6 ms·

Holy cow Elon said a lot of things that will drastically change the world in the next 2-3-5 years. I think it's very, very clear they've been doing a lot of stu

by grecy 8y ago

Holy cow Elon said a lot of things that will drastically change the world in the next 2-3-5 years. I think it's very, very clear they've been doing a lot of stuff behind that scenes that nobody has given them credit for over these last 5 years. Everyone thought they were just throwing everything at the Model 3 ramp and doing nothing else, but it turns out the opposite is true. At the end Elon said autonomy is basically their entire expense sheet! Whether or not Tesla can pull it off is obviously going to be an enormous topic of debate with haters and lovers on each side. This is super, super exciting. I'm going to grab the popcorn and enjoy watching Tesla try. Whether they succeed or fail I admire them aiming so high, and planning so far ahead.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sharadov 8y ago
And I think they are far ahead of the game compared to anyone else w.r.t autonomous driving, they have a fleet sending them data back real time.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  If the current state of autopilot is even tangentially related to their progress on full self-driving, then it's a lot more than a few years away.
  - danhak 8y ago
    How recent is your experience? I’ve owned a Model 3 for over a year and the pace at which autopilot has been improving is staggering.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      I did a road trip this weekend and used autopilot for more than 400 miles on a brand new P3D (with the FSD option, limited though it is right now). Mostly freeway, some rural roads. Here are my observations, I assume it's pretty typical but obviously all I have is anecdata. Lane following works effectively, but it wanders a bit. Mostly not enough to be bothersome, though sometimes it will hug one side or the other close enough to make me think about the big truck next to me. Sometimes a little late reacting to a curve, though not to the point of going across the line. Planned lane changes work pretty nicely. Identification of vehicles around the car is good towards the front and noticeably spotty to the rear quadrants. It reliably misidentifies the merging traffic lane as one big lane as soon as the line ends, and promptly drives to the right to straddle the 'middle' and then corrects as the line converges to the normal width. Adaptive cruise control is flat out disappointing. Granted, I've never driven anyone else's automation, but it actually made me motion sick at times. I thought it did a really admirable job of handling people merging right in front of the nose of my car without jamming the brakes. Just smoothly slipped back until the right following distance was achieved. But in open traffic, when I came up on another car, it would abruptly slow down a bit too aggressively, and then fiddle with the speed a bit until it matched the leading car. If the lead car switched lanes, it waited until several seconds after the car was in the next lane and then abruptly sped up to the programmed max speed. There were times I could tell how frustrating this style was to people behind us who were not using a similar system. Twice it braked suddenly, though not any kind of panic stop, and then immediately sped back up. Like it saw something concerning and then changed it's mind a split second later. Made my wife a little nervous after the second time, but it didn't happen again the rest of our trip. Overall I'd classify it as a moderately drunk driver :). I let it drive us into a couple moderately uncomfortable merge situations just to see how it would deal with traffic entering the freeway, and while it didn't get us in a wreck or anything, it didn't make me feel like AP is on the verge of becoming viable FSD. For what it's worth, this was on I-5 in between Portland and Seattle, in mostly light traffic. We have what are, in my experience, pretty easy relaxed freeway configurations. Long ramps, no ramp lights, etc. I borrowed the P3D so I could have myself an extended test drive to decide if I really wanted a Model 3 or not. Wicked fast (which is still an understatement), I love the power but would probably choose to steer it myself for the forseable future. I wish they'd put in nicer seats (like, my legs were getting numb at one point!), just standard Recaros like everyone else would be perfectly nice. I think I've decided that I really like it but I'm going to wait for Model Y before pulling the trigger. I will appreciate the additional head space and seat height, and hoping that in the meantime they do v3 or v4 of the seats.
      - zaroth 8y ago
        Thank you for taking the time to write up such a nice trip report! Some of your experiences are similar to mine. I think you have seen the improved merge handling, in prior versions zipper merging in heavy traffic had me disengaging due to getting too close to the merging car coming into my lane. I have also experienced the unexpected brake pulse during adaptive cruise on a couple occasions and would really like to have seen some indication on the guidance display of what caused it. The delay when a car moves out of lane (or turns right onto a side street ahead of you) is definitely too long. The stop and go following however I think is extremely smooth, and I commute heavy highway traffic 3-4 days a week and love it. I think the amount of wheel-touch requests from AP has decreased significantly on the highway when speed is low / in traffic, I had maybe 2 or 3 touche requests in 20 minutes of heavy traffic this afternoon, although I may have adjusted volume and skipped tracks in between a couple times (which counts). I wonder if the seats have changed? I find the drivers seat extremely comfortable. I know the back seats were revised since TM3 started shipping. I love the lack of a model year, they are always refining and enhancing the base hardware.
        Marsymars 8y ago
        > I love the lack of a model year, they are always refining and enhancing the base hardware. If I have a list of a half-dozen refinements I want which weren't included in the car at launch, how can I tell if a given used car for sale has them? Is there any type of master list of features/changes/dates?
  - jfoster 8y ago
    Which car available for purchase would you recommend looking at for something closer to full self-driving?
- gamblor956 8y ago
  This is definitely not true. The engineer explicitly stated that Tesla only gets data when trigger conditions are met (and that this was in fact always the case), so most of the miles that Tesla drivers have been driving was actually never even sent back to the mothership for use in ML training. IOW, despite Elon claiming for years that they're ahead because of the "millions of miles" of free data collection by Tesla drivers, it turns out once the engineers on the ground actually speak...they're actually pretty far behind on the data front, and most of the data they are getting is the same safe routes over and over again since they're not trying to put Autopilot into novel situations to acquire new data or test the ML algorithm's capabilities to handle unique/novel situations (like trucks turning in the highway, or freeway dividers).
  - andrewtbham 8y ago
    I have wondered about this myself... and I am working on an CV ML project myself... but data that is correctly predicted is not not as useful.. what you want are edge cases, images with low confidence, and errors. So when users take over and disengage, that is useful data. when the system beeps and forces a disengagement.. this is the data you need. That has been my experience and I'm glad to hear them validate that. Your training data needs diversity.
  - dreaminvm 8y ago
    They cherry-pick rare cases and use their fleet to get more examples of these situations. This seems like the right approach given more miles following the same car in a straight line is pretty useless. My takeaway from the presentation is that Tesla will perform better than other companies in this space (although I don't know enough about Waymo to comment) due to the following: -You want a large dataset (Tesla and many companies have this and can simulate) -You want a varied/diverse dataset (Tesla and many companies have this and can simulate)--the point here is simulations for simple cases work (you can only simulate when you know), but for complex ones are close to the difficulty of actual FSD -You want a real dataset (Tesla is the only company who can say this and can say they have data on how X00Ks of drivers will handle these situations)
    - 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- justapassenger 8y ago
  Quick look at their earnings shows it's not true. With amount of cars they have, even sending tiny % of it back home would require Tesla to spend billions on datacetners.
gamblor956 8y ago
None of what Elon said will change the world in the next 5 years... It's also pretty clear based on the selective presentation of data that they're even further behind Waymo than everyone thought. This was the time to actually prove that their ahead, and all they could give was more of Elon's hot air. At the end Elon said autonomy is basically their entire expense sheet! Must have missed that part, but if he actually said that it would have been a material misrepresentation of Tesla's financials, since they supposedly made a chunk of cars in Q1...OTOH, if the statement is true and Tesla basically made no cars in Q1, it would explain by Panasonic is refusing to make additional investments in the Gigafactory. Whether they succeed or fail I admire them aiming so high, and planning so far ahead. Other companies are both capable of aiming high, planning, and succeeding. Tesla has yet to demonstrate the capacity to do items 2 and 3 on this list. Case in point: pretty much everything about the Model 3 launch, from building to distribution, the solar roof panel (and really, the entire SolarCity acquisition). I'm even going to throw BoringCo in there since it's based out of the Tesla lot and uses Tesla vehicles and engineers.
- dougmwne 8y ago
  I took it as weasel words. The robotaxi business will be the vertically integrated capstone of everything Tesla does, therefore 100% of their expenditures are building towards the robotaxi.
  - vkou 8y ago
    And I was told for years by HN that actually, Tesla is a battery company. Now it's a robotaxi company? What is it going to be next year, a debt restructuring company?
- grecy 8y ago
  > None of what Elon said will change the world in the next 5 years... Oh come on! If even half of what he says comes true in the next five years the world will not be the same. Entire car rated to 1 million miles (including the battery pack) with minimal servicing Level five autonomy at the end of 2020. Remove steering wheels and pedals from cars a year after that. After robo-fleet goes live Tesla will be "massively profitable" Cars that today cost $38k will make $300k + in the next 11 years for their owners in the fleet etc. > Other companies are both capable of aiming high, planning, and succeeding He mentioned that all their cars since 2016 have had redundant power steering, redundant wiring and even redundant power. Even if it loses the main power pack it can still steer and brake safely. Give me ONE example of another auto manufacturer that has thought far enough ahead to design that kind of redundancy into their vehicles planning for self driving? It simply does not exist in the industry. The man really is seeing the future and trying his best to make it happen. Like I said there will be a huge debate about if he can actually do it.... I'm just saying that if he can it's going to be a very exciting time to be alive
RivieraKid 8y ago
It's so frustrating to see that people eat Elon's BS. Even after: - the Unsworth lie - the "zero concern and I mean zero about 10k Model 3s per week in Dec 2018" lie - the "funding secured" and "only uncertainty is shareholder approval" lies - the "short burn of the century" lies I mean, they were even wrong about Nvidia's chip today, Nvidia had to issue a statement: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccurate-in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccura...
- mlindner 8y ago
  There was no "Unsworth lie". There was Elon saying some very unkind things after Unsworth personally attacked him. Neither thing is appropriate, but let's not pretend this wasn't a tit-for-tat.
  - RivieraKid 8y ago
    He purposefully framed it as a seriously meant allegation, not as an insult. And then even doubled down on it.
  - justapassenger 8y ago
    There's huuuge difference between telling someone to stick something up their butt VS repeating, multiple times, to millions of people, that someone is a pedophile and you have proof of that.
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    When plotted on a logarithmic scale.
- lonnyk 8y ago
  The tech specs of AGX Pegasus say they're 130 TOPS[1]. Or am I misunderstanding something? [1] https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-agx https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-agx
  - mdorazio 8y ago
opportune 8y ago
or he's setting overly optimistic timelines at usual. But I would love to get excited this easily

by grecy 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sharadov 8y ago

And I think they are far ahead of the game compared to anyone else w.r.t autonomous driving, they have a fleet sending them data back real time.

rootusrootus 8y ago
If the current state of autopilot is even tangentially related to their progress on full self-driving, then it's a lot more than a few years away.
- danhak 8y ago
  How recent is your experience? I’ve owned a Model 3 for over a year and the pace at which autopilot has been improving is staggering.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    I did a road trip this weekend and used autopilot for more than 400 miles on a brand new P3D (with the FSD option, limited though it is right now). Mostly freeway, some rural roads. Here are my observations, I assume it's pretty typical but obviously all I have is anecdata. Lane following works effectively, but it wanders a bit. Mostly not enough to be bothersome, though sometimes it will hug one side or the other close enough to make me think about the big truck next to me. Sometimes a little late reacting to a curve, though not to the point of going across the line. Planned lane changes work pretty nicely. Identification of vehicles around the car is good towards the front and noticeably spotty to the rear quadrants. It reliably misidentifies the merging traffic lane as one big lane as soon as the line ends, and promptly drives to the right to straddle the 'middle' and then corrects as the line converges to the normal width. Adaptive cruise control is flat out disappointing. Granted, I've never driven anyone else's automation, but it actually made me motion sick at times. I thought it did a really admirable job of handling people merging right in front of the nose of my car without jamming the brakes. Just smoothly slipped back until the right following distance was achieved. But in open traffic, when I came up on another car, it would abruptly slow down a bit too aggressively, and then fiddle with the speed a bit until it matched the leading car. If the lead car switched lanes, it waited until several seconds after the car was in the next lane and then abruptly sped up to the programmed max speed. There were times I could tell how frustrating this style was to people behind us who were not using a similar system. Twice it braked suddenly, though not any kind of panic stop, and then immediately sped back up. Like it saw something concerning and then changed it's mind a split second later. Made my wife a little nervous after the second time, but it didn't happen again the rest of our trip. Overall I'd classify it as a moderately drunk driver :). I let it drive us into a couple moderately uncomfortable merge situations just to see how it would deal with traffic entering the freeway, and while it didn't get us in a wreck or anything, it didn't make me feel like AP is on the verge of becoming viable FSD. For what it's worth, this was on I-5 in between Portland and Seattle, in mostly light traffic. We have what are, in my experience, pretty easy relaxed freeway configurations. Long ramps, no ramp lights, etc. I borrowed the P3D so I could have myself an extended test drive to decide if I really wanted a Model 3 or not. Wicked fast (which is still an understatement), I love the power but would probably choose to steer it myself for the forseable future. I wish they'd put in nicer seats (like, my legs were getting numb at one point!), just standard Recaros like everyone else would be perfectly nice. I think I've decided that I really like it but I'm going to wait for Model Y before pulling the trigger. I will appreciate the additional head space and seat height, and hoping that in the meantime they do v3 or v4 of the seats.
    - zaroth 8y ago
      Thank you for taking the time to write up such a nice trip report! Some of your experiences are similar to mine. I think you have seen the improved merge handling, in prior versions zipper merging in heavy traffic had me disengaging due to getting too close to the merging car coming into my lane. I have also experienced the unexpected brake pulse during adaptive cruise on a couple occasions and would really like to have seen some indication on the guidance display of what caused it. The delay when a car moves out of lane (or turns right onto a side street ahead of you) is definitely too long. The stop and go following however I think is extremely smooth, and I commute heavy highway traffic 3-4 days a week and love it. I think the amount of wheel-touch requests from AP has decreased significantly on the highway when speed is low / in traffic, I had maybe 2 or 3 touche requests in 20 minutes of heavy traffic this afternoon, although I may have adjusted volume and skipped tracks in between a couple times (which counts). I wonder if the seats have changed? I find the drivers seat extremely comfortable. I know the back seats were revised since TM3 started shipping. I love the lack of a model year, they are always refining and enhancing the base hardware.
      - Marsymars 8y ago
        > I love the lack of a model year, they are always refining and enhancing the base hardware. If I have a list of a half-dozen refinements I want which weren't included in the car at launch, how can I tell if a given used car for sale has them? Is there any type of master list of features/changes/dates?
- jfoster 8y ago
  Which car available for purchase would you recommend looking at for something closer to full self-driving?
gamblor956 8y ago
This is definitely not true. The engineer explicitly stated that Tesla only gets data when trigger conditions are met (and that this was in fact always the case), so most of the miles that Tesla drivers have been driving was actually never even sent back to the mothership for use in ML training. IOW, despite Elon claiming for years that they're ahead because of the "millions of miles" of free data collection by Tesla drivers, it turns out once the engineers on the ground actually speak...they're actually pretty far behind on the data front, and most of the data they are getting is the same safe routes over and over again since they're not trying to put Autopilot into novel situations to acquire new data or test the ML algorithm's capabilities to handle unique/novel situations (like trucks turning in the highway, or freeway dividers).
- andrewtbham 8y ago
  I have wondered about this myself... and I am working on an CV ML project myself... but data that is correctly predicted is not not as useful.. what you want are edge cases, images with low confidence, and errors. So when users take over and disengage, that is useful data. when the system beeps and forces a disengagement.. this is the data you need. That has been my experience and I'm glad to hear them validate that. Your training data needs diversity.
- dreaminvm 8y ago
  They cherry-pick rare cases and use their fleet to get more examples of these situations. This seems like the right approach given more miles following the same car in a straight line is pretty useless. My takeaway from the presentation is that Tesla will perform better than other companies in this space (although I don't know enough about Waymo to comment) due to the following: -You want a large dataset (Tesla and many companies have this and can simulate) -You want a varied/diverse dataset (Tesla and many companies have this and can simulate)--the point here is simulations for simple cases work (you can only simulate when you know), but for complex ones are close to the difficulty of actual FSD -You want a real dataset (Tesla is the only company who can say this and can say they have data on how X00Ks of drivers will handle these situations)
  - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
justapassenger 8y ago
Quick look at their earnings shows it's not true. With amount of cars they have, even sending tiny % of it back home would require Tesla to spend billions on datacetners.

gamblor956 8y ago

None of what Elon said will change the world in the next 5 years... It's also pretty clear based on the selective presentation of data that they're even further behind Waymo than everyone thought. This was the time to actually prove that their ahead, and all they could give was more of Elon's hot air. At the end Elon said autonomy is basically their entire expense sheet! Must have missed that part, but if he actually said that it would have been a material misrepresentation of Tesla's financials, since they supposedly made a chunk of cars in Q1...OTOH, if the statement is true and Tesla basically made no cars in Q1, it would explain by Panasonic is refusing to make additional investments in the Gigafactory. Whether they succeed or fail I admire them aiming so high, and planning so far ahead. Other companies are both capable of aiming high, planning, and succeeding. Tesla has yet to demonstrate the capacity to do items 2 and 3 on this list. Case in point: pretty much everything about the Model 3 launch, from building to distribution, the solar roof panel (and really, the entire SolarCity acquisition). I'm even going to throw BoringCo in there since it's based out of the Tesla lot and uses Tesla vehicles and engineers.

dougmwne 8y ago
I took it as weasel words. The robotaxi business will be the vertically integrated capstone of everything Tesla does, therefore 100% of their expenditures are building towards the robotaxi.
- vkou 8y ago
  And I was told for years by HN that actually, Tesla is a battery company. Now it's a robotaxi company? What is it going to be next year, a debt restructuring company?
grecy 8y ago
> None of what Elon said will change the world in the next 5 years... Oh come on! If even half of what he says comes true in the next five years the world will not be the same. Entire car rated to 1 million miles (including the battery pack) with minimal servicing Level five autonomy at the end of 2020. Remove steering wheels and pedals from cars a year after that. After robo-fleet goes live Tesla will be "massively profitable" Cars that today cost $38k will make $300k + in the next 11 years for their owners in the fleet etc. > Other companies are both capable of aiming high, planning, and succeeding He mentioned that all their cars since 2016 have had redundant power steering, redundant wiring and even redundant power. Even if it loses the main power pack it can still steer and brake safely. Give me ONE example of another auto manufacturer that has thought far enough ahead to design that kind of redundancy into their vehicles planning for self driving? It simply does not exist in the industry. The man really is seeing the future and trying his best to make it happen. Like I said there will be a huge debate about if he can actually do it.... I'm just saying that if he can it's going to be a very exciting time to be alive

RivieraKid 8y ago

It's so frustrating to see that people eat Elon's BS. Even after: - the Unsworth lie - the "zero concern and I mean zero about 10k Model 3s per week in Dec 2018" lie - the "funding secured" and "only uncertainty is shareholder approval" lies - the "short burn of the century" lies I mean, they were even wrong about Nvidia's chip today, Nvidia had to issue a statement: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccurate-in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccura...

mlindner 8y ago
There was no "Unsworth lie". There was Elon saying some very unkind things after Unsworth personally attacked him. Neither thing is appropriate, but let's not pretend this wasn't a tit-for-tat.
- RivieraKid 8y ago
  He purposefully framed it as a seriously meant allegation, not as an insult. And then even doubled down on it.
- justapassenger 8y ago
  There's huuuge difference between telling someone to stick something up their butt VS repeating, multiple times, to millions of people, that someone is a pedophile and you have proof of that.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  When plotted on a logarithmic scale.
lonnyk 8y ago
The tech specs of AGX Pegasus say they're 130 TOPS[1]. Or am I misunderstanding something? [1] https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-agx https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-agx
- mdorazio 8y ago

opportune 8y ago

or he's setting overly optimistic timelines at usual. But I would love to get excited this easily