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

[dmvevguy]

Frustrated Musk Shakes Up Autopilot Team

I love how Elon sets crazy ambitious goals, but I do think Dec 31, 2019 for FSD is unrealistic. He's a great motivator and knows that sometimes you have to bring in fresh hungry blood to get this kind of work done!

 

[EVMeister]

Before the market opens: I pulled into my garage last night and plugged in and not a moment later my neighbor pulled up and into his garage with his 3....it was like I was living in the future, but it's reality!!

You posted that 30 minutes after the market opened though. So uncool.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Frustrated Musk Shakes Up Autopilot Team

Does the rest of the article say anything substantive? Past the paywall, I mean.

 

[mekberg]

I don’t think it’s as hard as you imagine. Behind the scenes the software creates digital widgets. All they have to do is map those widgets onto available screen real estate. Scale a bit if necessary. All in a day’s work.

This. It's really not that difficult.

 

[JRP3]

Does the rest of the article say anything substantive? Past the paywall, I mean.

Don't know.

 

[mekberg]

These are screenshots of i-Pace mobile app.

Is this fugly sugar a joke?
View attachment 427780
View attachment 427781

It's like the artists haven't gone back and beautified the programmer art.

 

[ReflexFunds]

These are some of the key people in the Autopilot team according to The Information last year. I’d guess some more of these now also report directly to Elon, perhaps Frank, Mark and Drew.

• Guangzhi Cao, who previously worked on iPhone cameras at Apple, develops software to process image data that comes from cameras on Tesla’s cars.
• Frank Havlak is one of the clear leaders of Autopilot. He is in charge of controls, which make sure the vehicle’s steering, braking and acceleration respond correctly to the Autopilot software decisions.
• Ashok Elluswamy, who was trained in robotics and learned about computer vision on the job at Tesla and is now effectively the senior most neural network researcher under Mr. Karpathy. Mr. Elluswamy helped develop the automatic lane change feature for the original launch of Autopilot.
• Mark McClelland works on the path planner, which determines the path the vehicle will travel based on what the Autopilot perception system “sees” on the road. He has been hard at work preparing for the recent update that allows a driver to type an address and let Autopilot take over the driving to follow the navigation instructions when the vehicle is on a highway.
• CJ Moore runs the “integration” team, which acts as the liaison between Autopilot and the rest of Tesla. He makes sure, for instance, that Tesla’s user-interface team, which designs the digital displays of information in the Tesla vehicles, including those about Autopilot, gets the correct measurements from the Autopilot system in real time. He also is responsible for quality control to identify and assign fixes to bugs discovered by the company’s test-track drivers and, later, by “alpha testers,” or real customers who get early access to Autopilot software before updates are pushed to all customers. And those discovered by Mr. Musk, of course.
• Zeljko Popovic, who works for Mr. Bowers, was a liaison between Tesla and Mobileye early in the life of Autlopilot, said a person briefed about it. He recently had been running a team that helped bring together data from cameras, radars and ultrasonics, known as sensor fusion, so that Tesla’s Autopilot software algorithms could use that data and decide how the car should drive.
• Drew Steedly is responsible for “geometric vision and perception.” That means he tries to make sure the sensors are calibrated correctly and provide useful data. Mr. Steedly is based in Seattle, and while the employee list does not reflect it, he appears to be overseeing Mr. Popovic’s work, according to a colleague.

Some more details from the information on the AP team shake up story a few months ago. Glad they have brought Drew in, I think he has led on many of Tesla’s tech breakthroughs over the years. Mostly it looks like Elon moving neural net guys/believers to leadership positions of the sub teams and pushing/forcing out some other employees

“Among the people who left the Autopilot group are Frank Havlak, who led controls and path planning—basically, figuring out where the Tesla should drive—and one of his deputies, Nenad Uzunovic; Drew Steedly, who led perception; Ben Goldstein, who led the simulation team and has already landed at another self-driving vehicle developer, GM’s Cruise. Those four individuals along with seven other recently departed members of the team either did not comment for this article or could not be reached for comment.

Among those who were elevated after the shake-up are Ashok Elluswamy, who now leads the “perception” and computer vision teams; Milan Kovac, who works on firmware and embedded systems engineering; and CJ Moore, the head of quality control, who took over the simulation team previously run by Mr. Goldstein, according to a former employee. (An in-depth look at the Autopilot group’s managers and rank-and-file employees can be found here.) Drew Baglino, a 13-year veteran of Tesla who had been overseeing engineering for battery cells and other components, took over Mr. Havlak’s group. “

 

[EVNow]

Shorts pushing the SP down ? Clear bigger volume dumps to push SP down - both below 229 and 228.

 

[anthonyj]

Shorts pushing the SP down ? Clear bigger volume dumps to push SP down - both below 229 and 228.

Reports of autopilot engineers quitting

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Reports of autopilot engineers quitting

Since when is the market rationally reacting to 'news'? It is just being used as a tool to move the SP in a desired direction.

 

[ggies07]

You posted that 30 minutes after the market opened though. So uncool.

haha. I thought it opened at 9am CT time?

 

[CyberDutchie]

Personally, I was never on the Model S/X refresh coming soon bandwagon anyways. The Raven upgrades are nice enough.

I didn’t believe the full interior refresh rumors initially. Then even respectable Tesla reporters started to spread it as news, even with a target release date of September.

Why refute those rumors only now? I know for sure, people have been holding off purchases to wait for the interior refresh, and they might be disappointed now, even changing their mind on the car all-together.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

I didn’t believe the full interior refresh rumors initially. Then even respectable Tesla reporters started to spread it as news, even with a target release date of September.

Why refute those rumors only now? I know for sure, people have been holding off purchases to wait for the interior refresh, and they might be disappointed now, even changing their mind on the car all-together.

Maybe it was only a recent decision to postpone the refresh (to 2020 or 2021) and to focus on getting Model Y to market as soon as possible. The choice of Fremont as a production location for Model Y could have played a role in that. In combination with an S and X refresh too much would be happening at the same time in a building that is bursting at its seams, straining the production process and straining capex. And maybe the Raven-refresh is already resulting in enough new orders to fill current production capacity (with two shifts).

 

[Tslynk67]

So the SP is down on unsubstantiated claims that Elon "shook up" the FSD team as they weren't progressing fast enough?

Observations:
a) FSD is valued at zero, right, so why any impact?
b) The changes Elon has allegedly made could accelerate development, surely that's why he's done it?

 

[Nocturnal]

Since when is there a law about number of years before a style refresh? Tesla does not follow auto company rules. If they did they would advertise and not innovate. They are constantly updating the tech and not just at new year models. The car is still the most stylistic of any sedan out there. New tech for other auto companies is more buttons and complicated buttons and controls. Nobody simplifies it like tesla and the style still not duplicated by others. Would like modelS vents to be changed to the model3 style and functionality though

Legacy companies do that because they have no new performance or technology to offer. Teslas receive new functionality every month, plus the raven changes etc.

 

[AlMc]

I didn’t believe the full interior refresh rumors initially. Then even respectable Tesla reporters started to spread it as news, even with a target release date of September.

Why refute those rumors only now? I know for sure, people have been holding off purchases to wait for the interior refresh, and they might be disappointed now, even changing their mind on the car all-together.

Just joining the 'refresh' discussion now. Sorry if thus has already been stated.

IMO, EM trying to mitigate osbourning. What we call 'refresh' he calls 'incremental improvement' or even 'next generation'. Matter of semantics.

I really wish he would just stay off twitter with anything regarding 'upcoming Stuff'

 

[azaz]

Musk is a straight fool when it comes to AP/FSD. Just hopelessly wrong and all his worst attributes as CEO shine there

 

[AndyH]

I love how Elon sets crazy ambitious goals, but I do think Dec 31, 2019 for FSD is unrealistic. He's a great motivator and knows that sometimes you have to bring in fresh hungry blood to get this kind of work done!

Elon said "feature complete" which means that the first versions of all the necessary functionality would be available like traffic light and sign recognition. That's still very far from reliable FSD. He then said that it would take a year more for all the different functions to mature enough that it would be capable of FSD where "you could basically fall asleep at the wheel". But note that the car would still not allow you to fall asleep at this point. It would need regulatory approval before unsupervised true FSD is enabled.

Even in Elon's mind FSD is at least 3-5 years away.

 

[CalX]

Electrameccanica up almost 30% on a Roth Capital buy analyst rating. Same thing happened last time an analyst initiated a buy, followed by a gradual drop back to mid 2s.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Drew Baglino, a 13-year veteran of Tesla who had been overseeing engineering for battery cells and other components, took over Mr. Havlak’s group. “

This is a sure sign that the new battery cell program is well underway, and that production planning has already been completed. Otherwise Drew wouldn't be moving to a higher priority project.

BTW, the SP was always headed to 227.50 this week. MMs want it, and its a very low volume time. Don't sweat the media FUD. Earnings are coming.

Cheers!