California tech billionaire launches Senate campaign to take on Tesla
mcclatchydc.com
mcclatchydc.com
This is why. Sweet deal on the airtime.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/16/don-odowd-elon-musk...
I designed and wrote the core security system for our nuclear forces, military and commercial aircraft, Top Secret encryptors, laptops for FBI field agents, and military cellphones and radios. This software has been certified by the NSA to Common Criteria EAL6+, a higher level of security certification than achieved by any other software. Has your security “expert” ever designed and written the security software for a system that never fails and can’t be hacked? Or, do they claim that no one can write software that never fails and can’t be hacked? I do it every day.>1977: Designed and wrote Mattel Electronic Football software
>The must have Christmas toy of 1977
Never mind my previous criticism, this guy has earned my vote.
https://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_mark...
Patent https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1b/46/29/d3532d0...
Despite this, I suppose it's possible that Mr O'Dowd did code the 6502 prototype and wasn't given credit in the patent.
> If you have been able to produce software that never fails and can’t be hacked for the last 25 years why aren’t you a billionaire?
> I am a billionaire, but my software has been mainly used by the military, and I have kept a low profile until now.
No, you cannot. Unless you define bug as something syntactical.
#!python
pritn(“Hello world”)
This happens relatively often for an experts in a one field. They extrapolate and make foolish statements on a entirely different field. Vaccine science is a very good example...
He openly manipulates markets without facing consequences, busts union activities, pushes to production over worker safety, uses extremely misleading marketing contrary to public safety, avoided paying taxes for years while becoming the worlds richest person... and you find it odd that the political left doesn't deify him to the same degree as the tech bros?
They have produced 2 million cars thus far. They're so demand slammed that orders are for 9 months out. They just finished building Giga Berlin and Giga Austin which is going to 2x their production to more than 1 million cars / year within a couple years. They already have plans for a $25k/yr car in a couple years. And every single car manufacturer considered EV's a no-go until Tesla started shipping Model S's en masse. There is no modern EV push, no "all cars sold must be EV by 2040" in many developed countries, without Tesla.
Technically still correct even if the intent was to use the wider margins to enable growth. But more to the parent comment's point, Musk used tax credits intended to incentivize EV purchases by everyday users to inflate the prices for his cars in order to extract more value from buyers/governments.
Proven true by the fact that he had to cut pre-rebate prices after Tesla cleared the sales thresholds for the tax rebates.
Ergo, it is a factual statement to say that (1) Tesla sells a small number of (2) luxury electric cars to (3) wealthy people.
[edit] As for the government subsidies... [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
Tesla delivered 310k vehicles in Q1: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/IOSHZZ_TSLA_Q1_2022_Updat...
310 is 14.4% of 2148, and it implies an annualised rate of 1240k per year. Tesla production and deliveries are growing exponentially, Toyota deliveries are shrinking. Last year in Q1 toyota delivered much less compared to 2020 and while this year it’s recovering it’s still delivering 170k less cars in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2020. Tesla just opened two new factories and this can feasibly double its capacity by next year.
In an average year, Toyota ships between 8 and 10 million cars, and has for a long time.
Tesla's year over year percentage increase in cars shipped has been trending down, of course, as they grow with the exception of last year.
However, last year, Tesla shipped 935K cars. Since it's just Q1 of 2022 I don't think it makes sense to make any extrapolations as to how many they will actually deliver this year, so let's use that number. I think that's generous given, you know, everything.
So, Tesla ships 9%-ish as many cars as Toyota.
To get from 900K to 10M per year, an 11X increase, would take:
- 27% year over year growth for 10 years.
- 30% year over year growth for 9 years.
- 35% year over year growth for 8 years.
- 40% year over year growth for 7 years.
- 50% year over year growth for 6 years.
As deliveries increase and the market is saturated growth rates will drop.
And that's to get to the same deliveries as just Toyota today (a company valued at 250B), when Tesla is valued at the sum total of the market cap of every other automaker on the planet, plus a utility company, plus the battery arm of Panasonic, plus a solar panel manufacturer.
The global auto market delivered 67M cars last year, of which Tesla accounted for 0.9M, or 1.3%. For comparison Porsche delivered 0.3M last year. Same ball park.
Even if Tesla doubled their deliveries this year and next year, they'd still sell a fairly small number of expensive electric cars to rich people. And that's a big if since right now is just about the single hottest auto market in history, and their deliveries remained flat quarter over quarter.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
A "small number of electric cars" isn't nonsense. Ford sold as many F-150s in 2021, than Tesla has sold in it's lifetime.
Why? Because the subsequent reduction of ozone-depleting emissions has done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any other measure taken, I believe roughly commensurate with the reduction you'd get from switching all power plants to renewable energy.
I have no opinion on the following:
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Pretty easy to imagine when you consider he's pushing to re-open social media platforms to the kind of abuse that (they believe) had a hand in taking down a political candidate.
He positioned himself in favor of absolute deregulation of speech by human individuals, or depending on your view, a suppression of free speech for some corporate entities by compelling them to share disagreeable viewpoints.
However even if you disagree with that take, the fact is, FSD is unsafe. It's kinda fun, but it's tried to kill me a few times, and there's myriad YouTube videos of it trying to kill people.
[edit] Elon's vision of the future is hardly some eco-leftist utopia. It's a fairly right-wing personal property forward world where inequality continues to be perpetrated by making people own (very expensive) electric cars to get around, and socializing the cost of free parking onto the poor. He's not a left-wing icon.
He's not a villain either, he's just a great marketer.
From wiki:
> According to Musk, the company's goal is to enhance tunneling speed enough such that establishing a tunnel network is financially feasible.
No fan of Musk, but if a company can bring down the cost of tunneling so that it works well for single-occupant vehicles, that would be a huge deal for multi occupancy vehicles as well. This is a goal worthy of support, at least.
[1] Amusingly, I think the Las Vegas one the company built may be the first PRT system to not be automated. For a guy who keeps touting futurism, failing to achieve similar capabilities to antecedents from 50 years ago is pretty ironic.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-vegas-loop-traf...
Why not beta test whether adding one extra lane of freeway, but covering it with a roof, improves traffic? I'm betting it won't.
Research by Kent Hymel of California State University of Northridge found that adding one percent more road capacity produces the exact same increase in the amount of vehicle miles traveled.
[1] https://archive.curbed.com/2020/3/6/21166655/highway-traffic...
[edit] Hong Kong is a great example.
Further you don't need to own a car to go on trips, car shares solve that! Just rent a car for the weekend when you want to leave town, or take a train.
Note that this guys company makes a product that is a competitor to Tesla's Autopilot software, so he is not impartial.
In any case, I fail to see someone with only one main agenda item could win the Senate. What are his viewpoints on other issues?
Well, he doesn't seem to be opposed to Teslas in general - just the self-driving tech.
Things like wars, abortion, civil rights, slavery, voting rights, etc could be enough in the right state at the right time.
He's built himself a bubble where the people around him think it's a big deal but ultimately he's just wasting his money.
I wonder - If Elon had to come out tomorrow and say "Sorry, we are terminating the self-driving program, effective immediately", what the impact would be to the biz and markets.
This contraption is long overdue for a formal investigation.
This just reads 'Works fine on my machine'.
> I feel like you haven't driven one?
One does not need to be a beta tester or a crash test dummy to see enough reports and tests from others over the years, risking their lives on using this 'safety-critical' beta quality software to know that this contraption needs to be investigated and the reports speak for themselves. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
[0] https://youtu.be/sbSDsbDQjSU?t=206
[1] https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1473307236952940548
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22778135/tesla-full-self...
[3] https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...
[4] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1478802681141645322
The rest of them crashed or ran over an object; especially when the car was driving at night; suggesting a lack of proper night vision present at all. Again when used at night in one of the videos even with the driver attentive, it's a full on crash.
Perhaps is that why the regulators have formally investigated this faulty software [0] since they also think that it is a danger to have it malfunctioning on the public roads, putting the lives of other drivers at risk?
[0] https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2022/04/21/teslas-autopilot-so...
So you're telling me (even despite all the evidence) that it functions as advertised with no serious malfunctions in the software and that it is not showing to be a risk on the public roads such that the regulators are not considering to launch a formal investigated over the dangers of this supposed safety-critical system?
I don't think you're ready to even begin to refute the evidence around this.
> and your bias is evident.
?
What bias exactly?
I’m a Tesla owner, and I’ve got concerns about their self driving tech being flaky, and I still can’t get myself to care enough that it’s an issue worth wasting a CA senate seat on.
is this a case of a completely sheltered billionaire thinking their pet issue is remotely important to the masses?
Tell me you don’t understand technology without telling me you don’t understand technology.
That is accurate, one only needs to look at the self driving behavior on display in Youtube videos by what appear to be largely untrained people but it's an odd thing to center an entire campaign around.
Would have been better to expand this to a more general debate about algorithmic decision making. From policing software, to surveillance, and self-driving among other things. There are many areas where citizens have become unwilling participants in software beta tests, not just when it comes to driving.
"The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, or objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness."