I am thrilled to see the progress Tesla is making on the new Model S/X/3 towards full autonomous vehicles. I am very disheartened that I bought (not leased, as I think Model S is a car worth 10yr of supremely enjoyable ownership) a $90K Model S brand new from your factory on Tuesday (18th Oct) that is already "outdated" and perhaps has a significant devaluation. When I put the deposit for this car in September, I even bought TSLA stock as I believe in the future Tesla has. But my car is no longer a "futuristic" car.
What I am most disheartened about is the fact that I waited so long to finally buy the dream car, and the excitement didn't last more than 24hours :-((.
I would like for Mr. Musk to consider this request not just for my case, but likely for many of those new car buyers that bought the X and S in the last quarter (Q3), and offer them some options:
(1) return vehicles with < 1K miles and refund the full money
(2) give them a "credit" for trade-in (e.g. $10K) to account for the devaluation that just happened
(3) even better option:
- offer the NVIDIA/compute upgrade for all AP1.0 cars
- optionally include the tri-camera h/w upgrade
The reason #3 is valuable in that, (a) you will instantly win the hearts of all your early adopters and supporters. (b) you will get a chance to remove all MBLEYE chipsets from all Teslas. This will help your firmware and s/w team to deliver code on one platform, whether AP1 or APX cars. Trust me - I have been in silicon valley for 18yrs and managed projects where engineers had to support code on multiple gen of platforms and it impacted the performance, time, and quality of the final delivery by at least 30% - and allowed newcomers to gain upper hand with faster releases with a single new platform.
Thoughts for your Area 51 (Yes we did the tour and it was cool to see the name
) leaders:
- when next-gen AP s/w is ready, also make it work with Gen1 AP sensors (1-camera, 1-radar, low-sensitive sonars, backup camera possibly)
- offer a one-time service fee to replace the MBLEYE compute chipsets
Now, you have 3 tiers of sensors the NVIDIA chipsets & s/w will work with:
(1) gen-1 sensors: 1-camera, 1-radar, gen-1 sonars, and (un)likely backup camera
(2a) gen-2 APE sensors: 4 cameras, 1 radar, 12 new sonars
(3b) gen-2 APF sensors: the full array of cameras
In my opinion, the NVIDIA is ready for even more in the future. Some thoughts:
(3) gen-3 APF2 sensors (future, likely 2yrs from now, Oct 2018 would be my guess): quite likely you may need to run another parallel channel of radar based sensors on the 4 corners of the car (or elsewhere) to account for visibility-challenged situations when the 360-cameras may not do the job (e.g. foggy mornings in Germany autobahns, general winter situations in New England & Nordics; tropical heavy rain downpour situations in Florida - these are the times when the humans are at even worse condition to have a safe driving situation. We want invisible eyes (radars/sonars) to take over when cameras(eyes) can't. This will be true victory for Tesla/autonomy. I don't have stats about accidents that occur during during good visibility days, and when weather conditions are poor. I have a feeling many accidents occur during poor visibility conditions. You are a stats man - you will know these already (accidents/deaths from Dec-April, vs. May-Nov, in NE area).
(4) gen-4 APF3 activators: now that Tesla cars and occupants are safe, it is time to make the world a bit safer for non-Tesla drivers. e.g. Gen1-4 h/w above likely cannot avoid a rear-ending if the car/driver behind is distracted (texting). How about the rear camera/sensor not only senses the vehicle speed behind and notes the rate of acceleration difference between that car and the Tesla, but also has a rear-pointing honk/bright flashing lights/laser lights/radio-jamming RF transmitters etc to communicate with the driver behind to get their attention. We might just save a rear-ending accident situation (assuming the Tesla cannot make last minute maneuver to get out of the lane altogether, sometimes that may not be possible).
(5) Gen-5: all cloud intelligence that sends to each vehicle (whether Tesla or not) the other cars conditions on the road so they become "social" cars after all and can maintain a better distance/space between each other, all from a "cloud" connected central nervous system. I know your team is already working on the central neural networks, and even Gen-1 cars will likely benefit from this over time, but it is time to make the whole world a better place, not just the Teslas on the road. I assume in about 10yrs from now, hopefully, 10% of the cars in the world would be Teslas. The rest 90% can still have their own sensors to protect from local instantaneous dangerous situations, but they could benefit by having a central nervous system (in the cloud) that can exchange real-time update of "vehicles" near me that are beyond visibility (beyond 250m).
Mr. Musk,
Would you please bring along the Gen-1 car owners, your most loyal and devoted fans, with you as you journey into the future? Would you consider this request?
Your newest fan (1-day old AP1.0 Gen Model S owner) and likely speaking on behalf of all AP1.0 car owners
PN, San Jose, CA
What I am most disheartened about is the fact that I waited so long to finally buy the dream car, and the excitement didn't last more than 24hours :-((.
I would like for Mr. Musk to consider this request not just for my case, but likely for many of those new car buyers that bought the X and S in the last quarter (Q3), and offer them some options:
(1) return vehicles with < 1K miles and refund the full money
(2) give them a "credit" for trade-in (e.g. $10K) to account for the devaluation that just happened
(3) even better option:
- offer the NVIDIA/compute upgrade for all AP1.0 cars
- optionally include the tri-camera h/w upgrade
The reason #3 is valuable in that, (a) you will instantly win the hearts of all your early adopters and supporters. (b) you will get a chance to remove all MBLEYE chipsets from all Teslas. This will help your firmware and s/w team to deliver code on one platform, whether AP1 or APX cars. Trust me - I have been in silicon valley for 18yrs and managed projects where engineers had to support code on multiple gen of platforms and it impacted the performance, time, and quality of the final delivery by at least 30% - and allowed newcomers to gain upper hand with faster releases with a single new platform.
Thoughts for your Area 51 (Yes we did the tour and it was cool to see the name
) leaders:- when next-gen AP s/w is ready, also make it work with Gen1 AP sensors (1-camera, 1-radar, low-sensitive sonars, backup camera possibly)
- offer a one-time service fee to replace the MBLEYE compute chipsets
Now, you have 3 tiers of sensors the NVIDIA chipsets & s/w will work with:
(1) gen-1 sensors: 1-camera, 1-radar, gen-1 sonars, and (un)likely backup camera
(2a) gen-2 APE sensors: 4 cameras, 1 radar, 12 new sonars
(3b) gen-2 APF sensors: the full array of cameras
In my opinion, the NVIDIA is ready for even more in the future. Some thoughts:
(3) gen-3 APF2 sensors (future, likely 2yrs from now, Oct 2018 would be my guess
): quite likely you may need to run another parallel channel of radar based sensors on the 4 corners of the car (or elsewhere) to account for visibility-challenged situations when the 360-cameras may not do the job (e.g. foggy mornings in Germany autobahns, general winter situations in New England & Nordics; tropical heavy rain downpour situations in Florida - these are the times when the humans are at even worse condition to have a safe driving situation. We want invisible eyes (radars/sonars) to take over when cameras(eyes) can't. This will be true victory for Tesla/autonomy. I don't have stats about accidents that occur during during good visibility days, and when weather conditions are poor. I have a feeling many accidents occur during poor visibility conditions. You are a stats man - you will know these already (accidents/deaths from Dec-April, vs. May-Nov, in NE area).(4) gen-4 APF3 activators: now that Tesla cars and occupants are safe, it is time to make the world a bit safer for non-Tesla drivers. e.g. Gen1-4 h/w above likely cannot avoid a rear-ending if the car/driver behind is distracted (texting). How about the rear camera/sensor not only senses the vehicle speed behind and notes the rate of acceleration difference between that car and the Tesla, but also has a rear-pointing honk/bright flashing lights/laser lights/radio-jamming RF transmitters etc to communicate with the driver behind to get their attention. We might just save a rear-ending accident situation (assuming the Tesla cannot make last minute maneuver to get out of the lane altogether, sometimes that may not be possible).
(5) Gen-5: all cloud intelligence that sends to each vehicle (whether Tesla or not) the other cars conditions on the road so they become "social" cars after all and can maintain a better distance/space between each other, all from a "cloud" connected central nervous system. I know your team is already working on the central neural networks, and even Gen-1 cars will likely benefit from this over time, but it is time to make the whole world a better place, not just the Teslas on the road. I assume in about 10yrs from now, hopefully, 10% of the cars in the world would be Teslas. The rest 90% can still have their own sensors to protect from local instantaneous dangerous situations, but they could benefit by having a central nervous system (in the cloud) that can exchange real-time update of "vehicles" near me that are beyond visibility (beyond 250m).
Mr. Musk,
Would you please bring along the Gen-1 car owners, your most loyal and devoted fans, with you as you journey into the future? Would you consider this request?
Your newest fan (1-day old AP1.0 Gen Model S owner) and likely speaking on behalf of all AP1.0 car owners
PN, San Jose, CA
