supervisors who watch the Robotaxis from afar and can take control of the vehicles remotely as needed.
In other words: Back to the Depression-era World’s Fair version of “autonomous vehicles” that we talked about up top.
If you’re keeping score, Elon Musk has:
Promised FSD every year for a decade.
Made terrible engineering decisions that hobbled his company’s progress.
Created a “vision-only” “self-driving” product that is vastly inferior to the state-of-the-art hybrid approach.
And is about to deliver a bait-and-switch “FSD” vehicle that is a glorified remote-control car.
This is the guy we put in charge of dismantling the federal government. Are you surprised that people are dying as a result?
4. Stupid
Last week Bloomberg published a big profile of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in which he claimed to use AI for most of his job. Here’s Bloomberg:
He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
And here’s Ed Zitron putting the finest possible point on this madness:
Is it because we've handed our economy to men that get paid $79 million a year to do a job they can't seem to describe, and even that, they would sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models than actually do?
We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
Read the whole thing. It’s all of a piece with Musk and FSD.
In 2022, six years after saying that FSD was a “solved” problem, Musk said, “The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”
From Fortune: “‘We believe the vast majority of valuation upside looking ahead for Tesla is centered around the success of its autonomous vision taking hold with a key June launch in Austin the beginning of this next era of growth for Musk and Tesla,’ Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst who has covered Tesla for more than a decade, wrote Friday in a note to investors.”
True story: I saw a Waymo robot taxi pulled over by a cop in Phoenix. It was pretty obvious that there was a whole set of protocols both for how the car would operate and how the police would treat it.
Let me save you a click: Amazon set up grocery stores where “technology” allowed shoppers to simply pick items off the shelf, put them into their carts, and walk out the door without having to check out. The magic was, supposedly, a suite of sensors which knew what people were buying.
The real magic was a thousand people in an Indian data center watching American customers over CCTV cameras, manually tallying up what they were buying, and then charging their Amazon accounts. (Amazon stores now use a lower-tech way of achieving basically the same walk-out-the-door result, with grocery carts that have built-in scales, computers, and UPC scanners.)
Traditional car manufacturers were less interested in achieving autonomous vehicles and more interested in how they could adapt the new technologies to create safer vehicles. So while Google went running off in search of driverless cars, the automakers busied themselves on refining the driver-assist features that are now standard on many cars.
That’s because automakers exist in a mature industry where a company has to see a return on its investments while tech companies existed in the ZIRP-fueled fairyland of Silicon Valley economics.
This was back when Tesla was mostly selling taxpayer-subsidized luxury supercars to the rich and famous. Before Elon had even thought to make any FSD promises.
Did you ever run into a roadblock going to a website where you were prompted to “click all the squares that have pictures of a stop light” or some such? Congratulations. You were helping Google train its cameras for self-driving cars.
Wikipedia’s explanation of how LiDAR works is useful:
Current lidar systems use rotating hexagonal mirrors which split the laser beam. The upper three beams are used for vehicle and obstacles ahead, and the lower beams are used to detect lane markings and road features. The major advantage of using lidar is that the spatial structure is obtained and this data can be fused with other sensors such as radar, etc. to get a better picture of the vehicle environment in terms of static and dynamic properties of the objects present in the environment. Conversely, a significant issue with lidar is the difficulty in reconstructing point cloud data in poor weather conditions.
FWIW, the price of lidar has dropped significantly in recent years for the most predictable reason in the world: As more carmakers integrated lidar technology, economies of scale kicked in and lidar systems became cheaper to manufacture.
How is it that a genius like Elon Musk couldn’t foresee that the cost element of active-sensing technology would be solved by unit economics?
For that matter: I wonder if the Robotaxis in Austin will actually be FSD or if they’ll have dedicated operators watching over them remotely.
Remember: We’re talking about a guy who has played games with his product demos before. Last year Musk staged an event where his Optimus robots performed for an audience—only for it later be discovered that the robots were being operated remotely by humans.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Musk has terminal venture capital brain.
He's always had that. He had that back when he launched his first 'everything' site that he called X, that failed. The thing about Musk, is that he plays the role of visionary, or did, but he's not one. And the difference between a real visionary and a guy like Musk is that they can see the steps to get to the thing they want to do.
So let's take self driving. Musk goes 'we should have self driving!' and he does this with the same vigor as thinking the Cybertruck is 'futuristic' despite looking like the 1980s idea of futurism. But he has no plan to get there. He hires other people to figure that out. That's SpaceX too; he says 'let's go to mars' but he doesn't know anything about space travel or logistics.
Some people like to compare Musk to Henry Ford, and he does resemble old Henry Ford, antisemitism and all, right down to the 'we don't need to innovate' and 'planes are not the future.' Hubris of being right once leads to a very hard fall.
Now, there's something else to be said about Musk, which is true of most science fiction writers: they're really, really bad at predicting the future. And this is because they extrapolate the future based on what the present is like. So for example, look at 1960s Star Trek; everything is big and boxy because they extrapolated what computers looked like then. Compare that to 2010s Star Trek, where everything looks like an Iphone; again, extrapolating.
Musk is perpetually trapped in the 1980s. He, like many guys who were hitting their earning years in the early 2000s, were inspired by the 1980s cyberpunk boom, with things like Neuromancer and Blade Runner. But here's the problem: all that stuff is pre-internet. That's a version of the future where the Internet and everything it did does not exist. It is entirely outdated, as outdated as the 1950s idea of the future is.
But Musk is wedded to this idea, and he's incapable of change or admitting fault. So he thinks that you can just make the future work, or make things work the way he wants them to be. He's not a futurist, not really. He takes an idea of what he thinks the future should be, and works backwards. And that ensures he is always behind everyone else.
Real futurists, like Steve Jobs with the Iphone or Bill Gates with Windows, begin with an idea and then try to see where it will take them. Guys like Musk try to figure out a way to go to a place, even if that place is entirely outdated by the time they get close.
What has exposed Musk as a fraud rather than a visionary is not his politics, though that helped, but his inability to actually look to the future as it is shaping up. Which means that his ideas are still outdated; he might as well be trying to claim that the future is without the internet. This likely explains his increasing radicalism; what happens when you can't make the future the way you want it to be, and it keeps changing around you?
Musk is not a unique existence that the world revolves around. Other people, other companies, have agency, and they shape the world too. That's why he flounders when Google jumps ahead of him with new tech. Musk did the equivalent of going all in on steam power, only for diesel to come into existence and make him irrelevant.
The guy isn't a visionary, or a futurist, he's a guy trying to create his dream world and is incapable of understanding that he's quickly becoming an old, outdated man.
right this precise second, stock buyers are ponying up $199.60 for $1 of tesla earnings, and when musk said he was rto, that number went up.
i know there's one born every minute, but still: we are approaching tulip mania.