Tesla Intrigue Deepens with Musk's Twitter Barrage
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Clearly that didn't impact pre-orders but I think a lot of people didn't love the internal look even if they thought it was nice looking externally (disclaimer: I was one of these people).
In my OPINION the 3 won't be fully self driving (for certification/legal reasons). But we can reasonably speculate that it will have things like auto-braking, lane keep assist, automatic cruise control, and similar. Since competitor's vehicles have this, and in order to achieve "five stars in every safety category" you actually need to have auto-braking.
Look at the requirements for the IIHS's "TOP SAFETY PICK+" which is the gold standard for safety. A system like EyeSight, Honda Sensing, or similar is required in 2016[0], and this vehicle will be looking for the 2017 or 2018 TSP+ rating no doubt.
So suggesting that it will have "auto-pilot"-like functionality[1] is very reasonable. But that doesn't mean it will have full self-driving ("hands off"), in particular given the regulatory landscape, development stage of the technology, and the costs. We'll see.
[0] "Vehicles with optional front crash prevention qualify for either award only when equipped with the technology." http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/TSP-List i.e. without frontal auto-braking as an option you cannot appear on the TSP+ list. But even vehicles on the list only quality as TSP+ rated when the auto-braking option is installed (without it they're TPS tier only).
I bought a mazda cx recently with all of these feature. I must say I don't find any of these really useful, but again I don't text while driving.
I think these features breed a false sense of security and encourage users to text while driving. Features like these should be introduced only when they can protect users from all cases of distracted driving not just one or two situations.
[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20160128/OEM06/160129871/aut...
Well, ofcourse. I am talking about ppl become less safety conscious because these features give them (false) sense of security.
eg: Anti-Tsunami walls killed more people than they saved during great japanese tsunami because they gave people false sense of security and ppl didn't take evacuation warnings seriously assuming walls would take care of it. And ofcourse studies proved that having Tsunami walls is safer than no walls.
Huh? So walls killed more people than they saved but studies showed that they are safer with the walls..?
I googled this, cannot find any information that the anti-Tsunami walls caused more people to be killed.
Studies was done with average tsunami heights from previous tsunamis. 2011 was magnitudes higher than previous ones, walls were no match for the tsunami.
>I googled this, cannot find any information that the anti-Tsunami walls caused more people to be killed.
I remember seeing this in a documentary, where they were interiviewing poeople whose famalies died becuase they thought walls are going to save them.
I googled it now, this was the first result
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/03/22/japan-to-build-massi...
'The paradox of such projects, experts say, is that while they may reduce some damage, they can foster complacency. That can be a grave risk along coastlines vulnerable to tsunamis, storm surges and other natural disasters. At least some of the 18,500 people who died or went missing in the 2011 disasters failed to heed warnings to escape in time.'
I think this is different. Putting on seat belts doesn't make you think that you'd be saved from crash while you text.
Although it is sometimes quite hard, my father was once going on a German Autobahn 180kmh and he didn't realize that in the front people completely stopped. My mom realized and shouted and he hit the breaks and stopped in-between cars (if there weren't enough space inbetween, he would have mildly hit the cars). But I don't think this system would have helped in this situation
Lane keep assist is just a quality of life thing. You get on the highway/motorway, get in your lane, and it makes subtle movements to keep you centered in the lane. It doesn't drive for you.
So for example on windy days when the wind is pushing you constantly one way, Lane Keep Assist counteracts that lateral movement. On a straight piece of highway/motorway with no wind it does nothing at all.
Automatic cruise control is the same as regular cruise control but requires less driver input. Instead of picking an exact speed you set a goal speed, and the vehicle will either go that speed or the speed of vehicles in front of you.
The nice thing about automatic cruise control is that traffic doesn't often go at one set speed for a long period. Things like exits, construction, traffic composition, earlier accidents, etc can all cause traffic to slow for periods of time before speeding back up. Automatic cruise control means you don't have to manually adjust to these variances. It also keeps you a safe travel distance from the vehicle in front.
Automatic forward braking helps make automatic cruise control safer by allowing the vehicle to slow extremely rapidly if needed (e.g. an accident happens in front of you). Faster in fact that most humans.
But automatic forward braking isn't just useful when combined with automatic cruise control, it can brake you when a "foreign object" is in the road (e.g. animal, pedestrian, etc) which can either stop accidents entirely or reduce the damage done. It also helps with common rear-end accidents or rarely more serious accidents.
Day to day you shouldn't be using automatic forward braking.
They've already been looking at if automatic forward braking works and, yes, it does. It reduces accidents and when accidents still occur it reduces how bad they are.[0]
None of this has anything to do with texting and driving. In fact if I take my hands out of the wheel the automatic cruise control will bleep at me and eventually disengage.
[0] http://www.autonews.com/article/20160128/OEM06/160129871/aut...
I looked into this. 0.21 is insanely low for a production car. How come this isn't bigger news? This alone is fascinating.
Also, that giant pane of smooth glass over the top probably helps.
(Same thing for S and X.)
And the "steering controls and system feels like a spaceship"
And Musk tweeted a little while ago about getting a special team of Software Engineers reporting directly to him for self-driving that was "top priority" within the company.
And there are no gauges directly in front of the driver at all, which has been confirmed to be like that for production.
At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous? (and maybe you'll have to take over sometimes, but I'm thinking 95%+ of the time it will be driving itself)
There is no way that autonomous driving is going to work in most small European town and villages. There are so many downtowns which were never meant to be used by car and it is already difficult to navigate those places as a human. I just don't see how this should work over here in Europe.
Selfdriving on the highway or in a typical suburban sprawl in the US? Yes, that might work in the near future. Navigating twisted one-way streets in some old town from the middle ages during rush hour? That will take a long time to do this fully autonomously.
I've often wondered how self-driving cars will deal with this. Imagine we reach the point where self driving cars are perceived as being guaranteed to stop before hitting a pedestrian.
This presents a lot of problems that need to be overcome. A car-jacker could rob you simply by getting an accomplice to stand in front of your car. Teenagers might start jumping in front of cars as a high-tech game of chicken. What happens when somebody steps into the road and the car brakes so hard it gives the occupants whiplash?
I'm sure all of these problems will be solved in time, but it's going to be interesting to see how!
So now you have a long street where tons of people are crossing every 10 meters during the day because it's a quite busy shopping district.
Although cars are driving slow, it must be very hard for autonomous cars because there are people everywhere running in every direction.
That said, the default is not going to be stopping within 1-2 inches of pedestrians, rather it's going to gradually slow down to deal with pedestrians while trying to maintain forward progress. The point is a self driving car could be more aggressive than most people while staying safe instead of freaking out and just stopping because people are jaywalking.
It's the edge case where a car needs to cross a really high traffic area that's going to be an issue and people can't do 20mph right in front of a high traffic box store entrance etc. Further, going slow for a few hundred feet really does not take that long.
There may still be reasons to prefer robot cars for low-speed environments but the probability of such a vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian is already very low, so that is not relevant to a discussion of a robot car's ability to stop very rapidly at very low speeds.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/HS809012.htm...
Yes, walls are easily located. Holes not so much. Emptiness is quite difficult to see.
The bigger problem, is imagine, would be weather. I dunno how completely they've solved that problem yet.
If I ever get an autonomous car, manual driving is a must-have feature :|
Keeping my horse was a must for those situations.
I once rode in a plane that could only go a few hundred miles before refueling.
Keeping my car was a must for those situations.
I once rode in a train that could only go ~60 mph.
Keep my car was a must for those situations.
(hint, I'm talking about early stuff)
2 autonomous cars could negotiate which has the shorter trip, an autonomous car encountering a human could default to timidity.
When a self driving car messes up it'll be a very expensive lawsuit for pain and suffering and psychological trauma of not being in control while the accident unfolds and surely its all the mfgrs fault for having a software bug.
Its not so much the physical characteristics of being narrow as being a location where many accidents happen compared to an interstate-class road.
Must be a nightmare for every car proximity-sensor.
I witnessed 2 car accidents when I was there and both were vehicles turning (slowly) and clipping motorbikes in their blind spots. Not gonna happen with a computer.
> and it is already difficult to navigate those places
> as a human
But is any of that a problem for Tesla to sell a lot of autonomous cars? No. Not even a little.
How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.
So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".
They don't use GPS for driving, perhaps general orientation, they use cameras and LASER based RADARs (called LIDARs)
But the self parking barely works, and can't handle anything complicated.
(I'm sure it does use GPS for navigation. But it's hypothetically possible to do without.)
It may use GPS supplementally, but never primarily.
You're not thinking far enough into the future. We already had that, in 2015.
These cars won't exist until late 2017, so you have to improve on what we've got, today, by more than 2 years.
Is that how you read it?
Because I read it as Tesla feeling the pressure to get something tangible out there for people to see, so they demonstrated a car that wasn't finished (just like the battery swap tech, or "off the hook" Powerwall demand). It got huge hype, now it'll be two more years of "wait and see what we have planned!" Smart, I guess.
I wish everyone would stop framing this as Tesla vs everyone else, instead of rooting on the EV industry as whole. There'd be less pressure on Tesla to take over the world, which ain't gonna happen.
In fact, when we're criticising UX we say it's like the controls in the space shuttle.
Yes, there's a risk you may hit something and be killed, but per passenger mile, I expect it to be even safer than the space shuttle.
I think most people imagine piloting a spaceship as being awesome. And are thinking of it more like sci-fi spaceships rather than a modern day shuttle packed with obtuse controls.
The rest of the information does not need constant visual presence, actually the GPS is probably more interesting than anything else.
I would still be surprised if there is no HUD provided with the car. You still need some very visible notification area for event like running out of juice or any kind of malfunction. Also there still some stuff the car are bad at doing like fog lights, or putting the light on in a foggy situation ( actually almost had a crash because of that - so use of the car switching the light on or off, forgot that fog during day or overcast weather are the same to a light sensor ) Also if the car is not 100% of the time autonomous, you need to be able to tell immediately if it is enabled or not.
As for the lack of instruments, I rarely look at much other than the speedometer while driving, and if the car can read the signs and help regulate speed for me, I may not even need that. My non-Tesla car has an audible chime at 50 and 25 miles to empty, so I don't even need to look at the fuel gauge.
Turns out the way I drive involves letting the wheel slip under my hands when going around corners, and you can't do that if the circumference of the wheel moves as it turns.
Is there a reason that basically NO car manufacturer has EVER made a production model with steering by anything other than a wheel and pedals?
They said that German legislation does not allow for cars with side-stick rather than steering wheels, and that it would be cost-prohibitive to introduce - the latter is probably no longer true...
The current model S is already problematic. I have had drivers adjusting their AC almost hit other drivers because they had to look down.
On American roads? Not likely.
That's a shitty metric. Does it mean it will need intervention every 950ms for 50ms?
- "I read half the book... It was completely incoherent."
- "Which half did you read?"
- "Every other word."
But otherwise... shooting for autonomous-first at launch will be interesting indeed. How would that effect the opinions of the folks now on the wait list? I wonder how much we're really going to need/want these levels of performance with the car doing the driving for us, of if having the go-fast will end up being mostly a safety feature for collision avoidance?
It's like the hatchback-shape of the Prius. I don't think anyone does actually find that attractive, but it's a great design to tell everyone from a distance that you're a better person than them.
The current design looks transitional to me...it has the general nose shape everyone is used to without the pointless nooks and crannies. If they were really trying to fully favor aerodynamics it would look like an F1 nose.
Edit: stupid autocorrect
That's the point, it's transitional not functional. It reminds me of the Lincoln Mark 8's old rear trunk faux tire hump:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Mark_VIII#/media/File:...
I would have thought Tesla would have skipped the transitional and re-thought what a frontend should do and look like when there's no need for a grill anymore.
Modern bumpers are actually integrated fascias. [1]
I can't be the only one who hates those, I mean, Trypophobia is one of the most common phobias.
From wikipedia:
> Trypophobia is a proposed phobia (pathological fear) of small holes, particularly irregular patterns or clusters of small holes. The term was coined in 2005 from the Greek τρύπα (trýpa) "hole" and φόβος (phóbos) "fear". Thousands of people say they have the condition. It is not a recognized diagnosis or condition in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or other scientific literature.
It's definitely unusual and I'm leaning more towards disliking it at the moment but I can see that removing it would eliminate drag.
This is entirely subject to personal taste, but
Alfa Romeos' (e.g. 147) fronts look nice in PR, but look hideous with a number plate attached literally "wherever there is some space for it".
New Audis suffer from similar problem: even though the number plate does not look hideous it still looks sort of out of place on the asphalt reaching grilles.
https://www.cars.com/articles/2013/10/how-many-states-requir...
That said, on the way to full autonomy I can foresee a car that can handle 99% of the driving itself but calls on the driver to help out during the other 1%. In such a scenario the car may know where it is and isn't safe to drive, but not exactly where, or when.
Examples include the 1-lane, 2-directions-of-traffic rural roads. Unmapped car parks and private premises. Navigating around roadworks. Basically all the 'edge-case' scenarios people often cite.
The car could guess the route and you use a joystick to control the forward speed. You can use the joystick to change the proposed route as you drive. And if you wanted to leave the detected 'safe area' ("no, I really do want to drive into that car - it's a tow truck and I need to get on it!") you acknowledge a bunch of ominous warnings and control the car directly, albeit at a very low speed.
Range. Current Model S ranges are from 240m to 270m, depending on trim. Model 3: 215m.
Cargo volume. The Model S has 31.6 ft^3. The Model 3 looks much smaller.
Free lifetime use of superchargers? I haven't seen this speculated, but I'll be surprised if the Model 3 includes unlimited supercharger use; I suspect paid use of the network will be a new Tesla revenue stream.
On the other hand, smaller makes for easier parking and maneuvering, in addition to the cost savings. And I expect the Model 3 to have more and better sensors, in support of better autonomous driving, than the current Model S can support.
All said, IMO the major advantage of the existing Model S is that it exists today. Owners are paying a huge premium to get semi-autonomous driving a couple of years ahead of schedule. “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4dc6rs/officia...
This was the plan after all.
I would argue that electric car companies are appealing to a much smaller subset of potential customers than are self driving cars. But the mission behind each is very different and that flows into all the key design and marketing decisions you have to make.
Tesla can easily pivot from one to the other. But Musk is so passionate about the first, and therefore so are so many of their key people, that you wonder what happens if they pivot to being first to market with the best self driving cars that just happen to be electric.
Both are clearly the future. So what's wrong with doing both?
You say "pivot" as though these are incompatible goals, when in fact they're perfectly complementary paths to a future ideal of ground transportation.
To me, your point is like asking "Is Google a search company, or an advertising company?" They're both, in a fully symbiotic sense. You cannot describe it as one of these accurately, without the other.
I think you're drawing some arbitrary distinctions here. Making big bets in several areas is no small part of why Apple, Google and Tesla are magnets for the best engineers and programmers. There's nothing unfocused about marrying great software and hardware, which is ultimately what Tesla is doing.
A lot of Musk's bet in AV is founded on the understanding that the existing automakers are/were quite capable of making a good electric car - they just have too much incentive to drag their feet. Autonomous driving will actually be the major differentiator in an industry that didn't have the software expertise to create a decent infotainment system.
Tesla also quietly changed it's name from Tesla Motors to Tesla Energy.
Tesla may pivot to other products but not IMO to selling self driving kits. In any case, I believe mobileye does the bulk of the computer vision stuff anyway.
Well, a supercomputer isn't supposed to fit in your backback. And a rotary phone isn't supposed to be wireless and fit in your pocket and play apps.
I don't know what to think anymore! It's almost like the world isn't made of categories.
Wasn't it like 6 seconds before? Or is this the top level rear-wheel drive version?
Since we don't know the details yet, we don't know how much of a departure it will be.
I also doubt that it will have no manual control mode, so it shouldn't an issue regardless. Tesla is clearly going the route of being a strict super-set of the capabilities of other cars, until the market decides what features are obsolete many years down the road (e.g. steering wheels).
Obviously, this is all speculative since they haven't revealed what they're talking about.
And I basically just hate trying to deal with touch screens. They get smudgy and gross at the blink of an eye, and their total lack of tactile feedback demands a tedious degree of conscious attention which makes them inefficient ways of performing routine tasks, which adjustment of an automobile's cabin controls ought to be.
Could they even legally sell a vehicle with no human control right now?
Tbh, I don't think Tesla cares. They have a ~$276 million dollar interest free loan with which to build the first wave of Model 3s. They just need to make enough on those sales to finance the next round until they get through everyone who wants one.
The goal is primarily to pay for the initial production run so they don't have to get outside financing.
http://bgr.com/2016/04/03/model-3-reservations-elon-musk-276...
> Earlier on Saturday, Musk indicated that Model 3 reservations checked in at about 232,000. That being the case, if the pace of reservations keeps up, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see Tesla report 300,000 reservations sometime later this week. And while the $1,000 deposits for the Model 3 are completely refundable, Tesla has effectively secured a $276 million interest free loan from eager buyers.
This is a company that, while producing just 33K cars a year, has operating expenses of $114M per week. That $276M won't be around long enough to build a single Model 3. They're going to need a lot more money.
Do you mean that a lot of people that reserved are not serious? They had to pay $1,000 for the reservation, so that looks unlikely to me.
Or do you mean the company has inflated the number of actual reservations?
Reservations are not sales. They are just something to tout to shareholders. If they wanted real numbers they'd make it non-refundable and up the down payment. The stock trades at an absolutely insane valuation (it's actually valued not too far from massive manufacturers like Ford and GM), the company will have to take on more debt to fulfill the reservations putting the company at liquidity risk. If the orders don't come through and you have increased debt burden, you're gonna have a bad time. This isn't something I'm making up, even the analysts at UBS agree.
Huh? What "middle class" are you talking about? In the USA, 2 in 3 people can't afford a $500 car repair or $1000 emergency room visit [1]. My guess is that people putting $1000 down on a car are either pretty rich or pretty serious about buying it.
1: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/63-of-americans-cant...
This is absurd. Do you seriously think that Tesla wont have every single Model 3 sold the moment it comes off the line? People were waiting in half mile long lines for days to pre order a CAR.
Straw man. No one has said that. What they've said is Tesla just got a couple hundred million in free financing.
You can check my comment history: I'm as annoyed by the Tesla hype-machine as anybody. The games they play when reporting (or not reporting) financial metrics is astounding, and I don't understand why the SV crowd finds it acceptable for a public company.
However, I want to see Tesla and the whole EV industry thrive. People just need to curb their expectations.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auto
Is there any good analysis on the impact of EV on the gas and oil demand on the world?
??% of Ca, US cars are EV, as results, ??% of Ca, US gas/oil consumptions are reduced. If the trend continue, here's what happen when % of EV reach 10, 20, 30, 50%, the global oil demand will be drop by ??,??,?? %.It better be fully autonomous if you've ever seen how rear-wheel drive performs in a north-eastern snowstorm. Sure, there's a lot of weight over the back wheels but that sounds crazy to me as the default.
I setup my cars with a heafty amount of rear toe-in (1/4"). When the weight transfers left/right or one of the rear wheels hits a bump/hole it will push the car in one direction similar to torquing one side of a shopping cart with your hand.
A RWD setup allows the car to be more efficient with its tires (using one set for turning and one for power vs. one for both). FWD is just seen as safer because most people panic when a car oversteers. As the saying goes among driving enthusiasts: "Oversteer scares passengers, Understeer scares drivers"
In modern cars Active Stability Control (ASC) is effective in eliminating oversteer, no matter what the drivetrain setup is. Traction at stop lights would favor RWD when a car has near 50/50 weight distribution (I don't know what the Model 3 is but would guess it's close).
RWD makes the car simpler and with modern ASC is no less safe for the average driver than FWD. I'd guess that traction in a Model 3 would slightly favor RWD but tires matter more.
I don't believe that.
Not really. There are multiple Ford and Suburau models (off the top of my head) that will run sub-6.0, some models $10k cheaper than the Model 3.
Of course, where most people judge a car's power while driving it normally is the 60-80 mph time. That's the only time most people floor the accelerator, when they're pulling out to pass someone. Gasoline vehicles have a marked advantage in this metric.
It sounds like less than 6 seconds is what we should expect from the base model though.
One of the motors is turned off when not needed so you can run essentially half-power and yet still have the second one available in a split second.
For EVs you're largely just fighting against Ohm's law(constant voltage requires that you draw more amps which means resistance generates heat, etc) and to a lesser degree weight. Which has much less impact like you note.
My basic understanding of ICEs is that they are most efficient when you can run them at a specific RPM(and tune for that RPM) which is why you see Diesel-Electric Locomotives where the ICE largely acts as a generator.
That's spot on. This is why you can't use the cam from a generator on a car and vice versa (even if it is otherwise the exact same engine, such as with the Willy's engine). The cam on a generator will be very pointy to open and close the valves across a very sharply defined moment in the engine cycle, whereas on the car version the cam is much more smooth giving a wider operating range (but at lower efficiency).
The reason why Diesel Electric locomotives use the electric motor to drive the wheels rather than using the diesel directly is twofold, one the efficiency that you already noted, the second reason is that the electric motor does not need a clutch and has a torque curve much better suited to getting a large weight accelerated (much like steam power is better than ICE's at this, it's the exact same reason).
i live in sf, where a book on your passenger seat will get you a broken window and lose you a book
the tablet looks like it is going to inadvertantly encourage broken windows and is inevitably going to be ripped out of the dash
here's to hoping it retracts to under the dash when off
I don't think any reasonable definition of "vaporware" can be applied to this car, given Tesla's track record. They could have all sorts of tweaks and production issues yet, sure. But it's a pretty good bet that a tangible version of this exists and will ship.