Tesla Cancels Mass-Market $25,000 Car, Musk Says This Is a Lie
jalopnik.com
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OTOH: I do hope that car (especially EV) makers would finally stop making oversized monstrosities that are utterly useless in like 95% of cases (and close to 100% if you live in the city)... I dearly miss segment A/B… but yeah... now we get abominations like Toyota AygoX (pseudo-suv, that's bigger on the inside, and smaller on the inside... but it "LOOKS")
Tesla is very far from having a reliable and safe driving system. 15 minutes of good driving footage is a neat tech demo, but for a deployable product you need 1,000,000 minutes of safe driving.
It's already interesting if he does it in a big city he knows we'll.
Nonetheless the YT videos of the self driving stuff looks quite good.
You need to start somewhere and others are already doing it.
Tesla announced a couple of days ago that they had passed 1 billion(!) miles on FSD, and growing exponentially [2]. In Elon's master plan from 8 years ago, he wrote they expected 6 billion miles before more global regulatory approval [3].
It's not there yet, but it's far far closer than most people realize. Me, personally, I think end of 2024, Tesla can demonstrate 2-3 billion miles driven on FSD and that a self-driving car is at least 10-20x safer than human drivers.
[1] https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1775238945506210004 [2] https://twitter.com/Tesla_AI/status/1776381278071267807 [3] https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
Already the case with people buying Kia or Hyundai or even Polestar when better Teslas are available for less.
It's like Richard Nixon cursing the newspapers. Except these days we have immediate "feedback", a string of silly, supportive comments, which some say could be computer-generated.1
1. Before taking over, Musk claimed Twitter was dominated by "bots".
Tesla's higher up(s?) need to get off Twitter.
Anyway it doesn't hurt -even if this is a lie- to say the cheap cars are coming. It sucks financial derisking off of competitors. To competition, Tesla doing a cheap car means no margin for a decade, if ever. Sometimes a little lie can go a long way for moat building.
On the other hand, what stops one from actually starting some low-key exploratory steps towards a new car, which you then mention as “we have something in the works” for a few years and then you cancel it that some point, after scaring most would be competitors? More effort than just running one’s mouth, sure..
Have you heard of Boring company before?
Completely in line with Tesla's master plan: https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
(At the same time, pushback against vehicles in general is worthwhile -- let's prioritize pedestrians and mass transit -- but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
“…but investing in it now will yield dividends in the future”
LA is so much better suited to it weather and topology wise but the roadways are dangerous. I feel you!
Point being, it's both the infrastructure and a small number of problematic people that make this untenable for most of us.
It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media.
Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center.
But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion).
It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto"
Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.
Old Money Palo goes to Woodlands, Woodside Priory, and Menlo School, or Palo Alto High
Lots of parents would buy houses or rent in crappy parts of East SJ to save enough money to sends both kids to Harker
The reason that new money (like me) tries to buy a house in Palo is so we can send our kids to PAUSD.
A lot of the born and raised crowd who were kids of hippies are fairly racist to the newer generation of Asian, Pacific Islander, Israeli+Eastern European, and Latino Americans on the Peninsula.
At this point I might as well buy a semi-rural house in San Benito County and spend the same amount donating a couple department libraries and Named Lecturer positions to my Alma mater for legacy benefits tbh.
In 1920, the population of LA was less than 600,000 (https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php), and the built up area was a lot smaller (https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a...)
I guess its population density also was quite a bit higher, making it harder to serve the population well with public transport using vehicles that can transport many people at a time.
> Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people
Having said that, mass transit includes buses. There are zillions of roads in LA. On the main roads dedicate one lane in each direction to buses or, better, light rail.
Main problem will be how people would get to stations. You could change one lane on minor roads to a bidirectional bike lane, but such bike lanes would not only be unattractive to ride on, but also dangerous because they’d frequently cross huge roads. So, I don’t think that would solve this problem well enough.
If the answer is “robotaxis”, why build expensive tunnels? Dedicating existing road lanes on the surface to robotaxis then should work, too, at much lower cost.
They are just not in competition.
In fact, they could keep the sensors and offer it as an integrated platform to other companies working on Driver Assist.
It sucks that it seems Tesla, or musk rather, is using their original promise as purely PR.
Tesla on your resume (versus, say, GM) is far more likely to get you an interview at another company than get you auto-rejected.
Plus ... imagine the stories!
Doing better manufacturing and selling EVs outside China than the rest of the entire auto industry?
OK.
I can respect the latter, but wrt the former, I can't see why Tesla is worse than any other conglomerate.
They would be dodging a bullet.
Where else are you going to go to work on incredible stuff that actually gets to market?
https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/much-more....
Well yeah, if you have an axe to grind and don't like Musk, then for you it's a red flag, but not for most people. Most people don't hate him enough to discriminate against a candidate for working there.
There are no more desirable companies than Space X because literally no other company is doing anything remotely like what they are. You have Boeing which is a disaster and Nasa which also isn't close.
As of 2022 Space X and Tesla were the #1 and #2 most desired companies to work for.
https://observer.com/list/power-employers-the-companies-us-s...
That said, I wonder if it matters. It took 4 years to deliver the Cybertruck, something they were working on. I imagine a "paused" Model 2 is several years away.