POTSDAM — Tesla has received approval for its German gigafactory near Berlin, the state of Brandenburg where plant is located said on Friday, ending months of delay for the landmark site that was initially supposed to open last summer.

But there was confusion in media reports about Friday's decision — perhaps having to do with translation problems of the whopping 536-page official document. The New York Times reported that Tesla had received final approval and could begin production. But Reuters said the ruling does not mean that Tesla can start producing right away, and that the electric vehicle pioneer first must prove that it fulfills numerous conditions, including in the area of water use and air pollution control.

Both areas have been of major concern for local environmental groups that fear the plant, located in the small community of Gruenheide near Berlin, will have a negative impact on the local habitat. There is still at least one lawsuit before a judge regarding water issues.

The factory, which Tesla has begun constructing under pre-approval permits, is set to produce over 500,000 battery-electric vehicles a year starting with the Tesla Model Y, while the battery plant will generate over 50 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year — outstripping European competitors on both fronts.

Numerous public consultations focusing primarily on the environmental impact of the site delayed the process, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk expressing irritation on multiple occasions at the complexity of German bureaucracy.

Not long ago, I wrote that Tesla could be doing the opposite of promoting electric mobility: it could be hurting it. A recent survey performed by Which? shows another example of how that can happen. According to the results, electric cars are the least reliable options in the British market, and that has a massive Tesla influence.
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Which? asked over 48,000 of its associates about the 56,853 vehicles they currently own. This survey focused on cars that are up to four years old. Full hybrid cars presented the least percentage of cars with at least one fault: 17.3%. Electric vehicles have the most cars fitting that description: 31.4%.

Putting it in another perspective, 3 out of 10 electric cars present faults. When the survey focuses only on Tesla vehicles, 4 in 10 units had defects, which shows that the results for electric cars could have been even worse should Tesla be even more prevalent than it already is.

According to Which?, 23.4% of the electric cars included in the survey are from Tesla. Nissan is in second with 14.5% of the EVs, followed by BMW (11.6%), Kia (11.1%), Renault (6.5%), Audi (5.9%), Hyundai (5.9%), Volkswagen (5.6%), Jaguar (4.2%), and MG (3%). Other brands represent 8.5% of the total.

Thanks to Tesla, electric cars are also the ones with the most failures to start and those that break down the most in the survey: 8.1%. The closest ones are diesel vehicles, with 6.9% of issues like those. The most trustworthy are petrol cars, with only 3.5% failing to start or breaking down.

The nail in the coffin for EVs in Which?’s survey is how many days they spend waiting for repair. Electric cars were out of the roads for 5.1 days. Plug-in hybrids are the closest ones to that number, with 4.2 days out of service. Again, the most reliable cars in the survey are those burning petrol, with only three days in repair shops.

Although Tesla advocates praise the company for its software prowess, it may be something from the past. Most of the issues reported with electric cars had to do with software. According to Which?, 12V battery problems and “electric braking aids” are the other most reported issues with EVs, in that order. There’s no word about missing brake pads.

Ironically, the Kia Niro EV did pretty well in the survey. Only 6.2% of them had any fault, and only 1% failed to start or broke down. In other words, only 6 in 100 had defects, and 1 in 100 refused to work for any reason. That makes the electric crossover not only the best electric vehicle British customers can buy: it is the most reliable compact/small car for sale in the UK and very likely elsewhere.

What the Which? survey makes evident is that Tesla desperately needs to step up its game and quality control. If nothing changes, there are only two possible outcomes for this: either Tesla will keep hurting EV reputation as a whole – bringing efforts from all companies down the drain – or other brands selling electric cars will stand out and leave Tesla to face alone the consequences of its policies and priorities. Either way, the company loses. Quality control should be priority number one at Tesla – before it is too late for Tesla or electric mobility in general.

Early Access Program | FSD Beta 10.11

– Upgraded modeling of lane geometry from dense rasters (“bag of points”) to an autoregressive decoder that directly predicts and connects “vector space” lanes point by point using a transformer neural network. This enables us to predict crossing lanes, allows computationally cheaper and less error-prone post-processing, and paves the way for predicting many other signals and their relationships jointly and end-to-end.

– Use more accurate predictions of where vehicles are turning or merging to reduce unnecessary slowdowns for vehicles that will not cross our path.

– Improved right-of-way understanding if the map is inaccurate or the car cannot follow the navigation. In particular, modeling intersection extents is now entirely based on network predictions and no longer uses map-based heuristics.

– Improved the precision of VRU detections by 44.9%, dramatically reducing spurious false positive pedestrians and bicycles (especially around tar seams, skid marks, and rain drops). This was accomplished by increasing the data size of the next-gen auto-labeler, training network parameters that were previously frozen, and modifying the network loss functions. We find that this decreases the incidence of VRU-related false slowdowns.

– Reduced the predicted velocity error of very close-by motorcycles, scooters, wheelchairs, and pedestrians by 63.6%. To do this, we introduced a new dataset of simulated adversarial high-speed VRU interactions. This update improves autopilot control around fast-moving and cutting-in VRUs.

– Improved creeping profile with higher jerk when creeping starts.

– Improved control for nearby obstacles by predicting continuous distance to static geometry with the general static obstacle network.

– Reduced vehicle “parked” attribute error rate by 17%, achieved by increasing the dataset size by 14%.

– Improved clear-to-go scenario velocity error by 5% and highway scenario velocity error by 10%, achieved by tuning loss function targeted at improving performance in difficult scenarios.

– Improved detection and control for open car doors.

– Improved smoothness through turns by using an optimization-based approach to decide which road lines are irrelevant for control given lateral and longitudinal acceleration and jerk limits as well as vehicle kinematics.

– Improved stability of the FSD Ul visualizations by optimizing the ethernet data transfer pipeline by 15%.

Tesla fired an employee and cut him out of FSD Beta after he reviewed the technology on YouTube

Tue, Mar 15 2022

Tesla has fired a former Autopilot employee named John Bernal after he shared candid video reviews on his YouTube channel, AI Addict, showing how the company’s Full Self Driving Beta system worked in different locations around Silicon Valley.

Following Bernal’s dismissal, Tesla also cut off his access to the FSD Beta system in the vehicle he personally owns, a 2021 Tesla Model 3, despite his having had no “strikes” in the safe driving software Tesla uses to control access to the program.

The FSD Beta option can best be summarized as a set of new driver assistance features that are not finished or fully debugged. Chief among them is “autosteer on city streets,” which lets the car navigate around complex urban environments without the driver needing to move the steering wheel. Customers must first have FSD, which costs $12,000 up front or $199 per month in the U.S., and then obtain and maintain a high driver-safety score, as determined by Tesla software that monitors their driving habits.

Although Tesla did not put details into writing saying why he was fired, Tesla and other Silicon Valley companies often foster a culture of loyalty. Internal criticisms may be tolerated, but criticism in public is viewed as disloyal.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Bernal’s situation.

The origins of his channel

Bernal started working for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker as a data annotation specialist in August 2020 in an office in San Mateo, California. He was dismissed in the second week of February this year, after having moved into the role of advanced driver assistance systems test operator, according to records he shared with CNBC.

As a lifelong car enthusiast proud to be working at Tesla, Bernal put in an order to buy a 2021 Model 3 with a long-range battery a few months after he began working there. He took delivery of the car on December 26, 2020.

He says he bought the car in part because Tesla offered employees free access to FSD — then worth $8,000 — as a perk. Employees had to agree to give the company the right to collect internal and external vehicle data in exchange.

Amazed by what he saw as Tesla’s “potentially life-saving technology,” he started the AI Addict channel on YouTube in February 2021 to show what the public version of FSD Beta could do.

Most of the AI Addict videos show Bernal driving around Silicon Valley with a friend in his Tesla, using the newest released versions of the FSD Beta software.

Bernal was not alone in posting his experiences with Tesla’s experimental software. Tesla FSD Beta users like Dirty Tesla, Chuck Cook, Kim Paquette and many others rush to review each new release on their channels.
‘I still care about Tesla’

When the company fired Bernal late last month, his written separation notice did not include the reason for his firing. It came after one of his videos depicted a drive in San Jose where his car knocked over bollards while FSD Beta was engaged.

Bernal says before he was dismissed, managers verbally told him he “broke Tesla policy” and that his YouTube channel was a “conflict of interest.”

Bernal said he was always transparent about his YouTube channel, both with his managers at Tesla and with the public. His online resume on LinkedIn, for example, always listed his Tesla employment right alongside his YouTube channel name. Bernal said he had never seen a policy barring him from creating car tech reviews on his own time using his own property.

A copy of Tesla’s social media policy, provided by a current employee, makes no direct reference to criticizing the company’s products in public. The policy states, “Tesla relies on the common sense and good judgment of its employees to engage in responsible social media activity.” It lists social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, LinkedIn, WeChat and personal blogs, but does not specifically mention YouTube.

Bernal said he never disclosed anything in his videos that Tesla had not released to the public. “The FSD Beta releases I was demonstrating were end-user consumer products,” he said.

But his videos did sometimes show problems with Tesla’s FSD Beta system.

In March 2021, for example, AI Addict posted a video entitled “FSD Beta 8.2 Oakland - Close Calls, Pedestrians, Bicycles!” that showed his car experiencing several “disengagements.” That’s where FSD Beta required Bernal to take over steering manually to avoid danger. At 11 minutes and 58 seconds into the video, the Tesla FSD Beta system begins to roll into an intersection just as a vehicle is crossing in front of Bernal’s Model 3. He narrowly avoided hitting the other car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs

That video has since racked up around a quarter million views.

After it first ran, Bernal told CNBC, “A manager from my Autopilot team tried to dissuade me from posting any negative or critical content in the future that involved FSD Beta. They held a video conference with me but never put anything in writing.”

According to an analysis of his channel by CNBC, roughly ten of 60 videos he posted revealed flaws in FSD Beta. Three of the videos focused on other Tesla topics and didn’t discuss FSD Beta, while another three focused on other automakers’ electric vehicles and were not Tesla-related at all.

Bernal shared screenshots and photos that indicate his FSD Beta access was revoked by the company after he was terminated, even though he had not gotten any “strikes” for unsafe driving or improper use of the system. Generally, FSD Beta users are allowed several strikes before access is revoked.

Losing FSD Beta access in his own car has curtailed his ability to create reviews of the system. However, he has attained access to other vehicles with FSD Beta enabled, and plans to continue his independent research and reviews.

Bernal knew he might attract attention by posting honest FSD Beta reviews. But as long as he was truthful, he said, and given his generally favorable views of the technology, he thought Tesla would allow it or at least formally tell him if he needed to stop before it ever came to his losing his dream job.

He told CNBC, “I still care about Tesla, vehicle safety and finding and fixing bugs.”
Free speech with exceptions

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently labeled himself a “free speech absolutist.” But his car company has a long history of asking customers and employees not to speak publicly about problems concerning their cars or the business.

For example, like many large companies, Tesla requires its employees to sign an arbitration agreement committing to resolve conflicts with the company without public lawsuits. Employees or temps can legally challenge and sometimes get released from the mandatory arbitration and go on to have their day in court, but those instances have been rare.

Tesla also used to require customers to sign non-disclosure agreements in exchange for service.

When FSD Beta first rolled out, as CNBC previously reported, the company asked drivers who enrolled in the early access program to be selective or refrain from posting to social media.

Federal vehicle safety regulators worried that the practice could have a chilling effect and hide critical safety complaints from the agency. They initiated a probe into the FSD Beta program as a result.

By September 2021, Musk said at a conference that the company shouldn’t have any restrictions like that at all. He said at the Code Conference during an interview with Kara Swisher that FSD Beta testers were “not really following it anyway.”

Bernal says before he was dismissed, managers verbally told him he “broke Tesla policy” and that his YouTube channel was a “conflict of interest.”

Bernal said he was always transparent about his YouTube channel, both with his managers at Tesla and with the public. His online resume on LinkedIn, for example, always listed his Tesla employment right alongside his YouTube channel name. Bernal said he had never seen a policy barring him from creating car tech reviews on his own time using his own property.

A copy of Tesla’s social media policy, provided by a current employee, makes no direct reference to criticizing the company’s products in public. The policy states, “Tesla relies on the common sense and good judgment of its employees to engage in responsible social media activity.” It lists social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, LinkedIn, WeChat and personal blogs, but does not specifically mention YouTube.

Bernal said he never disclosed anything in his videos that Tesla had not released to the public. “The FSD Beta releases I was demonstrating were end-user consumer products,” he said.

But his videos did sometimes show problems with Tesla’s FSD Beta system.

Tesla CEO Musk accuses SEC of calculated effort to ‘chill’ his right to free speech

Thu, Feb 17 2022

Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of harassment in a calculated effort to “chill” his right to free speech in its oversight of his communications with shareholders as part of a 2018 agreement that settled civil securities charges against the billionaire.

Musk and Tesla thought settling the charges would end the agency’s “harassment” of Musk and allow the court, not the agency to monitor his compliance, Musk’s lawyer wrote in a new court filing Thursday. “But the SEC has broken its promises,” he wrote, alleging that the agency has been “weaponizing the consent decree by using it to try to muzzle and harass Mr. Musk and Tesla.”