Recent content by Ben W

No question that different cost components scale differently. The battery would presumably be smaller and have somewhat less range (for the base model), which is a significant cost savings. And the materials and subsystems (e.g. screens, speakers, lights) would be expected to be less premium...

My 2008 Tesla Roadster is still working fine on its original battery pack, after 16 years. If a 2008 pack can last 16 years (and counting), a 2013 pack should certainly be capable of lasting 20 years, albeit with normal capacity degradation over time. A 30% reduction in capacity over 20 years...

Really? It's two inches shorter than a Model S/X. (196" for Lucid Air vs 198" for Model S/X.) The Model 3/Y are 186"/187", for comparison. Cybertruck, on the other hand, is 224" long, which is even longer than the Hummer EV (217"). Hilariously, the Cybertruck is closer in length to the Tesla...

Seventh half of 2023! My guess is that Robotaxi and Model 2 were originally planned to be the same body design, which will still be unveiled (as Robotaxi-only) on 8/8. The new plan will be to modify Model 3/Y with some (but not all) of the planned Robotaxi-generation manufacturing refinements...

Why wouldn't FSD see the wave? It has eight cameras. The beauty of end-to-end NN training is that it will implicitly train itself on subtle signals like this, just as humans do. (As long as these sorts of examples are in the training set, but why wouldn't they be?) Since the training data pulls...

I think the distributed supercomputer idea is quite a good one. Tesla's FSD computers are optimized for computational performance per watt (unlike say my old PlayStation 3, which was an absolute power hog when I once tried to use it for SETI-at-Home), and with increasing time-dependent renewable...

To be fair, the questioner asked a too-extreme question. They essentially asked, "Will you commit to providing free FSD transferability in perpetuity to all owners until Tesla's autonomy reaches L5?" That strongly deserved a No answer, not least because true L5 is probably 15 years away, but...

FUSC currently adds significantly to the private-party resale value. FSD not so much, because it’s seeming more and more clear that older hardware (HW3) will never achieve L4, for instance. FSD transferability is more important on principle because Tesla failed to deliver the original full value...

Yes, I know this is Waymo’s future plan, but the car is not in mass production yet, let alone publicly deployed. Here’s a more recent update: https://carnewschina.com/2024/01/17/zeekr-waymo-robotaxi-m-vision-spotted-testing-in-china-ahead-of-us-launch/ For Tesla’s Robotaxi, a lot hinges on...

Steer-by-wire makes sense for multiple reasons, but “lack of driving controls” implies L5 autonomy, and Tesla is at least 10 years away from that, probably 15-20 years. So I expect the first generation of Robotaxi will absolutely still have a steering wheel or equivalent controls, allowing...

I fully expect that "Model 2" and "Robotaxi" will be exactly the same hardware product, introduced on 8/8. The $25k price will be subsidized by the purchaser pledging a substantial cut of future Robotaxi revenue to Tesla. (Maybe there will be an option to pay a higher price upfront and keep more...

"Can", if it's extremely lucky. It's technically accurate to say that properly calibrated 12.3.4 has a nonzero probability of completing a coast-to-coast drive successfully and safely, with zero interventions. (I'd guess the probability of success on a given attempt would be less than 1%.) To be...

Agreed that it's "all a game", and just a question of finding the right time to strike. I'm not in a huge hurry; eventually there will be HW5, bidirectional charging, improved battery chemistry, an exterior refresh, and so forth. I'd be very surprised if they do away with the S and X altogether...

I have a 2017 Model 3 with FSD, and am considering upgrading it to new Model S. Having FSD transferability would make me MUCH more likely to pounce; it's actually quite difficult for me to see myself upgrading without it, knowing that it's likely to come back as an option at some point, and...

The difference is that the Oberth Effect cannot be leveraged to create a perpetual motion machine, but the reactionless drive can. The Oberth Effect doesn't violate conservation of energy / momentum, but the reactionless drive does. The reason I'm skeptical of the reactionless drive is this...