Bloomberg: “Tesla Optimus Bots were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event”

Some attendees said on social media afterward that the robots had help and at least one video posted online purportedly from the Oct. 10 Cybercab event shows an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being assisted by a human. That wasn’t stated by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk during his remarks on a webcast.

The use of human input raises questions over the capabilities and market readiness of the bot, which Musk said last week he expects to be the biggest product ever of any kind. The CEO told the crowd it will handle many household tasks and could eventually be available to consumers for $20,000 to $30,000 each.

What can it do? Musk said. It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.

Edward Ludlow & David Welch

Awkward for the part that ‘stole the show’ for some attendants to have been faked all along (I chuckled at the top comment on The Verge calling them Decepticons). The main event itself, the launch of Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi, was considered underwhelming due to its vagueness on technical details and the economics of the supposed robotaxi business – more of a concepts showcase than anything else. At least this time around the company was met with a frosty reaction on the stock markets, with shares dropping 9%, the worst decline in more than two months.

The Wall Street Journal: “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs that Power Silicon Valley.”

There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now, said Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness. It is the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what’s going on, said Goldfield.

Goldfield doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience. He said the number of questions he gets about how to microdose has grown dramatically in recent months.

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When Musk in 2018 smoked marijuana on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he and employees of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, were subjected to drug tests for months after, Musk has said, without offering further details.

The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.

Kirsten Grind & Katherine Bindley

Well, this certainly explains a lot about Musk’s erratic behavior… Also the anecdotes floating around about informal systems in place at Tesla and SpaceX designed to circumvent Musk’s terrible decisions.

Reuters: “Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints”

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer”, allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said.

Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged, the person said, adding: When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.

Steve Stecklow & Norihiko Shirouzu

I would totally trust this Musk guy to safely land people on Mars!

IEEE Spectrum: “For Better or Worse, Tesla Bot is Exactly What We Expected”

Most of what we saw in the presentation was hardware. And hardware is important and a necessary first step, but software is arguably a much more significant challenge when it comes to making robotics useful in the real world. Understanding and interacting with the environment, reasoning and decision-making, the ability to learn and be taught new tasks—these are all necessary pieces of the puzzle of a useful robot that Tesla is trying to put together, but they’re all also extremely difficult, cutting-edge problems, despite the enormous amount of work that the research community has put into them.

And so far, we (still) have very little indication that Tesla is going to be any better at tackling this stuff than anyone else. There doesn’t appear to be anything all that special or exciting from Tesla that provides any unique foundation for Musk’s vision in a way that’s likely to allow the company to outpace other companies working on similar things. I’ll reiterate what I said a year ago: The hard part is not building a robot, it’s getting that robot to do useful stuff.

Evan Ackerman

Interesting rundown of the announcements at this year’s Tesla AI Day, in particular the unveiling of the Tesla Bot prototype. Tesla seems to be going all-in on synergies between the humanoid robot and its existing automobile business, by porting software components developed for its vehicles to the robot’s environment, and suggesting that, once fully functioning, the robots would be laboring at Tesla’s assembly lines, among other uses. A solid plan in theory, although the road to achieving it appears murky and convoluted.

Fortune: “Elon Musk’s regulatory woes mount as U.S. moves closer to recalling Tesla’s self-driving software”

On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact, suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has often claimed that accidents cannot be the fault of the company, as data it extracted invariably showed Autopilot was not active in the moment of the collision.

While anything that might indicate the system was designed to shut off when it sensed an imminent accident might damage Tesla’s image, legally the company would be a difficult target.

All of Tesla’s current autonomous features, including its vaunted Full Self-Driving tech, currently in beta testing, are deemed assistance systems in which the driver is liable at all times rather than the manufacturer.

Christiaan Hetzner

It sure looks as if Tesla designed Autopilot to shut off immediately before an impact so the company can deny its software was at fault and evade legal liability…

Reuters: “Tesla recalls almost half a million electric cars over safety issues”

The model years affected in the recall range from 2014 to 2021, and the total number of recalled vehicles is almost equivalent to the half a million vehicles Tesla delivered last year.

Around 200,000 Tesla vehicles will be recalled in China, the country’s market regulator said on Friday.

The U.S. electric vehicle manufacturer is recalling 356,309 2017-2020 Model 3 vehicles to address rearview camera issues and 119,009 Model S vehicles due to front hood problems, the federal regulator said.

Hyunjoo Jin

Turns out having a chaotic manufacturing process and an unpredictable boss do eventually have negative consequences. Evidently it’s not the first time Tesla issued recalls, struggled with glaring faults, or rolled back software upgrades, but to recall a year’s worth of deliveries is remarkable. The stock market though has blissfully ignored the signal, as it has done in the past, and Tesla’s stock barely moved on the news. Ironically, just days before this was announced, Elon Musk sold another $1 billion in Tesla shares (overtly to pay a massive anticipated tax bill) – almost as if he expected significant negative news around the company…

The Washington Post: “Tesla is rolling back ‘Full Self-Driving’ for some users because of software issues”

The update had already proved troublesome earlier in the weekend, as Tesla delayed its initial release Saturday morning because of what Musk wrote was “regression in some left turns at traffic lights” found by internal quality inspectors. But he said Sunday that the company has proceeded with the rollout, noting that it leans on the public to gather more data on driving conditions and parameters.

Users reported sporadic issues including hard braking events, forward collision warnings and other system misfires that had not been present in previous versions.

It was the latest twist in a saga that has disrupted typical car industry practices and drawn the attention of safety advocates and regulators, who fear the consequences of Tesla foisting the largely untested software on the public. Full Self-Driving is an expanded iteration of the software that Tesla calls Autopilot, which can navigate highways, summon and park cars, and conduct other maneuvers with an attentive driver behind the wheel. Full Self-Driving brings those capabilities to city streets, allowing the software to navigate Tesla cars through local roads and residential areas. Users must pay attention at all times, and the software — despite its name — is not considered autonomous by industry or regulatory definitions.

Faiz Siddiqui

Considering Musk’s aversion to safety rules and regulations, this might be another reason behind the decision to relocate Tesla’s headquarters to Texas – aside from the obvious tax benefits for Musk: the Texas Attorney’s Office proved easily corruptible in the Boeing 737 Max case. If Tesla lands in legal trouble because of these rash decisions that might one day cause fatal crashes, Musk might be able to buy his way out of accountability…