Mobileye split with Tesla spurs debate on self-driving tech | Hacker News Reader

Mobileye split with Tesla spurs debate on self-driving tech

reuters.com

30 pointswibr12 comments

My takeaway from the article is whether Tesla has any defendable technology advantage?

All of its major competitors have existing lines of business they can amortize investment across as well as large dealership networks they can sell into with minimal investment.

If Tesla doesn't have a technology advantage it can defend, then it's going to be in trouble.

If Tesla doesn't have a technology advantage it can defend, then it's going to be in trouble.

Often when Tesla comes up I try to refrain from posting the reality on the ground in China - I failed today - electric vehicles are everywhere already: electric scooters ("e-bikes"), electric cars, electric tractors, electric buses, electric taxis, electric golf-carts (police patrol vehicles), etc. It seems to me that Tesla probably has some great tech staff but it's media presence seems to be mostly western hemisphere posturing, as if they are to claim originality and innovation in a field China is 5-10 years ahead in already and demonstrably leading in adoption and infrastructure.

The only advantage I see Tesla having right now is experience and mileage, as well as their OTA updates. Nobody does OTA software updates as well as Tesla. They're learning how to make rapid, small changes to their algorithms, championing an iteration-heavy strategy.

Whether this type of learning will allow them to compete with super experienced automakers who haven't yet brought an autonomous vehicle to market remains to be seen.

Knowing very little about Mobileye, it seems that Tesla wants to develop an in-house solution that they can control on their own and not be dependent on a third party for something that hopefully could be huge (self driving vehicles). It feels very Apple-ish to be bringing in the foundation of a new technology to separate themselves from everyone else (whether that's good or bad, I don't know).

I think that Tesla's tech is not an advantage. What they do have however is thousands of vehicles driving around every day collecting training data. They may have the largest collection of real-world training data for self-driving learning on the planet.

Shorting Tesla and spinning FUD?

Tesla has been hiring people to develop their own autonomous systems. They have learned from the MobileEye interaction, MobileEye has their own lessons.

So now we have Tesla who make cars and have learned a lot about training autonomous vehicles, and we have MobileEye who have experience building autonomous car brains but need a car manufacturer to pair with.

Tesla has a huge technology and infrastructure advantage in BEV manufacturing experience, the established car makers have the disadvantage of being schooled in the art of manufacturing ICE vehicles. Other battery manufacturers are ramping up production, but are any of them paired with vehicle manufacturers and designing BEVs that are integrated from the ground up?

Who is designing the power electronics for these BEVs? There is another technological advantage that Tesla has: they gave had the opportunity to attract some very good power engineers. Where are the other companies going to get their talent?

I'm not an automotive engineer but it seems to me the experience of manufacturing ICE vehicles at a scale orders of magnitude higher than Tesla is not really a disadvantage. Yes the powertrain in an electric vehicle is different, but otherwise it's a car. And the big established car makers know how to make those.

Shorting? not yet, but considering it.

FUD? I said Tesla doesn't have any defendable moats. Reading your post I appear to be correct. All Tesla has is some additional experience and (perhaps) better talent in a few areas. All things easily addressed by investment - which it's investors are well positioned to do, better positioned than Tesla, in fact.

I'm with you until you started talking electric vs. gas vehicles. That has nothing to do with autonomous vehicles.

I briefly tried to find a source and could not, but I seem to remember Musk making some statement re. the Model X that supplier delays were an issue for Tesla and he desired to be able to manufacture more components in-house.

While the chips wouldn't be moved in-house, I wonder if the fact that this chip is related to the self-driving technology is just a coincidence: perhaps this is to switch to another vendor that might fit better into the Tesla supply chain.

So maybe Geohotz' self-driving scheme is gaining traction (pun intended)?

He did say in that video that he was going to show musk his tech was better than mobileye.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/6/11866868/comma-ai-george-ho...

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