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Comment by ghostcluster | Hacker News Reader

It feels to me like another one of Elon's stubborn whims. Sometimes these result in great innovations, like Tesla's giant car part 'gigacasting'. Other times, they result in deciding to rename Twitter "X" and forcing a team of engineers to spend over a year combing meticulously through the codebase to remove all references to "twitter.com"

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Regarding the gigacasting: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.

Yep, don't count on Tesla for replacing fossil fuel cars. They had a good headstart but hopefully other manufacturers will now take its place to fill growing demand

In all likelihood auto manufacturers won't really be responsible for replacing fossil fuel cars. Designing and building the cars is straightforward enough, they need continued leaps energy storage and infrastructure to make that change possible.

> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.

Oh, come on. Yes, Musk announced that Tesla would announce a self-driving car with no steering wheel in August 2024. Of course, he said that in 2016, in 2018, in 2020...[1]

Reality is that Tesla, while signed up for California DMV's autonomous vehicle test program, didn't report any miles driven last year.

[1] https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tesla-robo-taxi-elon-musk...

That article states that they are retracting to their previous method of gigacasting.

The one that other carmakers are starting to use too, inspired by Tesla.

It actually says that they were attempting to gigacast their new vehicle as a single piece rather than three pieces, but that proved difficult so they are going back to gigacasting three separate pieces.

But your point stands: they are still gigacasting, just for now they are not doing the very ambitious "gigacast in a single bound" plan.

"Elons whim that resulted in great innovation" as ghostcluster put it referred to gigacasting as three pieces, not gigacasting as one.

sho_hn's comment could have been read as gigacasting being a failure. It is not.

Probably related to them dumping the model 2 project.

Article really would have helped if I could have understood how much cheaper/faster it is to make one piece instead of three.

This reminds me of Steve Jobs and his absolute refusal to let flash run on the iPhone. I think we're better now for that, but we had a few rough years for that.

Maybe, or maybe it's like his refusal to allow apps to force everything to be a web app, and Tesla will realize they are better off just having more sensors and more data

I kinda agree with steve jobs on both of those calls. if your "mobile app" is just a wrapper around a web page, I'd rather just have a bookmark shortcut on my homescreen. what's the value add?

I don't think either of those is very similar to the wiper thing. one is using the leverage of owning a major OS to force third parties to do something better for the end user in a context where the stakes are pretty low (ie, no one is going to die). even if it works out in the long run, the wiper only benefits tesla. and in the meantime it is a serious safety risk for the end user.

Tbh I agree because at least with the hindsight we have now, so many apps both desktop and on phones are just wrappers around web browsers anyways.

Back then there was some value add in having access to native APIs but over time we've just added more and more web APIs to bridge that gap.

Both Steve and Elon made stubborn decisions, some of which benefited and some of which hindered their companies' products.

Isn't gigacasting awful for the consumer? Can't replace most parts, have to replace the expensive gigacast?

It's not like it's cheap to repair frame damage in any car.

Frame damage is actually pretty straightforward on cars that actually have a frame (i.e. aren't unibody).

The problem with repair costs in modern cars is all the sensors, cameras, complex paint jobs, airbags, etc. Those expenses add up quickly, combined with the added costs of body panels and trim for certain brands and costs really get insane - it shouldn't be a surprise that car insurance costs keep growing much faster than inflation.

it's still not easy. - many years growing up fixing up race cars and such. hardest part besides engine repair

Definitely depends on the type of damage. Cracks and rust aren't a big deal at all, a twisted frame due to a corner collision is a royal pain.

In the context of price to repair though, I'd still rather be dealing with a car with a damaged frame rather than a modern car with loads of sensors, body panels, etc that all need replacing.

Refering to this stuff, not sure what you're getting at

https://www.theautopian.com/heres-why-that-rivian-r1t-repair...

I think most of the time if you are in a serious enough accident to damage the gigacast in a way that it needs replacing, that would've totalled most other cars as well.

not doubting you but how does it take a year to remove twitter references?

surely twitter has some internal code search tool like Sourcegraph which would let them easily search for all variations of “twitter”, right? /twi?t*e?r/gi

Code for a public facing website used by hundreds of millions of people is always more complicated than you think it is on the surface.

I would like you to do this for one of your larger projects at work - just change its name with a simple regex like this - and see how many unit tests fail.

"But I'll just fix those!", you might say, and you might. Except your project is likely not as big as twitter, and fixing every problem is likely to become a much bigger problem.

Plus, you now have to catch all the stuff not caught by unit tests, which also includes design elements that a person has to look at.

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