12 ms·

Tesla, software and disruption

117 points by slyall 8y ago

MarkMc 8y ago
Excellent article with well-reasoned analysis of the range of future possibilities for Tesla. But one disappointing omission is any mention of ride-hailing - surely it will have enormous consequences for the entire auto industry because people will for the most part stop buying cars and switch to autonomous taxis. This will (a) reduce the demand for number of new cars produced; (b) reduce the profit from each car (nobody really cares about the color or horsepower or brand of the taxi they take to work)
- coding123 8y ago
  Actually it would be nice to see someone take a crack at that... There are so many aspects there... Women and families may not want to jump in a car that other people touch. People that commute across the desert. Surely it will have an affect, but it might not exactly kill the auto industry.. but it might be enough to make a strong winner for the ones that can remain in a reduced market.
- gizmo 8y ago
  If Tesla is the first to crack autonomy they will win, regardless of ride-hailing. If Tesla doesn't crack autonomy they're likely to go under, regardless of ride-hailing.
  - repsilat 8y ago
    > If Tesla is the first to crack autonomy they will win, regardless of ride-hailing. I think that's a bit strong. People don't replace their cars all that often, and no massive increase in demand for Tesla's cars is going to cause their production numbers to jump. If they get full autonomy out five years ahead of Waymo and Cruise (good luck), they still probably won't win a dominant share of the market longer-term. > If Tesla doesn't crack autonomy they're likely to go under Shrugs, I think autonomy could seriously hurt them, whoever invents it. Tesla builds "a better car" -- nice acceleration, clean interface, more reliable -- and autonomous ride-hailing in cities essentially leads to the cars themselves not being an important point of differentiation.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    I don't think they will go under. They believe they will make enough model 3s to be profitable quarterly in the second half of 2018. They could also just sell stock if they needed more money short term. They are at least 10 years ahead on superchargers, long term driving. I'm coming up on 6 years of free long distance driving with my model s. There's no other ev with that capability. The next i-pace is missing charging away from your house.
- mcguire 8y ago
  I suspect ride hailing, just like taxies, is only viable in large, extremely dense cities. Those are really rather rare in the US. I don't know that they will be any more disruptive than taxies in the US unless society changes.
diskandar27 8y ago
it seems the article boils down to the autonomy puzzle in Tesla. Could Tesla make the autonomy a realization with their approach? would waymo approach be better in the future? One thing I think that is missing, although it mentioned people love their Tesla and so is other thing in life. It is the fact that I felt that this is derived from the way Tesla designed the car, it is intuitive just like when the first Iphone introduced. There is no whistle and bells like the traditional car. Just like iphone compare to Nokia. My big take away is harder for the car company to become a software company than a software company become a car company. Not to mentioned as a car company, it has lots of 'legacy' or baggage that they have to deal with. The works is two times harder I think for an incumbent to become a software company as a compare software company to become a hardware company. First: As an incumbent they have to unlearned the old way of doing or thinking about what a car company is. Second: If they are successful at the first one, then they have to learn how to do the software. While for Tesla, is only 1 step which is to learn how to make car (about the hardware). Tesla does not need to unlearn about things because it has no legacy. In my experience it is harder to unlearn about things rather than learning about things. I might be wrong :)
- compcoffee 8y ago
  >Not to mentioned as a car company, it has lots of 'legacy' or baggage that they have to deal with. Yeah, all "legacy" is bad. What could they possibly have learned in 100 years of building cars? Nothing that Tesla can't replicate in less than a decade! Meanwhile, Tesla owners are recommending a checklist of possible defects to look for when you go to pick up your vehicle. Non-super-fans will never tolerate that. No bells and whistles? Simpler than the tactile interface of legacy cars? This is simply not true.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    what does "non-superfans won't tolerate that" mean? I have a tesla, it's fine. it was made by humans, I'm sure it has some problems, but its just a car.
- PAClearner 8y ago
  andrej karpathy is kinda pretty freaking legit but I think the waymo team is probably stronger/larger and has significantly more engineering maturity. caveat: I don't do vision.
mrfusion 8y ago
If batteries are getting so cheap why isn’t anyone making battery powered: chainsaws, full size vacuum cleaners, jet skis, ride on mowers? All of those would be revolutionary.
- gizmo 8y ago
  Battery powered chainsaws are very popular for light duty work. Small battery powered vacuums are also very popular. You might as well ask, if batteries are getting cheap, why isn't anybody making cordless drills?
- larkinrichards 8y ago
  Most tool brands (milwaukee, dewalt, ryobi) are transitioning from tool companies to battery companies. Lots of cheap tools and expensive batteries. Also, battery powered chainsaws (husqvarna is well regarded for their chainsaws): https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/chainsaws/536li-xp/966729174/ https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/chainsaws/536li-xp/966... battery powered riding lawnmowers (ryobi not well known for ride-on mowers): https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ryobi-38-in-75-Ah-Battery-Electric-Rear-Engine-Riding-Lawn-Mower-RY48110/300246266 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ryobi-38-in-75-Ah-Battery-Electr...
  - kelchm 8y ago
    Battery powered chainsaws are definitely a thing and actually work pretty well, even on medium sized trees. Not needing hearing protection is a huge benefit in my opinion.
    - amluto 8y ago
      And DeWalt makes an excellent battery powered leaf blower.
- dfox 8y ago
  For me for a long time the example of tool that cannot be reasonably battery powered were angle grinders and SDS-mount hammer drills. DeWalt makes both of these for a few years.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
PAClearner 8y ago
for anyone who maybe got confused SLAM stands for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. edit: I think if it is possible to do SLAM without LIDAR waymo will definitely beat TESLA to the punch since waymo has an absurd amount of vision data labelled with the lidar-measured-depth.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  Speaking of that. I’d think we could possibly train on simulations. We’d have the 3d information plus the rendered 2d camera view.
  - PAClearner 8y ago
    I don't know if people do this for vision yet but I know some people doing this for RL for robotic control.
    - annerajb 8y ago
      Google has a simulation for their cars that does this. Nvidia has a hw suit for this purpose too and for testing autopilot hardware by feeding it data from another rack/server
dnprock 8y ago
I think an important advantage is vertical integration. Similar to Apple and iPhone, Tesla controls most of the stack. They can do a lot more than their competitors.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  There are a ton of differences between Apple and Tesla. Most noticeably, Apple actually made a profit selling the iPhone. 6-years after the release of the Model S, Telsa has yet to turn a profit. And instead, is facing bankruptcy within the next two years unless it can roll over its debt or otherwise raise yet a few more billion $$$$. Compare and contrast: the iPhone was released in 2007. The Tesla Model S was released in 2012. Steve Jobs died in 2011 (4-years after the iPhone). You can tell that that Apple was a successful company by the time Steve Jobs died. Furthermore, Apple accomplished its iPhone launch during the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis. In contrast, Tesla's rampup is during the cheapest money ever to be seen in modern history: low interest rates and a grand bull market. The political, environmental, and financial headwinds Apple faced during its time to create the iPhone were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's. And yet, Apple turned a profit and became a lasting company. The same cannot be said yet of Tesla.
  - trisomy21 8y ago
    “The political, environmental, and financial headwinds Apple faced during its time to create the iPhone were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's.“ I get that you might not be bullish on Tesla, but do you seriously believe this?
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      Were you around during the 2008 financial recession? Major US banks were literally going bankrupt, credit dried up. There was almost no opportunity to borrow money, the stock market was crashing, no opportunity to IPO or perform a secondary offering. Tesla is operating under one of the greatest, and longest, bull markets the US has ever seen. The great 2011 to 2018 (maybe longer??) boom. Tesla has been able to either secondary-offering, or borrow, roughly billion+ each year, every year, since its IPO. During recent years, its borrowed or otherwise raised over $2 billion / year.
Animats 8y ago
What "massive amount of data" from Tesla? They don't send all the video back to HQ. Tesla owners have observed large uploads, but apparently they are software crash dumps.
- pbreit 8y ago
  It's probably a representation of the video data that has value to providing autonomy. Plus all the path & geo data. With a few hundred thousand cars collecting it, I'd say that's "massive".
  - Latteland 8y ago
    You can also opt out of their monitoring of their car. I've wondered what the impact would be if I opted out on mine.
    - pbreit 8y ago
      Zero.
- annerajb 8y ago
  They are not crash dumps only. It includes images along with data of area where images where taken. It's not gbs thought. They only ask the car to upload relevant needed data. Example I want you to send pictures Everytime you get into a construction zone.
justicezyx 8y ago
"When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!” " Is this the basis of the article? The earliest Tesla car is rodster right? THAT IS A GREAT CAR in every aspect, right?...
- olivermarks 8y ago
  The earliest Tesla was a Lotus Elise with an electric motor and batteries installed by Tesla
  - Latteland 8y ago
    But I think a lot of people are stuck on that earlier car and don't get the engineering capability that Tesla has built over time.
frenchie4111 8y ago
Something missing from this article: Tesla doesn't necessarily need to solve the vision only SLAM/Autonomy problem itself. If anyone solves the problem, and is willing to sell it. Tesla can immediately license it and turn their fleet of 200k+ Autopilot 2 cars into self driving cars overnight.
- Soundest 8y ago
  Whilst that's true, it doesn't seem likely that we go from where we are now (Can't do autonomous driving) to a point where can get fully autonomous driving, and then to a point where we can do fully autonomous driving with the reduced sensors available on existing Teslas in a period of time that makes sense.
- akira2501 8y ago
  > Tesla can immediately license it Aren't they already licensing the second generation from Nvidia on Nvidia hardware? > Autopilot 2 cars into self driving cars overnight. That's presuming that the current sensor arrays, computing power and their arrangements will be compatible with the new technology.
  - annerajb 8y ago
    No. Tesla does not use Nvidia software libraries afaik. They do license the socs and gpus on a board designed by tesla. Based on the drive px1 reference design. Being changed in 6-8 months to a custom made asic made specifically for self driving by Tesla.
- emptyfile 8y ago
  I thought we were done with the autopilot fantasies?
- graeme 8y ago
  How is that a moat?
pcprincipal 8y ago
I read a lot of articles on TSLA and usually fail to see any mention of their power business. Granted, this is a small part of revenue right now ($1.1BN for FY17 of $11.8BN total), but growing fast and with some highly visible data points (Puerto Rico, South Australia). They are going to win multi-billion-dollar contracts if the US or other countries decide to rebuild their grids. As a TSLA shareholder, this opportunity actually gets me more excited about the future of the company than autonomy. It seems to me they have less competition doing huge battery installations than building autonomous vehicles.
- mariushn 8y ago
  How much profit do those projects bring?
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Hard to tell at this point. At least in South Australia I think he pretty much built it at cost just to have a reference site to help persuade other governments. That said you would think these projects would be profitable since they are billion dollars purchases made by governments.
    - annerajb 8y ago
      That was bidded by private companies and financed by private consortium. My understanding is that ongoing revenue will break it even. Initial install was near zero margin.
  - gizmo 8y ago
    Tesla lost money on the Australia project. They bought the battery cells from Samsung and put them in a Tesla branded unit. Samsung also could have installed the battery themselves (always cheaper to cut out a middle man), but Tesla was willing to buy their cells and then sell them at a loss to Australia. Tesla got a ton of publicity out of it, though, so it was probably a win for all parties involved.
    - 8y ago
sparkzilla 8y ago
Tesla is going to find it increasingly difficult as new competitors come online. For example, Autocar just gave Jaguar's I-Pace a positive review in a head-to-head comparison [1]. IMHO the I-Pace is a good-looking car, and has a superior interior to the Tesla. As more manufacturers catch up, can Tesla survive? [1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-model-s-vs-jaguar-i-pace-ev-twin-test https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-model-s-vs...
- jsight 8y ago
  The i-pace looks nice, but really showcases the technical lead that Tesla has. The i-pace is bigger, with less interior space, and poorer energy efficiency, which ultimately leads to less-than-great range. Maybe a second generation of it will be competitive.
  - sparkzilla 8y ago
    The I-Pace range isn't that much different from the Tesla. Anyway, the point isn't that the I-Pace is better, it's that it -- and the many other EVs coming from major manufacturers -- is competitive enough to take sales away from Tesla.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      there's no supercharger like network for the i-pace, making it only a city car. Tesla can drive from seattle to bamff, or portland to san diego or across the country. no other car can do that.
      - sparkzilla 8y ago
        Tesla has no monopoly on charging stations, which are popping up everywhere. In the UK, for example: https://www.zap-map.com/live/ https://www.zap-map.com/live/
        Latteland 8y ago
empath75 8y ago
I don’t get why Tesla added the self driving stuff at all. Just seems like a lot of wasted investment that keeps the price of the car high. They could have released a much cheaper model 3 without it, and likely deal with less bad press from their cars killing their owners.
- annerajb 8y ago
  It's not mandatory to buy the self driving car. They want it on the car regardless of the customer buys it or not. They have other uses for the hardware.
brian-armstrong 8y ago
Why are touchscreens in cars touted as innovation? They are a usability disaster. It is much easier to, say, change the A/C power when the control is a physical control I can reach for and identify by touch.
- mcny 8y ago
  It is a little premature. I think it will make much more sense in two or three decades (?) *when we can get self driving mostly working. This may be unpopular but control knobs are silly. How often do you reach for that climate control knob? Why can't the car just do the right thing? Why does the knob need to exist? My opinion is that doing away with knobs we don't need to be persistent is a good thing. Now, in a car today with no real self driving, we want the brakes to be accessible by a persistent control and it is in all cars. I just think tweaking climate control isn't that high in the list of priorities.
  - brian-armstrong 8y ago
    I feel like I reach for climate control all the time. Cars have tiny enclosed cabins and they go from cold to hot quickly depending on sun/shade etc. And how would it do the right thing? The right temperature is pretty subjective.
    - jfoster 8y ago
      You set the temperature you like once. It can use that as the default. That will cover most climate control cases, and then there's an override value for when you have passengers. Since there would be someone in the passenger seat then, they can do it whilst the driver drives. The override gets reset every 6 hours. Theoretical way it could work; unsure how much of that applies to Tesla.
      - SECProto 8y ago
        Temperature doesnt take in to account radiant heat (or lack thereof). If the sun is shining on you, and the cabin is set to 20, you'll be hot. If it's a cloudless winter night and -20 out, setting to 20 will be frigid cold. I mean just yesterday, I had to alternate between 18 and 22 depending whether the sun was shining on me, or was behind the car shining in the rear window (curvy road)
jfoster 8y ago
"That is, it’s entirely possible that Waymo, or someone else, gets autonomy to work in 202x with a $1000 or $2000 LIDAR and vision sensor suite and Tesla still doesn’t have it working with vision alone." In this scenario there still may be an upside for Tesla. For Waymo to cover the world in LIDAR-equipped cars will take decades. Tesla already sells cars all over the world. The Tesla car sharing network may scale extremely quickly as a result. Even if Waymo takes some markets first, once Tesla has autonomy working, they can be in most markets at the flip of a switch. Since the cars participating in the sharing network would be from Tesla purchasers, people may purchase the cars as an investment, meaning there would be no capital cost to Tesla in scaling their network. They just need to be able to produce enough Model 3s and get autonomy working. Then they can take profits from both the sale of the car and the clip of the car sharing network.
- kbob 8y ago
  Is LIDAR actually better than video? If I understand LIDAR correctly, it gives a 1D array of depth data and is fairly limited in either resolution or speed. Video provides much more data at higher speed, and it seems like it'd be easier to identify objects from 2D color images. Stereo (never mind eight cameras) can be used to derive depth information. But I'm not a practitioner, so educate me. How does LIDAR beat video?
  - jfoster 8y ago
    I was quoting the article, but I think LIDAR is a bit more like having a 3D model of the world around the vehicle. The processing of a 1D array into a usable point cloud is not of concern at the frontier of autonomous vehicle research. My understanding is that the main reason Tesla would choose video instead is that cameras are super-cheap in comparison to LIDAR, and theoretically good enough if you have AI that can understand what the cameras are seeing. I have a feeling that Musk is pushing OpenAI toward researching the technology that Tesla will need to make their approach work. I hope they are successful; it is probably the fastest path toward ubiquitous autonomous vehicles. It's likely that Waymo can get theirs working faster, but they can't scale the distribution side as fast as Tesla could.
iabacu 8y ago
Autonomous driving is such a big opportunity, that trying to do it wihtout LIDARs is a giant premature optimization. Just like trying to make fully automated assembly plants. Whatever edge it may give on sensor cost savings in the long run, it has a steep penalty in time to market. Even if eventually they make it without LIDARs, guess what? The competitors with successful fleets won’t be too far behind.
- Latteland 8y ago
  If lidar was available for a few thousand, I think they would have used it. But it was much much more expensive in 2012 when I got my first one. Now they are kind of committed because they promised it would work for the generation 2.5 hardware in the model 3. So if they can't make it work, they'd have to refund 5k for a lot of sellers, or pay for upgrading to new hardware. I have gen 2 hardware, but I kind of doubt that it will be enough for autodriving.
twic 8y ago
> There’s an old car industry joke that you can see the organization chart of a car company in the dashboard, and also see that the steering wheel team hates the gear stick team. So, Conway's Law then! Can anyone tell us more about this car industry adage?
- cagenut 8y ago
  yea I loved seeing that but a quick googling didn't net me anything more.

117 points by slyall 8y ago

Excellent article with well-reasoned analysis of the range of future possibilities for Tesla. But one disappointing omission is any mention of ride-hailing - surely it will have enormous consequences for the entire auto industry because people will for the most part stop buying cars and switch to autonomous taxis. This will (a) reduce the demand for number of new cars produced; (b) reduce the profit from each car (nobody really cares about the color or horsepower or brand of the taxi they take to work)

coding123 8y ago
Actually it would be nice to see someone take a crack at that... There are so many aspects there... Women and families may not want to jump in a car that other people touch. People that commute across the desert. Surely it will have an affect, but it might not exactly kill the auto industry.. but it might be enough to make a strong winner for the ones that can remain in a reduced market.
gizmo 8y ago
If Tesla is the first to crack autonomy they will win, regardless of ride-hailing. If Tesla doesn't crack autonomy they're likely to go under, regardless of ride-hailing.
- repsilat 8y ago
  > If Tesla is the first to crack autonomy they will win, regardless of ride-hailing. I think that's a bit strong. People don't replace their cars all that often, and no massive increase in demand for Tesla's cars is going to cause their production numbers to jump. If they get full autonomy out five years ahead of Waymo and Cruise (good luck), they still probably won't win a dominant share of the market longer-term. > If Tesla doesn't crack autonomy they're likely to go under Shrugs, I think autonomy could seriously hurt them, whoever invents it. Tesla builds "a better car" -- nice acceleration, clean interface, more reliable -- and autonomous ride-hailing in cities essentially leads to the cars themselves not being an important point of differentiation.
- Latteland 8y ago
  I don't think they will go under. They believe they will make enough model 3s to be profitable quarterly in the second half of 2018. They could also just sell stock if they needed more money short term. They are at least 10 years ahead on superchargers, long term driving. I'm coming up on 6 years of free long distance driving with my model s. There's no other ev with that capability. The next i-pace is missing charging away from your house.
mcguire 8y ago
I suspect ride hailing, just like taxies, is only viable in large, extremely dense cities. Those are really rather rare in the US. I don't know that they will be any more disruptive than taxies in the US unless society changes.

diskandar27 8y ago

it seems the article boils down to the autonomy puzzle in Tesla. Could Tesla make the autonomy a realization with their approach? would waymo approach be better in the future? One thing I think that is missing, although it mentioned people love their Tesla and so is other thing in life. It is the fact that I felt that this is derived from the way Tesla designed the car, it is intuitive just like when the first Iphone introduced. There is no whistle and bells like the traditional car. Just like iphone compare to Nokia. My big take away is harder for the car company to become a software company than a software company become a car company. Not to mentioned as a car company, it has lots of 'legacy' or baggage that they have to deal with. The works is two times harder I think for an incumbent to become a software company as a compare software company to become a hardware company. First: As an incumbent they have to unlearned the old way of doing or thinking about what a car company is. Second: If they are successful at the first one, then they have to learn how to do the software. While for Tesla, is only 1 step which is to learn how to make car (about the hardware). Tesla does not need to unlearn about things because it has no legacy. In my experience it is harder to unlearn about things rather than learning about things. I might be wrong :)

compcoffee 8y ago
>Not to mentioned as a car company, it has lots of 'legacy' or baggage that they have to deal with. Yeah, all "legacy" is bad. What could they possibly have learned in 100 years of building cars? Nothing that Tesla can't replicate in less than a decade! Meanwhile, Tesla owners are recommending a checklist of possible defects to look for when you go to pick up your vehicle. Non-super-fans will never tolerate that. No bells and whistles? Simpler than the tactile interface of legacy cars? This is simply not true.
- Latteland 8y ago
  what does "non-superfans won't tolerate that" mean? I have a tesla, it's fine. it was made by humans, I'm sure it has some problems, but its just a car.
PAClearner 8y ago
andrej karpathy is kinda pretty freaking legit but I think the waymo team is probably stronger/larger and has significantly more engineering maturity. caveat: I don't do vision.

mrfusion 8y ago

If batteries are getting so cheap why isn’t anyone making battery powered: chainsaws, full size vacuum cleaners, jet skis, ride on mowers? All of those would be revolutionary.

gizmo 8y ago
Battery powered chainsaws are very popular for light duty work. Small battery powered vacuums are also very popular. You might as well ask, if batteries are getting cheap, why isn't anybody making cordless drills?
larkinrichards 8y ago
Most tool brands (milwaukee, dewalt, ryobi) are transitioning from tool companies to battery companies. Lots of cheap tools and expensive batteries. Also, battery powered chainsaws (husqvarna is well regarded for their chainsaws): https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/chainsaws/536li-xp/966729174/ https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/chainsaws/536li-xp/966... battery powered riding lawnmowers (ryobi not well known for ride-on mowers): https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ryobi-38-in-75-Ah-Battery-Electric-Rear-Engine-Riding-Lawn-Mower-RY48110/300246266 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ryobi-38-in-75-Ah-Battery-Electr...
- kelchm 8y ago
  Battery powered chainsaws are definitely a thing and actually work pretty well, even on medium sized trees. Not needing hearing protection is a huge benefit in my opinion.
  - amluto 8y ago
    And DeWalt makes an excellent battery powered leaf blower.
dfox 8y ago
For me for a long time the example of tool that cannot be reasonably battery powered were angle grinders and SDS-mount hammer drills. DeWalt makes both of these for a few years.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

PAClearner 8y ago

for anyone who maybe got confused SLAM stands for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. edit: I think if it is possible to do SLAM without LIDAR waymo will definitely beat TESLA to the punch since waymo has an absurd amount of vision data labelled with the lidar-measured-depth.

mrfusion 8y ago
Speaking of that. I’d think we could possibly train on simulations. We’d have the 3d information plus the rendered 2d camera view.
- PAClearner 8y ago
  I don't know if people do this for vision yet but I know some people doing this for RL for robotic control.
  - annerajb 8y ago
    Google has a simulation for their cars that does this. Nvidia has a hw suit for this purpose too and for testing autopilot hardware by feeding it data from another rack/server

dnprock 8y ago

I think an important advantage is vertical integration. Similar to Apple and iPhone, Tesla controls most of the stack. They can do a lot more than their competitors.

dragontamer 8y ago
There are a ton of differences between Apple and Tesla. Most noticeably, Apple actually made a profit selling the iPhone. 6-years after the release of the Model S, Telsa has yet to turn a profit. And instead, is facing bankruptcy within the next two years unless it can roll over its debt or otherwise raise yet a few more billion $$$$. Compare and contrast: the iPhone was released in 2007. The Tesla Model S was released in 2012. Steve Jobs died in 2011 (4-years after the iPhone). You can tell that that Apple was a successful company by the time Steve Jobs died. Furthermore, Apple accomplished its iPhone launch during the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis. In contrast, Tesla's rampup is during the cheapest money ever to be seen in modern history: low interest rates and a grand bull market. The political, environmental, and financial headwinds Apple faced during its time to create the iPhone were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's. And yet, Apple turned a profit and became a lasting company. The same cannot be said yet of Tesla.
- trisomy21 8y ago
  “The political, environmental, and financial headwinds Apple faced during its time to create the iPhone were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's.“ I get that you might not be bullish on Tesla, but do you seriously believe this?
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    Were you around during the 2008 financial recession? Major US banks were literally going bankrupt, credit dried up. There was almost no opportunity to borrow money, the stock market was crashing, no opportunity to IPO or perform a secondary offering. Tesla is operating under one of the greatest, and longest, bull markets the US has ever seen. The great 2011 to 2018 (maybe longer??) boom. Tesla has been able to either secondary-offering, or borrow, roughly billion+ each year, every year, since its IPO. During recent years, its borrowed or otherwise raised over $2 billion / year.

Animats 8y ago

What "massive amount of data" from Tesla? They don't send all the video back to HQ. Tesla owners have observed large uploads, but apparently they are software crash dumps.

pbreit 8y ago
It's probably a representation of the video data that has value to providing autonomy. Plus all the path & geo data. With a few hundred thousand cars collecting it, I'd say that's "massive".
- Latteland 8y ago
  You can also opt out of their monitoring of their car. I've wondered what the impact would be if I opted out on mine.
  - pbreit 8y ago
    Zero.
annerajb 8y ago
They are not crash dumps only. It includes images along with data of area where images where taken. It's not gbs thought. They only ask the car to upload relevant needed data. Example I want you to send pictures Everytime you get into a construction zone.

justicezyx 8y ago

"When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!” " Is this the basis of the article? The earliest Tesla car is rodster right? THAT IS A GREAT CAR in every aspect, right?...

olivermarks 8y ago
The earliest Tesla was a Lotus Elise with an electric motor and batteries installed by Tesla
- Latteland 8y ago
  But I think a lot of people are stuck on that earlier car and don't get the engineering capability that Tesla has built over time.

frenchie4111 8y ago

Something missing from this article: Tesla doesn't necessarily need to solve the vision only SLAM/Autonomy problem itself. If anyone solves the problem, and is willing to sell it. Tesla can immediately license it and turn their fleet of 200k+ Autopilot 2 cars into self driving cars overnight.

Soundest 8y ago
Whilst that's true, it doesn't seem likely that we go from where we are now (Can't do autonomous driving) to a point where can get fully autonomous driving, and then to a point where we can do fully autonomous driving with the reduced sensors available on existing Teslas in a period of time that makes sense.
akira2501 8y ago
> Tesla can immediately license it Aren't they already licensing the second generation from Nvidia on Nvidia hardware? > Autopilot 2 cars into self driving cars overnight. That's presuming that the current sensor arrays, computing power and their arrangements will be compatible with the new technology.
- annerajb 8y ago
  No. Tesla does not use Nvidia software libraries afaik. They do license the socs and gpus on a board designed by tesla. Based on the drive px1 reference design. Being changed in 6-8 months to a custom made asic made specifically for self driving by Tesla.
emptyfile 8y ago
I thought we were done with the autopilot fantasies?
graeme 8y ago
How is that a moat?

pcprincipal 8y ago

I read a lot of articles on TSLA and usually fail to see any mention of their power business. Granted, this is a small part of revenue right now ($1.1BN for FY17 of $11.8BN total), but growing fast and with some highly visible data points (Puerto Rico, South Australia). They are going to win multi-billion-dollar contracts if the US or other countries decide to rebuild their grids. As a TSLA shareholder, this opportunity actually gets me more excited about the future of the company than autonomy. It seems to me they have less competition doing huge battery installations than building autonomous vehicles.

mariushn 8y ago
How much profit do those projects bring?
- threeseed 8y ago
  Hard to tell at this point. At least in South Australia I think he pretty much built it at cost just to have a reference site to help persuade other governments. That said you would think these projects would be profitable since they are billion dollars purchases made by governments.
  - annerajb 8y ago
    That was bidded by private companies and financed by private consortium. My understanding is that ongoing revenue will break it even. Initial install was near zero margin.
- gizmo 8y ago
  Tesla lost money on the Australia project. They bought the battery cells from Samsung and put them in a Tesla branded unit. Samsung also could have installed the battery themselves (always cheaper to cut out a middle man), but Tesla was willing to buy their cells and then sell them at a loss to Australia. Tesla got a ton of publicity out of it, though, so it was probably a win for all parties involved.
  - 8y ago

sparkzilla 8y ago

Tesla is going to find it increasingly difficult as new competitors come online. For example, Autocar just gave Jaguar's I-Pace a positive review in a head-to-head comparison [1]. IMHO the I-Pace is a good-looking car, and has a superior interior to the Tesla. As more manufacturers catch up, can Tesla survive? [1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-model-s-vs-jaguar-i-pace-ev-twin-test https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-model-s-vs...

jsight 8y ago
The i-pace looks nice, but really showcases the technical lead that Tesla has. The i-pace is bigger, with less interior space, and poorer energy efficiency, which ultimately leads to less-than-great range. Maybe a second generation of it will be competitive.
- sparkzilla 8y ago
  The I-Pace range isn't that much different from the Tesla. Anyway, the point isn't that the I-Pace is better, it's that it -- and the many other EVs coming from major manufacturers -- is competitive enough to take sales away from Tesla.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    there's no supercharger like network for the i-pace, making it only a city car. Tesla can drive from seattle to bamff, or portland to san diego or across the country. no other car can do that.
    - sparkzilla 8y ago
      Tesla has no monopoly on charging stations, which are popping up everywhere. In the UK, for example: https://www.zap-map.com/live/ https://www.zap-map.com/live/
      - Latteland 8y ago

empath75 8y ago

I don’t get why Tesla added the self driving stuff at all. Just seems like a lot of wasted investment that keeps the price of the car high. They could have released a much cheaper model 3 without it, and likely deal with less bad press from their cars killing their owners.

annerajb 8y ago
It's not mandatory to buy the self driving car. They want it on the car regardless of the customer buys it or not. They have other uses for the hardware.

brian-armstrong 8y ago

Why are touchscreens in cars touted as innovation? They are a usability disaster. It is much easier to, say, change the A/C power when the control is a physical control I can reach for and identify by touch.

mcny 8y ago
It is a little premature. I think it will make much more sense in two or three decades (?) *when we can get self driving mostly working. This may be unpopular but control knobs are silly. How often do you reach for that climate control knob? Why can't the car just do the right thing? Why does the knob need to exist? My opinion is that doing away with knobs we don't need to be persistent is a good thing. Now, in a car today with no real self driving, we want the brakes to be accessible by a persistent control and it is in all cars. I just think tweaking climate control isn't that high in the list of priorities.
- brian-armstrong 8y ago
  I feel like I reach for climate control all the time. Cars have tiny enclosed cabins and they go from cold to hot quickly depending on sun/shade etc. And how would it do the right thing? The right temperature is pretty subjective.
  - jfoster 8y ago
    You set the temperature you like once. It can use that as the default. That will cover most climate control cases, and then there's an override value for when you have passengers. Since there would be someone in the passenger seat then, they can do it whilst the driver drives. The override gets reset every 6 hours. Theoretical way it could work; unsure how much of that applies to Tesla.
    - SECProto 8y ago
      Temperature doesnt take in to account radiant heat (or lack thereof). If the sun is shining on you, and the cabin is set to 20, you'll be hot. If it's a cloudless winter night and -20 out, setting to 20 will be frigid cold. I mean just yesterday, I had to alternate between 18 and 22 depending whether the sun was shining on me, or was behind the car shining in the rear window (curvy road)

jfoster 8y ago

"That is, it’s entirely possible that Waymo, or someone else, gets autonomy to work in 202x with a $1000 or $2000 LIDAR and vision sensor suite and Tesla still doesn’t have it working with vision alone." In this scenario there still may be an upside for Tesla. For Waymo to cover the world in LIDAR-equipped cars will take decades. Tesla already sells cars all over the world. The Tesla car sharing network may scale extremely quickly as a result. Even if Waymo takes some markets first, once Tesla has autonomy working, they can be in most markets at the flip of a switch. Since the cars participating in the sharing network would be from Tesla purchasers, people may purchase the cars as an investment, meaning there would be no capital cost to Tesla in scaling their network. They just need to be able to produce enough Model 3s and get autonomy working. Then they can take profits from both the sale of the car and the clip of the car sharing network.

kbob 8y ago
Is LIDAR actually better than video? If I understand LIDAR correctly, it gives a 1D array of depth data and is fairly limited in either resolution or speed. Video provides much more data at higher speed, and it seems like it'd be easier to identify objects from 2D color images. Stereo (never mind eight cameras) can be used to derive depth information. But I'm not a practitioner, so educate me. How does LIDAR beat video?
- jfoster 8y ago
  I was quoting the article, but I think LIDAR is a bit more like having a 3D model of the world around the vehicle. The processing of a 1D array into a usable point cloud is not of concern at the frontier of autonomous vehicle research. My understanding is that the main reason Tesla would choose video instead is that cameras are super-cheap in comparison to LIDAR, and theoretically good enough if you have AI that can understand what the cameras are seeing. I have a feeling that Musk is pushing OpenAI toward researching the technology that Tesla will need to make their approach work. I hope they are successful; it is probably the fastest path toward ubiquitous autonomous vehicles. It's likely that Waymo can get theirs working faster, but they can't scale the distribution side as fast as Tesla could.

iabacu 8y ago

Autonomous driving is such a big opportunity, that trying to do it wihtout LIDARs is a giant premature optimization. Just like trying to make fully automated assembly plants. Whatever edge it may give on sensor cost savings in the long run, it has a steep penalty in time to market. Even if eventually they make it without LIDARs, guess what? The competitors with successful fleets won’t be too far behind.

Latteland 8y ago
If lidar was available for a few thousand, I think they would have used it. But it was much much more expensive in 2012 when I got my first one. Now they are kind of committed because they promised it would work for the generation 2.5 hardware in the model 3. So if they can't make it work, they'd have to refund 5k for a lot of sellers, or pay for upgrading to new hardware. I have gen 2 hardware, but I kind of doubt that it will be enough for autodriving.

twic 8y ago

> There’s an old car industry joke that you can see the organization chart of a car company in the dashboard, and also see that the steering wheel team hates the gear stick team. So, Conway's Law then! Can anyone tell us more about this car industry adage?

cagenut 8y ago
yea I loved seeing that but a quick googling didn't net me anything more.