
Tesla’s full self-driving computer is now in all new cars - kjhughes
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/teslas-computer-is-now-in-all-new-cars-and-a-next-gen-chip-is-already-halfway-done/
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sctb
Big discussion yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720832).

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danso
The highest upvoted Tesla-related HN thread is from Oct. 20, 2016: "All Tesla
Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" [0]

I think it's very cool Tesla is building its own chips. But the rate of
improvement in software just doesn't seem to be there yet, if Autopilot's
public updates are any indication. It's hard to believe that AP could have
these kind of basic regressions from just a month ago [1], while it
purportedly is solving much harder problems.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/)

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jpm_sd
Tesla's "maybe someday it will be capable of full self-driving" computer is
now in all new cars. Also, Full Self Driving is a marketing term that may or
may not ever mean Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy.

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huslage
Musk stated that they were looking for Level 4/5 next year. They demoed it to
the analysts, in admittedly controlled circumstances. I have little doubt that
they mean what they say even if their timeline is off.

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dangrossman
They also said that when they held the very same press conference in 2016,
promising coast-to-coast self-driving by the end of 2017. This is also the
third time they've said that all Tesla cars have all the hardware needed for
self-driving -- with three different sets of hardware now. Fool me once, shame
on you. Fool me three times? I have significant doubt that they mean what they
say.

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LAMike
My prediction: Tesla will stop selling cars to the public by 2023.

Why would they? their whole plan from the beginning was to do a reverse Uber -
a fleet of self driving cars that acts as a taxi service.

Cost of a model 3 to TSLA: 25k

Average Revenue per year for self driving taxi: $12/hr * 24 * 365 = 105k

Producing just 100k cars a year for this program would generate 10B dollars a
year in revenue, if they can make 1M cars a year, it's 100B... making TSLA a
trillion dollar company even with a Ford valuation.

Most of that revenue will be more profitable than a gas powered car since they
also own an energy company, and the software that runs the cars.

(Very glad I got a reservation worth of stock when the Model 3 was announced a
few years ago, so I am biased)

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dboreham
>Producing just 100k cars a year for this program would generate 10B dollars a
year in revenue

No competition fallacy. If some market exists that's $<huge>, you can only
sustain a high profit margin in serving that market if there are no
competitors (which seems unlikely).

Also falling into the "self driving is possible" fallacy..

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windexh8er
NVidia has an interesting response [0] to Tesla's event yesterday. They appear
to not want to seem too accepting of Tesla's progress, but clearly give credit
where due yet try to indicate their superiority in their products. Ultimately
I feel like it will be NVidia winning this long term as they will have the
luxury of scale across N number of vendors buying into their product. But for
Tesla it may be / is a niche differentiator for the time being. CV and self
driving hardware in cars will become akin to other tech specs: something some
consumers care about but a component of the car that is expected. I would
guess Tesla wants to keep on the performance edge of that moving forward.

[0] [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-self-
driving/](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-self-driving/)

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tibbydudeza
Impressive demo but it is not representative of the traffic conditions during
peak times in most cities.

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Abishek_Muthian
The article on self-driving Tesla, doesn't mention its lack of LIDAR. Has the
industry come into terms that Tesla will one day pull of Level 4 autonomy
without LIDAR?

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6d6b73
FSD can be done without LIDAR, but the real question is - should it be done
without it? It's the same with redundancy - when I drive my car, there is no
redundancy so computer based systems technically don't need it as well, but is
this a smart thing to do? NO. Can FSD be done using vision only ? Yes. Would
it be safer to have Vision + Lidar? Most definitely. So why Musk won't do it?
Cost + Ego + Time

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youeseh
What about old cars? Free retrofit?

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username223
> "All you need to do is improve the software," Musk said.

I had to double-check to make sure that April 1 had passed. At this point it's
hard to take Musk's "Full Self-Driving" schtick seriously. They developed
their own custom silicon, and now they "just" need to write the software that
will allow it, plus the sensors on a Tesla, to be "Full Self-Driving."

