Behind the war of words, it is all business.
Author: Jia Heng from the planet Magnesia
As a "traffic star" on the other side of the Pacific, Musk has a bunch of "fans" at the same time, but also a group of tireless "black fans".
Just recently, a billionaire from California also joined the "black powder" camp, announcing that he would spend $2 million to advertise across the internet, with the goal of bringing down Musk's proud FSD (Full Self Drive).
Tech bosses "rage" at FSD
The billionaire, Dan O'Dowd, founded Green Hills Software, the world's largest independent supplier of IoT software, is headquartered in California, where Tesla is located.
Just recently, Mr. O'Dodd announced that he was running for the California Senate for one purpose: to attack Tesla's FSD program.
He said the Tesla FSD Beta version was "terrible", "frequent problems" and should be "completely blocked on American roads". To that end, Mr. O'Dodd plans to invest $2 million in an advertising video in 36 U.S. states called "Unsafe at Any Speed," which focuses on the system's potential dangers.
In the 1-minute video, many thrilling moments that occurred during the long-term testing of FSD Beta are summarized, including hitting foreign objects, not controlled by the owner, and so on.
Of course, the footage in this video was exposed by drivers on the tubing a long time ago.
In an interview with the media, Mr. O'Dodd stressed that he would not talk about anything else throughout the campaign other than Tesla and the U.S. grid security and the water treatment plant's vulnerability to cyberattacks.
In addition to Ododoly, there are many drivers on the Internet who complain about the FSD Beta.
In a recent TED interview, Musk revealed that more than 100,000 drivers were involved in Tesla's FSD test program. It is also based on this that critics have begun to accuse Tesla of correcting the mistakes of the "driverless system" on public roads, which in fact has a high probability of making mistakes.
Not only did users begin to "complain", but the mainstream media also began to question Tesla. In February, the Washington Post and CNBC wrote that the current level of Tesla's FSD is still far from achieving true autonomous driving.
Figure | CNBC: Tesla FSD Beta: An Experiment on a Public Road
Some technology media that have long tracked Tesla's progress, while maintaining objective evaluations, began to express cautious skepticism about Musk's assertion that "FSD can be achieved this year".
But for the criticism, Musk does not seem to care, and in the interview he also stressed again: "More confidence." ”
Behind the war of words is business
To win the campaign, Mr. O'Dodd invested an additional $7 million in a campaign team that included advertising producers, party officials and a public affairs expert from London.
Despite the considerable costs, Mr. O'Dodd appeared to have shown little interest in running for the Senate, saying he was willing to withdraw as long as the legislature promised to ban Tesla from deploying FSD beta on public roads.
Some netizens pointed out that his Green Hills Software actually has a competitive relationship with Tesla, and this established company does not have an advantage in the competition, so he hopes to suppress Tesla through "political advertising".
In fact, this is not the first time that O'Dodd has used public opinion to attack Tesla.
As early as January, an organization called The Dawn Project submitted an ad to the New York Times calling on users not to become crash test dummies for Tesla's fully autonomous vehicles, which O'Dodd founded.
In the ad, The Dawn Project called FSD the "worst software ever sold" by a Fortune 500 company and claimed that Tesla bought the ad.
After the ad was published, O'Dodd tweeted @Musk. But at that time, netizens sidedly supported Musk and said that they wanted O'Dodd to publicly take money from which car companies.
In response, lao Ma directly replied: "Green Hills software is a pile of garbage." ”
As you can see from green Hills' website, they have been involved in the advanced driver assistance system business for a long time, and Toyota, Lexus, Ford, Jaguar, Lincoln and other car companies are their customers. On January 5 of this year, in a press release published on its website, the company announced a partnership with BMW and its new iX all-electric sport utility vehicle.
This should have been a good thing for an established Internet of Things software company, but O'Dodd's behavior is undoubtedly a "black behavior" for party A car companies.
Some foreign media technology bloggers commented that Tesla has changed the pattern of the entire industry since it entered the automotive industry. The company produces almost all of its parts in-house, rather than relying too much on suppliers like traditional car companies. In order to catch up with this trend, other car companies have also begun to build their own software development businesses, reducing their dependence on third-party companies such as Green Hills Software.
After a series of hype, Musk did not even reply to him again, and netizens also directly accompanied the picture and replied: "jealousy".
The future of FSD
In general, this advertising incident will not have much impact on Tesla, but the safety of FSD can not be ignored, and there is still a certain distance from the launch of the official version.
At present, Tesla plans to push the latest FSD Beta v10.12 version to users, before that, V10 has iterated to V10.11.1.
From V8 to V9 and even to V10, Tesla's update pace is very fast, but after the V10 version, Tesla's pace has slowed down significantly, and even a third-digit derivative code has appeared. Of course, Tesla is quite careful about the improvement of the V10 version, and there is a detailed introduction to each iteration on Twitter, among which the more important updates include updating the lane geometry model, increasing the size of the data set, and optimizing the software code.
It can be seen from here that FSD's current work is mainly at the software level, and there is still a certain distance to step into the V11 version.
In addition to its own technology, FSD also needs to spend time on global promotion.
In March, some netizens complained about "why the Toronto metropolitan area can't use FSD Beta", to which Musk explained that FSD Beta is difficult to deal with Toronto's tram (it just so happens that Tesla's autopilot visual director Andrej Karpathy is on paid leave, and the plan to fix the loophole is shelved).
This is still the case in Canada, and it is inevitable that Europe, which has an equally complex traffic situation, will put forward great requirements for subsequent updates of the FSD.
In addition, regulation is another important test of FSD globalization, each country has its own unique laws and regulations, legal functions in the United States, may not be legal in Europe.
To see the official version of the FSD in 2022, Comrade Musk still needs to work hard.