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

[Antares Nebula]

This seems really concerning. I’m thinking these news article will adversely affect the stock price next week. Am I just being paranoid?

But isn't it really a nothing burger, and having to do with some older S,X models? Liabilities and recalls (if at all) would be limited to those models.

Russ Mitchell on Twitter
"Note: NHTSA informs me that the Tesla fire inquiry is technically not an “investigation” but rather a “defect petition.” To avoid argument over plain-English definitions, we are changing the language in our story from “investigation” to “probe.”

 

[Antares Nebula]

Any guesses about this:

Elon Musk on Twitter
"Not sure about good of Twitter"

General griping of TSLAQ or something specific?

 

[Fact Checking]

Rain, snow, fog, etc will always be adding a tremendous amount of noise to your point cloud. Sure, you can try to dig out a signal out of the noise, and there's been a lot of research on that front because it's so important to LIDAR companies, but that's IMHO a waste of research money. It's always going to be a poor, noisy signal.

Not just noisy, but Lidar is also crowding out real safety: the $50,000 Waymo spends on a high end Lidar unit could have been spent much more efficiently.

I.e. in budget constrained passenger car mass production - which almost all of them is - Lidar is a safety hazard.

The real reason Waymo and others started out with Lidar is very mundane: they didn't and still don't have the onboard computing capacity that Tesla has with HW3 - which computing capacity is required for high reliability camera vision neural networks.

So they went with Lidar as a low power and low complexity shortcut that gave them 3D point clouds straight away, without the serious multi-year hassle Tesla is going through with camera based vision. Doing so they missed the big, gaping productization holes in the Lidar concept: it's expensive and it's a dead end - plus once you have Lidar experts on your team it's hard to get rid of them.

Elon didn't miss it.

 

[Deraillor]

It would seem that such long-term intense coordination (including the blockage of contrary information) has not likely been organized by a rabble of retail Tesla short sellers. Who is behind this?

You give $TSLAq WAYYY too much credit.

 

[EVNow]

Because people get 10x more upset (and likely to sue) over a loved one being accidentally killed by a corporation than by a person. Maybe 100x. Especially if an alert human would have easily prevented the wreck.

Lawyers aggressively seek out such cases, convincing victims and relatives their suffering deserves lottery-level compensation. Here in TX 46.3%* of all TV ads are lawyers saying "Hit by a company-owned car or truck? Contact Sleazebag & Feeraker to learn your rights!" If you're hit by an individual they have no interest.

Is it any different than death due to some other malfunction of cars ? Happens quite a bit, right ?

If the chance of getting killed has really gone down because of FSD, it would be ok.

 

[EVNow]

The real reason Waymo and others started out with Lidar is very mundane: they didn't and still don't have the onboard computing capacity that Tesla has with HW3 - which computing capacity is required for high reliability camera vision neural networks.

The reason for going with Lidar is different. Its because almost all autonomy programs were started by DARPA challenge veterans.

 

[EVNow]

Any guesses about this:

Elon Musk on Twitter
"Not sure about good of Twitter"

General griping of TSLAQ or something specific?

I wonder whether it is because of banning of Steve Job's Ghost ?

 

[Chunky Jr.]

Waymo works in a very small environment requiring detailed mapping and they still need a driver to supervise

I see Waymo cars driving around every single day and I have never seen one where the driver didn't have their hands on the wheel. It looks to me like the human is driving and their software is comparing what it thinks should be done with what the human is actually doing.

 

[Christine69420]

A nice Weekend Video:

Bjørn "Teslabjørn" Nyland just drove the original Tesla Roadster. Tesla have come so far since they released the original roadster in 2008!

 

[Chunky Jr.]

Stop dreaming about those 20 times larger companies can wake up one day

Yep. We don't buy our laptops from companies like Unisys, Data General, and Texas Instruments that were dominant at one point.

 

[Fact Checking]

The reason for going with Lidar is different. Its because almost all autonomy programs were started by DARPA challenge veterans.

Yes, but they started out with LIDAR to race in the DARPA Grand Challenge, because ~18 years ago the only way to get a high resolution, high FPS 3D map of the car's surroundings was LIDAR.

That "path dependent" LIDAR accident of history turned into a design and process failure they weren't able to get rid of yet.

Tesla's FSD efforts didn't have this historical baggage - they started from a clean slate in 2016 when Elon & his team realized that they could probably do FSD with 7 cameras, a bunch of ultrasonic sensors, accelerometers, GPS and two radar channels hooked up to an in-car power efficient supercomputer they designed for the purpose.

What amazes me is that despite Elon explaining this early on, none of the other major FSD projects is following Tesla's lead, they are stubbornly clinging to their LIDAR approaches - and by today it's probably too late already.

 

[MC3OZ]

IMO people are no giving enough consideration to the economics of FSD, specifically the cost basis, which is mainly the cost of the fleet and electrcity.

Waymo has a more expensive fleet cost and a slower expansion rate, they don't have their own fast charging network.

Things like insurance, maintenance, cleaning, app, admin etc. are pretty much a wash anything Tesla can do Waymo can match.

I think there is a strong chance that when Tesla has a working solution they drive the cost down to a point where Waymo and most other ride services lose money. Alphabet has deep pockets, if they can absorb the original losses and have good fleet longevity, they can hang around and be a player.

What Waymo can never do is drive prices down to the point where Tesla loses money, without losing even more money themselves.

My opinion is a being first buys at best a 2-3 year window to make money with limited or no competition, that is probably enough for Waymo to achieve an ROI, no where near enough to stop Tesla eventually competing. If find the idea that something can stop Tesla competing when they are 1st, 2nd or 3rd comical.

If Tesla is 10th .. they may have problems as the market will be fully saturated and it will be much harder to gain market share. Even when 10th I still back Tesla to have the lowest cost base. as there is a fair bet that 1..9 use lidar and only have a small fleet.

 

[jhm]

OMG can we please set up as separate thread for discussing self-driving edge cases? I might have to plunge an ice pick into my temporal lobe to make it stop hurting. Please, I beg of you. Take it to another thread.

 

[ggr]

I wonder whether it is because of banning of Steve Job's Ghost ?

I think partly that, and partly the people who were criticizing when one of his children played music at a retirement community, and when he donated a million dollars to plant trees.

 

[Buckminster]

OMG can we please set up as separate thread for discussing self-driving edge cases? I might have to plunge an ice pick into my temporal lobe to make it stop hurting. Please, I beg of you. Take it to another thread.

Yup, just make sure you use Lidar to locate the temporal lobe. Otherwise, you might end up like this guy:

 

[Singer3000]

The above posts talk about wrong point.

Does it make sense for Tesla to help competitors from the financial standpoint? None whatsoever. If you want to maximize profits, kill them and get as much market share as you can.

But EM talked about the mission. Here the issue is that Tesla may not ramp up fast enough to make as much impact as early as possible as they would like. Just can't spend money fast enough and scale.

The ramping speed of other market participants is important in this context - the earlier they start, the sooner they ramp to meaningful numbers, so waiting a few years before sharing tech is not helpful. With very limited progress so far on their side and per Gali's video with much higher battery costs, they may not be able to compete on their own.

I am against Tesla sharing their own new cells/manufacturing capacity if they can sell 100% of those cells.

Maybe they can sell the output from older Panasonic cell lines once they switch to Maxwell or completely remove those lines from GF1 and sell to anybody interested, b/c those cells have higher costs and lower life and do not represent Tesla's excellence anymore.

On the other hand, this older/slower manufacturing tech represents a hindrance to the transition to EVs(not max speed possible), so maybe licensing out the newest tech helps the mission more.

I could see Tesla saying to OEMs - here's how you make the batteries, you finance the whole thing (GFs) without drawing our resources, you pay us this much per unit, we don't customize our software for you, you don't compete with us for raw materials, you're on your own using this.

Why not? Yes, it is helping competition, but this is balancing between the mission and profits.
Tesla could grab 50% market, but after this they may only get to 20%(FSD excluded).
What we get in exchange is potential climate change reversal.


Elon said that spoiler is just for some measurements and will be removed.


Wipers actually had some lower scores on the Bloomberg's survey. I also don't like Auto.
I think they are just neglected temporarily, b/c more value can be achieved elsewhere.

The best way of accelerating the energy transition is to drive the dinosaurs out of business as swiftly as possible. Not by gifting them 10-years of hard graft and R&D so they can cross subsidise their existing ICE lines and keep them open for longer.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

Never underestimate the gullibility of investors either (I mean 'analysts' and hedge fund / vc types). I have 2 lidar units in my office for room-scale virtual reality software. The tech is EXCITING! There are little laser things that spin really fast and make an exciting electric motor noise. It all sounds and looks a bit 'mission impossible'. Much more exciting and investable than... ... cameras.

I'm a software dude, so I know that software can do amazing things even with relatively trivial hardware. For 99% of its existence, the auto industry has been about hardware, not software. Of COURSE the people using the most expensive hardware are doing the right thing!

If Teslas HW3 chip had lasers in it, and span around really fast, teslas valuation would double.

This sounds like I;m trying to be funny. Sadly I'm not. I'm trying to be accurate.

 

[Yuri_G]

Guy can run a 10.5 with the new update and groceries in his frunk.

Betcha Taycan't

 

[brian45011]

So what is an alarming number?

The scope of NHTSA's Request for Production covers all MY2012 through MY2019 Ss & Xs sold in USA and its territories.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2019/INIM-DP19005-76719.pdf

 

[heltok]

Re, disengagement reports: most people mistakenly think that this means that "every time the driver takes the wheel, you have to issue a disengagement report. That's not how it works.

California’s self-driving car reports are imperfect, but they’re better than nothing

A disengagement report only needs to be filed if the human driver decides that the reason that they took control of the wheel was due to "safety" or a "failure". Driver takes control to avoid missing a turn? To not block an intersection? To not annoy other drivers? None of those things count as a disengagement. And those sorts of things are the vast majority of the reason why people take control over from Autopilot as well.

Also, while Waymo "tests" in a number of cities (including a winter proving grounds in Michigan), notice how they only have public operations in places that never get snow? Yeah, because this:

... will render LIDAR basically useless for detecting road obstacle detections. Forget about "falling snow", ridges of snow on the road are indistinguishable from tree braches or children laying across the road. And it's like that all winter in northern climates.

Doesn't just change the surface of the road with random ridges and troughs and blocks... it also changes the sides of your road.

Medians may widen and go windy. Shoulders frequently disappear, and may intrude into the road. Parking spaces may turn into huge snowpiles. Your landmarks on the edge of the road may be totally transformed.

It's not just about how to deal with driving on slippery roads and how to recognize changes in how slippery a surface may be, how to navigate to less slippery parts, etc etc. That's an entirely separate, and critical, issue. No, it's not about how falling or blowing snow blocks LIDAR. Again, that's yet another issue. No, even before you get to that point, when it comes to snow accumulation, to LIDAR, it's all an obstacle. It has no idea how to tell snow accumulation apart from anything else.

Not sure how much experience you have with Lidars and snow, but Lidars sends out light and snow reflects light, so Lidars can see snow. Couldn’t find any great video, but here is one:

As for telling snow apart from other things, that is up to a neural network or some other filter to do. With the xyz coordinates and the reflectivity of the detections of the snow there is a lot of signal to pick up, it is not a very different problem than deciding what is road and what is grass.

There is plenty of testing being done on snow:

Driving on snow is a challenge, but it is a challenge for humans also! =)