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To anyone who's paid close attention to Tesla and to Elon's various offhand remarks to the press and on Twitter, this was all easy to see coming, every bit of i
by aerovistae 10y ago
To anyone who's paid close attention to Tesla and to Elon's various offhand remarks to the press and on Twitter, this was all easy to see coming, every bit of it.
But now that he's confirmed it all officially: this NUTS. This is so awesome. The press is going to go crazy with this.
I wonder what will happen to Uber...seems like it will be hard for them to compete with the rates of cars that don't have to pay their driver a living wage, nor pay for gas.
Electric semis-- THANK GOD. I live in Chicago and I can't tell you how sick I am of the massive exhaust plumes billowing over me as they pass by, and the roaring of their engines on the street outside my apartment.
- jonny_eh 10y agoUber's been likely working on self-driving cars, potentially in partnership with Google. What Tesla has as an advantage though, is an assembly line to produce lots of quality cars. In other words, Tesla will likely be ready for the future of transportation before Uber.
- danhak 10y agoTesla's other advantage is a global fleet that is actively logging millions of real-world miles a day. I don't think that can be understated at this stage.
- ams6110 10y agoAs owner of a Tesla is it possible to opt-out of this logging? Or is it a required condition of buying the car?
- bryanlarsen 10y agoGoogle may have a lot fewer miles, but they're much higher quality miles. The sensor suite on their car is much superior, so they're getting much better data. Even if the eventual Google car uses cheaper sensors, the data they get from the superior sensors helps a lot training the algorithms.
- pm90 10y agoI don't see how this will work though. Unless you plan to equip all those future cars with the same high quality sensors as those on the Google ones (which I've heard are prohibitively expensive). If those sensors eventually do become really cheap, then Tesla could use them too and negate any advantages Google might have had.
- mdorazio 10y agoThey're already cheap (see elsewhere in this thread for links). Tesla has opted not to implement them because Elon thinks LIDAR isn't needed [1]. Of course without LIDAR you get situations like autopilot running into white tractor trailers because it can't see them... [1] http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lidar-google-uses-in-its-self-driving-car-doesnt-make-sense-in-a-car-context/ http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lid...
- Cthulhu_ 10y agoI think the main point would be to compare the images from the high-quality sensors with those of the low-quality ones, so that they can make good guesses to how accurate they are and what quality they can get away with.
- oh_sigh 10y agoDoes google collect high velocity data like tesla's? I heard that the google self driving car was limited to 25mph in the areas where they tested it, and so their data may only be reflective of that.
- greglindahl 10y agoGoogle operates several kinds of cars -- I see the Lexus ones driving at highway speeds on 101 all the time.
- jasonkolb 10y agoGoogle has Waze data. Which I would think serves as a GREAT set of labels for the data that the self driving cars collect.
- oh_sigh 10y agoWaze is just where people are going...the data tesla collects could be from sensors like a front-facing camera, radar, 360 degree ultrasonic sensors, etc.
- Zaheer 10y agoA Google <-> Uber partnership could reveal something similar.
- mulcahey 10y agoI also think that Tesla will have an easier time acquiring top talent in both the autonomy software and manufacturing. Uber/Google have to partner with Old Guard automotive companies.
- AceJohnny2 10y agoNot necessarily. A lot of people have wisened up to Musk's invasive and destructive management style. Don't think the frequent departures from the company at all levels of hierarchy have gone unnoticed.
- JeffL 10y agoBut with Tesla's open policies, such as open sourcing all their patents, maybe they will happily supply Uber with all the self driving cars Uber might want, plus the API's to remotely control them?
- pm90 10y agoI'm sure they would be more than willing to supply Uber with cars but how much access/control they give to Uber of the data from the cars remains to be seen.
- sudoscript 10y agoAlso millions of miles of fleet learning a day, which Uber doesn't have, since they don't own the cars. Self-driving cars is a supervised learning problem, and he who has the data wins
- argonaut 10y agoIt is a supervised learning problem, but that doesn't mean it will be solved by just shoving large amounts of data into a black box algorithm. This is not MobileEye's approach, and it almost certainly is not Tesla's approach. The data is useless unless it is annotated (e.g. a human labels where the lanes are, where the obstacles are, what the bicylist is doing, etc.) - that's the bottleneck, not collecting large amounts of raw sensor data + driver actions.
- tansey 10y ago> The data is useless unless it is annotated (e.g. a human labels where the lanes are, where the obstacles are, what the bicylist is doing, etc.) - that's the bottleneck, not collecting large amounts of raw sensor data + driver actions. Except that is exactly what Nvidia did, and it worked out fine for them: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316 https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316
- argonaut 10y agoNope. That car just does lane keeping - it doesn't even do turns or lane changes. This is all stuff solved 20 years ago. And even then it only achieves 98% autonomy on lane keeping - this is a task that needs 100% accuracy. You should not be running into the median every couple miles. Furthermore, they augmented the data with left/right-offset cameras to supplement the data with examples of "bad" camera views. This is not present on Tesla cars (because these sensors are only used for training purposes) In fact, the paper actually supports my point. They collected all this data for one task, lane keeping. They subdivided the problem of autonomous driving, and managed to solve one small subproblem (the easiest subproblem of autonomous driving, solved for decades already). They avoided the need for annotators, but only because they used specialized purpose-built cameras to augment the data.
- puranjay 10y agoIf Tesla can pull off this transportation + energy revolution, it would be a trillion dollar company
- aerovistae 10y agoExactly my thinking.
- dfischer 10y agoYeah this is so awesome. SWEET!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 10y agoWhere has he mentioned semis or buses? I thought I had been paying close attention.
- aerovistae 10y agoI'm sorry, I've read/watched every interview or press release or tweet he's given in the past 5 years. I couldn't tell you exactly where individual bits came from.
- mulcahey 10y agoHere ya go: http://electrek.co/2016/01/26/elon-musk-tesla-truck-video/ http://electrek.co/2016/01/26/elon-musk-tesla-truck-video/
- tajen 10y agoHe mentioned them in the blog post (Title 2, paragraph 3).
- lallysingh 10y agoDo you think they'll have solar panels on the trailer? Would they have to roll them on/off when they switch trailers?
- tdy721 10y agoNot very soon, there are better places for Solar Panels than roads...
- dredmorbius 10y agoAlmost certainly not. Except for, say, powering auxiliary electronics, concentrations of solar power are far too low for on-vehicle collection. Put the panels alongside the road. Not on the vehicles. Not on solar freaking roadways, which are the stupidest idea since stupid. But in medians, on extant construction, and in concentrated high-insolation solar farms (deserts, etc.). We're going to need one hell of a lot of panels.
- asymmetric 10y agoWhy are solar roadways stupid?
- stale2002 10y agoThere is tons of space to put solar panels. We don't NEED to come up with a clever solution of where to put the solar panels. Just put them anywhere, it doesn't matter. Space is cheap. Rooftop space is even cheaper.
- dredmorbius 10y agoRooftop space also ties directly into existing built infrastructure and grid, which is a neat plus. There's not sufficient rooftop space for present electrical needs, nor future likely needs. But yes, it's a good start.
- dredmorbius 10y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/26on7y/solar_roadways_either_a_scam_or_gross_incompetence/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/26on7y/solar_r... https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27uq3a/facing_the_freakin_facts_solar_roadways_socalled/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27uq3a/facing_... The first rebuts the initial premise soundly and points to multiple other critiques. TL;DR: an exceptionally poor and expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
- Bulkington 10y agoRe: diesel pollution/electric semis (tangent) The Tesla Autopilot crash in Florida has led directly to the Missouri governor's veto of a bill to allow big rig platooning--a semi-autonomous technology that lets trucks travel in close pairs (or more) for aero/fuel efficiency and safety benefits. The backlash is going to get worse before broad public acceptance gets better. The rest of the US ain't SV. Veto: http://trucker.com/blog/autonomous-tech-honeymoon-over http://trucker.com/blog/autonomous-tech-honeymoon-over Platooning: http://peloton-tech.com http://peloton-tech.com
- pcr0 10y agoI don't think Uber and Tesla are competing in any way. In fact, Travis Kalanick stated he would buy half a million Teslas if they became fully autonomous[0]. [0]: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098997_uber-ceo-to-tesla-sell-me-half-a-million-autonomous-electric-cars-in-2020 http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098997_uber-ceo-to-tesl...
- aerovistae 10y agoBut Tesla won't sell them to him, man. Why would they, when Elon's just said he's going to create their own autonomous fleet? Why would they hand it over to Uber? Of course they're competing! Elon's just said they're going to make a fleet of autonomous electric taxis! Travis wasn't being literal; he knows there aren't going to be 500,000 available for a single company to buy for many years. And even if it weren't redirecting profits, Tesla still wouldn't allow a single entity to buy up the entire output of their factories, preventing nearly all consumers from getting any. That would be crazy. And Travis knows that. He was more just expressing Uber's enthusiasm about the idea of autonomous electric cars. If he could, he would, but he knows he can't.
- sidereal1 10y agoTesla can make the hardware and Uber can make the app, that's not a bad deal for either. And there's no reason why Tesla couldn't sell to Uber's competitors as well.
- stale2002 10y agoWhy wouldn't they sell them? They are in the business of making money, and if Uber offers to pay a premium or sign a contract, it would allow Tesla to grow much quicker, expand capacity, and make even MORE money. A self driving car bought by Uber would pay for itself in under 2 years easy. I am sure Uber would pay quite a lot for THAT opportunity.
- aerovistae 10y agoHere is my prediction: Uber and Tesla will never have any business dealings. Time will tell.