Winston Churchill once said: “I no longer listen to what people say. I just watch what they do.” We have no idea if Mahmood Hikmet meant to pay tribute to Churchill's wisdom, but he did what the British statesman said with a little twist. He listened to what Elon Musk said about autonomous driving and compared that to what FSD Beta is doing. It was not pretty.
Hikmet took footage from Elon Musk talking about autonomous driving recorded in 2020. Then he edited the footage and intercalated it with multiple clips from FSD Beta driving dangerously. There were situations in which the software drove into oncoming traffic, stopped cars in the opposite lane, curbs, and poles. We can also see it suddenly braking the car due to detection issues.
When Musk states that Level 5 will happen very quickly, boom! A clear example that Tesla is nowhere near that emerges. Then he says that the basic functionality will be attained “this year,” repeating what he said so many other times since 2016. That’s followed by another example of how FSD is behaving with regular customers. We know one of them personally.
Kyle Conner is a skilled driver and a talented YouTuber responsible for the Out of Spec YouTube channel. If even he was surprised by the way FSD behaves, people with less experience may be very negatively surprised by how the beta software controls the car. It may have been the case with the first FSD crash autoevolution revealed on November 11.
Hearing Musk says that there are no fundamental challenges for Level 5 autonomy, while one of his voluntary "test drivers" said that the only screen in his car went black was scary. It gives the impression that Musk is trying to prove he is right at all costs, even when the evidence presented by the videos and compiled by Hikmet shows otherwise. Some of the situations could have resulted in nasty crashes. When that happens, regulators will have no excuse to watch silently what is happening. As Churchill also said, "behavior never lies." Let’s hope no one has to get hurt for things to change.
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