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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
RobStark
Well-Known Member
Or things are going really swell with Grimes.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
As an American I can look down disapprovingly at the Luxembourgers.
Those dirty bastards.
I'm wondering if the FSD event is just a late delivery of the short burn of the century.
Does soneone know how the HW3 development was at this time?
Elon Musk on Twitter
Does soneone know how the HW3 development was at this time?
Elon Musk on Twitter
That graph is definitely wrong. How can the angle of the line stay unchanged from mid-2017 to present date, even though the number of Teslas on the road has gone up exponentially since then?
How have people forgotten that we did get a big short burn after the Q3 ER?
Regardless of the relative quality of the vehicle, Jaguar are putting in effort to switch to EVs. That should be applauded.
In their last ER they said that they're doing it for regulatory reasons.
I guarantee you, the vast majority of brands would drop EVs like hotcakes if regulatory environments that encourage manufacturers to make them disappeared. Not all, but the vast majority.
Thank the regulators, not the automakers.
Does it also have fake tailpipes that occasionally emit puffs of black powder?
While we are all thinking about Full Self-Driving, let's all read this really interesting piece about the Boeing 737 Max crashes and think about what self-driving cars really means.
How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer
I think a lot of people are imagining a world where cars are completely not controllable by humans and even may no longer have steering wheels. I believe that would be a world just waiting for a mass death event like commercial jetliners that are fatally attracted to the ground. In fact we already know that Tesla has a problem where they keep re-introducing an erroneous Autopilot behavior which drives the car into concrete dividers, a behavior which has already killed a driver.
Just as Boeing made an unbelievable (and unforgivable) mistake in creating an airplane which adamantly will not allow the humans to override it's behavior under any circumstance, resulting in the completely avoidable deaths of 346 people, it would be an absolute mistake to create a car which adamantly will not allow humans to override it's behavior and furthermore even lacks controls for the human to manipulate. I will never, ever sit in a car which lacks a steering wheel and will not immediately cede control to me the moment I grab said steering wheel and start trying to point the car in a direction other than the direction it thinks it should go.
I also don't really believe the 737 Max is fundamentally a safe airframe design and I'll go out of my way to avoid flying on one in the future. If this means I have to quit Southwest Airlines then so be it.
How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer
I think a lot of people are imagining a world where cars are completely not controllable by humans and even may no longer have steering wheels. I believe that would be a world just waiting for a mass death event like commercial jetliners that are fatally attracted to the ground. In fact we already know that Tesla has a problem where they keep re-introducing an erroneous Autopilot behavior which drives the car into concrete dividers, a behavior which has already killed a driver.
Just as Boeing made an unbelievable (and unforgivable) mistake in creating an airplane which adamantly will not allow the humans to override it's behavior under any circumstance, resulting in the completely avoidable deaths of 346 people, it would be an absolute mistake to create a car which adamantly will not allow humans to override it's behavior and furthermore even lacks controls for the human to manipulate. I will never, ever sit in a car which lacks a steering wheel and will not immediately cede control to me the moment I grab said steering wheel and start trying to point the car in a direction other than the direction it thinks it should go.
I also don't really believe the 737 Max is fundamentally a safe airframe design and I'll go out of my way to avoid flying on one in the future. If this means I have to quit Southwest Airlines then so be it.
I've thought it would be really funny to do that to a Tesla for April Fools
I was thinking just a bit of stainless steel tubing as your "exhaust pipe" - open on both ends, some felt on the inside as thermal insulation, and bracketed where the tow hitch from an EcoHitch would go. Inside would be slightly moist graphite powder (bought at a a paint supply store or online), frozen, with space for air to flow through the pipe on the top. So it should melt from the top down, and as it melts, the powder would get blown out by the air moving through the pipe.Only downside is unless it were windy, you wouldn't get any "idling" exhaust
The other option that comes to mind involves having literal fire in the pipe to generate actual smoke, but I think it might be tricky to keep it from being blown out (or overfanned) while driving, but still have enough oxygen when idle. Unless it were to include its own oxidizer... The old potassium nitrate and sugar smoke bomb formula, maybe? Grey smoke, not black, but still...
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It's a graph I plotted with the information I had.
You are probably right that I missed some info regarding 2017 and 2018, if you have some data points I can add them.
The real problem is that everyone (Tesla included) lost interest in keeping track of electric miles.
I just saw a +10B in the Sustainability report, so I tried to so what it looked like.
shlokavica22
Member
Interesting insight on the state of Autonomy from the Founder of Creative Destruction Lab and AI expert : teslamotors
I work for one of the major customer experience companies (Enterprise Software) in the world and just got back from our annual customer conference in Las Vegas. We have a lot of AI and machine learning in our product portfolio and have everything from voice analytics that can detect sentiment (along with key words and phrases) for marketing/training/prediction of behavior etc (for contact centers or otherwise discerning the voice of the customer), to real time authentication, financial transaction analysis (think financial crime and compliance) and robotic process automation (attended and un-attended software robots with real time virtual assistants) and other things which also leverage machine learning. Most of the breakout sessions revolved around customers deep diving into the use cases and/ or technology to assist their businesses, but one session in particular caught my eye - "our automated future - learning to adapt and thrive in the era of intelligent machines" by Dr. Ajay Agrawal. He opened by describing the history of the University of Toronto (I had no idea) as one (if not the) pre-eminent centers for AI research (especially for neural networks and deep learning) and listed off a "whos who" of researchers who have spun off into positions at major companies around the world. Of course when he mentioned Andrej Karpathy, my ears pricked up. Very interesting lecture. Couple of things that he said that after hearing I was like - oh of course. First - whoever gets there first, in terms of application of AI to a vertical market (like autonomous driving) wins. Like Google did with search, they were the first to really get it right - and now because they have SO many users reinforcing and providing data to refine and continue to build they keep getting better and better. As he described it, AI is simply a prediction machine, and when the software makes a prediction, the software then makes an analysis of risk of error (what happens if I make the wrong/right decision, what happens if I don't make a decision), makes a prediction and then gets the result which provides a feedback loop to improve the model. Obviously this is vastly oversimplified, but in his example with google, you type in a query - the software predicts what you want to see, provides the results and you click on the one you want. Based on what you clicked on, it gets feedback as to how well it predicted and so on. The pure brute force approach works well on simple models, but when things get very sophisticated (like with driving) its limited by data. That made sense to me as well. He referenced Tesla and Waymo a few times in the lecture and used FSD as a use case example a lot and he knows Karpathy (as well as a number of the major players in the AI/NN research and commercial fields). One of the KEY things he brought forward when it comes to the development of NN and AI, in all applications, but especially the most difficult applications is the value of the DATA - which he said has been described as "the new oil" - super valuable, but must be refined into the things we really want (gasoline, plastic, chemicals) which then drive profitable activity. Neural Networks (NN) are fairly well understood - and are simply refining that data into a product which can be commercialized. I'd never heard it described that way. The other key thing he brought forward was that much like computational advances can be described as reducing the price of arithmetic to zero (or the internet driving the cost of searching and communicating to zero), AI can be described as the reduction of the cost of prediction (to zero), and as the cost of prediction is driven down, its the DATA which is injected into the prediction machines that has the real value as a complimentary product (in economic terms) which will increase significantly if not exponentially.
The light bulb went on in my head.
So after the lecture I had a chance to talk to him for a while - (which was amazing in retrospect - I didn't realize quite how big a deal he was until after and only about 20 people attended his session (there were 3k+ people at our event) and I got the time to talk to him about Tesla and Karpathy's approach. I opened asking about Waymo and Tesla - and how it seemed pretty clear based on the disengagement reports that Waymo appeared to be head and shoulders beyond Tesla, even though Elon seems to be VASTLY confident (over?) about Tesla's capabilities. I asked about how the data is gathered - basically the lidar vs machine vision debate and whether or not that was part of it. His basic take was that he felt like Waymo seems like they are ahead now because they are likely using much more 'hard' code to do things which works well in in the "middle" or more typical use cases but what happens is that they "top out" in terms of performance and defining the corner cases rather than taking the time to let the AI/NN learn on its own. He says he use of simulators to teach the AI works well, but is limited in terms of how much data and the types of use cases that can be simulated in a sophisticated application like driving. This is why they appeared to jump ahead, but have now stalled or slowed down because their data inputs are limited both in use cases and in volume of the data. He believes and agreed that he thinks Tesla's approach will ultimately win, and then own the FSD market simply due to the amount of data that they are able to feed into the neural network and that what they have seen in their AI/NN research is a slow and steady improvement, marked by HUGE jumps forward in progress and then continued refinement and improvement at a fairly predictable rate. Tesla obviously has a HUGE advantage here in terms of the data collected from the cars and the feedback it gets from drivers back into the NN as to whether or not the 'prediction' model was correct or not.
Much like google, now that they have so many users providing data into the feedback loop, they will continue to get better and better to the point of where new competitors just cant enter or get to the point of where Tesla is or will be.
As for the camera vs lidar debate:
As he put it - what he sees with machine vision with cameras is amazing and likely to kill or fully depreciate many areas such as imaging diagnosis (think MRI or Xray scans) and that its pretty clear cameras are the way to go although Lidar has its place for sure and is basically just another method to do the same thing. The difference is that machine vision would deliver the highest amount of flexibility in terms of what can be visualized and discerned, smoke/weather/haze not withstanding. He felt like a hybrid model was likely best and where things would end up at Tesla in time, given the reduction in cost of Lidar over the last few years -- think AP 4.0 hardware. Having both would provide redundancy and the ability to 'see' in compromised environments (dark/smoke/fog etc) that camera only applications have limitations on.
I also asked about why the versions seem to regress in terms of performance - for example in my car the latest version with Nav on AP which is smoother on the highway and does some new amazing things better than ever, now cant take a typical offramp curve without ping ponging all over the place when its been smooth as silk for 4-5 versions. He said that sometimes small adjustments in the model / or the way the NN/AI is learning can have some unexpected results in corner cases which then have to re-adjust themselves over time or via tweaks by the software team. All part of the process. I was pretty encouraged by this - and will be excited to see what Tesla shows us on the FSD investor event coming up.
TLDR: Tesla's approach, while slow and steady will likely deliver major jumps in FSD performance and in time is the most likely approach to deliver the highest performing FSD product, covering the most use cases, and if first to market will likely result in Tesla owning that market due to the sheer amount of data that is collected and used to refine the model. Also machine vision is more than likely more than adequate for FSD as applied today.
Edit:
The part in bold is more or less confirmed in this video:
The long tail is what has to be mastered and that's exactly where TSLA has the advantage.
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SebastianR
Active Member
Happy to discuss. The post on Reddit is garbage. Yes, the SR+ will be in demand but even the more expensive models will not pay exorbitant prices either. As I said before the Model 3 is perfectly priced for Denmark. If you want to know how much fees there are for DK, go to Tesla, configure the car and go to check-out. There you can see how much Sales Taxe and how much Registration Fees are in the prices.
Edit: while I was in Tesla shop in Hamburg yesterday I noted that a few Danes were stopping by, too. So it is interesting to see that the car has enough of a pull for folks to spend time during their vacation to look at it... The sales adviser in the store said that they are looking for more staff in Hamburg as they can't handle the volume of orders coming it. He said he himself processes about 60 orders per week. To me that doesn't seem extremely high. I guess there are more orders online and of course there are many more sales folks out there, too. While I was at the store a constant flow of people came in. It was busy but not crazy busy.
Here you go: Interesting insight on the state of Autonomy from the Founder of Creative Destruction Lab and AI expert : teslamotors
I did read it. Interesting, not revolutionary. Some of it seems a bit 3rd hand knowledge of a guy who is giving his estimate about a field he generally know something about but without being in the details.
Edit: @shlokavica22 beat me to it...
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Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Also note that 80%+ of the "EV" regulations are still skewed towards ICE carmaker profits:
- Hybrids and limited weird-mobiles with giggle-batteries often get similarly good incentives as well, under the disguise of being "electric".
- Emissions test cycles (defined by regulators as well) are nowhere near representative of everyday emissions. One of the dirty little secrets is that everyday ICE and hybrid driving uses a lot more fuel compared to the emissions test protocols than a BEV. This too benefits ICE makers.
- The various sales and registrations data often commingles hybrids under electric, creating a false impression of ICE makers being serious about EVs, when they still are not. By such sales data BMW is the leading EV maker in Europe. Really?
The moment real EV incentives are introduced, which exclude all non-BEVs, you get rules like the 3.65m car length limit in Germany, which is just 4 cm shorter than the Model 3's 3.69m, or the Canadian EV incentives that include all ICE incumbents and excludes a single EV, the Model 3, made by EV-only maker Tesla ...
There's a few rays of hope like Norway and Iceland EV incentives, but in 90%+ of the ICE markets it's still regulatory capture, all the way down, and turtles.
So no, I'd not give most regulators too much credit, but I'd give ICE incumbents an extra score in ingenuity to commit another level of fraud by faking EV production.
Re, the notion that Tesla could add LIDAR if it ever becomes cheap enough... this is the beauty part. Yes, Tesla can always just tack LIDAR into the system and immediately benefit from it. But the reverse isn't true. Waymo can't just instantly tack in an evolved vision system based on data collected from a vast fleet of users, unless Tesla for some reason decides to give them one.
Of the "future, cheaper LIDAR concepts being worked on", I kind of like the concept of time-of-flight cameras, since they're so simple. If they get down in price to near that of conventional cameras, Tesla could just use them in place of its existing ones, since they can do both vision and ranging. Existing owners could get their cameras swapped out.
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shlokavica22
Member
Also note that 80%+ of the "EV" regulations are still skewed towards ICE carmaker profits:
Many of the "EV incentives" actually hinder BEVs, because most of the incentives actually go towards maintaining the status quo, and go towards the incumbents playing for time.
- Hybrids and limited weird-mobiles with giggle-batteries often get similarly good incentives as well, under the disguise of being "electric".
- Emissions test cycles (defined by regulators as well) are nowhere near representative of everyday emissions. One of the dirty little secrets is that everyday ICE and hybrid driving uses a lot more fuel compared to the emissions test protocols than a BEV. This too benefits ICE makers.
- The various sales and registrations data often commingles hybrids under electric, creating a false impression of ICE makers being serious about EVs, when they still are not. By such sales data BMW is the leading EV maker in Europe. Really?
The moment real EV incentives are introduced, which exclude all non-BEVs, you get rules like the 3.65m car length limit in Germany, which is just 4 cm shorter than the Model 3's 3.69m, or the Canadian EV incentives that include all ICE incumbents and excludes a single EV, the Model 3, made by EV-only maker Tesla ...
There's a few rays of hope like Norway and Iceland EV incentives, but in 90%+ of the ICE markets it's still regulatory capture, all the way down, and turtles.
So no, I'd not give most regulators too much credit, but I'd give ICE incumbents an extra score in ingenuity to commit another level of fraud by faking EV production.
That's the worst part- it's done under the pretext they care about the environment, while in fact- the result is in the complete opposite direction.
How many people bought "clean diesel" with sincere care about their CO2 footprint? How long it would've going on if it wasn't for the exceptional work done by International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT)?
People who care about the environment must think critically about any regulation that is described as "environmentally oriented".
Interesting article about the EU emission regulations: Autobouwers riskeren CO2-boete van 500 miljoen euro in België
For Belgium, on average the 2021 target will be missed by 10g, i.e. a fine of 10*95 euro per car sold. In other words, those car prices should increase by 1K euro to maintain the same financial results at the car manufacturers.
According to the environmental pressue groups, this was agreed upon in 2009. Some manufacturers like Toyota transformed their cars to comply, others (FCA) did nothing.
By 2025 and 2030, the target are lower by 15% and 37.5%, compared to the 2021 target. Let’s an extra 40g by 2030 or the equivalent of an extra 4000 euro fine per car.
So a decade from now, the average ICE car will increase in price by 5000 euro just to cover the EU emission fine. That’s in addition to other local regulations that make ICE cars much more expensive to own and drive. The threshold where EVs will be cheaper to buy, own and drive will come very fast in the EU;
For Belgium, on average the 2021 target will be missed by 10g, i.e. a fine of 10*95 euro per car sold. In other words, those car prices should increase by 1K euro to maintain the same financial results at the car manufacturers.
According to the environmental pressue groups, this was agreed upon in 2009. Some manufacturers like Toyota transformed their cars to comply, others (FCA) did nothing.
By 2025 and 2030, the target are lower by 15% and 37.5%, compared to the 2021 target. Let’s an extra 40g by 2030 or the equivalent of an extra 4000 euro fine per car.
So a decade from now, the average ICE car will increase in price by 5000 euro just to cover the EU emission fine. That’s in addition to other local regulations that make ICE cars much more expensive to own and drive. The threshold where EVs will be cheaper to buy, own and drive will come very fast in the EU;
Sean Wagner
Member
Don't want to deviate too far from the thread, but I think Boeing flight computers usually were less intrusive and did actually allow for ultimate pilot overrides. [The 737MAX manual overrides were known not to work in certain conditions, but the organization "forgot".] So that would also add a discontinuity in expected and habitual control laws.
The problem with pilots and drivers taking over while lacking the necessary skills honed through constant use became apparent in the Asiana 214 crash of a triple seven in San Francisco some years back. An emergency stop button with embedded traffic alerts might be smarter.
I have to disagree here. EM "promised" a burn of the century, larger than Volkswagen.
Volkaswagen was a fivefold within a few trading days. Q3 ER even wasn't an ATH.
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