6 ms·

Does he really though ? In my 5 years in Mech Engg, Germans were known for highly skilled labor, excellence in manufacturing tolerance + reliability and doing

by screye 6y ago

Does he really though ? In my 5 years in Mech Engg, Germans were known for highly skilled labor, excellence in manufacturing tolerance + reliability and doing all of it in a stable and consistent manner. Elon's Tesla is terrible at precisely these things. Manufacturing tolerance and reliability is notoriously bad for Teslas. Tesla also under pays and over works employees at a rate that's unheard of in the valley. Tesla's strengths lie in battery technology, an army of blind supporters and it being run as a silicon valley tech firm. > "Tesla, he (VW CEO Herbert Diess) said, isn't just a carmaker, but also a battery manufacturer, a dealer and a service provider. He says this enables Tesla to identify customer needs in an "unparalleled" way and to generate profits in areas that go "far beyond what we can do with our conventional car business." He hit the nail on the head. Elon Musk taught the Germans a vital silicon valley lesson. "Moonshot investments even in the most stable of times are necessary to not get caught with your pants down." (AKA, Buy Instagram and Oculus for $2 Billion, or else it will cost you 20$ billion (whatsapp ) or worse, it can consume your entire market overnight (Tiktok).) Auto manufacturers tunnel visioned on gas vehicles, and made investments a bit too late. Now they've learnt the wrong lesson. Their foolish billion$ acquisitions of unproven self-driving car startups that have nothing to show for it, is proof that they are panicking. _____________ (edit, I do not mean to downplay the battery tech. If anything, Tesla's market position entirely showcases why it is so important. The blind supporters help, but the other 2 strengths count for a bit more.)

jodrellblank 6y ago
Survivorship bias is when you differentiate "necessary investment" from "foolish panicking" retrospectively by whether it worked out well or not.
- screye 6y ago
  Agreed, but the self-driving one is the only place where I could differentiate between the two with reasonable confidence due to decent domain and insider knowledge. The acquisitions of Cruise, Nutonomy and the like were so inflated for the tech they had, that you can almost call it being fleeced. It was a good idea to get these companies as acqui-hires, but for between $0.5-1.5 billion the big companies got algorithms that would be obsolete in a year and a few talent employees, who they could have obtained for faaaar cheaper. (Zoox by amazon at least made some sense) What is hilarious, is that Waymo is still so far ahead in the data game that I doubt it is possible for them to even catch up. Self-driving has become a tech problem, and suddenly the likes of Uber, Google and Apple find themselves far better equipped to handle what is now a data science problem than any of these traditional companies. My prediction: The breakthrough moment for self-driving will come from Waymo or Amazon's Zoox (the ones with tons of 3d data). The 'winning' company will then licence the tech to every 3rd party car manufacturer and you will have an android like self-driving ecosystem, where they are all more or less the same.
  - nickik 6y ago
    I just don't get how Tesla is not ahead on Self Driving. Waymo has spent 10 years mapping the same city and its basically the single easiest place to do self-driving in the whole world. If you actually look at Tesla presentation, a huge part of the problem they are dealing with is handing things like 50000 different kinds of speed limit signs in every country in the world. Assigning lights to the associated lanes and things like that. Finding the 0.00001% cases like object falling of trucks on the highway. Understanding complex intersection without prior mapping data of any kind. I have not heard a single clear explanation how Waymo will go from where the currently are, to overriding a global general solution. Tesla is a silicon Vally tech company that is trying to get its hand on the exact same people that Apple and Google are. And they unlike Apple and Google have their own gigantic data-gathering fleet across every first-world country. They are so far ahead of everybody in terms of data and data gathering its not even remotely close. The reason Tesla seems to get no respect is that (a) Elon Musk over-promised and now he is forever labeled a joke that can never be taken seriously (b) the consumer product on the road does not yet do all the things it claims it will one day do so it providing something for people to criticize.
    - screye 6y ago
      Tesla is the only company that believes that 2d vision can solve the whole problem. Every other company uses it with LIDAR. It may be hubris, but I simply cannot see how vision alone will be sufficient to solve self-driving. This is especially true in heavy rains, snow and any driving condition that doesn't follow the nicest of layouts like the Bay Area. This means that occlusion will stay unsolved by definition. Even if it works out one day, my intuition is that 3D maps / LIDAR self-driving is going to be ready sooner than that, purely due to having richer data. Also, from what I know, (very little but) Tesla isn't THE company landing top self-driving and vision talent. They seem to be going to Waymo, Uber, Apple and Nvidia instead. Additionally, while I deeply respect Andrej Karpathy, he simply doesn't have the same research credentials as some of the distinguished professors who lead the other groups. 3D self-driving labs are all building on each other's work, as the cost of GPUs and LIDAR sensors has dropped by orders of magnitude over the last decade. Cameras and sensors on the other hand remain more or less where they were 10 years ago, and Tesla is left alone to compete with everyone else.
threatofrain 6y ago
IMO Tiktok is a random example. They're not a moonshot tech company, and they were just serving a pent-up demand that came from the death of Vine under Twitter.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  Tiktok is an example of getting caught unprepared, by the sudden rise of a competitor you weren't aware would or could exist.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Tiktok is capturing a market that was huge and did exist on vine. Anyone could have seen that a vine competitor would have inevitably popped up after twitter killed it. It was a massively popular platform and probably the worst move twitter ever did as a business.
youeseh 6y ago
> an army of blind supporters What makes you say that the supporters are blind? Judging by the success of the company, shouldn't its supporters get a little more credit?
- asdff 6y ago
  There are supporters then there are people making memes about Elon Musk the God King and using their entire paycheck to buy weekly options.
- screye 6y ago
  Blind doesn't mean wrong. It does mean that it did not fit into how they have traditionally computed value propositions. A lot of the people who I know bought a Tesla, did it for other reasons. It was status symbol, a tool for virtue signalling, a luxury first and a car last. A ton of these friends were cross shopping the Tesla with a Civic, Corolla or a Prius. Because for these non-car enthusiasts, if not Tesla, they couldn't imagine spending that kind of money on a car. It is similar to how Apple convinced non-traditional customers to buy a $500 watch or how Beats convinced your average person to splurge $300 on headphones that didn't even sound great. The first adopters ordered their cars 3 years out, before they'd even seen one reviewed. The blind-ness comes from the numerous contradictions that Tesla represents. The Tesla is fast, but it is bought by non-enthusiasts who never speed. The Tesla is green so it'd appeal to sustainability activists. But Manufacturing consists a bulk of carbon footprint, so if you cared you'd get a used car. Tesla also has toxic and exploitative work practices that someone who loves sustainability would generally disavow. Teslas are great cars and provide a very different value proposition. But, the reason Tesla is doing well is not because it beat the Germans at their own game (as the articles want to imply). It is because they played a different game all together. Tesla - " Exploration and exploitation "
  - nickik 6y ago
    What a horrifying point. First of all lots of people who would have bought expensive cars bought Tesla, its absurdly wrong to claim every Tesla buyer would have bought a Civic instead. You are suffering from massive selection bias. And consumer products are almost always more then just pure base value. > But Manufacturing consists a bulk of carbon footprint, so if you cared you'd get a used car. So everybody who cars can never buy a used car and the people who buy new cars buy gas cars that eventually turn into used gas cars? Do you really not understand how that makes absolutely no sense what so ever? > But, the reason Tesla is doing well is not because it beat the Germans at their own game (as the articles want to imply). It is because they played a different game all together. German game was to build expensive cars the people really wanted. And so did Tesla.
justapassenger 6y ago
> Auto manufacturers tunnel visioned on gas vehicles, and made investments a bit too late Did they? Last time I've checked EV market wasn't exactly eating gas market lunch. Sure, it's destined to, but as of today I don't think we have data to show that traditional OEM investments were too late.
- dflock 6y ago
  Slowly, then all at once.
svet_0 6y ago
Tesla is far from perfect but saying that it's strength is in "an army of blind supporters" is just ridiculous. Tesla is moving and innovating very fast, not just in battery tech but also electric drive train, vehicle mass manufacturing, energy storage, etc. Tesla/Elon hate is strong these days, probably outweighs the fanboyism.
- charliemil4 6y ago
  They’ve also innovated a fully green business model - selling tax credits as consistent, bonafide revenue.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Is it fully green? Or are they trading polluting heavy metals and chemicals and co2 from mining operations for co2 produced from internal combustion engines? It seems like they are externalizing their environmental impact, like a traditional multi-national but with the added business model of selling credits earned from selling electrics. Or am I wrong? Is the pollution created by these huge batteries being netted out from their credits?
    - nickik 6y ago
      Pretty much all serious studies on this show that over the lifetime you easily beat ICE. And only because the not so optimized yet supply lines is it even a question. The thing is, you need to mine nickel/graphite once and then cycle it 5000 times. If you compare this to the equivalent driving distance in gas its not remotely close. Also, all of these batteries will be recycled, so it only needs to be mined once. The credits he refers to are fuel efficiency standards that manufactures need to have across their fleet.
      - jjeaff 6y ago
        Yes, I understand that over the lifetime, electrics beat ice. But does that calculation include the fuel efficiency credits. Or probably more directly, do the fuel efficiency credits take into account the co2 emitted for building the battery in your electric? It's probably just looking at fuel efficiency.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Tesla's strengths lie in battery technology, At the moment, and likely for the next 5+ years, the EV industry is going to be dominated by battery technology. Batteries determine pricing, speed, charging speed, and range. You can't have a great car if you can't nail those things. BMW & VW have managed to make EVs which are great in every other way, but without getting the basics right, nobody is buying. > ...an army of blind supporters... Tesla has some glaring issues (IMO largely around self driving and quality control), but they've nailed the things about a car that people care about: Price, Performance, & Range. Complaining that people like Tesla's while ignoring the obvious advantages Tesla brings to the table just points out your own biases. BMW's best EVs have 60% of the range of the bottom end Tesla and only marginally better performance. That makes it a bit difficult to point at Tesla and say they are successful due to "Blind Supporters".
- clouddrover 6y ago
  > BMW & VW have managed to make EVs which are great in every other way, but without getting the basics right, nobody is buying. The Renault Zoe is the best selling EV in Europe so far this year. The VW ID.3 might manage to outsell the Zoe in 2020 even though the ID.3 has only been out for a month or so. It'll be interesting to see where the ID.3 ends up by year's end.
ksk 6y ago
Not knocking the quality of German products, but I work in biotech and I've noticed German companies that I've worked with to be inbcredibly slow. We purchase custom fabricated equipment and other supplies from all over the world and German companies often are slow to respond to technical questions about products and other sales related inquiries. Its almost feels like they're doing us a favor by giving us their time. Maybe its cultural expectations, but meanwhile local US suppliers are way too pushy, but at-least we get our questions/concerns addressed quickly. Couldn't resist a small dig here, but German cars are well known to be money-pits. :)
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Diz iz because ze Cyber is absolute "Neuland / Terra Incognita" for us. Even our (current) chancellor said so in public ;> https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/neuland https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/neuland Also maybe ambiguities between metric/imperial measurements, area of competence, having to ask around to be safe, waiting for answer/confirmation, and so on?
  - ksk 6y ago
    Well there are lots of little things that I noticed. One example - I found that there wasn't a 'point person' who could quickly get us answers. We're used to having a go-to person who will nag internal team-members and make sure the customer is taken care of. We were shuffled across different teams for no apparent reason which slowed things down. There just seemed to be more internal inflexibility/bureaucracy than we're used to here in the US. We did end up buying equipment from the company in the end, so I might travel there sometime soon and experience the business culture first-hand.
- m463 6y ago
  I don't know - my friends who work on a wide variety of cars say porsche is near the top. I guess the thing is - they're competing against cars that are not designed to come apart. Is it a sea-change to the models of televisions and computers that are designed to be purchased and disposed of at the end of their lives?
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
> under pays So does the german car industry via proxy by temporary employment agencies. AFAIK at least since the 90ies.

by screye 6y ago

jodrellblank 6y ago

Survivorship bias is when you differentiate "necessary investment" from "foolish panicking" retrospectively by whether it worked out well or not.

screye 6y ago
Agreed, but the self-driving one is the only place where I could differentiate between the two with reasonable confidence due to decent domain and insider knowledge. The acquisitions of Cruise, Nutonomy and the like were so inflated for the tech they had, that you can almost call it being fleeced. It was a good idea to get these companies as acqui-hires, but for between $0.5-1.5 billion the big companies got algorithms that would be obsolete in a year and a few talent employees, who they could have obtained for faaaar cheaper. (Zoox by amazon at least made some sense) What is hilarious, is that Waymo is still so far ahead in the data game that I doubt it is possible for them to even catch up. Self-driving has become a tech problem, and suddenly the likes of Uber, Google and Apple find themselves far better equipped to handle what is now a data science problem than any of these traditional companies. My prediction: The breakthrough moment for self-driving will come from Waymo or Amazon's Zoox (the ones with tons of 3d data). The 'winning' company will then licence the tech to every 3rd party car manufacturer and you will have an android like self-driving ecosystem, where they are all more or less the same.
- nickik 6y ago
  I just don't get how Tesla is not ahead on Self Driving. Waymo has spent 10 years mapping the same city and its basically the single easiest place to do self-driving in the whole world. If you actually look at Tesla presentation, a huge part of the problem they are dealing with is handing things like 50000 different kinds of speed limit signs in every country in the world. Assigning lights to the associated lanes and things like that. Finding the 0.00001% cases like object falling of trucks on the highway. Understanding complex intersection without prior mapping data of any kind. I have not heard a single clear explanation how Waymo will go from where the currently are, to overriding a global general solution. Tesla is a silicon Vally tech company that is trying to get its hand on the exact same people that Apple and Google are. And they unlike Apple and Google have their own gigantic data-gathering fleet across every first-world country. They are so far ahead of everybody in terms of data and data gathering its not even remotely close. The reason Tesla seems to get no respect is that (a) Elon Musk over-promised and now he is forever labeled a joke that can never be taken seriously (b) the consumer product on the road does not yet do all the things it claims it will one day do so it providing something for people to criticize.
  - screye 6y ago
    Tesla is the only company that believes that 2d vision can solve the whole problem. Every other company uses it with LIDAR. It may be hubris, but I simply cannot see how vision alone will be sufficient to solve self-driving. This is especially true in heavy rains, snow and any driving condition that doesn't follow the nicest of layouts like the Bay Area. This means that occlusion will stay unsolved by definition. Even if it works out one day, my intuition is that 3D maps / LIDAR self-driving is going to be ready sooner than that, purely due to having richer data. Also, from what I know, (very little but) Tesla isn't THE company landing top self-driving and vision talent. They seem to be going to Waymo, Uber, Apple and Nvidia instead. Additionally, while I deeply respect Andrej Karpathy, he simply doesn't have the same research credentials as some of the distinguished professors who lead the other groups. 3D self-driving labs are all building on each other's work, as the cost of GPUs and LIDAR sensors has dropped by orders of magnitude over the last decade. Cameras and sensors on the other hand remain more or less where they were 10 years ago, and Tesla is left alone to compete with everyone else.

threatofrain 6y ago

IMO Tiktok is a random example. They're not a moonshot tech company, and they were just serving a pent-up demand that came from the death of Vine under Twitter.

anonymousab 6y ago
Tiktok is an example of getting caught unprepared, by the sudden rise of a competitor you weren't aware would or could exist.
- asdff 6y ago
  Tiktok is capturing a market that was huge and did exist on vine. Anyone could have seen that a vine competitor would have inevitably popped up after twitter killed it. It was a massively popular platform and probably the worst move twitter ever did as a business.

youeseh 6y ago

> an army of blind supporters What makes you say that the supporters are blind? Judging by the success of the company, shouldn't its supporters get a little more credit?

asdff 6y ago
There are supporters then there are people making memes about Elon Musk the God King and using their entire paycheck to buy weekly options.
screye 6y ago
Blind doesn't mean wrong. It does mean that it did not fit into how they have traditionally computed value propositions. A lot of the people who I know bought a Tesla, did it for other reasons. It was status symbol, a tool for virtue signalling, a luxury first and a car last. A ton of these friends were cross shopping the Tesla with a Civic, Corolla or a Prius. Because for these non-car enthusiasts, if not Tesla, they couldn't imagine spending that kind of money on a car. It is similar to how Apple convinced non-traditional customers to buy a $500 watch or how Beats convinced your average person to splurge $300 on headphones that didn't even sound great. The first adopters ordered their cars 3 years out, before they'd even seen one reviewed. The blind-ness comes from the numerous contradictions that Tesla represents. The Tesla is fast, but it is bought by non-enthusiasts who never speed. The Tesla is green so it'd appeal to sustainability activists. But Manufacturing consists a bulk of carbon footprint, so if you cared you'd get a used car. Tesla also has toxic and exploitative work practices that someone who loves sustainability would generally disavow. Teslas are great cars and provide a very different value proposition. But, the reason Tesla is doing well is not because it beat the Germans at their own game (as the articles want to imply). It is because they played a different game all together. Tesla - " Exploration and exploitation "
- nickik 6y ago
  What a horrifying point. First of all lots of people who would have bought expensive cars bought Tesla, its absurdly wrong to claim every Tesla buyer would have bought a Civic instead. You are suffering from massive selection bias. And consumer products are almost always more then just pure base value. > But Manufacturing consists a bulk of carbon footprint, so if you cared you'd get a used car. So everybody who cars can never buy a used car and the people who buy new cars buy gas cars that eventually turn into used gas cars? Do you really not understand how that makes absolutely no sense what so ever? > But, the reason Tesla is doing well is not because it beat the Germans at their own game (as the articles want to imply). It is because they played a different game all together. German game was to build expensive cars the people really wanted. And so did Tesla.

justapassenger 6y ago

> Auto manufacturers tunnel visioned on gas vehicles, and made investments a bit too late Did they? Last time I've checked EV market wasn't exactly eating gas market lunch. Sure, it's destined to, but as of today I don't think we have data to show that traditional OEM investments were too late.

dflock 6y ago
Slowly, then all at once.

svet_0 6y ago

Tesla is far from perfect but saying that it's strength is in "an army of blind supporters" is just ridiculous. Tesla is moving and innovating very fast, not just in battery tech but also electric drive train, vehicle mass manufacturing, energy storage, etc. Tesla/Elon hate is strong these days, probably outweighs the fanboyism.

charliemil4 6y ago
They’ve also innovated a fully green business model - selling tax credits as consistent, bonafide revenue.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Is it fully green? Or are they trading polluting heavy metals and chemicals and co2 from mining operations for co2 produced from internal combustion engines? It seems like they are externalizing their environmental impact, like a traditional multi-national but with the added business model of selling credits earned from selling electrics. Or am I wrong? Is the pollution created by these huge batteries being netted out from their credits?
  - nickik 6y ago
    Pretty much all serious studies on this show that over the lifetime you easily beat ICE. And only because the not so optimized yet supply lines is it even a question. The thing is, you need to mine nickel/graphite once and then cycle it 5000 times. If you compare this to the equivalent driving distance in gas its not remotely close. Also, all of these batteries will be recycled, so it only needs to be mined once. The credits he refers to are fuel efficiency standards that manufactures need to have across their fleet.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Yes, I understand that over the lifetime, electrics beat ice. But does that calculation include the fuel efficiency credits. Or probably more directly, do the fuel efficiency credits take into account the co2 emitted for building the battery in your electric? It's probably just looking at fuel efficiency.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Tesla's strengths lie in battery technology, At the moment, and likely for the next 5+ years, the EV industry is going to be dominated by battery technology. Batteries determine pricing, speed, charging speed, and range. You can't have a great car if you can't nail those things. BMW & VW have managed to make EVs which are great in every other way, but without getting the basics right, nobody is buying. > ...an army of blind supporters... Tesla has some glaring issues (IMO largely around self driving and quality control), but they've nailed the things about a car that people care about: Price, Performance, & Range. Complaining that people like Tesla's while ignoring the obvious advantages Tesla brings to the table just points out your own biases. BMW's best EVs have 60% of the range of the bottom end Tesla and only marginally better performance. That makes it a bit difficult to point at Tesla and say they are successful due to "Blind Supporters".

clouddrover 6y ago
> BMW & VW have managed to make EVs which are great in every other way, but without getting the basics right, nobody is buying. The Renault Zoe is the best selling EV in Europe so far this year. The VW ID.3 might manage to outsell the Zoe in 2020 even though the ID.3 has only been out for a month or so. It'll be interesting to see where the ID.3 ends up by year's end.

ksk 6y ago

Not knocking the quality of German products, but I work in biotech and I've noticed German companies that I've worked with to be inbcredibly slow. We purchase custom fabricated equipment and other supplies from all over the world and German companies often are slow to respond to technical questions about products and other sales related inquiries. Its almost feels like they're doing us a favor by giving us their time. Maybe its cultural expectations, but meanwhile local US suppliers are way too pushy, but at-least we get our questions/concerns addressed quickly. Couldn't resist a small dig here, but German cars are well known to be money-pits. :)

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Diz iz because ze Cyber is absolute "Neuland / Terra Incognita" for us. Even our (current) chancellor said so in public ;> https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/neuland https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/neuland Also maybe ambiguities between metric/imperial measurements, area of competence, having to ask around to be safe, waiting for answer/confirmation, and so on?
- ksk 6y ago
  Well there are lots of little things that I noticed. One example - I found that there wasn't a 'point person' who could quickly get us answers. We're used to having a go-to person who will nag internal team-members and make sure the customer is taken care of. We were shuffled across different teams for no apparent reason which slowed things down. There just seemed to be more internal inflexibility/bureaucracy than we're used to here in the US. We did end up buying equipment from the company in the end, so I might travel there sometime soon and experience the business culture first-hand.
m463 6y ago
I don't know - my friends who work on a wide variety of cars say porsche is near the top. I guess the thing is - they're competing against cars that are not designed to come apart. Is it a sea-change to the models of televisions and computers that are designed to be purchased and disposed of at the end of their lives?

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

> under pays So does the german car industry via proxy by temporary employment agencies. AFAIK at least since the 90ies.