Master Plan, Part Deux
tesla.com
tesla.com
What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. That's realistic. His two top production guys quit when he announced 2018 as the delivery date for the Model 3. His new production head, from Audi, may have given Musk a reality check.
Tesla produced about 50,000 cars in 2015 with 13,000 employees, about 4 cars per employee. Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee. Toyota produced about 9 million cars with 344,000 employees, about 26 cars per employee. So Tesla needs to get their productivity per employee up by 4x - 7x to play with the big guys. Clearly Musk has done the same calculation.
Now, though, he's admitting that they can't do it by 2018. This is prepping the stockholders for bad financial news. Tesla is going to burn a lot of cash through at least 2022.
There's no reason that Tesla can't get their productivity up to at least Ford levels in time. Ford has a much broader product line, and Tesla's car isn't that complicated mechanically. But it's not instant.
A better locksmith takes less time to open a door.
Oh, that and the fact that such cars can easily reach 300 km/h.
Next, the QA on a premium car has to me more stringent, simply because the expectations are higher.
So I can't imagine luxury car not taking more time to make than a budget car.
For example, Top Speed suggests that all other manufacturers are still playing catch-up. That it'd be nice if the seats had been updated a bit, but otherwise things are great.
http://www.topspeed.com/cars/tesla/2017-tesla-model-s-ar1729...
But within the same strategic groupings, it might become more appropriate to say "outsourcing or more/less integration is/isn't a good choice for this industry due to xyz". So at some point you might expect to see (for example) the manufacturer who mines their own metal's revenue to increase if there's ever a global shortage, compared to competitors who rely on other companies. So as in, the mining car company might have lower production numbers per employee than competitors due to a larger staff, but if vertical integration makes sense in that industry, you'd expect revenue per employee to demonstrate that over time.
In this case, if Tesla have lower production numbers per staff due to less outsourcing then that's just necessity, due to the fact that it's a tentative young company which sells a highly niche product. It'll work out over time if they can establish themselves in the industry.
But basically yeah you're correct, it doesn't make sense to look at a single metric in isolation, without taking a wider view.
EDIT: must be subcontracting...?
Ford was immediately profitable, was it not? Even before implementing an assembly line?
In what world is a Jaguar a "medium" end car? The high end Jaguars extend into Maserati territory.
If Tesla wants to be better than a Maserati or Jaguar, they need to observe how much nicer the interiors of those cars are. Consumer Reports doesn't care about that above a certain level of basic competence, but a Maserati or Jaguar buyer does.
Indeed. I was shocked when I first hitched a ride in a Model S – the interior is more spartan and cramped than that of a 90s Japanese keicar (an impressive feat, in a sense) apart from the entertainment system, which had an uglier, clunkier UI than what any web developer could have drawn you up in a week.
The sales rep's "oh don't worry about battery replacement cycles, nobody keeps a car for longer than five years anyway" statement was only the final nail in the coffin.
Note: I'd still like to believe in Tesla's world improving ambitions
I mean, sure, but you have to be awfully fanatical to put up with just how uncomfortable the cars are right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...
1. http://revenuesandprofits.com/amazon-vs-walmart-revenues-and...
For fiscal 2015 they were positive on net income: $596 million.
Q1 2016: $513 million in net income
They'll be generating $3 billion in annual net income in just another year. Sounds like a business to me, even if half of that net income comes from AWS.
Those companies are means to an end, not profit-generating machines.
How is this not investing in their future?
The only real difference is that they have higher bootstrapping costs due to the type of product they make. i.e a physical object with a complex production pipeline. The only way to ever get profitable is to heavily and intentionally reinvest in R&D. Musk is doing the only thing that a startup in this space can do and expect to succeed outside of getting acquired which would be pretty much directly counter to the stated goals of the company.
- Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
- Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car
Amazon is way better at making money to invest in growth. Tesla ?still? is in a fairly deep well, and will need investments to crawl out of it. Big question is whether they will.
Good news is that they aren't at 2012 scale anymore; bad news is that they aren't improving recently (https://ycharts.com/companies/TSLA/profit_margin)
The income increases the cash flow, which is obviously important, but it also signals to investors and bankers that there is a business, and they can invest or loan with better confidence.
The ship has been righted for now, but it was pretty good in 2000 as well.
[1] http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70R0S420110128
[2] http://www.factcheck.org/2011/09/ford-motor-co-does-u-turn-o...
That's like saying the top VC firms are all inept because most of the startups they fund fail.
It has often been the role of our government to make risky bets in order to advance step-changes in our society's progress. Those bets have resulted in such things as spaceflight, modern telecommunications, lasers and the internet to name just a few.
If Tesla indeed transforms the world as they are poised to do, their success will far exceed the cumulative failures of Solyndra and the like.
Not to mention, Tesla's competition are subsidized in many ways, most of which are more subtle than the tax credits for alternative fuels that you allude to. Failure to price in the health and climate externalities of fossil fuels amounts to subsidy, as do the trillions of dollars spent on overseas entanglements to secure fossil fuel supplies.
I love it when people champion entities like Tesla benefiting from incentive structures when it's conveniently aligned with their personal beliefs about the superiority of the tech industry, their political agendas, and/or the idolzation of people like Musk, but forget that there's a far broader and more insidious reality here.
Reply to Below: Not libertarian. I believe strongly in government regulations where appropriate and that limiting our personal liberties in certain ways is essential to guaranteeing economic and physical security. I happen to agree with the sustainability agenda as well. I disagree with the mechanism being employed to advance it. USG should instead focus on taxing/penalizing for carbon emissions as a negative externality, which would have an ancillary benefit of making alternative energy companies overall more competitive. Asking the government to make decisions about structuring incentives, by contrast, is positively asinine (you get things like ethanol). Furthermore, I have a serious problem with the government deploying tax dollars to directly benefit corporations when there is no immediate and tangible return, regardless of the context.
But you're really just throwing around a bunch of innuendo and five-dollar words to suggest the incentive structure that Tesla (and all other automakers) have at their disposal is bogus. You've provided no evidence, and Occam's Razor offers a much more reasonable explanation: becoming energy independent and sustainable would be in our national interest in a massive way, and policymakers decided these incentives offer a reasonable risk / reward for accelerating that goal.
If you object on some philosophical / libertarian grounds then fine, I disagree with you but can understand where you're coming from. But don't throw around unsubstantiated claims of corruption and "insidious realities" and expect anyone to be sympathetic to your argument when you're not actually saying anything of substance.
Does Tesla price in the health and climate externalities of the lithium cycle and the reset of their raw materials?
These blanket statements are often wrong, there are really bad instances of a government trying to manipulate markets but there are also instances where it is needed to keep businesses in check.
I would rather live in the world as it is right now than in a Corporatocracy.
This sounds exactly like the free market to me. Hapless morons who don't know what they're doing—but try to reach their goals nonetheless—as far as the eye can see.
Edit: I feel like I have to clarify this everywhere perhaps because it's an unorthodox viewpoint: of course companies need to be regulated; I'm arguing against government-sponsored incentives and subsidies. Stick to making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, thereby increasing receipts (use it to fund alternatives research, studies, etc similar to how Big Tobacco has to pay for anti-smoking ads) instead of less expensive to buy someone's product, at the cost of taxpayer dollars.
The alternative would be making petrol-car drivers paying for the actual costs of cars including healthcare for diseases related with pollution, possibly at any level of the production chain and so on.
Hidden costs are often cut away and offloaded on community (I couldn't find anything specifically related with cars (didn't have time to look for), but for comparison here's a short video that shows the real costs of meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDsSnpYZrw). Incentives make it a little bit more explicit. While it may be true claiming that Teslas cost would be higher without incentives, for sure Ford's car would be way more expensive if everything had been taken into account.
What's sad is that so many people seem to take an all-or-nothing stance on this politically. Either laissez faire or nanny state. Moderation is a dying art.
In some way I notice the irony that these incentives for automakers (aimed to reduce pollution, to keep jobs, to communitize part of the drawbacks related with cars, ecc...) are a form of socialism in the US. Well done Yankees.
And if we don't invade country X, it may come back to bite us some day, right? And if we don't prop up the auto industry buying clunkers and robbing shareholders to pay union reps top dollar, people will have to start riding bikes and millions will be out of work, right?
If you're hoping for miracles, the government would be the last place to go looking for them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and while one could argue that our society "needs" this technology just like it "needs" to invade other countries, centralized decision making never leads to optimal outcomes, let alone "miracles".
(Tesla's subsidised by lithium salt concentrations in Bolivia, but that's a rather smaller overall subsidy.)
http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
How much would it cost you to create a barrel of crude oil?
Not "extract from the ground", the usual meaning of "producing oil", which borrows rather more from "produce the evidence" than "manufacture the good". But actually start with high-entropy substrates and some energy source and synthesize oil.
Why do markets not account for this cost?
(Hotelling's Rule is ignored, and is, moreover, based on faulty logic. Curiously, Bohm-Bawerk, an Austrian Economist, gets far close to the truth in his theory of value, an exceedingly rare case in which I find myself agreeing with any Austrian principles.)
Are you going to account for the cost of making water? Not the bill you pay to the utility for use, but the actual cost of formulating water?
What about air?
How about the cost of creating a sun if you rely on solar power?
Short answer: cost, flux, total size, and rate of consumption all matter.
We've had biofuel for quite a while now.
At the turn of the 20th century, when horses were used for local transport, about 25% of US grain production went to transport fuel supply -- as horse feed. In Europe, historically, that value was closer to 33%.
Pricing these in terms of labour equivalents without mechanisation or fossil-fuel derived fertiliser and pesticides probably gives the fairest comparison.
Scaling biofuel production to present levels of petroleum consumption is entirely nontractable.
Biodiesel costs range from $300 to $1000 /bbl. That's 3-10x petroleum at its peak prices, and 10-30x its recent price of ~$30 bbl.
As an opportunistic adjunct to fuels, biomass from waste streams and some dedicated fuels production may make sense. At present scales of fuel use, it cannot and almost certainly never will compete. We'll either have to use far less fuel, or have far fewer people. Which may happen regardless.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...
There are certainly implicit subsidies for oil, in the form of the externalities like health and environmental damage from the pollution emitted when using it. But it makes no sense to me to account for the work that went into creating the oil. Hordes of microbes already did that work millions or billions of years ago. It's done, it's there, and the cost of taking advantage of that work is just the cost of extraction and use.
And actually, tracing back resources to their antecedents is useful -- there are compounds which formed through biological activity (fossil fuels, limestone, most iron ores, a particularly interesting study), and elements which formed, variously, through stellar fusion (most helium in the universe, though not on Earth, for various reasons, also C, N, O, F, and a few others), supernovae, neutron star collisions, including gold and platinum-group metals (the alchemists were really out of their league...), and, if you want the antecedent of hydrogen itself, yes, the Big Bang.
There are several factors to consider, and source resource costing (solar emergy cost, or exergic potential cost) are among them:
1. Solar (or other source) emergic cost. What was the initial energy influx basis for the resource creation. For fossil fuels, Jeffrey S. Duke's 2003 paper, "Burning Buried Sunshine", provides an excellent breakdown. Humans are burning fossil fuels at the rate of about 5 million years of accumulation per year of present consumption. Given ~200-300 million years of accumulation, and at best a partial recovery rate (not all resource can be feasibly extracted), that's a quantifiably finite period.
2. Production / renewal rate. Another response on this thread looks at water. If you live in a region where rainfall levels are high, say, Seattle, with over 1,000 mm/year, you're starting with a basis of 10 million litre/hectare of water. In Las Vegas, with 100 mm/yr, you're down to 1 million litre/hectare, and have evaporation and soil absorption to deal with as well.
If you're a farmer in western Nebraska, you might want to consider that the water you're pulling from your well represents a few thousand years of accumulation per year of use. That's not going to be particularly sustainable. And figuring your costs only on the drilling and pumping costs, rather than a capital depletion allowance for the water itself, is significant.
While the work which went into creating that resource wasn't contributed by you, it's work that isn't being performed today, at rates equivalent to present usage.
An alternate formulation which might make sense (and this is similar to the description Hotelling used in his original paper, though I came up with it independently and realised that later): say you've discovered a sudden and unexpected inheritance. Not just a rich uncle, but a rich family line has died and left you an accumulated inheritance worth, well, a lot of money.
There's a restriction. You can only withdraw as much of this as you can comfortably carry at a time, it takes some rooting around to actually provide you with the cash, and you've got to take a taxi across town to the bank in order to withdraw your funds.
Does it make sense to account for your cost of withdrawal as only the cab-fare and time costs you incur directly, or to figure in the depletion value of the account itself. I'm pretty sure a bookkeeper or accountant would want to include the latter.
Your next question concerns the size of the inheritance. If it's $10,000, you might spend much of it within a few months, if you were living on it exclusively. At $100,000, a year or two, at $1 million, you could live comfortably for some years, at $1 billion, assuming you were merely spending it down, you could live out your lifetime. The size of the account matters.
(I'm ignoring pollution and other secondary effects here.)
You might even cut others in on the deal if the total value were, say, a few trillions of dollars. Which might make it run down faster.
I'm looking up total resources (that's the total material amount, recoverable or not) of coal and oil. A 1975 USGS estimate was 14.5 trillion tons of coal, and a GeoScienceWorld estimate give 3 trillion barrels of petroleum (http://geoscienceworld.org/content/global-resource-estimates...), though that I believe excludes previous consumption, which I'll assume as that again, so a 6 trillion barrel total original endowment.
If you were to consider the equivalent energy content from what humans previously relied on for biofuel, namely wood, that's ... a lot of wood. A ton of coal is roughly the same energy as a cord of wood -- about 30 million BTU per cord of oak, 14.5 trillion tons is about 13 trillion cords. And 6 trillion barrels of oil is about 7 trillion cords of wood.
Total US annual wood production is slightly less than 20 million cord / year (http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/resource...). I'll assume global wood production is 5x that, for a nice round 100 million cord/year.
We had a 20 trillion cord total fossil fuel resource.
Swapping out that fossil fuel resource for wood production leaves us looking at 200,000 years of equivalent global timber harvest.
Again: we've consumed roughly half that -- 100,000 years of tree growth -- in just over 200 years (and most of that within the past 50). Mind that here we're not talking about input energy (emergy) but the total available energy equivalent (exergy) from fossil fuels. The input would be hundreds to millions of times as much.
(This also has a great deal to inform the question of offsetting carbon output through forestry -- we'd need phenomenally rapid plant growth, and no liberating of that carbon.)
As to your first point -- you're actually correct, we don't necessarily need to figure our cost on the basis of what it took to produce the resource we're using. We can consider the best available alternative fuels, and their cost and flux characteristics. Still doesn't look particularly promising.
Another interesting, though to me fascinating study is to look at the history of extractive resource pricing and price management over time, particularly over the past 150 years or so (the fossil fuel era). Early oil extraction especially was characterised by massive overdrilling -- the "derrick forests" of Titusvill, Oil Creek, East Texas, Los Angeles, and Kern County, all speak to that. Rising alongside this were efforts to create coordinated systems for managing that activity: John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, the 1931 initiation of extraction quotas managed via certificates of clearance through the highly inaccurately named Texas Railroad Commission and US Department of Interior (a fascinating history, see chapter 13 of Daniel Yergin's epic on oil history, The Prize, also https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/doe01, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mlc03, and http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-oil-export-controls-kemp-...), as well as national producers and OPEC.
Absent specific limits on rates of oil extraction, in the aftermath of "Poppy" Joiner's "Daisy No. 3" well, oil prices in Texas (and the US) fell from $1/bbl, to $0.13/bbl, and then further to $0.02/bbl, as wildcatters fought to out-extract one another, often on leases too small to individually segregate underground pools. It wasn't until government coercion, at force of arms (Texas and Oklahoma's governors called out their respective national guards, Texas also the Rangers, to sieze wellhead operations), that the overpumping stopped.
Again: without some level of collective, coercive power, the tendency was to simply suck wells as fast as possible, despite falling market prices (lower prices actually promoted ever-more-frantic pumping due to loan obligations), even if that destroyed longer-term productivity and potential of wells. Rockefeller described a similar rationale for his privately organised control system.
Hotelling's 1931 paper alludes to this in its introduction:
"CONTEMPLATION of the world's disappearing supplies of minerals, forests, and other exhaustible assets has led to demands for regulation of their exploitation. The feeling that these products are now too cheap for the good of future generations, that they are being selfishly exploited at too rapid a rate, and that in consequence of their excessive cheapness they are being produced and consumed wastefully has given rise to the conservation movement."
http://www.kleykampintaiwan.com/files/GradEco/hotelling.pdf
When you consider that under-priced energy, again, possibly by a factor of 100x to 1,000,000x, substitutes for labour and depresses the costs of virtually all other production, this becomes more than a passing concern.
But I don't see why looking at the energy used to create the resource, or the cost of creating it from scratch, is useful. All that matters today is what's there and how much we use. For example, consider oil versus uranium. In terms of usable energy content, there's a lot more uranium than oil on the planet. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm guessing that stellar nucleosynthesis of heavy elements like uranium is way less efficient than turning CHON into oil with photosynthesis and time. Certainly, if we were creating this stuff today, it would be way cheaper to create a megajoule of oil than a megajoule of U235. But, who cares? We have more uranium, so it ought to be cheaper per megajoule, all else being equal (which it very much isn't, of course).
You say that we're consuming about five million years of fossil fuel production per year, and that there's about 200-300 million years total. The rate is basically ignorable compared to usage, so what really matters is reserves divided by consumption rate. The relevant number is 40-50 years of reserves at current rates. For example, say it turns out that the geologists and petrochemists got it wrong, oil is actually much more energy intensive to produce naturally, and current reserves actually represent 400-600 million years of accumulation. The energetic cost accounting changes dramatically; each barrel of oil now represents twice as much input energy! But our economic situation today doesn't change one bit.
Taking your inheritance analogy, it doesn't matter how much money your rich family line started with, all that matters is how much is there now. It doesn't make a bit of difference to your spending whether your $10 million inheritance is the paltry remains of a $10 billion fortune, or the amazing end result of a $10 investment.
The whole business of input energy and cost to recreate just seems so very arbitrary. For example, why are you counting the cost of the oil, but not the cost of the oxygen you use to burn it? Both parts are necessary, and the fact that oxygen is ubiquitous and easy to access just makes it even more of a subsidy. Shouldn't we be counting not only all the fossil energy needed to create the oil we burn, but all the fossil energy needed to crack all that oxygen out of CO2?
Remind me again: this is Hacker News run by Y Combinator, right?
That said they certainly have a huge hill to climb, but as he said its one we all need to climb so great that they are pushing ahead with a business model to make it there
Right. What Tesla is attempting is orders of magnitude more difficult than your typical YC app shop with an exit strategy. I think they deserve a bit more slack than you seem willing to cut them. If it all blows up in their faces you can have your day with a smug "I told you so" but you won't be able to deny the benefits they've already provided to society via Musk's aggressive strategy and the effect that's had on the wider industry.
And that's fine. The founders of a company are free to specify its purpose in the company's articles. There is no legal requirement that says corporations must seek profits.
> Tesla Motors was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who financed the company until the Series A round of funding.[37] Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to and after Elon Musk's involvement, with Eberhard the original CEO of Tesla until he was asked to resign in August 2007 by the board of directors.
Musk didn't found Tesla. That's from wikipedia.
Now, I'm on the board of a non-profit, but I can tell you that even for for-profit corporations, fiduciary duties consists of those three duties. There is no duty of maximizing profits. There's not even a duty of maximizing share prices, which is probably what you're thinking about.
To quote the US Supreme Court: "While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind."[1]
Tesla needs to state their goal as "make the world more sustainable" so people becoming owners can do so with understanding of that goal. Shareholders need to back this goal. But fiduciary duty means they have to serve the interests of their principals, not that those interests are profit over all else.
Let's not play this game of "there is only one legitimate goal for a corporation". That's not true, de facto or de jure.
Yes Tesla's cars are "cool" and everybody wants one, but even the new "cheaper" model costs far more than the average person spends on a car. Right now, Tesla caters to the luxury market, and is viewed as a "cool alternative" to more traditional luxury makes.
Ford, Toyota et al, have models that cover just about every price range and every type of customer, from the extreme budget oriented to the extreme luxury sports car fanatic. Toyota owns Scion, Toyota, and Lexus for example - so if you need a car, chances are one of the Toyota offerings will satisfy your needs and budget. This opens the market potential to include just about every person.
The one thing that has worried me about Tesla for a long while, is Musk's claims that next year they'll sell 30% more cars, every year - something that's now proving to be an impossible feat. At some point, they were going to hit a ceiling of maximum potential sales as they attempted to wedge into the already entrenched high-end luxury sports car market - there just aren't enough buyers to keep that growth at these prices.
Where do you get your numbers from, because this[1] seems to be about right at the Tesla price point.
[1]: http://mediaroom.kbb.com/record-new-car-transaction-prices-r...
The Model 3 (Tesla's cheapest option) starts at $35,000, which means average price point is well above your link's cited $35,000 (remember, those prices in the link are after upgrades, very few people buy a completely stock vehicle).
You know, the same was said about the iPhone.
Citation needed.
The numbers I'm looking at are the following: http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-18886&...
As of March 2016:
$ 182,482,000 in Research and Development last Quarter.
$ 282,267,000 net loss in the quarter.
So even if we got rid of Tesla's ENTIRE R&D department, they lost $100 Million last QUARTER. The primary cost of Tesla is "Selling, general and administrative", which was around $300 Million.
The only other cost that's larger than their administrative costs were the $779,316,000 spent on parts.
#1 Cost: The parts (~$780 Million)
#2 Cost: Selling, General, and Administrative. $300 Million
#3 Cost: $182 Million spent on R&D.
These numbers are per quarter.
Tesla takes in more revenue than their cars cost to build. It currently is not enough to cover all the other expenses of the company.
Tesla could stop ALL R&D they're doing and they will still be an unprofitable company.
> > They make a net profit on their cars, but they are currently investing it all into aggressive expansion
> Citation needed.
The citation is right in the statement. They make a gross profit, which means they make a profit on their cars. The in turn spend more on activities that do not involve getting cars to customers. The activities that cause the company to have a net loss are not "cost of revenue" activities. Presumably the majority of that non-revenue expense involves expansion of the company.
What the company does is reinvest the profits, instead of giving it back to shareholders. It makes a lot of sense in a growing market.
That's not outsourcing, that's distribution. Every industry in the world has similar distribution channels. They still have a large sales department.
Sorry, but you don't understand Tesla's manufacturing or that of any automaker. A large amount of the assemblies are outsourced. For the larger companies even drive trains and transmissions can be but that is rare. Ford and GM cooperated on ten speed transmissions recently so that is a benefit of such sourcing.
1 - http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-14LQRE/247256098...
Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it's actually pretty meaningless on its own.
Being boring, and looking at sustainable production costs and what consumers are willing to pay is far closer to what matters than the shorthand of looking at employees per car.
It's a very important metric. The number of man-hours per item is a good stand-in for production costs. It isn't perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works.
I'm interested to hear of how much staff time is put to new production/development and how much is dedicated to maintaining the current fleet. I have to believe that Toyota walks away in that area too.
Not sure but we might be having an apples-to-oranges comparison here:
If man hours pr item are significantly better for one but the other has much lower materials cost pr item (motors, sales etc) or enormously lower fixed costs then it is not so easy to say anymore.
So considering only car constructors employees is a pretty inaccurate estimation of man-hours/item in that scenario.
EDIT: comma <=> satan
Perhaps if some of the larger manufactures have in house teams for things others outsource, it will be largely insignificant given their larger size.
Essentially it's not significant.
For example, concerning the subject we are discussing in the first place, Tesla because of the specificity of their cars probably have to produce themselves a huge part of the components of the car whereas Ford, Volkswagen,... are now to a point where a huge amount of the parts of their car are similar and can be outsourced to contractors that will decrease costs by producing only one type of components in huge quantity and provides to multiple constructors (who looks more and more like assemblers nowadays).
So I agree that it is in fact not easy to compare manufacturers on this metrics but I would believe that it's actually suggesting that Tesla does a lot more in-house than conventional car manufacturers.
So Tesla is at the same level of outsourcing like every one else. So actually you can compare the numbers.
Why is that? That seems insane.
This is an awesome analysis. Do you happen to know the numbers for BMW, the most frequently compared "like" to Tesla that I've seen? (or a similar luxury company)
If you're an American, you're twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.
A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.
I do wonder, though, how this would reshape our cities - if we're not careful. Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we're not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
On the whole, though, it's a beautiful thing.
There's the rub
The way to "save the planet" is to not drive. Driving a 5000# vehicle around thinking you're doing good for the environment is just the marketing genius of the car industry in 2016.
This is absolutely false. Lithium is not toxic to mine at all. It isn't even "mined".
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/12/lithium-mining-vs-oil-sa...
> Electric cars cause pollution
They cause zero pollution when you have solar panels on your roof and the car is properly scrapped after you're done with it.
> The way to "save the planet" is to not drive.
This is silly and impractical.
Unless you factor in manufacturing.
Realistically, at present most EV owners will not charge their cars from solar panels but from the utility mains and that means coal-generated electricity in many if not most areas.
Car manufacturing involves a tremendous investment of energy to mine and produce steel, aluminum, rubber, plastics, and electronics. Recycling itself consumes more energy, and in many cases raw virgin product is cheaper than recycled.
Not driving is impractical. Driving less, when possible, is worth considering.
Right now if you need to buy a car, the most environmentally friendly choice is probably a used (no new manufacturing) fuel-efficient conventional car.
[1] A friend of mine who owns one said the only thing worse than the 20 minute charge time is waiting 20 minutes to plug into an available spot.
[2] http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec17.pdf
Actually it would be a lot more efficient if your friend charged at home or at work rather than drive all the way to a supercharger station.
You would do well to point your friend to this PSA [1] by Elon Musk and J B Straubel during the Q&A at Tesla's shareholder meeting some months ago.
There's also a ton of energy going into the cracking of crude into its constitutions parts before it even enters the supply chain for use in ICE vehicle.
Further, centralized power generation does a much better job at filtering and removing toxic elements from its discharge stream than gasoline/diesel vehicles filtering mechanisms do.
Notwithstanding the above, fossil fuel electric plants can be removed from the grid and replaced by cleaner energy solutions without having to replace or modify the consuming vehicle.
In Germany, solar power is much more widespread, and so it is more likely that a German electric vehicle user would be riding in a vehicle charged from solar power. This is not to say anything about solar power or Germany, but rather to speak to the flexibility of the electric vehicle. Electric vehicles can depend on an infrastructure running on nuclear energy, or anything else, making it extremely adaptive to the ecological and energy needs of the future.
On the other hand, traditional combustion engine vehicles absolutely depend on fossil fuels, and they depend on a massive infrastructure that is specific to supplying fossil fuels. For a traditional combustion vehicle to shed its utter dependence on fossil fuels would mean finding an alternative and abundant fuel source to combust, and even then it would require a highly specific infrastructure to deliver those alternative fuels.
If people are living farther away from their jobs, you're likely to get more congestion, not less.
Does this effect overcome the added amount of cars on the road from people who can now drive that wouldn't be able to before? I'm skeptical.
Incidentally, I was talking with a government transportation engineer recently, and that's what keeps them up at night - trips that are too long or just too inconvenient today become doable with self driving cars.
AFAIK none of the current autonomous control technology coordinates in any way with other vehicles or any kind of central control facility. Human drivers using Waze is probably the closest approximation of that to date.
Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?
One other point I wanted to address. One negative side of sprawl is how it affects natural environments - but, again, does it really have to, or do we do it just because it's the easiest and cheapest way to implement it? It feels like living less densely could actually be beneficial for the environment if done right, compared to the cities. Consider: a metropolis will always carve a chunk out of nature and replace it with a dense grid of roads around high rises, completely ruining the ecological system in the affected area - heck, our cities even have their own microclimates now, because of how much heat we pump out at once in a single place.
On the other hand, a single residence does not have a significant impact; and if you space them out sufficiently, you can preserve the original environment in that space between. Infrastructure is trickier and more invasive, but we've seen some trends towards more localization recently (e.g. with residential solar, composting etc).
Who knows, perhaps we can actually make this description from "The Diamond Age" a reality?
"The prevailing architecture here, among those who had not adopted neo-Victorian precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people were somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell even a handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched monotonously up the tumbling slopes toward the frozen, sodden ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half buried, a house wasn't even a proper house; it was an association of modules, scattered about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels."
The alternate future would have seen everyone living in dense urban areas paying most of their wages as rent to the descendants of gilded age land owners.
edit: spelling
Which is what is happening now anyway. The suburban sprawl merely delayed it by a few decades (okay, maybe half a century, to be generous), but all the underlying issues with it are still there.
Modern urbanism is very opposed to urban sprawl because of those and many other reasons. Transport is just one aspect of it.
I'm not sure that higher pollution is innate in lower densities, or whether that is due to the specific way our suburbs are designed today, and the technologies (such as ICE for transportation) that we use to enable them. It feels like an engineering problem.
And sure, putting everyone into a giant anthill might make it cheaper to contain and dispose of all the generated pollution. But then we should be honest and admit that it's about cost, not about what's best.
Small businesses - I don't think there's any innate value to them, in a sense that we need as many as we need to serve our needs, but there's no "right" for any particular small business to be viable in a world with changing conditions. If suburbs can sustain fewer small businesses, so be it.
Segregation is an orthogonal issue. I think you meant stuff like "white flight", but it is a symptom rather than a cause. If you prevent people from moving away, it will not resolve the tensions that make them desire to move - indeed, it may well exacerbate them.
What you refer to as "modern urbanism" sounds like an ideology that insists that it's the right solution for everyone, and those who disagree should be forced into it for their own good. I think that different people have different preferences in this aspect, as they do in most others, and that any approach should, ideally, try to respect those preferences, rather than ignoring them, or pretending that they are irrelevant.
In a car oriented suburb where you have to drive to literally every location you have to try extra hard to get even a basic level of exercise.
FWIW, the suburb where I live is on the edge of a wilderness area. There are several great walking, cycling and hiking trails within a 2 mile radius. Some of those are fairly steep, too, so even one mile provides a good workout. I find that I engage in these activities far more often than what I lived in a large city, and had to drive for quite a bit before getting anywhere bigger than a tiny block-sized park.
Because humans are irrational.
Gentler answer: Because of a variety of social, political, and economic pressures. For example, quick list because I really shouldn’t be spending time on this:
* Social: Running away from black people.
* Political: Spreading out the population in case of nuclear war. Accommodating population growth without the headache of having to tear down any existing building. Giving the white flight voting bloc the housing that they think they deserve.
* Economic: A fad in having housing physically separated from jobs and other commercial activities, like the current ridiculous fad of flat UI design in software. Objectively worse, but that’s what you get paid to build and favorable financing to buy.
What I care about is that suburbs are not sustainable. The climate change crisis is acute now, and I look at the per capita use of energy, water, and infrastructure (how many miles of roads per capita, how many miles of driving per capita, how many miles of water pipes per capita, how much water usage per capita), and on no measure are suburbs better than dense cities. Take away debt financing for the infrastructure, which eventually does stop working, and I don’t think most suburbs would physically survive.
If you moved cattle or poultry around like we move people, you'd get fined and put out of business. Deservedly so, because of the risk of spreading disease and wiping out whole crops of valuable animals. But people, not so important I guess.
But I think it'll have an even larger effect on suburban areas. Shopping centers, strip malls, and similar will no longer need to have massive flat single-story parking lots, freeing up a huge amount of space. Likewise for major employers, and commuter parking lots for mass transit.
Instead of 100 people owning 100 cars they drive 5% of the time, they could own 10 summonable cars that drive them around 50% of the time.
The first scenario requires 95 parking spots. The second only 5. There is still as much traffic on the roads, and as much transport work being done, but most of the space now needed for parking can be put to other use.
This would have benefits today, but still rarely happens. A very small fraction of massive businesses have shift workers do this to more efficiently handle the volume that transitions between shifts would otherwise cause, but the vast majority of businesses do not. I don't think self-driving cars would change this.
> Also add in more home offices.
This would help today as well, but I don't think self-driving cars will change this either. (And if they do, it might not be in the direction you'd hope: self-driving cars might cause people to tolerate longer commutes.)
Which is quite different from "car savings", if we're being picky.
Source: Personal conversation with ZipCar analyst.
One could do this already by just taking taxis everywhere.
This obviously doesn't happen that much.
What is autonomous car technology going to change that will make this concept a reality?
If you're an American you're more likely to die from suicide than you are from motor vehicle related injuries. You're more likely to be poisoned than to die in a motor vehicle crash. You're 16 times more likely to die from heart disease or cancer.
Compared to 1950, motor vehicle death rates have more than halved.
And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we'll be spared?
Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger.
Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-24 the death rate is 21.5. From 24-75 the rates drop a few points for both sexes and then increase again after 75.
> In the medium term, fully-autonomous vehicles will eventually cut both of those numbers to virtually zero.
My point is, the statistics may be painting a different picture when viewed in the whole. Even if this specific case is true, we may just be trading one cause of death for another. There's no guarantee overall injury or "suffering" will be reduced.
> When they're available worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
Maybe, and maybe when everyone can afford them. Yet still, even today in America, more likely to die to the Flu than you are to motor vehicle related injuries.
I'm all for automated cars, but I'm skeptical of the rhetoric that gets tossed around.
The same is true when you prevent death by any means at all. Everyone dies eventually by some cause. This does not mean we shouldn't try to prolong life where we can by avoiding early, needless death! (Otherwise why would we even have airbags or seatbelts, etc?)
I believe a better standard is to look at QALY -- quality-adjusted life years. That deducts relatively little for, say, a heart-attack at age 85 (you're already at your maximum life expectancy), but would put a heavy weight to, say, a pre-teen girl crippled by an auto accident, but surviving for life.
https://plus.google.com/+MarlaCaldwell/posts/BUZH36tmjso
http://www.cbs46.com/story/31596864/two-children-hospitalize...
While self driving cars are part of the picture towards reducing deaths in this group, it's incomplete; and you might do just as well with better parental controls and driver behavior reporting embedded into vehicle control software. Some of this is already available, but I have a feeling it's used far less often than it otherwise could be; which speaks to differing levels of parental involvement in the safety of their teenagers.
At the same time nobody's discussing taking motorcycles off the road and we're not at a point where we can put the requisite technologies in motorcycles to grant them the same safety we're supposing automated vehicles will possess. These vehicles in particular kill a disproportionate amount of young males.
Even if we do add these technologies to a motorcycle, you can still buy an ATV, or a snowmobile, or a farm tractor or any number of other off-road gasoline powered gadgets that can quickly become lethal.
I have nothing against the advancement of the safety of human society through technology, but I don't like the taste of the automated vehicle kool-aid that gets passed around and I'd like us to hedge our bets. That's all.
While autonomy is great and will definitely save many lives, it is absolutely not on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics. Not even close.
You're comparing the deaths of millions to thousands.
1.3 million people die every year. This very well may be on that scale.
There is a huge assumption underlying this: That computer systems would be more intelligent than humans.
I believe the opposite: Computer systems will be much dumber than humans, and increase the number of accidents if ever adopted on large scale.
But... I quite like the theory that a developer has spent time (whilst not under much pressure) analysing crashes and potential crash scenarios, and programming to accommodate; rather than me trying to make a good-and-safe decision in milliseconds in the heat of the moment.
Also, you can sleep in the car, which would greatly solve our sleep deprivation problem, which would boost productivity massively.
Commuting is the worst part of my day by a big margin. If I can get 2 hours of extra sleep instead, I'd be way more productive
This is due to safer cars, no doubt.
I'd love to see some stats between 2008 and 2015, which I believe would show the abundant increase in distracted drivers thanks to smart phones.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/USA_annu...
This future is interesting because both living way out in the suburbs AND living in a city both become more attractive.
Though many US city demographics are different to anywhere else in the world due to white flight - the "wealth donut" around a poor inner city rather rather than people getting poorer as you move further out in the suburbs.
I was just thinking about this today (and have been for a while now), but with regards to vehicle comfort.
I drive a small sedan, but have ridden in pickup trucks and SUVs. They are far more comfortable than the sedans the way they sit taller, have far more room, and feel like a small bubble protecting one from the rest of the world.
This is a danger on two fronts: safety, and comfort leading to more driving. If we continue to make cars more comfortable, we continue to abstract the idea that we are zipping around in 3,000 pound death machines, thus leading to more reckless or risky behavior.
As autonomous vehicles roll out to the public, no doubt people will expect computers, internet, and television to be front and center. Others may take naps during commutes. But with this, rather than curing the disease that is longer and longer commutes due to policy that encourages sprawl, entertainment will just treat the symptoms.
So grey-hound or car rentals are your best bet unless you already own a car.
There are also legal questions about self driving. For example if my theoretical fully self driving hits a passenger on the zebras that hasn't dresses up for the liking of radars, who is guilty? Certainly there needs to be put in place a big infrastructure for interautomobile communication to effectively avoid crashes. Infrastrutture is unavoidable.
This is like saying: if the electric infrastructure is not good and widely available, then give everyone a generator.
I like this analogy!
My comment wasn't about how I think things should be, just an observation about how they currently are. Currently in parts of the US (and I'm sure other parts of the globe too), the public transport infrastructure isn't there.
That being said, I long for the day when cities or companies maintain fleets of self-driving cars/buses I can summon as needed.
If you can take a vehicle directly to your destination, or a short walk from it, things works pretty well. If you need to transfer, even once, you can easily double trip time (consider a typical commute is ~20 minutes one-way).
Scheduling transfers with shared-roadbed (e.g., bus, light rail) systems is all but impossible.
Prior to the creation of early transit systems (horse-drawn omnibuses, either wheeled or tracked), few cities had a cross-section of more than 1-2 miles, as 1 miles is about a 20 minute walk. Streetcars (horse, electric, steam) extended that based on their average speed, typically 5-15 mph, with a 5-10 mile commute becoming possible though still usually less, and those commutes forming along rail lines, hence a hub-and-spoke city layout (see for example Chicago). Dense grids such as New York's were unusual.
Personal (or small-ridership) vehicles can go directly point-to-point, and make longer, flexible-route commutes possible (I'm not saying this is a good thing, merely a fact), though requiring parking, chauffers/cabbies, automatic vehicle control, etc.). In an interesting parallel, one reason there were so many horses in late-19th-century America was because of railroads. You had 30-60 MPH transit along fixed routes, but limited movement within cities or towns. So horses, wagons, and coaches to get to and from railway stations for goods and people. Petrol-powered automobiles replaced horses before they substituted for trains, though railroad use was already in decline by 1920 (rising one last time due to fuel rationing in WWII).
Upshot: there's a place for public transit, but almost certainly only with massively revamped land-use within urban and suburban regions.
As far as the rest of the world loving it, that's ridiculous. The mom in rural Kenya walking miles each day for water.. I bet she'd love a car. When you have to get to a meeting and its 40C outside, I'm sure a brisk walk would be just adorable.
Not everyone can afford to live within walking distance.
There's public transport, there's biking, even segways and hoverboards and those motorised skateboards everyone loves, and the list goes on. All of which are technologies which themselves can be improved too.
Taking bikes as an example, since I'm most familiar with those: Dutch infrastructure is practically built around it[0] and for the vast majority of trips, which are short-distance, it is a far better solution than cars. (of course the Netherlands is unfairly advantaged here, being compact and flat, but that does not make bikes useless elsewhere). For long distance trips a combination of public transport and a locally rented bike is usually all you need to get around. Amsterdam is a famously bike friendly capital, but all our cities are, really, and especially in smaller ones like Groningen it is the de-facto mode of transportation[1][2].
As for your Kenya example, in most contexts bikes are arguably a better solution in developing countries than cars: it needs no fuel, is simple enough to fix yourself, possible to make from local materials even (see Ghana's bamboo bikes[4] for example), less dependent on roads and existing infrastructure and still enough of a time and energy saver that it brings a lot of wealth to the people who own one.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei/videos
[1] https://vimeo.com/76207227
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...
So in this case yes, designing a better car may be a big part of the solution.
> The report also concluded that, despite these advantages, public authorities will not commit to building PRT because of the risks associated with being the first public implementation.
Of course, there's also the question of whether this will be more or less efficient than a smart fleet of buses, for example.
Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident).
The problem is that a typical person doesn't care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are "normal." We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and/or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber/Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve.
Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone's built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn't yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.
A jury needs to award damages against A) the grieving widow of the drunk driver or B) A large corporation. I suspect the latter will be at least an order of magnitude higher. This means that until autonomous vehicles are an order of magnitude safer, the car companies will have to absorb more damages than the sum of what all of their customers would have.
Your concern about sprawl could come true, or vehicles could switch largely to on-demand access, where urbanization will provide the critical mass for on-demand vehicle use, making the exurbs relatively more expensive.
I woke up this morning feeling sullen (many factors involved). I didn't feel like going to work. I could hardly get out of bed. I just sat for a few minutes staring in the vacuumn. Something told me to check Hacker News (I am trying to avoid it in morning), and the top link was this. I went through it twice. It instilled hope and enthusiasm in me. I woke up in an instant and rushed to work to do great stuff.
Thanks for the article I am typing this at work, else would have wasted the day filled with self-loathing and despair. Hang in there guys, it gets better. Do Great Stuff.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m...
While there are always ups and downs in life, general disconnection with the world would be good to dig deeper into.
I wanted to give it a creative twist, sad it turned out dramatic. And I agree with you. Sometimes what motivates you brings you down due to the burden of expectations.
Let me also recommend popping-pills. It's not enough by itself, but it can help you do the yak-shaving that is needed for getting out of a dead-end job. At least speaking for myself, without medication, updating a resume, practicing interviewing skills, and researching job prospects (or alternatively doing market research, developing an MVP, filling out paperwork for a business, and seeking seed funding) could take years.
Yeah, news about Tesla and SpaceX often do the trick for me. Those two companies seem to be hell-bent on pushing us into a brighter, better future.
As much as the Internet transformed society, I also can't help but feel like we were on the track to have achieved these things and got distracted by our global communications and selfie-cat picture delivery network and are only now starting to come to our senses as the ubiquity has occurred and the ecosystem of necessary applications has become fleshed out, matured and developed a commercial angle.
If you look at his pre-hardware days, he built basically a e-phonebook when paper phonebooks were still all the rage and a couple payment companies. Both no-duh companies in hindsight.
Musk's plans feel like he's taking a derailed train, applying some common sense grease (solar panels on electric cars? MADNESS! Reusable rocket stages instead of throwing away the entire ship? ~~CRAZY!~~) and getting our civilization going again.
He's also really really public about his plans and telegraphs his moves years in advance...and yet very few seem able to execute anywhere near his league.
I sometimes feel if things had shaken out differently and Steve Jobs was younger than Musk and was running a successful Apple, Musk might try to recruit him with a "do you want to sell cat picture delivery boxes for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
I don't know if Musk is going to succeed in the long run, and I hope serious competition finally shows up (because that makes each of his industries healthier), but seriously,
it's about fucking time.
Additionally, the existing players in the rocket market didn't have much incentive to innovate given how few players there were. Your guess is as good as mine on why the automobile industry didn't continue much EV research after the 90s.
Then a startup comes along, reinvents or polishes that product and is very successful. Eventually it turns into a BigCo. And the cycle repeats.
SpaceX market share (Tesla too for that matter) will NEVER have a "hockey stick" growth chart... The tech is too hard
I don't think this is the correct comparison. A car used correctly is safe. We have huge numbers of road accidents because most people are unable to reliably use a car correctly. The value of an 'autopilot' functionality is that it should be much better at using the car correctly in the real world than a human.
What matters is not how many accidents result when using autopilot 'correctly', but how many accidents result from using autopilot in the real world.
Also, because autopilot is primarily used on particular road profiles, it's not fair to compare accidents per autopilot mile directly with accidents per human driver mile. You need to adjust for the fact that autopilot is not used during more complex driving anyway.
I'd be very interested to know what the statistics are for those, since the recent press has given me a (potentially incorrect) impression that autopilot has lead to a relatively large number of serious accidents compared to the number of cars deployed.
It's probably why so much people keep resisting evolution like autopilot, they can't admit that even them can someday fail and crash. They believe that if they are good drivers they will avoid it.
Sadly very good drivers die every day and not only because of someone else's mistake.
Of course a computer or a machine can fail too, but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do. Because we can be careless, sleepy, drunk, unskilled,...
Now the real problem we will face (what scares me even though I'm pro-autopilot) is to accept to hand our lives to machines that will have to make choices in emergency situations (should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it ?, who is responsible in case of a crash ?,...)
Ok I know this is my little cause of the moment, but seriously why are computers apriori better at anything? Sure they don't make poor life choices but they are absolutely at the mercy of the quality of the algorithms, sensors, operating system, training data and physical computational hardware.
But seriously, the most important part of that sentence 'safe' is absolutely unproven.
Autonomous systems, as a technology, are capable of performing better than humans; that doesn't imply that some particular autonomous system (e.g. Tesla's Autopilot) does so right now.
Maybe eventually, but what I'm interested in is right now, does the tesla autopilot fail more often than a human driving in similar conditions. My suspicion is that it does.
Consider this anecdote: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132
Then rethink if you really believe that this pedestrian deserves to be dead because you don't trust the data and the world-class engineers for which this is literally their job everyday.
Your statistic ignores the fact that autopilot is only used in relatively simple situations, and since you're measuring fatalities only, you need to compare it only with cars of equivalent safety ratings.
If you have statistics comparing humans and autopilot in relevant situations I'd be very interested, but the ones you quote are exactly the ones I'm complaining about as being nonrepresentative.
Even considering all miles equally, a rate of 1 per 130 million autopilot miles (a much too small statistic from which to generalise) still does not compare particularly well to a lot of cars driven by humans, e.g. the BMW 7 series.
Incidentally, it's not at all clear that the situation described in your anecdote even involved the autopilot functionality, as it sounds like it was autonomous breaking which is a standard feature on many cars.
This is the average for all cars on all roads, in all driving conditions.
To have a meaningful comparison, we would need to know the fatality rate for new luxury sedans on divided highways in good weather conditions.
the real shocking truth is none of these systems is capable of driving when even skilled drivers might need the assistance. think about it this way, car safety systems are designed to insure recovery of safe driving during some of the worst conditions yet self driving systems cannot handle most of these poor conditions as they cannot accurately see and assess the situation.
I'm pretty sure that on contrary, autonomous car constructors are actually testing their cars in the worst possible conditions even some that are unlikely to ever happen to anyone. At least it's what Google is telling about their test process.
It would seem as the life expectancy of dwarves will go up.
Indeed, and that may often be because of taking warranted risks. It bothers me that when making comparisons of driving safety people tend to suffer from absence blindness and discount other important things like the death avoidance cases. Let's say you have a bleeding injured person which requires urgent access to a medical facility. Here the driver can take some risks in order to save a life. Or any number of causes that may warrant risk taking. Now, take away the control from that driver and leave it to an autopilot that may compute the driving parameters in order to satisfy minimum pollution, safety (from the manufacturer's judicial liabilities prospective), and whatnot. Heck, I foresee cases when the autopilot won't even approve any movement due to whatever considerations when there may be passengers in risk of loosing their lives if won't reach somewhere soon enough. For now people can take risks, which may be both good and bad. Don't look only at the bad side.
That's exactly what I argue about. In a rare (but very important) occasion where risk taking would be needed, you're forcing the moral dilemma of an even rarer occurrence with a presumed victim. We don't know if it would come to that. For all I care there might be only some speeding on a rainy road. My car will recommend going slowly for my own sake, but in that moment I care less for me personally and more for avoiding wife's impending death. Actually, I fear that my car will not limit itself to recommending, it will force that on me, because it knows better, because the people behind the said decisions won't be only the engineers trying give their best, but also lawyers doing "mercantile calculation of legal liability", politicians trying to score on public safety through their regulations, and so on!
Even if the problem exists in the early days, I'm pretty sure this is the kind of things that can be dealt with easily later. Those car are already capable of evaluating dangerous situations for others and I don't think that's unreasonable to believe that they will adapt their comportment to conditions and even in some special cases allow for risks taking if it only concerns the one that chose so.
And don't forget that we don't speak about only one company. There will be concurrence as it exists today and if some constructors are so limiting in the behavior of their cars that people die in it when conditions would have allowed to save them otherwise then soon enough someone will come with a car that can deal with that situation and so forth.
If a driver ever has to make that choice, they were going too fast in the first place. You should never be going faster than the stopping distance to the nearest blind spot, unless you're driving on a controlled access highway.
I seem to remember reading a paper postulating drivers unconsciously always try to avoid crashing their side of the car into hard objects.
A human, with proper training and heuristics, can reasonably be expected to never make a mistake that causes a terrible accident.
Unfortunately, a large part of "proper training" involves being driven around as a passenger for your entire childhood, immersed in a car culture. Further, the heuristics are commonly ignored by males younger than, say, 25.
fighter pilots make mistakes causing terrible accidents. and they're a group of humans that were pre-screened to ensure physical/mental/emotional fit, and had extensive training.
And in my opinion the only reason that can make you believe that is that there is, fortunately, few enough car crashes that you think those who had never crashed avoided it because of their skills.
Of course skills and training will allow you to behave well in a lots of situations that could have killed you otherwise but my conviction is that if you go through life without a big accident, a huge part of it is due to luck. Luck that you didn't encounter the situation in which training and skills couldn't have saved you.
1. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/front-crash-pr... 2. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings
Disclaimer - I work for GM, any opinions are my own.
Which would you prefer? Going at 100 km/h with autopilot on today's highways, sharing the road with people without autopilot, or going at 250 km/h with autopilot on a highway where everyone else is also on autopilot?
We will have to follow a likely tortuous path to get from now to then, but I am totally convinced we will get there.
For some numbers, see https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-you-drive-a-Tesla-S-P90D-... . The top comment is about racing, but the one below it lists 300Wh/km at 160km/h and 380Wh/km at 180km/h. That's a quarter more energy per km (!) for going 20km/h faster.
A car is safe when it's used correctly, and all the other cars on the road are used correctly, and all the people and animals near the road behave correctly, and the weather behaves correctly.
It was in fact the whole point I was making that it's generally not possible in the real world for a human to consistently use a car correctly. That's why I don't care about statistics for autopilot 'when used correctly'. I'm interested in autopilot as it gets used in the real world.
But now that he's confirmed it all officially: this NUTS. This is so awesome. The press is going to go crazy with this.
I wonder what will happen to Uber...seems like it will be hard for them to compete with the rates of cars that don't have to pay their driver a living wage, nor pay for gas.
Electric semis-- THANK GOD. I live in Chicago and I can't tell you how sick I am of the massive exhaust plumes billowing over me as they pass by, and the roaring of their engines on the street outside my apartment.
If those sensors eventually do become really cheap, then Tesla could use them too and negate any advantages Google might have had.
[1] http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lid...
people are trying to fix this problem too
Complete LIDAR units are already available for under $500[1]. There are other, cheaper sensors which aren't as good as full LIDAR but are available for under $100[2].
There are plenty of other options hitting the market soon too[3]
[1] http://www.teraranger.com/products/teraranger-lidar/
[2] https://www.pulsedlight3d.com/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/12/0...
Back in 2003, I dragged a VC down to see Advanced Scientific Concepts in Santa Barbara. They make the best flash LIDAR. But they were happy being a DoD and aerospace contractor, selling expensive one-offs. The Dragon spacecraft uses an ASC flash LIDAR to dock with the space station. DARPA buys their units. But their price point is around $100K. There's no inherent reason it has to be that expensive, but it takes custom sensor ICs made in small quantities. Last March, Continental AG (German tire/brake/auto parts company) bought the technology from ASC.[1] We'll have to see how that works out. This is the right technology if the price point can be brought down.
[1] http://www.spar3d.com/news/lidar/flash-lidar-company-acquire...
Except that is exactly what Nvidia did, and it worked out fine for them: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316
Furthermore, they augmented the data with left/right-offset cameras to supplement the data with examples of "bad" camera views. This is not present on Tesla cars (because these sensors are only used for training purposes)
In fact, the paper actually supports my point. They collected all this data for one task, lane keeping. They subdivided the problem of autonomous driving, and managed to solve one small subproblem (the easiest subproblem of autonomous driving, solved for decades already). They avoided the need for annotators, but only because they used specialized purpose-built cameras to augment the data.
So why not several autonomous subsystems that use specialized purpose-built cameras and don't need annotators? I'm not saying that like it's easy - obviously it's not. Just seems scalable.
Put the panels alongside the road. Not on the vehicles. Not on solar freaking roadways, which are the stupidest idea since stupid. But in medians, on extant construction, and in concentrated high-insolation solar farms (deserts, etc.).
We're going to need one hell of a lot of panels.
Just put them anywhere, it doesn't matter. Space is cheap. Rooftop space is even cheaper.
There's not sufficient rooftop space for present electrical needs, nor future likely needs. But yes, it's a good start.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27uq3a/facing_...
The first rebuts the initial premise soundly and points to multiple other critiques.
TL;DR: an exceptionally poor and expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
The Tesla Autopilot crash in Florida has led directly to the Missouri governor's veto of a bill to allow big rig platooning--a semi-autonomous technology that lets trucks travel in close pairs (or more) for aero/fuel efficiency and safety benefits.
The backlash is going to get worse before broad public acceptance gets better. The rest of the US ain't SV.
Veto: http://trucker.com/blog/autonomous-tech-honeymoon-over
Platooning: http://peloton-tech.com
[0]: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098997_uber-ceo-to-tesl...
Travis wasn't being literal; he knows there aren't going to be 500,000 available for a single company to buy for many years. And even if it weren't redirecting profits, Tesla still wouldn't allow a single entity to buy up the entire output of their factories, preventing nearly all consumers from getting any. That would be crazy. And Travis knows that. He was more just expressing Uber's enthusiasm about the idea of autonomous electric cars. If he could, he would, but he knows he can't.
They are in the business of making money, and if Uber offers to pay a premium or sign a contract, it would allow Tesla to grow much quicker, expand capacity, and make even MORE money.
A self driving car bought by Uber would pay for itself in under 2 years easy. I am sure Uber would pay quite a lot for THAT opportunity.
Time will tell.
1. Semis. A typical long haul semi gets well under 10MPG. In some cases not much more than half that. They are heavy and need a lot of energy to move. A Tesla Model S weighs 4650 lbs and has a range of a couple of hundred miles. A semi truck can weigh up to 80,000 lbs. That is a lot of weight to get rolling and a lot to pull up a grade. Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highway speeds where air resistance is at a maximum. To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.
2. Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.
3. Enable your car to make money for you. I don't want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes. So legal liability laws will have to change. If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don't want to wait for another one. I don't want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat. I feel that my car is an extension of my home. It's personal space that I don't want to share with random strangers.
YMMV.
This can probably only work when the car is old such that its value has already been depreciated significantly.
Not for people that can afford to own a Tesla and have it sit idle waiting for them 90% of the time (like all of today's owners).
Why would a self-driving cargo vehicle drive at highway speeds? A human truck driver can only drive 11 hours/day, an autonomous vehicle can be on the move 24/7 and so could travel at slower, more efficient speeds while completing trips on similar time scales.
> To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.
Don't forget about the solar roof unit. There is a lot of surface area on a trailer. This could offset some of the energy requirements along with other technology such as regenerative breaking. Also consider that a supercharger network might be constructed.
> Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.
I disagree. The evidence is to the contrary technically speaking. The matter is more subjective on the social front, but we've seen how popular attitudes change to technology. It might be a fatuous example but consider how it was once uncool to be online and then MySpace happened, and consider how it was anathema to be anywhere near online dating, the archetypal hallmark of a loser, then Tinder happened and now it's almost de rigueur in the mainstream.
> Enable your car to make money for you. I don't want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes.
Insurance (including public liability insurance) is already a thing. Insurance is priced according to risk, so when autonomous vehicles are here and much safer than human drivers the insurance will be priced as such.
> If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don't want to wait for another one.
The post alluded to making your car available when you're at work etc. I expect the intention is ensure it has returned to you by the time you want to go home.
> I don't want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat.
These are valid concerns I share too.
Solar on the roof is most likely rather insignificant and will also just add weight.
An ISO container that could fit on a truck trailer is typically 40'x8'. Solar panels are, on the sunniest of days, making 10-14 watts per square foot. This gives us:
40x8=320sqft assuming panels with no borders.
Assuming 14 watts per sqft (optimal conditions) we'd end up with 4,480 watts. Assuming 100% efficiency converting this into usable motion, we'd get 6 BHP. A normal semi truck has 350-600HP, so this is a drop in the bucket compared to their normal output power. As far as how much of that they use while cruising, I'd wager that it's much more than the 1-2% boost which solar-powered electric would provide (again remember that my calculations assume cloudless sky, no dust on panels, no weight or aerodynamic penalty, no maintenance costs, 100% conversion efficiency, etc).
They reason you don't see them is because it's not worth it. The aero mods under and behind the trailer on the other hand ARE worth it, and this claims that a specific version of a "trailer tail" gives a 6.6% boost to fuel economy at 65MPH: http://realtruckdriver.com/what-do-i-think-about-semi-truck-...
The truck logistics industry has been struggling with this problem for years. How do we increase fuel efficiency from the days of 90s Caterpillar engines dragging 80K lbs at 4.3 mpg while simultaneously decreasing emissions while simultaneously figuring out how to make the truck itself lighter and able to move more cargo in a single load?
Autonomous electric trucks would improve "fuel" economy and minimize downtime caused by the limits of human endurance, but at what cost? How many miles of range would the batteries have to have to compensate for the slower cruising speed and additional stops needed to recharge them? How much DOT downtime has to be eliminated to make up for being able to pull a few thousand pounds less on each trip, owing to the massive number of LiOn batteries scattered around the truck and trailer?
When I worked at Penske Truck Leasing in the late aughts, I'd have fascinating conversations with truck drivers on the math they were doing to optimize for fuel economy and load capacity. The switch one of Penske's clients made in changing their fleet to DEF Volvos with 240 gallons of diesel capacity compared to the classic Detroit Diesel Freightliner Centuries with dual 150-gallon tanks caused many an angry tirade.
Many of the drivers were constantly juggling juuuuuust enough fuel to make it to the destination and back; the trailer they were headed to pick up was so heavy they couldn't have more than ~200 gallons of fuel or they'd be over 80K and fined accordingly at the scales. Good luck making that 1200 mile round trip on your 200 gallons, driver.
I'm not sure trucks are the answer. We'd need too much overhauling of the current system to make it worthwhile. Without increasing weight loads, which destroys our infrastructure even faster, as well as rethinking how trailers are loaded and unloaded to maximize the 24/7 automated nature of autonomous fleets... We're a long way off.
And, anyways, aren't cargo ships and trains basically already electric and their massive diesel engines are just powering the electric motors? No weight limits or problems caused by slow cruising speeds in those applications, that I'm aware of.
It actually shows that neither of you are paying attention. Musks article did not say anything about putting solar panels on the roof of trucks. He only talks about solar panels on the roof of buildings.
1. It's local, so it's always near a charger 2. They're smaller, so easier to build in their existing factory space 3. Possibly the biggest perceived win for the environment, as people wouldn't see exhaust soot anymore right outside their window 4. Stoplights - the box trucks spend more time accelerating from a light, so they need torque. Something that electric motors have from a dead stop.
This, at least in most of the United States, is not a correct statement of the law. Absent something like Negligent Entrustment[1] or Vicarious Liability[2], one's ownership of a vehicle does not determine if one is liable if damage is caused while another is operating the vehicle. Some might be under this impression because we tend to purchase insurance "for a vehicle", however liability is placed upon a negligent driver (not owner). Somewhat of a discussion of this is found here: http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2014/06/05/249762...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligent_entrustment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability
I'm sure there are some exceptions e.g. if your vehicle is stolen, or in cases of a clear contract such as a vehicle lease or rental.
Subject to the foregoing, it seems entirely reasonable that if I allow a random stranger to use my car while I'm at work, that is my decision and my responsibility. And I would not do it.
Ummm... Where the hell do you live where this is the case?
Who else would be responsible, if not the owner?
As for power density... going to a turbine engine feeding electric power systems is a sufficiently big win compared to straight-up diesel ICE. There's a big industry group looking into this:
http://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2014/03/26/...
2. Maybe so, but it will happen, and the delay won't really hinder Tesla. They're not dependent on it. It's not like they can't sell cars without it. It's just another tier of advancement to be reached in time.
3. Maybe you don't want anyone using your car (nor would I), but that's why it's optional. A lot of people will love this. Owning a car of that level of quality for a greatly reduced price thanks to earned revenue. I assume the app will let you monitor its location, and you can anticipate when you'll need it back again and call it back before that time arrives. Or....just take someone else's car if you're in such a rush :) Sharing is caring.
But that's an enormous inversion of expense that falls on the trailer owners. The tractor-trailer model works so well because it concentrates complexity and cost in the tractor.
At present trailers are mechanically fairly simple and require only routine servicing with a basic toolkit. They draw power from their tractor. An owner can maintain a fleet of trailers to match their peak demand and are immediately available. Just charter a tractor and away they go.
Battery-equipped trailers will be much more complex, heavy and maintenance-intensive. More expensive but with a smaller payload and prolonged periods of unavailability whilst charging. The cost of haulage charters will have to reduce by magnitudes to make that an attractive preposition.
People still treat this company as if it is some stoner's living room project, not a multi-billion dollar organization that built the best electric car on the planet while its sister company built a reusable rocket
I agree that the power densities for long-haul, BEV trucking simply don't make sense, even with platooning technologies. Intermittent fast-charge stations plus catenaries, with off-grid battery capabilities, would be a possibility however.
Another option would be for always (or nearly-always) tracked operation, with what's effectively a cargo-streetcar function within cities and suburbs, and traditional rail off.
Functions such as field-to-depot transport would almost certainly still require fueled vehicles.
I think that highways in the future will become electrified and then teslas semis will be able to charge as they go on the highways.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23603751
https://www.scania.com/group/en/worlds-first-electric-road-o...
Whatever counter Tesla might have in store to prevent this, it would have to involve them analyzing/monitoring/recording the behavior of people in the vehicle, which would be a huge privacy nightmare that nobody wants to be a party to.
That's a hell of a statement and I want to see much better stats than that. Just looking at the total distance per death in human driven cars and comparing it to the autopilot total distance is a gross simplification. At an absolute minimum you have to start by only comparing driving on similar roads. Tesla simply keeps hiding behind 'if used correctly' which includes the driver being alert and ready to take over - if we restrict human driving stats to similarly ideal conditions the accident rate will also drop. Additionally driver demographics is a big deal as is the safety features of the car itself.
Who knows, but if Tesla feels they have a moral duty to leave on autopilot if it is safer, they equally have one if it is more dangerous. It seems they are pretty happy to be in dark about which it is while they test their system.
On the other hand about 1 million people die each year in driving accidents so if by winging it a bit you can stop that a year earlier it's a million lives saved vs maybe <10 autonomous deaths in the research phase.
Musk misreads the public's attitude about vehicle safety. Human error is understandable, mechanical failure is unacceptable. Society can live with 10 people driving themselves off a cliff (and blame the drivers, road conditions, or poor signage) but they will not accept a car driving its trusting passengers off a cliff.
If the public genuinely thought that way they wouldn't exist already. Tesla is just bringing more scale to what we already have in parts of Europe and I'm sure the US too.
I don't think Musk has misread public attitude towards safety but rather hit the nail on the head. Such vehicles don't need to be perfect just significantly safer than people.
Meanwhile SolarCity has been burning cash on a consistent basis [1], and is sitting in a hyper competitive solar panel industry, where I don't see their competitive advantage. It seems foolish to bring that business inside of Tesla, as if it failed, the debt risk would now affect Tesla's future. As many others have mentioned, a long term licensing deal or partnership avoids those risks.
[1] http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/musk-says-solarcity...
> Honestly enterprise is enterprise.
What I like about Tesla and SpaceX is that they're honest, plain companies. They exist as means to an end. Vehicles to achieve material goals - in this case, sustainable transport and making humanity multiplanetary. This is how all companies should work, and yet somehow we got lost on the way and most companies exist to make money, without giving much shit about how exactly they're making this money.
Elon Musk as a person, is a person. A single person. You say that he "seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money to make it happen." According to whom? Interplanetary travel's possibility and practicality is questionable, let alone human chance of extraterrestrial survival. Some may well think that this is a waste of resources. Sustainable transport is nice -- and I love Tesla cars for being seemingly practical non-fossil cars -- but self-driving cars are a big change and actually requires moral adaptations. Would being killed by a self-operating machine equal to being killed by a manual car? Who is to blame if an accident happens? What do I do if my spouse goes under a self-driving car and it is not her fault? Do I sue the car? What happens if it is found guilty (i.e. it's AI is mistaken)? Do we jail the car? Is Tesla to pay me in indemnity? If my self-driving car hits another car's rear bumper, am I liable? Do I recompensate the other driver? Who is liable if an automatic vehicle breaks some traffic rule? What if it passes when it's red?
If all cars are electric, how we'll be affected by increased electric demand? This will mean increased CO2 production with geothermal production, and increased nuclear waste to be disposed off with nuclear production. Will we have to build more dams? Will we instead use the same dinosaur oil to to produce electricity, canceling out the gain?
We should think on these, and Musk being a SV angel figure is not an answer to these questions. We did not question anything till the end of the past century, and we are at the edge of a climate disaster. This tech (self-driving) means a great, big change to our daily lives, and it cannot happen because someone who "seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money" wanted it to.
The answers to those questions are simple if you care to look for them - or even listen to the "SV messiah". Sure increased electricity demand may mean upgrades to infrastructure, but this happens anyway as peoples' dependence on electrically-powered devices grow. Nuclear waste is an utter non-problem, it only seems so because of unfounded fears. The fact is we can manage it. As for using fossil fuels, even that outcome would be a huge win - power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines in cars, so even by just centralizing the burning of that oil you're saving lots of energy.
I'm not going to take a position on "statistics manipulation" - I haven't seen anything besides few HNers jumping to conclusions, and I recall that the actual outcome turned out to favour Tesla's position even more. But maybe I'm missing something, I'll happily read up if you could point me to a good source.
Circling back to the point about companies - what you described is the mechanism how companies work. What I was talking about is the reason to found them. As it is today, most companies are what I fondly call "toilet-paper companies" - ones that couldn't care less about what they're actually doing as long as it turns in profit, and would gladly switch to selling toilet paper if it was more profitable than their current operations. Tesla and SpaceX are the rare kind of companies for which their stated goal is the terminal value, not an instrumental one. That's why their decisions keep baffling people - because we're not used to see businesses actually driven by ideas (as opposed to saying so for PR benefit) very often.
People who buy electric cars are far more likely to buy solar panels. And storage batteries. And wiring they would need for the electric car. It's all directly related.
So when I buy a Tesla ... I have to hire a 3rd party to install the wiring to charge it. I can buy the storage battery from Tesla, but again, need to hire someone else to install it. And if I want solar panels for that storage battery, again 3rd party.
SolarCity has a fleet of professionals ready to do all of that. They also have a plant to manufacture their own panels, which hopefully they'll be able to differentiate on. Combining the two companies will enable Tesla to service that whole loop with the equipment and installation.
Now, you can argue that Tesla may have been better off starting their own division from scratch or buying someone else ... but from what I heard, they're getting a hell of a bargain for SolarCity.
Is this true? I'd be interested in learning more about the data behind this.
Anyway, for the sake of discussion let's say it is. Does that mean there is a correlation that scales to the whole population?
Or is it just that electric cars and solar panels appeal to the same small segment of the population? That would show a strong correlation, but not scale well.
Tesla is a luxury product company. All of their products are either luxury or commercial. Their strategy scales well in that segment.
Oh, and I've heard Tesla described as "a battery company that makes cars." Solar is also tightly coupled with battery tech since without it they're a lot less useful. Maybe that's the synergy?
Solar panels (+ installation) is now pretty cheap and getting cheaper. Subsidies are being removed, financing is available. It's becoming a no-brainer. So they're winning there, but this creates a problem. When a significant portion of homes have solar panels, the power companies can no longer act as a free-ish battery for day/night or summer/winter. They will have to massively adjust their pricing... charging solar homes for storage, paying them a crap daily rate, and charging higher rates a night and in the winter. Regulators will be forced to let them do this because otherwise they will go bankrupt.
This screws with the solar leasing model. Tesla makes big batteries that happen to have wheels on them, which gives a lot of room to innovate here. They can smooth out the day/night cycle; car/home owners can profit from the low energy price instead of be punished by it (especially if you're uber-ing out your car); used car batteries that aren't ideal for continued usage in cars (say 70% capacity or slower charge/discharge rates) are fine for power smoothing in your basement, etc.
What if you also have a massive deployment of solar panels on top of existing real estate, that you essentially don't have to pay rent for?
When Teslas are autonomous, and owners are using them to make money by giving other people rides. How are these cars getting charged? And that energy doesn't come for free. Tesla will have their hand in every piece of transportation.
We're lucky right now that the government's promotion of PV is putting the burden of power storage on the power-grid operators. Without net metering, this stage of PV would never happen. But net metering is essentially bad for the grid operators; they get paid nothing for storing power or sending it from a net producer to a net consumer. They will eventually prevail like they tried to do in Nevada earlier this year and buy power cheaper than they sell it.
But in the meantime the power grid companies haven't got a chance without competition. My home electric meter is as dumb as a box of hammers, even though I spend a lot of money with it and rely on it to keep my family safe in the winter. If that meter were capable of telling me when the power I used was coming from a peak-load diesel generator, I would happily turn off my electric stuff. But they can't do that now.
PV needs to use this window of opportunity to get going, and to get other power-storage solutions working. A Model S is one of those solutions: a gigantic battery with wheels and cruise control. To my way of thinking, systemwide integration is an electropolitical move worth making.
From a personal point of view, I can say that Solar City's sales and engineering teams are smarter and more committed than the people at other PV companies I spoke to. They are trying to build a scalable business rather than bopping from town to town installing stuff and moving on.
Will this work long term? Who knows? But it's worth trying.
And once you're in the business of selling solar storage batteries it makes some sense to integrate with a solar provider.
But I think you're right in your second paragraph and it might make more sense for Solar City to just be a re-seller of Tesla batteries without Tesla buying them.
However, in the grand scheme of things, this really does seem like I am watching history unfold. I don't know if I've ever truly believed the "grand mission statement" of a company before so much as I do Tesla's. Mostly because, when it has come down to it, Musk has proved that he really means it. Silicon Valley has made the joke a billion times of start-ups saying they're trying "To make the world a better place." The difference with Tesla (and probably also SpaceX) is that if they succeed, it seems they really will make the world a better place. ..and probably cement Musk a pretty good paragraph in the history books, it seems.
There are many things to take from Musk's master plan part deux, but the most important for me is the intent and aspiration.
I live in Australia, the leadership here is absolutely dire both political and economic. A relentless cycle of vested mining interests and climate change deniers espousing at length on the cattle exports to Asia suffering if marriage equality is passed.
Maybe Musk succeeds, maybe not, but here's someone with vision, a plan, and he's going to have a fair swing at it.
The leadership here isn't dire, it's just boring (in global terms) and a bit of a soap opera. The country is still a great place to live. If you look beyond the media, there is leadership - for example, in Gillard's tenure, more articles of legislation were passed than in any previous government, including some key items, despite the media loudly claiming (with plenty of misogyny) that the minority government was hamstrung and paralysed.
Turnbull is not the guy I want in right now, but his leadership is hardly 'dire'. Besides, if you use 'dire' for something as beige as Turnbull, what have you got left for something like Erdogan's latest activities in Turkey?
He won the 2013 federal election as the leader of the Liberals, that's fairly conclusive.
"The leadership here isn't dire"
We disagree.
"Besides, if you use 'dire' for something as beige as Turnbull, what have you got left for something like Erdogan's latest activities in Turkey?"
Criminal? The question is whataboutery.
Just because we're not living in an impossible utopia doesn't mean the situation is dire. We haven't had great leadership since the Hawke/Keating years (over 20 years ago), yet still the country is going grand - not having great leadership doesn't mean we must be having the polar opposite.
I also tried giving you reasoned paragraphs, and you responded with trite lines adding very little - I wouldn't go taking the high road here about 'contributing to the conversation'.
This seems very significant for Tesla vs competitors. Yes Google has a strong technology lead today, but how long will that last when Tesla is collecting more miles of data every day than Google has collected in 5 years? (Sincere question) Not to mention Apple and existing car vendors, who each have 0 million miles of experience.
Tesla should reach 6 billion miles very quickly once the model 3 is out.
Not sure how they came up with 6 billion as the magic number, but if that's accurate, that's very soon. It also helps that there are no real government stakeholders in preventing the proliferation of self-driving cars. People just need to generally believe that they are much safer than human drivers, which of course is not true yet.
With deliberately chosen conditions, scenarios, and routes, it seems to me Google could be collecting data that are just as useful although maybe covering much a smaller number of miles.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/6/11866868/comma-ai-george-ho...
[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
[1]: http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/02/04/bart-tests-new-seat-layo...
I feel like Musk's actions are a great example of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message". Tesla is not a car company. They're doing cars because it's a way into their actual business. He wants them to invest in solar power because it's another way that ties into a general plan.
Tesla is building the vehicles and energy source for the vehicles, and building the autonomy in to them, but it's betting on a user-base acquisition via hardware (vehicle) ownership and/or eventually some form of subscription to the "Tesla" club.
Carbon-based fuel(s) will eventually run out. Tesla via SolarCity will be in an incredible position of offering energy, so I'll be looking at how well their plan of putting Solar on every roof works rather than autonomy / vehicle manufacturing / sales. I think this is likely going to be their make or break asset.
Also, four entities have launched rockets into space: the US, China, the Soviet Union (Russia) and Elon Musk.
This guy is thinking and planning on a scale I find it hard to even imagine, to fit in my brain.
France [1], Japan [2], India [3], Israel [4], Iran [5], and even North Korea [6] have developed and launched rockets that successfully put satellites in orbit.
I like Elon as much as the next guy, but this mythologizing is just too much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamant
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_(rocket_family)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Launch_Vehicle
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit
"the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX"
This is the same guy joking about smoking crack and listening to Tupac while writing this plan, I don't think he really cares about making a good impression to anyone
Notice that Musk runs his companies the same way - by trusting what's really important vs what isn't. And anyone who has invested in Tesla is already familiar with his irreverent character. (See this[1] interview for example).
2) In most cases, "formality" and "rigor" only works to mask unfortunate realities and incompetence. Being plain spoken need not imply ignorance nor thoughtlessness. I may not be a sophisticated investor, but Musk's ability to so clearly outline the plan (and proven track record of executing such plans!) gives me great confidence.
3) I view the entertainment and excitement that Musk provides is a small, but welcome dividend that I'm happy to share with non-investors alike. I feel sad for you that you can't or won't appreciate it.
So unless you do a more thorough analysis comparing the two strategies regarding this particular article of communication, your criticism is just quick opinion without "sufficient"[1] effort to limit any prior biases[2].
[1] Quoted because I have no quantification measure.
[2] If you are a communications expert then of-course this particular criticism against your quick opinion is not justified.
We can't do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together."
I don't really see how this answers the question as to why they need to merge? Why can't their just be a partnership?
(Anecdotal evidence, based on working in an energy startup in Australia for a few years).
Also, I would probably be evaluating a DI framework long before thinking of anything beyond an Industry. Even an EJB sounds great by that point.
Should autonomous vehicles be identified as such (special lights or label) so that real humans can know not to be erratic around it?
Great idea. Would do wonders for marketing the capabilities too.
Cars we considered the new weird thing that needed to take special steps to not spook horses or their riders/drivers.
Now, of course, the situation is reversed and horses often are required to have special visibility gear to be seen more clearly by cars.
So, perhaps in the future there will be some sort of indicator light that turns on when the idiot driver turns on manual driving mode so you (edit, or your car!) can give them a wide berth.
Agreed. Don't mark the autonomous vehicles. Mark the ones to be more concerned about: the ones with a human driving.
Historically yes, if you cause problems your licence is revoked and in some cases your vehicle is seized.
I look forward to the rise of the machines, with humans losing driving privileges for simple things like wandering across lanes without signalling, running red lights, hitting pedestrians or bumping other vehicles in the parking lot.
That doesn't seem very simple to me.
- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage - Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments - Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning - Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it"
I take this as...
Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous semitrucks transporting cargo across america.
Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous public buses transporting people around a city.
Have my car join a fleet of uber-like autonomous teslas while i'm not using it.
How does one calculate this? Does there exist some canonical Productivity-Equation?
This is the part I really want to see.
I can't picture the layout he's describing here - not sure if it's been discussed in more detail elsewhere - anyone got a better idea or a reference image?
"Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared."
I have a lot of trouble understanding the public transportation part. The ideas presented fall apart when you remove the baffling assumption that traffic congestion decreases with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles will expand the possible set of drivers. That will dramatically increase the amount of vehicles on the road. If anything our future with autonomous vehicles will be unbearable gridlock.
It's also very sloppy; it's not an actual plan, with goals and steps that logically follow each other. The last master plan had a clear logic to it: you used the margin of each successive step to fund research and development further down in order to increase the use of electric cars and limit global warming. This is more like a wish list than a plan. "We want to make semis." "It'd be great if we also provided the solar part of the stack because it dovetails with this other initiative we're doing." "Once we have solar, we can do this new thing." Etc, etc. Unlike the first master plan, I can't gauge how long any of this will take or whether it is feasible. I can't gauge what the actual strategy is any better than I could yesterday. And isn't that the point of a Master Plan?
Since the first master plan was published in 2006, Tesla Motors has raised money privately (during its near death experience in 2008), sold a 10% stake to Daimler (which was recently divested), went public which has a side effect of raising even more (though the main reason to IPO in most cases liquidity to existing investors), and since then have continually raised money from the public market every year or two. There's probably private and public capital raisings since 2006 that I'm forgetting too (and they raised other capital streams like debt, such as the DoE loan)
The very lofty stock price of Tesla in recent years has helped it fund Model S, Model X and Model 3 designs, development, manufacturing (at large scales) and delivery, as well as the building of a large battery factory which Tesla owns a stake in. This constant fund raising has kept Tesla alive and I don't argue that it was very good corporate governance by Elon Musk and team to get Tesla Motors to where it is now (approaching the delivery date for the first Model 3 shipments and having a huge capacity to manufacture battery packs).
However, it's still a failure in its attempt to bootstrap the funding of Model 3 based on sales of previous models.
Of course, Tesla and SpaceX has consistently ended up achieving great things, even if the timeline is optimistic and the budget ends up blowing out. But issuing stock and eventually debt can only stretch Tesla so far. Hopefully Tesla can become a more sustainable business before that happens.
Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use *that* money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
Don't tell anyone.
Also, the summary Elon Musk has just posted continues using the same italicized emphasis:
Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
Use *that* money to create an affordable, high volume car
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurem...
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1263107
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/0650...
But I mean, he's Elon Musk. He could still pull it off.
His biggest problem by far (excepting, perhaps, Model 3 production targets) will be regulations. It makes a nice story when you talk about the relative risks rationally, but there's no chance whatsoever American politics will deal with the issue in a rational fashion. Autopilot may retroactively become illegal in places people currently get away with it; cars driving themselves around is a different and titanic can of worms. What if a terrorist gets their hands on a Tesla and stuffs it full of explosives?
I think SolarCity is part 2, now that cars are running on electricity, it's time to make the electricity clean.
IIRC he originally saw three major fields to move forward on: the Internet, Transportation/Energy, and Space. By the sounds of it he was thinking of these as early as high school, to at the latest some time after he sold his first company (Zip2). He did the Internet thing pretty well, now he's working on the other two. This is someone who does think on these scales. Keep in mind, as the article itself points out, that you're an idiot if you think starting a car company is a good idea. Energy was the whole point all along. A company for its own sake isn't in Elon's DNA. That would probably just be too boring for him.
Whether this specific merger is a good idea or not is a different question. And I also don't think the emergence of cheap supercomputers in the form of geek-subsidized graphics cards and their applicability to a particularly effective machine learning genre would have been predicted by anyone.
Using a Cobb County Georgia as an example, stats posted awhile ago listed over a thousand school buses traveling almost seventy thousand miles a day. Seventy thousand miles a day! Since the buses have to load/unload at schools and such its easy to establish charging points to include fast top offs where five or six minutes of charging can extend enough to the next time. Then between major routes, elementary, middle, and high school, longer charge periods can be done.
Get kids and parents used to silent electric buses and you go a long way to establishing a generation on them. Get autopilot to work well in that environment and you get to sell them on two innovations at once
Doesn't Tesla charge a large fee to have autopilot enabled on your car? Isn't that equally morally reprehensible?
Solar-powered, autonomous spacecraft.
So he is essentially say, in at most five in a half years, they'll be ready for fully self driving cars?
It's a tall order, but can you set your sights on those "long life vehicles" presently used by the US Postal Service in urban and suburban areas, or maybe similar vehicles in Europe. Those machines return to base daily and usually are unused at least 8 hr/day. Massive buildings with large roofs.
Cop cars. Lots of slow speed cruising combined with a very occasional need for high speed and agility. Return to base every shift. Location awareness.
These sales cycles will be long, and probably a pain in the neck for your major account teams. But you're in it for the long haul.
From the owner of Model S #146761
But master plan part deux seems odd: what exactly does "One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app" for solar have to do with the Tesla transportation part?
Tesla needs batteries. SolarCity does not need batteries except in jurisdictions that make having a battery significantly favorable over having one. Also, the high energy density batteries that Tesla needs are, IMO, mostly unnecessary for stationary use. Compare Powerwall prices to lead-acid -- lead-acid wins hands down. Sure, the lead acid batteries are heavy, but that's not a problem if you plunk them in the basement or crawlspace.
I think in the long run Google might be building the correct solution for greater number of people.
Not entirely contradictory with my previous guess; being profitable by laying off the sales department is basically saying the company will not soon be profitable by itself; but Musk is so certain that it’s a good deal for the respective companies that he’s promising to recuse himself from the vote.
The other interesting aspect is that they don’t expect the sale to close and the details to be official for several months. It’s actually near the beginning of the negotiating process, with due diligence and stuff yet to be done. Since Musk is a large shareholder of both companies, they decided to announce it publicly this early.
Musk said Tesla has always planned to provide solar energy. SolarCity provides solar energy. The odd part to outsiders is, why now?
I think Musk's investment in SolarCity was being threatened by the end of subsidized net metering. He needed to speed up the time table for energy storage to keep the company in business. SolarCity had the solar panels, but Tesla had the batteries. It would be a poor customer experience for SolarCity to have to negotiate with Tesla for the Powerwall, and it would be a waste of time and money for SolarCity to start its own battery sourcing.
If Musk could get the market valuation and accelerate the world's weaning from fossil fuels this way, it's a big bonus, but all this leveraging is pretty risky.
Do note that it was only a proposal and nothing has been accepted yet with the deal, so it's an offer only - in fact, if you look at SolarCity's stock price, it's weighted toward investors believing that the deal does not happen.
Where I'm from, we call that trains.
Meanwhile, most of Europe, Japan and China has a really cool high-speed working train system and suburban trains that really work.
I remember how shocked I was when I first when into the NYC subway. And don't start me on BART or MUNI in SF, those are awful.
This is why they're including batteries instead of telling customers to feed excess energy back into the grid. Feeding into the grid is technically more efficient and doesn't require all those batteries, but does require the headache of interfacing with your local utility.
In cities, everyone needs their car at exactly the same time, that's why we have congestions. When I'm not using my car, no one else needs one (that's an exaggeration of course but not by much).
So in order to get to sustainability, we need to understand why remote working (for instance) hasn't happened yet.
[I'd still like to own a fully autonomous mobile home that drives me to work while I am eating breakfast in my bath robe or taking a shower and then moves me to a beach while I'm sleeping on Friday nights. Well, one can hope, right?]
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/tesl...
Tesla will require regular infusions of capital over, say, the next 5 years. The only source for that is more equity, and to do that you need to actually start meeting some of your self-declared profitability goals. Up to now, Tesla hasn't.
The tactic of diverting attention with "but look, here's this great awesome world-changing thing we'll do next" has worked so far but it's rapidly getting old. In general, the frequency with which sleights of hand are starting to be employed is concerning. Remember the "but don't just take my word on it — I myself will be buying $20M of new stock!" thing? Sure you will to reassure investors, given that loss of confidence will cost you personally far more than $20M.
SolarCity? "If Musk thought Tesla really needs a solar company, he might as well buy a good one. But it doesn't" [FT Lex]. Given how important it is that they are able to keep raising capital through equity offerings, taking the risk of freaking the investors out with SolarCity acquisition (otherwise expected to go into bankruptcy protection by next year) makes sense only if letting SC fail presents a bigger risk of the same. The Musk fairytale would certainly take a hit from a SC bankruptcy.
And Musk setting these crazy numbers goals practically guarantees he's setting TSLA shareholders up for disappointment.
Non-profit-making Amazon has been raised as a counterargument in the comments on this thread; the amount of trust the market has extended to Bezos for the time that it has is practically unprecedented; and Bezos has worked hard to make that happen by making investment/direction choices & providing information to earn the trust of the market. Musk, to the contrary, is doing everything to the opposite.
Now, what's the likelihood of a macro downturn within the next 2-5 years? Massive. That might trip up the availability of capital a bit—those refundable $1000 deposits too but who cares about them (by the way, much of T's capital has been raised during the period of literally historically unprecedented low cost of capital)
I didn't even begin to talk about competition. Or that Panasonic, T's critical gigafactory partner, isn't just sitting around twiddling thumbs (or the Chinese).
So, it'd be prudent to curb your enthusiasm. There might not be a part trois.
Is Tesla going to make this data freely available, to accelerate the development of safer autonomous driving software? Given that it's "morally reprehensible to delay release" of autopilot, it is also morally reprehensible not to publicly release such data if more groups working on the task will lead to safer software.
The world could be a better place for so many people, but somehow a bunch of other people think it's okay to continue doing them until they die.
The other day I came across an article in which a school prohibited their students clapping when cheering, instead making the cheer in quiet with a fistpump or something like that.
The stated reason for this was that some of their pupils were noise sensitive and it made them feel bad/anxious/terrified.
Now, regardless of whether this particular story is true like that, it illustrates something interesting.
There is a whole bag of human behavior that has the possibility to affect their environment negatively. I would go so far to say
> Being alive is an interruption to your environment
You can't not be a nuisance. Nor should you strive to be. That doesn't mean you should be as annoying as possible to everyone you meet, but it means to recognize that we live in a society in which people are different, and specifically to your point, have different trade-offs when it comes to acceptable risk and freedom.
That you have different trade-offs doesn't give you a moral high-ground, over people "thinking it's ok until they die". And I'm not totally relativist here, I think there should be limits and that some trade-offs are wrong.
It's just that that goes both ways between recklessly irresponsible and fascist government limiting everything dangerous, and there is a lot of space in between the two.
I'm a left-wing guy, but the older I get the more I have the feeling, getting my life rid of socalist projects (public healthcare, retirment funds, etc) lets me live a more lefty life, haha.
An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.
Back of napkin, it looks like you get ~3*15 meters of roof which seems to translate to 10 kW of output under good conditions and then you need something like 150 kW to rumble up the highway.
Plus you could use the sides of the trailer for some power too.
Finally even if 10kw can't power the truck. It could extend its range by some amount. Plus that's still a significant amount of power you don't need to buy. 2-3 rooftops worth?
I guess electric trucks would still put a lot more effort into avoiding air resistance because of the lower energy per unit mass of batteries (the aerodynamic improvements can be pretty directly traded for either range or cargo capacity).
I think present day solar cells are a combination of too expensive and too heavy to bother with. That could change in the future.
I don't see how automation reduces the need to get on the bus.
Things are gonna get real interesting in the auto world in the next few years, aren't they?
Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth? Even if there were a way, it's not necessary or effective. He's said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country. Why bother putting them in space? No advantage.
However, SolarCity IS likely to provide the panels for SpaceX's satellites, of course. So there is that form of solar harvesting in space.
Solar power collected on earth is just using energy that is already being delivered to the surface -- no net change.
This has been investigated several times and the most promising technique involves using maser downlinks to transfer the energy.
> He's said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country.
Ok that's a start. That takes care of the energy needs of 3.5% of the Earth's population, once they have sufficient storage capacity to see them through the night.
Geostationary space-based solar collection can work 24 hours per day, with much higher efficiency and minimal storage requirements, right over the areas of peak demand even when the ground is obscured by rain and cloud. No deserts required.
Come to think of it, if you can transfer the energy... Just put the reactors in space?
We're now going a step further and building a next-gen interface for that autonomous future. #Asteria.
I suspect Tesla won't be alone in that space. Good luck to those who are.
The rates of accidents in manual vs current version of autopilot may work out to be favorable - (and that is still under debate) - but there certainly will be people who will die (and have died) due to a premature roll-out of Autopilot and their trust of it. This is some bloody cold calculation
There are 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes in the US every year. Self driving cars might end up being safer even if we were all perfect drivers.
There will definitely be people who need their own vehicles, but typical families (and typical families live in urban or suburban areas) won't.
So if they tout the idea of people not owning cars too much that is will only antagonize people in the short term.
If the ownership model changes they can easily adapt. I think they are very aware of the car ownership statistics and how cars being shared is a fundamentally better model in most cases.
This man is dreaming the future. Nay, he is building the future.
Does he really think that ?
- on time performance (I'm yet to leave bus stop in the morning on-time after about 10 years -- bus is always late); - less traffic in the bus terminal, where drives always make wrong assumption and create traffic where it could have been avoided; - safer commute (not that it isn't safe enough now, but there are drivers who prefer driving way too fast).
Oh well, this is only dreams.
If the end goal for both is a fleet of autonomous vehicles and a strong app to facilitate the use of that fleet by the public, I would much rather be in Tesla's position. Having a fleet and needing to create an app sounds a lot more promising than having an app but no fleet. Tesla will be able to get an app up and running far sooner than Uber will be able to get a fleet.
Gives "pimp my ride" a whole new meaning.
Master Plan: Part Tres
Solar powered flying cars that will take you to Mars and beyond.
I really like this, but the laws of supply and demand still apply. If you live in a sparsely populated area there's not going to be much for your car to do.
Great for those in urban centres, but then if you lived there why bother owning at all when there will be more cabs to hail?
Sure, stuff sounds neat, but where are you going to get the capital from?
Another secondary share offering?
I guess the most concrete thing I saw was new factory for Model 3. Shouldn't that be your only priority?
Not designing an electric semi truck on paper to entice Joe Q Public into stepping up for another secondary share offer?
Blows my mind.
"We'll never have reusable rockets, what a joke..."
hasn't Tesla repeatedly missed price points and delivery dates.
Or are those not promises.
I actually think most of what he is talking about is pretty doable. The ones I'm skeptical of are his talk about the massive factory improvements (in a few years too?) and the magic buses with no aisles or entrances.
By what measure are Tesla and SpaceX the "two most difficult companies in America"
Regarding missed promises, if you're saying that as if to suggest that what he's promised isn't nonetheless coming true at a pace faster than anyone else could have possibly delivered, I think you're wearing blinders.
Regarding "most difficult".......are you aware of other companies working on something as technologically and logistically and legally challenging as SpaceX and Tesla????
At least in terms of fatalities per mile.
Tesla has thousands of regular consumers driving all over the world in sleek sedans.
Let's see which bet pays off better in five years' time.
And they have yet to hit a pedestrian or decapitate a driver with a semi. Be real; Tesla's is basically a smarter cruise control. It can't actually deal with complicated scenarios.
So you're saying that, if I promise you I'll give you a thousand dollars in a week but then I give it to you in two years, I haven't broken a promise?
Electric Cars and Reusable rockets are engineering marvels, not nifty software. That's difficult.
I give him credit for SpaceX, but Tesla's main product so far has been hopes and dreams.
Their product is very good.
And this should be good enough for law enforcement to nail Tesla.
I think, like everyone else, that Musk is probably the smartest entrepreneurs of our time. In this case though, maybe he is over his head a bit:
- Getting Tesla 3 to production volume will not be easy.
- Autopilot is NOT good enough to be used in production. This can be fatal to Tesla if FCC catches up. Tesla needs to quit Autopilot and focus only on getting Tesla 3 out. Tesla 3 will face competition sooner rather than later and market dominance is not guaranteed.
- SolarCity has absolutely no synergies with this business. It should be sold off.
- SpaceX is again a distraction given how hard it will be for Tesla 3 to roll off.
Elon is very smart, but even Jobs didnt get it right with Next.