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

[JustMe]

What competition?

Any company can buy a plaid S and tear it down themselves. Also, Munro doesn't give away the very valuable info. For that, you need to buy their reports.

I'm looking forward to the teardown by Munro. It's one of the few channels I'm subscribed to.

Moreover, according to Sandy Monroe, none of the other US auto companies bought their Model 3 teardown report. Hubris and denial will be their undoing.

 

[JRP3]

What's good about publicly revealing Tesla's advancements sooner than later to potential competition?

How do you know potential competitors haven't already bought in secret? At least with Munro the average person gets access to most of the information.

 

[StealthP3D]

American road and street design is a travesty. Every time I ride one of these "bike lanes" putting kids on bicycles right next to cars whizzing by at 50mph, I want to strangle a road engineer. Dunno if self-driving cars will fix the problem, but I'm a strong advocate of pedestrian safety standards in car design, and fixing America's atrocious street design.

The problem is not road design, it's human drivers. In this case an oncoming car crossed the centerline (and I presume at least one lane of oncoming traffic) to kill someone in a bike lane who was, by all accounts I'm aware of, a wonderful person. Sure, American road design could be improved but the real problem is the meathead behind the wheel. Nicky Hayden successfully raced silly fast motorcycles for many years before being killed by a car on his bicycle, not on an American road, on an Italian road. A human was behind the wheel.

 

[Wicket]

EV car subsidies seem like they might be out of the new bi-partisan infrastructure bill proposal (it isn’t mentioned In the details of the article linked to)

electric buses are in - might we see a Model “B” emerge from Tesla perhaps?

Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal nears its big reveal

A group of senators has circulated a tentative plan on how they want to divvy up $579 billion in new spending on infrastructure, according to an outline obtained by POLITICO.

www.politico.com

proposal:

And Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday questioned such heavy reliance on public-private partnerships.

Bernie is a fan of vertical integration. He's just like Elon.

 

[kengchang]

Bernie is a fan of vertical integration. He's just like Elon.

And he doesn't like Elon.....

 

[CHGolferJim]

Bernie is a fan of vertical integration. He's just like Elon.

He wants it all done by the public sector, more likely.

 

[StealthP3D]

What's good about publicly revealing Tesla's advancements sooner than later to potential competition?

Edit - slower is better.

The competition needs all the help they can get just to remain a going concern. If revealing Tesla's secrets from two years ago will allow them to replicate them in three years and stay in the game of making EV's, that's better for the industry, the planet and even Tesla. Because they will still just be addressing the scraps around the edges at questionable profit margins.

Tesla needs all the help they can get in fulfilling the soon to be exploding demand for EV's. I mean, demand is already expanding rapidly but it's nothing like it's going to be in 3 years! It's going to literally explode and Ford and GM still think 50K units is a lot of EV's.

 

[uujjj2]

The problem is not road design, it's human drivers. In this case an oncoming car crossed the centerline (and I presume at least one lane of oncoming traffic) to kill someone in a bike lane who was, by all accounts I'm aware of, a wonderful person. Sure, American road design could be improved but the real problem is the meathead behind the wheel. Nicky Hayden successfully raced silly fast motorcycles for many years before being killed by a car on his bicycle, not on American roads but an Italian road. A human was behind the wheel.

Every collision has a causal chain. Not just one cause but a chain of causes. You'll find very few collisions that are a direct result of bad street design. Instead, the flaws in American street design just make those causal links more likely. Fast moving cars in close proximity to bikes is going to create more opportunities for a really bad event than either 1. slow cars in close proximity to bikes or 2. fast cars well separated from bikes.

 

[Unpilot]

Gawd we need self driving. Like yesterday.
The amount of distracted driving that happens every single day is criminal.
Just look around at your fellow drivers and count the number of cell phone users and makeup putting oners and back seat screamers.

It is CRIMINAL we allow this to continue.

 

[UrsS]

According to Mich McConnell there will be no bipartisan anything whatsoever.

 

[Nocturnal]

Gawd we need self driving. Like yesterday.
The amount of distracted driving that happens every single day is criminal.
Just look around at your fellow drivers and count the number of cell phone users and makeup putting oners and back seat screamers.

It is CRIMINAL we allow this to continue.

Whenever I see somebody concern trolling about Autopilot and how scary it is I point out that 10k people in the US die each year from drunk driving. Ignition interlocks would save nearly all of them. Another 10k die from distracted driving/speeding. We could put laws in place that give real penalties to people doing those things. Heck, modern cars could be limited to the speed limit by software. Of course they don't want to do those things because freedom and personal responsibility. A fine argument, but you one you can't make while arguing we should ban ADAS.

 

[BrownOuttaSpec]

The competition needs all the help they can get just to remain a going concern. If revealing Tesla's secrets from two years ago will allow them to replicate them in three years and stay in the game of making EV's, that's better for the industry, the planet and even Tesla. Because they will still just be addressing the scraps around the edges at questionable profit margins.

Tesla needs all the help they can get in fulfilling the soon to be exploding demand for EV's. I mean, demand is already expanding rapidly but it's nothing like it's going to be in 3 years! It's going to literally explode and Ford and GM still think 50K units is a lot of EV's.

Exactly! A great read (via 2014! from Tesla): All Our Patent Are Belong To You

"At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales."

 

[jbcarioca]

Moreover, according to Sandy Monroe, none of the other US auto companies bought their Model 3 teardown report. Hubris and denial will be their undoing.

Maybe your conclusion is correct. However, both GM and Ford tend to do their own tear downs. Post FCA I have no idea what Chrysler does, but I suspect they buy some Munro projects, given his views about Ram.

 

[brianhn1]

Agreed, must watch, not very technical actually, so don’t be intimidated just because it’s for CVPR conference.

My notes:

• Briefly touching vision vs Lidar and mentioned Lidar is not a generalizable solution.
• Now vision is working well that they can start to remove other sensors.
• Mainly focused on the feature of using pure vision to remove radar in AEB(auto emergency braking) to illustrate how Tesla AI works
• Start with data accusation, they have 221 triggers running that will record 10sec video and send back for events like “driver brakes hard on freeway” or “detected lead car slow down but driver didn’t brake” etc.
• Offline auto labeling to get accurate depth/velocity, with benefits of hindsight and more computing, auto labeling could actually get very good quality labels.
• Train net and deploy to fleet in shadow mode.
• Then collect more disagreements and retrain.
• 7 rounds of shadow mode deployment before final release.
• In total 1M clips collected, 6billion labels, 1.5Pb dataset size(some tweets interpreted this as the total size of FSD dataset, my interpretation is 1.5Pb is for AEB feature alone)
• Compared with legacy solution with radars, the new pure vision system avoids phantom brake, detects stopped truck earlier and works more reliably in case of hard braking of lead car(in that case radars lose tracking of the lead car and re-acquired it a few times in one second, produced a lot of noise)
• QA process includes 10k simulation scenarios, 10years of QA drive and 1000years of shadow mode drive. (Next time Waymo brags about simulation we can say Tesla do that too, on top of millions of real world video clips, hand picked from billions of miles of real world drives)
• Tesla training cluster has 5760x NV A100 GPUs, the 5th largest supercomputer in the world. And this is only 1 of the 3 clusters they are building. Next step is Dojo, but not ready to talk about that yet.
• Was asked about whether adding other sensors would be helpful, for example infra cam, answered there is infinite number of sensors you can chose from, but they still think cameras in visible spectrum are the best choice, it has all the information needed for driving, basically it’s necessary and sufficient for FSD.

TL;DL:
Demonstrated a lot of speculated Tesla AI moats, data collection triggers, auto labeling, shadow mode, training clusters, etc.
Also shows great progress on pure vision using the example of vision AEB.
Bullish AF!

The slide that caused my jaw to drop was when Andrej showed actual features already implemented in Tesla vehicles TODAY!

1. AEB = Autonomous Emergency Braking for pedestrians, vehicles, objects: Results into lives saved, Teslas avoiding fender benders, Teslas not going into repair shops.
2. Traffic Control Warning during approach of red lights at intersections to tell the driver that they are an idiot or about to do something dangerous.
3. But the big one I didn't know existed, PMM = Pedal Misapplication Mitigation. 1. Driver accidentally floors pedal? No problem, slam on brakes to prevent driver from running 3 people over. 2. Oh there isn't a path for the Tesla to go because there is a freaking river in front? No problem slam on brakes to prevent the Tesla to go for a swim.

The value of PMM is amazing. Why isn't it advertised anywhere? Guess the lawyers would jump off a cliff if Elon said, "Yeah we got PMM and it will prevent your Tesla to run over people" and the idiots proceed to "test" running over people. Sigh. Sometimes no advertising/bragging of a feature is a necessary thing to do.

I'm excited to see what other tricks Tesla is going to pull out of their hat next.

 

[printf42]

Tesla battery partner CATL debunks shocking new rumors from China

Tesla battery supplier Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), which provides cells for Gigafactory Shanghai’s vehicles, has put its foot down on recent rumors alleging that it is forcing its employees to purchase “defective” Tesla vehicles. The statement was related by the battery maker to the...

www.teslarati.com

From the article:
The anonymous staff worker further claimed that the defective vehicles were sold by Tesla China to CATL to reduce inventory. This is a substantial claim, and one that most certainly caught its own round of controversy. In its statement to the Times, however, CATL denied these rumors.

This has been circulating and been laughed at for a few days in Chinese forums.

One simple counterpoint, if there were some defective packs, why not return those packs?
Why would Tesla risk bad packs to be on the road creating liability for them?

Also the source of the rumors is not an anonymous employee as hinted in the article, it’s just some random dude posting on a forum claiming to be an employee.

IMO this seems to be part of an campaign to pump BYD, which has been going on for a while. By trying to attack CATL and Tesla at the same time, they want to claim BYD should have the market cap of CATL battery business and Tesla car business combined

 

[Blue horseshoe]

This has been circulating and been laughed at for a few days in Chinese forums.

One simple counterpoint, if there were some defective packs, why not return those packs?
Why would Tesla risk bad packs to be on the road creating liability for them?

Also the source of the rumors is not an anonymous employee as hinted in the article, it’s just some random dude posting on a forum claiming to be an employee.

IMO this seems to be part of an campaign to pump BYD, which has been going on for a while. By trying to attack CATL and Tesla at the same time, they want to claim BYD should have the market cap of CATL battery business and Tesla car business combined

I'm in total agreement. It was the first I had seen of catl responding and denying that it had happened... Not that any of us here thought this to actually be true.

 

[gillfoto]

EV car subsidies seem like they might be out of the new bi-partisan infrastructure bill proposal (it isn’t mentioned In the details of the article linked to)

electric buses are in - might we see a Model “B” emerge from Tesla perhaps?

Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal nears its big reveal

A group of senators has circulated a tentative plan on how they want to divvy up $579 billion in new spending on infrastructure, according to an outline obtained by POLITICO.

www.politico.com

proposal:

as is Model B(us), based on the Tesla Semi?

 

[StealthP3D]

I'm in total agreement. It was the first I had seen of catl responding and denying that it had happened... Not that any of us here thought this to actually be true.

Well, to be honest, I think there's probably at least a couple TMC members that just lowered their gaze and said "Wow, Tesla is really getting out of hand now. I knew something like this would happen if Elon didn't have more effective oversight."

 

[Prunesquallor]

Looks like they made it!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1407179656533524480

 

[dhanson865]

Way too slow this morning….

How’s this for ironic….”Model S Plaid is officially a “Super Gas” Dragster according to the offIcial @NHRA Drag Strip Safety Rules”

https://twitter.com/x/status/1406713085503545346

Only if you don't understand the word "or".

The rules say "9.99 seconds (6.39 1/8th) or Super Gas or 135 mph" never said it was "super gas" it says those 3 types need the same safety equipment.