
Tesla’s Dangerous Sprint into the Future - fmihaila
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html
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ChuckMcM
From the article --

 _Imagine Tesla didn’t exist, Steve Jurvetson told me. “What would the world
look like? I have this sinking suspicion it wouldn’t look that different than
10 years ago. A bunch of hybrid cars. A bunch of noise about hydrogen
vehicles. You know, I don’t think the world would look anything like today —
where entire nations are saying, ‘We’re going to stop making gas cars.’ ”_

The last thought is the really compelling one for me, what would the world
look like if Elon Musk hadn't started SpaceX and Tesla?

~~~
colechristensen
There are other space launch companies and other electric car companies. The
time was ripe for both. SpaceX and (less clearly) Tesla have just been
executing best and earlier than others.

Every car company is working on electrics, and they have been for quite a
while. The limitations were battery technology and cost, and battery
technology with laptops and cell phones made electric cars practical.

NASA was talking about fostering commercial space launch companies before
SpaceX was founded, and the two of them have been in close cooperation (other
commercial companies too of course). If SpaceX didn't exist, that strong
partnership would have existed with a different company but would likely look
similar.

There's a tendency to think that the world would be different without
"revolutionary" people or companies, but usually what ends up happening is
just being at the right place at the right time. Excellence is required to
succeed, but take one specific revolutionary out of the picture and another
would have taken their place.

Einstein is a great example of this. A brilliant man, no doubt, but he is
famous for discovering things which were ripe for discovery. The pieces were
all in place waiting for someone to put them together. Doing so, and before
anyone else, was an accomplishment, but he wasn't unique in his ability to
make things happen, he was just first. Like a marathon, somebody always
finishes first but there are many others running behind them.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I see it quite differently of course.

If I understand your argument it is that the current state of affairs would
exist with or without the key individuals we call out in history, because the
environment would have created those changes anyway, and the individuals named
would simply be other individuals who happened to be the ones to catalyze the
change.

If I have characterized your argument incorrectly please help me understand it
better.

The reason I disagree with that argument, as I see it, is that it implies a
sort of 'fate' or destiny aspect of change and advancement. Which would be
like saying that exhaust fumes from a car will eventually convert into water
and co2 even without the platinum catalyst. Too often I have seen
organizations and fields which were stably stagnant until an individual or
group created a sea change that was, in hindsight, pretty obvious but it had
resisted being detected for years.

~~~
colechristensen
For example: the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was absolutely
going to happen in the decade or so when it did happen. Somebody had to go and
do it, but the environment of tools, techniques, and general motivation were
all there making it possible.

You find all sorts of examples of people independently discovering things at
the same time, and this isn't just coincidence. Maybe most famously is Leibniz
vs Newton creating calculus. The pieces were all in place for the mathematical
study of change. The outcome wasn't predestined, each man's creation was quite
different in ways, but they accomplished something that was ready to be
accomplished.

Whether it's physics or technology, nature abhors a vacuum. Unexploited niches
get filled. Sometimes in significantly different directions, but very often
the outcome is strongly influenced by the opportunity.

In biology, this is a bit like convergent evolution. The implementation
details aren't predestined, but general solutions to environmental problems
_are_. Eyes and legs are very useful things to have, and they're nearly
ubiquitous.

With Tesla, the deal is that we know we're going to run out of oil, and
pollution sucks. Developing an alternative has been a big talking point since
the 90s, and there are a whole lot of players in the game. Lots of companies
are making lots of attempts and have been trying many different technologies.
Lithium batteries are winning the technology race, they developed because of
other consumer electronics and the environment is best for them. It's just
evolution. Many other companies are trying different things and the same
thing, it's not driven by copying Tesla (the competition helps though) it's
driven by the niche need for a solution expanding and becoming more and more
possible.

The variables are implementation details (fuel cells? lithium batteries?
something else?) and timing. There can be quite a lot of uncertainty with
"how" and "when" but quite a lot less with "if".

~~~
ChuckMcM
Fair enough, I can see your argument. However, I'm not persuaded.

Let's assume your hypothesis is correct, then given the population of
practitioners for a given technological space, we should be able to find
examples of catalyzing change in the technology space that was initiated by
what would otherwise be an 'average' practitioner in that space right? Given
that I would expect to be able to identify people that are considered
'average' by their peers prior to their making some large catalyzing change.

That is hard looking back as most biographers will call out all sorts of
details that made someone special with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm
looking for people more current who were considered 'ordinary' and yet they
were the catalyst for a huge change.

Finding such examples would help me with your argument.

~~~
colechristensen
It is not that exceptional people don't exist, quite the opposite in fact.
There are many many exceptional people made exceptional both by circumstance
and talent in different proportions.

The best illustration of this I think could be learned from studying the
development of physics between ~1850 to 1950. It becomes more and more
difficult to think that each step wasn't inevitable as you learn about the
sheer number of exceptional people and catalyzing changes. Each set of
questions led to a new breakthrough and each breakthrough led to a new set of
questions. It's hard to imagine the whole web falling apart for the loss of a
single person. It was a great network of people and accomplishments
influencing each other both average and exceptional.

A key that might make the big picture difficult to see is focusing on
biographies which by name are focused on individuals instead of systems of
people.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Excellent. I think we completely agree that there are many exceptional people,
and the more there are looking a problem, the more likely a new and
exceptional insight/change will occur.

I also agree physics is a good example as it draws in many exceptional people
and each provide pieces of the puzzles.

Using physics as a metaphor, I _also_ believe that there is a sort of
"activation energy" which grows, perhaps exponentially higher, the further
away an idea is from the common set of ideas that are considered 'canon' in
the space. So the idea that private companies can build rockets profitably
without government subsidy is a 'small' distance away from the canon that
without the government's help the "business" of building and launching rockets
is a money losing proposition. And the idea that you could 'land' a rocket
after launching it in some way was clearly identified as a workable, not
necessarily practical, idea back in the 60's. And it was certainly considered
in the DC-X days of the 80's and 90's. But the idea that someone was going to
make a profitable business out of launching rockets and recovering the
boosters by landing them, was an idea that few people in the industry really
considered. It had very high 'activation energy'.

My hypothesis is that without an individual or group that has the necessary
level of "activation energy" to get an idea from the pool of the possible to
make it the new way to do things, those ideas _do not happen_ even if there
are people who recognize that they "could" happen.

When I look at the electric car market I see the General Motors EV-1 which was
almost exactly the same idea of the Tesla but done with insufficient
activation energy to convert the entire auto industry into that mode of
thinking. So I ask what did Elon bring to the problem that the CEO of GM
didn't? Why did Elon have the runway to prototype, build, redesign, build
again, and then build again into a market changing car, when GM already had
all the expertise in the world about building electric cars and the
connections to do everything Elon did in probably 1/3 the time it took Tesla?
Why didn't someone in GM pop out of the woodwork and make Electric cars
happen? What was different?

GM has some of the worlds best vehicle designers and engineers. Some of whom
left GM to go work at Tesla. I believe Elon was the catalyst, and had he not
started what he did I don't think we would be driving GM Model S equivalents
today. _That_ is the difference in people who catalyze change and the elements
of change being available in my opinion.

~~~
guiambros
This discussion reminds me of the "Everything is a Remix" [1] documentary. We
tend to look at the winners to explain history, even though in many cases
multiple players were working on the same theories at the same time, and the
likely outcome would have been exactly the same if the winners have not
existed.

Worth watching.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I remember when it came out. Conceptually it is a remix of James Burke's
_Connections_ [1] which goes through all sorts of discoveries from their
origins to their modern manifestations.

It is an essential element of this discussion that there are ideas that are
brought up discarded, used, re-used, and remixed. But a more interesting
question is not the origin of a particular idea, but how these implementations
are "catalyzed" into the mainstream by different individuals. And much like
chemical reactions where the components are already in abundance around the
catalyst, the elements of these ideas are already floating around.

My hypothesis is that some individuals have a way of looking at the world and
thinking which allows them to live in a world of many possibilities that are
not currently possible. And, when given the opportunity, to pull the rest of
us into there version of the universe with astonishing results.

The NY Times article reminded me of that when the question of what the world
might look like today if Tesla hadn't been started was reminder of that sort
of change.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_\(TV_series\))

------
ibero
It is comments like these that exasperate me.

 _As one Tesla executive involved in its design told me, the goal here was not
only to minimize the movement of materials like lithium and cobalt but also to
shorten the path of every molecule that moves through the plant. “Because the
further a molecule needs to travel,” he said, “the more cost gets added into
it. We actually think of it in terms of molecular distance.”_

It's things like these, where obvious truths are packaged as some sort of
insight that really get my goat.

~~~
cconcepts
I was cutting wood with my kids the other day and showing them how you have to
pick the wood up as little as possible so you could get more done with less
effort.

No talk about molecules necessary - just don't do stuff you don't need to do.
Sure it takes a lot of planning to achieve but its been a standard concept
around getting the job done for, I would say, millennia...

~~~
jbob2000
"Don't move it twice" was a common saying when I had a summer job contracting.
Don't move the wood off the truck, cut it in the bed of the truck, bring cut
pieces in. Save all the dinky, random cuts for last, do them all in one go,
instead of running back and forth to the truck every time. Clean from the top
down, from the back to the front, so you don't have to clean something twice.

There's a lot of wisdom in the trades! I guess you care more for efficiency
when it's your own energy you're spending, instead of some random computer's.

------
MarkMMullin
As for Elon being one of the driving forces behind the transition to electric
- Rock on Elon, nice damn job - as far as L5 AV - umm, you're so full of it
you need to drag a septic tank - I'm just a little fella, and I do admire the
primarily visual approach, but this all really boils down to 'You look, but
you do not see' \- I've been in an out of machine vision for a long time, and
the one thing that's always been true is that we fail, and fail again, when we
ignore the gigantic cognitive stack that is processing that visual data and
making decisions based on it (and if we don't ignore it, we are forced to
admit we can't handle it) . L1,L2, L3... yeah, sure, it's not that hard -I
think 'Logan' got the freight trucks in 10 years spot on. L5 - I'll believe it
when Elon and the Times author leave NYC for a late fall drive to check out a
VT ski home, say about mid October - storm gone thru, cloudy/foggy night, poor
visibility, and the only brains you got are in that car - better hope it knows
that leaves get ripped down then and piled up in the twists and turns of
backcountry VT roads - my guess is there will be a funeral, or it's gonna be a
multi-day trip - the ability of a machine to go 'I have seen this before' has
nothing at all to do with 'I understand what I am seeing and can draw rational
inferences' My 2c, admittedly playing with midget systems, but the failure
modes are pretty much the same

~~~
aquadrop
I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so
autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I
don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced
L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving
(like car stuck or something), should be enough.

~~~
MarkMMullin
L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver
'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then
deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with
this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my
fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in
much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick
Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road

~~~
Bartweiss
Having been caught out in Tucson hailstorms with a 0% precipitation forecast,
I'm not much impressed by "L5 for some regions, sometimes" myself.

L4, sure, map easy suburban spaces carefully and wake up your driver if things
get weird. But L5 is intended to be human-parity, or at least have well-
defined boundaries. It can give up and park until the snow stops, but if
you're taking out the steering wheel it had better not stop more than humans
do - and offer a "chance it anyway" button for if the snow isn't stopping.

------
ggm
I feel like the AV aspect distracts from the far more immediate EV aspect. AV
disrupts more, in as much as it alters the dynamics of moving on roads. EV
disrupts faster, as it displaces ICE. AV takes longer, has higher legislative
barriers and is an almost unbounded problem (recognize all <x> which are a
threat to your vehicle, recognize all <y> you are a threat to, from
everything, all the time)

I think if the AV part had been cast more clearly into the future, we could
have seen more energy and capital behind fixing the EV problems. For instane,
we didn't get battery swap. Why? Its obviously the most immediate path to
faster charge problems. Relying on future chemistry of batteries to make it
possible to fix the charge time problem is praying for rain. Relying on
altering out perceptions of what travel time is, by making the stop "fun" is
yanking my chain. Making the batteries ephemeral and swapping them out would
have made charge delay a non-problem.

EV alters more immediate problems. batteries are more immediately interesting.
AV is being tackled in the mining industry and other restricted vehicle
contexts.

~~~
ctdonath
The problem with battery swaps was that you're exchanging a big heavy $20,000
box with minimal assurance of its integrity. I'd rather wait for _my_ battery
to charge in 20 minutes rather than swap one for another, never knowing if I'm
getting bad hardware in the process.

A recurring overlooked point of EVs: minimal exceptions aside, you begin every
day with a full charge, and with 300+ mile batteries you're unlikely to run
out most days. You almost never have to "fill up" like with gasoline; a 5
minute gas "recharge" every few days loses to never having to "recharge" at
all (park for the night, plug in, charged by morning). In this context,
swapping the entire battery seems distressing overkill. Trying to explain this
paradigm shift to people who never drove EVs is...difficult.

~~~
mikestew
I never realized what a pain the ass it is to drive a gas car until we got the
Leaf, while keeping the gas car. It’s a first-world problem for sure, but
having to go out of my way to “recharge” now seems so...primitive. As you say,
it’s difficult to explain to the unwashed.

~~~
ggm
Oh, I get it. I know my driving is dominated by short run. But I also know
that my desire for long run country driving is there. My key point wasn't to
sell battery swap. It was to try and argue autonomous vehicle design should be
decoupled from EV distribution.

~~~
FullyFunctional
That's why, for me, the Tesla Supercharging network was a complete game
changer. I've gone on multiple multi-day trips that were enabled by the
Supercharger. We got rid of our last ICE car more than a year ago.

