Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[SunCatcher]

I’m reminded a bit of George Washington. He lost almost every battle, but persisted to win the war. With failures like growing only 75% a year, rather then 100 or 150% or getting FSD done a year or two later then planned, but years ahead of the rest, those are failures we can all be happy about down the road. It may hurt the stock in the short run, but even short term, the stock is approaching 1 times forward one year revenue. It is engineering for lower earnings to lock in a very long term market leadership and possibly a near monopoly in the transportation as a service market. Keep failing Tesla and keep overpromising your way to 500+ billion market cap.

GREAT analogy! I love it, along with the rest of your post!

BTW, if you haven't seen it, AMC produced a fantastic miniseries a few years ago showing General Washington's struggles to survive onslaughts by the British Army, and how he eventually won the war;

TURN: Washington's Spies | Netflix

In a way, Tesla is also fighting a Revolutionary War; in a struggle for independence from OIL!

 

[printf42]

I suspect the old man is starting to feel some heat. This is not the candy shop, this is the core of his story.
Edit: as much as he doesn’t understand tech, he knows very well that insurance is based on data, and that Tesla has more data than anyone regarding their cars. His comment doesn’t make rational sense.

Anyone sensing the Tesla Insurance could end up be a bad thing for certain groups of people?

I can imagine Tesla crunching your hard driving data ruthlessly and doesn’t put in any attempt to be unbiased at all.

For example if you constantly drift out of your lane and triggers Lane Departure Warning all day long, or rush yellow lights all the time, Tesla’s could raise your rate and try push you out of their plan.
Then when you seek quotes from other insurance, they know by default anyone not taking Tesla’s plan is a bad driver and carries higher risk.
So your rate could hike instead of drop.

But, maybe those groups of people really shouldn’t drive.
When Robotaxis gets cheaper than their insurance rate, they should just give up private car ownership for greater good.

 

[HG Wells]

Also, could Tesla cars collect data about the cars around them.
Speed, tag number, all worth a lot of money to the other insurance companies.

IE That car going 50 mph faster than the speed limit that passed you?
How much would that be worth to Allstate, Progressive, or any other insurance company ?

 

[ReflexFunds]

My understanding is that Dojo is the system for training the NN (potentially from video), not the HW4 processor.
(and I wonder if it will also be used for training NN for robots on the manufacturing line. Perhaps by watching videos of humans performing tasks?)

It seems Tesla already has some machine learning in its manufacturing processes:
From an employee on Linkedin - Senior Machine Learning and Controls Engineer at Tesla

"Going on 4 years at the Tesla Gigafactory, where I lead development of the supervisory machine learning algorithms used in both computer vision based automation and in the real-time global control optimization of critical infrastructure systems.
Our machine vision solutions use deep learning via convolutional neural network variants for classification, detection and segmentation, while the control system cloud architecture combines AI, big data, control theory and industrial control by leveraging Python, GPUs, and MySQL to use continuous deep reinforcement learning, model predictive control, state estimation and supervised learning models to forecast loads and plan optimal sequences of control actions sent to PLCs with respect to energy cost, setpoint error and equipment reliability."

I presume Tesla ultimately aims to move much of the manufacturing code to machine learning. OpenAI made a breakthrough here last year with a new method to train a robot in simulation that was much better at transferring to the real world than prior methods. Their idea was that rather than trying to model the physics of the real world accurately (which makes your simulation very brittle to real world imperfections and complexities not captured by your model), they instead varied the laws of Physics in their simulation and trained a robot that could perform well in any of these simulated conditions. This AI robot was much more robust at dealing with the variations between the real world and the simulation. Still a long way to go though. Learning Dexterity

 

[EVNow]

Reinforcement learning in simulation is only really going to work if you already know the case you are trying to solve. This is why Waymo's simulation first approach isn't likely to work, and why in fact Tesla also has the advantage in simulation.

Tesla's fleet will be able to identify and collect data on far more rare problem scenarios. For these scenarios it can use the data collected to feed good driving examples into a supervised learning model in a simulation and improve the driving policy through reinforcement learning.

Tesla should produce a white paper that shows these with examples and math to prove that their approach is correct.

BTW, Tesla knows how good a particular driver is. So, in theory they can use this grading to only use good driver actions to do unsupervised learning and still make the NN better.

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

IE That car going 50 mph faster than the speed limit that passed you?
How much would that be worth to Allstate, Progressive, or any other insurance company ?

I would prefer if Teslas did not become the snitches of the car world. Although it would be cool if they were programmed to look out for amber alerts.

 

[SwTslaGrl]

OT?
I think it would be good if Tesla started small scale cell production near Grohmann in Europe. As a hedge. Reliable cell supply is important for all products in the coming years.

 

[neroden]

By that logic the following car safety automated technologies wouldn't exist:

• ABS-brakes are actually braking worse than the best human driver: in slippery conditions a professional driver can just stay at the edge of wheel slip, without waiting for the wheel to actually slip. To make matters worse ABS typically cannot even be turned off by the human driver, it's an all-or-nothing feature included by manufacturers. This means that braking distance with ABS is actually longer than with the "best human" driver, hence by your logic ABS technologies would have been "shut down" already.
  
• Airbags will sometimes kill people too, because they are generally calibrated for average height and average weight, so too small people can get hurt. Sometimes even ordinary size people with a medical condition can be hurt by airbags, badly - and the outcome can be worse than a seatbelts-only mild collision that usually deploys them. Airbags generally cannot be turned off either - they are a mandatory safety feature. By your logic airbags would have been "shut down" already, because they can make things worse.

You are also making the invalid assumption that all markets that Tesla is active in are unpredictably litigious as the western world. If for example Chinese regulators allow robotaxis based on scientific data and under common-sense oversight, then the litigation risk is a lot lower than say in the U.S. or in Germany. Not every high-tech economy in the world is run by lawyers.

You are not reading what I wrote. Reasd it again and stop making irrelevant off topic posts.

 

[Thumper]

Rules of Thumb: A maniac is anyone driving 15mph faster than you. An old person is anyone 15 years older than you.

 

[EVNow]

Good analogy except that with WW2 just about everyone was actively trying to help. No one was denying that war.

With Climate Change there are many deniers and many pacifists that either try to block or do not care about the climate war.

The problem is - politicians have approached the problem very badly. They basically said we will make some small regulatory changes and the market will take care of this. So, naturally when "market takes care" of something a group of people lose and another win. This is a sure way to make big enemies. We see this with yellow vest protests in France too. We need robust policies to help people who lose out due to the needed changes - then we'll have fewer obstructionists.

 

[Mobius484]

Good analogy except that with WW2 just about everyone was actively trying to help. No one was denying that war.

With Climate Change there are many deniers and many pacifists that either try to block or do not care about the climate war.

How sweet would it be to crowd fund a model 3 for Greta Thunberg.... That climate change warrior should drive a tesla, although she would probably walk....

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

Anyone sensing the Tesla Insurance could end up be a bad thing for certain groups of people?

I can imagine Tesla crunching your hard driving data ruthlessly and doesn’t put in any attempt to be unbiased at all.

For example if you constantly drift out of your lane and triggers Lane Departure Warning all day long, or rush yellow lights all the time, Tesla’s could raise your rate and try push you out of their plan.
Then when you seek quotes from other insurance, they know by default anyone not taking Tesla’s plan is a bad driver and carries higher risk.
So your rate could hike instead of drop.

But, maybe those groups of people really shouldn’t drive.
When Robotaxis gets cheaper than their insurance rate, they should just give up private car ownership for greater good.

There is a huge inertia in customer preferences, i.e. laziness that stops us from switching from our default providers (insurance or otherwise).

Scenario you're describing may play out. But it will take years to become clear cut, i.e. that only aggressive drivers are left with non-Tesla insurance.

Until that happens, or statistics start to get meaningfully worse (as less accident prone drivers leave reg. insureres), which again will take time, it won't factor into other insurance companies rates setting.

 

[Krugerrand]

Good analogy except that with WW2 just about everyone was actively trying to help. No one was denying that war.

With Climate Change there are many deniers and many pacifists that either try to block or do not care about the climate war.

So in the context of the comment (Elon’s aggressive timelines) there’s even more reason for Elon’s aggressive timelines.

 

[neroden]

Except the example I cited: on ice the stopping distance is +60% with ABS, and the best braking strategy is to slip intentionally. Which a professional driver won't be able to perform due to always-on ABS.

So yes, ABS is an example of safety technology adoption that is obviously less safe in at least one important driving scenario.

Every car I have had has had an ABS disable switch. Next question?

Note that it was not practical to use said switch but it was there for psychological reassurance.

 

[EVNow]

Anyone sensing the Tesla Insurance could end up be a bad thing for certain groups of people?

I suspect really bad drivers won't switch to Tesla - because of this.

BTW, I'm not sure what exactly Tesla does with multi-car households. We get pretty good discounts for being a multicar household (+home insurance). I don't know whether Tesla will insure other cars - if they don't I don't think they will come in at a lower cost. If the cost differential is small lot of people like me won't switch.

 

[neroden]

Keyword: Success

Tesla has a history of actuarial incompetence, mispricing extended warranties and service plans, miscalculating warranty reserves, so unless they have hired some new talent, they could lose everything by writing insurance. The plan revealed in the California filing looks pretty conservative though so maybe they have some actuaries...

 

[liuping]

Every car I have had has had an ABS disable switch. Next question?

No car or SUV I've ever owned had an ABS disable switch.

Maybe high end sports cars meant for tracking do, but normal car don't.

 

[neroden]

I've talked to people in the industry. They don't think it's an impossible deadline.

Funny. For some reason self driving brings out irrational optimism. They were saying they would have it in five years in the 1950s.

It is an impossible deadline. Anyone who has really studied it, not the fools in the industry, knows this.

 

[kaz90]

Havent seen this posted yet:

About halfway through, Munster says he was at the factory recently and noted the production bottlenecks have been released

 

[neroden]

OT.

GREAT analogy! I love it, along with the rest of your post!

BTW, if you haven't seen it, AMC produced a fantastic miniseries a few years ago showing General Washington's struggles to survive onslaughts by the British Army, and how he eventually won the war;

TURN: Washington's Spies | Netflix

In a way, Tesla is also fighting a Revolutionary War; in a struggle for independence from OIL!

Disagree because of the evidence that the war was won by bringing in people more competent than Washington. But this is WAY OT.