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Tesla: Insane or Clever
- faitswulff 7y agoMentioning SpaceX and autonomous Teslas in the same breath makes me wonder if the Starlink satellite internet program is related to his plans for self-driving cars.
- loceng 7y agoThere's synergy between everything he works on, it seems to be a natural extension to his flow of thinking - expanding further into the next biggest market. It's the ESSO (gas company) model: they needed a truck to transport fuel, so they designed a truck to manufacture, and sell it to others too, and so on.
- Already__Taken 7y agoCan I coin the phrase full-stack entrepreneur?
- wesammikhail 7y agoI like it. Sustained!
- danmaz74 7y agoThere is already "vertical integration".
- asdff 7y agoIs that what we are calling Rockefeller this century
- jacobush 7y agoDon't forget he wants to bore underground cities on Mars. https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-use-boring-company-tunneling-technology-mars/ https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-use-boring-company-tunnelin...
- Tepix 7y agoThe boring company could provide the tech to build tunnels on Mars. And with the minimal atmosphere you'll have a Hyperloop. Hardly a coincidence.
- y0y 7y agoOh my god. I literally just now got the joke: the boring company. Because they bore tunnels.
- kowdermeister 7y agoGood morning :)
- y0y 7y agoApparently it took over a year for the coffee to kick in! I just always shrugged and thought it was a cutesy name for a company that did something boring like dig tunnels. I cannot believe that pun escaped me for so long. :)
- loceng 7y agoI wear the hat everyday - a good conversation starter. Some people guess it's an accounting company name.
- loceng 7y agoThey are aiming for 1223 kmph (760 mph) on Earth, I wonder how that differs with lower gravity.
- hef19898 7y agoPlease tell me that is not what Musk really thinks he's doing...
- fwip 7y agoIn the software world, we call that NIH syndrome.
- athenot 7y agoThe difference between NIH and vertical integration is in the result. When accounting for cost of effort, does it end up inferior to some third-party solution, or does it allow for a more efficient business process? Most of the time, you're right: one is better off going with a solution put together by some other group who made it their core expertise. But if you keep bumping into limits, and have the resources to throw at the problem, you can develop a compelling solution in-house. It's a bit like the tradeoff (for enterprises) between buying a turn-key solution and going with an opensource project. The latter is often more expensive (once you factor in the cost involved in figuring everything out) BUT will end up much more taylored to your needs—especially if your usage involves controbuting patches to the project.
- lazyjones 7y ago> self-driving cars. Why not just "cars"? Teslas with or without FSD capability already use Internet connections for OTA updates, maps, audio. Other manufacturers will likely follow sooner or later. That's a good outlook for any global Internet provider... I'd offer maps, audio services to other car makers in his position, wouldn't you?
- Tepix 7y agoStarlink will require a phased array antenna that is pizzabox-sized and also not cheap (in fact, making them cheap enough to make the business case worthwhile is a major challenge). Using 3G, LTE or 5G seems like the vastly cheaper and easier option.
- leesec 7y agoAnd if 3G, LTE, or 5G is not an option? (It isn't to most of the world.)
- TomMarius 7y agoCould you please go more in detail about what makes the antenna expensive? Why isn't the cost solved by metal 3d printing? EDIT: Sorry for asking a question I guess, what's so wrong I'm getting so many downvotes?
- 0xffff2 7y agoMetal additive manufacturing has never solved a cost problem AFAIK. The problem it solves is the manufacture of parts that have physical characteristics that are difficult to machine, or in the case of Inconel, materials that are simply difficult to machine period. Neither of those characteristics are going to be a problem for the Starlink antennas.
- TomMarius 7y ago> The problem it solves is the manufacture of parts that have physical characteristics that are difficult to machine I thought this is the case. Thank you for answering!
- _Microft 7y agoA small series (when producing other tooling would be too expensive; a single, bespoke part would be the extreme thereof) or ones that would be impossible to machine otherwise are candidates for additive manufacturing. Mass production is usually less suited for that.
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- mhermher 7y agoAll vaporware is theoretically related.
- ncallaway 7y agoI don't really see how the Starlink constellation is vaporware. They've launched 2 test satellites into orbit and are less than a week out from launching the first batch of 60 satellites into orbit. I think when you've reached the point of a 60-satellite production run, integrated on the pad and waiting for launch, you've at least passed vaporware.
- 3327 7y agoInteresting... The guy is landing rockets on Earth. He said, it planned it did it. So on one hand - do you listen to a bunch of wallstreet know it all short sellers pumping out negative news and counting parking lots and shipping containers. Or do you listen to the Elon case - that it actually may be crazy to buy a car that that is not a Tesla... One thing is certain, A car like a boat has been a money loosing investment until today, and consumers have been marketed to oblivion and convinced that, that is O.K. IF THAT CHANGES, even slightly, well, then... Its GG (good game). because that changes everything, and even the die hard truck lovers will be tempted to make a few bucks on the side.
- bdcravens 7y agoEven genius can be spread too thin.
- ck425 7y agoLanding a rocket on earth is technically a lot easier that making a self-driving car. The former is in a complex but reasonably well understood area of physics plus some advance manufacturing. The latter is cutting edge AI sitting in the middle of a legislative/political/ethical quagmire. Ashlee Vance's biography actually explains this really well, how one paper SpaceX looks far more difficult to pull off than Tesla but how in reality it's the opposite.
- navigatesol 7y agoHave you ever considered that no one bothered landing rockets because it was pointless and uneconomic, not impossible? And I love the disdain for wall street, completely ignoring that Elon is in bed with the bankers.
- cowmix 7y agoWell, now SpaceX has a way to launch 12K sats for global Internet. No one else is even remotely ready to do that. Talk about your moats.
- navigatesol 7y ago
- LoSboccacc 7y agotesla basks in a wake of deaths and late stage capitalist are still undecided whether if its strategy was "clever" e: "we're hacker news, we don't deal in ethics"
- pwinnski 7y agoSoftware is eating the world, automobiles included. I'm a huge skeptic when it comes to Tesla, but JLG raises a good point here. Apple had all sorts of problems in 2007, so many that established phone manufacturers largely brushed them off. A focus on software rewrote the mobile phone industry, and every day I get into my car and watch the onboard computer struggle to handle bluetooth properly. I need to look beyond the obvious inanity of Musk and remember this shift: software will eat this part of the world too.
- mbesto 7y ago> Apple had all sorts of problems in 2007 This analog is disingenuous. - Selling a $1k phone or a $2k computer is very different from selling a $80k luxury car - A smartphone is a full fledge computer, which is a massive change from a dumb-phone (which capabilities were limited to calling and SMS). An electric car has the same features as a gas car, with the exception that its drive chain has a different source of power. - Apple was an established business for 30 years before 2007, and navigated a software/hardware development environment (90's) that was very immature prior. > software will eat this part of the world too. Yet we're talking about a company that sells a big hunk of steel. The quote "software is eating the world" has to do with the replacement of human beings by software, not with "shiny new thing that still needs to be powered by energy". PS - Tesla's fully autonomous (Level 5) solution is unproven. Until then, let's take the "software is eating the world" talk out the question.
- neuronic 7y agoLet's make two points clear: Point 1) Tesla does not have SAE Level 5. It is an absolutely ridiculous claim. At most Level 3, but the SAE levels are kind of fuzzy between 2 and 3, so you could even argue level 2. [1] Tesla Autopilot cannot and will not be able to deal with ALL situations that can possibly occur - which would be SAE Level 5. They are spouting marketing bullshit in face of their poor quarterly results. Most engineers in the space will agree that level 4 will be the highest level reached for decades - if ever. Showing an Autopilot in heavily trained-for area during perfect weather and road conditions with infinite retries for getting the video right means nothing. This has to be viewed separate from some real progress and contributions that Tesla has made in the space. However, that doesn't mean they get to throw around the "Level 5" term yet. And they likely won't within the next decades. Level 5 is a whole other beast than Level 4 and nobody is even remotely close to get there. Point 2) Have you ever sat in a modern car beyond 1995? They ARE computers. And in most recent years, user access is widened. 10 years ago an onboard computer would calculate your air-fuel mix and you wouldn't ever interact directly with it. Today there are huge and ever growing interfaces and you can use voice control to make your car perform certain tasks. So yes, software is eating up the industry. Doesn't mean the steel hunks disappear. [1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/sae-levels-driving-automation https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/sae-levels-drivin...
- whenchamenia 7y agoAt what point will tesla marketers tire of hn? This company is beyond tiring. Great drivetrain, shit quality, dystopyan user rights. The sooner their tech is normalized and divorced from elon the better.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoAutomakers will say and probably rightfully so, it was never about the software it was about the nuts and bolts of making large amounts of vehicles and the act of actually selling them to dealerships. It probably turns out automakers do it the way they do it because it is the best way to make money and not because they are stupid.
- flyinglizard 7y agoNuts and bolts are becoming commodotized by the day, as they do in any other industry frankly. EVs are a huge accelerator of this process because they are a fraction of the complexity of an IC drivetrain. The supply chains in automotive are also becoming more dominant and most of the stuff in your car is sourced from Aptive or Bosch or Continental or whoever. So it's not just a commodity yet, but it will be - especially towards the lower third echelon of the market - in a decade or two (a decade is not long in auto industry terms; it's merely two product cycles).
- Gravityloss 7y agoWhat was not commoditized in automobiles in the seventies that is now?
- ndiscussion 7y agoWe'll just keep waiting :)
- flyinglizard 7y agoThe global supply chain was in its infancy. You had national suppliers, but nothing like the multinationals you see today. The number of automakers in the 1970s was much higher and the number of unique models (vs dress ups like GM does across brands) was higher still. Virtually no mass market car brand was formed in the last four decades, other than Tesla.
- Gravityloss 7y ago
- sunstone 7y agoHey I don't remember all of this being in Telsa's original secret master plan.
- goshx 7y agohttps://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux Search for "Sharing".
- ckastner 7y agoWhy "or"? Tesla and Musk do a lot of things. Some are clever, eg: Tesla gets marketing that other car companies can only dream of, for free. Other things are insane, eg Musk's "secured" bid of $420 for a company that today traded unter 200, less than a year later.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago>Musk's "secured" bid of $420 for a company that today traded unter 200, less than a year later. This keeps being repeated ad nauseam but what's the relationship between the 'going private' tweet and today's stock price? It's been proven that the Saudi asked Musk multiple times to take Tesla private between early 2017 and summer 2018 but other shareholders resisted the attempt (with far less capital at hand than the Musk and the Saudi). Remember that non-accredited shareholders (like me) would also have been forced to sell at that time, if the company was to be delisted (which wasn't Musk's intention but still does not undermine the "funding secured" tweet one bit). In fact, today's stock price makes a strong case for the company to be taken private and even a stronger one for the attempt to do it when it was above $350.
- rohit2412 7y ago> Saudi asked Musk multiple times to take Tesla private Do you have a source for that? All I know is that Saudis had one meeting with him where they discussed simple investment, not going private. Further, this meeting could just be them answering a request from Elon musk, and they wouldn't even be interested.
- jcranmer 7y ago> It's been proven that the Saudi asked Musk multiple times to take Tesla private between early 2017 and summer 2018 but other shareholders resisted the attempt (with far less capital at hand than the Musk and the Saudi). Actually, the record seems to be that Musk was interested in taking Tesla private, and met with the Saudis once or twice, where they allegedly indicated some verbal support for the idea while not agreeing (or even discussing) on things such as at what price. Musk then took the verbal support as a full commitment to buy Tesla at a premium over current prices and gave his infamous "funding secured" tweets.
- geggam 7y agoIt will be interesting to see if Elon can push electricity and batteries in time to get over the momentum petroleum has. I actually see hemp and bio diesel being easier to push because it could leverage the huge existing infrastructure.
- Consultant32452 7y agoI'm still betting my $0.02 on gen 3/4 nuclear, even though I'm rooting for solar/wind/battery.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoPetroleum certainly has momentum, however there's no reason to suggest EV and ICE won't co-exist for a couple of decades. I doubt bio-fuel will ever be as cheap as oil, sadly, there are simply too many sources with very easy to extract oil (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc.)
- mcguire 7y agoI suspect progress in electricity and batteries has lagged far behind the excitement and hype that Tesla needs to keep afloat.
- gpapilion 7y agoThe bio diesel relies on a net investment in calories to achieve its green fuel. Most of the investment comes from petroleum products used as fertilizer. (All be it some time ago, I remember it being 4:1 calories invested:harvested for corn).
- geggam 7y agohemp... aka weed grows like a weed. https://phys.org/news/2010-10-hemp-viable-biodiesel.html https://phys.org/news/2010-10-hemp-viable-biodiesel.html
- asdff 7y agoBattery tech is fine today if companies like Tesla and other EV manufacturers weren't so against open standards. You should be able to pull out your battery and swap it with a full one at a gas station, just like you do with a propane tank (and the gogoro electric scooter). You don't see a car manufacturer making a proprietary gas inlet that only takes a proprietary pump, but that's exactly what EVs are currently doing because they can squeeze more money this way at the cost of how good the tech could be for people.
- mcguire 7y agoI just had to callout this: "AI expert Kai-Fu Lee of Apple, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, and Google fame used the best antidote for such folly, Twitter humor: "“If there are a million Tesla robo-taxis functioning on the road in 2020, I will eat them.”"
- mtgx 7y agoThe way Tesla tends to defend Autopilot-caused crashes makes me think that if someone did take over their servers and then sent an update to a specific car to kill someone, Tesla would hide this from the public. The U.S. needs better data breach disclosure laws before self-driving cars become mainstream.
- Proven 7y agoThings are looking up, eh? Too bad it's all fake news. The company is doomed and their share price is collapsing: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-20/wedbush-calls-tesla-code-red-situation-sending-stock-crashing-3-year-low https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-20/wedbush-calls-tesl...
- czr 7y agoIt's worth emphasizing that Tesla is strong at software relative to other automakers; in absolute terms, the (non-AP) parts of Tesla's software frequently have user-facing problems [0] and appear to have been built on a Babelian tower of hacks [1]... but it's still better than the rest of the market, and it keeps improving month over month. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/search/?q=reboot&restrict_sr=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/search/?q=reboot&restri... [1] https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
- Shivetya 7y agoLove my TM3 but as I have posted before, Tesla needs to focus, Musk needs to focus. Tesla cars have some great user facing features but also are woefully behind in other areas. The most flagrant is the awful support for playing music from blue tooth or attached devices. It has been common for years to be able to use the touch screen or menu to select playlists, artists, or more, from the car's UI. Not so with Telsa, want to do that drag your phone out and change what is play. You can only navigate within a playing playlist. Seeing how its illegal to use your phone in your hand in many states Tesla needs to remedy it. We have none of our promised voice commands, no improvement since when I bought mine in August. Our energy meter is near useless, does not track when car is not moving, and only tracks overall use and does not break out HVAC, regen,or drive train use. But we got fart humor, animated rain drops, and MAME. Their priorities suck, its no wonder why they aren't profitable, they cannot get done what they started before going off doing something else or wasting resources on stuff that does not matter
- zaroth 7y agoThis is what the joy of OTA updates feels like Shivetya! There is no other auto manufacturer on the planet where you could complain about wanting news features XYZ instead of the delivered ABC and actually expect something might be done about it! > But we got fart humor, animated rain drops, and MAME. This is unfair. Aside from the humor and slight touches, which sometimes is delightful, we also got Dashcam, Sentry, Dog Mode, updated Climate controls, Blind Spot display, zoom-in speed award guidance display, improved auto-park, improved Summon, and probably another two dozen features I’m forgetting. That’s aside from all the core AP enhancements which are almost too numerous to list. Media is hard because they probably refuse to make the interface work for just a single model of phone, or even a narrow range of software versions of a single model of phone. They don’t want to write and maintain features that need to be tested across 100 models and versions of phones from a dozen different countries.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI think there’s a world that a lot of tech people don’t consider. Let’s say Tesla rolls out their self driving taxi service. And let’s say it’s decent. Not great. It kills people infrequently and Tesla manages to argue its way out of liability... Wouldn’t that be a pretty good business? It has some severe ethical costs, but... a lot of people are ok with that. What should be doesn’t really effect the market’s reaction to things or even consumer preferences.
- fullshark 7y agoIt would be an amazing business, if in fact it was tesla owners pressing a button on cars they own and letting it make some money for them as a robotaxi. The fact that even that declaration that Musk sees that happening in 2020 didn't move the needle for Tesla stock shows how little the market believes it's actually coming imo.
- hef19898 7y agoBut it made for a better fund raising story than "we need to cover our operational losses for the next 10 months".
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI agree that was the motivation for the timing of the event. I do think he is being serious though. His track record is reasonably good in that he does intend to accomplish what he says he wants to do with zero to moderate delays. By my mental model, I would expect him to deliver this by 2021.
- Tiktaalik 7y agoThe major flaw (among many) with Musk's self driving taxi Tesla vision is that it treats cities, the entities that control the roads the taxis would drive on, as passive entities that wouldn't make any peep of objection. In reality cities have plans on the books to shift away from car oriented design whether it be electric or ICE. Additionally, cities now understand that ride hailing competes with and erodes the quality of public transit, with some accordingly capping ride hailing licenses. Cities are not going to want the surge of congestion that self driving Tesla taxis would bring.
- AtlasBarfed 7y agoAutonomous cars are part of the shift from cars, because they don't need street parking and can "loiter" offsite. Urban plans for alternate modes of transit (scooters, bikes, etc) will massively benefit from street parking elimination. It's where the lanes can be safely placed. Autonomous driving will revolutionize public transit. Uber isn't wrong about that, it's just that they are too evil to be trusted with it from a monopoly standpoint. Autonomous can solve last mile problems and centralize transit stations so that you don't really need bussing, and can concentrate on fast high capacity trains with "coarse grained" stations.
- asdff 7y agoIt is still a model of having one 15'x6' vehicle carrying 1 person to 1 destination, which leads to congestion no matter how well the cars are timing off of each other. Either these things get really really tiny (self driving moped?) or we cram more people in one of them (self driving bus?) because at the end of the day its a physics problem of there being not enough space on the road for everyone in a city to be transported one at a time, 20' by 8' apart.
- Roark66 7y agoPersonally I think Tesla business would get crushed if someone made really well designed plug-in hybrids. Most trips people take are under 30 miles. No need for a 70kWh, 350kg huge battery. Plug-in hybrids could be operated as full electric during short trips and the internal combustion engine could charge the battery when necessary. No doubt someone will immediately reply with a question: why would you want to change mechanical power, into electric, store it in battery, then change it into mechanic power again, when you can use ICE directly, or go full electric. I'll tell you why. Hybrids allow you all the same advantages as full electric car for short trips, and they are significantly more fuel efficient than normal ICE cars for long trips. All this in a package that can achieve 400+ miles of range and 5 minute recharge in a package that weights less than half of a comparable battery,it doesn't need to waste energy to be kept warm in winter and cold in summer nor it slowly deteriorates whether you use it or not. We have to have an honest conversation about disadvantages of battery powered electric cars. Everything that makes those cars cool - great torque of electric motors, mechanical simplicity, user interface can be replicated in a plug-in hybrid(sacrificing some of the simplicity as a hybrid needs either a fuel cell or an ICE to recharge). Then imagine buying a 10 year old Tesla model 3 economy, in a climate with -20deg C winters? Lets say you're left with 60% battery capacity, then you don't want to kill it completely so you don't let it go to complete 0 and you don't charge it to full capacity leaving you with perhaps 40%? Is this enough? To go to work and back, maybe, but what if you want to, or have to travel further once in a while? You can't using that car.
- BoorishBears 7y agoIt already happened, the 2nd generation Volt was an excellent car and it just died. Which is a shame because it's the "35k Model 3" most people should have gotten
- perardi 7y agoWe arguably have that in the Prius Prime, or had that in the recently discontinued Chevy Volt. I think the marketing and design is tough. So far, there really isn’t an electric car market in North America. There is a Tesla market—they sell well, but basically every other electric vehicle is sold at a substantial loss and in tiny volumes to satisfy various government mandates. In my opinion, people buy a Tesla because they are buying a Tesla, and then people can see you driving a Tesla. Same thing we saw with hybrids. There is a Prius market, because you are obviously driving a hybrid car with brand recognition, and otherwise nobody is buying the Honda Insight or hybrid Camry. And I think it’s tough to market, quickly, how a plug-in hybrid works. It is not the simplest drivetrain, and trying to explain to people when you have to plug it in and how to get the best electric mileage and yes the engine will run occasionally and yeah that’ll be weird when it kicks in...a pure electric car is just conceptually easier to understand.
- dfilppi 7y agoClever and insane are not mutually exclusive. At least he didn't say there would be millions of robo taxis on Mars next year.
- skywhopper 7y agoI would just laugh at Elon's crazy proclamations, but there are plenty of people buying Teslas who believe them. At this point, Musk's claims verge on the fraudulent. Fully autonomous driving is never coming to current Teslas, sorry folks. As for the frequent OTA software updates, I wouldn't consider that a feature. While it's true that at this point software is a critical piece of the puzzle and automakers who haven't woken up to the idea that owning your software is as important as any other aspect of the design may eventually be left behind. But I don't think Tesla offers a good model to emulate. As for JLG's specific points, providing a single, centralized method of updating automobile software over the Internet--or even a specialized wireless connection--should be seen as a security risk, not a powerful feature. Most critical systems in cars should be isolated from each other and from the Internet entirely. Updates should not be haphazardly distributed, but should be carefully tested and rolled out as rarely as possible and in a controlled manner. I have no hope that car companies will actually heed advice like this. But it's disappointing to see tech veterans buy into the delusion that the equivalent of Windows Update, but for your car, would be a good idea.
- kitsunesoba 7y agoTo me the primary value of OTA updates like Tesla’s is that the dash systems won’t become worthless in a few years. I don’t own a car myself, but it always grates me just how bad and outdated the dash systems in cars even just a handful of years old are when taking ubers or riding with friends. It’s generally not found acceptable when major features of any other expensive purchase are phoned-in at best, so why is it tolerated with cars? At minimum, I think car manufacturers should decide on a dash platform standard and stick to it for at least a decade, making it possible to continue to properly update and support existing cars for a reasonable amount of time. Tesla isn’t doing anything special, it’s just a plain old off the shelf ARM SoC running a touch-optimized Ubuntu variant. Surely Toyota, GM, etc could figure this out? Barring that, they could save money and exclude built in dash functionality all together in favor of CarPlay and Android Auto, but that could be problematic for customers who don’t use smartphones.
- fumar 7y agoI don't own a Tesla. Can you provide evidence on why Elon's claims are fraudulent? I was thinking about a Tesla as my next car and would like to learn more. Do you know if the Tesla over the air updates are altering critical systems without diligent testing? I assume only Tesla engineers would have insight into this.
- oceanghost 7y ago> labels that adorn Camembert boxes (a tyriosémiophile). This word tyriosémiophile, appears nowhere on google but within reference to this article. Does anyone know what it is? OR what it is meant to mean?
- kvb 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrosemiophilia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrosemiophilia
- oceanghost 7y agoWell that was easy, thank you.