4 ms·

Yeah I think car companies should focus less on making cars... - Your first point is cars - there are a ton of evs for sale from many large companies and direc

Yeah I think car companies should focus less on making cars... - Your first point is cars - there are a ton of evs for sale from many large companies and direct sale doesn't seem to sell more cars than indirect. - Tesla is partnering with battery companies just as GM does on the bolt and volt. Nothing special here as their battery business is pretty minuscule. - Again a niche market that compares to GMs after market crate motor program in revenue and size. - Self driving tech doesn't belong to Tesla and Google, most luxury car companies had automated cruise systems when Tesla was making the roadster. Gm has a large fleet roaming around Detroit, Chrysler is partnering with Google with their Pacificas, and Ford has a fleet of fusions as well after billions in investment. The larger point is that elon and his 16 companies seem to do no wrong and avoid comparisons to the existing car companies, he should focus on getting market share in the extremely competitive automotive market instead of making a space/AI/brainlink/tunnel/solar/ev company.

sxates 10y ago
1. Tesla's EVs are outselling everyone else combined, even with an average sale price that's double everyone else. 2. Tesla is partnered with Panasonic, but they're practically married with communal property. They haven't outsourced this, they've put billions into building a gigafactory. What part of "doubling global output of lithium batteries" is minuscule to you? 3. In 20 years, probably half the world's electricity will come from Solar PV. Was coal a niche market? Because this will be bigger. 4. Most other car makers are licensing systems from others, not building their own, and they don't have the self-driving hardware in any cars yet. Tesla has 10's of thousands of cars on the road right now (25k just in Q1) with their second generation system, while GM and Chrysler are still fiddling with prototypes. If you don't see how all these things connect, then I understand your view. But when you recognize how they're all interconnected it makes complete sense to me to be building all of them at once, otherwise a failure in one dooms them all.
- bischofs 10y ago
  1. Nope. Are you just pulling numbers from a hat? Nissan sold 14,000 leafs last year, add that to the 24,000 volts and the 8,000 i3s and you get more than the model S. 2. Im saying the current business is minuscule, if we looked at elons promises as gospel (which you apparently do) we would have had a model x three years ago. LGchem and Samsung SDI are more than capable to meet the demand of the current lithium battery market without panasonic. 3. Speculation 4. Tesla has a SAE level 1 system which is the same as my VW golfs adaptive cruise with lane assist. They sell the car with the "hardware" and you think they are done? -> " All we have to do is build the controls and software now!!" By this logic throwing a couple cameras on the car means it has "self-driving hardware".
  - sxates 10y ago
    1. "Tesla delivered over 76,000 vehicles in 2016" [1]. My math may be rusty, but I'm pretty sure I'm right that they're outselling everyone combined with $100k cars. They're tracking to over 100,000 for 2017. 2. Several billion dollars worth of capital investments disagree with you. And what's important isn't the current market, but the future market - these things are growing and production bottlenecks kill growth. 3. Again, look at the trend lines not just what it is today. 4. A golf you buy today will keep lanes, and will never do anything better. A Tesla has all the hardware needed for Level 5 autonomy (which they've demo'd, but requires regulatory approval), and it's a software update away. And their whole fleet is sensors-on all the time, whether you're using it or not to enable that, which is not true for any other vehicle manufacturer. Google is the only other company that's close. I'm no disciple, but I can see where the puck is going to be. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/3/14159292/tesla-q4-2016-delivery-production-model-s-x http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/3/14159292/tesla-q4-2016-deli...
    - legolas2412 10y ago
      You do buy in Tesla's marketing as gospel though. > A Tesla has all the hardware needed for Level 5 autonomy (which they've demo'd, but requires regulatory approval), and it's a software update away. Audi, BMW, Google etc. demoe'd similar capacity as the tesla did 2-3 years ago. Do you even understand how difficult problem it is? It's not a problem you engineer away. Do you think Tesla made machine learning breakthroughs that Google or CMU (Uber) researchers couldn't? Tesla beating Google at Machine learning? > And their whole fleet is sensors-on all the time, whether you're using it or not to enable that, which is not true for any other vehicle manufacturer. Does it matter what kind of sensor? Almost everybody else agrees LIDAR is necessary. And what use is random data from useless sensors? It's like saying that you'd put cameras in a pedestrian crossing, and soon you'll process it to make a human level intelligence.
      - sxates 10y ago
        They demo'd it, but they didn't ship it!

sxates 10y ago

1. Tesla's EVs are outselling everyone else combined, even with an average sale price that's double everyone else. 2. Tesla is partnered with Panasonic, but they're practically married with communal property. They haven't outsourced this, they've put billions into building a gigafactory. What part of "doubling global output of lithium batteries" is minuscule to you? 3. In 20 years, probably half the world's electricity will come from Solar PV. Was coal a niche market? Because this will be bigger. 4. Most other car makers are licensing systems from others, not building their own, and they don't have the self-driving hardware in any cars yet. Tesla has 10's of thousands of cars on the road right now (25k just in Q1) with their second generation system, while GM and Chrysler are still fiddling with prototypes. If you don't see how all these things connect, then I understand your view. But when you recognize how they're all interconnected it makes complete sense to me to be building all of them at once, otherwise a failure in one dooms them all.

bischofs 10y ago
1. Nope. Are you just pulling numbers from a hat? Nissan sold 14,000 leafs last year, add that to the 24,000 volts and the 8,000 i3s and you get more than the model S. 2. Im saying the current business is minuscule, if we looked at elons promises as gospel (which you apparently do) we would have had a model x three years ago. LGchem and Samsung SDI are more than capable to meet the demand of the current lithium battery market without panasonic. 3. Speculation 4. Tesla has a SAE level 1 system which is the same as my VW golfs adaptive cruise with lane assist. They sell the car with the "hardware" and you think they are done? -> " All we have to do is build the controls and software now!!" By this logic throwing a couple cameras on the car means it has "self-driving hardware".
- sxates 10y ago
  1. "Tesla delivered over 76,000 vehicles in 2016" [1]. My math may be rusty, but I'm pretty sure I'm right that they're outselling everyone combined with $100k cars. They're tracking to over 100,000 for 2017. 2. Several billion dollars worth of capital investments disagree with you. And what's important isn't the current market, but the future market - these things are growing and production bottlenecks kill growth. 3. Again, look at the trend lines not just what it is today. 4. A golf you buy today will keep lanes, and will never do anything better. A Tesla has all the hardware needed for Level 5 autonomy (which they've demo'd, but requires regulatory approval), and it's a software update away. And their whole fleet is sensors-on all the time, whether you're using it or not to enable that, which is not true for any other vehicle manufacturer. Google is the only other company that's close. I'm no disciple, but I can see where the puck is going to be. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/3/14159292/tesla-q4-2016-delivery-production-model-s-x http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/3/14159292/tesla-q4-2016-deli...
  - legolas2412 10y ago
    You do buy in Tesla's marketing as gospel though. > A Tesla has all the hardware needed for Level 5 autonomy (which they've demo'd, but requires regulatory approval), and it's a software update away. Audi, BMW, Google etc. demoe'd similar capacity as the tesla did 2-3 years ago. Do you even understand how difficult problem it is? It's not a problem you engineer away. Do you think Tesla made machine learning breakthroughs that Google or CMU (Uber) researchers couldn't? Tesla beating Google at Machine learning? > And their whole fleet is sensors-on all the time, whether you're using it or not to enable that, which is not true for any other vehicle manufacturer. Does it matter what kind of sensor? Almost everybody else agrees LIDAR is necessary. And what use is random data from useless sensors? It's like saying that you'd put cameras in a pedestrian crossing, and soon you'll process it to make a human level intelligence.
    - sxates 10y ago
      They demo'd it, but they didn't ship it!