It was out of spite. From an unpaywalled source:
The lawyer at Cooley LLP worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission during a probe of Tesla CEO Elon Musk that led to a $20 million fine and Musk’s removal as Tesla chairman.
In other news, oops:
Gillmore…took delivery of her EV on Dec. 19, only to notice a worrying scraping sound from the driver-side rear wheel while driving. The following day, she reported the issue to Tesla
Tesla requested a video of the issue.
multiple technicians listened to the video, only to declare “the brakes sounded normal for a performance Model 3.”
Lolol this is the video in question:
You’d think even Tesla would rather admit one fuck-up than pretend that all performance-trim Model 3’s sound like that lmfao, the latter would be worse for Tesla would it not? This is like, “No I didn’t steal that pack of gum, I stole the entire shelf of it!”
I’m sure Elon is the first time this dynamic has played out. 
removal as chairman was for tweeting about taking tesla private, right? after which stock went up and down like a yoyo? wht a fucking cuck
Yup that was the tweet
literally the thing SEC is tasked with policing
Billionaires don’t think they’re supposed to be policed.
Meh. Catching a tech exec overpromising is like catching a conservative contradicting themselves.
In fairness, I drove around in a Model Y with the new Full Self Driving beta in December, and it was pretty freaking amazing. Literally plugged in a destination, double-tapped the thingy and it did the rest until the destination was reached (aside form having to apply a bit of resistance to the wheel every little bit to confirm you’re still alert and engaged).
Weird feeling for sure, but I’m pretty certain it’s already much better than human drivers on average. Every time one of those things doinks a fire truck on the side of the road it makes the news (driver should have been paying attention and taken control), but you’d have to be fairly silly not to weigh that against all of the incidents that would have been avoided that a dipshit human would have caused.
The combo of full self driving + an engaged operator has to far safer ime.
The 83% of passengers that did not die in a fiery explosion have reported high levels of customer satisfaction. Stock up 10%.
This might be a me problem, but I just don’t see how it is possible to be engaged while the car is driving itself near perfectly. Eventually, inattention will set in.
Oh I don’t doubt there will be some of that as folks adjust. Perhaps even a lot of that.
That said, inattention also gets a metric buttload of people killed in cars (and by cars) being manually driven.
True.
My point was that any technology that relies on an attentive driver as the failsafe is gonna fail a lot.
Exactly. It’s like telling a nurse to watch some output screen that barely changes for days on end, but if it suddenly drops and you don’t act within a half second the patient dies. It’s set up to fail.
I also think the consumer value proposition for self driving cars is very much you get in, push a button, and play on your phone until you arrive at your destination. They are positioning automated navigation as a complete revolution of the idea of a car. Consumers are not going to be satisfied with something where their experience is not that different than conventional driving.
The whole Full Self Driving venture has been a pretty big fail as far as marketing it goes. The technology itself is incredible and will continually improve, but it’s still in beta testing and is nowhere near “get in, push button, play on phone”. It will be eventually, but it’s not currently and I’d guess most people misunderstand what it is. Same goes for “autopilot”. Maybe if Tesla had a PR department they’d avoid such confusion, but Elon is arrogant and doesn’t see the need for that. The company would massively benefit from having a good PR wing to push back against the extreme media bias they face too.
With that said, I’m off to go pick up my new Tesla :)
Airplanes use the same model of autopilot + a human that pays attention and is prepared to take over pretty successfully.
FSD still very much a beta and rapidly iterating and improving, so I don’t think it’s at all clear that this is a failed venture, especially because it already works and is likely already far safer per mile than human operation, from a technological perspective.
Whether consumers will like it or find value in an autopilot that requires them to still actively monitor the controls (ie commercially viable) is another question especially at a 10k price point.
I believe there have been zero accidents so far in the entirety of the FSD Beta program. Granted that has required plenty of human interventions, but still impressive for a new technology of this scale.