Giga Shanghai panoramic views. Not quite the time lapse video I was hoping for, but it was still impressive to go back to a mud field and compare to what it is today.
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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
Do you have the FSD computer in your car yet? No. Be patient. Next year is a long ways away.
This is a very good question and is central to understanding Tesla's approach versus Waymo's approach. I don't have much time to get into the full on answer that this topic deserves, but I'll take a gander at a shorter version.
There are two main splits that are instructional. Back in TMC '16, Lex Fridman gave a presentation on self driving along with another speaker. Unfortunately, I don't remember her name. Anyways, he highlighted a schism between two main camps trying to deliver autonomous vehicles. He said there are those that believed that autonomous driving can only come about through internal test fleets and ship to consumer, either through ride sharing (w/o safety driver) or through vehicles once level 4/5 is achieved. Tesla, amongst others, believe in an incremental improvement approach. This drives a completely different development plan and we'll call one the direct birth approach and the other is the incremental approach. The other main split is what Mobileye calls map heavy versus map light. A map heavy approach means a team can get some pretty good looking results pretty quick. Extensively map an area... whether it be a small city neighborhood or an entire city. And then throw a suite of sensors on to try to avoid hitting anything, and voila - you can get hundreds of millions or maybe even billions in VC. It's a pretty good looking demo. But it doesn't solve any of the thorny problems in perception for generalized autonomous driving. The idea is that you get somewhere and then figure out the really hard parts piece by piece. So in that way, they are incremental.
So, there is direct birth versus incremental improvement approach and map heavy versus map light. Waymo is both direct birth and map heavy, while Tesla is incremental improvement and map light. Waymo's approach can get you low disengagement numbers quicker than Tesla's approach. For the hard problems with autonomous driving, we don't know which one will end up winners yet. Maybe both or neither. The CA disengagement reports are therefore exceedingly misleading. To make big movements, developers need to break stuff. They need to find where things are wrong and do it repeatedly. Lots and lots of miles without disengagement, when one is short of the goal, indicates either they are really close to the solution or they are not attempting to seriously tackle the situation. And given the distance from the goal, the real answer is that they are not seriously developing the solution on CA public roads.
The direct birth, map heavy approach leads one to structure the development program in a certain way, and the incremental improvement and map light approach causes a different structure. Tesla's Autonomy Day is best seen as Tesla showing their development process. And few can follow in Tesla's approach to the development process. If the direct birth, map heavy approach ends up hitting local maximum as both Waymo has indicated and Tesla has insinuated, then they are stalled. The incremental approach means lots of humans teaching the system. That means deploying lots of vehicles to lots of humans. The cost per vehicle cannot be very high. Say, in volume, Waymo's approach means the test development vehicle costs $200,000. And they deploy 20,000 of them. That's $4 billion dollars. Each vehicle has been driving about 10,000 to 15,000 miles according to their CA report. That's 300 million miles a year at best. Assuming they cannot get enough ride sharing to cover much of that cost, the labor cost likely approaches $1 billion a year. On the other hand, Tesla's approach is about $1,500 of incremental cost to a vehicle. Tesla's customers pay for that cost. Tesla gets its customers to provide most of the labor for free. They just have to come up with ways to use their customer's miles to be fruitful and they outline a number of their approaches to collect that data and utilize that data during the presentation. There are just over 400,000 AP2.x+ vehicles on the road. Each does roughly 12,500 miles a year. That's 5 billion miles a year. There is no labor cost for driving around and teaching the system, as Tesla owners are performing micro work for the effort. Of course, there are big R&D costs, but we assume that is roughly the same between the two teams. Actually, we pay Tesla for the privilege of doing the micro-work for them. Note that if the Autopilot sensor suite costs $5,000+ in hardware, this approach wouldn't work as not enough people would opt for the sensor suite in their vehicles.
Back on the issue of disengagements. The map heavy approach with LIDAR gets a team a good looking stat pretty quickly. It doesn't mean it can drive, much like when you see Disney's Liberty Belle Paddle Steamer, it isn't actually a boat, but a train sitting in water. Since that Paddle Steamer is riding on rails, it can never sink, it can never get grounded, but it isn't actually a boat.
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Causalien
Prime 8 ball Oracle
LOL the guy is experiencing an Elon moment where everything he said gets distorted.
omgwtfbyobbq
Active Member
That's it as far as I know. If I buy a $118k S for $103k prior to them being upgraded (and maybe refreshed in a year or two), and the guarantee says I can sell it back to Tesla for $56k 3 years later, then there's a good chance I'll take them up on that instead of bothering with a PP sale or trade-in on my pre-upgraded range, acceleration, interior, etc... car.
But they couldn't get it into mass production at acceptable quality rates and production rates.
Not intentionally -- they just couldn't get the damn thing working at high speed. Happens sometimes, you know?
RobStark
Well-Known Member
Maybe you should why BYD manufactures buses and other heavy EVs in Lancaster CA.
And how Proterra is growing their electric bus business while manufacturing in the US.
Tesla buses will last longer with superior autonomous features reducing TCO per mile.
This is a frequently-cited argument that I have observed not for years, but for many decades - more than I am going to reveal. I find it disingenuous, deceptive, deluded, and worst of all, demonstrative of a fundamental lack of understanding about capital markets.
It is correct to AND ONLY TO a First Order approximation. Yes: per that capital raise that occurs at time T=1, that is when the corporation receives a bagful of cash.
However, only the truly näive believes that the investors who bought and sold at all times previous to T=1, and that all future buys and sells times subsequent to T=1 neither help...nor hurt...the company. It is precisely the functioning marketplace - that is to say, all those buys and sells - that demonstrates to the entire capital market not only that any forthcoming capital raise may occur ===>but at what price the capital raise can be<===. Put another way, to a very great extent: are there no trades? The company is worthless. Are market manipulators ceaselessly - and mischeivously - driving a company's stock price lower OR higher? A forthcoming capital raise likewise will be more expensive (stock price driven below the Prudent Man's level), or less (vice versa).
The truth is, then, that investors - and not market manipulators or, other than as a 3rd or 4th Order effect, derivative players, very much do help the company.
An understanding of that not-terribly difficult to grasp concept - but one which sadly is less perceived than it should be - goes a very long way to understanding why my Signature's third line reads as it does.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Please temper any rebound until I get a fresh infusion of investable cash in my IRA Jun1.
Remember, there is still a LOT of uncertainty out there. Do they even test the brakes? Unclear.
Remember, there is still a LOT of uncertainty out there. Do they even test the brakes? Unclear.
sundaymorning
Active Member
Different cities in different states have different driving dynamics, road signs, traffic signs. Heck even, traffic lights are different in certain states like Texas.
I cannot wait until Waymo deploys taxis attempting unprotected left turns in LA. You know, where basically only 2 cars get to turn left AFTER the light has turned red. Waymo vehicles will just be road boulder causing traffic backups, and the vehicles will absolutely get vandalized.
Great! Mine was a total pain in the ass - would be adjusted, tightened, reset, lubricated, everything, even got totally replaced one time, but then after a few days it would be rattling like hell again. But I loved that pano roof nevertheless, and I loved that P85 dearly. Great, great car.
I always thought that they did that as a marketing stunt to enhance the sales of their main product (e.g. classic coke).
And while I will say that I certainly have bought advertised items, I turned off the TV years ago, so I have no idea what the current ads are.
Well, all these permabulls here may well contribute to this share being so lovely to pay the bandwidth short term trading game with. I don't know the data but can imagine that the price needs to drop more for someone to unload some shares same as the price needs to rise more to acquire some. Not to claim any markets are natural in the 21st century but we can't pretend there is only healthy trading action on the long side. Are there any stocks with more cult-like would-be donors? I see well-off Tesla owners say it into their vlogging camera "I consider my newly bought share a donation to Elon's cause".
On here someone recently posted that a smart person can still do stupid things, referring to you-know-who. The post exclusively received disgree ratings. On a flipping investors' round table thread! This is the kind of thing I would need to show to people to believe it. Or they might guess I was talking about Tesla.
On here someone recently posted that a smart person can still do stupid things, referring to you-know-who. The post exclusively received disgree ratings. On a flipping investors' round table thread! This is the kind of thing I would need to show to people to believe it. Or they might guess I was talking about Tesla.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
??????
Please elucidate. I have never noticed a difference in Texas traffic lights.
anthonyj
Stonks
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