I agree with what you say, but part of the reason Tesla is even around to have these problems is Musk's dubious talents as a relentless hype man. Musk himself says they were at the brink of bankruptcy at least twice: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-bankruptcy-m...
Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.
He strikes me more as a physicist arguing from first principles. Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. Also, the world's energy problems are trivial when you consider how cheap and efficient solar power is, and how little surface area is required. Clean water is just a matter of filtration at best or desalination at worst, which just devolves into an energy problem. And so on.
I do it myself sometimes, but at least I recognize how annoying and inaccurate it is. It is kind of nice to have someone arguing these positions and even better to act on them, and I for one wish that these analyses held (the world would be a better place if they did). But the real world just doesn't care about your first principles, and even simple ideas present obstacles you never imagined. Musk knows this, but willfully leaves it out during his pep talks, which is dishonest. But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself, which is quite chilling considering the amount of real power he's amassed (being able to launch large things into space is about as real as real power gets.)
> Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem.
This argument proves a little too much. Even if we assume that the sensors are equivalent to whatever input stream humans are working with, reduction of the problem to ”software eng” doesn’t mean it is tractable in our lifetime. Compare: ”Once you remove the requirement that employees work from the office, building a software engineer is a pure software problem.”
Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem.
This is correct, but only if you have the right drive-by-wire and sensor array tech. Essentially what you're saying is "Once you solve the hardware problem the rest is just software" which isn't particularly insightful.
What happens if Tesla can't solve the software problem because the sensors aren't providing the necessary data?
>what you're saying .. which isn't particularly insightful.
Which was my point. I'm intentionally making silly arguments that are valid from first principles, but clearly wrong in the real world. I'm sorry that wasn't obvious because I endeavored to make it so.
add more inaccurate sensors and do corrections in software? We have photos of black holes out of almost a pure noise, surely it is possible to build self driving car with current gen of hardware.
The point here is that Tesla have already sold the $10k FSD sensor pack to people and told them that one day in the future a software update will provide FSD, with no additional sensors necessary. Adding more sensors is not an option (well, maybe Tesla will do that for people who bought the upgrade, but it seems unlikely they'd do that for free.)
One part of the argument you are missing is that FSD requires real-time decision making as well, so when complexity goes up with a larger number of inaccurate sensors that can become an issue. No one cares if getting a picture of a black hole from noisy data takes one year to process, the same is not true for self driving.
To others commenting on the comment above: read the entire comment, the first paragraph is a satire on the trivialization Musk and others often do of complex subjects.
Thanks for saying that. But the lesson for me, or anyone making points like this, is that you can never be too explicit. Intricate constructions are dangerous on the internet. I like them but I have to admit they function something like a trap that readers can fall into. It's tempting to blame them for not understanding, but it's really on me. At the very least I should have put a warning label at the bottom.
> self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops.
Hyperloop was a great example of a project that made no sence from first principles, yet he pushed it anyway. It makes no sence because it's capacity, passengers it can move per hour, is like 2% of a high-speed train line. Additionally he came up with some pure fantasy cost estimates where the whole things cost less to build than a cycle path would, budgeted $0 for land aquisition, compacting or earth-works.
Re software problem:
Human genome is now digital too now, so figuring out immortality is a pure software problem.
Making money on the stock market is a pure software problem.
Simulating a concious mind is a software problem.
> I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself
Maybe tha's what happens when you fire agressively anyone who disagrees and end up surrounded by yes-men
> You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops.
I can say this about a lot of things, but man, it scares me that there’s people in the world who are crazy enough to think that’s true. Even Elon Musk isn’t that delusional.
> But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself
That is one of the best ways to lie. If you stop caring whether things are true, it can be much easier to sound like you believe whatever thing is most useful in the moment. And think of all the brain cycles you can save by not checking in with thinks like external reality or consistency with one's past statements.
Software can no doubt be capable of being written to implement the alg... but no one has a good enough alg or even knows if one can exist or can exist with tesla's limited sensors.
"he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list" ... why do midwits always chose AP thread to gather .... i guess you dont need to start a rocket company an electric car company or try to create a fintech company in 1999 ... why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie" .... if biden goes ahead with this he will only shoot the foot of his supporter's like GM ( half of its current value is tied to cruise ) and blow up VC mna pipline for all the lidar based startup's
I am having trouble extracting much sense from this.
I'm not saying lying is all he did. But his major skill is hype. E.g., you cite his fintech history as something apparently good. But he got rich on that because after a merger he ended up as PayPal's CEO for like 6 months, after which he was fired. His major focus, apparently, was shifting away from Unix to Windows. Which even if it were a good idea at the time (it wasn't), it was a terrible priority for a fast-growing company.
People treating that as some sort of sign of business acumen, as opposed to a golden parachute for an arrogant chump correctly getting fired, is a great example of how good a hype man Musk is.
Because lying is hard work! Ask any politician, clergyman, lawyer, or nearest big corp C-suite leader. Noone said it was easy.
> tell a main paint is wet, and he has to touch it to be sure. But tell him there's an invisible man in the sky that created the universe, and the will believe you
> i guess you dont need to start a rocket company an electric car company or try to create a fintech company in 1999
Did you mean "start" as in founding a company or "start" as in purchase established existing companies?
> why work 100 hr weeks when you can just "lie"
Well 60 of those hours are playing wario on SNL then playing wario on twitter then strategizing with your PR firm on how to convince people that buying Twitter means you invented social media.
>blow up VC mna pipline for all the lidar based startup's
Better to blow up lidar pipeline VCs than autopiloting battery fires straight into pedestrians
i cant counter plain crazy . you win i guess . I am not claiming the dude can do no wrong . I am stating the fact that claiming he didn't do any thing new or special is just plain crazy . just try doing any one of the things he has already done .
It's pretty bad that Musk was asking people to pre-pay for the FSD feature years before it's even close to finished - with promises like "it's $5000 if you buy it now, or $10000 if you buy it when it's done."
Even worse, some people are falling for this scam.
>>Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.
Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.
Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.
SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:
Not quite - GP cites the spectre of Tesla nearly going bust to imply that Musk helped achieve the opposite (extremely healthy company) via dubious, ideally criminal means. It's not entirely based on that, but the implication is there.
Put simply, if Musk only made one controversial call, this comment thread wouldn't exist. The many controversial calls cannot be easily disentangled.
Do really healthy companies often have their stock price fall by half?
Personally, I think that Tesla is not particularly healthy, and that its future is grim as mainstream car manufacturers get in on the EV action. Tesla is not particularly well regarded by Consumer Reports. Of the 16 EV cars with current rankings, Tesla's models are at spots 4, 10, 11, and 16, with low reliability scores. [1]
Tesla does have a big slice of the US EV market, but that's only 3% of the total market. It's perfectly plausible that Tesla's lead among tech enthusiasts, always a small fraction of a market [2], won't translate into mainstream acceptance, and that Tesla will enter a death spiral where their relatively low volumes mean they won't be able to keep up with the major car manufacturers. Their eventual fate could be what happened to so many promising early manufacturers of internal combustion cars: they become brands owned by bigger car companies. [3]
So personally, I think Musk lies did create a window of opportunity for him, but that as with so many liars, he sowed the seeds of Tesla's destruction with the same lies that enabled initial success.
Apple are down 26% ytd. It wouldn’t be unheard of in this market. What should hopefully be clear is that stocks such as Tesla are not particularly correlated to the fundamentals of the company, there are whole-economy effects driving price rises and drops.
What I see in Tesla:
- extremely profitable car manufacturing. industry beating profits per car driven by cheaper BOM than legacy manufacturers, in large part due to innovation. margin of 30.5%.
- Manufacturing limited - huge wait list despite accelerating production (Q1 2022 best quarter ever, 68% increase yoy).
- huge investments in manufacturing across the supply chain starting to pay off.
- for the first time, manufacturing investments that can rival premium legacies. With the factories in Berlin and Texas coming online, it’s believable that Tesla has capacity to produce in excess of a manufacturer like BMW.
- very high purchaser satisfaction (the product is good).
- large overall profit - already beating most in the industry.
I'm no finance expert, but Tesla being down twice as much as Apple is not what I'd call a positive sign.
We'll see how Telsa's finances go once competition heats up. A major source of profit for them is selling emissions credits to other companies. Which a) undercuts Tesla's claims to eco-goodness, and b) will surely decline as others EV sales pick up. We'll also see how much that profit is affected by recalls and lawsuits.
In many cases, high customer satisfaction is indicative of a good future, but I'm not sure that's the case here. One, their satisfaction is in the same range as a lot of car companies, including BMW and Honda [1], so it's not a competitive advantage. And two, their current user base is a technophile, early-adopter niche. It's not clear that Tesla can cross Moore's Chasm and serve a mass audience that doesn't care who Musk is.
I look forward to seeing how it turns out. But given the way Musk is flaming out in his attempts to buy Twitter, his success is clearly not guaranteed. And that's before we account for him being distracted by trying to run 3 big companies at once.
> Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.
Elon is not the only one that needs to be held accountable -> big oil has literally prosecuted and killed people, just look at what they've done to Steven Donziger.
If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.
> Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars
Laws don't work this way - If I save someone's life today that does not give me a voucher to murder someone tomorrow.
>>If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.
This is just utopianism.
>>Laws don't work this way
I wasn't saying they do. I was explaining the consequences of those "better laws" existing. In truth, the laws being sought by the OP would further undermine the very foundations of a liberal society, with contract liberty, to replace it with social control by an officialdom made up of unionized government bureaucrats with next to zero accountability, micromanaging the actions of others based on an elitist "government knows best" philosophy.
Are you saying that bold lying and criminal negligence were also necessary for SpaceX to succeed? I wasn't aware of that, but I'm happy to take your word for it.
It’s fascinating how quickly people will suddenly decide apolitical things you are associated with are “not cool/impressive” when you start expressing political opinions they disagree with.
You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party? People have been plenty critical about Musk well before that, and about most of the same points.
Honestly, I think the causal arrow goes the other way. Musk has beclowned himself with the way he handled the Twitter deal, and Tesla's stock price has dropped accordingly. So a lot of the noise he has made since then can be seen as attempts to distract people with politics so they don't notice how his impressiveness is declining. This article makes a good case for that: https://twitter.com/BITech/status/1534939630809800706
>>You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party?
Musk doesn't have any good alternatives, unfortunately. He's supposed to back the Democratic Party, that relies on a long-tradition of union-backed left-wing violence to intimidate the opposition? [1] The party that fanned the flames of 500+ riots in the summer of 2020, leading to dozens being killed and billions of dollars worth of people's livelihoods going up in flames?
The party that is aggressively moving toward authoritarianism, and trying to silence/cancel any one who speaks out about it, like Glenn Greenwald? [2]
The party of lawyers [3], who early on pushed aggressively for CCP-style lockdowns and vaccine mandates [4]?
The party fully backed by elite anti-Free-Speech movements? [5]
Even when the GOP were under Trump, the Democrats weren't clearly the more moral choice.
Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.