Tesla is dumping Mobileye???

[Tam]

I'm not so sure about that, especially when you look at how the Falcon Wing Doors have turned out. That work was brought in house.

Originally, in February 2014, the job was sourced to a third party Hoerbiger to deliver the finished product to Tesla.

In May 2015, it came back with oil leaking from the hydraulic system so much that Tesla decided to bring it in-house.

Tesla decided to start it from a scratch and redesigned the system and ditched the third party's hydraulic system.

It then went with electronic mechanism instead.

And that was a very incredibly short time to turn a disaster around in just 4 months to deliver a first Model X in September 2015.

Yes, there have been problems but they are fixable because it's done in-house.

Those in-house problems are just like a walk in the park when you compare them with the finished product from a third party.

 

[Tam]

everything I read also said it was Mobileye who did the dumping.

So who would you like to listen to?

Elon Musk or Mobileye?

 

[msnow]

So who would you like to listen to?

Elon Musk or Mobileye?

Tesla because what ME said in that article made zero sense.

 

[RDoc]

I thought we we're discussing hardware here? In-house proprietary Tesla chips as opposed to Mobileye chips and cameras. In my experience Tesla's hardware ia excellent.

Custom chips are run by software. Speaking as someone who's designed and build complex software system for decades, Tesla's software department is at best second rate.

I'm unaware of any Tesla custom chips, what do you have in mind?

 

[Stoneymonster]

Custom chips are run by software. Speaking as someone who's designed and build complex software system for decades, Tesla's software department is at best second rate.

I'm unaware of any Tesla custom chips, what do you have in mind?

Tesla's safety critical systems and drive control are certainly not "second-rate".

 

[trils0n]

Tesla's safety critical systems and drive control are certainly not "second-rate".

Exactly. The infotainment is shoddy, but the software that actually runs the car has been rock solid since day 1.

 

[Krugerrand]

No, but a comparison was made to Google, which does offer free food to employees.

And yet Tesla does in fact offer free food stuffs to its employees.

You seem to be incredibly pedantic.

Yeah, I like to get the facts straight.

 

[malcolm]

It's interesting to recall just how many "Never-gonna-happen" moments we've seen delivered in the course of the last five years.

Ludicrous mode. Increased range with AWD. The introduction of Autopilot. The Falcon wing doors.

Certainly the level of challenge and complexity with some of these has been more painfully apparent than with others and we can argue that most should have arrived sooner and/or in better shape, but it remains an astonishing tally of engineering achievements in a sector where most rivals are still trying to match the Roadster (*cough* Mission E *cough*).

MobilEye is very innovative compared with industry norms. But as several people have observed, when it comes to Elon, we're not talking normal (or rather, "just comfortably above-average")

And on top of that there's the engineering achievements of Spacex. Some of which, cross fertilize the work at Tesla.

Really envious of those of you with the chance to see a fraction of what the Oompa Loompas of Science have been getting up to at the Gigafactory tomorrow.

 

[Stoneymonster]

Exactly. The infotainment is shoddy, but the software that actually runs the car has been rock solid since day 1.

And the infotainment is still better than any of the cars I've owned before, so while I agree there's a *ton* of room for improvement there, you couldn't exchange it for anything else on the market for me right now. A lot of that is thanks to the screen.

 

[RDoc]

Tesla's safety critical systems and drive control are certainly not "second-rate".

When we first got our car, the AP would consistently get way too close, way too fast, to stopped cars ahead, requiring me to always override it. That's much better now, but for them to release such a potentially dangerous system doesn't speak well for their software department. The car still will often overshoot lane makers, sometimes with other vehicles next to the car. This is also dangerous and has been complained about for months.

By "drive control", I assume you mean running the motor and things of that sort. These are orders of magnitude simpler than even the current flawed AP software system.

 

[RDoc]

And the infotainment is still better than any of the cars I've owned before, so while I agree there's a *ton* of room for improvement there, you couldn't exchange it for anything else on the market for me right now. A lot of that is thanks to the screen.

My 5 year old aftermarket Sony head unit has far better software. For example, it knows how to use playlists and I've never had it crash when reading a USB drive.

 

[Stoneymonster]

My 5 year old aftermarket Sony head unit has far better software. For example, it knows how to use playlists and I've never had it crash when reading a USB drive.

I think the fact that you are using an aftermarket unit kinda supports my point

 

[RDoc]

I think the fact that you are using an aftermarket unit kinda supports my point

Well, apart from dying, the Blaupunct that came in my 1991 NSX lacked a few features.

 

[J1mbo]

Tesla's safety critical systems and drive control are certainly not "second-rate".

Tesla doesn't write the software for the safety systems. That comes from the OEM (Bosch or ME). Tesla adopted ME's development (learning) process to refine Autopilot, but the actual "safety critical" component of the software is from the OEM.

On the other hand, Tesla have spent over 10 years developing and refining their sublime drive control. At that rate we can expect the media player and navigation to be out of beta within about 5 years...

 

[Waiting4M3]

Custom chips are run by software. Speaking as someone who's designed and build complex software system for decades, Tesla's software department is at best second rate.

I'm unaware of any Tesla custom chips, what do you have in mind?

You're aware of a bunch of chip design guys that Tesla hired from Apple(PA Semi) and AMD this year, right?

 

[MP3Mike]

Tesla doesn't write the software for the safety systems. That comes from the OEM (Bosch or ME). Tesla adopted ME's development (learning) process to refine Autopilot, but the actual "safety critical" component of the software is from the OEM.

Are you sure about that? I thought Tesla pretty much writes/maintains the software themselves linking all of the hardware they get from OEMs. Which is why Autopilot is so much better than any other car with a Mobile Eye system.

 

[J1mbo]

Are you sure about that? I thought Tesla pretty much writes/maintains the software themselves linking all of the hardware they get from OEMs. Which is why Autopilot is so much better than any other car with a Mobile Eye system.

All other car manufacturers train the ME system (DNN) during the development cycle, using tools supplied by ME. The other manufacturer's system may be updated once a year as part of the annual service. Tesla's innovation seems to be that they have extended the ME training process to the whole fleet, and they leave it running all the time.

It will be interesting to see whether they are able to transition something as tailor-made as an ME DNN (taught to respond to millions of miles worth of radar + visual data, integrated and processed by ME's custom EyeQ3 chip) over to another hardware/software solution without compromising quality or safety.

My bet is that they won't: Tesla know full well how quickly this kind of system can improve once it is "out in the wild".

 

[Bruin1996]

So I was talking to one of my Tesla-owning colleagues today about Autopilot and he believes that the discontinuation of the relationship with Mobileye will cause a delay in the release of the Autopilot updates in Tesla OS 8.0. What do you all think about this? Has anyone heard any news to support this?

 

[MP3Mike]

So I was talking to one of my Tesla-owning colleagues today about Autopilot and he believes that the discontinuation of the relationship with Mobileye will cause a delay in the release of the Autopilot updates in Tesla OS 8.0. What do you all think about this? Has anyone heard any news to support this?

I highly doubt that since Tesla and Mobile Eye have said that they will continue to work together to support/improve the current solution Tesla is using. If it was going to delay anything it would be AP 2.0. (new hardware)

 

[Tam]

The Future of Tesla Autopilot - What Happens After Mobileye?

The break up was well planned in advance by Tesla as evidenced by the hiring frenzy in the following quotes:

"

• Jim Keller (legendary microprocessor architect and formerly of Apple and AMD) joined Tesla Autopilot as the VP of Autopilot Hardware Engineering.

• Peter Bannon (formerly of Apple) followed Jim to Tesla Autopilot.

• David Glasco (formerly worked at Intel, IBM and Nvidia) was Senior Director of Server SOC Architecture at AMD before joining Tesla.

• Thaddeus Fortenberry (formerly Cloud Server Architect at AMD) also joined Tesla Autopilot in the coming weeks.

• Debjit Das Sarma (former AMD fellow and CPU Lead Architect) also joined Tesla soon after.

• Keith Witek (formerly AMD Corporate Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development) joined Tesla as the Director of Autopilot Enablement and Associate General Counsel.

• Junli Gu (Formerly Member Technical Staff, Machine Learning at AMD) joined Tesla as the Tech Lead for Machine Learning, Autopilot"

Speculation: 2 choices:

1) In-house chip design: just like some other components, in addition to using the products for itself, it then can supply them to others (powertrain/battery packs to Toyota & Mercedes in the past, Powerwall/PowerPacks for homes & utility companies...)

2) Switching to Nvidia that is flexible and adaptable to keep up with the fast paced Tesla.