Tesla could have done a better job communicating that the internal look or feel wasn't finalised.
Clearly that didn't impact pre-orders but I think a lot of people didn't love the internal look even if they thought it was nice looking externally (disclaimer: I was one of these people).
In my OPINION the 3 won't be fully self driving (for certification/legal reasons). But we can reasonably speculate that it will have things like auto-braking, lane keep assist, automatic cruise control, and similar. Since competitor's vehicles have this, and in order to achieve "five stars in every safety category" you actually need to have auto-braking.
Look at the requirements for the IIHS's "TOP SAFETY PICK+" which is the gold standard for safety. A system like EyeSight, Honda Sensing, or similar is required in 2016[0], and this vehicle will be looking for the 2017 or 2018 TSP+ rating no doubt.
So suggesting that it will have "auto-pilot"-like functionality[1] is very reasonable. But that doesn't mean it will have full self-driving ("hands off"), in particular given the regulatory landscape, development stage of the technology, and the costs. We'll see.
[0] "Vehicles with optional front crash prevention qualify for either award only when equipped with the technology." http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/TSP-List i.e. without frontal auto-braking as an option you cannot appear on the TSP+ list. But even vehicles on the list only quality as TSP+ rated when the auto-braking option is installed (without it they're TPS tier only).
They barely communicated anything at the reveal. It was like a few minutes of leadup, five bullet points about the 3, and then they showed the cars and ended it. Given the audience they had, a bit of a wasted opportunity.
I'm fairly certain the Part 1 reveal was intended to be a media machine/hype generator, while more details about the vehicle itself are coming in Part 2.
>auto-braking, lane keep assist, automatic cruise control, and similar
I bought a mazda cx recently with all of these feature. I must say I don't find any of these really useful, but again I don't text while driving.
I think these features breed a false sense of security and encourage users to text while driving. Features like these should be introduced only when they can protect users from all cases of distracted driving not just one or two situations.
To be fair, auto-braking isn't useful until you need it, and by that point you're about a half second away from smashing into another car so you don't have much time to think about it. That feature alone could reduce total crashes by 10% [1]
>That feature alone could reduce total crashes by 10% [1]
Well, ofcourse. I am talking about ppl become less safety conscious because these features give them (false) sense of security.
eg: Anti-Tsunami walls killed more people than they saved during great japanese tsunami because they gave people false sense of security and ppl didn't take evacuation warnings seriously assuming walls would take care of it. And ofcourse studies proved that having Tsunami walls is safer than no walls.
> eg: Anti-Tsunami walls killed more people than they saved during great japanese tsunami [..] And ofcourse studies proved that having Tsunami walls is safer than no walls.
Huh? So walls killed more people than they saved but studies showed that they are safer with the walls..?
I googled this, cannot find any information that the anti-Tsunami walls caused more people to be killed.
>Huh? So walls killed more people than they saved but studies showed that they are safer with the walls..?
Studies was done with average tsunami heights from previous tsunamis. 2011 was magnitudes higher than previous ones, walls were no match for the tsunami.
>I googled this, cannot find any information that the anti-Tsunami walls caused more people to be killed.
I remember seeing this in a documentary, where they were interiviewing poeople whose famalies died becuase they thought walls are going to save them.
'The paradox of such projects, experts say, is that while they may reduce some damage, they can foster complacency. That can be a grave risk along coastlines vulnerable to tsunamis, storm surges and other natural disasters. At least some of the 18,500 people who died or went missing in the 2011 disasters failed to heed warnings to escape in time.'
This is not a new argument for car safety features. The same things were said about seat belts, 3-point harnesses, and air bags. In each case, they were wrong. Accident survival rates went up significantly, while overall accident rates did not.
Although it is sometimes quite hard, my father was once going on a German Autobahn 180kmh and he didn't realize that in the front people completely stopped. My mom realized and shouted and he hit the breaks and stopped in-between cars (if there weren't enough space inbetween, he would have mildly hit the cars). But I don't think this system would have helped in this situation
> I must say I don't find any of these really useful, but again I don't text while driving.
Lane keep assist is just a quality of life thing. You get on the highway/motorway, get in your lane, and it makes subtle movements to keep you centered in the lane. It doesn't drive for you.
So for example on windy days when the wind is pushing you constantly one way, Lane Keep Assist counteracts that lateral movement. On a straight piece of highway/motorway with no wind it does nothing at all.
Automatic cruise control is the same as regular cruise control but requires less driver input. Instead of picking an exact speed you set a goal speed, and the vehicle will either go that speed or the speed of vehicles in front of you.
The nice thing about automatic cruise control is that traffic doesn't often go at one set speed for a long period. Things like exits, construction, traffic composition, earlier accidents, etc can all cause traffic to slow for periods of time before speeding back up. Automatic cruise control means you don't have to manually adjust to these variances. It also keeps you a safe travel distance from the vehicle in front.
Automatic forward braking helps make automatic cruise control safer by allowing the vehicle to slow extremely rapidly if needed (e.g. an accident happens in front of you). Faster in fact that most humans.
But automatic forward braking isn't just useful when combined with automatic cruise control, it can brake you when a "foreign object" is in the road (e.g. animal, pedestrian, etc) which can either stop accidents entirely or reduce the damage done. It also helps with common rear-end accidents or rarely more serious accidents.
Day to day you shouldn't be using automatic forward braking.
They've already been looking at if automatic forward braking works and, yes, it does. It reduces accidents and when accidents still occur it reduces how bad they are.[0]
None of this has anything to do with texting and driving. In fact if I take my hands out of the wheel the automatic cruise control will bleep at me and eventually disengage.
The first gen honda insight had a drag coefficient of .25. If you could remove the radiator, intake, and exhaust from the engine and drivetrain it would be possible to hit .21 on a production car.
I'm guessing Tesla gets to cheat a bit since they don't use heat engines and don't have to run a bunch of air over a giant mesh screen to keep the engine from burning up.
Also, that giant pane of smooth glass over the top probably helps.
They get to play on a tilted playing field. They do have to lug around the weight of the batteries, but for cruising at highway speed (where the aero figure is most important), extra weight matters little.
And the "steering controls and system feels like a spaceship"
And Musk tweeted a little while ago about getting a special team of Software Engineers reporting directly to him for self-driving that was "top priority" within the company.
And there are no gauges directly in front of the driver at all, which has been confirmed to be like that for production.
At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?
(and maybe you'll have to take over sometimes, but I'm thinking 95%+ of the time it will be driving itself)
> At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?
There is no way that autonomous driving is going to work in most small European town and villages. There are so many downtowns which were never meant to be used by car and it is already difficult to navigate those places as a human. I just don't see how this should work over here in Europe.
Selfdriving on the highway or in a typical suburban sprawl in the US? Yes, that might work in the near future. Navigating twisted one-way streets in some old town from the middle ages during rush hour? That will take a long time to do this fully autonomously.
I actually think that low speed driving and parking in very narrow streets is much easier for an autonomous system than for a person. All those obstacles are made of stone so nice juicy returns for the sensor systems. Carrying out a turn with a centimetre of clearance from a hard surface is much easier for a computer than maintaining lane discipline on a road with faded markings at high speed.
A lot of impact avoidance with other vehicles and pedestrians is done by communicating with looking at each other though. The easiest solution, car always yields, would just mean it will take forever to move because people will lose all respect and just treat it like a solid obstacle. Also, sometimes cars can and do pass within a few cms to humans (ok if everyone is aware of the maneuver and it's slow), would an automated system do that?
> The easiest solution, car always yields, would just mean it will take forever to move because people will lose all respect and just treat it like a solid obstacle.
I've often wondered how self-driving cars will deal with this. Imagine we reach the point where self driving cars are perceived as being guaranteed to stop before hitting a pedestrian.
This presents a lot of problems that need to be overcome. A car-jacker could rob you simply by getting an accomplice to stand in front of your car. Teenagers might start jumping in front of cars as a high-tech game of chicken. What happens when somebody steps into the road and the car brakes so hard it gives the occupants whiplash?
I'm sure all of these problems will be solved in time, but it's going to be interesting to see how!
There is a 500 m long street in front of my house where it is customary that people cross it everywhere and cars are just expected to stop for the people. There are no traffic lights or pedestrian crossing or any special rules, its just that people started doing this decades ago and now it is just tradition to do this.
So now you have a long street where tons of people are crossing every 10 meters during the day because it's a quite busy shopping district.
Although cars are driving slow, it must be very hard for autonomous cars because there are people everywhere running in every direction.
Do you want to be inside the car when it does that? It is not going to be much fun unless you are paying attention and bracing yourself, in which case I'm not sure I see the advantage of letting the computer do it for you.
You are probably overestimating the jerk from that. 5mph has (1/12)^2 = 1/144th the energy of 60mph. Passengers often don't pay attention to what's going on and breaking force is generally not enough to really mess with people.
That said, the default is not going to be stopping within 1-2 inches of pedestrians, rather it's going to gradually slow down to deal with pedestrians while trying to maintain forward progress. The point is a self driving car could be more aggressive than most people while staying safe instead of freaking out and just stopping because people are jaywalking.
You're right of course. It's hard to imagine any useful vehicle spending much of its time moving at only 5 mph, though, so I suppose I'm really imagining what such a stop would be like from a more normal travel speed like 20-25 mph.
I am picturing this more as an extreme edge case than anything else. If a person can safely do 20-25mph in an area then a self-driving car should be able to do the same thing.
It's the edge case where a car needs to cross a really high traffic area that's going to be an issue and people can't do 20mph right in front of a high traffic box store entrance etc. Further, going slow for a few hundred feet really does not take that long.
Nobody is going to die from a 5 mph collision. It's not even likely to break any bones. At 30 mph, the chance of death is still only 5%!
There may still be reasons to prefer robot cars for low-speed environments but the probability of such a vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian is already very low, so that is not relevant to a discussion of a robot car's ability to stop very rapidly at very low speeds.
The "every direction" bit is actually something autonomous cars handle far better than humans since they can have eyes pointing in every direction. The hard part is noticing that someone waiting at a crosswalk wants you to stop so they can cross.
The problem is not necessarily "obstacles made of stone." Think about lanes in the countryside where you only see grass and the possibility of a ditch to either side... I guess that is really complicated for a self-driving car to manage in each and every case as well as human does.
Yes, walls are easily located. Holes not so much. Emptiness is quite difficult to see.
I recently drove in freezing storm. Whole frontend was covered in icy-slushy mixture. Parking sensors were freaking out and working totally randomly in such conditions.
If I ever get an autonomous car, manual driving is a must-have feature :|
One of many examples would be a single lane street which goes up a hill and around the corner. Although there is only space for one car you can drive both directions. Rather often than not you have two cars meeting in the middle and then one car has to drive back to let the other car pass. This is pretty difficult to do as a human and I am not sure how an autonomous car would do that.
Oftentimes there's a two-way street when only one car can pass. Sometimes there are signs for that, but not always. And sometimes you need to check mirror to see if car is approaching from behind the corner before you can proceed.
When a human messes up its a cheap accident, just bad human judgment call number one billion.
When a self driving car messes up it'll be a very expensive lawsuit for pain and suffering and psychological trauma of not being in control while the accident unfolds and surely its all the mfgrs fault for having a software bug.
Its not so much the physical characteristics of being narrow as being a location where many accidents happen compared to an interstate-class road.
One scenario that I keep thinking about all the time: traffic in most south-east asian countries like Vietnam (Hanoi for example). The streets are occupied by a mix of cars, pedestrians (+ animals) and motorcycles. Everything moves ultra close.
Must be a nightmare for every car proximity-sensor.
Actually, no. Speeds are low enough that almost-zero reaction time is a huge advantage, and the rules are basic swarm-like behavior (plus bigger cars have priority).
I'm not sure. In my experience, you have traffic situations where everyone around you is trying to weave in and out through the smallest gaps. The car will need to get really good at predicting behavior or drive so conservatively that all other vehicles end up passing you by.
Lol, yeah. Asking for a self driving car programmed to follow traffic laws that can handle Saigon or Bangkok is like asking for a smart drone that can fly safely thru a tornado.
I agree that this is a really bad example. Especially as I was in Hanoi 5 days ago.
I witnessed 2 car accidents when I was there and both were vehicles turning (slowly) and clipping motorbikes in their blind spots. Not gonna happen with a computer.
> and it is already difficult to navigate those places
> as a human
I don't know why a machine that has 3d perfect vision and knows exactly how big it is relative to its surroundings would be worse at this that a human bean.
Because in a lot of situations you are not alone on the road and you have to negotiate with other cars or people and decide what to do. There are a lot of single lane streets which can be passed in both directions and the car has sonehow have to deal with the incoming var on who should drive first or who drives backwards.
Meh, again, I don't know why software that's never having a bad day, never frustrated, is trained to drive defensively, and has the actual highway code programmed in to it will struggle more than Pedro will, especially given that if the other car is also autonomous then they can actually negotiate.
People always raise these issues... "I know about a tricky street that no computer could drive!" But it doesn't really matter in terms of selling autonomous cars. If autonomous driving is only enabled for the top 90% of the most autonomy-friendly routes, then only people in those areas will buy the first round of autonomous cars. Over time, AI improves, maps improve, and people put pressure on municipalities to improve roads.
But is any of that a problem for Tesla to sell a lot of autonomous cars? No. Not even a little.
It seems impossible that they could have it be fully autonomous to the point of not needing a steering wheel though. You can tell an autonomous car "take me to the mall", or "pull out of the garage", but there are so many edge cases that seem like they would still require manual control.
How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.
So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".
Seems like it might need GPS at times, or some other means to know where it is at certain moments. Once it establishes where it is then I could see it no longer needing GPS, as it should be bright enough to keep track of location by itself using a map.
This is what I'm thinking too. The lack of dashboard is not because the car will be autonomous, it will be but only on the freeway, but because there will be a HUD.
>And there are no gauges directly in front of the driver at all, which has been confirmed to be like that for production
Is that how you read it?
Because I read it as Tesla feeling the pressure to get something tangible out there for people to see, so they demonstrated a car that wasn't finished (just like the battery swap tech, or "off the hook" Powerwall demand). It got huge hype, now it'll be two more years of "wait and see what we have planned!" Smart, I guess.
I wish everyone would stop framing this as Tesla vs everyone else, instead of rooting on the EV industry as whole. There'd be less pressure on Tesla to take over the world, which ain't gonna happen.
In some of the ride-along vidoes the people driving (all heads of design) confirm the lack of gauges is going into production, as-is the landscape screen.
Musk said on Twitter that Autopilot convenience features would not be included in the base model, "same as S and X." So it doesn't seem like they would be basing the interior design on an optional feature.
Yes, and it will have standard safety features like automatic braking that use that hardware. But what does that have to do with whether or not the Model 3 design is based around fully autonomous driving?
Is it really hard to pilot a spaceship? You maneuver it out of the solar system (should not be _that_ difficult, certainly not if your destination is in a direction outside of the ecliptic), point it in the right direction, move to full throttle, and let it do its thing for a few centuries while you sleep or watch history on earth go by.
Yes, there's a risk you may hit something and be killed, but per passenger mile, I expect it to be even safer than the space shuttle.
I think most people imagine piloting a spaceship as being awesome. And are thinking of it more like sci-fi spaceships rather than a modern day shuttle packed with obtuse controls.
You don't really need gauge at all, autonomous car or not. Seriously, in every day driving you need the speed and that's it. (even on a clutch ICE car, the RPM is really unnecessary unless you have a racing driving style) They have confirmed in some video that the odometer is within the visual field of the driver and actually very visible.
The rest of the information does not need constant visual presence, actually the GPS is probably more interesting than anything else.
I would still be surprised if there is no HUD provided with the car. You still need some very visible notification area for event like running out of juice or any kind of malfunction. Also there still some stuff the car are bad at doing like fog lights, or putting the light on in a foggy situation ( actually almost had a crash because of that - so use of the car switching the light on or off, forgot that fog during day or overcast weather are the same to a light sensor ) Also if the car is not 100% of the time autonomous, you need to be able to tell immediately if it is enabled or not.
With the oblong steering wheel they mentioned and spaceship like controls, I'm thinking they just don't want the steering wheel sticking up in front of that awesome view. Perhaps an airplane-line yoke? There is the problem of the steering wheel needing to go multiple revolutions, but there do exist some variable ratio steering systems where you might limit rotation to +/-90 degrees but the wheel travel is speed dependent. There are options besides fully autonomous.
As for the lack of instruments, I rarely look at much other than the speedometer while driving, and if the car can read the signs and help regulate speed for me, I may not even need that. My non-Tesla car has an audible chime at 50 and 25 miles to empty, so I don't even need to look at the fuel gauge.
My friend has a Prius and I hate driving it because the steering wheel isn't round.
Turns out the way I drive involves letting the wheel slip under my hands when going around corners, and you can't do that if the circumference of the wheel moves as it turns.
Mercedes has presented a prototype with joystick in 1999, said to have been easier to learn for beginners than steering wheels, and quicker to perform emergency maneuvers with.
They said that German legislation does not allow for cars with side-stick rather than steering wheels, and that it would be cost-prohibitive to introduce - the latter is probably no longer true...
I'm hoping we'll indeed see some tweaks to the nose -- it looks like a blank waiting for a cut-out to fit a grill and will leave the car feeling nearly-finished if it stays that way for production. Only bit that wasn't really a home run for me (for a pre-production, anyways).
But otherwise... shooting for autonomous-first at launch will be interesting indeed. How would that effect the opinions of the folks now on the wait list? I wonder how much we're really going to need/want these levels of performance with the car doing the driving for us, of if having the go-fast will end up being mostly a safety feature for collision avoidance?
That mask started to grow on me: it makes the car look like a spaceship, and even more importantly, it sets it apart from all other cars out there.
It's like the hatchback-shape of the Prius. I don't think anyone does actually find that attractive, but it's a great design to tell everyone from a distance that you're a better person than them.
I don't own one, but the Prius is actually just an excellent car. Aside from its fuel efficiency, it has lots of interior space, has an outstanding service life measured in hundreds of thousands of miles with no major services, and is priced very competitively. There's a reason tons of taxi cabs are Priuses. The stereotype that the Prius is bought by snooty people is completely undeserved. If you're just shopping for a simple commuter car, it's really hard to beat the Prius.
The function of the grille on a car with a combustion engine is to protect the radiator from debris while still allowing airflow to it. The need for airflow comes at a cost of aerodynamics, so if the Model 3 lacks a radiator, would it not be more "functional" to sacrifice the traditional grille in favor of improved aerodynamics?
The current design looks transitional to me...it has the general nose shape everyone is used to without the pointless nooks and crannies. If they were really trying to fully favor aerodynamics it would look like an F1 nose.
I would have thought Tesla would have skipped the transitional and re-thought what a frontend should do and look like when there's no need for a grill anymore.
Yeah, could be. Doesn't mean the car has to have a grill. Note that VW Beetles get along fine without a front grill, and the engines on those need lots of air cooling.
Look below the nose for the radiator hole on the Model 3. If you look carefully at the placement of radiators in modern cars, you can see that most of the actual airflow placement is below the "bumper" (depending on the vehicle).
Modern bumpers are actually integrated fascias. [1]
Note that the model 3 isn't a hatchback. Due to the 'entire roof is glass' design, the hinge can't be at the top of the car like it is in a hatchback. On the model 3, the trunk hinges at end of the glass.
FYI for anyone tempted to google search for it: there are some pretty gross image-search results that I wish I could un-see, helpfully inserted by Google before most of the results.
From wikipedia:
> Trypophobia is a proposed phobia (pathological fear) of small holes, particularly irregular patterns or clusters of small holes. The term was coined in 2005 from the Greek τρύπα (trýpa) "hole" and φόβος (phóbos) "fear". Thousands of people say they have the condition. It is not a recognized diagnosis or condition in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or other scientific literature.
Seeing as trypophobia is not even a recognized phobia, just something people on the Internet say they have, I don't know how you'd determine how common it is. Lots of people are demonstrably OK with luxury car grills, considering they sell well.
A thing to note on looks: there will be a number plate to complete the looks. And remember there are at least US and European versions of that to consider in the design.
This is entirely subject to personal taste, but
Alfa Romeos' (e.g. 147) fronts look nice in PR, but look hideous with a number plate attached literally "wherever there is some space for it".
New Audis suffer from similar problem: even though the number plate does not look hideous it still looks sort of out of place on the asphalt reaching grilles.
At least in my country the rules regarding number plate placement have statements like "clearly visible", "unobstructed" and "must not be covered by protective materials". I the rules would be similar +/- everywhere.
I think this is mostly related to speed cameras and similar tools being able to clearly read the plate number.
So I watched the Model 3 unveil. I found it to be pretty awful. I had seen Musk unveil the battery swap, and felt that he looked way more polished than he did in the Model 3 unveil. The reveal kind of stressed me out the way he was stammering over the words. It seemed as though he had either not practiced the script, not written one, or had a bout of stage fright. He really didnt "sell" the car. Just said yes its going to be great and gave 3-4 bullet points on features. It was not something that I would compare to any apple product reveal by any stretch.
I read the Musk bio this fall and it gave me the impression this is Musk's typical style. Unlike Jobs, who would rehearse endlessly, Musk tends to be more off the cuff.
It may be, but as I referenced in my original post, he was much more polished and looked way more comfortable when he was comparing the battery swap to refueling an Audi. I just would expect that launching the "car that will save Tesla from bankruptcy" should have had a bit more polish.
Also gives weight to the idea that when presenting, authenticity is everything. Jobs, according to countless close acquaintances, was very much the person he was on stage.
It's draining to watch/listen. His speaking is so unsteady that it becomes very distracting. I understand wanting to be the face of the company, but he's simply not a strong presenter.
It's not just men that can "have everything taken from them".
Portraying yourself as some sort of "victim of the system" because other people can get married doesn't exactly seem like the strongest way of arguing against asset division during divorce.
Having someone parent your kids while you work 120 hours a week is pretty useful. It's the opinion of the courts that that job is worth exactly half of whatever the working spouse brings home. If you don't like that arrangement what's the point of being married in the first place?
I'm as incredulous as the next person that a mostly self-driving car will be available by 2017-8 and that this will be it.
That said, on the way to full autonomy I can foresee a car that can handle 99% of the driving itself but calls on the driver to help out during the other 1%. In such a scenario the car may know where it is and isn't safe to drive, but not exactly where, or when.
Examples include the 1-lane, 2-directions-of-traffic rural roads. Unmapped car parks and private premises. Navigating around roadworks. Basically all the 'edge-case' scenarios people often cite.
The car could guess the route and you use a joystick to control the forward speed. You can use the joystick to change the proposed route as you drive. And if you wanted to leave the detected 'safe area' ("no, I really do want to drive into that car - it's a tow truck and I need to get on it!") you acknowledge a bunch of ominous warnings and control the car directly, albeit at a very low speed.
Speed (acceleration). Current Model S 0-6 times are from 5.2s to 2.8s, depending on trim. The Model 3 is “under six seconds” and maybe “substantially faster”: it could overlap the slower current Model S trims.
Range. Current Model S ranges are from 240m to 270m, depending on trim. Model 3: 215m.
Cargo volume. The Model S has 31.6 ft^3. The Model 3 looks much smaller.
Free lifetime use of superchargers? I haven't seen this speculated, but I'll be surprised if the Model 3 includes unlimited supercharger use; I suspect paid use of the network will be a new Tesla revenue stream.
On the other hand, smaller makes for easier parking and maneuvering, in addition to the cost savings. And I expect the Model 3 to have more and better sensors, in support of better autonomous driving, than the current Model S can support.
All said, IMO the major advantage of the existing Model S is that it exists today. Owners are paying a huge premium to get semi-autonomous driving a couple of years ahead of schedule. “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
You don't understand. "Supercharging" means hardware. It takes additional charging hardware to be compatible with a supercharger. On the Model S supercharging hardware was an option. I hope you are right but at this point it's still unconfirmed.
Thanks for that link. To me, 'supercharging' is the act of charging. And he specifically said supercharging, not supercharger hardware. So that is where the confusion came from.
One of the things I find fascinating, and that Tesla has to grapple with at some point with real ramifications, is: are they a self driving car company that just happens to be an electric car company? Or the other way around?
I would argue that electric car companies are appealing to a much smaller subset of potential customers than are self driving cars. But the mission behind each is very different and that flows into all the key design and marketing decisions you have to make.
Tesla can easily pivot from one to the other. But Musk is so passionate about the first, and therefore so are so many of their key people, that you wonder what happens if they pivot to being first to market with the best self driving cars that just happen to be electric.
Why do you need to define a car company in a single adjective like "[self driving] car company" or "[electric] car company"?
Both are clearly the future. So what's wrong with doing both?
You say "pivot" as though these are incompatible goals, when in fact they're perfectly complementary paths to a future ideal of ground transportation.
To me, your point is like asking "Is Google a search company, or an advertising company?" They're both, in a fully symbiotic sense. You cannot describe it as one of these accurately, without the other.
Everything about Tesla has been around helping/saving the environment by accelerating the adoption of battery driven cars vs ICE. Nothing about self driving cars says they have to be electric. In fact, if the first fully self driving car was gasoline that would probably impede Tesla's growth. So it impacts where your limited R&D, manufacturing and sales and marketing $$"s go. I don't think a company as small as Tesla can be both - at least not effectively. One will have to give to the other.
Nothing about making computers says you have to make phones (Apple). As the GP mentioned, nothing about search says you have to sell advertising (Google). And none of the above say you have to make a self driving car (as both are reported to be attempting).
I think you're drawing some arbitrary distinctions here. Making big bets in several areas is no small part of why Apple, Google and Tesla are magnets for the best engineers and programmers. There's nothing unfocused about marrying great software and hardware, which is ultimately what Tesla is doing.
A lot of Musk's bet in AV is founded on the understanding that the existing automakers are/were quite capable of making a good electric car - they just have too much incentive to drag their feet. Autonomous driving will actually be the major differentiator in an industry that didn't have the software expertise to create a decent infotainment system.
That level of thinking is what you get from a company like GM. When asked about building charging infrastructure they said "we're a car company, not an infrastructure company".
Tesla also quietly changed it's name from Tesla Motors to Tesla Energy.
I think the whole point of Tesla is to be an excellent car company. "Electric" and "self-driving" just happen to be two attributes of an excellent car company at this particular point in history.
Musk has said before that he wants people to buy a Tesla not because it is an electric car but because it is a really good car. He will keep adding features to it that make it an excellent car.
Tesla may pivot to other products but not IMO to selling self driving kits. In any case, I believe mobileye does the bulk of the computer vision stuff anyway.
Also, is Apple a supercomputer company that happened to get into AT&T's telephone handset business and Sony's walkman business? The way AT&T used to make rotary phones? Or are they a telephone handset business that happens to make miniature Cray supercomputers with, for some reason, integrated screens? Because an iPad is stronger than a supercomputer of previous decades.
Well, a supercomputer isn't supposed to fit in your backback. And a rotary phone isn't supposed to be wireless and fit in your pocket and play apps.
I don't know what to think anymore! It's almost like the world isn't made of categories.
so we've answered the question: Tesla is a transportation company. hell, in the future their stuff could fly (why not.) but you still buy it to transport you and your family or stuff from A to B.
Just flying over the comments I find it interesting that a lot of people try their best to find negative aspects of self-driving cars. I always try to be open to all parties, but a lot of people are wayyy too confident in human abilities. We are pretty bad, seriously.
I wonder, when Tesla unveils something that doesn't fit within the parameters that those people think of as a 'car', how many will drop their reservation?
Since we don't know the details yet, we don't know how much of a departure it will be.
I doubt that the demographic that pre-orders a Tesla Model 3 (years before shipping), is a demographic that is unwilling to embrace change.
I also doubt that it will have no manual control mode, so it shouldn't an issue regardless. Tesla is clearly going the route of being a strict super-set of the capabilities of other cars, until the market decides what features are obsolete many years down the road (e.g. steering wheels).
I might like to buy a car with the Model 3's general parameters - I had the electrical service on my house redone a couple of years ago in part because I wanted to have the capacity to add a car charger someday - but I am almost completely uninterested in a Tesla because I am not on board with their "just sit back and trust us" philosophy. No, thank you, I don't trust you, or any car maker, and don't want your auto-updating auto-everything machine!
And I basically just hate trying to deal with touch screens. They get smudgy and gross at the blink of an eye, and their total lack of tactile feedback demands a tedious degree of conscious attention which makes them inefficient ways of performing routine tasks, which adjustment of an automobile's cabin controls ought to be.
> I wonder, when Tesla unveils something that doesn't fit within the parameters that those people think of as a 'car', how many will drop their reservation?
Tbh, I don't think Tesla cares. They have a ~$276 million dollar interest free loan with which to build the first wave of Model 3s. They just need to make enough on those sales to finance the next round until they get through everyone who wants one.
The goal is primarily to pay for the initial production run so they don't have to get outside financing.
> Earlier on Saturday, Musk indicated that Model 3 reservations checked in at about 232,000. That being the case, if the pace of reservations keeps up, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see Tesla report 300,000 reservations sometime later this week. And while the $1,000 deposits for the Model 3 are completely refundable, Tesla has effectively secured a $276 million interest free loan from eager buyers.
> They have a ~$276 million dollar interest free loan with which to build the first wave of Model 3s
This is a company that, while producing just 33K cars a year, has operating expenses of $114M per week. That $276M won't be around long enough to build a single Model 3. They're going to need a lot more money.
Yeah, most of the "reservations" are not going to be real customers. It's just something to tout to shareholders to justify their massive multiple. Tesla is in a race against the clock, they are practically corporate welfare queens with their subsidies and they continue to take on more debt.
The $1000 is 100% refundable. A person that can afford a Tesla can afford to put down $1000 with no risk. Heck, even a normal middle class person could probably foot $1000 at no risk.
Reservations are not sales. They are just something to tout to shareholders. If they wanted real numbers they'd make it non-refundable and up the down payment. The stock trades at an absolutely insane valuation (it's actually valued not too far from massive manufacturers like Ford and GM), the company will have to take on more debt to fulfill the reservations putting the company at liquidity risk. If the orders don't come through and you have increased debt burden, you're gonna have a bad time. This isn't something I'm making up, even the analysts at UBS agree.
> Heck, even a normal middle class person could probably foot $1000 at no risk.
Huh? What "middle class" are you talking about? In the USA, 2 in 3 people can't afford a $500 car repair or $1000 emergency room visit [1]. My guess is that people putting $1000 down on a car are either pretty rich or pretty serious about buying it.
That article is not about the middle class, and the target audience of Tesla is generally going to be someone that has disposable income and an education (which your own article alludes to having increased savings.)
This is absurd. Do you seriously think that Tesla wont have every single Model 3 sold the moment it comes off the line? People were waiting in half mile long lines for days to pre order a CAR.
Most of this thread is people telling me that people put in $1000 so they are going to buy the car, which is ridiculous. That's not a straw man, that's people equating a refundable reservation with an order.
For example, I made a reservation. We expect to buy a car somewhere around 2018, so we made a reservation in case we want a Model 3. I expect the model 3 will be high on our list, but we'll definitely comparison shop when the time comes.
You can check my comment history: I'm as annoyed by the Tesla hype-machine as anybody. The games they play when reporting (or not reporting) financial metrics is astounding, and I don't understand why the SV crowd finds it acceptable for a public company.
However, I want to see Tesla and the whole EV industry thrive. People just need to curb their expectations.
There are already draft regulations in California [1] for exactly this. I expect that at least some states will have cleared the way by 2018, though obviously not all. Autonomous driving will likely be location-restricted to start with as a result. Remember, there is a lot of pressure on politicians from many companies and people to get autonomous vehicles on the road as soon as possible.
NHTSA is scrambling to make it possible, this is the biggest safety innovation in cars since the seat belt. And as long as they have the hardware capabilities, Tesla wouldn't have to launch it with full autonomous mode available.
Just imagine how safe we will be if we reach Level 5 autonomy, no driver control possible? I think the Model 3 is going to be the first production car to reach Level 4. I'm hoping that's what the "part 2" update is.
Windshield stretching from front to back (the roof) will be quite a bit more expensive to replace than a standard windshield no doubt. Ironic given the price point.
Is there any good analysis on the impact of EV on the gas and oil demand on the world?
??% of Ca, US cars are EV, as results, ??% of Ca, US gas/oil consumptions are reduced. If the trend continue, here's what happen when % of EV reach 10, 20, 30, 50%, the global oil demand will be drop by ??,??,?? %.
> The Model 3 will come with standard rear-wheel drive, with an option for dual-motor all-wheel drive.
It better be fully autonomous if you've ever seen how rear-wheel drive performs in a north-eastern snowstorm. Sure, there's a lot of weight over the back wheels but that sounds crazy to me as the default.
Eh, you may be defeating your own argument there. The main reason that front-wheel drive is better in slick conditions is more weight over the wheels in the typical front engined car. Rear wheel drive may actually be better if the battery pack is sitting on top of it.
That's only part of it. The other reason is that on a front wheel drive car, torque is applied in the direction you want to go. On a rear wheel drive car, torque is applied in the direction you are currently going.
Since you don't push your shopping cart by turning the wheels, those intuitions are probably not that helpful. The force you exert on the handle of a shopping cart is not automatically aligned with the direction the cart is facing, meaning it's unstable - any deviation from a direct push generates a turning torque. But the rear wheels of a car are fixed so they will always generate a forward force aligned with the car's axis, never a turning motion (diffs and grip variance across the axle aside).
Not true. I've always driven RWD and have competed in National Amateur racing events with the SCCA (and taught high performance driving techniques at my local club).
I setup my cars with a heafty amount of rear toe-in (1/4"). When the weight transfers left/right or one of the rear wheels hits a bump/hole it will push the car in one direction similar to torquing one side of a shopping cart with your hand.
A RWD setup allows the car to be more efficient with its tires (using one set for turning and one for power vs. one for both). FWD is just seen as safer because most people panic when a car oversteers. As the saying goes among driving enthusiasts: "Oversteer scares passengers, Understeer scares drivers"
So, on the subject of whether rear wheel drive electric cars will have trouble in snow, we've now heard from both a shopping cart driver and a performance racing instructor who configures cars to deliberately amplify rear axle steering effects under cornering. I can't help but think that the reality of driving a Tesla Model 3 in traffic in light snow might be somewhat different to both of those experiences.
On that topic: the selection of the driven wheels probably matters less than people think. The most important factor is the tires. Want winter traction? Buy winter tires.
In modern cars Active Stability Control (ASC) is effective in eliminating oversteer, no matter what the drivetrain setup is. Traction at stop lights would favor RWD when a car has near 50/50 weight distribution (I don't know what the Model 3 is but would guess it's close).
RWD makes the car simpler and with modern ASC is no less safe for the average driver than FWD. I'd guess that traction in a Model 3 would slightly favor RWD but tires matter more.
That depends, RWD is harder to control even if the weight is on the back. Understeer is much safer than oversteer, unless you're a talented driver who knows what they're doing, and oversteer is way more likely in a RWD car.
It’s a known fact that electric cars have superb acceleration mainly because they deliver all power from the beginning, in contrast to internal combustion engines that need to reach certain rpms to achieve the same thing. Even if it’s 6 seconds instead of 4 it still is an impressive number for a car at that price range.
How many of those can do it without revving the engine and popping the clutch? An electric car's low end torque is usable for everyday driving.
Of course, where most people judge a car's power while driving it normally is the 60-80 mph time. That's the only time most people floor the accelerator, when they're pulling out to pass someone. Gasoline vehicles have a marked advantage in this metric.
6 seconds at that price point is pretty normal for a car portending to be a sporty. For example a CLA is in its price range and does 0-60 a tad over 6 seconds.
A CLA doesn’t have six seconds acceleration. The CLA 200 which in Europe is priced around €30k does 1-100 (or 0-60 miles) at 8,4 seconds. Unless you’re referring to the AMG version which does it at 4,6 seconds but costs north of €50k.
The model S 0-60 varies from 2.8s (P85D in ludicrous mode) right up to 5.9s (2012 Base model), so it's possible that they'll also release a version of the model 3 that will be able to go zero to 60 in less than 4 seconds.
It sounds like less than 6 seconds is what we should expect from the base model though.
It is also absolutely irrelevant for normal driving. 0 to 100 km / h in 10 seconds or even more is perfectly acceptable, and lower accelerations are actually better for the range.
Having the ability to tap into faster acceleration doesn't hurt range, in fact with dual motors it you can actually have a faster car that is more efficient.
One of the motors is turned off when not needed so you can run essentially half-power and yet still have the second one available in a split second.
There's actually a subtle difference, with an ICE you pay for the larger displacement with more fuel usage at idle and inefficient RPM ranges(things like VVT help mitigate it but physics is physics).
For EVs you're largely just fighting against Ohm's law(constant voltage requires that you draw more amps which means resistance generates heat, etc) and to a lesser degree weight. Which has much less impact like you note.
My basic understanding of ICEs is that they are most efficient when you can run them at a specific RPM(and tune for that RPM) which is why you see Diesel-Electric Locomotives where the ICE largely acts as a generator.
> My basic understanding of ICEs is that they are most efficient when you can run them at a specific RPM(and tune for that RPM) which is why you see Diesel-Electric Locomotives where the ICE largely acts as a generator.
That's spot on. This is why you can't use the cam from a generator on a car and vice versa (even if it is otherwise the exact same engine, such as with the Willy's engine). The cam on a generator will be very pointy to open and close the valves across a very sharply defined moment in the engine cycle, whereas on the car version the cam is much more smooth giving a wider operating range (but at lower efficiency).
The reason why Diesel Electric locomotives use the electric motor to drive the wheels rather than using the diesel directly is twofold, one the efficiency that you already noted, the second reason is that the electric motor does not need a clutch and has a torque curve much better suited to getting a large weight accelerated (much like steam power is better than ICE's at this, it's the exact same reason).
Yup, was aware of point #2 as well. They mitigate that in part by backing up too(thus putting slack in the cars) before moving forward. Always fun to hear the cars going thunk, thunk, thunk as they get ready to head out.
I pulled onto I-5 behind a Model S once while riding my 750cc Honda and was really impressed by the fact that I simply could not keep pace - it pulled smoothly ahead like it wasn't even trying. I have never seen any other car do that; it's part of the fun of riding, since cars on the freeway typically feel like they're all half asleep.
Hah. I am too much of a hooligan to let myself acquire a proper sportbike; I get into enough trouble as it is. I'm actually thinking of switching to a BMW K75 or K100, since I'm no longer commuting via bike (nowhere to park downtown, alas) and something suitable for long weekend cruises might get more use.
It's an unfinished cabin design. I doubt they're going to leave a monitor sitting in that spot as the end look. Most likely it'll be mounted flush into the dash in some manner.
I don't think any reasonable definition of "vaporware" can be applied to this car, given Tesla's track record. They could have all sorts of tweaks and production issues yet, sure. But it's a pretty good bet that a tangible version of this exists and will ship.
Clearly that didn't impact pre-orders but I think a lot of people didn't love the internal look even if they thought it was nice looking externally (disclaimer: I was one of these people).
In my OPINION the 3 won't be fully self driving (for certification/legal reasons). But we can reasonably speculate that it will have things like auto-braking, lane keep assist, automatic cruise control, and similar. Since competitor's vehicles have this, and in order to achieve "five stars in every safety category" you actually need to have auto-braking.
Look at the requirements for the IIHS's "TOP SAFETY PICK+" which is the gold standard for safety. A system like EyeSight, Honda Sensing, or similar is required in 2016[0], and this vehicle will be looking for the 2017 or 2018 TSP+ rating no doubt.
So suggesting that it will have "auto-pilot"-like functionality[1] is very reasonable. But that doesn't mean it will have full self-driving ("hands off"), in particular given the regulatory landscape, development stage of the technology, and the costs. We'll see.
[0] "Vehicles with optional front crash prevention qualify for either award only when equipped with the technology." http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/TSP-List i.e. without frontal auto-braking as an option you cannot appear on the TSP+ list. But even vehicles on the list only quality as TSP+ rated when the auto-braking option is installed (without it they're TPS tier only).
[1] https://www.teslamotors.com/presskit/autopilot