In a recent interview with CNBC’s Squawk on Thursday, Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976 talked about Elon Musk. He accused Musk of ‘dishonesty’, saying he was deeply unimpressed by the South African-born billionaire’s inability to fulfill the promises he makes with Tesla. Over the years, Tesla’s CEO promised the self-driving technology to be finished and launched into he market for commercial purposes. However, its 2023 now and the FSD program launched into the market is still a beta version and not the complete one. Lot more is to be worked on and improved for a complete autonomous software.
Wozniak said he was unimpressed by the self-driving feature. ‘It makes mistakes all the time,’ he said. ‘It’s a horrible, frightening experience.’ The engineer said he disliked Musk’s attitude. ‘My life has been based on total honesty,’ he said. ‘Everything you say is totally honest. You don’t hide things, you don’t describe things, you don’t make things up to make yourself seem better. ‘A lot of honesty disappears when you look at Elon Musk and Tesla.’ Wozniak, who married his fourth wife, Janet Hill, in 2008, said believing Musk’s promises cost him and his family dearly.
‘They have robbed my family – myself and my wife – of so much money I couldn’t tell you, with things they said that we really believed would be real.’ Wozniak, asked whether he thought Musk and Jobs were similar, said they both were leaders of ‘a cult’, which he felt was dangerous.
Robotaxis
In 2019, Musk claimed that Teslas would turn into ‘robotaxis’ which were so advanced their owners ‘could go to sleep’ in the vehicle while it chauffeurs them around. The billionaire told customers that they could earn around $30,000 a year by allowing their Teslas to be used as part of a fleet of robotaxis.
As of now, customers in the U.S. and Canada who paid an extra $15,000 have a beta version of self-driving, but they must be behind the wheel. ‘Elon Musk said it would drive itself across the country by the end of 2016,’ Wozniak added. Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the July transcript that Musk ordered the 2016 video to promote self-driving, even though it was not ready. The video carries a tagline saying: ‘The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’ Elluswamy said Tesla’s Autopilot team set out to engineer and record a ‘demonstration of the system’s capabilities’ at the request of Musk. To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto, he said.
