7 ms·

A robotaxi isn't too far off if you limit where it can operate. It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of

A robotaxi isn't too far off if you limit where it can operate. It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever. Some place where it doesn't snow, doesn't rain often, and drivers/cyclists/pedestrians are fairly predictable (at least compared to someplace like Asia). Alternatively, a robobus, that is to say an automated system that drives from one place to the other on a highway or interstate, seems to be mostly solved. In both cases, if the vehicles were mostly autonomous but could also be controlled remotely by a human in ambiguous cases, they would still be vastly cheaper to operate than existing taxi/bus services.

dragontamer 8y ago
Is Tesla really ready for a long protracted war against Uber, Waymo (aka Google), and other autonomous taxi companies? Tesla just spent (probably) ~$100 Million or so developing a 14nm chip, already obsolete (NVidia has a 12nm chip already, Intel/MobilEye has 7nm incoming 2020, and who knows what Google/Waymo got up their sleeves. Those TPUs are fully proprietary and fully to Google/Waymo's advantage). 7nm is deployed and shipping, Tesla's already behind. And now you're telling me that to "raise money", they're entering another highly competitive field full of companies who are literally willing to lose money over the next 5-years on this idea? That's straight up madness. I'm sure autonomous taxis will eventually become a reality, but no company is going to make money in that field for 5 to 10 years. The other companies like Google / Waymo are going to do what Silicon Valley does best: loss lead for years and years to build a customer base, before raising prices and eventually making a sustainable business. Tesla has already spent all of its cash and loans on Gigafactory 1, Gigafactory 2, and Gigafactory 3. Scratch that, Gigafactory 3 isn't even complete yet (and is estimated to be a few billion dollars alone in costs...). At best, Tesla will have to enter the autonomous taxi industry offering goods at cost (or higher: trying to make a profit). That's innately going to put them severely behind Google / Waymo, who will loss lead their way to cheaper prices and more customers.
- DennisP 8y ago
  There's more to it than feature size. Other companies have more general-purpose chips. Tesla basically built an ASIC for self-driving.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    NVidia is the only chip that seems a bit heavy on GPU features. But the Volta architecture has tensor processors with full FP16 and INT8 support, so it seems useful for self-driving as far as I can tell. MobilEye EyeQ4 and EyeQ5 has no other purpose than self-driving. EyeQ5 is going to be 7nm and is launching 2020. A full ASIC for self-driving as well. And no one knows what the heck Google / Waymo is doing. All we know is that its working, today, in Phoenix Arizona, where anyone can use Google / Waymo's taxi service TODAY. We also know that Google employes the same researchers who made TPUs that powered AlphaGo. They're very secretive about their hardware (for good reason!), but they're the elephant in the room with regards to self-driving. https://waymo.com/apply/ https://waymo.com/apply/
    - Judgmentality 8y ago
      > And no one knows what the heck Google / Waymo is doing. All we know is that its working, today, in Phoenix Arizona, where anyone can use Google / Waymo's taxi service TODAY. This is false. There are, to the best of anyone's knowledge, a handful of people in the Waymo One program (I'm fairly confident it's less than 10). Everyone in the Early Rider program is still under NDA. In order to be accepted to either, you have to apply. The application process being open to the public does not mean the service is public, anymore than the application process to Google being public means anyone can work at Google. As to regards to how well it's working...they are definitely in the lead, and they do really have cars driving around, but all of them are still with safety drivers. Until they pull the safety drivers you can't really call them driverless and it shows a lack of faith in their product because it's not ready yet to actually be driverless. Waymo lost their goodwill when they said they'd have the service you mentioned in 2018, basically pulled a bullshit PR event in order to "fulfill" their promise. It's pretty obvious though it was just so whoever was in charge could get some bonus attached to the timeline, very similar to how Google seems to launch products already - they do it so people can get promoted and then all the important people leave before the product is useful to anyone. It's no secret that almost the entire original team has already left and most of them have started competing against Waymo, so it seems they are confident they can take on Waymo and win - and they'd know better than anyone because they built Waymo. And Waymo has since gone silent on when they'll expand their program, or pull the driver from the car, or pretty much anything. I agree it's a good idea for them to play their cards close to their chest, but compared to their past posturing that's a sign that it's not around the corner.
- keithwarren 8y ago
  Asserting that Tesla is behind because they are fab at 14 instead of something smaller is so laughable you cannot be serious. Thermal profile and power, instruction set and a dozen other things are more important. Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot I watched it, and I'm calling them out on it. They focused their entire presentation on NVidia and completely ignored Google/Waymo and Intel/MobilEye Q5 comparisons. Autonomy day was an obvious hype-fest that ignored the competition. Tesla was only looking at NVidia Xavier or Pegasus, but ignores the real giants in the field. The arguments in that presentation were exceptionally poor. There's no way a 500W chip could be a problem in a car with 300,000W motors attached and 1000W air conditioners / heaters. It was obvious to me when they were skewing their examples to be absurd corner cases to make a point: 12mph stop-and-go traffic for many hours? Yeah, as if the 300,000W motor would like 12mph stop-and-go traffic anyway. Its not like regenerative brakes are much better than 50% recycling of the energy btw, the stop-and-go condition is going to wreak your mileage regardless. A 500W chip can be powered by a 75kW-hr battery for 150 hours. That's nearly a whole week of life. The thought that a Model 3 or Model S car would be scrounging for efficiency in the ~100W magnitude is completely laughable.
    - matz1 8y ago
      Vertical integration. Tesla can have the chip solely focused on their specific needs. They ignore google/waymo because they won't sell them the chip anyway.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        Elon Musk is pretending like Tesla can make money from this self-driving taxi idea. You can't make money from self-driving Taxis if Google/Waymo simply offers a similar service for cheaper right next to you. And yes, Google/Waymo has the vertical integration thing all figured out too. Now if you think that maybe Tesla's chip is useful for its M3 customers... sure. I strongly disagree with that fact, but you're certainly entitled to your opinion on that subject. My main issue is that Elon Musk is trying to sell this idea... that Tesla can actually raise money by going into self-driving taxis. That's completely hogwash. Completely. There's not a chance of that at all. The other companies are too far ahead, and Tesla doesn't have enough cash to enter that fledgling industry. Tesla isn't a tech company anymore, its a car company. It built a $2.5 Billion factory that can only produce cars, and its stuck with that (and its associated loans). Elon Musk can't just pivot into a new industry with all of these loans weighing down on his company. Now, maybe if Elon Musk wanted to start a new company, one that wasn't burdened by all of the Gigafactory Debt, to tackle the self-driving problem... well... maybe that would work. But Tesla has already bet its life on wide-scale deployment of the Model 3. It doesn't have any other chances. It simply doesn't have the money to do anything else, or to pivot anymore.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hef19898 8y ago
  Tesla is not at all focused anymore, no idea why. To operate a robot EDIT:taxi service EDIT end: you need to figure out maintenance, placement of cars, customer service, you name it. And they already have issues running production and distribution. But that might be a nice way to get outside funding for a new service that can buy a bunch of Teslas. That in turn would increase sales and, potentially, increase the stock. Kind of what Tesla did with Solar City, more or less. For me that is only postponing the time they hit a hard wall.
lordnacho 8y ago
> It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever. Some place where it doesn't snow, doesn't rain often, and drivers/cyclists/pedestrians are fairly predictable (at least compared to someplace like Asia). I bet there are more corner cases than just bad weather and other traffic participants. Glare from the sun, stuff that looks like one thing but turns out to be another close up, curious people wanting a closer look at the marvellous robotic car. That's just from a short brainstorm.
andbberger 8y ago
> It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever You don't know that.

dragontamer 8y ago

Is Tesla really ready for a long protracted war against Uber, Waymo (aka Google), and other autonomous taxi companies? Tesla just spent (probably) ~$100 Million or so developing a 14nm chip, already obsolete (NVidia has a 12nm chip already, Intel/MobilEye has 7nm incoming 2020, and who knows what Google/Waymo got up their sleeves. Those TPUs are fully proprietary and fully to Google/Waymo's advantage). 7nm is deployed and shipping, Tesla's already behind. And now you're telling me that to "raise money", they're entering another highly competitive field full of companies who are literally willing to lose money over the next 5-years on this idea? That's straight up madness. I'm sure autonomous taxis will eventually become a reality, but no company is going to make money in that field for 5 to 10 years. The other companies like Google / Waymo are going to do what Silicon Valley does best: loss lead for years and years to build a customer base, before raising prices and eventually making a sustainable business. Tesla has already spent all of its cash and loans on Gigafactory 1, Gigafactory 2, and Gigafactory 3. Scratch that, Gigafactory 3 isn't even complete yet (and is estimated to be a few billion dollars alone in costs...). At best, Tesla will have to enter the autonomous taxi industry offering goods at cost (or higher: trying to make a profit). That's innately going to put them severely behind Google / Waymo, who will loss lead their way to cheaper prices and more customers.

DennisP 8y ago
There's more to it than feature size. Other companies have more general-purpose chips. Tesla basically built an ASIC for self-driving.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  NVidia is the only chip that seems a bit heavy on GPU features. But the Volta architecture has tensor processors with full FP16 and INT8 support, so it seems useful for self-driving as far as I can tell. MobilEye EyeQ4 and EyeQ5 has no other purpose than self-driving. EyeQ5 is going to be 7nm and is launching 2020. A full ASIC for self-driving as well. And no one knows what the heck Google / Waymo is doing. All we know is that its working, today, in Phoenix Arizona, where anyone can use Google / Waymo's taxi service TODAY. We also know that Google employes the same researchers who made TPUs that powered AlphaGo. They're very secretive about their hardware (for good reason!), but they're the elephant in the room with regards to self-driving. https://waymo.com/apply/ https://waymo.com/apply/
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    > And no one knows what the heck Google / Waymo is doing. All we know is that its working, today, in Phoenix Arizona, where anyone can use Google / Waymo's taxi service TODAY. This is false. There are, to the best of anyone's knowledge, a handful of people in the Waymo One program (I'm fairly confident it's less than 10). Everyone in the Early Rider program is still under NDA. In order to be accepted to either, you have to apply. The application process being open to the public does not mean the service is public, anymore than the application process to Google being public means anyone can work at Google. As to regards to how well it's working...they are definitely in the lead, and they do really have cars driving around, but all of them are still with safety drivers. Until they pull the safety drivers you can't really call them driverless and it shows a lack of faith in their product because it's not ready yet to actually be driverless. Waymo lost their goodwill when they said they'd have the service you mentioned in 2018, basically pulled a bullshit PR event in order to "fulfill" their promise. It's pretty obvious though it was just so whoever was in charge could get some bonus attached to the timeline, very similar to how Google seems to launch products already - they do it so people can get promoted and then all the important people leave before the product is useful to anyone. It's no secret that almost the entire original team has already left and most of them have started competing against Waymo, so it seems they are confident they can take on Waymo and win - and they'd know better than anyone because they built Waymo. And Waymo has since gone silent on when they'll expand their program, or pull the driver from the car, or pretty much anything. I agree it's a good idea for them to play their cards close to their chest, but compared to their past posturing that's a sign that it's not around the corner.
keithwarren 8y ago
Asserting that Tesla is behind because they are fab at 14 instead of something smaller is so laughable you cannot be serious. Thermal profile and power, instruction set and a dozen other things are more important. Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot
- dragontamer 8y ago
  > Watch the autonomy day video on how the chip was built and why, will help a lot I watched it, and I'm calling them out on it. They focused their entire presentation on NVidia and completely ignored Google/Waymo and Intel/MobilEye Q5 comparisons. Autonomy day was an obvious hype-fest that ignored the competition. Tesla was only looking at NVidia Xavier or Pegasus, but ignores the real giants in the field. The arguments in that presentation were exceptionally poor. There's no way a 500W chip could be a problem in a car with 300,000W motors attached and 1000W air conditioners / heaters. It was obvious to me when they were skewing their examples to be absurd corner cases to make a point: 12mph stop-and-go traffic for many hours? Yeah, as if the 300,000W motor would like 12mph stop-and-go traffic anyway. Its not like regenerative brakes are much better than 50% recycling of the energy btw, the stop-and-go condition is going to wreak your mileage regardless. A 500W chip can be powered by a 75kW-hr battery for 150 hours. That's nearly a whole week of life. The thought that a Model 3 or Model S car would be scrounging for efficiency in the ~100W magnitude is completely laughable.
  - matz1 8y ago
    Vertical integration. Tesla can have the chip solely focused on their specific needs. They ignore google/waymo because they won't sell them the chip anyway.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      Elon Musk is pretending like Tesla can make money from this self-driving taxi idea. You can't make money from self-driving Taxis if Google/Waymo simply offers a similar service for cheaper right next to you. And yes, Google/Waymo has the vertical integration thing all figured out too. Now if you think that maybe Tesla's chip is useful for its M3 customers... sure. I strongly disagree with that fact, but you're certainly entitled to your opinion on that subject. My main issue is that Elon Musk is trying to sell this idea... that Tesla can actually raise money by going into self-driving taxis. That's completely hogwash. Completely. There's not a chance of that at all. The other companies are too far ahead, and Tesla doesn't have enough cash to enter that fledgling industry. Tesla isn't a tech company anymore, its a car company. It built a $2.5 Billion factory that can only produce cars, and its stuck with that (and its associated loans). Elon Musk can't just pivot into a new industry with all of these loans weighing down on his company. Now, maybe if Elon Musk wanted to start a new company, one that wasn't burdened by all of the Gigafactory Debt, to tackle the self-driving problem... well... maybe that would work. But Tesla has already bet its life on wide-scale deployment of the Model 3. It doesn't have any other chances. It simply doesn't have the money to do anything else, or to pivot anymore.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hef19898 8y ago
Tesla is not at all focused anymore, no idea why. To operate a robot EDIT:taxi service EDIT end: you need to figure out maintenance, placement of cars, customer service, you name it. And they already have issues running production and distribution. But that might be a nice way to get outside funding for a new service that can buy a bunch of Teslas. That in turn would increase sales and, potentially, increase the stock. Kind of what Tesla did with Solar City, more or less. For me that is only postponing the time they hit a hard wall.

lordnacho 8y ago

> It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever. Some place where it doesn't snow, doesn't rain often, and drivers/cyclists/pedestrians are fairly predictable (at least compared to someplace like Asia). I bet there are more corner cases than just bad weather and other traffic participants. Glare from the sun, stuff that looks like one thing but turns out to be another close up, curious people wanting a closer look at the marvellous robotic car. That's just from a short brainstorm.

andbberger 8y ago

> It's not infeasible to train an automated driving system specifically suited to the streets of LA or wherever You don't know that.