The End of Tesla’s Dominance May Be Closer Than It Appears
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Although around 2025 to 2028 we may start to see full scale deployment of self driving technology. VW will not be ahead unless they go all in on that too.
I honestly don't understand how anyone can actually believe that. Actual self-driving(not just a fancy cruise control) seems about 50 years away if not more. There will be "self driving" systems which work on nice american streets and motorways, but a general use self driving system that can be sold worldwide? Not a chance in the next few decades.
Tesla is trying hard too, but it goes with a big dose of bullshiting from Musk. They are a lot more dependent on AI break troughs in DL due to their vision only philosophy.
OpenAI research around scaling laws in DL suggest that naive 1000 increase in training compute over CLIP should get us to state of the art vision in zero shot settings i.e. without task specific training data. But they probably can cover 1/3 of that with algorithms improvements. Beyond that machines should really be above human vision across the board besides adversarial settings.
Quote https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020 :
> While scaling has so far steadily improved performance and suggests a route for continued improvement, we estimate around a 1000x increase in compute is required for zero-shot CLIP to reach overall state-of-the-art performance.
There is also the question of robust car control, but there should be good progress on it too due to RL research.
I think it will take years before Tesla FSD can drive from A to B without making catastrophic errors, but at least they're trying to solve the correct problem. And I think it's important to remember that it's OK if self-driving cars behave stupidly in ways that don't kill people, because the status quo has people dying every day because they're drunk/tired/texting, and self-driving only has to outperform the worst drivers in order to be a big leap forward.
They are trying to solve the “how to build FSD that works on existing Tesla cars because Musk has tricked a whole bunch of buyers into handing over money” problem.
Our heads constantly move around and have the worlds most advanced neural network trained over decades to understand objects and how they behave. So for us vision works. But because Tesla isn’t solving the right problem they insist on going down this road instead of LiDAR which is safe and works.
Sounds logical, doesn't necessarily mean it's true. I'm not an expert.
It's also interesting to think that we may have a lot of ideas like that. They are just waiting patiently for compute in some small communities.
And the compute quite consistently grows exponentially. We will make bigger absolute increases in compute in next 5 years than we did ever before.
So....I know this, and yet I still prefer to have my own car that I drive myself. What do self-driving cars solve here? A self driving car is literally like a taxi, minus a driver. Yet even if taxis were quarter of their price, I would still like to have my own car.
But sure, maybe it's just me. But I think a lot of people prefer to have their own vehicle rather than take taxis everywhere, even if it's logically cheaper thing to do.
It will only take a few fatalities for the govt to stop any autonomous vehicles on public roadways unless it is in a safe geo-fenced area with clear liability.
The life threatening situations are rather simple and reactive. It's a car colliding with something at a high speed.
No deep planing or human level negotiations necessary. Well designed LiDAR cars will almost never be at fault of killing someone.
I was predicting [0] in Nov 2018 that a next self driving car fatality will occur with 50% chance before March 2020.
80% before March 2021. Well, self driving cars are safer than I expected back then.
And Tesla should get there too sooner or later.
Also, the govt approach is proving to be quite risk accepting.
Tesla already killed and injured many people when on autopilot.
[0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/776/when-will-the-next-f...
"automated system saved my life"
and
"automated system didn't kill me"
Like, my own car has several features which I believe are enough to prevent 90% of accidents in urban settings. But I find it hard to interpret when someone says "autopilot saved my life" - like, you mean "autopilot didn't kill me"? Because if it merely stopped hitting something then I really don't understand how you can be certain that
1) you wouldn't have avoided the collision by yourself
2) you wouldn't have avoided the collision with exisitng systems without going full autopilot
And I have been in a Tesla(few actually) and I personally think that they way Tesla does it is the worst possible implementation - it gives you so much confidence that you really stop paying attention(even though you absolutely should never ever do that) only to spontantiously decide QUICK! HUMAN, TAKE OVER! in the middle of a turn.
Like, if I owned a Tesla I'm sure I'd love the autopilot, but I also think it's far too dangerous to be forming any kind of statements like "we'll have full self driving rollout by 2025-2028" based on it.
"saving your life" - never been in such a situation before except once in my life when I encountered a parked tractor trailer at the side of a country road in the middle of the night without any working lights.
I saw it when the high beams hit the rear reflectors and reflective number plate and I swerved out slightly without a major correction otherwise it would been a rollover.
Multiple times ????.
Could you provide some data at least when you give any sort of predition on the future ? Otherwise it's meaningless. anyone can have a "feeling" or an "opinion"
Like, don't get me wrong. It's a great system. But it's just a very clever cruise control. It's nowhere near Level 5, not even Level 4 and I'd argue it's not even level 3 at the moment. And yet the OP says we'll see "massive self driving deployment by 2025-2028"??? Like...how? With what technology?
So? I can't BASE jump, but you should still heed my criticism if I tell you doing it from 30 feet up won't work.
Someone who can't cook can still identify bad food. Someone who can't code can point out that Facebook's UX is confusing. A non-driver can identify bad driving. A non-singer can identify someone being off-pitch. Dismissing criticism in this nature is a mistake.
No its just a meaningless opinion that is polluting the feed. Its just noise. In general in technology debates, especially here on hacker news, we prefer actual "insights" or "diffs" if you go read the site guidelines.
Just look at the state of Tesla's full self driving product. Yes, it's impressive in many situations yet it fails at things that are generally. What's the point of automation if I have to babysit it?
From companies like Cruise, Waymo etc who will be using them for very specific use cases e.g. deliveries or Airport pickups in well known, good weather cities.
But definitely not from Tesla who can’t even navigate around car parks let alone the wide range of conditions that their cars experience today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
It is weird how certain things get forgotten.
And out of all of those, only VW actually admitted it, and only VW ended up in the media.
That will be a lesson for PR people for years to come: If you don't admit it, people will reward you.
They got caught by EPA in California, sued, and settled. If that is what you mean by “actually admit it”...
Other manufacturers have also been found but not at the scale of WV.
Either way, I find your post interesting and would like to read up on what you are specifically talking about more. I don’t think you’re trying to normalize the fraud.
Just to clarify my PoV, and my view why most carmakers should be closed immediately (at least VW started building electric vehicles since... that's at least some improvement).
The original study by the west virginia university, for the ICCT, names 6 carmakers all using defeat devices. (I read it back when Dieselgate happened)
Bosch, manufacturer of the VW defeat device, in trial, said that they delivered these exact configurations to all their customers, just with slightly different parameters.
Defeat devices based on temperature (instead of air pressure or humidity) are legal in the US, "to protect the engine".
One of the results of the dieselgate scandal was that VW was forced to build a certain amount of electric vehicles. Why weren't the other carmakers forced to do so as well?
(Note: this is just my observation on the ground, I don't know if sales numbers agree with me.)
https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2021/01/europe-december-2020.h...
They want cars, which are electric, and BMW et. al. will give them tons of those and that's it.
The other 'nice things' Telsa has are niche feature offers; nice, but not going to change the world.
Elon is betting that he can automate manufacturing better than other companies, that remains to be seen.
===== EDIT:
There's a broad belief in the US that "Tesla has change the world" ... which really isn't true.
If we wanted to attribute it to a car, it's probably the Nissan Leaf though that wouldn't be right either.
I think the 'Tesla Myth' is borne out of pop culture instinct, not really industry reality or data.
Here are the facts [1] (EV sales historical)
Tesla has never been an important EV maker - in terms of volume.
The major manufacturers have always been innovating, tweaking, and out-selling Tesla on EV's by a wide margin.
If Tesla were not on that chart, it wouldn't have changed a thing.
Tesla is a niche player and boldly entered into a locked up market, and helped some pop culture trends and some points of innovation - all of that is meaningful and they deserve credit - they are a great company.
But they didn't move the needle that much and we'd be in roughly the same position otherwise.
Tesla has always been a bet that a tech company can learn to make cars faster than car companies can learn to make tech. Moves like VW's push the latter aggressively, while Tesla is taking longer to scale its car production, giving credence to the idea that the electric car the average person drives twenty years from now will not be a Tesla.
And if that's the case, can Tesla justify its corporate valuation? Comparing Tesla's stock to other automakers, the markets have priced in an expectation of rapid earnings growth; the stock will plummet if those expectations can't be met.
They have been selling and experimenting with electric cars for a very long time.
Nobody has 'copied' anything that Tesla has done, they've done it on their own terms and sales have been picking up especially in Europe for a long time.
Tesla added some enthusiasm and pop culture flavour to the moment, but they didn't change anything. At most, they accelerated the timeline by a few years.
One crucial mistake they all made was focusing on the low-end, where the technology just wasn't viable/practical and couldn't be made viable/practical in one step.
Tesla's genius was focusing on the high end first and letting that trickle down. Starting with a car that didn't have to be practical to be viable.
Millions of EV's are sold by companies that didn't copy or follow Tesla.
I agree with your assessment of how Tesla 'did it' - but other companies were 'doing it' at the same time.
He is a pop culture icon now, and that's marketing that money can't buy.
They're an upper middle class status symbol now. It's likely gonna take a solid decade of something being better for that to change. As long as the product is at least arguably competitive they'll be fine.
Their brand power is not going to be enough for them to live in a very well established industry of premium and regular brands.
Tesla will do fine, I think they will be a legit new car company, but that's just it: 'another' auto player.
Forget BMW. They had a lead with the i3, which they squandered. Their latest EV is the Mini One Electric, which is a rebranded i3. BMW dropped the ball.
No decent future lineup of EVs. More importantly, no planned investment in battery factories. BMW is dead in the water, with a lag behind Tesla of 5-10 years.
VW is the first brand I see with a less than five year lag behind Tesla. Battery production capacity is a good metric for how much of a competition each manufacturer is. VW should catch up to Tesla a bit before 2025, assuming no delays and assuming no ramp-up of Tesla Gigafactory investment.
But it's a massive, massive industry. Maybe the biggest. 5 years is a blip.
The 'brand value' of BMW is going nowhere, same can be said for 'all the other brands'.
The industry will catch up, brand by brand, at which point it remains to be seen what Tesla will look like in the mix.
My prediction is that it's a 2cnd tier player, but they are growing fast, they could put themselves in the position of being a major player no doubt. But I don't see the other brands changing that much in terms of status.
I haven’t seen any other manufacturer seriously address that. They all seem to assume that it will be magically “figured out” when these cars release. Electrify America and ChargePoint are garbage by comparison.
IMO, Amazon should just buy Rivian and outfit all Whole Foods with chargers.
The experience is still better for Tesla, but it probably doesn't represent much of an advantage, parity will happen in a couple years.
Miatas seem a perfect candidate for electric cars. I wonder if there’s anything out there that fits that niche?
I get the grunts in the factories, but how are there any engineers that still work there?
Maybe I’m gulping the kool-aid but I want a 500 mile range truck!
My current line up is a minivan, an 11 mpg land cruiser, and a Chevy Volt.
I agree that VW and other manufacturers are going big on EV platforms and cars, but (in the US at least) until there is a viable competitor to the supercharging network, I will go with a Tesla.
It's like iPhone vs Android in the early 2010s. "It just works" is actually worth a lot, vs all the quirks you'll have to deal with for the non-Tesla alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSmSiOo-v8s
The Volkswagen ID.4 costs less and comes with 3 years free charging on Electrify America:
Spoken like a true dinosaur.
People who are buying EVs right now are classic early adopters: Western, middle to upper class, willing to overlook inadequate charging infrastructure and good but not great range.
To get the other 90% to move is going to require governments spending billions in infrastructure. Which is challenging when most are running large deficits and at every turn are up against a powerful coalition of oil and gas interests. Not to mention the myriad of logistical and technical challenges eg. can grids support EVs.
Yeaaa, but:
"China is both the largest manufacturer and buyer of electric vehicles in the world, accounting for more than half of all electric cars made and sold in the world in 2018. China also makes 99% of the world's electric buses"[1]
Technically China is west of the United States =)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_industry_in_C...
Meanwhile, cities in China have electrified their multi hundred thousand strong bus fleets and have built the infrastructure to cope.
Sadly we in the West have just lost that hunger for big projects.
Additionally, over the past year, availability of FTTH with symmetric gigabit connections was increased from below 1% to 53% of the state, with the goal to reach >98% by the end of the year. Over 38% of the state already have switched ISPs accordingly. This is also necessary to get >98% LTE coverage by area.
Big infrastructure projects are still possible :)
I’m more interested in how you bring EVs to the edge cases of society eg. rural areas of Indonesia, sparse land masses like Australia/Africa and the developing world. Because that’s hard and constantly overlooked in people’s timeframes.
I bet every city has 5 buses they've painted green with "ELECTRIC!!!!" on them, to show they're doing something. But nothing of substance.
Check out the ID-3 for example https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/electric/electric-cars/id3.html , the sticker price is GBP 30k which brings a full electric household car within range of a lot of people, and explains why I've been seeing more of them on the street.