I think most people who specialize in this area on HN know that L5 (or even L4) on existing vehicles on the road today is unlikely to happen. Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush.
Autonomous cars are coming. They just will come first to specific areas where the cars are more experienced, like waymo does in Phoenix, and the cars themselves will be purpose built. As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.
It’s crazy irresponsible that Tesla switched on what they did and marketed it as FSD, and it’ll set back self driving cars years when people start getting into collisions.
I can't decide if Elon Musk and Tesla believe the claims he's been saying, or knows that he can't deliver anytime soon but has some end game planned. Surely the AI developers understand the issues that still have be resolved for safe driverless operation. They must have seen their own and the customer test videos that look terrifying. There's a 1000 fold increase in ability needed from 'intelligent lane assist' to your car dropping your kids off at hockey practice then picking you up from work by itself.
Will the definition of FSD be slowly reworded, or are they careful to never state the delivery date for it in contracts. Or will Tesla rely on traffic authorities not approving the technology, so they can say that they've delivered but government won't let customers use it.
He is an "idea guy." At this point most companies shove the founder off to be Chief Innovation Officer or something and let them keep coming up with ideas, but bring in an adult to run things day-to-day.
SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.
Passing off Musk as an idea guy doesn't quite hit the mark. Jobs was an idea guy who could make things happen by synthesizing good ideas from talented people. Musk is dot-com wealth who was able to convince other tech wealth to invest in him and they've been pretending success is around the corner since he took charge.
He's an engineer who actively participates in the design of several wildly successful products AND he runs several extremely successful companies AND has successfully founded, ran and sold companies in the past, e.g. PayPal.
Wowee, if that's true that a 6 month contribution got him equity resulting in a $180 million payday when eBay bought Paypal - then his value/pay/contribution was equal to roughly $1 million per day; your shallow minimizing of an argument is a weak one.
Are you arguing that, because he's rich, he must've done a good job? Because that doesn't follow in general; I think we can all think of a few dozen counter-examples.
Are you arguing that, because he's rich, he must not have done a good job ? Because that doesn't follow in general either. I think we can all think of a few dozen counter-examples where people got rich while actually putting in a lot of work and risk.
Especially Elon put all his money on the line a few times. And he is definitely not just an idea guy.
I have not seen any real engineers too overwhelmed with his apparent knowledge. Things like claiming that the new Roadster will have pressurized air thrusters that will allow it to hover a few feet off the ground for a few seconds comes to mind.
I personally feel like we need more people like him to bring ideas and advice to people in charge. However, I would like the people that are actually in charge to be more careful and responsible.
Sure but arguably he also single-handedly forced the hand of all auto manufacturers in a stagnant auto-oil industrial complex to actually start shifting to EV; seriously, how many lives will be saved in total due to the lessened pollution?
With his time machine? The Nissan Leaf and BYD E6 launched in 2010, the Renault Zoe and Tesla Model S in 2012. The electric car changeover is happening due to battery price dynamics; it's fairly simple. Until the mid to late noughties, lithium ions were simply too expensive (and early electric cars using other chemistries simply didn't have acceptable range).
Exactly. Existing ICE companies didn’t have the vision to completely reimagine what an EV shins be. Rethink everything from the ground up, don’t just slap batteries in existing platforms.
The Renault Zoe outsells all Tesla models in Europe these days, wasn't built on an existing platform, and came out the same time as the Model S. I believe for the whole of the last decade except for a year around when the Model 3 came out, either the Zoe or the rather similar Nissan Leaf outsold Tesla in Europe.
Tesla's main success story seems to have been the US, presumably due to very lackluster competition. The US isn't a huge market for electric cars, tho.
On that line of argument, you should use the roadster, not the model s.
The Model T wasn't the first car, but it was the first widely accessible and usable one for the masses. Tesla's innovation is more comparable to that.
That said, Elon should have never been in charge of a public company. He's good at challenging the status quo and should keep doing that in new markets. He's a terrible person to be in charge of an established company (which tesla very much is now!)
The Nissan Leaf and BYD E6 were exactly why the electric car was going nowhere fast. Nobody is ever trading in their 5-series BMW or S-Class benz for a leaf, period.
The Tesla options are all extremely high performance cars. They're luxury oriented but the interiors left a bit to be desired. Either way the overlap between the market Tesla capture and the leaf captured are almost non-existent.
As long as it doesn't jeopardize public safety, which shoddy self-driving vehicles could, I would not like more cautious leadership. The gains bold leadership makes - say in bringing forward Mars colonization, mass-accessible high-speed satellite internet, and reusable rockets by 30 years - will have recurring benefits that could significantly increase life expectancy and quality of life all over the world.
He also argues that we need regulation on AI (I agree that it is at least something that is lacking attention) and is simultaneously working on devices intended to allow people to hook their brains directly up to computers. Likely computers running unregulated AI.
This is a terrible idea. I hope it doesn't get anywhere beyond being a research project.
That's a bit of an academic argument. He was the first major investor and became chairman after making that investment (about 6 months after founding).
I've always heard of defense contractors being notorious for cost overruns and going beyond schedule. What military contacts bearing jail time are you referring to?
Government doesn't care so much about cost, but they care a great deal about being lied to. There is a far more unlimited stream of money to attack those who defraud government contracts.
Sometimes I think Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos and Musk are not that different.
However Musk has much stronger persistence and likability. He can keep promise things and collect money for much longer and be forgiven when delivers much less of what he promised.
I bet Theranos could have still be a thing today if Musk was the CEO instead of Holmes. Instead of failing, they would have delivered slightly smaller machines that work with about the same amount of blood but with better UI and integrated fart jokes.
That said, I don't think that Musk is a fraud. I think that he is amazing in building financial hype machines, thus capable of concentrating wealth that can be used to work on far fetched ideas. Even if he fails to deliver on the high promises, he menages to change the landscape. After all, electric cars and commercial space flight are a thing now, aren't they?
Holmes should have delivered iOT blood testing machines of regular type when being funny on Twitter and could have been fine. When asked when the 300 test from 1 drop of blood is coming, she should have always answered "I'm confident that we will have it in 2 years". Even maybe she could have sold a more expensive machine that "has the hardware to do 1 drop blood test but will be enabled with a software update later".
Holmes delivered nothing. She claimed that accurate blood tests could be done with much smaller amounts of blood and never even built a prototype that could deliver that.
Musk claimed that reusable rockets and electric cars were the future and people said those things wouldn't happen for 50 years. Now where are we? Saying that FSD is 50 years away seems like a risky bet given what musk has accomplished already.
What I am saying, she should have delivered what she could and promise to devliver better in the feature instead of failing to deliver on the promises.
She could have bought a small manufacturer with all that funding, slap a nice UI and iOT functions on top of it and deliver that. Continue to work on the original 1 drop of blood tests, maybe integrate it into the more expensive version of the machines of the manufacturer she bought, call it beta and use on own risk and the accurate version will be enabled through software update in the future.
Also, being funny on twitter could have been better strategy than imitating Steve Jobs.
I agree that not committing fraud would have gotten her into less legal trouble, but I don't know how much funding she would have got with that approach. Her whole scam was that she was the blond steve jobs of biotech. She needed to promise a "revolutionary" product was possible soon to keep that image alive.
She failed to keep the machine churning. She was not likeable and banked on being paddled by people with their own agenda(people who advocate for the women in business). She didn't have to be fraud, had she acted smarter IMHO.
The problem though is that what she was selling was complete fantasy. Tesla raised some eyebrows over whether they would be able to produce faster, better and cheaper, but the product Theranos had didn't even exist with higher costs or quality control issues; it simply was inexistant.
Theranos was fraud from beginning to end. They literally tested samples on Siemens machines and pretended that their own machines did the analysis.
It was worse than just using siemens machines and claiming they were doing it with their own.
They were taking small amounts of blood, too small for the siemens machines and then diluting it down to increase the volume.
So not only were they passing it off as if it was their own machines, but they were providing inaccurate test results leading to incorrect diagnosis.
And I can't believe they got as far as they did with the scam because lots of experts were saying what she was claiming was not possible. Because a drop of blood is simply not large enough to get a statistical result for most things tested. It doesn't matter how amazing or sensitive your machinery is, you can't give a correct result if you simply don't have a large enough sample.
I don't think that it was complete fantasy but unsolved Engineering problem. It's not like she promised something unscientific like faster than speed travel or free energy device.
Also, Tesla too failed on cost and quality control issues until they stopped failing.
Yes, she apparently faked the tests but faking till making is nothing new in SV. With all that money, she could have bought a manufacturer or lease buy and rebrand from Siemens by adding something on the top of it. Many big names start by acquiring their parts from OEMs. She could have build on top of some less known European company that sucks at the software UX, for example and keep kicking the can down for the one one drop blood tests. When asked what is going on, give a presentation about the challanges and about the work you did and say that it's going to be ready in 2 years.
Theranos's whole product concept was unscientific and far more than just an unsolved engineering problem. It is biologically impossible to get accurate results on most assays from a single finger prick drop of blood. That can work reasonably well for a few things like glucose level or positive/negative on antibodies but generally it's a dead end.
You need to add "with the current technology" at the end, and the statement will be accurate.
You can't know what a research will bring, maybe it will be discovered that you can do all these tests through some proxy measurement etc. In biology they don't deal with "laws of nature" in the same sense with the physicist, therefore everything is engineering problem since you always have the option to go above or below the biological processes.
You can't transplant a heart until you find a way to do it, you can't change genes until you find a way to do it.
There's no natural law prohibiting measuring something something from the finger that can be measured from somewhere else, it simply cannot be done with the current methods due to some process going on in the human body. The task would be to find a way around the mechanism that is preventing you doing it.
You have misunderstood the basic biology. This is not a technology issue. For most blood assays the necessary analytes are simply not present in a single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels. This is pretty much a law of nature and no amount of engineering or research will alter that reality.
Sounds like an engineering issue. I doubt that it's random, therefore other signals could be used to estimate at good enough accuracy. Maybe combining it with saliva or urine samples or finding a correlation with the existence or levels other chemicals etc. can give it away.
You seem to be doubling down on aggressive ignorance of human physiology. You can believe what you like but what you're proposing is simply nonsense in the general case, more akin to alchemy than anything resembling actual science or engineering.
I'm not proposing anything since we talk "in principle", not about anything specific. What I say is that the current technology is not final and anything could be possible and it is an engineering problem unless it's restrained by the fundamental laws of physics. Could be hard or impossible with the current state of the art but that's why we do research and development, aren't we?
"single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels" is definitely not one of the fundamental laws of nature. They may not correlate but maybe it's possible to acquire the information about the body through some other channels. It's not like there's a single way of surveying the body, right?
A specific test can be impossible but another method can be develop for obtaining the same information.
What you are proposing is like trying to calculate the current weather in New York based on cloud cover in Detroit. Sure you can probably find some small statistical correlation but the results won't be useful to a New Yorker trying to plan her day.
If a doctor needs the patient's current platelet count for treatment they're not going to be able to get it through a nasal swab or urine test or whatever. This is restrained by fundamental physical laws. If you're still not getting it then all I can suggest is taking a remedial biology course.
In which case, it wouldn't be done through a drop of blood, as Theranos advertised. It will be done through those undiscovered "magical" means (in the sufficiently advanced levels of technology are akin to magic manner of speaking) that currently elude our understanding both technical and theoretical.
It doesn't matter how it's done. When they promise a drop of blood, what they promise is not drop of blood but a value associated with being able to do these test from drop of blood. If similar value can be delivered through other means, it would be fine. Not drop of a blood but saliva and breathing analysis? Just as good.
Blood test nerds can be disappointed, of course. I doubt that the core audience are the blood test aficionado, but you can always make them happy by saying "We are confident that the test can be done through single drop of blood in 2 years".
> I bet Theranos could still be a thing today if Musk was the CEO instead of Holmes.
How so? The very basis of what Holmes promised with Theranos is impossible based on current knowledge. Musk promised something that at least had a basis in reality, and could be worked on refined (not the autonomous driving, but an electric car).
Holmes just promised something arbitrary and then hoped for a scientific breakthrough.
Musk is also hoping for scientific breakthrough. When the breakthrough is not there, he says it will be there in 2 years.
What he does is nothing new, electric cars or vertically landing rockets, reusable space vehicles are not new but he is the only one who could manage to collect the funding necessary to work on these things again and be the one who is doing it with the current technology(which could end up financially sound this time).
For example, hyperloop is proving to be total BS, no roots in reality. Just look what he promised and what he delivered. The trick to keep party going on, if the party is not over you don't fail. "Hyperloop delivered nothing" is a failure, "Hyperloop delivered something that is nothing that was promised but a car in a concrete tunnel, nice CGI and a model of what it could be" is work in progress.
If you can keep the party going on for long enough, ether the technology will catch up or people will forget the original promise and accept the current delivery. Musk could end up being Tube magnate if he can keep up the funding despite not delivering on the vacuum tube hypersonic travel stuff.
> Musk is also hoping for scientific breakthrough. When the breakthrough is not there, he says it will be there in 2 years.
Yes, a lot of what he says is nonsense, like Holmes. But the difference is he also delivered big time on some of what he said. I assume many people are aware of his pie in the sky hopes for the future, but that is different from Holmes claiming she already had a technological breakthrough and succeeded in something all the other scientists with decades more experience knew wasn’t possible, and yet not providing any evidence.
Any examples of the big time deliveries? Except the stock prices and cryptocoins? I think his first big time delivery of something revolutionary is about to be StarLink.
Musk's biggest achievement is changing the Conventional Wisdom[1] of government policymakers in the west from "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but a toy for rich people" to "right, we're phasing out fossil fuel powered cars" in the space of a decade.
That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
You will quibble that lots of other people did the technical work. But Musk had the public visibility.
That's a pretty wild statement, even if it was about Tesla instead of Musk.
Especially considering that a ton of these policies are about as old as the Tesla roadster. Must be a hell of a achievement to change policy retroactively.
The reason why we have an electronic car revolution now is because batteries have finally become cheap and dense enough. Maybe the largest manufacturer of EVs deserves some credit, but that's of course never been Tesla.
I don't know what newspapers you read. Even the Model S was wildly successfull by 2017. I certainly read about that car topping sales charts in Norway thanks to government subsidies in 2013 or so.
There were government subsidies for EV cars more than 18 years ago, and they were almost everywhere 18 months ago. Anyway, what newspapers report and what's the "conventional wisdom of policymakers in the west" is unrelated, if we even accept that "the west" and "conventional wisdom of policymakers" aren't nebulous constructs.
I was talking about announcements of government policies in various European countries to prohibit or tightly limit sales of new fossil fueled vehicles by 2030 or 2035 or similar year, not about current annual sales of vehicles.
As I said, the conventional wisdom changed from "electric vehicles are not practical" to " we must have only electric vehicles" in the space of a decade in which Tesla showed that EVs could be as practical as fossil fuel vehicles.[1] Other manufacturers (VW, Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, etc., are now scrambling to catch up.
1. Yes, the Nissan Leaf was there too, and a few others, but it/they suffered from short range and/or other compromises, so the "impractical" label remained in the minds of policymakers. And it/they suffered from undermarketing, because the makers didn't want to cannibalise their ICE vehicle sales.
I see a lot more driving Toyota Corollas. Making a car is not a new thing, even electric cars are nothing new.
And as for Space X, space travel is also nothing new. We have been traveling to space since 60 years and vertical landing and reusable space vehicles had been done before.
All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially. As I said, Musk is brilliant in building commercial systems. This time we have better cheaper technology and these things can actually be feasible.
How are Corollas relevant to this discussion? If you think scaling up a car manufacturer to becoming a mainstream brand is not “delivering big time”, then I guess I will simply have to disagree.
> All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially.
That was my point. At least some of Musks’s claims were based in reality and so he was able to deliver something. The entirety of Holmes’ claims were fictional. That’s the difference.
Becoming a mainstream brand is definitely not a big delivery on the promise that in 2 years you will tell your electric car where you want to go and it will take you there without further input from you.
As a financial delivery, sure. It turned out to be a good stock investment. So may others like AMD, Apple or GameStop. I don't argue that Musk can't make brands and money, he surely can.
You're running some very weird arguments here. Bringing costs down and volumes up are significant achievements in any industry.
Sure there were a few other electric cars out there before Tesla but nothing with 500km range that was compelling and affordable to the middle classes. There were other rockets too but SpaceX significantly reduced cost and launch frequency. Nobody had recovered an orbital rocket before SpaceX, let alone reusing it another 7 times.
I don't think that I argued against any of that, I don't know what do you expect me to say but I have to point out that the pace shuttles were re-used much more than 7 times. I'm sure that SpaceX will surpass these numbers some day, after all it's a work in progress as long as you don't accept that you failed. Space X is doing some cool stuff and spectacular videos.
The orbiters and solid boosters were but the massive external tank was not recovered. The time and complexity associated with the refurbishment of the orbiters and booters resulted in a program cost of over $1b per launch. SpaceX can launch similar sized payloads on FH for ~$150m.
The issue is even more intractable than this. The world accepts that occasionally, a semi truck driver will make a mistake and wipe out a family of 4. Right or wrong, we accept that humans make mistakes.
The world will not accept it when a self driving truck does this. Computers are supposed to be perfect, as far as the public is concerned. If a computer killed a bunch of people, there must be a flaw. The fleet must be grounded until the flaw is found and fixed.
How much better than a human driver does a self-driving truck need to be before people will accept and trust it? 3x? 10x? Infinitely better?
I tend to think the scale trends towards 'infinitely better'.
I believe that for self driving vehicles (at least commercial ones) to truly find adoption there's going to have to be the perception that there's still a human supervisor, even if this is a 'polite lie'. Perhaps it will take the form of lower paid and less skilled human 'co-pilots' who are simple there in the truck or taxi cab as 'sin eater' to take the blame when something goes wrong. Or perhaps one individual can monitor several vehicles remotely (in a totally ineffectual manner). At the end of the day though, I think that for the public to accept truly self driving cars in the near-ish future, there's still going to have to be a human they can blame if something goes wrong.
I'm pretty sure he knows he can't deliver and doesn't really care. I have a friend working on Tesla after sales service, used to work for other brands, and he says it's astonishing how little Tesla cares about its customers. Still would buy a model 3 though.
> I can't decide if Elon Musk and Tesla believe the claims he's been saying, or knows that he can't deliver soon
He needs the money to try and as such needs to present it as something that will happen soon to get that money. I don't think there's any other way to go about it. Who would spend on "we don't know if and don't know when"?
I think there's a lot more trial and error in human tech advancement then we want to admit. Especially for developments that take more than a few years. Failure is always an option, recent popular optimism "anything is possible" is wishful thinking. To answer if it is possible you can only try and see. And to really try you need to believe.
Sure, but at the same time it's important to stress that while the judge is still out on Tesla , the wealth of mr. Musk is pretty real, and I mean both the mega salary which has parameters optimized for Musk to achieve as well as the paper wealth which despite its name for sure won't go to 0 like Theranos.
But let's focus on the salary package, it is a optimized for growth not for success, those are 2 very different things.
I am kinda conflicted about this, but when I am calm and analyze the situation from a neutral standpoint I always come up to the conclusion that it takes 2 parties to come up with an agreement . Musk managed to sell his way during the negotiation and arrive to that advantageous salary compensation which is basically crafted for him to achieve by basically keep doing what he's doing (growth and nonstop promotion), can't say anything other than "well played mr. Musk", good for him, he managed to get what he wanted out of the negotiation.
I have one of the cheaper cars that has some of the newly standard assistance tech, and after about six months, I think the best of it is the adaptive cruise control. I didn't think it was more than a gimmick at first, but I've started using it, and it transfers a significant mental burden so that I feel more relaxed on the highway, almost as if I was a passenger. It complements a hybrid very well; somehow it's psychologically easier to follow someone slow when the car automatically keeps its distance.
However, the lane keeping assist does not seem like a good idea to me. It sort of works, but I never know if it will lose track of the lane suddenly. When there is an exit or something that breaks the lines, I think of the Tesla crash I read about. When there is a curve in the road, it seems like there is a threshold beyond which it doesn't try to follow. So it amounts to an unpredictable resistance of the power steering, and doesn't reduce the driver's workload at all, in my opinion. Maybe it's supposed to be used on straight highways, but if it worked without attention for a while, that seems even more hazardous.
I wonder if that could be a direction to go in - future cars could let the driver steer, but mostly figure out going and stopping on their own.
The lane keeping assistant from an rental Audi (2019 model) tryed to crash me several times to a tunnel wall. Suddenly the car tryed to turn hard right into the wall. It was very scary.
However, rather than tried to crash, I think of it as an awareness aid. Blindly following it a bad idea.
I hate blind spot assist. It just makes me concerned that I'm missing something. I adjust my mirrors in accordance with SAE guidelines from 1995 that eliminates blind spots.
I have a 2020 Hyundai, top spec but still just a Hyundai. It has great lane departure warning and it's very accurate. It picks up the difference between solid/double/broken white lines and lane changing/merging/splitting. We took it around a local race track and it followed the track markings on everything but a hairpin which it applies brakes and took us to a complete stop. If it wasn't for the driver attention settings (no steering wheel feedback from driver, the car will also stop) it could have almost been an unassisted drive.
But adaptative speed control is something relatively basic that is available on many brands since years. It's absolutely great, but nothing remarkable.
My experience with a road trip rental of a 2020 RAV4 is exactly the same as what you describe.
The ACC was great, and very useful in both high-speed traffic and stop-and-go traffic.
But the lane-center tech was useless, regardless of the road conditions. Even with full sunlight and freshly-painted lines, it didn't work reliably.
When I was test driving a RAV4, the dealer told me not to use the lane-centering when in the slow lane, allegedly because people are coming and going a lot. But it was clear that the real problem was that it would keep you centered even as the line on the right veered off for an exit, which would drive you right into an overpass.
I have a 2014 (so, very old) tesla and the lanekeeping continues to work extremely well. I have literally never had this issue and I live in a rainy area.
It can read the street signs, but it also uses published information about the road in the absence of a sign (e.g. you turn on to a new road - what is the speed limit if there is no visible sign?)
that seems awfully dangerous, though? if you drive yourself and have no sign there, you can at least argue. if the published information tesla is using is claiming 100 miles an hour is the limit, the car will speed up?
It uses other information too. It wouldn’t go over 45 or so unless it’s clearly a freeway with a divider and other cars were going that fast. And there is probably something that uses last known speed, and it remembers speeds it has seen before.
But the updates do other things too, like help it understand new kinds of signs or to improve handling of weird situations.
Is this thanks to software updates that Tesla offers? I've asked Toyota and Subaru dealers if they offer OTA updates, and I've been told they don't/won't.
I'd be much more likely to buy a car that has pretty good driver assist tech if it were regularly updated. I don't want to have a car for 10 years if half the driver assist tech is useless when the car is brand new, and it will never be updated.
I don’t think I could feel relaxed enough to be like a passenger after seeing the crash videos. The failure state seems to be suddenly doing something completely insane, and I’m not sure if I was relaxed I could assess and correct the situation quickly enough.
Telsa has actually had several models of autopilot.
The first one by mobileye is actually pretty decent at automating the boring stuff. "traffic aware cruise control + autosteer". It was actually better than the next one for a little while until features caught up.
Some folks with the pre-autopilot tesla cars were able to retrofit a mobileye device on the dash somehow. I don't know if it still works to do that.
the infrastructure will gradually shift from making roads safe for humans to making it safe for robots, meaning it will gradually become hostile to humans. as it gradually gets hostile to humans, they will have to use robots to get around, and so private capital will be able to extract rent from public infrastructure, and the public will still be responsible for maintaining and upgrading that infrastructure, at least until the body is killed by its parasites. isn't that the vision of über, and why so much investment has gone to it? isn't that all big tech does?
Roads are already hostile to humans. We need to make human islands, areas where the roads have been converted into gardens or grassy areas, where people can walk freely without cars. And then make safe, robot friendly ways to transport humans between them.
Or we could just get rid of a lot of cars and use trains for most of our travel.
Relatedly, have you ever looked at the urban planning of Brasilia? Concepts similar to yours have been tried under the high modernism of the mid 20th century.
I think what you are trying to say is that future will look bleak for drivers. It does not mean humans in general though. Drivers will be replaced by more cost efficient and often more reliable robots. But the upside is lower prices, more free time, less stress, less accidents. So it would be a net gain for most of the humans.
The entire purpose of infrastructure is to enable commerce that makes life better for the tax payers who fund it.
Horse and buggy enthusiasts hate semis but people who shop at Amazon love them.
The same goes for people who want self driving cars and the infrastructure they will be supported by. If the world goes that way, it's because the people want it.
> As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.
So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Let's not. If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
> So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items?
Most of America has no public transit, and cars are mandatory to transit any appreciable distance (Texas, Florida, most of California, for example). That is unlikely to change, and therefore it is reasonable to discuss efforts and resources into improving environment attributes for self driving vehicles of all manufacturers. Roads are already governed by safety and regulatory standards, there is no reason those standards setting bodies should not take input from developers of self driving vehicles.
> If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
Sure, that stop sign (or rather, the roadway segment attributes necessary for the vehicle to infer that a stop is required) should be in OpenStreetMap anyway, which should be used as canonical digital ground truth for roadway intents by automakers, regulators, and roadway O&M alike.
COVID drilled a huge dent into perceived viability of public transportation. IMHO some form of self driving, self cleaning car shares is the future. At least in the underpopulated countries
Not sure why you are being downvoted since the facts agree with you. Public transport has taken a massive drop all over the world thanks to Covid. Meanwhile demand for cars has exceeded rapidly.
A bit less blak-or-white please. Demand has stayed the same, if anything. There were just restrictions put in place that prevent or at least discourage public transport use. Where I live I know people who use the bus now since their usual car sharing buddy is not driving in to work these days.
You want everyone to invest in a technology that currently only benefits a select few.
Why don't we invest that money in making current technology economical before we go asking single mothers driving clapped out Ford Taurus's to pay for it.
How else is the technology going to benefit everyone if not for spending resources on it and scaling up? That is the investment. No one donated Tesla the capital required for a $600 million global Supercharger network; their Model S and X buyers ("wealthy consumers of goods") paid for that (out of vehicle margins). Self driving vehicles will be no different, and those capabilities will trickle down as most technology does over time, from only the wealthy paying for it ($10k is a hard pill to swallow for Autopilot) to mass adoption.
Model S and X buyers are the only ones who can use them. Therefore logic dictates they should be the only ones who pay for them.
You conflate scaling Tesla up with scaling the technology up. You want everyone to invest in Tesla so that Tesla can fulfill the promises Tesla made to Tesla owners.
> Model S and X buyers are the only ones who can use them. Therefore logic dictates they should be the only ones who pay for them.
You misunderstand. All Tesla vehicles can use Superchargers. S and X owners paid for the network build out for the 3 and Y buyers (and future S and X owners, which there are less of naturally due to the 3 and Y cannibalizing higher end sales [Musk's statement from an earnings call indicates they continue to sell the S and X as "art pieces" and for "sentimental reasons", backed up by their most recent quarterly report]). Tesla has offered the network to other automakers in a cost sharing agreement, and publicly no one has agreed to that (privately, an automaker is testing interoperability). The point is that someone has to make the investment, those funds have to come from someone's pocket. The US government didn't cough up significant EV charger funds until this year as part of COVID relief [1] (and the goal is for 500k chargers by 2030 ಠ_ಠ). As of February 18, 2021, Tesla operates over 23,277 Superchargers in over 2,564 stations worldwide (an average of 9 chargers per station). Tesla's Supercharger network build was started in 2012 [2].
> You conflate scaling Tesla up with scaling the technology up. You want everyone to invest in Tesla so that Tesla can fulfill the promises Tesla made to Tesla owners.
No. I don't care if you invest in Tesla. I'm not invested in Tesla. It won't even matter if you invest in Tesla (institutional money and index funds are driving the show there, retail is just along for the ride). You're arguing that someone should come along and invest in self driving for everyone's mutual benefit, and that entity doesn't exist. Tesla likely won't even be held accountable for false marketing if they can't deliver on FSD other than a class action (for those who were savvy enough to opt out of arbitration) where purchasers receive a trivial payout, attorneys walk away with a chunk of change, but it's a slap on the wrist compared to revenue and enterprise value (which was able to grow faster than the potential penalty cost of Musk's tenuous promises). Not saying it's fair, nor right, just how it's always played out.
It's going to be interesting when class actions start happening for companies pushing the mandatory arbitration garbage. If a class action still proceeds because enough people have opted out, then it will demonstrate real damages. After which, everybody who didn't opt out will have a pretty strong case to arbitrate asking for at least the same compensation - while a settlement isn't an admission of guilt it does demonstrate merit, and the arbitrator will not want to admit that they're an outright sham. And once this gets popular (eg a one-stop website for submitting your arbitration claim), the company is going to be stuck paying all of those separate arbitration case fees as they promised.
>And once this gets popular (eg a one-stop website for submitting your arbitration claim), the company is going to be stuck paying all of those separate arbitration case fees as they promised.
Almost exactly a year ago, the article below was published talking about this exact thing. Since companies tried restricting class action lawsuits, there are now instances of death by 1,000 arbitrations.
Judge William Alsup, who also handled Oracle vs. Google, is quoted:
"Your law firm and all the defense law firms have tried for 30 years to keep plaintiffs out of court, and so finally someone says, ‘OK, we’ll take you to arbitration,’ and suddenly it’s not in your interest anymore. Now you’re wiggling around, trying to find some way to squirm out of your agreement. There is a lot of poetic justice here."
The companies made this bed, and they don't seem to like laying in it.
Ah that sounds familiar but I must have forgotten. It looks like the arbitrators are reinventing class action lawsuits (which makes sense). Of course that doesn't do anything to fix the larger issue of the huge conflict of interest.
The chargers should be open to all makes and models of EV. Single brand plugs and chargers is wasteful infrastructure.
Tesla switched to CCS in Europe. They should switch to CCS in the US as well. The next step is to open the chargers to all EVs like the other charging networks do.
You can fuel an ICE car at any fuel station so you should be able to charge an EV at any charging station. Not being able to do so makes EVs less practical than internal combustion vehicles.
Everything newfangled is expensive and thus available only to the wealthy. But if governments never spurred economic investment in new technologies we’d be 100 years behind where we are.
It's worth spending just for the improvement to the average human driver. From what I've heard, policy makers are asking autonomous car designers what would be helpful on the roads, and the first thing they would like is just better road maintenance/design to existing standards (which is something the politicians are keen on because it's too boring to get any positive press).
Wait, why not? The definiton of separate infrastructure seems arbitrary. GPS relies on satellites. Is that separate infrastructure?
Humans use road signs and lights and... We created separate, additional infrastructure for ourselves as drivers. Why wouldn't we add infra to "help" autonomous cars? Can't a car that senses RFIDs at every corner be considered autonomous, full self-driving? How is that different from sensing road markings via camera?
If the issue is just a terminology one, to distinguish "full self driving" versus "full self driving with fully self-contained reasoning" or whatever I must object - that's not how these terms get defined.
Tesla is arguably misusing the term "full" because it doesn't operate to the level we'd expect; not because of whatever resources it uses to function
If this is too long -
tl;dr: I think the absolute majority of people won't mind calling a car that requires _any_ additional infrastructure (including communication with other cars) a "full self-driving" car. As long as it drives itself 100% of the time without a human driver, it's full self driving.
"Separate infrastructure" means it's separate. GPS is not separate, you can use it no matter which road you are on. Streets and rails are (usually) separate, a vehicle for one can't use the other. That's what may be necessary for fully autonomous vehicles.
Exactly, the original comment I was replying to was suggesting we'd have "full self driving" where the autonomous vehicles were on completely seperate roads that humans didn't use.
If a robot can't deal with a human cyclist or someone crossing the street the that is not remotely self driving.
That's the difference between L4 and L5 automated driving. L4 works in specific locations that have special infrastructure, L5 is supposed to work everywhere, even on a dirt road up a nameless hill in the country.
So many things to unpack here. Please keep in mind that Tesla and Musk are masters of misrepresenting statistics out of context.
So, when you said that "Tesla cars" kill humans at a lower rate than "human drivers", could you provide a source for that? Or did you mean the regular claim by Musk about teslas being safer by 100% than an average driver, which means that an average tesla car while running autopilot in almost always highway conditions in almost always sunny conditions has lower fatalities than the average human driver, who will skew older and more accident prone, driving on average roads, in average conditions, with the average 10 year old car with less safety features.
Never in any of these statements have i seen any discussion of pedestrians deaths, but it makes sense right? How many pedestrians are on highways where autopilot is mostly used.
I don’t think so, and it would be hard to collect truly independent data on miles driven for example, though the data from Tesla is pretty convincing and no public data I can find contradicts it. They’re not safe in all conditions and I wouldn’t personally pay for their ‘FSD’ product but they’re safer than the average human in average conditions (a very low bar).
The data says Tesla's autopilot is in the safest conditions better than the average human in average conditions. It does not say that it is safer than the average human in the safest conditions, nor that it is safer when in average conditions.
The infrastructure required for trains is many times more expensive than road, so ends up being impractical.
Trains can't pass each other, so you will need multiple lines with lots of trains, and they don't serve all transport needs unless you manage to get rail outside all shops for instance.
Where I live and based on what I can find, train is cheaper per km and per personkm that get traveled.
Roads outside of shops is a small minority of all roads, and we are currently undergoing a change in how city planning is handling commercial districts, with movements towards the edges or online.
There are however major problems with train networks, one being that lack of redundancy. With road maintenance you can shutdown a major highway and redirect traffic temporary to smaller roads with significant reduction in speed. With trains you either have the option to go around the maintenance, or you replace the train temporarily with road based travel.
A second big problem with train infrastructure is the lack of an obvious upgrade path. With roads you build a new highway when security, air pollution and noise become too severe for smaller towns around the old road, and the better road also adds higher capacity and faster allowed speeds for transportation. There are so many incentives to upgrade old roads, and with an increasing population it makes traffic heavier for old roads, speeding up demand for better and bigger roads that runs outside the towns.
For rails, there is mostly just an economic argument in favor of building more. The reduction in car travel is not significant enough compared to building a new road outside the limits of the smaller towns.
> As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.
At least in the US, my major concern would not really be building it right the first time (though there are plenty of places where we don't even do that), but maintaining it over time.
Many jurisdictions can barely keep the paint legible on the roads, so autonomous cars are just going to have to deal with poor or deferred maintenance.
Is waymo (or anyone) working on autonomous buses? Seems more practical for a first deployment (~fixed route, higher capital cost, operator salary is the greatest cost).
That sounds like a good idea/question, but a side question from me - driver salary is really the main cost? I'd imagine fleet depreciation to be the main (non-cash) expense.
I'm no expert, but it's what I heard. But back of the the envelope, a bus costs O($500k) and lasts O(20 years), but you have to pay for multiple FTE operators per bus. Obviously maintenance and fuel also cost money but not as much as a (typically unionized) operator.
If an autonomous bus costs twice as much I think it still wins out. Maybe you still need a conductor to make sure people pay and don't act antisocially but such a person can probably be much cheaper/less skilled.
>but not as much as a (typically unionized) operator.
Why do you need to specify the "unionized" drivers? Do they cost more? Why? because they are paid fair(like paid extra if they have to work on Christmas or extra hours)? Or maybe they union negotiated to keep the salary in sync with inflation?
Yes, because they get paid more compared to e.g. an Uber driver, and also there are typically things like minimum shift lengths and required breaks. It's not a bad thing, but helps explain why operator costs tend to be dominant.
It doesn't take that much skill to drive a bus. College kids and retirees do it for part time income. I'd think the conductor/security guard would be as expensive if not more expensive than the driver.
Fleet maintenance is also a huge fixed cost, and improvements to bus technology that reduce maintenance are a neutral impact when it comes to driver/driverless as options.
The transport authority in Oslo (Ruter#), has been running self driving services for a few years now and there is some info about it at https://ruter.no/en/about-ruter/reports-projects-plans/auton... .
I don't live in a part of town they've been experimenting in. But what I've seen indicates that what they are doing is running slow moving, small self driving busses in areas where it would not be cost efficient to use a bus with a driver. Since they are slow driving, the self driving problem is a lot easier, you don't have to see that far off, and stopping is faster so you don't need to model the future far out to be safe. In addition low speed collision are safer, which makes failures safer aswell.
Is operator salary the highest cost? I'm honestly curious, and it sounds logical. But it also sounds like a statement that just keeps being repeated without it being confirmed, or universally true.
It's pretty crazy how much city buses cost. I think I saw that NC hybrid busses cost 800k each. You can buy a lot of cars/vans for that much and probably have more capacity and happier riders since the trips will be more frequent and more direct.
More capacity than a bus in cars seems unlikely given that they probably wouldn’t be packed to capacity most times.
I guess if you purchased say, 40 honda civics?
There’s a lot of other considerations to consider here as well.
Cars and vans would both take up more space for the same amount of people which means more traffic which leads to slower speeds and more noise and air pollution.
Cleaning all these cars and vans would require more workers than cleaning the equivalent number of busses either by capitol or by riders.
Cars and vans require more space to park.
There’d be far more maintenance for cars and vans than busses.
Busses are equipped with handicap ramps, bike racks, and seats to accomodate the differently abled, as well as payment processors. These features all drive up costs. Tech only solutions can prevent access to transportation for indigent and differently abled populations.
More cars and vans means more road wear.
And of course the lifetimes of the vehicles may differ adding in other costs.
It's really hard to fill buses to capacity too. If you want people to be able to rely on the buses, then they have to go everywhere all the time. But if they go everywhere, there will be enough of them that are mostly empty that the average efficiency might be less than cars.
In reality, they compromise. I live in a not-very large city. I used to rent an apartment in a suburb to the southeast just a few miles out, and the bus only made one trip in the morning to the city and one trip in the afternoon back, and if you didn't work the exact hours that you could catch the bus, like my job was 9-6 or 2-11, etc., you were out of luck.
Now, I live within city limits, in the southwest, but there is no bus route going north-south to where I work (or did before covid), because most of the traffic goes east to downtown and back, so that's how all the routes go. There aren't many routes or stops to the north and west.
When I was living in an apartment in a slightly different suburb, there were more frequent buses, but they were almost empty when I rode them. You can't assume that they're saving resources in any circumstance.
No that's completely false as well as gratuitously insulting.
I'm saying that there's a tradeoff between investment and cost effectiveness relative to individual transportation.
A bus gets like 6 mpg. You have to have a certain average number of people on it per time or distance for it to be more efficient than a person in a car.
A network is more valuable the larger it is. But the more routes you have, the less traffic each one will have.
Being willing to invest is irrelevant, unless you think investing in something that makes people worse off is a no-brainer.
It's not meant to be insulting, it's just based on the numbers. 81% of Federal and State spending is allocated to highways, 19% to all other transit. 61% of local funding, too [1].
American governments tend to prioritize investment and spending for individual transportation over public transportation. The numbers get really crazy when you actually factor in the costs associated with 'free parking' - including requirements that new developments include a minimum amount of parking spots for each housing unit - and all the other subsidies car transportation enjoys.
[edit] > Being willing to invest is irrelevant, unless you think investing in something that makes people worse off is a no-brainer.
The thing is, public transportation isn't meant to be necessarily cost effective or even in all cases fuel efficient at the point of service, it levels the playing field. Poor folks currently have to buy a car to get to work. That's a huge investment in a depreciating asset at usurious interest rates. Public transportation reduces inequality and bolsters the economy indirectly, too.
>It's not meant to be insulting, it's just based on the numbers
It's offensive and insulting to go off on an anti-American tangent that signals a complete lack of engagement with the comment supposedly being replied to.
You're compounding it. Whether what you write is true or not, has nothing to do with it being an obnoxious political digression.
I made a comment on tradeoffs. Whether anybody is willing to spend money on things that have a positive return for society is changing the subject. The assumption was that we all are.
I'm genuinely not sure why you think it's insulting and anti-American to suggest American governments don't prioritize spending on public transit, when the numbers bear that out. It's an observation, not an attack. It's viewed as a welfare program, a lifeline for those who can't afford to own cars. American's don't really like public transit - in part because of this perception. That's not a value judgement. [1] Governments invest in things people like and care about and are popular - that's one way to get elected, after all.
Am I wrong? Do Americans actually love public transit, and is the government in fact willing to invest as much as it takes to make the system work right? All the data I've dug up suggests otherwise but if you have some I'm happy to read it.
> Whether anybody is willing to spend money on things that have a positive return for society is changing the subject. The assumption was that we all are.
Well, not really, narratives and entrenched interests do a good job of convincing people to vote against their own interests.
That conveniently ignores the fact that public attitudes are not in any way shaped, whether by corporations or politicians. If a leader believes that public transit is in the long term best interest for America, then they can work to change public attitudes. In the same vein, automobile manufacturers will do their best through advertising and lobbying to ensure America's love interest in their private vehicles continues indefinitely without competition from the public sector.
The 800k hybrid buses and the 1.2M pure EV buses don't get 6mpg.
The average number of people you need for simply the fuel is like, 5. But as far as all other factors, a lot are fixed costs, so number of trips is more important that average people.
Not to forget, again, electric buses exist and work well.
Some buses are more fuel efficient than average; so are some cars.
I was not promoting specific numbers; the point is there's a tradeoff and a tipping point where more trips make things worse, whatever the numbers are.
Averages have a way of being a lot lower than peak numbers, too.
Yeah, but the averages don't matter as much as the max in this case. The total carrying capacity between 8-10 and 4-6 is what's important, as traditionally, this is when most of the people moving occurred. It doesn't really matter if the buses are less efficient than cars the rest of the time, as long as they take enough of the overall journeys at peak times that the whole city traffic system moves quicker.
Speaking as someone outside the autonomous vehicle industry, can you provide sources or reputable commentary on how Waymo is furthest ahead? And maybe a rough ranking of the rest of the major players?
The only public data is California's safety reports over the last couple years, which show Cruise and Waymo having millions of miles driven with Waymo having fewer "disengagements" than Cruise. There is also the fact that Waymo has ride sharing service in "production". As someone who is also outside the AV industry that is the closest I've gotten to a source, everything else is just hearsay by various Hacker News engineers about how Waymo is the best.
The ranking as I understand it is Waymo, Cruise, then everyone else.
You might want to have a look into the public output of George Hotz. Obviously he is a little biased towards his own efforts, but he is very open about limitations and the actual reality of the self driving business.
You're telling people not to listen to Ford PR, and instead pointing them to a podcast by a higher-up at Tesla with a very clear bias and incentive to talk shit about competitors? Dude...
Waymo can scale as fast as they want to via partnerships like the one they have with Chrysler already. Other companies will build the vehicles and add the hardware, Waymo will handle the software. Not everyone has to do everything in-house like Tesla does.
Sure things could have changed, but by all accounts they haven't, given the lack of deployment. They took 5 years to get to 90%, another 5 to get to 99%, and will take roughly the same amount of time to get to 99.9%, etc. And that doesn't mean they're done.
(I have been following this for at least 10 years, and I also worked on a college project in autonomous vehicles 21 years ago. It was not good, but the deployment and philosophical issues are identical to the ones back then IMO.)
> Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush.
You're absolutely correct, but there are far more people who want to make the argument that Tesla's ahead because they're "beta" on roads and "don't need LIDAR".
There's optimism, and there's reality-distortion field. I think a lot of people bought into the latter.
You're probably trolling, but in case you're not aware, Waymo is the only company that offers a level-4 robotaxi service, albeit only available in a small region.
No im not trolling actually ... its about as feasible as running a taxi service with Ferrari's all while having comparable revenue to a uber driver .. it just wont work , it can not scale capex is to high.
Waymo isn't selling cars to customers though and has no plans to. They want to run a taxi service like Uber. They don't want the liability of customers owning the vehicles and maybe modifying them and then getting bad press exactly like Tesla gets over it's system.
Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.
Why does the US need car ownership? wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
The trouble with this capacity utilization argument is that the driving happens roughly at the same time. One could also argue that we can get rid of 2/3 of beds because humans sleep only 8 out of 24 hours on average. Aside from many practical limitations, the trouble is that the majority of people sleep in the same timeframe.
Car usage is obviously directly tied to road usage. High road usage leads to congestion. In a sense, you want there to be a limit of the number of cars on the road: Just under what would start causing significant slowdown.
The fixed costs of owning a car are expensive, but typical city/suburban usage ignoring work commute easily makes the costs worth it. The time expense of using public transit or the dollar expense of relying on lyft/uber are simply too high.
Self driving cars have some advantages:
They reduce the cost of sporadic non-peak usage. For some this will make the work commute on public transit a dollars+time net savings. This pressure will be especially high on 2+ car households, where the economics of a second car will be abysmal.
Self driving cars can act as a much more efficient feeder to public transit. At any given time, especially during peak usage, there are a bunch of people going from approximately where you are to approximately where you're going.
We aren't taking advantage of this today because of two problems: Coordination is hard and requires a critical mass. Any time stopped just kills average speed, greatly increasing time to get to a destination (this is why busses are soooo sloooow.)
Self driving cars can take people from their houses in suburban neighborhoods to coordination locations. Hop in a small bus/shuttle with a few others. Wait no more than a minute or two as cars arrive. Then the shuttle takes everyone to their destination (if it's a high density city where the destination is within a block), or the reverse of a feeder, where single person taxis are already there waiting to take you, with a pause as long as it takes to get out of a vehicle, walk a few feed, and get in another.
I fundamentally believe that car dependence is built into North American suburbia (how much of this is by design is another matter - plenty of people claim that the car and oil industries have been making sure their products will continue to be in demand for decades to come).
Public transport and bikes are not feasible in Houston or Los Angeles, due to low density and hostile roads.
Going back to your argument, I believe all of this would also be possible with cabs, from a user's perspective the only difference between an autonomous car and an Uber might be price (over the long term)
High speed rail between large agglomerations like SF/LA seem like obvious improvements,but seem impossible to build in the USA.
Owning a car means you get the exact 2 hours you need rather than waiting for the 2 hours a taxi company will sell you. It means you can use the car as 24 hour storage for all the things you keep in your car. It means sometimes you can use the car for way more than 2 hours in a day. You can share the car with other people at minimal additional cost. It means you can live in a rural place 2 hours from the nearest taxi company and not have to pay for 2 hours of additional time as the empty taxi comes to you and 2 hours more when it returns after you're done with it.
For many people a robot taxi is a viable alternative to car ownership, but for plenty of people owning a car is always going to be a better option.
Cause freedom. You're talking about the U.S. Why does the US need gun ownership? Cause.
> wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
I hear this again and again and I wonder how detached from reality people are. There are many reasons this won't happen. People have different standards of cleanliness. People have different standards of how much scratches they tolerate on a car. People view cars as status symbols. The list goes on.
People buy condos even though a rental would financially make more sense. But they want to own something they can call theirs and do with it whatever they want or keep it pristine to their liking.
It makes lots of sense to me that they would target miles transported vs owners.
When I lived ~10 miles outside of a town, I would have been fine not having a car if I could reliably summon cheap transport. In a small town, all the same. The amount of waiting matters, but not that much.
Waymo works like a rail shooter. You cannot go where they have not built detailed maps down to curbs and such. It says so on their site. That is not FSD but instead a theme park ride.
While I own a Tesla model 3 with FSD I am more impressed by what is shown on youtube by beta testers than by anything my car can do. Simply put, Telsa only recently changed their entire FSD suite to include maintaining an active awareness of all labeled objects which in itself is greatly improved as my car clearly does not see everything.
Think of it this way, current versions work on a very short moment of time so and don't have labels for everything it can see which leads to missing parked vehicles (as in how did that survive this long) and more. My favorite example is my car rendering cones around a parked cable/phone truck but not the damn truck! It also had fun with a garbage truck doing a great job rendering the guy and cans and with the truck not always there but immediately real once it moved.
As for buying FSD, don't. Regular autopilot provides the driver assistance people can actually use on long trips. Which is, keeps you safe if you get distracted or worse. Plus there is still an issue with trade ins to Tesla, pretty much they were assigning ZERO dollars for FSD. So until Tesla provides a transfer fee or puts FSD at the account level I am never buying another one.
FSD needs to be at the account level. It would actually make Tesla more money as they could then sell a subscription for those who only need it for trips.
This is amazing, I can't believe I haven't seen this page before. How can people still take him seriously? It almost sounds like a bot is Tweeting from his account.
> "I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house. [...] Don’t need the cash. Devoting myself to Mars and Earth. Possession just weigh you down."
> "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April" (Posted Mar 2020)
Unbelievable, these are just the ones from a year ago. People that take him seriously, could you explain why you do?
His predictions on Crypto and BTC now seem even more ridiculous and pump'n'dump-y.
Pretty much every famous genius in history has spewed numerous claims, collecting lots of hits and lots of misses along the way. It's part of being human that thinks big. Thinking big means missing the mark a lot.
I'm not an Elon fanboy, it's just a little bizarre to me that people mark this guy up as a crazy liar who shouldn't be taken seriously, meanwhile many of his bold claims have actually resulted in advancing tech and science in staggering ways. Like, people were saying the same thing about his claim to land first stage boosters, and here we are.
Side note, apparently he is still actively selling off all his possessions.
Making extremely aggressive predictions about a topic that you know nothing about isn't "thinking big". Somebody with massive media attention and countless acolytes needs to wield their power with care, especially given that a pandemic is driven by human behavior (if it's not a big deal, why wear a mask?). Not knowing what you don't know is just foolish.
I mean, Starship exists and with each (frequent) test flight it gets closer to delivering on the promise of full reusability, which is jet-age-level shit.
F9 is also incredible and has made the impossible possible... and Starlink is one instance of that, which also exists and is usable.
You can't really highlight his failures without also giving credit where credit is due to his (and his organizations') successes.
I'm really curious how he gets such smart and talented people to work at his companies.
I don't want to deny the successes at all. But everything SpaceX has achieved so far was possible before. I guess the statement that Starship is getting closer to its promise can be expressed that way, but it almost sounds like it's already close and in reality it's far from being ready.
Also consider that it took NASA about 9 years to fully develop the Space Shuttle from ground up and they didn't lose a single vehicle during testing - 50 years ago!
> But everything SpaceX has achieved so far was possible before.
This is not accurate: reusable orbital first stages is a SpaceX first, and the cost savings it yielded enabled Starlink, which is another SpaceX first (high speed, low-latency, low-altitude LEO satellite internet).
Reusable rockets were developed by a private company 30 years before SpaceX.[1] Using such rockets as first stages is what SpaceX did first, I give them that. But it's more of a means to an end than an achievement. The savings so far are much lower than claimed. Deploying LEO satellites is nothing new. StarLink is burning a lot of money and it is questionable if they will ever become profitable.
No, there was no reusable first stage before SpaceX, and pretty much everyone in the industry was laughing at Elon for even proposing it.
Would you please stop lying about SpaceX?
Reusable first stages are not an achievement. Reusable rockets were invented 30 years before SpaceX. Using such rockets as first stages is a questionable decision by SpaceX, which may be a means to an end if it can save costs.
Exactly. And us Europeans just got our collective ass handed to us, realizing that our new shiny planned rockets wont cut it in direct competition even if us tax payers shoulder the development costs.
Elon says stupid things sometimes, but I would rather have most of the time, than more stupid manager talk from our German companies with their 'electrified intelligence' and AI in our dashboards (because they bind a GPS coordinate to a setting like Tesla).
No, they lost one when it mattered most: when humans were on board. Besides, Starship is meant as more of a replacement for Apollo than for the shuttle.
It's not a contradiction what I wrote, it's a fair point. Two of the five shuttles eventually exploded with passengers on board. Better to learn the hard edge cases in testing.
You probably shouldn't have started the sentence with "No" then, but never mind. Let's hope that space travel will be safer in the future.
Anyway, I really just wanted to point out that 50 years ago it was apparently possible to develop spaceships in less time without a "move fast and break things" approach.
Fact check:
Starship was in development for much less time than SLS, it costs order of magnitudes less and it had several successful 10 km flights.
Your comment is absolutely misleading if not outright false because starship as we know it with the steel construction is from end of 2018, so a little more than 2 years ago. The current testing pace is two launches in less than 30 days.
SLS had a failed static fire in January and it took them 3 months just to do another static fire.
Starship performs multiple static fires per day and it’s the only vehicle in history that managed to fly with full flow engines.
Elon has unfortunately become a classic example of smart person in some domains believing they are smart in all domains. HN, I implore you, never trust a genius in one domain to weigh in an adjacent domain, let alone an entirely different one. Brain power is great but domain specific expertise is greater.
Yeah for example, Elon has done a lot of great stuff with Space X for example, but the shit he says about boring company and public transit, it's so wildly out of touch with reality, wrong and stupid, it's an embarrassment.
Very few people are good at everything. Probably no one. If that's your standard for who you should listen to, you should just bury your head in the sand, permanently, on every topic.
Elon Musk is demonstrably very good at some things - in particular running companies. I can't think of any other person who has successfully started multiple billion dollar companies. Which isn't to say that they don't exist, but... (see next paragraph)
Elon Musk is also much more willing to speak his mind than most successful entrepreneurs (which is why you hear about him). Sometimes he is rather stupid (see paragraph 1), sometimes he is not. Often I think his statements (and to a large extent probably his actual opinions as well) are biased towards what is good for his companies. The information you can get from when he is not being stupid or overly biased is probably worth putting up with the stupid.
Finally he's just involved in a lot of cool technology... and however else you feel about him you have to admire him remaining that involved when he has more than enough money to fuck off and retire.
Maybe one way to drive home the point is to just answer a lot of yes/no questions about him:
Do I think he's overselling autopilot, yes. Do I think he's wrong about bitcoin, yes. Do I think he's wrong about how to run companies, I mean probably also yes, but on average less wrong than basically anyone else talking about it, it's a complex topic but he is good at it. Do I think he's wrong about how to build rockets? Like the answer to companies. Do I think he's wrong about how to build factories? The same again. Do I think he intends to put people on mars? Yes. Do I think he will succeed? I put it at above 50% probability, which is far higher than I think of anyone else. Do I think we will get his self sustaining city? Almost certainly not. And so on and so on.
You do know how he started in Canada right ? Nothing glamorous about that. And don't get me started on the Emerald mine talking point. As far as every trustworthy source has confirmed he was quite far from a trust fund kid. The one thing in his favor was possible to be a white, well educated kid. Compared to all the PoC who don't even have that under similar conditions.
What was Jobs' second? NeXT wasn't a billion dollar company and he didn't start Pixar. His wiki page doesn't list major involvement with any other companies.
There are plenty of elon haters around. Some people just can't accept that someone can think outside the box and profit from it. I've seen the same mentality in crypto and other places.
I'm a big Elon fan but this website is pretty eye-opening... Many great entrepreneurs are delusional optimists. But seeing it all in one place like this... wow.
Last year they delivered 499000 cars so they reached their objective.
The current delivery numbers point to at least 800k deliveries for this year, and 1M is quite possible.
Oh god, he is such a complete bull shitter that it's embarrassing.
A while back, I was like "This Elon Musk guy is really an example of what we need more of in the world".
It makes me cringe.
This was the days of solar rooftiles, Boring company, going to mars soon, the hyperloop, battery technologies, self driving vehicles.
All of it was complete horseshit.
The worst thing of all is that, I can hold my hands up and be laughed at but since then there are armies of Elon fans that don't recognise it.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
EDIT: Even on hackernews, there are people with this fetish. "It isn't his fault, the public is to blame for thinking that fully automated self driving cars, meant fully automated self driving cars". Ugh.
Elon Musk has start up ideas, and most start up ideas fail. Yes, he overhypes the ideas, but this is common in the start up world.
The difference is he has been involved with three large successes - ebay, telsa, and spacex. This success/failure ratio is leagues better than just about anyone else. And he did this in three very different industries.
So his self driving car effort will likely fail, or at best be very late.
But we do need more people willing to take chances like this who can also execute as this is rare.
Taking chances on a startup is one thing. Knowingly lying in the position of CEO of a publicly traded company and selling something that will never exist is fraud. Fake it til you make it isn’t legal in public securities nor should it be.
As much as he might stretch the truth, the most beautiful Elon trait is he dreams and is not afraid to share this dream world in the world no matter how foolish, foolhardy, or stupid it is. The rest of the FAANG CEOs provide a vague statement about how some vague description of AI will change the world and how their compy will lead the charge, which gives investors confidence but says nothing. For all his bullshiterry, Elon will provide an explicit goal versus a vague concept, which means a lot.
The line between "sharing his dream world" and "committing securities fraud" is evidently in the eye of the beholder. I admit that I'm surprised he doesn't get sued more for his blatant lies.
I think the issue is that he has had enough successes that people are assuming his current ideas will also, necessarily, be successes. And his self-confidence conveys that.
The thing people need to realize is that people can start hitting misses at any time.
Elon Musk is perhaps a con man (in the fully expounded sense of the term "confidence man"), but particularly one who believes his own bull.
I'm not sure he's a bullshitter exactly. He's wildly overoptimistic and is immune to reality to a large degree. The thing is, those can be really good traits for advancing the state of the art and developing new things.
If he wasn't like that, he might not have done some of the worthwhile things he's done. I definitely wouldn't take anything he says at face value, but I think there's value in him being like that.
I'm might have a better BS detector, or just older. But my thought was all Musk really does is prove how bad the management at automotive companies are.
My point is any of the auto companies could have done what Tesla did and done a better job. Except their managers in large totally suck. How bad to they suck? Musk is actually mentally ill.
Consider Toyota. 25 years ago their upper management was capable of fostering the development of hybrids. Now they seem to be unable to change direction.
VW is doing a better job. Probably because Germany threw some of the previous management in prison.
It's funny how many people take Elon's joke posts seriously. I mean come on people. Most of what he says is funny jokes (including most of the stuff in that link). Most of that stuff, even then, is a "this will be the case someday" type posts so there's no point in tracking the number of days since he said it.
Like:
> "Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync"
That's still the plan, and they're actively working toward that goal, and no deadline was set.
How do we know which ones are jokes and which ones aren't?
From what I can tell, the ones that are jokes are the ones he said a few times but made no progress towards. Like the self driving ones. And the ones where he throws paying customers his product killed under the bus.
> How do we know which ones are jokes and which ones aren't?
Good question. For me personally it's always been obvious and I've yet to be wrong, other than the time he said he would drive cross country on autopilot by a certain date. He's very obviously been wrong on Autopilot/Full Self Driving dates. I read every tweet he writes and I have a good sense of his personality having watched most interviews with him since the early 2010s when I originally started following him via SpaceX.
> Like the self driving ones.
I don't think the self driving ones have been jokes. He just really underestimated the difficulty of it. He has many times tempered his well known self driving tweets with less talked about tweets talking about 9s of reliability and how hard it is. People naturally only see his most wild claims reposted the most so assume most of what he says is the wild claims when that's generally a tiny minority.
And they have been making progress towards it. The system as of a few years ago compared to the system today is dramatically different. At current rates they're probably 2 years or so away from a system that matches Waymo's system, but works almost everywhere in the US, not just one city.
> And the ones where he throws paying customers his product killed under the bus.
To be honest... I'm on the side of Tesla on these. I'm not a fan of blaming a company when people misuse a product that's gated behind warning labels that say to not use it improperly. So when people die and he says "people shouldn't have been using the product this way" he's right, they accepted the risk when they turned the feature on past the warnings.
Autonomous cars are coming. They just will come first to specific areas where the cars are more experienced, like waymo does in Phoenix, and the cars themselves will be purpose built. As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.
It’s crazy irresponsible that Tesla switched on what they did and marketed it as FSD, and it’ll set back self driving cars years when people start getting into collisions.