Mood. It's a scary fucking time to have this realization, and I'm really not sure what I'm going to do either....
As someone who works in the industry, and done plenty of work for Tesla, I can create a far greater list of all the things they've fucked up in the industry, including electrification.
I can tell you the real reason: Cameras are cheap for the amount of stuff you can kinda-sorta manage with them. That's literally it. There's no other 4D chess game of data collecting or anything else. They're cheap to add and integrate, and adequate for object detection in typical scenarios. No need to worry about the shape of the bumper or paint effecting the radar, no need to have a bunch of individual ultrasonics integrated into the bumper and the associated wiring/labor costs.
I worked with them, and there were numerous times where they came to us asking for new sensors because their cameras were too shitty for what they wanted to do, then once they got a quote, they miraculously didn't need them and figured it out. It happened with corner radars on the Y, it happened with them removing the front radars on everything, and it happened with the ultrasonics.
They bet it all on cameras as a lie to consumers and defraud investors that their cheap shit-boxes would be income generating Robotaxis. Even worse, their own engineers had hard data showing that removing the radar would directly result in pedestrian/motorcyclist deaths, but they had to keep those bullshit production numbers going, so they took them out and it's directly resulted in dozens of likely preventable deaths.
Anyone who's ever worked with Tesla directly knows they're an absolute fucking nightmare, and even compared to the shitshow of GM or Stellantis, the absolute blatant disregard for human life at that company is disgusting.
It sucks, where is the 2016 Musk. That dude seemed to really want to help the world
Knowing people who worked with him at the time, 2016 Musk was a PR illusion and nothing more. He's literally always been a giant piece of shit, he just had much better handlers and was able to hide it a lot better so he could get all those sweet government subsidies and commit stock fraud. Literally everything he's ever done has been in the name of gifting money from the government or shareholders in some form or another for personal enrichment. He's never once cared about anyone other than himself.
Musk is now one of the wealthiest people in the world and our justice and financial system have made it clear he won't be punished, so now he can be the same piece of shit he's always been, just publicly, because it's clear there will be basically zero repercussions.
The thing is that you don't need FSD to do that. Having a really good AEB system massively improves safety, far more than a convenience feature like FSD does, but they fucked that up by taking the radar out so now it performs far worse at night, hence running over pedestrians and other VRUs far more often.
But you can't grift billions out of investors by having a really good safety feature, so you hack together a system from hardware only ever originally only meant for adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and tech bros can show off on YouTube and hopefully not run over a cyclist, all to keep that grift rolling
This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it's basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He's praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he's almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.
See: the cyborg soldier subplot of Metal Gear Rising: Revengence
It's kind of both. A lot of modern Samsung phones do this really weird "AI Enhancement" shit to improve the look of zoomed in shots. I remember testing it out at Best Buy, taking pictures of some Blu-rays on the other side of the store with the 20x zoom option. The original photo was pretty much what you'd expect, it looked like a low-res super cropped pic, but then it applied the "AI Enhancement" and did it's best to fill in the text and price labels, and wound up looking exactly like a bunch of garbled AI text.
Just because it's not publicly traded, doesn't mean that there isn't stock nor that there's no market. Usually, you can technically still buy/sell the stock, just not as a random member of the public on a public stock exchange like the NYSE or FTSE.
There are a surprising number of cis women on Grindr. The ones that aren't bots I've seen are usually looking for either a third for a MMF threesome, a trans guy/gal, or really want a bi partner.
Or just pull this fuse for the module?
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Very, very broadly, I'd say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you're doing it as a "technology company"
Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because "we'll fix it with an OTA" and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.
Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it's because buttons are "old tech"
Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.
Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies
Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I've seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.