Tesla's real plan is to disrupt itself with the robot cars.

[Vitold]

I agree that this is the plan but have doubts that current sensor suite can take Tesla to level 5. Two major issues are blind spots and short range of side repeaters.

I also believe that at some point in development as complexity increases it will become apparent that it would be cheaper (compute and power) to add real stereo vision rather than simulating it within time domain.

 

[Nocturnal]

During the Autonomy Day livestream Elon said the public will demand autonmous cars instead of 4,000 " death machines ". It seemed odd then that the car on the stage looked like a roadster - a car that can go from 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds. Will he be throwing away the steering wheel and pedals on those too?

What they haven't talked about yet is augmented driving. If a car can be full FSD, then surely it can let you drive and then take over if you do something too stupid.

 

[RxShah]

If he hits on robotaxi then making cars will be nothing but a hobby for him. Which I’m sure is what he wants again. I think the idea of Tesla and designing the first cars was fun, once it became about profits it’s become a burden. I’d love for Musk to get a chance to move forward with a little less stress.

He did try to take it private but that ship has sailed...

 

[mvotb]

I wish Tesla would would put all their effort into just building a successful, profitable, high quality EV car company, with service to match, and do this FSD stuff on the side. Didn't Elon spend a fortune on robots to build cars, just to scrap them, when he found out that there are things that people just do better?

 

[CarlK]

I wish Tesla would would put all their effort into just building a successful, profitable, high quality EV car company, with service to match, and do this FSD stuff on the side. Didn't Elon spend a fortune on robots to build cars, just to scrap them, when he found out that there are things that people just do better?

That's what traditional ICE car companies and their customers thought too, Just let us have better V6, V8 or turbo charged cars we'll be fine. The thing is it's not fine when the disruption is coming. The point of this thread op is when the disruption is inevitable you don't want it to come from others.

 

[JDBurch]

"Tesla" and "plan" often seems oxymoronic. If they have a plan, it is to stay afloat long enough to come up with another plan to stay afloat.

I don't write the above in jest, I have their cars and want them to succeed, but I worry when Musk, or anyone says "Mark my words." once, let alone multiple times. Tesla's competition may not be as visionary, but I won't write them off as all doing a fool's errand either.

Vision is a great thing, but who wouldn't want it, and other sensors that see the environment even better working better than just vision?

I should probably stop here to stay on topic, but...

My model 3 can barely get in and out of my garage without running into either side of it or parking like a drunken sailor. To back into my garage straight, I have to have it perfectly aligned, or it will take out the side of the car, and it pretty garage door.

So I just don't know how they are going to get from where they are now, to being able to get in and out of a private or public garage, down a driveway and out onto public streets with trash cans, trash trucks, construction crews, pot holes, sink holes, emergency vehicles, toddlers on tricycles, cats and dogs - alive or squished, equestrians, bicyclist's, tree trimmers, street vendors, and homeless crisscrossing the streets all before the car gets to the freeway. You have to be able to make decisions about all of those and countless others. Musk made a big deal about having the best computer for autonomous driving. Great. But has to make life and death decisions too.

I can't see Autopilot or any real level 5 projects passing regulatory approval until the trolly car experiment can be taken into account. Who lives, who dies in autonomous vehicles and out. Does the car know to squish a cat, dog, or squirrel instead to the 3 year on a tricycle?

Not to be morose, but what is the car going to do when it comes upon a body or injured party on the road? With and without passengers in the car? Because there are multiple scenarios in either case. Either way, hazard lights should come on and a call to emergency services placed. Without passengers, the car should probably stay in a position not to let the body or injured person get struck by another vehicle. But with passengers, maybe it should do the same, but ask them to exit the vehicle??? Maybe it should pull off the road to keep from being struck to protect the paying passengers, maybe it should query the passengers on what to do? It's endless, and it is life and death.

Your model 3 parks like a drunken sailor because it has not “learned” yet. Kind of like putting a 3 yr old behind the wheel and tell him to pull into the garage. FSD with the current chip will make him 7 yrs old, with the new chip he will be 15, and with the ‘next generation’ chip he will be 20 yrs old and have the reflexes of a cat, eyes of a fly, and a brain far more capable than a human brain. With cars traveling at higher speeds and communicating with each other using ‘near field communications’ you won’t even want to try and drive yourself.

 

[Camera-Cruiser]

Your model 3 parks like a drunken sailor because it has not “learned” yet. Kind of like putting a 3 yr old behind the wheel and tell him to pull into the garage. FSD with the current chip will make him 7 yrs old, with the new chip he will be 15, and with the ‘next generation’ chip he will be 20 yrs old and have the reflexes of a cat, eyes of a fly, and a brain far more capable than a human brain. With cars traveling at higher speeds and communicating with each other using ‘near field communications’ you won’t even want to try and drive yourself.

You have a lot of faith, I’ll grant you that.

 

[Maitri982]

I wish Tesla would would put all their effort into just building a successful, profitable, high quality EV car company, with service to match, and do this FSD stuff on the side. Didn't Elon spend a fortune on robots to build cars, just to scrap them, when he found out that there are things that people just do better?

If you are about the environment, then the FSD is a must. Tesla cannot make enough cars to impact the environment if its 1 customer per car. If you have robotaxis than 5-10 customers per car so not only less pollution on the driving side but less energy usage on car manufacture per customer.

 

[hljmesa]

I have just posted this on the Tesla forum. I'm copying it here since there are probably many here who are interested. Let's discuss.

It has just dawned on me we are witnessing the biggest transformation of the auto industry in the entire automotive history. Our resident visionary Elon Musk is conducting this transformation again. No it's not the EV transition but transition to robot cars although the two are pretty related. We have all been beating on wrong bushes.

Let's look at the history:
-- Elon said in 2015 self driving project was Tesla's top priority. People to be recruited will report directly to him.
-- FSD and TeslaNet was put on the master plan deux as a major goal of the company.
-- Tesla put hardware in every car at likely a pretty stiff cost.
-- When asked how much of Tesla's expenditure was on the self driving car project he said (I think sarcastically) all of it.

Two serious questions are raised here. Why cash strapped Tesla would want to spend those serious money over the years on the project that has little to do with making and selling compelling cars? Isn't it a whole lot better to use the money to strengthen the bottom line and profit to boast the stock price? The other one is Tesla sells car because they are nice drive. What's the point of making driving unnecessary and taken away one of its most desirable traits? The only logical explanation is Elon saw robot cars as the inevitable disruption. With his AI involvements he's in the best position to see that. He wanted the disruption to come from Tesla instead of someone else.

There is this eerie similarity of this to what had happened to Netflix, another company I admire a lot. By the later part of 2000's Netflix's DVD by mail model had dominated the video watching business and killed off all competitors. Then Netflix seemed to have abandoned this position and switched the entire focus to streaming. It had caused its stock to drop more than 75% but the rest are of course history. It's very hard to disrupt your own dominate business. Only visionary with greatest confidence is able to take the risk and be rewarded.

You might say I like to drive my car and I want to do it instead of having cars to drive themselves. Elon likes to drive too but he also knows the reality. He can see how this technology will lead us to. It's very likely that in ten years few would drive their own cars and in twenty years no one will be allowed to. Toyota, VW, Mercedes, Ferrari... I don't care who you are. You will die if you can't compete in the robot car business in the future. It won't even take 10 or 20 years for consumers to see writing on the wall. Elon did say buying a car today is like buying a horse. He's not joking.

One more thing why I said this is still related to his mission. Making robot cars is the best and most cost effective way to get rid of ICE cars.

Well I must honestly say that some of us that used to teach Robotics in high School saw this coming.. Google 1st robotics and you will understand what I mean.

 

[CarlK]

A month and half after the event the Wall Street seems to have ignored the significance and, except for rare cases, just wrote it off as Elon's gimmicky tactic to divert attention from Tesla's troubles. What troubles there were if you understood his real plan? Again it's pretty clear this had been Elon's top priority since at least 2015. He didn't invent it just now. In Hyperchange's video I linked in a post above (BTW all three in that video seem to be very smart and knowledgeable guys) it was mentioned those attending the event were auto analysts and know very little of the tech industry. Many of them may not even know what AI or NN stands for. You can't expect them to get the significance of this.

If you ask tech analysts at least some of them will, or should, instead of just compare to valuation of Ford or BMW, take a look at GM Cruise's valuation of $19 billion, Intel's purchase price $15.4 billion of Mobileye and Waymo's reported valuation of ~100 billion and say TSLA is likely very underpriced. None of these companies has even a small fraction of what Tesla has in this field at this point.

 

[neostars]

Autonomy will happen sooner than you think.
1 million people die on the road every year, we can do a lot better.
I seriously don't care if anyone is not allow to drive anymore on roads(Take it to the racetrack on weekends). Safety is the number one priority and if FSD can prove to the governments that it is more safer, it will take off.

 

[CarlK]

Autonomy will happen sooner than you think.
1 million people die on the road every year, we can do a lot better.
I seriously don't care if anyone is not allow to drive anymore on roads(Take it to the racetrack on weekends). Safety is the number one priority and if FSD can prove to the governments that it is more safer, it will take off.

One advantage of the machine over human driver is it could continue to learn and improve with almost no limit. Based on what Tesla described of its approach there is no more show stopper, like 4 way stop or snow covered lane marking, it could not handle now. Can't say the same for anyone else's. Regardless when FSD will first be released there is little doubt Tesla will get us to the point of we don't need to, or not allowed to, drive sooner than anyone else could. AlphaGo was amazing when it could just play the game but few predicted that it eventually could easily beat EVERY Go player in the world. Imagine anyone would still play Go if punishment of losing a game is your life? Most people thought it's a joke when Elon said buying a car that is not a Tesla is like buying a horse today. They just could not see the future like Elon could.

 

[voyager]

As you all know, I believe level 5 is very far away. However, I take Carl's point: nobody else is going to disrupt Tesla's business by developing robocars before Tesla does; Tesla has just made sure of that.

Bold statements:
Recently Elon Musk publicly stated that it will have Level 5 autonomy by the year 2020. He went further to state that all Tesla’s will be able to act as robo-taxis and will be able to generate up $30,000 in revenue for it’s owners. Musk claims that Tesla will have an extensive network of self-driving cars by 2020. He claims that Tesla can achieve all of this without technologies that every major competitor including Waymo and Cruise Automation employ.

Tesla Level 5: Autopilot

 

[voyager]

I've heard it time and again how it's wasteful having four passenger cars on the road with only one person in them. Is it really the best use of our limited roadway resources, having a bunch of empty cars driving around, to go pick people up?

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

I wish Tesla would would put all their effort into just building a successful, profitable, high quality EV car company, with service to match, and do this FSD stuff on the side. Didn't Elon spend a fortune on robots to build cars, just to scrap them, when he found out that there are things that people just do better?

Forgot what Musk said at the autonomy presentation. That was just him trying to stoke demand and, more importantly, to get investors to give them another $2B. Tesla is working to build electric vehicles, but with a parallel, significant effort on autonomy.

But, unlike some other companies, Tesla's autonomy program is one in which they sell the incremental progress, and the promise of progress as they go. Autopilot and Tesla's aggressiveness with it, have helped sell cars, and if autonomy truly arrives, companies without it will disappear as they lose market share.

 

[EVNow]

Looks like you are advocating for electric "autorickshaw".

Here it is for just $6k - but this is only with a top speed of 25 kms/hour and range of 85 kms

Mahindra Launches e-Alfa Mini Electric Rickshaw; Priced At Rs. 1.12 Lakh - NDTV CarAndBike

 

[voyager]

Looks like you are advocating for electric "autorickshaw".
Here it is for just $6k - but this is only with a top speed of 25 kms/hour and range of 85 kms

Mahindra Launches e-Alfa Mini Electric Rickshaw; Priced At Rs. 1.12 Lakh - NDTV CarAndBike

Mahindra has the two wheels aft. Makes a big difference.

 

[EVNow]

Mahindra has the two wheels aft. Makes a big difference.

Not sure what you mean, Mahindra's rickshaws are in 1+2 arrangement, just like the ones in your post.

 

[voyager]

Not sure what you mean, Mahindra's rickshaws are in 1+2 arrangement, just like the ones in your post.

Makes a huge difference in vehicle dynamics whether you have two wheels upfront or like the Mahindra in the back...

 

[Dr. J]

That's what traditional ICE car companies and their customers thought too, Just let us have better V6, V8 or turbo charged cars we'll be fine. The thing is it's not fine when the disruption is coming. The point of this thread op is when the disruption is inevitable you don't want it to come from others.

Carl, help me with this. Let's say everything goes according to plan deux and Autonomy Day, and owners who sign up for the Tesla Network earn up to $30K/year. What does that do for demand for new and used Tesla cars, and for their price? They should sell for much more, at least until supply catches up with demand, which presumably would take a long, long time (every other manufacturer will be selling horses). Does Tesla intend to start pricing cars at equilibrium (say, $100K), or "give" them away at roughly current prices? Which of these best meets Elon's goals, but also the goals of his investors?