
Chairman Elon's Great Leap Forward - evo_9
https://mondaynote.com/chairman-elons-great-leap-forward-68f49ffde372#.55l1ayfv8
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simonbarker87
I'm a big Musk fan and think the ambition of his current projects are
incredible.

But, my fear with Tesla is that the AutoPilot stuff derails and ultimately
kills the company. Not because it lands up being more dangerous than
conventional driving but because of the bad image the media could/will paint
of the technology as the number of crashes increases. Pushing forward electric
cars is important, autonomous driving is going to happen with or without Telsa
driving it forward, I don't think electric cars will happen without them
getting out the Model 3 and growing their market share appreciably - it would
be a shame for that mission to fail because of a feature that is essentially a
development of established car technology (cruise control -> cruise control+
-> autonomous).

As an aside, if you've not read the articles on Wait But Why[1] on him then I
highly recommend setting aside a few hours to do so as they give a clear (if
biased) picture of what Musk has set out to do and why.

[1] [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-
raddest-m...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-
man.html)

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Animats
Tesla's problem is Musk denying that they have a problem. That's not flying.

Tesla needs to immediately issue an over the air update so that after 5
seconds of hands-off-wheel, the vehicle starts to slow down. That will keep
the driver in the loop.

Longer-term, the radar blind spot at windshield height has to be fixed. They
need a vision system and control system which doesn't treat "unrangeable
uniform surface" as "no obstacle". And the system should have a database of
limited access highways and refuse to engage on anything else. What Tesla has
is only good enough for freeway driving, and it needs to refuse to operate on
anything else.

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simonbarker87
Agreed, he's a great salesman vision wise but he is not good at crisis
management with front line press - his press releases/blog posts are coming
over very poorly at the moment.

Which comes back to my point that they should be focussing on the electric car
aspect, let Ford etc take the lead on consumer autonomous for now and come
back once they've proved everyone wrong with electric cars.

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Animats
Car companies can't "focus". Automotive manufacturing is about doing several
hundred things simultaneously yet in a coordinated way. Most YC-type companies
don't have that degree of operating complexity.

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x2398dh1
I am not a huge fan of Musk, and agree with some of the sentiments of the
article, but I found the title quite offensive - to me saying, "Elon's Great
Leap Forward," sounds like saying, "Elon's Final Solution."

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mmanfrin
That's the intention. The title is being facetious about Musk's denigrators.

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greglindahl
Referring to events that killed 10s of millions of people (by unnecessary
famine, in the case of the Great Leap Forward) invokes a corollary to Godwin's
Law. Not a smart rhetorical device.

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Animats
Not much content there.

Musk's companies have consistently been late with getting product out the
door. (Or, alternatively, they have a problem with top management setting
unreasonable schedules.) When he announced that he wanted the Model 3 shipping
at 500K units a year in 18 months, his top two production people quit.

The Model 3 will probably be late, and it will probably cost more than the
presently announced price. But there's no reason it shouldn't ship.

