So many "but what if this and that and this..." & "and yeah let's see if it can handle X & Y"
This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars!
That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..."
Don't we have to start somewhere??
Aren't there supposed to be a big user base here who understands that it's an evolutionary process - we build the plane before we build the rocket before we shoot people into space?
Oviously the perfect self-driving car is still some way off, but I for one am thrilled this race is on!
I laughed out loud when I googled "tsla" after watching the video and the top headline in the news section of the google results was "Analyst doubts the new move by Tesla Motors."
Clicking on the article for humor's value, I continued to read:
> However, Edmunds.com, Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell questions the value of purchasing a self-driving car before regulations catch up. Caldwell said that, meanwhile, competitors could introduce better solutions, potentially making Tesla’s hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.”
It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.
Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market.
These same people have written that Tesla will be left in the dust as its competitors beat it to the market because it can't keep up with their manufacturing, and thus being first to market is only an advantage if you're not Tesla.
No surprise since Edmunds makes money off of everyone except Tesla (no advertising, no dealers, no comparison shopping that converts to lead gen).
"How does Edmunds make money?
Edmunds sells advertising to marketers who have contextually relevant messages for site visitors. Also, car-shoppers who visit Edmunds have the opportunity to request price quotes from dealers and providers of insurance, financing and extended warranties. Edmunds is paid by the automakers, dealers and other service providers for the lead referrals."
http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html
Or, how about Edmunds observes car resell values and is predicting whatever Tesla puts in cars today, will not maintain it's resell value (relative to other vehicles in it's class) tomorrow since this market aspect is going to move rapidly before it "gets it right".
The resell value may be less than a comparable "normal" car, and there's the risk that some government regulation makes all the technology in a Tesla today obsolete or illegal to use in the future.
(and I believe Tesla quietly killed their promise to artificially inflate resell values by footing the bill themselves a while back)
Some people naturally won't care about resell value - of course, others will.
My anecdote: I discovered Edmunds because of their review of first Tesla sedan. It was for me, a technically inclined but nevertheless technically naive reader, the best car review I've ever read.
> It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.
As much as I anticipate more cool stuff from Tesla, one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time.
I actually laughed out loud when I saw the Headline of this submission "Tesla released a video of a car driving itself" being the number one entry on HN - sorry but this speaks volumes about the "neutrality" of HN regarding Tesla.
Especially since this is trying to put a positive spin on Tesla having to announce that all their newly shipped cars will now come without those features that already existed in other cars for quite some time, and that anyone who purchases a car with them will not actually have those features until they're reimplemented and patched back in.
Well those roundabouts do give them an unfair advantage. All joking aside, that video was of a research vehicle. The article above is for a car you can buy right now.
Wonder how long it will take for someone to jail break that hardware and hack up some v0.0.1alpha open source self-driving software for it. Not saying it would be wise, but it seems like the kind of thing people traditionally do for "locked up hardware, with software-enable coming in the future" (see gaming consoles, routers, etc).
>> jail break that hardware and hack up some v0.0.1alpha open source self-driving software for it.
That "someone" would have to be a world leading AI research team, to "hack" something that would be a few decades ahead of the current state of the art. But alright.
Not really. The state of the art will get you a self driving car, just not a very safe one. Think more 1995 CMU Navlab and less anything that would ever be approved or marketed to the public. Self-driving car technology is 20 years old. Self-driving car technology I would be willing to trust my life to is... well -2 to -5 years old at best.
Sure. But that's not the kind of thing a IoT hacker would consider a success. Someone might be content, however, with making a mod for Tesla that can e.g. follow "complex" paths of bright orange cones in a parking lot. Test it there, without being in the car themselves and put it on GitHub for bragging rights of having made a cool AI+Systems project. The problem is then someone might see that "cool hack", think it is more than it really is, and kill themselves turning it on while on the highway...
It's not just self-driving cars. It's features like autonomous parking, lane-assitance, cruise control that automatically keeps the distance to the car in front of you and the like. Stuff like that has been repeatedly hailed by HN'ers as revolutionary when Tesla introduced it. Neglecting that other companies had those features for years.
Whenever Tesla is the topic it's almost guaranteed every negative comment on HN will be downvoted (I just see that right now with my comment above. It's constantly gaining and losing me karma).
Besides that, the self-driving Tesla isn't news. That is the joke here. It's a press release that gets frenzied on HN's #1 spot.
I've read comparisons of tesla's system vs others. They aren't even in the same ballpark. C&D has one with Infiniti, Mercedes, Telsa, and BMW.
They drove 50 miles on a fairly challenging road and recorded the number of times they had to grab the steering wheel. BMW and Mercedes were twice as often, infiniti about 3 times.
The #2 BMW "City streets also foil this equipment; occasionally the BMW lost the trail on clearly marked straight sections of pavement for no obvious reason at all."
The Tesla (with driving hardware 2 revisions ago, and software at least on revision ago) "the Tesla Model S locks onto the path ahead with a cruise missile’s determination and your hands resting on your lap.","The Tesla’s Autosteer performance can be distinguished from our other contenders by two words: no wobbling.", and "This system rises well above parlor-trick status to beg your use in daily driving.", "to Tesla’s credit, this is the only car capable of hands-free lane changes.", and " but by tallying only 29 interruptions in 50 miles, Tesla’s Autopilot app lives in a class of one."
So do other companies have lane following and related features... yes. Do they do as well as Tesla, not from what I've seen.
True. In a way this is kind of analogous to how Apple 'fanboys'/users behave when new features are introduced in iPhones but have already been present in Android for many years prior to that.
Can't speak for him, but I haven't. And I know others that haven't. Doing so only reflects an insecurity in your own opinion. I downvote for ad-hominems, or blatantly (easily verifiable) false claims.
Assuming that others downvote over differing opinions does paint you in the light of doing that yourself, though...
The downvote button isn't a disagree or dislike button. If I disagree (and care enough), I use the other button, reply, to try to understand their point of view and try to get them to understand mine.
The forum founders have stated that the downvote button is for disagree/dislike. If you think a comment is very bad, there's a 'flag' function if you click on the comment's timestamp (if you have the requisite karma).
My understanding was that downvoting was for comments which do not contribute to the conversation.
I'm both surprised and sad to hear that the downvote button's intended purpose is disagreement. This seems like it would discourage people from posting alternative points of view if their view is the minority.
As much as I tried looking for it on my own, I couldn't find one, so would you mind posting a source as to where the founders stated the purpose of voting?
That... kind of makes me want to visit this site much less.
I often upvote both sides of a polite to-and-from between two parties with differing opinions, if the discussion is interesting, since that, I feel, adds to the quality of the whole page. I frown upon learning that it is encouraged to downvote if you disagree. Isn't it an equivalent of childish sticking fingers into your ears and hoping the other opinion goes away?
I usually try to argument with them, that's what a discussion is about, a exchange of argument and a test of there validity. Everything else, is just bubbling oneself into another ideology.
I think the interesting point here is that the hardware is available on all Teslas. The functionality shown in the video could be available on everyone's Tesla by installing an update. What they showed may be similar to what's been demonstrated by other companies in the past, but the potential for broad availability is novel.
Some would argue that Gathering training data is beneficial to users in the long term, and the more aggressive auto-manufacturers go about it the better the cars will be to us users.
Eh, I don't think it's HN being fond of Tesla. I think it's just that Tesla (rather, Elon Musk) is very good at grabbing headlines and people are sometimes not as well informed about the state-of-the-art as they wish they were.
Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.
It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.
> They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did. It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.
The iPhone is synonymous with smartphone technology because its debut was a quantum leap ahead of the competition at the time (Blackberry, Palm, etc.). Google was working on a phone that used a physical keyboard until they saw the iPhone announcement and then quickly modified Android to ape iPhone/iOS.
I'm really sick of people trying to downplay Apple's innovations as nothing more than slick packaging and marketing. It's a stupid meme that refuses to die.
As far as I know, there were two new things that came along with the iphone: multitouch capacitive screen and 3g data plans that were actually worth using because apple threw their weight behind negotiating with the carriers. A few generations later, the iphone app store was a huge achievement too. All of those were huge, but there are also a lot of other innovations associated with the iphone that were actually around years before.
> one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time.
Exactly. I would go as far as saying it's simply infotainment.
Here is a test that I would use to determine the value of this. If it wasn't infotainment, it probably wouldn't need to be set to a soundtrack and would stand on it's own w/o music. The music creates an emotion and helps stave off the boredom.
I found this to be impressive because it seems to be working without LIDAR and performing very well. I may be wrong but most other contemporary cars that drive this well use expensive laser sensors
Lidar sounds great, but 250 meters x 360 degrees without a tower on top of your car sounds cost prohibitive for now.
Cameras are cheap and I suspect the 12 cameras have overlap to help with depth perception and maybe even fault tolerances. I suspect as soon as LIDAR becomes a better solution for the price (if that happens) that Tesla will use them. Or maybe a hybrid of both so they can use the strengths of both as needed.
I hear you, but this move is >actually< super innovative and revolutionary, and has potential to catapult Tesla's self driving team way ahead of the pack.
If we're continuing the iPhone metaphor from the GP, note that Apple is almost always late to a market segment. When the iPhone was released, Windows CE had owned the smartphone segment for years. The iPod was hardly the first hard drive mp3 player. Apple Watch wasn't the first smart watch. Etc etc etc. Apple makes good products, not innovative ones. It is not at all unthinkable that someone else will release a better self driving car after Tesla, and win marketshare.
Continuing that path I'd say: Tesla gets software right. Way better than what I've seen in other cars.
But what stops that iPhone metaphor for me is Design, Materials and Finish. Apple Products look and feel like luxury. Where as Tesla only achieves that on the software side - and in your pocket.
At the risk of sounding like a nationalistic asshole, Teslas look very American - i.e., a mix of cheap and tacky. Put a 5 series bmw next to it - two different leagues really. I want to root for Tesla, and I'd buy one if I could park it somewhere where I could charge it, but I don't think they're doing great in the looks department, especially not to Europeans.
Clearly you never used a windows Mobile device if you can even think to compare the experience with those awful devices with a far, far superior experience.
The iPhone is the first smartphone as we know them today, denying it is simply lying.
Source: I owned Windows CE / windows mobile devices since as early as 2001 if I recall correctly.
The second generation iPhone was the first as you know them today. The first was a glorified iPod Touch with a cellular radio stack. In fact, aside from the better touch-friendly screen, the iPhone was a step backwards from Windows CE/Smartphone/Mobile devices because on those I could run applications.
Source: I owned Windows CE/Smartphone/Mobile devices starting with the Samsung i600 and was actively using a Treo 700w when the iPhone was released.
The iPhone was the first smartphone without a physical keyboard, allowing for a much more functional screen in a convenient form factor, right? I recall it seeming like a non-trivial difference at the time, and clearly a game-changing one.
Some models of the Tungsten didn't have keyboard. Most palms didn't, the advantage of the treo was that it did so you didn't have to learn the palm handwriting system. The screens weren't sensitive enough for on screen keyboards.
Ya, I should have phrased my original comment differently. The iPhone was the first phone that effectively made the on-screen keyboard unnecessary. Past devices did without one, but not without a significant loss of functionality.
Palm treo/tungsten had a keyboard but also a good screen and were far more functional than the first iphones. Not as flashy and the software was much more expensive though.
> Having the equipment ready and in action first...
That seems to be Ms. Caldwell's point: Without the software or regulations in place, it's impossible to know if the "equipment is ready." I don't disagree with her on this one.
The strategy Musk has clearly been using for a long time now with this is to put as much hardware and software into the field as possible, often even without the customers knowing it's there, and gathering vast amounts of data from it, and gradually forcing it into widespread availability and acceptance, all while letting the system learn and improve itself, which is a necessary step.
He's doing what he does best: forcing a hard change on an established system.
Autonomous driving not allowed? Well, we'll give them "Autopilot"-- make sure to keep your hands on the wheel! Nope, it's not autonomous, it's Autopilot! It just happens to have all the hardware needed to be fully autonomous, and Autopilot will "gradually gain new capabilities." Questionable? Sure. Best way to make an extremely hard industry transition? Almost definitely.
It would be a chicken and egg problem if he didn't do this. Can't test the system extensively beyond the lab without regulations, can't have a system that doesn't meet regulations because it hasn't been tested enough yet. He's just sidestepping this dilemma.
It's an extremely bold commitment on Tesla's part. The available details are a bit ambiguous, but it appears they're putting $8k worth of hardware into every new car though Tesla owners need only pay for it if they want it enabled.
All this in spite of tremendous uncertainty not just with regards to the regulatory environment but to the not yet fully developed capabilities of their own software.
Someone needs to pay for the R+D before the hardware can exist, so I don't see anything wrong with considering R+D as part of the cost of the hardware (its "worth" if you will). The alternative is only considering the raw materials as part of the cost of building something.
Right, but the parent comment was questioning the widsom of installing the hardware in every car. My point is the pricing model is that people using the software pay for it. The price of putting the hardware in the cars is probably low, and also Tesla probably benefit from the data gathered by that hardware anyway.
Tldr: I suspect Tesla know what they're doing with the pricing of this thing.
> Thousands of cars out there collecting data is a huge advantage over groups working with a handful of prototypes.
I'm not sure this is true. At least for Google, it seems like the main bottleneck to progress is engineering time to fix the problems that arise. The problem is not a lack of vehicles driving and finding problems.
I say this because Google has made very little effort to expand their fleet of testing vehicles. The last big expansion, from 28 to 48 vehicles, was in Sept. 2015. Since then they've expanded from 48 to 58, but it doesn't seem to be a priority. [1]
I think it's just that it isn't an option. The data from 100 cars isnt much more useful than the data from 50. That doesn't mean the data from 10000 cars isn't much more useful than the data from 50.
It just isn't reasonable for Google to build and manage a fleet of that size for a development program. It would cost Google half a billion dollars, but for Tesla it's just a bit of cost they roll into the product.
Teslas approach is different to Google's. Tesla is gathering hi-res location data from both human driven and autopilot driven cars to build an accurate map of every lane of every highway.
Sure. But having auto-pilot a significant % of the roads in the USA (and norway by the sounds of it) gives tesla an advantage. After all you can't learn from a road you haven't been on.
In the choice between putting the hardware on all cars vs only on a few prototypes, the R&D is a sunk cost that shouldn't influence the decision and only the pure incremental cost of the hardware matters.
I don't think the iPhone had iOS 10 ;). Apple is a pretty good analogy for what Tesla's HW/SW plans seems to be. "Reasonable" backwards software support (at least compared to the otherwise "none") while iterating hardware.
Yeah, well... it's not really autonomous. It's a slightly better cruise control + assisted lane change. In fact the "Autopilot" marketing term makes it sound much more like fully autonomous driving than it actually is.
>> The strategy Musk has clearly been using for a long time now (redacted for brevity)
Elon Musk does what he does best alright: make billions. The rest is just educated guesses at best.
At worse, any attempt to "explain" marketing strategy as some sort of passionate drive to improve the technology, or similar, is just so much cold-reading yourself at for the benefit of a commercial company's bottom line.
> Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market.
So I think it might be from an investment standpoint; just think of Tivo they made the DVR, but once others saw what they were doing there are plenty of other DVR choices and Tivo didn't win the category.
Tesla might be forging ahead and blazing the trail for others, who will actually capitalize on it.
I think that the Tesla brand is sexy enough that they'll maintain their niche (as Tivo has to some extent), I'm not sure if that will translate into investment returns.
It's not a horrible comparison, but the barriers to entry between an electric car (+entire charging network) are much higher than a DVR. First mover advantage digs a bigger moat.
The stakes are higher and the margins are smaller. First mover advantage either digs a deeper moat or a trap for yourself. (Vercingetorix vs. Julius Caesar at Alesia.)
Tivo lost because cable/sat went digital and it made a lot more sense to integrate the DVR into the digital receiver than it did to have a separate box that required using a CableCARD. I'm pretty sure most people don't even know what a CableCARD is.
When Tivo was a simple as plugging in the analog coax signal from your cable or antenna, it made a lot of sense. But once the signal from the cable company needed digital decoding, it hurt them, despite Tivo having a better UI.
> It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.
It's probably because there is a substantial gap between what Musk spins, and reality.
Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing.
Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.
> Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.
Because genuine competition in the Soviet Union was not allowed. Don't want to wait for Mr. Musk's Magical Mystery Car? Then buy a damn Honda Civic or something. A huge pre-order list is notable when it occurs in a context where people have many other options not involving a long wait. It proves the existence of real demand, not "demand-because-of-a-lack-of-alternatives". Proving this demand is important for a small company which is trying to scale up.
The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning.
When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.
I'm not at all implying that the money will go poof. What I do mean is that inability to meet demand is actually an incredibly serious problem for a car manufacturer - one that's more closely associated with failing Soviet enterprises, regardless of spin to the contrary. Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary.
Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks.
Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
That's a pretty big difference to me. The possibility that the model 3 could save my family and I an accident over it's 10 year lifetime is pretty important to me.
How can there an "inability to meet demand" on a product that hasn't been released yet? Or right, that isn't possible.
Once it is released then we can talk about the rate of mfg vs backlog but it is pure silliness to argue against a product because lots of people want it.
>A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning
In what way are they "winning" against Detroit? Certainly not in revenues, profits, miles driven or cars produced.
Yes, they "own" one segment": high end electric vehicles. No one there is close. But Detroit owns many others. Why does the one that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?
Tesla's market cap is $30bn, more than Renault, Mazda, Chrystler or Subaru (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055885). If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn), even with a tenth or a hundredth of their production. Why would it be more valued, per car produced? Because of its future potential.
> Why does the segment that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?
The stock market is adjusting for a <10% market share of ICE cars in 2050. It's a Schroedinger situation: If the <10% hypothesis is wrong, then we're all dead (more precisely: Half of us are living under giant cataclisms, the Gulf Stream has stopped, the costal cities are flooded, and our economy is so disorganized that we can't plan where the money will be), so markets don't need to account for this situation. So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla, unless they adapt. It may be hard to imagine if you live in USA because they rely so much on cars for their lifestyle, but our civilization will get rid of petrol cars within our lifespan. This is also the genius of Musk: He saw a version of the future that is obvious but that no other American citizen could understand, and he executed on it. Hence the importance of travelling the world or meeting many people when we want to innovate.
By the way, maybe a sweeping change is preparing that the petrol generations can't foresee. We could imagine things like an international agreement on global warming suddenly reducing the worldwide production of cars. It's impossible today, but educated people may have good reasons to believe something like this will happen, in which case Tesla wins all.
I'm not sure how having a disproportionately high market cap indicates "beating" anyone. It's the whim of the markets.
>If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn)
Based on what, exactly? This is Silicon Valley math. Who on earth is going to pay Toyota prices for a company that you yourself say might only have a fraction of the production? What sort of investment would that be?
I know this is taboo around here, but one day high-growth slows and companies become "established" and it's about how much money they make and return to shareholders. If Tesla is making as many cars as Toyota and as much profit is Toyota, then they'll be priced like Toyota. Why would it be any other way?
>So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla
There were over 70 millions cars sold in 2015. Tesla delivered about 50 thousand, for about a 0.07% market share. Are you surprised that they are able to grow relative to specific players in a massive industry?
> If Tesla is making as many cars as Toyota and as much profit is Toyota, then they'll be priced like Toyota
But maybe Toyota will return fewer profit per car? Ah, you've already accounted for that. There are other variables: If production is equal today, but if Toyota is expected to halve its production in 2040, the Toyota share will get lower and lower until it's half of Tesla. Other variables can be the health of their distribution system (a vendor with no cardealer lock-in will save a lot on sales), customer trust, innovation methods (e.g. Toyota's methods only led to the invention of Prius, whereas Tesla's methods led to the invention of a fully-electric car with a lot of autonomy, so it's a predictor that Tesla's innovation scheme will produce better things than Toyota in the future), marketing methods (They spend little in advertising and are able to have thousands of viewers watch their keynotes without pushing ads in the newspapers), a legacy of employees that might be hard to re-train, or a forecast that huge R&D expenses will be necessary to keep being relevant in the market of 2040. It's not "a whim of the market", it's that Toyota is shrunk by default in 2050 whereas Tesla is alive by default in 2050.
> Tesla delivered about 50,000, for about a 0.07% market share. Are you surprised that they are able to grow relative to specific players in a massive industry?
..and Tesla plans to deliver 500,000 in 2018, for about 0.7% of the market share. Then I personally think they'll become even more popular (because of law advances, both against pollution and in favor of self-driving cars, and because of social status, geeks, comfort and market-specific innovations like the air filter that will be appealing in China, etc) and that means 7% market share in 2022, etc. So I'd buy Tesla shares for a higher price than Toyota's because I'd trust them more for delivering good dividends in the long term.
Note: I'm neither a financial advisor nor an owner of Tesla shares.
Not high end EV — EV period. Why so much weight? Because it's literally the only direction left for land based vehicles to go (the puns write themselves!) in the next century at least?
> Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing.
Because it kind of is when we're talking about an electric car. Tesla's competitors can't come up with those numbers for EVs combined (even with hybrids). GM is expected to make 30,000 Bolts for next year, for instance (and it may or may not sell all of them).
That said, I'm skeptical the Autopilot 2.0 hardware is a "Level 5 autonomous system". I think a good rule of thumb would be to subtract about "one level" from what Musk promises, as he always tends to be a little overoptimistic, even if what he creates still ends up being better than the competition.
Take the first Autopilot, which Musk said is "Level 2". It's probably more like a real Level 1. It only works under very specific situations, and even when those specific situations are met (a highway) it can still fail, because Tesla may have accounted for US highways but not European ones, or other road quirks. See the recent Autobahn accident because the Autopilot couldn't properly identify "yellow lines" as opposed to white ones.
So yeah, I expect this to be more like Level 4 ... three years from now (as ready for mainstream use, not just a demo). I don't think we'll see true Level 5 until the 2020s. I think there are still many unexpected things Musk and his engineers aren't foreseeing right now.
> Because it kind of is when we're talking about an electric car. Tesla's competitors can't come up with those numbers for EVs combined (even with hybrids).
Check your sources, we're at well over a million EV/PHEVs[0] combined nowadays and the model S is a bit over 10% of that. It's been a while since I last saw an EV parking spot with chargers that was empty.
Now that I checked it, the Leaf alone is past those numbers for the Model 3.[1]
Level 5 is unachievable and unnecessary. There will always be some small number of locales that confound the system. But if you can't use autonomy a few times per year, who cares?
When we get to level 4 the game is over, it's just an adoption curve at that point.
I don't know how "unnecessary" it is if we're talking snowed roads, country roads, roads that haven't been painted in a decade or longer, or if we're talking about autonomous cars without a wheel.
Under those conditions, it's pretty much Level 5 or bust. But yes, that doesn't mean Level 4 cars won't start getting adopted, especially if the autonomous systems are just another "feature" on a regular car (hopefully EVs in all or most cases).
Having to turn off self-driving features will be like losing cell service. It's not what you paid for, it can be mildly inconvenient, but you get over it and on with your day.
I've seen some sources that the original Volkswagen Beetle had upwards of 150,000 pre-orders. But then WWII happened and none of them were delivered to civilians until the company was resurrected after the war.
That's ridiculous. My 2+ year old Mercedes self drives on the freeway quite nicely. They do require I keep my hands on the wheel, but other than that, it's doing the driving.
Other manufacturers aren't simply responding to Elan.
I've read comparisons between the Mercedes and Tesla. It wasn't even close. Even through the comparison was with 2 versions ago of the hardware (the single camera) and at least one major software revision ago. Car and Drive has the details.
It is on the list, and notice I said "mass market" vehicles. No other manufacturer, even today, has as many autonomous cars on the road as them. And the ones that do exist are not as advanced as Tesla's.
These other car companies have had so much more time and resources, and they have not pushed the way Tesla has.
Because Tesla needs to make a lot of money, very quickly. The other makers are already big, and can afford to play it safe. Tesla has to keep risking everything in silly marketing tricks.
Very grateful to misunderstandings like this. It had caused Tesla and several tech stocks to be severely undervalued in the market. At 40$, I knew Tesla was worth 140$. And sure enough it started to go up suddenly mostly because of media coverage.
Traditional car investors look at certain tried and proven market indicators to judge stocks. When new tech comes along, they don't know what to think. So they think here and there like in this case.
The real value in bringing self driving tech here is to provide cool features to the buyer, not necessarily bring the stock of the company up. If investors do not know how how to place value on this, I only shrug.
I look at Tesla as the exception to a lot of rules. I agree with you here-- launching hardware which not only is a value add to users but also Tesla data teams, is so far ahead that this seemed like a dumb comment.
That said, if some company had manufactured bluetooth hardware last year way in advance of the release and full spec, I would argue that it was a pretty bad move. Clearly this is not a perfect analogy, but it should illustrate that this can seem counter intuitive. Building in the cost of beta tech that doesnt fully work and is not legal is a huge gamble. I just wouldn't personally bet against tesla and for the reasons i outlined; it is likely the right call
I cannot judge for myself having not read them yet.
The only people who suggest them are people who I do not respect (rich assholes or people who think they should be rich assholes) or people I not do not know mixed with people insulting them.
There's a lot of cartoonish hubristic crap in Rand's books, and she only really has one philosophical point to make, which is that self reliance and being unafraid of naysayers is good. Which is true.
Basing your entire philosophy on a cartoon is a mistake, but bashing an author when you haven't read any of their work is a grosser mistake.
Her one good book in my opinion is "we the living" - oh, and Anthem was an interesting novella - think she inspired Tom Disch's 334
Rand was a mundane, myopic, self righteous ideologue with the philosophical depth f a puddle and the macroeconomic wisdom of a 6 year old with a 20 dollar bill.
Randian politics are a comic strip masquerading as a political movement.
Worthless except as a study in sociology of those people who hold it up as a worldview.
OK, I will try, given that I am mere a poor asshole.
The classic literature (and Atlas without any doubt belongs to so called modern classic) much like classical music, is a complex and highly artificial phenomena. The word for referring to a piece of art is artifact.
In the case of classical music there is absolutely no objective criteria to judge symphonies. It is possible to compare the pieces of music, and lots of pseudo-intellectual assholes do it for living, but it will be nothing but a joggling with a metaphorical jargon. Nevertheless, one almost always could distinguish some fragments from this or that piece of classical music which he likes for some not very articulable reasons. Bach, arguably, composed most of such sources of a beautiful fragments, Mozart is the second, etc.
These notions could be applied to literature. Like a symphony, a big novel, even a small poem, cannot be judged by a single criteria, but some parts of it we might find delightful and beautiful. The question, as it is in the case of classic music, is who is the reader (or listener).
In case of Atlas Shrugged, there are too many to count arguably beautiful parts (majoring in physics and philosophy is one of them), fragments or even passages, which appeals to the mind of modestly educated reader. The best personages she created were, ironically, not the central, heroic and positive, but all the crooks and weaklings, mediocrities and minor idiots. This, perhaps, is why Rand is hated so much.
As a student of philosophy, Rand got most of the philosophic and economic aspects right. Indeed, her Hegelian professor is a true masterpiece, her bureaucrats are convincing, James Taggard is remarkable. Her main characters are overloaded with virtues.)
Certain naivety of the plot - the miraculous alloy and especially the perpetuum mobile, for which the book has been criticized so often by idiots, actually are mere nuances. The real story is about focus and persistence, accepting the challenges, adapting and evolving and never giving up - all the postulates of a sound moral philosophy, which goes back to ancient Greeks. No one takes the plot of Atlas seriously.
She is also right that the motivations which drive us should be simple and pure (the Greeks, again), should be grounded in our human nature (shaped by evolution, constrained by biology) not in some abstract nonsense, dogmas, fleeting fashions, or even social norms. Rigid social norms are always reflect the ugliness of urban societies. While her main characters are rather angular and clumsy, the driving forces behind them are clearly recognizable and proper. Let's not blame Rand for this angularity.
I could do it for hours, but I think you got the idea. Good literature requires a "good" reader to be able to appreciate what is behind the words in a sentence.
"but all the crooks and weaklings, mediocrities and minor idiots. This, perhaps, is why Rand is hated so much."
You may well be right - many might read atlas and empathise with the antagonists, and dislike rand's treatment of them. Certainly many self proclaimed conservatives disagree with her philosophy, because it doesn't agree with protecting their rusting vested interests at the expense of innovation and the taxpayer.
An awful lot of people who like rand are assholes, however. The average randroid is more representative of James Taggart than Roarke, bitter and small, scathing of those who disagree with their narrow opinion.
Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays.
What I find really interesting about Tesla (and SpaceX and HyperLoop) criticism is that people think it will fail for what it doesn't do, instead of focusing on what it does do. What they don't realize is that all products in history that got hugely successful didn't do a ton of stuff initially. They just did some things really well.
Early washing machines were noisy as hell and got unbalanced all the time. But who cares? they washed clothes and everyone wanted one.
Early TVs were massive things with fussy screens and only in B&W.
The first iPhone was extremely slow and only had EDGE.
But rather than focus on what all of those things don't do, you only need to realize they do something really well, and that's why they are a huge success.
Even if the Tesla can't drive itself too well in heavy snow, or if the range is crap in really, really cold weather - WHO CARES? There are still tens of millions of people on earth that will lap them up because of the list of things they do so well.
Products don't fail or succeed because of what they don't do. They fail or succeed because of what they do do.
To be fair, being enthusiastic and positive about the future isn't that useful of a comment. There is only one way to say 'Elon's vision is right and it will happen,' but there are countless, interesting, ways to point out how it might fail. So after the first few excited comments come in, often the only novel thing to contribute is a counter point.
This doesn't mean that the majority of people aren't optimistic about the future, just that their opinion has already been expressed.
>To be fair, being enthusiastic and positive about the future isn't that useful of a comment. .... but there are countless, interesting, ways to point out how it might fail
Sure, but there is more than one way to say it:
"I live in the mountains of Virginia and this will never work here with the snow, therefore it's crap, therefore it will fail!!!!"
OR
"It's going to be really hard for them to solve the problem of heavy snow. I wonder if they'll use <something interesting we can all learn about> or <something else>. I wonder if they've teamed up with <who knows> to research <something interesting>. I think the best approach would be x,y,z and I read the Google are using a,b,c".
etc.
I mean, we're talking about a multi-billon dollar company trying to push forward - OF COURSE there are tons of hard parts. Pointing them out it not useful - thinking about (and working on) how to solve them is what HN should be about.
"I wonder if Elon will go down path A...." "Interesting that the battery is now x, this is probably a result of Y technology they developed last year." Etc. I don't find it hard to discuss a topic in a positive light at all.
It's interesting to think about the ways your opponent might capture your pieces, but it's just as interesting and just as important to think about the ways you might capture theirs.
Time we spend bickering about whether electric cars are ready is time not spent talking about the new grid, the new architecture, the new social organization that will form around these (to me obviously) imminent technologies.
I don't think "how it could succeed" is less interesting than "how it could fail". And if I expect something to succeed, frankly the failure speculation starts to get a bit boring.
It's a bit personal for me because I am pursuing a high-setback business model in my startup and so people always want to talk about the looming dangers they see. It starts to get boring, because I expect a certain number of failures, and I intend to work through them. What's interesting to mr is whether the first principles analysis is right, and how the plan looks from a Zen perspective... Not is everything right, but am I applying pressure in the right place today given the conditions.
I agree this attitude is common on HN. But is it really a recent development? Engineers are skeptical by nature. I feel like engineers are especially skeptical of marketing and "idea" people.
>Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays.
I see things differently. Anyone who criticized Theranos was met with the same reaction, "Everyone on HN is so negative!" But the questions were valid. Look what happened.
The same thing is occurring with Tesla. Yes, there is fantastic work being done, but many people here can't separate marketing from the real world. It's shocking, frankly.
When I looked into the Solar City after the announcement of the Tesla buying them, these "Solar Bonds" did make me a bit uneasy. Their interest rate implies junk...
>Are you suggesting that Tesla is defrauding investors and regulators, as Theranos did?
I'm suggesting that there's a lack of critical analysis applied to what are, essentially, Tesla press releases. Like when it was implied that people were sexist for questioning the genius of Elizabeth Holmes, because she was changing the world and all that, according to the press releases.
Again, I have no problem with being a Tesla fan. I probably come off as a "hater" here because I like to play Devil's Advocate and it's a pretty one-sided discussion on HackerNews (expectedly). I think what they're doing is fantastic. But give some credit to other companies who are also doing good things for this space, people's safety and the planet.
My opinion might not be popular here, but when I studied computer science, there was a big discussion about the ethical aspects of our job. Especially, I had the opportunity to speak with Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum [1] a couple of times, who always remembered me that users don't know what we as programmers, technicians and scientists know about the limitations of a solution. So we have the duty to ensure that our solutions don't harm and don't fuel unreasonable expectations.
From the Wikipedia article [1] about Joseph Weizenbaum:
"His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom."
So, asking "but what if ..." in a responsible way should always be a big part of any innovation. Just shouting "hey, we are hackers, lets innovate and be open" isn't always responsible.
As a bonus, there's a great archive [2] about Joseph Weizenbaum with audio and film clips for anyone interested. Most of the site and the documents are in german unfortunately, but some transcripts are available in english as well.
It's not at all the same -- self-driving cars can risk the lives not only of the passengers, but of innocent bystanders. Several commenters have pointed out problems such as rain, snow, darkness, etc., but there are more fundamental problems. For example, self-driving cars based on machine learning may be susceptible to adversarial attacks that cause the car to behave unpredictably [1,2]. How will self-driving cars know how to react when things go wrong, e.g., the stop light is broken? What about construction?
I'm not saying humans react perfectly in these situations, but self-driving cars are rule-based, and have zero ability to adapt to unanticipated situations. I'm not arguing that Tesla shouldn't push forward. However, I believe that so far, Tesla has demonstrated a lack of concern for user safety. Companies like Google, Mercedes-Benz, etc. have tech at least as good as Tesla's, but have been much more cautious about deploying it.
The new system is not generally rule-based (although it does have a few rules for some things), it has integrated deep learning. It adapts to novel situations based on patterns learned from experience. The network will be trained by actual Tesla driver actions in these situations over the next months/years.
That's different from the previous auto-pilot version.
I'm fully supportive of self-driving vehicles, but arguments like this don't do the "pro-selfdriving" any favors.
"Autopilot v1" miles are also largely on freeways and conditions favorable to the driving-assist features. The 1 in 90 million is comparing to all cars and not just other cars with driving-assist. I don't think many people would argue that driving-assist is more dangerous than without. The 1 in 90 million is across far more driving conditions, many of which are more dangerous than what the Tesla Autopilot is driving in.
The comparison between the two isn't really a fair comparison and, in my opinion, is dishonest.
E:
In addition, picking any random model car may yield similar statistics. "Car accidents involving a Honda Civic per mile driven" is probably a lot higher than "Car accidents involving a Pontiac Firebird per mile driven". Because there are more Civics on the road... Firebirds may be in fewer accidents, but my money is on the Civic being a safer car.
Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology.*
*Joke; in fact Israeli security services invented it in the '90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash). Also there aren't reported fatalities from Note 7 explosions.
The thing about their plan though, if you read the post entirely, is that this new car with the new sensor comes with almost all features disabled.
The reality is, with machine learning, you need a lot of data, and yes, you can send a few of your own cars with employees inside like Google, but that's slow. Instead, Tesla is using their existing brand and user base to collect orders of magnitude more data, and this way, they will be able to validate their models much faster.
Again, the thing with data and algorithms is that you can test and retest them. When you have all the data, you can see the info at time X, and also have access to the data at time X+1, so you can check if your algorithm made the right choice. Furthermore, you can actually take tricky situations and replay them thousands of time while tweaking your algorithm to do better.
So yes, while getting it right is very important, I believe their approach of collecting as much data as possible is the best way of getting there
Yes self driving cars could save lives, if they're working properly. That's literally what we're talking about. If they're working as good a humans, good. If they're working better, they're saving lives. If they turn into oncoming traffic like the Tesla did in the video, they can kill people.
A first-gen iPhone couldn't save people, but a first gen auto-driving car can certainly kill a lot of people if the software isn't working right.
But critically, it's (probably) impossible to get past the "good as humans" point without a huge amount of learning data. That means either a lot of time or a lot of testers.
It's interesting that the new Tesla software will be shadowing while the meatbag is driving: not just reporting back driving data, but also simulating what it would do all the time. There's going to be a lot of situations where it would be wrong, all nicely laid out for the developers, ready to fix.
This is an area where it's easy to be too credulous. If you want "iPhone 1 of self-driving cars", Google has been tooling around in them for a while now. They do a great job under ideal conditions, on a sunny day. The future already happened!
It simply isn't enough to post a video of a car driving in light traffic on a beautiful, California afternoon. That isn't what makes the problem hard. Mess up with your video-based system in the dark, or in bad weather, or...lots of people will die.
This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release. (Which, not incidentally, is why they haven't released anything other than a video.)
Google's cars are not iPhone 1. They still just have a few dozen or a few hundred, who knows, and they have only been driving 2 million miles until now. They are not even for sale and will not be any time soon. Oor ever, if they don't market their own electric cars very soon or hook up with a car manufacturer.
Tesla can collect data from 5 billion miles of driving already one year after the Giga Factory is full operation, if production reaches the planned 500,000 in 2018 and each car drives 10,000 miles annually. And then the miles accumulate exponentially.
Here is my guess:
After a few million miles of shadow driving, i.e. a few weeks after the first few thousand new Teslas have been sold, Tesla is likely ready for the real thing under perfect driving conditions like those Google experiences in California. So Tesla is going to open for the self driving capabilities in such geographic areas during the day when weather is nice.
After a few hundred million miles of shadow driving, i.e. within half a year or so when Tesla has marketed 1-200,000 cars that have driven for a couple of months, Tesla will have collected enough data to drive in more difficult traffic conditions, like other American urban areas.
After a billion miles, around a year after Tesla has gotten the Giga Factory up in full speed and the first 2-300,000 cars have been on the streets for half a year, Tesla is probably ready for certain bad weather conditions, like rain, light snow, light fog, and for driving in the dark.
Give it another few billion miles, so still before 2020, and the streets of Istanbul or the snowy roads of Nebraska have been tamed.
Not sure why you keep talking about the gigafactory as if that's relevant to self-driving cars. Your only point can be summarized in one sentence: they've released a senor suite into the field, and through some combination of Big Data and magical AI, they will win. This, as much as anything else, is a religious belief.
Ultimately, this game is about the sensors. If your sensor suite is inadequate to detect every conceivable bad situation a car can be in, then it doesn't matter how much data you accumulate. One million miles of good LIDAR data is worth more than a billion miles of video, if the video can't see white objects during the daytime, or figure out on what side of the parking lot the car should be driving (ahem).
I have no idea how good or bad their sensors are, but instinct tells me they're not up to the task of all-condition driving, and this video provides no useful information either way.
Production capacity is the most important factor for data collection.
The Teslas sold in October 2018 don't need to have the same sensors as the ones sold in january 2018. As you can see, the car is designed modularly. No other mass marketed car on the planet has any sensors integrated yet.
It's all about big numbers. Google has spent 5 years or more driving a few cars around California. It's never going to match billions of miles driven around the globe.
EDIT: Imagine the engineers working at Google's autonomous cars today. I bet many of them are preparing their resumes for Tesla. They can launch an algorithm or a new sensor type now, wait a few months and then get the feedback on how it worked. With Tesla, they will get that feedback in days. In which lab would you want to work if you want to take part in shaping the future? In the Google lab where you have a Lexus or two assigned to you that drive up to 25 miles per hour in California or in the Tesla lab where you have 2,000 Teslas assigned driving in 50 different countries?
Once again: if the sensors don't work for the problem domain, the quantity of data gathered is irrelevant.
If you mounted a forward-facing video camera on every car in in the world and gathered the data for decades, you'd still be nowhere: you're missing the side and rear views. This is a thought exercise, but it demonstrates the point. If your robot car has a blind spot, all the data in the world won't fix it.
Nobody knows how good these cameras are, but every camera-based system so far has had the same critical limitations: they don't work well at night or in poor visibility.
But we know that the sensor suite must be at least as good as a human; more vision, plus other sensors. Therefore we know the sensor suite is sufficient to be as good as (and likely better than) a human.
It's not. For example, the eye has much higher dynamic range than any camera sensor available today. Try taking a picture at night that looks half as decent as it does in your head.
> but instinct tells me they're not up to the task of all-condition driving
From a sensor perspective, what does a human have that are missing in the new Tesla suite?
The sensors cover the whole spectrum of light humans can see, plus a lot more. There is also ultrasonic sonar.
Human eyes have significantly higher dynamic range than cameras though, which is important when you have scenes with both dark and brightly illuminated areas.
Once again, far from being an expert in this field.
That was also my understanding for the general case, but I was also assuming that cameras were available that could at least approach human dynamic range.
This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release
First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account. I myself paid several customers a penalty/reimbursement, when because of our website, they suffered. And I am sure there are websites/apps which are more critical.
Second: You are assuming, they have done a half-assed job and hurrying to release. If you look at the earlier thread[1], several people have explained, how Tesla has 100s of millions of kms of their customers driving footage, using which they have trained the AI/ML algos. So I won't be surprised if these cars can do well enough in the dark.
Sebastian Thrun, one of the pioneers of self driving cars, recently has taken a turn to self driven cars just using cameras and AI. In his own words[2] he says, that we humans also just have our two eyes, so cameras should do the job well.
Well, for starters, the only thing Tesla has "released" here is a video. So there's that. I don't know if they hurried the release of the video. The real product launch is the sensor suite...and those haven't shipped in any quantity, yet.
As for AI, there's no magical "algo" that solves the problem of an all-black video frame. Having more black video frames than anyone else doesn't exactly solve that problem. See also: rain, snow and fog.
But finally, nobody said that web developers are stupid. Calm down. But it's completely fair to note that, however much money you lose for your customers with half-baked beta releases, you're still not killing them. The stakes are higher here. The expectations of proof are higher as well.
there's no magical "algo" that solves the problem of an all-black video frame
So do human eyes. I perhaps should have used the word night rather than dark. So basically it should work in the night also is my understanding.
And I'm totally calm, and not angered :-). Just trying to make my point. Because I don't like arguments like - 'this is not rocket science', or 'this is not web development.
> First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account.
The impact of that, terrifying as it may be, is still significantly less then the impact of a self-driving-but-buggy vehicle into the side of a semi.
I was arguing against the trivialization of web dev -- this isn't web development -- while I agree that self driven car is one of the highest level of critical. But that said, people can equally suffer, if not so visually, due to financial app bugs. I shudder to think of state of people who lost lot of money in hacks on MtGox and other Bitcoin exchanges for example.
There was no net impact in that accident. It replaced three deaths which would have occurred without autopilot, so it was part of a net gain in lives.
Perhaps that particular human was special and worth saving over the other two who were saved instead, but I am not aware of any reason to believe that.
Only after a particularly tortured interpretation of highway safety statistics.
If you exclude pedestrian deaths (Few jaywalkers on the interstate), motorcycle deaths, deaths in conditions where autopilot cannot be used, and deaths due to collisions of lighter, less safe, older, or poorly-maintained automobiles, then regular highway death statistics start looking better then autopilot-enabled ones. [1] [2]
Again, there's a great gap between the hype of Tesla, and the reality.
AI/ML algos cannot magically guarantee safety, for example, deep nets are known to be very un-robust: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199. We are not yet at the point where AI/ML based algos can be guaranteed to be safe.
Bet you there is a clause that it's only usable during perfect conditions. I don't doubt there is a ton of information being sent back to Tesla for machine learning. They have the capability to send software updates to the cars. When you have hundreds of thousands of these cars driving around, they should be able to gather so much information and tweak the design to perfect the whole issue.
If I had one of these cars, I would not put 100% faith into this technology yet. But, after 5 years, who knows? I may finally be able to drink more than 1 beer at a bar with friends and have my car drive me safely home.
Which brings an interesting point, traffic violations. What will local police do now that self-driving cars drive safely?
If we assume self-driving cars will be an on-demand service, they could be offered intermittently - only on good weather, at daytime, at cities(or even routes) already mapped. Even with that limitation, it could be a pretty valuable service, if complemented by the right ride-sharing services.
And even when purchasing a car , a car that "only" drives itself when it's safe would be great, even if it's only 40% of the time, for people in the right city.
This level of negativity is typical for HN. Look at what happened when dhouston announced Dropbox- the second comment was about how any Linux user can trivially replace it for themselves:
A comment from the iPod thread: "AAPL is going down fast! - Mmmm. APPL is already down $1.00... Looks like the markets aren't looking too favorably on Apple's new forays into the digital device market." [1]
Today on Yahoo Finance: 'Tesla Falls After Announcement - Tesla Motors (TSLA) fell nearly 2% and remained in the lower parts of a six-month-old consolidation. Late Wednesday, Tesla said all of its new vehicles will be equipped with hardware that enables fully autonomous driving "at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." [2]
Now go look at Theranos, and what the defenders were saying here.
Or the hundreds of other bad ideas that were criticized and failed because they were bad ideas. Picking a few big successes doesn't make an argument. Because, I agree, there are naysayers for everything. I'm glad; keeps people honest.
This is one of my favorite nuggets of internet history–also excellent because the thread ID (500) makes it easy to find since it'll redirect from: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/500.
That is GOLD! My favorite comment is this, which is so wrong it almost sounds sarcastic:
"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently!
Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"
For balance, here are other comments from the first two pages of that thread:
"Come on everyone, y'all are saying it sucks before you have even held it in your hand. I mean 5GB in a little tiny thing like that, it's amazing. I don't see anyone else making something like that. Do you?"
"No matter what Apple does there are always people who are NEVER happy. Give it a rest. It's a great idea and the first of many."
"The truth is that is really is revolutionary. 5 gigs? Where do you see 5 gigs in an Mp3 player?"
"This is not like any other MP3 player on the market, imagine being able to store several days worth of music at once! The iPod will be great for travelers, students, heck anyone who is really into music"
"This thing's too cool. It makes my Rio 500 (recently upgraded to hold 128 MB of songs) look pathetic. It's beautiful. It looks too easy to use. It has all sorts of cool features that I will never live without again. This is a home run, and y'all who keep complaining its not a $200 Newton device, buy a Visor. They can play MP3s, by the way, but they're still stuck in the 21st century compared to the iPod."
"THIS THING IS AMAZING!!!
It's not jus ANOTHER mp3 player. It's a BREAKTROUGH mp3 player!"
"with all the hype surrounding it, the iPod still came out looking quite good."
"I think it looks like a great toy. The price is steep for 5 GB, but everything else about it is great."
"iPod is a great idea. It has huge capacity for MP3s (5GB is much more than any other similarly sized mp3 toy), syncs with iTunes, and a nicely sized backlit LCD screen with good battery life (10hours). Recharges by FireWIre is also a neat thing."
In all fairness, the initial iPods were nothing to write home about and, as I recall, iTunes didn't even run on anything except Macs--then a rather niche hardware platform. Of course, iPods improved relative to the competition but it was really the iTunes store and Apple's ability to fundamentally change how music was sold that really had the impact.
This sounds like the perspective of someone who didn't actually use early iPods and definitely didn't use Sony Discmans and Walkmans and other predecessors.
Because folks who actually used all that stuff know that the iPod was a quantum leap, even in its first few generations. 5GB of storage, MUCH better battery life than any competing device of any kind, and FireWire 400 felt fast enough back then that it was like actually being on fire.
Indeed. I had a walkman in the 80's. I still remember not being able to walk too quickly with my discman.
As soon as the ipod came out, I bought one for my girlfriend as a birthday present. She has never used any other system for listening to or acquiring music since. It obviously switched to the smart-phone, but still...
The first iPod provided unprecedented amounts of storage in a form factor that actually fit in your pocket. They accomplished this by buying out the world's initial supply of tiny hard drives for over a year and change. This kept would-be competitors at bay, making every other 5GB MP3 player look like a giant brick by comparison.
Most of the people who were shitting on the iPod never held one in their hands.
The difference between this and the Iphone 1 is that the technology is not there yet for fully autonomous cars, and it's unclear you can get there just by trying really hard and spending lots of money. Fully self-driving cars wouldn't just have to stay in their lane on the freeway, they would have to make the decisions during edge-case driving situations that a human would. That means knowing to slow down when a ball rolls across the road, reading people's hand signals, responding correctly when a police car tries to stop traffic on the freeway, etc. I'm not sure how you even begin to handle cases like that. Our driving situation was designed for humans, so you would have to make the algorithm "think like a human" and understand all our wierd idiosyncrasies. So far, machine learning has had very little luck with trying to similate human decision-making.
What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.
What is with all these meta posts on HN recently by people who think they understand HN, and then need to tell everyone that they are not fitting into their idea of HN?
And why are you comparing iPhones to self driving cars? That's like comparing paper airplanes to commercial airliners. Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted.
That's funny, but it's not quite accurate. There's a difference between a) saying that certain viewpoints don't belong here, and b) saying that comments which say that certain viewpoints don't belong here don't belong here.
It's like there are three positions:
1. Certain viewpoints or comments should not be allowed.
2. Everything should be allowed except comments which say that certain things shouldn't be allowed (i.e. tolerant of everything except intolerance).
3. Everything should be allowed.
#1 is intolerant, #2 is an attempt at enforced tolerance (which is necessarily intolerant in itself), and #3 is actual tolerance.
It seems to me that the real problem is that meta discussions are frowned upon on HN, but there is no designated place to have them instead. So whenever someone starts one, they face the risk of censure-by-downvote.
Speaking for myself, I really want self-driving cars to happen in my lifetime but I've become incredibly wary of the credulous attitudes seen in media hype, among the general population, and within the tech community amongst people who don't understand how hard (and possibly intractable) some of these problems are.
If self-driving cars don't happen in my lifetime, it will be because companies piggybacked on the media hype too readily and shipped dangerously misleading technology to consumers before it's ready. A few CNN incidents later, et voila, no one's talking about self-driving cars anymore. The whole thing can grind to a halt just like that. Every overly enthusiastic, precocious CS undergrad who posts in forums about how incredibly inevitable self-driving cars are, and how it's basically a solved problem and a done deal, are helping to set up self-driving cars for failure by encouraging overly optimistic expectations.
For people who care deeply about the technology, the possibility of a company like Tesla putting something out there before it's ready and potentially causing CNN incidents can be more alarming than no one putting anything out there at all. Maybe some people are being too negative and nitpicky, or maybe not, but I think that's where the negative attitudes come from. It's from people who want self-driving cars to succeed.
If we've learned anything about AI learning systems, it's that they require as much training data as possible. By putting the hardware in the cars now, Tesla can start gathering that training data on a scale that nobody else can dream of. Anybody who can't see that as a huge competitive advantage isn't well informed.
It's sort of like startups. 90% of potential world-shaking innovations fail but pretty much everything that changed the world looked risky at one time. It's important to be sensitive to both sides of the coin.
And in this case, it's even more important than just being the first from a market perspective. Being first here allows Tesla to acquire a ton of data for their ML to churn on. Data is the monopoly that makes tech companies like Facebook so valuable today.
Facebook open sources most of their infrastructure, and anyone can copy their designs because they're fully public.
> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..."
Differently from mobile phones, cars actually have the capacity to go horribly, horribly wrong. This is not something to have a "let's fix it in public beta" Approach on.
> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..."
We don't know yet whether this is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars or the Newton of self-driving cars, a decade or more ahead of its time.
MVPs are of course great and I think this will be huge, but this is a safety critical piece of kit. There is a big difference between having your phone crash and having your car (literally) crash, into something solid.
yes and no... if cellphone is imperfect, at most it can cause inconvenience (let's ignore Note 7 topic for now), if car's driving is imperfect, it can easily kill not so low amount of people
we are geeks, many happy to be early adopters (aka testers), but try to explain this to average middle class joe who sees this and thinks it's already there in point of perfection, no mistake possible.
I just hope for Tesla that they delivered an outstanding technology that will just work, too much at stake with it. For now, respect to engineering team behind this!
So many "but what if this and that and this..." & "and yeah let's see if it can handle X & Y"
This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..."
Don't we have to start somewhere?? Aren't there supposed to be a big user base here who understands that it's an evolutionary process - we build the plane before we build the rocket before we shoot people into space?
Oviously the perfect self-driving car is still some way off, but I for one am thrilled this race is on!