"A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle. The first Model 3 factory machine should be thought of as version 0.5, with version 1.0 probably in 2018."
What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. That's realistic. His two top production guys quit when he announced 2018 as the delivery date for the Model 3. His new production head, from Audi, may have given Musk a reality check.
Tesla produced about 50,000 cars in 2015 with 13,000 employees, about 4 cars per employee. Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee. Toyota produced about 9 million cars with 344,000 employees, about 26 cars per employee. So Tesla needs to get their productivity per employee up by 4x - 7x to play with the big guys. Clearly Musk has done the same calculation.
Now, though, he's admitting that they can't do it by 2018. This is prepping the stockholders for bad financial news. Tesla is going to burn a lot of cash through at least 2022.
There's no reason that Tesla can't get their productivity up to at least Ford levels in time. Ford has a much broader product line, and Tesla's car isn't that complicated mechanically. But it's not instant.
Ford can have fewer employees per car because they're at full scale, they've outsourced nearly all their engineering and have outsourced their sales as well via an antiquated dealer model.
This, citing employee numbers is somewhat meaningless without any data on the number of non-employees working in your supply chain. Could indeed very well be a case of outsourcing differences rather than a difference in productivity.
No industry counts the number of employees within a supply chain. It might be impossible and it's half the point in having separate SC entities...it's irrelevant to a car manufacturer how many miners various aluminium companies feel they need to hire, say.
Yeah, possibly. It depends on the industry. Like you couldn't directly compare Intel to ARM because their strategic groups are too divergent, even though they ostensibly do the same thing.
But within the same strategic groupings, it might become more appropriate to say "outsourcing or more/less integration is/isn't a good choice for this industry due to xyz". So at some point you might expect to see (for example) the manufacturer who mines their own metal's revenue to increase if there's ever a global shortage, compared to competitors who rely on other companies. So as in, the mining car company might have lower production numbers per employee than competitors due to a larger staff, but if vertical integration makes sense in that industry, you'd expect revenue per employee to demonstrate that over time.
In this case, if Tesla have lower production numbers per staff due to less outsourcing then that's just necessity, due to the fact that it's a tentative young company which sells a highly niche product. It'll work out over time if they can establish themselves in the industry.
But basically yeah you're correct, it doesn't make sense to look at a single metric in isolation, without taking a wider view.
Well you'd measure 'value addition' in revenue, and Income per Employee is already a metric used, but it still wouldn't extend beyond the bounds of your own company, as an entity in a wider supply chain/network.
This seems more like a sneer than a legitimate criticism. AFAIK Tesla's business is fundamentally pretty solid. They make a net profit on their cars, but they are currently investing it all into aggressive expansion. Is it surprising that a young, growing company is spending a lot on growth compared to a century-old company? Do you think it would be better for Tesla if they didn't invest in the future?
I admire what Tesla has been able to achieve from a technological and a marketing point of view but I wouldn't call their business "fundamentally solid". Tesla stock has been one of the most heavily shorted equities for some time and it's because their balance sheet is a train wreck while their valuation is sky-high. Tesla burns cash at a phenomenal rate and regularly has to take on debt and / or raise new capital through equity offerings in order to stay in business. Of course they have to invest in the future- automobile manufacturing is a highly competitive, extremely capital intensive business and every OEM (Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen,..) has to regularly invest huge sums of money in staying relevant. Tesla is no different in that regard.
$ 182,482,000 in Research and Development last Quarter.
$ 282,267,000 net loss in the quarter.
So even if we got rid of Tesla's ENTIRE R&D department, they lost $100 Million last QUARTER. The primary cost of Tesla is "Selling, general and administrative", which was around $300 Million.
The only other cost that's larger than their administrative costs were the $779,316,000 spent on parts.
#1 Cost: The parts (~$780 Million)
#2 Cost: Selling, General, and Administrative. $300 Million
The statement you linked clearly shows a gross profit and net loss. "Selling, general and administrative" is not a cost of revenue, hence why it does not count against the gross profit. These are fixed costs not tied to the sales volume that covers the basic operation of the company, advertising, executive compensation, and other overhead costs not directly tied to generating revenue or R&D (since it is a separate line item).
Tesla takes in more revenue than their cars cost to build. It currently is not enough to cover all the other expenses of the company.
You specifically referenced a line from the post you are replying to as such:
> > They make a net profit on their cars, but they are currently investing it all into aggressive expansion
> Citation needed.
The citation is right in the statement. They make a gross profit, which means they make a profit on their cars. The in turn spend more on activities that do not involve getting cars to customers. The activities that cause the company to have a net loss are not "cost of revenue" activities. Presumably the majority of that non-revenue expense involves expansion of the company.
I agree with, basically Musk is hoping that investors won't lose confidence in the company for several more years.
However, this model has so far proven worked with Amazon and a few others and I think there is enough shareholders willing to keep the stock that long.
Tesla strikes me as too much of a cult of personality, at least from an investor's perspective. Amazon is another business that reinvests all its profits and then some, but Bezos could walk away without destroying the investment brand. I don't think that's true of Musk and Tesla.
Unlike Ford, GM, etc... Tesla has a much narrower market potential.
Yes Tesla's cars are "cool" and everybody wants one, but even the new "cheaper" model costs far more than the average person spends on a car. Right now, Tesla caters to the luxury market, and is viewed as a "cool alternative" to more traditional luxury makes.
Ford, Toyota et al, have models that cover just about every price range and every type of customer, from the extreme budget oriented to the extreme luxury sports car fanatic. Toyota owns Scion, Toyota, and Lexus for example - so if you need a car, chances are one of the Toyota offerings will satisfy your needs and budget. This opens the market potential to include just about every person.
The one thing that has worried me about Tesla for a long while, is Musk's claims that next year they'll sell 30% more cars, every year - something that's now proving to be an impossible feat. At some point, they were going to hit a ceiling of maximum potential sales as they attempted to wedge into the already entrenched high-end luxury sports car market - there just aren't enough buyers to keep that growth at these prices.
The Model 3 (Tesla's cheapest option) starts at $35,000, which means average price point is well above your link's cited $35,000 (remember, those prices in the link are after upgrades, very few people buy a completely stock vehicle).
I agree, they have an extremely compelling and valuable product. They have aggressive aspirations and so far have a track record of achievement. This is pretty similar to other companies that rarely turn a profit e.g. Amazon.
That said they certainly have a huge hill to climb, but as he said its one we all need to climb so great that they are pushing ahead with a business model to make it there
Remind me- is Tesla a for-profit corporation or are they a non-profit organization? Making a profit is sort of the main point, though obviously not the only point. They've been around since 2003 so it's not like they're a scrappy Y-Combinator incubator company.
Right. What Tesla is attempting is orders of magnitude more difficult than your typical YC app shop with an exit strategy. I think they deserve a bit more slack than you seem willing to cut them. If it all blows up in their faces you can have your day with a smug "I told you so" but you won't be able to deny the benefits they've already provided to society via Musk's aggressive strategy and the effect that's had on the wider industry.
Musk founded Tesla with a vision to make the world more sustainable, and not with the vision to become obscenely rich. Being profitable is a means to an end for him, and not the other way around.
And that's fine. The founders of a company are free to specify its purpose in the company's articles. There is no legal requirement that says corporations must seek profits.
> Tesla Motors was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who financed the company until the Series A round of funding.[37] Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to and after Elon Musk's involvement, with Eberhard the original CEO of Tesla until he was asked to resign in August 2007 by the board of directors.
I'm a fiduciary serving on a board of directors, so yes, it rings a bell. We talk about our duty of care, our duty of loyalty, our duty of good faith.
Now, I'm on the board of a non-profit, but I can tell you that even for for-profit corporations, fiduciary duties consists of those three duties. There is no duty of maximizing profits. There's not even a duty of maximizing share prices, which is probably what you're thinking about.
To quote the US Supreme Court: "While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind."[1]
Tesla needs to state their goal as "make the world more sustainable" so people becoming owners can do so with understanding of that goal. Shareholders need to back this goal. But fiduciary duty means they have to serve the interests of their principals, not that those interests are profit over all else.
Let's not play this game of "there is only one legitimate goal for a corporation". That's not true, de facto or de jure.
Making a profit is absolutely not a goal of Tesla's right now. If they were trying to and missing that would be a cause for alarm, but clearly they're not trying to do that at all.
Weeellll, except for that $30B loss from 2006-2008 [1] leading to them taking a $5.9B government "loan" in 2009. (It should also be noted that while not directly dipping into the $80B bailout pot, Ford told Congress that not bailing out other companies threatened Ford's continued existence. [2]) Plus they were second only to Toyota in the amount of money they drew from cash-for-clunkers - not exactly standing on their own two feet.
The ship has been righted for now, but it was pretty good in 2000 as well.
Well Tesla also relies on government subsidies as well a loan (which it paid back early, as did Ford). Also Ford is more than a 100 years old, so it's bound to have a bad period. We'll have to see what happens when tech companies are that old ( or will they even survive)
I don't trust the government to manipulate the free market efficiently. It's comprised of hapless morons who don't know what they're doing and whose favor is for sale to the highest bidder. Case in point are the tremendous number of bankrupt alternative energy companies built upon favorable treatment by the government. Market intervention doesn't suddenly become justifiable simply because the outcome of advancing the sustainability agenda is positive.
> Case in point are the tremendous number of bankrupt alternative energy companies built upon favorable treatment by the government
That's like saying the top VC firms are all inept because most of the startups they fund fail.
It has often been the role of our government to make risky bets in order to advance step-changes in our society's progress. Those bets have resulted in such things as spaceflight, modern telecommunications, lasers and the internet to name just a few.
If Tesla indeed transforms the world as they are poised to do, their success will far exceed the cumulative failures of Solyndra and the like.
Not to mention, Tesla's competition are subsidized in many ways, most of which are more subtle than the tax credits for alternative fuels that you allude to. Failure to price in the health and climate externalities of fossil fuels amounts to subsidy, as do the trillions of dollars spent on overseas entanglements to secure fossil fuel supplies.
DARPA et al do not represent an analogous scenario. As for portfolio theory: I'm not questioning something that fundamental. I'm saying the government has little to no hope of deploying it efficiently. If you had a technocracy of highly intelligent people perfectly resilient to corruption, then this might be a different story. And if you know anything about VC, you know that there's a long tail of failing ones that underperform standard benchmarks (you probably do know; that's why you said "top VCs"). Also, if you want to view USG market interventionism as an aggregate portfolio, guess which way that's going to go.
I love it when people champion entities like Tesla benefiting from incentive structures when it's conveniently aligned with their personal beliefs about the superiority of the tech industry, their political agendas, and/or the idolzation of people like Musk, but forget that there's a far broader and more insidious reality here.
Reply to Below: Not libertarian. I believe strongly in government regulations where appropriate and that limiting our personal liberties in certain ways is essential to guaranteeing economic and physical security. I happen to agree with the sustainability agenda as well. I disagree with the mechanism being employed to advance it. USG should instead focus on taxing/penalizing for carbon emissions as a negative externality, which would have an ancillary benefit of making alternative energy companies overall more competitive. Asking the government to make decisions about structuring incentives, by contrast, is positively asinine (you get things like ethanol). Furthermore, I have a serious problem with the government deploying tax dollars to directly benefit corporations when there is no immediate and tangible return, regardless of the context.
The last sentence of your post is strange and difficult to parse. You love it when people communicate in ways that align with their worldview? OK fair enough.
But you're really just throwing around a bunch of innuendo and five-dollar words to suggest the incentive structure that Tesla (and all other automakers) have at their disposal is bogus. You've provided no evidence, and Occam's Razor offers a much more reasonable explanation: becoming energy independent and sustainable would be in our national interest in a massive way, and policymakers decided these incentives offer a reasonable risk / reward for accelerating that goal.
If you object on some philosophical / libertarian grounds then fine, I disagree with you but can understand where you're coming from. But don't throw around unsubstantiated claims of corruption and "insidious realities" and expect anyone to be sympathetic to your argument when you're not actually saying anything of substance.
And I don't trust that a profit-based only incentive is good overall, for example: if it wasn't for governments meddling with making oil less desirable as an energy resource (higher taxes, stricter regulations about pollution, more incentives for alternative technologies) we wouldn't be seeing a shift so early as we still have plenty of oil to burn and it's very profitable to do it.
These blanket statements are often wrong, there are really bad instances of a government trying to manipulate markets but there are also instances where it is needed to keep businesses in check.
I would rather live in the world as it is right now than in a Corporatocracy.
> It's comprised of hapless morons who don't know what they're doing...
This sounds exactly like the free market to me. Hapless morons who don't know what they're doing—but try to reach their goals nonetheless—as far as the eye can see.
You'd be surprised what happens when people are risking their own money. But now we're just getting into Capitalism 101..
Edit: I feel like I have to clarify this everywhere perhaps because it's an unorthodox viewpoint: of course companies need to be regulated; I'm arguing against government-sponsored incentives and subsidies. Stick to making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, thereby increasing receipts (use it to fund alternatives research, studies, etc similar to how Big Tobacco has to pay for anti-smoking ads) instead of less expensive to buy someone's product, at the cost of taxpayer dollars.
More electric vehicles will get on the road when there is a realistic economic rationale to buy them. Without the subsidy, an $80,000 car that can only go 200 miles is a lot less appealing.
Hence they are subsidized. People with a bit of forward vision realize that without an economic incentive today, there may not be an economic rationale tomorrow, since the technology will not miraculously develop itself.
What I think people do not realise is that incentives to adopt cleaner car are just one side of a coin.
The alternative would be making petrol-car drivers paying for the actual costs of cars including healthcare for diseases related with pollution, possibly at any level of the production chain and so on.
Hidden costs are often cut away and offloaded on community (I couldn't find anything specifically related with cars (didn't have time to look for), but for comparison here's a short video that shows the real costs of meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDsSnpYZrw). Incentives make it a little bit more explicit. While it may be true claiming that Teslas cost would be higher without incentives, for sure Ford's car would be way more expensive if everything had been taken into account.
Exactly. Maybe I should have been more clear earlier that I'm referring to incentives- driven intervention. Penalizing companies for the negative externalities they inflict on society is practically a first principle of good governance, and USG has failed dramatically.
What's sad is that so many people seem to take an all-or-nothing stance on this politically. Either laissez faire or nanny state. Moderation is a dying art.
Yes, moderation is dead. To embrace moderation one need to have doubt about his beliefs, to accept that someone else might hold a part of the truth. It's difficult and tiring and imply to constantly change one's state of mind and ideas. Moreover, it's much more fun and easy to treat everything as a sport match where you choose one side and you are against the other side.
In some way I notice the irony that these incentives for automakers (aimed to reduce pollution, to keep jobs, to communitize part of the drawbacks related with cars, ecc...) are a form of socialism in the US. Well done Yankees.
> there may not be an economic rationale tomorrow, since the technology will not miraculously develop itself
And if we don't invade country X, it may come back to bite us some day, right? And if we don't prop up the auto industry buying clunkers and robbing shareholders to pay union reps top dollar, people will have to start riding bikes and millions will be out of work, right?
If you're hoping for miracles, the government would be the last place to go looking for them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and while one could argue that our society "needs" this technology just like it "needs" to invade other countries, centralized decision making never leads to optimal outcomes, let alone "miracles".
If this was the only thing that mattered for businesses, we wouldn't have Amazon as Walmart has consistently produced more net profit over Amazon since the last 22 years. 1
A difference is that Tesla hasn't really managed to execute its original plan, in particular:
- Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
- Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car
Amazon is way better at making money to invest in growth. Tesla ?still? is in a fairly deep well, and will need investments to crawl out of it. Big question is whether they will.
That would depend on what your definition of “use” is. Musk is using a surprising definition of “use” that includes “leverage.”
The income increases the cash flow, which is obviously important, but it also signals to investors and bankers that there is a business, and they can invest or loan with better confidence.
What? There are room for multiple companies that make a profit. The point is that claiming a business sucks that still makes a profit and provides value to lots of people is tone deaf.
Amazon was never a profit machine. I do think that's part of the core business, re-invest everything and more... and they turned into a giant comparable to Walmart.
It's not really the same thing. Amazon don't turn a profit because they intentionally re-invest they money they would make into areas that they think will make them money in future. (Once or twice they've screwed this up and accidentally ended up making a profit.) Tesla don't turn a profit because they're making and selling cars at prices below their total costs.
They have basically a single source of revenue AFAIK which is selling cars. They sell X amount of cars per year making $Y. They don't turn a profit. Last year they lost close to $1B mostly because of their R&D costs. They need to either sell more cars (assuming that they can make money per additional unit like they say they can) or charge more for the ones they do sell, or both. Fortunately they are expected by investors to follow the Amazon model so they can get away with it for the foreseeable future.
Spending on R&D is exactly the same as Amazon intentionally reinvesting in areas that will make them more money. How does this not make them like Amazon?
The only real difference is that they have higher bootstrapping costs due to the type of product they make. i.e a physical object with a complex production pipeline. The only way to ever get profitable is to heavily and intentionally reinvest in R&D. Musk is doing the only thing that a startup in this space can do and expect to succeed outside of getting acquired which would be pretty much directly counter to the stated goals of the company.
That's of course incorrect. Amazon doesn't lose money on every sale. Their business is profitable and generates a lot of cash. Their retail business is also profitable. They lose money in retail only on new segments and similar, not on the older existing segments. That has been well known about them for years now.
For fiscal 2015 they were positive on net income: $596 million.
Q1 2016: $513 million in net income
They'll be generating $3 billion in annual net income in just another year. Sounds like a business to me, even if half of that net income comes from AWS.
Reminds me of the old accounting joke.
CFO -> CEO We have a major problem, recent price cuts mean that we are now making a loss per unit on our major product lines.
CEO -> CFO Don't worry about that, We'll make it up on the volume!
Not to over-analyze a comic, but the business model might not be awful in this case. They sell all potions for 20gp kind of like the original dollar stores. The one particular item is at a loss, but the majority may be at a profit or at least the aggregate based on volume is a profit. Basically they have loss-leaders to get people to use them as their only store.
This may seem like a ridiculous strawman, possibly because it's presented as a comic strip, but I've seen similar conversations on the TV show Kitchen Nightmares. Possibly worse actually, as the business owners didn't even know how much it cost them to make their most popular dishes.
Amazon has diversified income streams, they don't just resell products they purchase wholesale. They have a pretty sweet deal with 3rd party sellers, they make a big cut providing a sales channel for inventory owned by others, either seller-fulfilled or FBA.
When ford came on the market, it only had to be better than a horse. A tesla has to be better than a masarati on the high end, a jaguar on the "medium" end, and a subaru on the "low" end.
That's not true. Other automakers existed before Ford; he had automotive competition.
In what world is a Jaguar a "medium" end car? The high end Jaguars extend into Maserati territory.
If Tesla wants to be better than a Maserati or Jaguar, they need to observe how much nicer the interiors of those cars are. Consumer Reports doesn't care about that above a certain level of basic competence, but a Maserati or Jaguar buyer does.
> If Tesla wants to be better than a Maserati or Jaguar, they need to observe how much nicer the interiors of those cars are.
Indeed. I was shocked when I first hitched a ride in a Model S – the interior is more spartan and cramped than that of a 90s Japanese keicar (an impressive feat, in a sense) apart from the entertainment system, which had an uglier, clunkier UI than what any web developer could have drawn you up in a week.
The sales rep's "oh don't worry about battery replacement cycles, nobody keeps a car for longer than five years anyway" statement was only the final nail in the coffin.
That's his sales market. Tesla wants fanboy buyers who will be upgrading within five years and that's not a bad thing. They are such a small player that they can do this. I used to lease SUVs on 2-year lease. They had massive incentives and very high residuals because the manufacturers realize they can sell you 5 cars every decade if you are loyal. I did it because the savings were awesome, but I eventually stopped because I got sick of shopping for a new car every two years.
Not at all, but it was incredibly affordable considering that in 10 years I never had a car older than 2 years. There is zero maintenance other than a few oil changes. Like I said, the residuals were usually so high that the buy-out was not realistic. That kept the lease rate very low and made it unthinkable to keep it at the end.
See above. That is a valid claim to subsidy, but it's not the one I'm referring to, which involves, depending on your view / word choices: total factor costs, solar emergy cost, or natural capital costs.
It's a net decrease in total wealth, if you include natural capital in that metric. Various authorities differ on that. As early as the late 19th century, Adam Smith's biographer and scholar Edwin Cannan was noting that Smith's definition of wealth, "the annual labour and produce of the nation", doesn't account for natural capital: farmland, forests, fisheries, game, topsoil, and natural resources.
How much would it cost you to create a barrel of crude oil?
Not "extract from the ground", the usual meaning of "producing oil", which borrows rather more from "produce the evidence" than "manufacture the good". But actually start with high-entropy substrates and some energy source and synthesize oil.
Why do markets not account for this cost?
(Hotelling's Rule is ignored, and is, moreover, based on faulty logic. Curiously, Bohm-Bawerk, an Austrian Economist, gets far close to the truth in his theory of value, an exceedingly rare case in which I find myself agreeing with any Austrian principles.)
Why would it make any sense to account for the effort needed to produce oil from high-entropy substrates and an energy source? If you're going that far, why not take it to its logical conclusion and ask how much it would cost to create a barrel of crude oil starting from nothing at all, creating your own Big Bang and going from there? As Sagan said, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
There are certainly implicit subsidies for oil, in the form of the externalities like health and environmental damage from the pollution emitted when using it. But it makes no sense to me to account for the work that went into creating the oil. Hordes of microbes already did that work millions or billions of years ago. It's done, it's there, and the cost of taking advantage of that work is just the cost of extraction and use.
Looking at the actual cost of formation of fossil fuels makes sense from a total accounting standpoint. That's a depletion of an existing capital stock -- a bank account, if you will. Might want to talk to the good citizens of Nauru about their experience.
And actually, tracing back resources to their antecedents is useful -- there are compounds which formed through biological activity (fossil fuels, limestone, most iron ores, a particularly interesting study), and elements which formed, variously, through stellar fusion (most helium in the universe, though not on Earth, for various reasons, also C, N, O, F, and a few others), supernovae, neutron star collisions, including gold and platinum-group metals (the alchemists were really out of their league...), and, if you want the antecedent of hydrogen itself, yes, the Big Bang.
There are several factors to consider, and source resource costing (solar emergy cost, or exergic potential cost) are among them:
1. Solar (or other source) emergic cost. What was the initial energy influx basis for the resource creation. For fossil fuels, Jeffrey S. Duke's 2003 paper, "Burning Buried Sunshine", provides an excellent breakdown. Humans are burning fossil fuels at the rate of about 5 million years of accumulation per year of present consumption. Given ~200-300 million years of accumulation, and at best a partial recovery rate (not all resource can be feasibly extracted), that's a quantifiably finite period.
2. Production / renewal rate. Another response on this thread looks at water. If you live in a region where rainfall levels are high, say, Seattle, with over 1,000 mm/year, you're starting with a basis of 10 million litre/hectare of water. In Las Vegas, with 100 mm/yr, you're down to 1 million litre/hectare, and have evaporation and soil absorption to deal with as well.
If you're a farmer in western Nebraska, you might want to consider that the water you're pulling from your well represents a few thousand years of accumulation per year of use. That's not going to be particularly sustainable. And figuring your costs only on the drilling and pumping costs, rather than a capital depletion allowance for the water itself, is significant.
While the work which went into creating that resource wasn't contributed by you, it's work that isn't being performed today, at rates equivalent to present usage.
An alternate formulation which might make sense (and this is similar to the description Hotelling used in his original paper, though I came up with it independently and realised that later): say you've discovered a sudden and unexpected inheritance. Not just a rich uncle, but a rich family line has died and left you an accumulated inheritance worth, well, a lot of money.
There's a restriction. You can only withdraw as much of this as you can comfortably carry at a time, it takes some rooting around to actually provide you with the cash, and you've got to take a taxi across town to the bank in order to withdraw your funds.
Does it make sense to account for your cost of withdrawal as only the cab-fare and time costs you incur directly, or to figure in the depletion value of the account itself. I'm pretty sure a bookkeeper or accountant would want to include the latter.
Your next question concerns the size of the inheritance. If it's $10,000, you might spend much of it within a few months, if you were living on it exclusively. At $100,000, a year or two, at $1 million, you could live comfortably for some years, at $1 billion, assuming you were merely spending it down, you could live out your lifetime. The size of the account matters.
(I'm ignoring pollution and other secondary effects here.)
You might even cut others in on the deal if the total value were, say, a few trillions of dollars. Which might make it run down faster.
I'm looking up total resources (that's the total material amount, recoverable or not) of coal and oil. A 1975 USGS estimate was 14.5 trillion tons of coal, and a GeoScienceWorld estimate give 3 trillion barrels of petroleum (http://geoscienceworld.org/content/global-resource-estimates...), though that I believe excludes previous consumption, which I'll assume as that again, so a 6 trillion barrel total original endowment.
If you were to consider the equivalent energy content from what humans previously relied on for biofuel, namely wood, that's ... a lot of wood. A ton of coal is roughly the same energy as a cord of wood -- about 30 million BTU per cord of oak, 14.5 trillion tons is about 13 trillion cords. And 6 trillion barrels of oil is about 7 trillion cords of wood.
We had a 20 trillion cord total fossil fuel resource.
Swapping out that fossil fuel resource for wood production leaves us looking at 200,000 years of equivalent global timber harvest.
Again: we've consumed roughly half that -- 100,000 years of tree growth -- in just over 200 years (and most of that within the past 50). Mind that here we're not talking about input energy (emergy) but the total available energy equivalent (exergy) from fossil fuels. The input would be hundreds to millions of times as much.
(This also has a great deal to inform the question of offsetting carbon output through forestry -- we'd need phenomenally rapid plant growth, and no liberating of that carbon.)
As to your first point -- you're actually correct, we don't necessarily need to figure our cost on the basis of what it took to produce the resource we're using. We can consider the best available alternative fuels, and their cost and flux characteristics. Still doesn't look particularly promising.
Another interesting, though to me fascinating study is to look at the history of extractive resource pricing and price management over time, particularly over the past 150 years or so (the fossil fuel era). Early oil extraction especially was characterised by massive overdrilling -- the "derrick forests" of Titusvill, Oil Creek, East Texas, Los Angeles, and Kern County, all speak to that. Rising alongside this were efforts to create coordinated systems for managing that activity: John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, the 1931 initiation of extraction quotas managed via certificates of clearance through the highly inaccurately named Texas Railroad Commission and US Department of Interior (a fascinating history, see chapter 13 of Daniel Yergin's epic on oil history, The Prize, also https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/doe01, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mlc03, and http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-oil-export-controls-kemp-...), as well as national producers and OPEC.
Absent specific limits on rates of oil extraction, in the aftermath of "Poppy" Joiner's "Daisy No. 3" well, oil prices in Texas (and the US) fell from $1/bbl, to $0.13/bbl, and then further to $0.02/bbl, as wildcatters fought to out-extract one another, often on leases too small to individually segregate underground pools. It wasn't until government coercion, at force of arms (Texas and Oklahoma's governors called out their respective national guards, Texas also the Rangers, to sieze wellhead operations), that the overpumping stopped.
Again: without some level of collective, coercive power, the tendency was to simply suck wells as fast as possible, despite falling market prices (lower prices actually promoted ever-more-frantic pumping due to loan obligations), even if that destroyed longer-term productivity and potential of wells. Rockefeller described a similar rationale for his privately organised control system.
Hotelling's 1931 paper alludes to this in its introduction:
"CONTEMPLATION of the world's disappearing supplies of minerals, forests, and other exhaustible assets has led to demands for regulation of their exploitation. The feeling that these products are now too cheap for the good of future generations, that they are being selfishly exploited at too rapid a rate, and that in consequence of their excessive cheapness they are being produced and consumed wastefully has given rise to the conservation movement."
When you consider that under-priced energy, again, possibly by a factor of 100x to 1,000,000x, substitutes for labour and depresses the costs of virtually all other production, this becomes more than a passing concern.
That's all very interesting, and I totally agree that when you're extracting a resource faster than it's being created, you need to somehow account for the fact that the available quantity is finite.
But I don't see why looking at the energy used to create the resource, or the cost of creating it from scratch, is useful. All that matters today is what's there and how much we use. For example, consider oil versus uranium. In terms of usable energy content, there's a lot more uranium than oil on the planet. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm guessing that stellar nucleosynthesis of heavy elements like uranium is way less efficient than turning CHON into oil with photosynthesis and time. Certainly, if we were creating this stuff today, it would be way cheaper to create a megajoule of oil than a megajoule of U235. But, who cares? We have more uranium, so it ought to be cheaper per megajoule, all else being equal (which it very much isn't, of course).
You say that we're consuming about five million years of fossil fuel production per year, and that there's about 200-300 million years total. The rate is basically ignorable compared to usage, so what really matters is reserves divided by consumption rate. The relevant number is 40-50 years of reserves at current rates. For example, say it turns out that the geologists and petrochemists got it wrong, oil is actually much more energy intensive to produce naturally, and current reserves actually represent 400-600 million years of accumulation. The energetic cost accounting changes dramatically; each barrel of oil now represents twice as much input energy! But our economic situation today doesn't change one bit.
Taking your inheritance analogy, it doesn't matter how much money your rich family line started with, all that matters is how much is there now. It doesn't make a bit of difference to your spending whether your $10 million inheritance is the paltry remains of a $10 billion fortune, or the amazing end result of a $10 investment.
The whole business of input energy and cost to recreate just seems so very arbitrary. For example, why are you counting the cost of the oil, but not the cost of the oxygen you use to burn it? Both parts are necessary, and the fact that oxygen is ubiquitous and easy to access just makes it even more of a subsidy. Shouldn't we be counting not only all the fossil energy needed to create the oil we burn, but all the fossil energy needed to crack all that oxygen out of CO2?
Ethanol is highly subsidised and reliant on petroleum and natural-gas fed processes. 40% of US corn goes to provide about 10% of motor fuel as ethanol, with a net EROEI that's very close to break-even -- some studies show a net energy loss, a few a slight gain.
At the turn of the 20th century, when horses were used for local transport, about 25% of US grain production went to transport fuel supply -- as horse feed. In Europe, historically, that value was closer to 33%.
Pricing these in terms of labour equivalents without mechanisation or fossil-fuel derived fertiliser and pesticides probably gives the fairest comparison.
Scaling biofuel production to present levels of petroleum consumption is entirely nontractable.
Biodiesel costs range from $300 to $1000 /bbl. That's 3-10x petroleum at its peak prices, and 10-30x its recent price of ~$30 bbl.
As an opportunistic adjunct to fuels, biomass from waste streams and some dedicated fuels production may make sense. At present scales of fuel use, it cannot and almost certainly never will compete. We'll either have to use far less fuel, or have far fewer people. Which may happen regardless.
so your thinking Tesla isn't buying completed components from third party suppliers? Really? That antiquated dealer model also protects consumers against manufacturers who would otherwise ignore them as large companies can. It also would probably do well against an executive who tends to mock customers (and even lose in court with having to buy cars back)
Sorry, but you don't understand Tesla's manufacturing or that of any automaker. A large amount of the assemblies are outsourced. For the larger companies even drive trains and transmissions can be but that is rare. Ford and GM cooperated on ten speed transmissions recently so that is a benefit of such sourcing.
How about the employees at all of the subcontractors each of the incumbent manufacturers uses for completed components?
Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it's actually pretty meaningless on its own.
Being boring, and looking at sustainable production costs and what consumers are willing to pay is far closer to what matters than the shorthand of looking at employees per car.
At first that seems right. But there is a big BUT. Even Tesla has outsourced a lot of components. A lot of the components except the drivetrain is being outsourced. There are only 2 manufacturers for airbags in the world. There is only 1 good quality manufacturer in the world for the in car rearview mirror. There is only 1 manufacturer for the Homelink system with its best features developed by an Audi engineer I personally know. (All the Homelink systems in the premium cars are this only one system and I know the 2014 numbers sold to Tesla at that time.) The brake system in the Model X is from Bosch. And so on.
So Tesla is at the same level of outsourcing like every one else. So actually you can compare the numbers.
It's a very important metric. The number of man-hours per item is a good stand-in for production costs. It isn't perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works.
I'm interested to hear of how much staff time is put to new production/development and how much is dedicated to maintaining the current fleet. I have to believe that Toyota walks away in that area too.
I think this is different between companies but not in the way you are suggesting.
For example, concerning the subject we are discussing in the first place, Tesla because of the specificity of their cars probably have to produce themselves a huge part of the components of the car whereas Ford, Volkswagen,... are now to a point where a huge amount of the parts of their car are similar and can be outsourced to contractors that will decrease costs by producing only one type of components in huge quantity and provides to multiple constructors (who looks more and more like assemblers nowadays).
So I agree that it is in fact not easy to compare manufacturers on this metrics but I would believe that it's actually suggesting that Tesla does a lot more in-house than conventional car manufacturers.
> It isn't perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works.
Not sure but we might be having an apples-to-oranges comparison here:
If man hours pr item are significantly better for one but the other has much lower materials cost pr item (motors, sales etc) or enormously lower fixed costs then it is not so easy to say anymore.
You are comparing premium tesla sedans with ford and Honda cars, of course premium car will take longer to build. Porsche for example produced 189,000 cars [1] in 2014 with 19,000 employees. And the average price of Porsche car is also lower than Tesla's.
[1] - http://press.porsche.com/news/release.php?id=897
The premium car will have lot more parts, like 26-speaker sound system etc, additional soundproofing, double-pane glass, heated _and_cooled seats etc. That takes work to install.
Next, the QA on a premium car has to me more stringent, simply because the expectations are higher.
So I can't imagine luxury car not taking more time to make than a budget car.
By which accounts? I've honestly never heard anyone complaining about QA or "Not Premium Enough"
For example, Top Speed suggests that all other manufacturers are still playing catch-up. That it'd be nice if the seats had been updated a bit, but otherwise things are great.
Buyers of premium cars expect details that are expensive to manufacture. That doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be difficult to manufacture them or that the productivity has to be low.
but tesla's production rate is increasing. the end of q2 saw rates of over 2k cars/week, which would be on target for >100k/year, over twice 2015's rate.
employees per car is irrelevant metric as business lines are totally different. Exclude people working on the charger network, dealerships and home products (powerwall) and then it will be more or less apples to apples comparison.
A certain amount of optimism is a necessary prerequisite of being an entrepreneur. Nobody would ever do it if they knew from the start how hard it would be.
I think some of this might be offset by the fact that this plan doesn't seem to focus on just cars. A solar product described in the first step of the plan could help fund the cars.
> Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee.
This is an awesome analysis. Do you happen to know the numbers for BMW, the most frequently compared "like" to Tesla that I've seen? (or a similar luxury company)
shhh, everyone knows ford is an antiquated company run by morons who think a computer is just a fancy light box and tesla is going to run them out of business within 5 years.
> "When used correctly, [partially autonomous driving] is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves"
If you're an American, you're twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.
A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.
I do wonder, though, how this would reshape our cities - if we're not careful. Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we're not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
> If you're an American, you're twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.
If you're an American you're more likely to die from suicide than you are from motor vehicle related injuries. You're more likely to be poisoned than to die in a motor vehicle crash. You're 16 times more likely to die from heart disease or cancer.
Compared to 1950, motor vehicle death rates have more than halved.
There are 30,000 motor vehicle deaths in America each year. In perhaps 30 years, fully autonomous vehicles could cut all of that needless carnage to nearly nothing.
And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we'll be spared?
Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
> Americans spend a million days each year in the hospital due to injuries sustained in motor vehicles.
Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger.
Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-24 the death rate is 21.5. From 24-75 the rates drop a few points for both sexes and then increase again after 75.
> In the medium term, fully-autonomous vehicles will eventually cut both of those numbers to virtually zero.
My point is, the statistics may be painting a different picture when viewed in the whole. Even if this specific case is true, we may just be trading one cause of death for another. There's no guarantee overall injury or "suffering" will be reduced.
> When they're available worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
Maybe, and maybe when everyone can afford them. Yet still, even today in America, more likely to die to the Flu than you are to motor vehicle related injuries.
I'm all for automated cars, but I'm skeptical of the rhetoric that gets tossed around.
Blind "cause of death" stats are fairly meaningless.
I believe a better standard is to look at QALY -- quality-adjusted life years. That deducts relatively little for, say, a heart-attack at age 85 (you're already at your maximum life expectancy), but would put a heavy weight to, say, a pre-teen girl crippled by an auto accident, but surviving for life.
True, and that's a fair way to look at things. To me, the overall picture is that young men are exceptionally self-destructive when compared to anyone else.
While self driving cars are part of the picture towards reducing deaths in this group, it's incomplete; and you might do just as well with better parental controls and driver behavior reporting embedded into vehicle control software. Some of this is already available, but I have a feeling it's used far less often than it otherwise could be; which speaks to differing levels of parental involvement in the safety of their teenagers.
At the same time nobody's discussing taking motorcycles off the road and we're not at a point where we can put the requisite technologies in motorcycles to grant them the same safety we're supposing automated vehicles will possess. These vehicles in particular kill a disproportionate amount of young males.
Even if we do add these technologies to a motorcycle, you can still buy an ATV, or a snowmobile, or a farm tractor or any number of other off-road gasoline powered gadgets that can quickly become lethal.
I have nothing against the advancement of the safety of human society through technology, but I don't like the taste of the automated vehicle kool-aid that gets passed around and I'd like us to hedge our bets. That's all.
> My point is, the statistics may be painting a different picture when viewed in the whole. Even if this specific case is true, we may just be trading one cause of death for another. There's no guarantee overall injury or "suffering" will be reduced.
The same is true when you prevent death by any means at all. Everyone dies eventually by some cause. This does not mean we shouldn't try to prolong life where we can by avoiding early, needless death! (Otherwise why would we even have airbags or seatbelts, etc?)
>There are 30,000 motor vehicle deaths in America each year. In perhaps 30 years, fully autonomous vehicles could cut all of that needless carnage to nearly nothing.
There is a huge assumption underlying this: That computer systems would be more intelligent than humans.
I believe the opposite: Computer systems will be much dumber than humans, and increase the number of accidents if ever adopted on large scale.
It's not a question of intelligence, but of attention. Few crashes are caused by wrong inferences; most are caused by lapses in attention or impaired judgement. Computer systems do not necessarily suffer from those.
But... I quite like the theory that a developer has spent time (whilst not under much pressure) analysing crashes and potential crash scenarios, and programming to accommodate; rather than me trying to make a good-and-safe decision in milliseconds in the heat of the moment.
Maybe that would be a good thing? Without need for parking, commercial districts could get denser and denser, and people could have nice large homes far away for cheaper than ever. If the cars aren't causing pollution or gridlock, what's so bad about living in the suburbs?
Electric cars cause pollution; they run on mostly coal or natural gas and have very toxic-to-mine, manufacture, and dispose-of batteries. They also emit just as much particulate emissions as normal cars: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/electric-car-particulate-m...
The way to "save the planet" is to not drive. Driving a 5000# vehicle around thinking you're doing good for the environment is just the marketing genius of the car industry in 2016.
It's not a requirement that electric vehicles principally derive energy from fossil fuel infrastructure. Electric vehicles are the most flexible vehicles in terms of dependence on any specific energy source or infrastructure.
In Germany, solar power is much more widespread, and so it is more likely that a German electric vehicle user would be riding in a vehicle charged from solar power. This is not to say anything about solar power or Germany, but rather to speak to the flexibility of the electric vehicle. Electric vehicles can depend on an infrastructure running on nuclear energy, or anything else, making it extremely adaptive to the ecological and energy needs of the future.
On the other hand, traditional combustion engine vehicles absolutely depend on fossil fuels, and they depend on a massive infrastructure that is specific to supplying fossil fuels. For a traditional combustion vehicle to shed its utter dependence on fossil fuels would mean finding an alternative and abundant fuel source to combust, and even then it would require a highly specific infrastructure to deliver those alternative fuels.
There's more than lithium in the batteries, and other components such as Cobalt or Arsenic are not exactly nontoxic. On balance however, lithium ion batteries are less toxic than alternatives.
Realistically, at present most EV owners will not charge their cars from solar panels but from the utility mains and that means coal-generated electricity in many if not most areas.
Car manufacturing involves a tremendous investment of energy to mine and produce steel, aluminum, rubber, plastics, and electronics. Recycling itself consumes more energy, and in many cases raw virgin product is cheaper than recycled.
Not driving is impractical. Driving less, when possible, is worth considering.
Right now if you need to buy a car, the most environmentally friendly choice is probably a used (no new manufacturing) fuel-efficient conventional car.
It is perhaps an artifact of the bay area but there are many many Tesla vehicles here and many of them seem to use the superchargers for charging[1]. But the question of pollution and CO2 comparisons between ICE vehicles and electric ones, comes down firmly on the side of the electric vehicles (for the case of California at least). The thermal efficiency of converting gas to electricity is over 47% and the closest an ICE can come is about 38%. Lots of additional information from the EIA here [2].
[1] A friend of mine who owns one said the only thing worse than the 20 minute charge time is waiting 20 minutes to plug into an available spot.
It's kinda meaningless to look at the hypothetical future with automated cars all around (how far away is that? at least a decade, I'd bet), and assume that the current distribution of power sources still applies.
>Electric cars cause pollution; they run on mostly coal or natural gas.
There's also a ton of energy going into the cracking of crude into its constitutions parts before it even enters the supply chain for use in ICE vehicle.
Further, centralized power generation does a much better job at filtering and removing toxic elements from its discharge stream than gasoline/diesel vehicles filtering mechanisms do.
Notwithstanding the above, fossil fuel electric plants can be removed from the grid and replaced by cleaner energy solutions without having to replace or modify the consuming vehicle.
When vehicles don't crash, they don't have to be crashworthy, and don't have to weigh two tons. That, in turn will cut particulate emissions from brakes and tires, and cut the environmental impact of manufacturing inputs.
Suburbs destroy public life, create anxiety and a sense of atomization, and turn natural spaces into scar tissue. Even if you could perfect transportation technology, suburbs are the least optimal configuration for humans to live in the world.
Dense urban areas create anxiety for me, while suburbs give the nice quiet retreat with plenty of open space, and no random annoyances. I bet I'm not alone in this. Don't assume that your subjective personal experiences translate to everyone.
Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?
Low density remote developments or just typical suburbs cause higher pollution, higher service costs, segregation, hurt smaller businesses and have a negative impact on health.
Modern urbanism is very opposed to urban sprawl because of those and many other reasons. Transport is just one aspect of it.
I'm curious about your "have a negative impact on health" approach. The density of a typical city is orders of magnitude greater than anything that our ancestors have seen in nature; and, historically, cities have been a breeding ground for all kinds of diseases (because sanitation is harder and spreading is easier). Can you clarify what exactly you meant?
I'm not sure that higher pollution is innate in lower densities, or whether that is due to the specific way our suburbs are designed today, and the technologies (such as ICE for transportation) that we use to enable them. It feels like an engineering problem.
And sure, putting everyone into a giant anthill might make it cheaper to contain and dispose of all the generated pollution. But then we should be honest and admit that it's about cost, not about what's best.
Small businesses - I don't think there's any innate value to them, in a sense that we need as many as we need to serve our needs, but there's no "right" for any particular small business to be viable in a world with changing conditions. If suburbs can sustain fewer small businesses, so be it.
Segregation is an orthogonal issue. I think you meant stuff like "white flight", but it is a symptom rather than a cause. If you prevent people from moving away, it will not resolve the tensions that make them desire to move - indeed, it may well exacerbate them.
What you refer to as "modern urbanism" sounds like an ideology that insists that it's the right solution for everyone, and those who disagree should be forced into it for their own good. I think that different people have different preferences in this aspect, as they do in most others, and that any approach should, ideally, try to respect those preferences, rather than ignoring them, or pretending that they are irrelevant.
Again, you're pointing out issues that are about a specific implementation of low-density living, and not inherent to the concept itself. Why can't we have suburbs with sidewalks, for example?
FWIW, the suburb where I live is on the edge of a wilderness area. There are several great walking, cycling and hiking trails within a 2 mile radius. Some of those are fairly steep, too, so even one mile provides a good workout. I find that I engage in these activities far more often than what I lived in a large city, and had to drive for quite a bit before getting anywhere bigger than a tiny block-sized park.
Sure implementation details matter. There's lots of good, traditionally built, well crafted small towns (with sidewalks!) outside of major cities that are "suburbs." Typically when an urbanist is disparaging the suburb they're talking about the common strip mall, cul-de-sac suburb type that isn't this. There's studies that show that these poorly built suburbs discourage walking and negatively affect health. Pick up the book Happy City if you're interested. It discusses how the differences in design of cities has implications on people's lives
Dense urban areas provide excellent opportunity for rent seeking by urban land owners. The mobility provided the automobile (also rail and bicycles) made it practical to live outside urban areas where land is cheaper, which also permitted lower density. Urban land rent decreased significantly between the late 19th century and the mid 20th century.
The alternate future would have seen everyone living in dense urban areas paying most of their wages as rent to the descendants of gilded age land owners.
> The alternate future would have seen everyone living in dense urban areas paying most of their wages as rent to the descendants of gilded age land owners.
Which is what is happening now anyway. The suburban sprawl merely delayed it by a few decades (okay, maybe half a century, to be generous), but all the underlying issues with it are still there.
> Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?
Because humans are irrational.
Gentler answer: Because of a variety of social, political, and economic pressures. For example, quick list because I really shouldn’t be spending time on this:
* Social: Running away from black people.
* Political: Spreading out the population in case of nuclear war. Accommodating population growth without the headache of having to tear down any existing building. Giving the white flight voting bloc the housing that they think they deserve.
* Economic: A fad in having housing physically separated from jobs and other commercial activities, like the current ridiculous fad of flat UI design in software. Objectively worse, but that’s what you get paid to build and favorable financing to buy.
What I care about is that suburbs are not sustainable. The climate change crisis is acute now, and I look at the per capita use of energy, water, and infrastructure (how many miles of roads per capita, how many miles of driving per capita, how many miles of water pipes per capita, how much water usage per capita), and on no measure are suburbs better than dense cities. Take away debt financing for the infrastructure, which eventually does stop working, and I don’t think most suburbs would physically survive.
This would imply that there isn't enough space for everyone. Is that true, though? It feels like most dense concentrations of people are created artificially - either directly through borders (e.g. Haiti vs Dominican Republic), or indirectly through economic limitations (have to live close to where jobs are and commute is too expensive etc). If so, then this is a solvable problem.
One other point I wanted to address. One negative side of sprawl is how it affects natural environments - but, again, does it really have to, or do we do it just because it's the easiest and cheapest way to implement it? It feels like living less densely could actually be beneficial for the environment if done right, compared to the cities. Consider: a metropolis will always carve a chunk out of nature and replace it with a dense grid of roads around high rises, completely ruining the ecological system in the affected area - heck, our cities even have their own microclimates now, because of how much heat we pump out at once in a single place.
On the other hand, a single residence does not have a significant impact; and if you space them out sufficiently, you can preserve the original environment in that space between. Infrastructure is trickier and more invasive, but we've seen some trends towards more localization recently (e.g. with residential solar, composting etc).
Who knows, perhaps we can actually make this description from "The Diamond Age" a reality?
"The prevailing architecture here, among those who had not adopted neo-Victorian precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people were somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell even a handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched monotonously up the tumbling slopes toward the frozen, sodden ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half buried, a house wasn't even a proper house; it was an association of modules, scattered about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels."
No, that's not the implication. The implication is that each person wants space around their house, but would ideally be close to all the amenities they visit (like restaurants, doctors, groceries) in order to avoid wasteful transport - think a manor house with a village around it. But instead everybody builds space around their house and now they all live a long way away from everything they need to get to.
Right. So people are willing to live further away from amenities for the sake of having more space. Seems like the desire for more room is pretty strong. Why, then, is dense urban living preferable? Why shouldn't we be trying to start with the premise that less dense is better, and design from there?
Because travel is polluting for a start. When we get cold fusion teleportation with no environmental externalities then everyone can live 100 miles from work if they want. When we don't have to carpet the world in roads and internet cables and have people drive past their house to deliver mail every day they can live as far away as they want. When they aren't burning fossil fuels to heat 40000 square feet of living room then they can live in the biggest house they can build and I won't care. Until all those things are true, I'm going to argue that dense urban living is better and we should be encouraging it or at the very least zoning for it and allowing it.
I'm a bit of a germaphobe, so I may be over-sensationalizing the risk. But high human density seems to be a dangerous living condition in terms of illness. History has shown numerous plagues that have wiped out vast numbers of people living in dense human areas. With the continued resistance and misuse of antibiotics, it seems highly likely that we will see some sort of plague that will impact people in direct proportion to their direct contact with other humans.
Its not so much the density (which is important) as the cross-contamination. Everybody travels nearly everywhere without so much as a doctor's note. There's no such thing as a quarantined population, nor any attempt to test travelers for dangerous pathogens.
If you moved cattle or poultry around like we move people, you'd get fined and put out of business. Deservedly so, because of the risk of spreading disease and wiping out whole crops of valuable animals. But people, not so important I guess.
If this scenario has a majority of cars autonomously driven, congestion is less of a problem. The cars would cooperate to solve congestion issues that individual human drivers struggle with. Also, as a passenger you're probably sleeping or being productive within the car, so the increased commute time is less of a problem.
That was my point. If I buy a van that drives itself I can tolerate much longer commutes - I'll just put a bed in the back and sleep my way to work. So what if it takes three hours.
Incidentally, I was talking with a government transportation engineer recently, and that's what keeps them up at night - trips that are too long or just too inconvenient today become doable with self driving cars.
Theoretically autonomous cars will decrease congestion through better driving patterns and maybe coordinating with each other, meaning we could support a lot more traffic with the infrastructure we already have.
The operative word is "theoretically." It remains to be demonstrated that thousands of independent autonomous vehicles can really operate in congested areas more effectively than human drivers.
AFAIK none of the current autonomous control technology coordinates in any way with other vehicles or any kind of central control facility. Human drivers using Waze is probably the closest approximation of that to date.
> Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we're not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
I was just thinking about this today (and have been for a while now), but with regards to vehicle comfort.
I drive a small sedan, but have ridden in pickup trucks and SUVs. They are far more comfortable than the sedans the way they sit taller, have far more room, and feel like a small bubble protecting one from the rest of the world.
This is a danger on two fronts: safety, and comfort leading to more driving. If we continue to make cars more comfortable, we continue to abstract the idea that we are zipping around in 3,000 pound death machines, thus leading to more reckless or risky behavior.
As autonomous vehicles roll out to the public, no doubt people will expect computers, internet, and television to be front and center. Others may take naps during commutes. But with this, rather than curing the disease that is longer and longer commutes due to policy that encourages sprawl, entertainment will just treat the symptoms.
I know what you mean about SUVs and trucks feeling safer and more comfortable. Objectively however, their handling characteristics and weight distribution (particularly the very light rear weight in pickups) make them quite a bit less safe in terms of what they will do in a high speed evasive action situation.
It may create more sprawl, but 2 of the big complaints I've heard about living in a city is how hard it is to get around, and it's hard to have a car that allows you to leave. Autonomous cars would solve both of these problems while freeing up cityscapes to also be more walkable/bikeable (you have to do something with what was former car parking).
This future is interesting because both living way out in the suburbs AND living in a city both become more attractive.
It's more that it's time consuming than boring, which obviously gets worse with urban sprawl. Sure, I can do all my "down time" entertainment, but I can't schedule anything else while I'm commuting which is the real issue.
Though many US city demographics are different to anywhere else in the world due to white flight - the "wealth donut" around a poor inner city rather rather than people getting poorer as you move further out in the suburbs.
Honest question: are any of the large European cities seeing the "white flight" phenomenon with the influx of poor middle eastern and african immigrants?
IMO it's the reverse; all the fun for young wealthy people is in the city centre, while minorities are pushed out to the suburbs. Old tenement buildings get reworked into apartments, warehouses in old industrial districts get similar treatment, etc.
Is that why the streets are empty and you can always find a parking space in London? How about downtown Shanghai? Or Rome? Or the suburbs of Guadalajara? This qualifies as some of the rest of the world and all of the places mentioned are traffic nightmares. It must be all of the walkers clogging up the roads.
As far as the rest of the world loving it, that's ridiculous. The mom in rural Kenya walking miles each day for water.. I bet she'd love a car. When you have to get to a meeting and its 40C outside, I'm sure a brisk walk would be just adorable.
Not everyone can afford to live within walking distance.
The walking remark by GP was perhaps a bit snarky, but there is a deeper point to be made: if the problem is caused by cars, limiting your view to designing better cars is not a smart strategy (don't get me wrong: we should build better, safer, smarter cars, they just shouldn't be the only potential solution we look at). Something something Ford something "faster horses".
There's public transport, there's biking, even segways and hoverboards and those motorised skateboards everyone loves, and the list goes on. All of which are technologies which themselves can be improved too.
Taking bikes as an example, since I'm most familiar with those: Dutch infrastructure is practically built around it[0] and for the vast majority of trips, which are short-distance, it is a far better solution than cars. (of course the Netherlands is unfairly advantaged here, being compact and flat, but that does not make bikes useless elsewhere). For long distance trips a combination of public transport and a locally rented bike is usually all you need to get around. Amsterdam is a famously bike friendly capital, but all our cities are, really, and especially in smaller ones like Groningen it is the de-facto mode of transportation[1][2].
As for your Kenya example, in most contexts bikes are arguably a better solution in developing countries than cars: it needs no fuel, is simple enough to fix yourself, possible to make from local materials even (see Ghana's bamboo bikes[4] for example), less dependent on roads and existing infrastructure and still enough of a time and energy saver that it brings a lot of wealth to the people who own one.
I agree about the point of different transport options, but then if you want to go full-efficiency with public transport, you have the concept of PRT[0]... which when you look at it you realize it's exactly what Tesla is aiming for with autonomous electric car fleets.
So in this case yes, designing a better car may be a big part of the solution.
Oh yes, absolutely! The other worrying bits there are the need for a standard, for which we have the always relevant xkcd[0], and this:
> The report also concluded that, despite these advantages, public authorities will not commit to building PRT because of the risks associated with being the first public implementation.
Of course, there's also the question of whether this will be more or less efficient than a smart fleet of buses, for example.
Yes there are bad things too. I contend the bad things about car societies are worse. Not everyone can afford to not live in walking distance... we probably can't even afford it.
Cities already tend to have limited parking. We might see more parking structures located in cheap out-of-the-way locations rather than near places people want to go. And street parking could go away in favor of consolidated parking structures, freeing up road space for both car traffic (with extra lanes) and foot traffic (widen sidewalks).
But I think it'll have an even larger effect on suburban areas. Shopping centers, strip malls, and similar will no longer need to have massive flat single-story parking lots, freeing up a huge amount of space. Likewise for major employers, and commuter parking lots for mass transit.
Instead of 100 people owning 100 cars they drive 5% of the time, they could own 10 summonable cars that drive them around 50% of the time.
The first scenario requires 95 parking spots. The second only 5. There is still as much traffic on the roads, and as much transport work being done, but most of the space now needed for parking can be put to other use.
No because you have to account for peak usage and have the capacity for it. There will be car savings, but the math wont be as simple as you say it is.
Have staggered work start and end times and "peak usage" will be a less pronounced peak. Also add in more home offices. I've no doubt that in 20 years car ownership will be a fraction of what it is today. Everything points in that direction and nothing opposes it.
> Have staggered work start and end times and "peak usage" will be a less pronounced peak.
This would have benefits today, but still rarely happens. A very small fraction of massive businesses have shift workers do this to more efficiently handle the volume that transitions between shifts would otherwise cause, but the vast majority of businesses do not. I don't think self-driving cars would change this.
> Also add in more home offices.
This would help today as well, but I don't think self-driving cars will change this either. (And if they do, it might not be in the direction you'd hope: self-driving cars might cause people to tolerate longer commutes.)
A taxi driver has a salary of, let's say, $40k a year. When that's removed the cost to travel in an autonomous car will be so low that it's lower than most forms of public transport with the benefit that it brings you door to door.
> A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.
Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident).
The problem is that a typical person doesn't care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are "normal." We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and/or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber/Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve.
Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone's built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn't yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.
There's also a significant tort issue. Consider the case where a drunk driver kills himself and someone else. Now consider the case where an autonomous vehicle kills its passenger and the passenger in another car.
A jury needs to award damages against A) the grieving widow of the drunk driver or B) A large corporation. I suspect the latter will be at least an order of magnitude higher. This means that until autonomous vehicles are an order of magnitude safer, the car companies will have to absorb more damages than the sum of what all of their customers would have.
While the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved annually, worldwide, due to self-driving vehicles is more than enough to justify hurrying toward that goal, self driving technology will have enormous secondary effects, only some of which can be reliably predicted.
Your concern about sprawl could come true, or vehicles could switch largely to on-demand access, where urbanization will provide the critical mass for on-demand vehicle use, making the exurbs relatively more expensive.
I don't understand, why would you need self driving cars if you don't want to drive? Public transport is here, is cheaper and safer. Also it allows to multitask.
I'm a huge fan of public transit. It is of limited utility in land-use patterns typical of modern American cities, or, far more so, suburbs.
If you can take a vehicle directly to your destination, or a short walk from it, things works pretty well. If you need to transfer, even once, you can easily double trip time (consider a typical commute is ~20 minutes one-way).
Scheduling transfers with shared-roadbed (e.g., bus, light rail) systems is all but impossible.
Prior to the creation of early transit systems (horse-drawn omnibuses, either wheeled or tracked), few cities had a cross-section of more than 1-2 miles, as 1 miles is about a 20 minute walk. Streetcars (horse, electric, steam) extended that based on their average speed, typically 5-15 mph, with a 5-10 mile commute becoming possible though still usually less, and those commutes forming along rail lines, hence a hub-and-spoke city layout (see for example Chicago). Dense grids such as New York's were unusual.
Personal (or small-ridership) vehicles can go directly point-to-point, and make longer, flexible-route commutes possible (I'm not saying this is a good thing, merely a fact), though requiring parking, chauffers/cabbies, automatic vehicle control, etc.). In an interesting parallel, one reason there were so many horses in late-19th-century America was because of railroads. You had 30-60 MPH transit along fixed routes, but limited movement within cities or towns. So horses, wagons, and coaches to get to and from railway stations for goods and people. Petrol-powered automobiles replaced horses before they substituted for trains, though railroad use was already in decline by 1920 (rising one last time due to fuel rationing in WWII).
Upshot: there's a place for public transit, but almost certainly only with massively revamped land-use within urban and suburban regions.
Well.... public transportation requires infrastructure which is not always around. In the south-east USA, for instance, there are public buses here and there but they rarely go for more than a few miles, and there are no trains or subways to travel mid-distance or between cities.
So grey-hound or car rentals are your best bet unless you already own a car.
I'm in one of the most crowded and traffic-ridden of the world, non-US. We have a growing rail complex and a good and frequent bus system. I perceive car ownership as masochism, as public transport is always faster, and you don't have to care about parking, gas, taxes and all the other burdens associated with cars. Electric cars won't solve these, e.g. many cars can self park, but you can't save the time spent searching for a parking space, self drive or manual. It also won't save you from traffic.
There are also legal questions about self driving. For example if my theoretical fully self driving hits a passenger on the zebras that hasn't dresses up for the liking of radars, who is guilty? Certainly there needs to be put in place a big infrastructure for interautomobile communication to effectively avoid crashes. Infrastrutture is unavoidable.
This is like saying: if the electric infrastructure is not good and widely available, then give everyone a generator.
"if the electric infrastructure is not good and widely available, then give everyone a generator"
I like this analogy!
My comment wasn't about how I think things should be, just an observation about how they currently are. Currently in parts of the US (and I'm sure other parts of the globe too), the public transport infrastructure isn't there.
That being said, I long for the day when cities or companies maintain fleets of self-driving cars/buses I can summon as needed.
Self driving cars and public transportation are not mutually exclusive though. Think of how convenient it would be when buses and taxi operate just as easily at night as during the day. One of the reason why cabs are more expensive at night in some cities is because you have to pay the driver more to provide the service at night. Same with buses.
last time I took the bus some guy fell asleep on my shoulder. It's loud, slow, too warm, uncomfortable, and literally makes me feel ill about half the time (I get terrible motion sickness).
I woke up this morning feeling sullen (many factors involved). I didn't feel like going to work. I could hardly get out of bed. I just sat for a few minutes staring in the vacuumn. Something told me to check Hacker News (I am trying to avoid it in morning), and the top link was this. I went through it twice. It instilled hope and enthusiasm in me. I woke up in an instant and rushed to work to do great stuff.
Thanks for the article I am typing this at work, else would have wasted the day filled with self-loathing and despair. Hang in there guys, it gets better. Do Great Stuff.
You might want to seek some help. Unless you're just being dramatic here for effect, there are some red flags in your post such as not being able to get out of bed, being filled with self-loathing and despair, etc.
Don't be so dramatic. This is me every day. It's ADHD meets debt, family obligations, and dead-end job. A lot of entrepreneurs/wantrepreneurs and devs have ADHD. Can't do much about it unless I pop pills, which I'm not overly keen on doing. I'd rather find something to do that motivates me to get out of bed at 5am every day.
I've noticed some form of existential malaise seems to be very common among people with ADHD.
Let me also recommend popping-pills. It's not enough by itself, but it can help you do the yak-shaving that is needed for getting out of a dead-end job. At least speaking for myself, without medication, updating a resume, practicing interviewing skills, and researching job prospects (or alternatively doing market research, developing an MVP, filling out paperwork for a business, and seeking seed funding) could take years.
I wanted to give it a creative twist, sad it turned out dramatic. And I agree with you. Sometimes what motivates you brings you down due to the burden of expectations.
I just realized the other pill beside magnesium complement my doctor prescribed to me was an anti anxiety pill (didn't know the name, thought it was a muscle relaxant). I have to admit that it made my mood smooth, and got out of bed in a way that I didn't since a year. Damn brain.
No different and stronger I suppose, paroxetin/SSRI. Body is weird this thing impacts my overall blood flow. I expected to feel awkwardly stupid happy but it's not, it just makes you calm.
I can't even recall why I/we think of goofy people when thinking of pills. If my sensation is not placebo driven, then these things really are re-balancing tools. I don't feel overly anything, just ok without trying.
Did you catch the SpaceX Launch on Sunday night? Always does the trick for me... Especially when they stick the landing! But regardless, it's a few min's where I can forget myself and cheer for the future.
I'm always surprised when we get insight into Musk's plan, not because they're complicated but because they always come across as "no duh, why aren't we already doing these things? weren't we already on track to do these things decades ago?"
As much as the Internet transformed society, I also can't help but feel like we were on the track to have achieved these things and got distracted by our global communications and selfie-cat picture delivery network and are only now starting to come to our senses as the ubiquity has occurred and the ecosystem of necessary applications has become fleshed out, matured and developed a commercial angle.
If you look at his pre-hardware days, he built basically a e-phonebook when paper phonebooks were still all the rage and a couple payment companies. Both no-duh companies in hindsight.
Musk's plans feel like he's taking a derailed train, applying some common sense grease (solar panels on electric cars? MADNESS! Reusable rocket stages instead of throwing away the entire ship? ~~CRAZY!~~) and getting our civilization going again.
He's also really really public about his plans and telegraphs his moves years in advance...and yet very few seem able to execute anywhere near his league.
I sometimes feel if things had shaken out differently and Steve Jobs was younger than Musk and was running a successful Apple, Musk might try to recruit him with a "do you want to sell cat picture delivery boxes for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
I don't know if Musk is going to succeed in the long run, and I hope serious competition finally shows up (because that makes each of his industries healthier), but seriously,
Tesla and SpaceX required a lot of startup capital (relative to most other technology startups). Yes, their ideas are simple, but few people have the capital to implement those ideas.
Additionally, the existing players in the rocket market didn't have much incentive to innovate given how few players there were. Your guess is as good as mine on why the automobile industry didn't continue much EV research after the 90s.
Its the same reason why Kodak invented the first digital camera and didn't put it in the market. We see the same pattern over and over again and if you work at any of these huge corporations, you understand that the main duty of the executives is to protect their profit centers at all costs. Any product that is capable of cannibalizing on the profit centers will face a tough road to success and at the worst, get culled early.
Then a startup comes along, reinvents or polishes that product and is very successful. Eventually it turns into a BigCo. And the cycle repeats.
The main duty of executives is to increase shareholder value, but their personal incentives are generally misaligned so they
abuse profit centers and undermine company future to hit short term numbers and get the bonuses.
I think it's similar to companies needing a different kind of CEO to bootstrap a company than is needed to scale up and streamline one. It's also very difficult to know which area and how much to risk on something new when you already have a successful product.
Is he putting (or planning on putting) solar panels on cars as you mentioned? I think the "solar-roof-with-battery product" he was referring to was solar city + powerwall on a house.
> The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.
I don't think this is the correct comparison. A car used correctly is safe. We have huge numbers of road accidents because most people are unable to reliably use a car correctly. The value of an 'autopilot' functionality is that it should be much better at using the car correctly in the real world than a human.
What matters is not how many accidents result when using autopilot 'correctly', but how many accidents result from using autopilot in the real world.
Also, because autopilot is primarily used on particular road profiles, it's not fair to compare accidents per autopilot mile directly with accidents per human driver mile. You need to adjust for the fact that autopilot is not used during more complex driving anyway.
I'd be very interested to know what the statistics are for those, since the recent press has given me a (potentially incorrect) impression that autopilot has lead to a relatively large number of serious accidents compared to the number of cars deployed.
Humans are the very definition of imperfection and thinking that you are capable of "correctly using a car" that is, never make the mistake that will cause a terrible accident is a big problem.
It's probably why so much people keep resisting evolution like autopilot, they can't admit that even them can someday fail and crash. They believe that if they are good drivers they will avoid it.
Sadly very good drivers die every day and not only because of someone else's mistake.
Of course a computer or a machine can fail too, but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do. Because we can be careless, sleepy, drunk, unskilled,...
Now the real problem we will face (what scares me even though I'm pro-autopilot) is to accept to hand our lives to machines that will have to make choices in emergency situations (should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it ?, who is responsible in case of a crash ?,...)
> but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do.
Maybe eventually, but what I'm interested in is right now, does the tesla autopilot fail more often than a human driving in similar conditions. My suspicion is that it does.
The data already gathered would indicate that your suspicion is wrong. Currently the US averages 1 fatality for every 89 million miles driven. Autopilot is at almost twice that with only 1 fatality. So autopilot already fails less often than a human.
Then rethink if you really believe that this pedestrian deserves to be dead because you don't trust the data and the world-class engineers for which this is literally their job everyday.
Either you've not read my comments in this thread or I've not clearly explained my point.
Your statistic ignores the fact that autopilot is only used in relatively simple situations, and since you're measuring fatalities only, you need to compare it only with cars of equivalent safety ratings.
If you have statistics comparing humans and autopilot in relevant situations I'd be very interested, but the ones you quote are exactly the ones I'm complaining about as being nonrepresentative.
Even considering all miles equally, a rate of 1 per 130 million autopilot miles (a much too small statistic from which to generalise) still does not compare particularly well to a lot of cars driven by humans, e.g. the BMW 7 series.
Incidentally, it's not at all clear that the situation described in your anecdote even involved the autopilot functionality, as it sounds like it was autonomous breaking which is a standard feature on many cars.
"Sadly very good drivers die every day and not only because of someone else's mistake."
Indeed, and that may often be because of taking warranted risks. It bothers me that when making comparisons of driving safety people tend to suffer from absence blindness and discount other important things like the death avoidance cases. Let's say you have a bleeding injured person which requires urgent access to a medical facility. Here the driver can take some risks in order to save a life. Or any number of causes that may warrant risk taking. Now, take away the control from that driver and leave it to an autopilot that may compute the driving parameters in order to satisfy minimum pollution, safety (from the manufacturer's judicial liabilities prospective), and whatnot. Heck, I foresee cases when the autopilot won't even approve any movement due to whatever considerations when there may be passengers in risk of loosing their lives if won't reach somewhere soon enough. For now people can take risks, which may be both good and bad. Don't look only at the bad side.
This is a very interesting point and I wonder if this might at some point turn into an advantage once there are enough self driving cars. Here is a potential feature: I am in an emergency and request "emergency override" or whatever you want to call it. Maybe someone pops up on the screen asks a question or not, maybe the override gets activated immediately and deactivated if it gets identified that I don't actually have an emergency. If the override is active the car goes faster and more importantly communicates to other self driving cars what's going on. Other cars will automatically make room like they would for an emergency vehicle. In general how self driving cars react to emergency vehicles of any kind could be so much better than anything we have today.
Yes, that is an interesting solution. Either letting the driver to take risks or allowing the autopilot to have a special mode so it can override a lot if not all of the limiting factors that would otherwise be commended. It's something like "give me 110% now, I'll gladly answer for that later if I'll have to!"
Well you can say it would be infuriating to be unable to take risks to save let's say your wife dying in the car but you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?
"you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?"
That's exactly what I argue about. In a rare (but very important) occasion where risk taking would be needed, you're forcing the moral dilemma of an even rarer occurrence with a presumed victim. We don't know if it would come to that. For all I care there might be only some speeding on a rainy road. My car will recommend going slowly for my own sake, but in that moment I care less for me personally and more for avoiding wife's impending death. Actually, I fear that my car will not limit itself to recommending, it will force that on me, because it knows better, because the people behind the said decisions won't be only the engineers trying give their best, but also lawyers doing "mercantile calculation of legal liability", politicians trying to score on public safety through their regulations, and so on!
I understand you and again it will be something to have in mind during design of said cars but I don't think this will be a huge problem.
Even if the problem exists in the early days, I'm pretty sure this is the kind of things that can be dealt with easily later. Those car are already capable of evaluating dangerous situations for others and I don't think that's unreasonable to believe that they will adapt their comportment to conditions and even in some special cases allow for risks taking if it only concerns the one that chose so.
And don't forget that we don't speak about only one company. There will be concurrence as it exists today and if some constructors are so limiting in the behavior of their cars that people die in it when conditions would have allowed to save them otherwise then soon enough someone will come with a car that can deal with that situation and so forth.
The social contract is such that people can reasonably be assumed to be ok with a minuscule increase in risk in order to get a dying person to the hospital.
"Humans are the very definition of imperfection and thinking that you are capable of "correctly using a car" that is, never make the mistake that will cause a terrible accident is a big problem."
A human, with proper training and heuristics, can reasonably be expected to never make a mistake that causes a terrible accident.
Unfortunately, a large part of "proper training" involves being driven around as a passenger for your entire childhood, immersed in a car culture. Further, the heuristics are commonly ignored by males younger than, say, 25.
> A human, with proper training and heuristics, can reasonably be expected to never make a mistake that causes a terrible accident.
fighter pilots make mistakes causing terrible accidents. and they're a group of humans that were pre-screened to ensure physical/mental/emotional fit, and had extensive training.
Wow! That's exactly what I said earlier, you are convinced that a good driver (one with proper training or whatever heuristics are) will be able to avoid those crashes.
And in my opinion the only reason that can make you believe that is that there is, fortunately, few enough car crashes that you think those who had never crashed avoided it because of their skills.
Of course skills and training will allow you to behave well in a lots of situations that could have killed you otherwise but my conviction is that if you go through life without a big accident, a huge part of it is due to luck. Luck that you didn't encounter the situation in which training and skills couldn't have saved you.
"but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do"
Ok I know this is my little cause of the moment, but seriously why are computers apriori better at anything? Sure they don't make poor life choices but they are absolutely at the mercy of the quality of the algorithms, sensors, operating system, training data and physical computational hardware.
Better is probably a poor word, but consistent at least. Even good drivers may run the speed limit and be "perfectly safe", but the autopilot will always stay at the speed limit and will always make the same choices in a given situation - there's no emotion or influence (alcohol, drugs, bad mood, etc.). In short, they are boring but safe.
I agree. It's like arguing that autonomous weapons systems are better than human-operated because they don't get tired, whilst neglecting to mention that, say, their object detection algorithms can't tell the difference between combatants and civilians.
Autonomous systems, as a technology, are capable of performing better than humans; that doesn't imply that some particular autonomous system (e.g. Tesla's Autopilot) does so right now.
Every decision a machine makes benefits from the accumulated organized efforts of hundreds (if not many thousands). In a sense, so too do human decisions, but in practice we can much more quickly improve the decision-making of machines, over time leading to them having the advantage, especially in routinized tasks.
Computers are not apriori better - you can always develop a stupid or buggy algorithm that fails often. But Tesla is working to PROVE (using real-world data) that autopilot is better than a human driver, and IMPROVE it constantly until it is ten times better.
> should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it?
If a driver ever has to make that choice, they were going too fast in the first place. You should never be going faster than the stopping distance to the nearest blind spot, unless you're driving on a controlled access highway.
the autopilot system, if not every system similar that is offered these days, does the driving in conditions that are already likely the easiest a driver will encounter.
the real shocking truth is none of these systems is capable of driving when even skilled drivers might need the assistance. think about it this way, car safety systems are designed to insure recovery of safe driving during some of the worst conditions yet self driving systems cannot handle most of these poor conditions as they cannot accurately see and assess the situation.
I'm not sure about this... Do you have sources on that ?
I'm pretty sure that on contrary, autonomous car constructors are actually testing their cars in the worst possible conditions even some that are unlikely to ever happen to anyone. At least it's what Google is telling about their test process.
Maybe it shouldn't choose, instead, it should pick at random, based on the probabilities of survival. If both have the same probability, then both should get the same chance to survive. Otherwise there will be endless bickering about how to decide every case.
Which would you prefer? Going at 100 km/h with autopilot on today's highways, sharing the road with people without autopilot, or going at 250 km/h with autopilot on a highway where everyone else is also on autopilot?
We will have to follow a likely tortuous path to get from now to then, but I am totally convinced we will get there.
The problem with that is that aerodynamic drag grows with the third power of speed, so going faster requires much more energy, even after accounting for slipstream benefits that a self-driving mechanism could exploit.
For some numbers, see https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-you-drive-a-Tesla-S-P90D-... . The top comment is about racing, but the one below it lists 300Wh/km at 160km/h and 380Wh/km at 180km/h. That's a quarter more energy per km (!) for going 20km/h faster.
Not to mention that battery tech will hopefully improve once everybody relies on battery powered cars, and some currently infeasible tech becomes cost-effective due to large scale deployments.
A car is safe when it's used correctly, and all the other cars on the road are used correctly, and all the people and animals near the road behave correctly, and the weather behaves correctly.
It was in fact the whole point I was making that it's generally not possible in the real world for a human to consistently use a car correctly. That's why I don't care about statistics for autopilot 'when used correctly'. I'm interested in autopilot as it gets used in the real world.
That's what the rest of the industry refer to as autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian detection. It's a few years old now, there's been some vague talk of eventually making it mandatory, and you don't have to automate normal driving in any way to get the safety benefits from it. (In fact, I suspect it's probably better if it's not part of Autopilot, since then there's going to less risk of the driver not paying attention in the first place.)
To anyone who's paid close attention to Tesla and to Elon's various offhand remarks to the press and on Twitter, this was all easy to see coming, every bit of it.
But now that he's confirmed it all officially: this NUTS. This is so awesome. The press is going to go crazy with this.
I wonder what will happen to Uber...seems like it will be hard for them to compete with the rates of cars that don't have to pay their driver a living wage, nor pay for gas.
Electric semis-- THANK GOD. I live in Chicago and I can't tell you how sick I am of the massive exhaust plumes billowing over me as they pass by, and the roaring of their engines on the street outside my apartment.
Uber's been likely working on self-driving cars, potentially in partnership with Google. What Tesla has as an advantage though, is an assembly line to produce lots of quality cars. In other words, Tesla will likely be ready for the future of transportation before Uber.
Also millions of miles of fleet learning a day, which Uber doesn't have, since they don't own the cars. Self-driving cars is a supervised learning problem, and he who has the data wins
It is a supervised learning problem, but that doesn't mean it will be solved by just shoving large amounts of data into a black box algorithm. This is not MobileEye's approach, and it almost certainly is not Tesla's approach. The data is useless unless it is annotated (e.g. a human labels where the lanes are, where the obstacles are, what the bicylist is doing, etc.) - that's the bottleneck, not collecting large amounts of raw sensor data + driver actions.
> The data is useless unless it is annotated (e.g. a human labels where the lanes are, where the obstacles are, what the bicylist is doing, etc.) - that's the bottleneck, not collecting large amounts of raw sensor data + driver actions.
Nope. That car just does lane keeping - it doesn't even do turns or lane changes. This is all stuff solved 20 years ago. And even then it only achieves 98% autonomy on lane keeping - this is a task that needs 100% accuracy. You should not be running into the median every couple miles.
Furthermore, they augmented the data with left/right-offset cameras to supplement the data with examples of "bad" camera views. This is not present on Tesla cars (because these sensors are only used for training purposes)
In fact, the paper actually supports my point. They collected all this data for one task, lane keeping. They subdivided the problem of autonomous driving, and managed to solve one small subproblem (the easiest subproblem of autonomous driving, solved for decades already). They avoided the need for annotators, but only because they used specialized purpose-built cameras to augment the data.
> They collected all this data for one task, lane keeping. They subdivided the problem of autonomous driving, and managed to solve one small subproblem (the easiest subproblem of autonomous driving, solved for decades already). They avoided the need for annotators, but only because they used specialized purpose-built cameras to augment the data.
So why not several autonomous subsystems that use specialized purpose-built cameras and don't need annotators? I'm not saying that like it's easy - obviously it's not. Just seems scalable.
The solution was specific to that subproblem. The left/right-offset cameras were for the sole purpose of providing examples of what it would look like if the car was deviating off path. The same trick would not work for any other problems. Can you think of similar camera data augmentation tricks for obstacle detection, drivable path segmentation, bicyclist signaling/intention, pedestrian detection, and so on?
Complete LIDAR units are already available for under $500[1]. There are other, cheaper sensors which aren't as good as full LIDAR but are available for under $100[2].
There are plenty of other options hitting the market soon too[3]
It's not quite here yet. I've been following this since the DARPA Grand Challenge, when we had to use a huge SICK LMS just to get a line scanner. There are now several affordable indoor line scanners. Outdoor sunlight-tolerant systems cost more. 3D scanners, which scan in multiple planes, are still expensive. There are some MEMS devices coming along. Flash LIDAR will probably win out in the end, once someone does the sensor IC development to get the price down from $100K.
Back in 2003, I dragged a VC down to see Advanced Scientific Concepts in Santa Barbara. They make the best flash LIDAR. But they were happy being a DoD and aerospace contractor, selling expensive one-offs. The Dragon spacecraft uses an ASC flash LIDAR to dock with the space station. DARPA buys their units. But their price point is around $100K. There's no inherent reason it has to be that expensive, but it takes custom sensor ICs made in small quantities. Last March, Continental AG (German tire/brake/auto parts company) bought the technology from ASC.[1] We'll have to see how that works out. This is the right technology if the price point can be brought down.
Tesla's other advantage is a global fleet that is actively logging millions of real-world miles a day. I don't think that can be understated at this stage.
Google may have a lot fewer miles, but they're much higher quality miles. The sensor suite on their car is much superior, so they're getting much better data. Even if the eventual Google car uses cheaper sensors, the data they get from the superior sensors helps a lot training the algorithms.
I don't see how this will work though. Unless you plan to equip all those future cars with the same high quality sensors as those on the Google ones (which I've heard are prohibitively expensive).
If those sensors eventually do become really cheap, then Tesla could use them too and negate any advantages Google might have had.
They're already cheap (see elsewhere in this thread for links). Tesla has opted not to implement them because Elon thinks LIDAR isn't needed [1]. Of course without LIDAR you get situations like autopilot running into white tractor trailers because it can't see them...
I think the main point would be to compare the images from the high-quality sensors with those of the low-quality ones, so that they can make good guesses to how accurate they are and what quality they can get away with.
Does google collect high velocity data like tesla's? I heard that the google self driving car was limited to 25mph in the areas where they tested it, and so their data may only be reflective of that.
Waze is just where people are going...the data tesla collects could be from sensors like a front-facing camera, radar, 360 degree ultrasonic sensors, etc.
But with Tesla's open policies, such as open sourcing all their patents, maybe they will happily supply Uber with all the self driving cars Uber might want, plus the API's to remotely control them?
I'm sure they would be more than willing to supply Uber with cars but how much access/control they give to Uber of the data from the cars remains to be seen.
I also think that Tesla will have an easier time acquiring top talent in both the autonomy software and manufacturing. Uber/Google have to partner with Old Guard automotive companies.
Not necessarily. A lot of people have wisened up to Musk's invasive and destructive management style. Don't think the frequent departures from the company at all levels of hierarchy have gone unnoticed.
The Tesla Autopilot crash in Florida has led directly to the Missouri governor's veto of a bill to allow big rig platooning--a semi-autonomous technology that lets trucks travel in close pairs (or more) for aero/fuel efficiency and safety benefits.
The backlash is going to get worse before broad public acceptance gets better. The rest of the US ain't SV.
I'm sorry, I've read/watched every interview or press release or tweet he's given in the past 5 years. I couldn't tell you exactly where individual bits came from.
I don't think Uber and Tesla are competing in any way. In fact, Travis Kalanick stated he would buy half a million Teslas if they became fully autonomous[0].
But Tesla won't sell them to him, man. Why would they, when Elon's just said he's going to create their own autonomous fleet? Why would they hand it over to Uber? Of course they're competing! Elon's just said they're going to make a fleet of autonomous electric taxis!
Travis wasn't being literal; he knows there aren't going to be 500,000 available for a single company to buy for many years. And even if it weren't redirecting profits, Tesla still wouldn't allow a single entity to buy up the entire output of their factories, preventing nearly all consumers from getting any. That would be crazy. And Travis knows that. He was more just expressing Uber's enthusiasm about the idea of autonomous electric cars. If he could, he would, but he knows he can't.
They are in the business of making money, and if Uber offers to pay a premium or sign a contract, it would allow Tesla to grow much quicker, expand capacity, and make even MORE money.
A self driving car bought by Uber would pay for itself in under 2 years easy. I am sure Uber would pay quite a lot for THAT opportunity.
Tesla can make the hardware and Uber can make the app, that's not a bad deal for either. And there's no reason why Tesla couldn't sell to Uber's competitors as well.
Almost certainly not. Except for, say, powering auxiliary electronics, concentrations of solar power are far too low for on-vehicle collection.
Put the panels alongside the road. Not on the vehicles. Not on solar freaking roadways, which are the stupidest idea since stupid. But in medians, on extant construction, and in concentrated high-insolation solar farms (deserts, etc.).
1. Semis. A typical long haul semi gets well under 10MPG. In some cases not much more than half that. They are heavy and need a lot of energy to move. A Tesla Model S weighs 4650 lbs and has a range of a couple of hundred miles. A semi truck can weigh up to 80,000 lbs. That is a lot of weight to get rolling and a lot to pull up a grade. Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highway speeds where air resistance is at a maximum. To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.
2. Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.
3. Enable your car to make money for you. I don't want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes. So legal liability laws will have to change. If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don't want to wait for another one. I don't want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat. I feel that my car is an extension of my home. It's personal space that I don't want to share with random strangers.
> Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes. So legal liability laws will have to change.
This, at least in most of the United States, is not a correct statement of the law. Absent something like Negligent Entrustment[1] or Vicarious Liability[2], one's ownership of a vehicle does not determine if one is liable if damage is caused while another is operating the vehicle. Some might be under this impression because we tend to purchase insurance "for a vehicle", however liability is placed upon a negligent driver (not owner). Somewhat of a discussion of this is found here: http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2014/06/05/249762...
I can't speak for everywhere, I'll admit. Where I live, the owner is responsible, as I have learned firsthand by involvement in several accident scenarios where the vehicle owner was not driving at the time. You must purchase insurance for each vehicle you own, and if you allow another person to drive your vehicle you retain the liability.
I'm sure there are some exceptions e.g. if your vehicle is stolen, or in cases of a clear contract such as a vehicle lease or rental.
Subject to the foregoing, it seems entirely reasonable that if I allow a random stranger to use my car while I'm at work, that is my decision and my responsibility. And I would not do it.
How is the liability with rental or lease cars though? I think that's the legal structure in which the Tesla car pool would operate in. If Tesla would lease out their own cars instead of sell them, they could make a lot of money too, plus lower the bar for a lot of people to drive it.
In the UK, under section 151 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, the owner's insurers are liable for third party injuries or losses caused by a thief driving the vehicle. They can try and claim back their losses from the thief, but that's unlikely to make them whole. So the legal owner will end up with a claim on their insurance.
1. They'll be able to line the entire trailer with batteries. Elon's pretty good at physics and engineering: if he says this can be done better than existing gas-powered semis, you're not going to be able to prove him wrong with some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, as if he hadn't considered this. Obviously he has and knows it will work. Tesla didn't get this far on vague conjecture.
2. Maybe so, but it will happen, and the delay won't really hinder Tesla. They're not dependent on it. It's not like they can't sell cars without it. It's just another tier of advancement to be reached in time.
3. Maybe you don't want anyone using your car (nor would I), but that's why it's optional. A lot of people will love this. Owning a car of that level of quality for a greatly reduced price thanks to earned revenue. I assume the app will let you monitor its location, and you can anticipate when you'll need it back again and call it back before that time arrives. Or....just take someone else's car if you're in such a rush :) Sharing is caring.
Most criticisms of Tesla are so...amateur. They try to point out obvious issues which Musk and team must have thought out on day 1.
People still treat this company as if it is some stoner's living room project, not a multi-billion dollar organization that built the best electric car on the planet while its sister company built a reusable rocket
> 1. They'll be able to line the entire trailer with batteries
But that's an enormous inversion of expense that falls on the trailer owners. The tractor-trailer model works so well because it concentrates complexity and cost in the tractor.
At present trailers are mechanically fairly simple and require only routine servicing with a basic toolkit. They draw power from their tractor. An owner can maintain a fleet of trailers to match their peak demand and are immediately available. Just charter a tractor and away they go.
Battery-equipped trailers will be much more complex, heavy and maintenance-intensive. More expensive but with a smaller payload and prolonged periods of unavailability whilst charging. The cost of haulage charters will have to reduce by magnitudes to make that an attractive preposition.
Semis sound like a better market for hot-swapping and renting your battery compared to consumers. The rollout is a bit more straightforward since the travel routes are more obvious (weigh stations or truck stops).
Some math on the weight issue - A big rig tractor unit is about 10 tons in weight. A tesla model S battery is about half a ton. The energy to move a truck is maybe 8x (given trucks get 5mpg, cars 40mpg approx), so that's a 4 ton battery for 200 mile range. Electric motors weigh much less than a large diesel engine so the weight would come out about the same. I think cost may be more of an issue.
> Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highway speeds where air resistance is at a maximum.
Why would a self-driving cargo vehicle drive at highway speeds? A human truck driver can only drive 11 hours/day, an autonomous vehicle can be on the move 24/7 and so could travel at slower, more efficient speeds while completing trips on similar time scales.
> To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.
Don't forget about the solar roof unit. There is a lot of surface area on a trailer. This could offset some of the energy requirements along with other technology such as regenerative breaking. Also consider that a supercharger network might be constructed.
> Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.
I disagree. The evidence is to the contrary technically speaking. The matter is more subjective on the social front, but we've seen how popular attitudes change to technology. It might be a fatuous example but consider how it was once uncool to be online and then MySpace happened, and consider how it was anathema to be anywhere near online dating, the archetypal hallmark of a loser, then Tinder happened and now it's almost de rigueur in the mainstream.
> Enable your car to make money for you. I don't want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes.
Insurance (including public liability insurance) is already a thing. Insurance is priced according to risk, so when autonomous vehicles are here and much safer than human drivers the insurance will be priced as such.
> If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don't want to wait for another one.
The post alluded to making your car available when you're at work etc. I expect the intention is ensure it has returned to you by the time you want to go home.
> I don't want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat.
Even though he said Semi, I don't think he meant an interstate tractor-trailer. I expect to see a replacement for the typical urban box truck, that is used to make local deliveries.
1. It's local, so it's always near a charger
2. They're smaller, so easier to build in their existing factory space
3. Possibly the biggest perceived win for the environment, as people wouldn't see exhaust soot anymore right outside their window
4. Stoplights - the box trucks spend more time accelerating from a light, so they need torque. Something that electric motors have from a dead stop.
A semi travelling a very slow speeds would need his own lane or it would significantly increase the risk of accidents (unless every car on the road is autonomous).
Solar on the roof is most likely rather insignificant and will also just add weight.
Re: solar on the roof, agreed that it wouldn't do much:
An ISO container that could fit on a truck trailer is typically 40'x8'. Solar panels are, on the sunniest of days, making 10-14 watts per square foot. This gives us:
40x8=320sqft assuming panels with no borders.
Assuming 14 watts per sqft (optimal conditions) we'd end up with 4,480 watts. Assuming 100% efficiency converting this into usable motion, we'd get 6 BHP. A normal semi truck has 350-600HP, so this is a drop in the bucket compared to their normal output power. As far as how much of that they use while cruising, I'd wager that it's much more than the 1-2% boost which solar-powered electric would provide (again remember that my calculations assume cloudless sky, no dust on panels, no weight or aerodynamic penalty, no maintenance costs, 100% conversion efficiency, etc).
They reason you don't see them is because it's not worth it. The aero mods under and behind the trailer on the other hand ARE worth it, and this claims that a specific version of a "trailer tail" gives a 6.6% boost to fuel economy at 65MPH: http://realtruckdriver.com/what-do-i-think-about-semi-truck-...
Thanks for this math, which really demonstrates how... er, pipe-dreamy Musk is on this.
The truck logistics industry has been struggling with this problem for years. How do we increase fuel efficiency from the days of 90s Caterpillar engines dragging 80K lbs at 4.3 mpg while simultaneously decreasing emissions while simultaneously figuring out how to make the truck itself lighter and able to move more cargo in a single load?
Autonomous electric trucks would improve "fuel" economy and minimize downtime caused by the limits of human endurance, but at what cost? How many miles of range would the batteries have to have to compensate for the slower cruising speed and additional stops needed to recharge them? How much DOT downtime has to be eliminated to make up for being able to pull a few thousand pounds less on each trip, owing to the massive number of LiOn batteries scattered around the truck and trailer?
When I worked at Penske Truck Leasing in the late aughts, I'd have fascinating conversations with truck drivers on the math they were doing to optimize for fuel economy and load capacity. The switch one of Penske's clients made in changing their fleet to DEF Volvos with 240 gallons of diesel capacity compared to the classic Detroit Diesel Freightliner Centuries with dual 150-gallon tanks caused many an angry tirade.
Many of the drivers were constantly juggling juuuuuust enough fuel to make it to the destination and back; the trailer they were headed to pick up was so heavy they couldn't have more than ~200 gallons of fuel or they'd be over 80K and fined accordingly at the scales. Good luck making that 1200 mile round trip on your 200 gallons, driver.
I'm not sure trucks are the answer. We'd need too much overhauling of the current system to make it worthwhile. Without increasing weight loads, which destroys our infrastructure even faster, as well as rethinking how trailers are loaded and unloaded to maximize the 24/7 automated nature of autonomous fleets... We're a long way off.
And, anyways, aren't cargo ships and trains basically already electric and their massive diesel engines are just powering the electric motors? No weight limits or problems caused by slow cruising speeds in those applications, that I'm aware of.
Thanks for this math, which really demonstrates how... er, pipe-dreamy Musk is on this.
It actually shows that neither of you are paying attention. Musks article did not say anything about putting solar panels on the roof of trucks. He only talks about solar panels on the roof of buildings.
Agree with part 3. I fail to see why anyone who is willing to pay a premium for a Tesla car would be willing to let random strangers into their (new) car, unless the benefits far outweighs the cost/risks, but in that case, if the other car user has to pay a high price to use a Tesla for his commute, why not just use Uber instead?
This can probably only work when the car is old such that its value has already been depreciated significantly.
Where do you live that this is not the case? I know some states have (or had) a "no-fault" approach to automobile liability claims but I thought it was a minority and perhaps had been mostly abandonded?
That makes obvious sense, but then the question becomes who has to have insurance on the car that's being driven: the owner/primary user, or the current driver? Generally I can drive my parent's or friend's car without an issue even if I'm not the person insuring the car, because the car is insured, but if I get into an accident the person responsible is not necessarily the driver, it's the insurance holder. Would we require every driver to have insurance for the car they're driving (and if we did, laws would have to chance because you can't currently have insurance "per hour").
3. Seems like the biggest issue to me. If you're an Uber/taxi driver you have the ability to stop the car and kick people out. Your presence is what mostly deters the riders from doing untoward shit. Just think about everything drunk people would do if a driver was absent.
Whatever counter Tesla might have in store to prevent this, it would have to involve them analyzing/monitoring/recording the behavior of people in the vehicle, which would be a huge privacy nightmare that nobody wants to be a party to.
A future for semis which have a 4-8 km off-grid range, and operate largely as self-assembling intermodal train rigs for long-distance transport, either on existing railcars or with a streamlined wheelset mechanism, might work.
I agree that the power densities for long-haul, BEV trucking simply don't make sense, even with platooning technologies. Intermittent fast-charge stations plus catenaries, with off-grid battery capabilities, would be a possibility however.
Another option would be for always (or nearly-always) tracked operation, with what's effectively a cargo-streetcar function within cities and suburbs, and traditional rail off.
Functions such as field-to-depot transport would almost certainly still require fueled vehicles.
Autonomy is a big win for semis -- even just platooning (drafting) is a huge win. Two startups in this space: Otto & Peloton.
As for power density... going to a turbine engine feeding electric power systems is a sufficiently big win compared to straight-up diesel ICE. There's a big industry group looking into this:
Maybe one way on trucking side would be do to things a bit differently. Instead of one tractor pulling the cargo from start to finish, use electric/autonomous vehicles on those parts of journey where they are the most efficient choice and leave the rest to diesel/humans. Like things are done in container world, where the same container can travel via different modes of transportation during its journey.
If you assume that trucks can be fully autonomous, then cost efficiency may be achieved by more trucks carrying less weight since driver wage is no longer a part of the equation.
"I should add a note here to explain why Tesla is deploying partial autonomy now, rather than waiting until some point in the future. The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability."
That's a hell of a statement and I want to see much better stats than that. Just looking at the total distance per death in human driven cars and comparing it to the autopilot total distance is a gross simplification. At an absolute minimum you have to start by only comparing driving on similar roads. Tesla simply keeps hiding behind 'if used correctly' which includes the driver being alert and ready to take over - if we restrict human driving stats to similarly ideal conditions the accident rate will also drop. Additionally driver demographics is a big deal as is the safety features of the car itself.
Here's a probably equally badly made statistic. Tesla estimates their cars had driven 130 million autopilot miles before the fatality. Some googling suggests the first non-autopilot Tesla S fatality was in july 2014 and this graph ( http://insideevs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Tesla-Model-... ) suggests that was around 400 million miles driven. So the autopilot is 3.33 times 'worse'?
Who knows, but if Tesla feels they have a moral duty to leave on autopilot if it is safer, they equally have one if it is more dangerous. It seems they are pretty happy to be in dark about which it is while they test their system.
I get that impression from the stats. They say the autopilot is ok if you keep an eye on it but in the real world people won't always - I think the guy who died was watching a movie.
On the other hand about 1 million people die each year in driving accidents so if by winging it a bit you can stop that a year earlier it's a million lives saved vs maybe <10 autonomous deaths in the research phase.
Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the US vehicle average, the beta label will be removed
Musk misreads the public's attitude about vehicle safety. Human error is understandable, mechanical failure is unacceptable. Society can live with 10 people driving themselves off a cliff (and blame the drivers, road conditions, or poor signage) but they will not accept a car driving its trusting passengers off a cliff.
What about all the autonomous trams, trains and buses already in existence?
If the public genuinely thought that way they wouldn't exist already. Tesla is just bringing more scale to what we already have in parts of Europe and I'm sure the US too.
I don't think Musk has misread public attitude towards safety but rather hit the nail on the head. Such vehicles don't need to be perfect just significantly safer than people.
The public's attitude is slowly changing in favor of machines. By the time autopilot is super-safe, self-driving car passengers will probably feel like passengers of an airplane or a river boat; yes there are risks of not driving yourself but the benefits greatly overcome those.
I still don't understand the SolarCity part. Tesla is atop the best rated electric cars, and has a good trajectory toward that product line future, with lots of innovation ahead. Successful companies like Apple focus on best-in-class products, so Tesla is smart to continue focusing their resources into those product lines.
Meanwhile SolarCity has been burning cash on a consistent basis [1], and is sitting in a hyper competitive solar panel industry, where I don't see their competitive advantage. It seems foolish to bring that business inside of Tesla, as if it failed, the debt risk would now affect Tesla's future. As many others have mentioned, a long term licensing deal or partnership avoids those risks.
People who buy electric cars are far more likely to buy solar panels. And storage batteries. And wiring they would need for the electric car. It's all directly related.
So when I buy a Tesla ... I have to hire a 3rd party to install the wiring to charge it. I can buy the storage battery from Tesla, but again, need to hire someone else to install it. And if I want solar panels for that storage battery, again 3rd party.
SolarCity has a fleet of professionals ready to do all of that. They also have a plant to manufacture their own panels, which hopefully they'll be able to differentiate on. Combining the two companies will enable Tesla to service that whole loop with the equipment and installation.
Now, you can argue that Tesla may have been better off starting their own division from scratch or buying someone else ... but from what I heard, they're getting a hell of a bargain for SolarCity.
> People who buy electric cars are far more likely to buy solar panels. And storage batteries. And wiring they would need for the electric car. It's all directly related.
Is this true? I'd be interested in learning more about the data behind this.
Anyway, for the sake of discussion let's say it is. Does that mean there is a correlation that scales to the whole population?
Or is it just that electric cars and solar panels appeal to the same small segment of the population? That would show a strong correlation, but not scale well.
Generally, having an electric car would push your electric bill into much higher usage tiers where the power is most expensive. Solar panels make the most sense for people who use the most electricity and pay the most for it. I've seen first hand that people who drive electric cars like to talk about clean energy and if they've got solar panels on their roof, it refutes the argument about burning coal to generate the electricity. As solar panels continue to drop in price, it starts to make more sense for the rest of the population, too.
> Or is it just that electric cars and solar panels appeal to the same small segment of the population? That would show a strong correlation, but not scale well.
Tesla is a luxury product company. All of their products are either luxury or commercial. Their strategy scales well in that segment.
This is a huge problem and you're right, Tesla is set up well to solve this. Think of a buying experience where you stick a pack on the roof, and only have to run two cables, one for the house and one for your garage. The roof unit could contain the batteries, panels, inverter hardware, and cooling system. Not exactly unboxing a Mac, but with some creative thinking I bet they could find a way to sidestep enough of the painful parts.
I'm doing business (in my household) with both Tesla and Solar City. I can tell you this about Solar City: They're doing with roofing and power meters what Tesla is doing with vehicles. They're promoting a location-aware distributed electric-distribution grid.
We're lucky right now that the government's promotion of PV is putting the burden of power storage on the power-grid operators. Without net metering, this stage of PV would never happen. But net metering is essentially bad for the grid operators; they get paid nothing for storing power or sending it from a net producer to a net consumer. They will eventually prevail like they tried to do in Nevada earlier this year and buy power cheaper than they sell it.
But in the meantime the power grid companies haven't got a chance without competition. My home electric meter is as dumb as a box of hammers, even though I spend a lot of money with it and rely on it to keep my family safe in the winter. If that meter were capable of telling me when the power I used was coming from a peak-load diesel generator, I would happily turn off my electric stuff. But they can't do that now.
PV needs to use this window of opportunity to get going, and to get other power-storage solutions working. A Model S is one of those solutions: a gigantic battery with wheels and cruise control. To my way of thinking, systemwide integration is an electropolitical move worth making.
From a personal point of view, I can say that Solar City's sales and engineering teams are smarter and more committed than the people at other PV companies I spoke to. They are trying to build a scalable business rather than bopping from town to town installing stuff and moving on.
Will this work long term? Who knows? But it's worth trying.
The product isn't solar panels, it's energy. With a huge fleet of electric cars needing to be charged in major metros, where is the electricity coming from?
What if you also have a massive deployment of solar panels on top of existing real estate, that you essentially don't have to pay rent for?
When Teslas are autonomous, and owners are using them to make money by giving other people rides. How are these cars getting charged? And that energy doesn't come for free. Tesla will have their hand in every piece of transportation.
I thought SolarCity's competitive advantage was solar leasing [1]. Which would mean they're sacrificing upfront profits for longer term gains and any dollar spent now would very likely mean profits in the future. I haven't paid enough attention to see how well that's going.
Oh, and I've heard Tesla described as "a battery company that makes cars." Solar is also tightly coupled with battery tech since without it they're a lot less useful. Maybe that's the synergy?
Solar leasing is not going to be profitable, very soon.
Solar panels (+ installation) is now pretty cheap and getting cheaper. Subsidies are being removed, financing is available. It's becoming a no-brainer. So they're winning there, but this creates a problem. When a significant portion of homes have solar panels, the power companies can no longer act as a free-ish battery for day/night or summer/winter. They will have to massively adjust their pricing... charging solar homes for storage, paying them a crap daily rate, and charging higher rates a night and in the winter. Regulators will be forced to let them do this because otherwise they will go bankrupt.
This screws with the solar leasing model. Tesla makes big batteries that happen to have wheels on them, which gives a lot of room to innovate here. They can smooth out the day/night cycle; car/home owners can profit from the low energy price instead of be punished by it (especially if you're uber-ing out your car); used car batteries that aren't ideal for continued usage in cars (say 70% capacity or slower charge/discharge rates) are fine for power smoothing in your basement, etc.
Agreed but I feel Musk is not here to do a business; he is here to fix humanity. Normal logic does not apply on him, just like when he used all his earnings from selling Paypal and decided to start a roket company (SpaceX)! Other enterpreneurs literally laughed at him and called him crazy.
He's not SV Messiah, he seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money to make it happen. The only bad thing about this is that it is so rare.
> Honestly enterprise is enterprise.
What I like about Tesla and SpaceX is that they're honest, plain companies. They exist as means to an end. Vehicles to achieve material goals - in this case, sustainable transport and making humanity multiplanetary. This is how all companies should work, and yet somehow we got lost on the way and most companies exist to make money, without giving much shit about how exactly they're making this money.
Companies are in the business of selling things for profit. That's essential to them, because they have to pay taxes, create capital and produce, which are all results of commerce. For this they need to maintain an image. And with the first danger to its image, we've seen how Tesla reacted: statistics manipulation and aggression, instead of admitting its their fault and promising to work for better. So we can't bet on companies' honesty, ever.
Elon Musk as a person, is a person. A single person. You say that he "seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money to make it happen." According to whom? Interplanetary travel's possibility and practicality is questionable, let alone human chance of extraterrestrial survival. Some may well think that this is a waste of resources. Sustainable transport is nice -- and I love Tesla cars for being seemingly practical non-fossil cars -- but self-driving cars are a big change and actually requires moral adaptations. Would being killed by a self-operating machine equal to being killed by a manual car? Who is to blame if an accident happens? What do I do if my spouse goes under a self-driving car and it is not her fault? Do I sue the car? What happens if it is found guilty (i.e. it's AI is mistaken)? Do we jail the car? Is Tesla to pay me in indemnity? If my self-driving car hits another car's rear bumper, am I liable? Do I recompensate the other driver? Who is liable if an automatic vehicle breaks some traffic rule? What if it passes when it's red?
If all cars are electric, how we'll be affected by increased electric demand? This will mean increased CO2 production with geothermal production, and increased nuclear waste to be disposed off with nuclear production. Will we have to build more dams? Will we instead use the same dinosaur oil to to produce electricity, canceling out the gain?
We should think on these, and Musk being a SV angel figure is not an answer to these questions. We did not question anything till the end of the past century, and we are at the edge of a climate disaster. This tech (self-driving) means a great, big change to our daily lives, and it cannot happen because someone who "seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money" wanted it to.
> If all cars are electric, how we'll be affected by increased electric demand? This will mean increased CO2 production with geothermal production, and increased nuclear waste to be disposed off with nuclear production. Will we have to build more dams? Will we instead use the same dinosaur oil to to produce electricity, canceling out the gain?
The answers to those questions are simple if you care to look for them - or even listen to the "SV messiah". Sure increased electricity demand may mean upgrades to infrastructure, but this happens anyway as peoples' dependence on electrically-powered devices grow. Nuclear waste is an utter non-problem, it only seems so because of unfounded fears. The fact is we can manage it. As for using fossil fuels, even that outcome would be a huge win - power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines in cars, so even by just centralizing the burning of that oil you're saving lots of energy.
I'm not going to take a position on "statistics manipulation" - I haven't seen anything besides few HNers jumping to conclusions, and I recall that the actual outcome turned out to favour Tesla's position even more. But maybe I'm missing something, I'll happily read up if you could point me to a good source.
Circling back to the point about companies - what you described is the mechanism how companies work. What I was talking about is the reason to found them. As it is today, most companies are what I fondly call "toilet-paper companies" - ones that couldn't care less about what they're actually doing as long as it turns in profit, and would gladly switch to selling toilet paper if it was more profitable than their current operations. Tesla and SpaceX are the rare kind of companies for which their stated goal is the terminal value, not an instrumental one. That's why their decisions keep baffling people - because we're not used to see businesses actually driven by ideas (as opposed to saying so for PR benefit) very often.
You can think of a Tesla, to a gross approximation, as a giant battery with some wheels strapped on. Giant batteries are more than anything else crucial to their business and what they spend a lot of time figuring out how to manufacture well. That's why they've gone into the business of selling batteries for temporarily powering homes or letting people store solar energy.
And once you're in the business of selling solar storage batteries it makes some sense to integrate with a solar provider.
But I think you're right in your second paragraph and it might make more sense for Solar City to just be a re-seller of Tesla batteries without Tesla buying them.
The proposed SolarCity acquisition is probably bad for Tesla shareholders but good for Musk personally as he was the largest shareholder of SolarCity and the deal will kind of bail it out. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-21/tesla-anno...
I think time will tell if the movement proves "foolish". However, there is one reason why this makes sense. Storage batteries and solar panels will go hand in hand for the vast majority of sales. So it makes sense for Tesla to want to control that half of the "solution" for renewable energy generation.
I'm on board with most of this. The goals here are obviously ambitious by any standard, and would seem totally absurd if put forth by anyone who didn't happen to berth a private spacecraft with the ISS earlier this morning.
I've read a fair share of criticisms against Tesla, and many of them are founded on solid points.
However, in the grand scheme of things, this really does seem like I am watching history unfold. I don't know if I've ever truly believed the "grand mission statement" of a company before so much as I do Tesla's. Mostly because, when it has come down to it, Musk has proved that he really means it. Silicon Valley has made the joke a billion times of start-ups saying they're trying "To make the world a better place." The difference with Tesla (and probably also SpaceX) is that if they succeed, it seems they really will make the world a better place. ..and probably cement Musk a pretty good paragraph in the history books, it seems.
I have stock in Solar City and I don't care if I lose it all. It's not my life savings though. I invested because I enjoy day dreaming a similar dream to what Musk must be dreaming. Like any great science we just have to try and be excited, together. We can all banter about economics, rationality and history but I'm stoked. Who cares. I don't see how Tesla or SolarCity failing would lead to mass starvation or anything so let's strap in and be pumped!
"Coal is the future" - Tony Abbott, Australian PM, 2014.
There are many things to take from Musk's master plan part deux, but the most important for me is the intent and aspiration.
I live in Australia, the leadership here is absolutely dire both political and economic. A relentless cycle of vested mining interests and climate change deniers espousing at length on the cattle exports to Asia suffering if marriage equality is passed.
Maybe Musk succeeds, maybe not, but here's someone with vision, a plan, and he's going to have a fair swing at it.
Abbott is the last person anyone should quote to support an argument. He wasn't voted in; the other party was voted out. His policy for everything was "No!", and once in power, found out that "No!" didn't cut it anymore. He did do a lot of damage, but his leadership was so bad that he was ejected by his own party in his first term despite them using that 'they ejected in first term!' argument in their election campaign to win power. That's kind've promising, actually... the party was worried about the public enough that they'd eject a lunatic leader.
The leadership here isn't dire, it's just boring (in global terms) and a bit of a soap opera. The country is still a great place to live. If you look beyond the media, there is leadership - for example, in Gillard's tenure, more articles of legislation were passed than in any previous government, including some key items, despite the media loudly claiming (with plenty of misogyny) that the minority government was hamstrung and paralysed.
Turnbull is not the guy I want in right now, but his leadership is hardly 'dire'. Besides, if you use 'dire' for something as beige as Turnbull, what have you got left for something like Erdogan's latest activities in Turkey?
Ah, you're right. Rather than living in one of the most stable and wealthy societies on the planet, we're actually falling fast towards a Mad Max-style dystopia. I must remember to weld some more armour onto my car tonight...
Just because we're not living in an impossible utopia doesn't mean the situation is dire. We haven't had great leadership since the Hawke/Keating years (over 20 years ago), yet still the country is going grand - not having great leadership doesn't mean we must be having the polar opposite.
"Dire" is hyperbole, and pretending that you don't know what I mean when I say "voted out, not voted in" is just insulting.
I also tried giving you reasoned paragraphs, and you responded with trite lines adding very little - I wouldn't go taking the high road here about 'contributing to the conversation'.
> We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.
This seems very significant for Tesla vs competitors. Yes Google has a strong technology lead today, but how long will that last when Tesla is collecting more miles of data every day than Google has collected in 5 years? (Sincere question) Not to mention Apple and existing car vendors, who each have 0 million miles of experience.
Tesla should reach 6 billion miles very quickly once the model 3 is out.
It seems to me the data tesla are collecting are not unique. How many times logging the same driver driving the same 20 mile commute before you're in diminishing returns?
With deliberately chosen conditions, scenarios, and routes, it seems to me Google could be collecting data that are just as useful although maybe covering much a smaller number of miles.
I can't imagine that the data from carefully selected scenarios would be anywhere near as valuable as the data from random, unpredictable, real world driving.
I don't know where you live, but my daily commute is never the same. They either start/end at different times, or I have to take different routes, or the weather is different. I think it would take a lot longer than 3 years before they start seeing actual diminishing returns on mileage collection.
More than 3 years? I would confidently wager that noticeable diminishing returns would occur after 3 days, and very significant diminishing returns after 3 weeks.
Think about seasons, varying weather, light levels, traffic fluctuation, construction, changing parking patterns, delivery drivers/stopped trucks...the list goes on. It would be very useful to have that occur within a relatively known route, where you can isolate and model what isn't understood already.
What does that data give you? Raw sensor data + steering angle + acceleration/braking is not particularly useful in of itself. Nobody is trying to shove large amounts of data through a blackbox model and directly trying to predict car controls from images. This is not MobileEye's approach and almost certainly isn't Tesla's approach. The bottleneck is data that is decomposed and labeled in greater detail (lane markings, obstacles, bicyclist hand signs, etc) - and you need human annotators for that.
I recommend watching this [0] ted talk on the subject. In it, you'll see that Google, last year, already had solved bicyclist hand signs, lane markings, unforeseen obstacles, etc. And they did it __without__ human annotators. Just some straight up convolution neural networks.
You're mistaken. Convolutional neural networks require annotated data. It's a TED talk; they're obviously not going to mention the very boring details of their annotation protocols.
Some quick napkin math: 3 million miles a day gets you 6 billion miles in 5 and a half years (not counting the ~100mm miles they already have). Since the daily mileage rate will only be growing exponentially, it's not unreasonable to assume that Tesla hit this number in under 3 years.
Not sure how they came up with 6 billion as the magic number, but if that's accurate, that's very soon. It also helps that there are no real government stakeholders in preventing the proliferation of self-driving cars. People just need to generally believe that they are much safer than human drivers, which of course is not true yet.
Also sounds like it's written by someone who has never used public transport his entire life. In my bus in the morning 70% of the passengers are standing not sitting.
Yeah, higher densities on public transports can be achieved by standing rather than sitting. For instance, BART has been testing removing seats to fit more people into each train carriage [1].
I think they're removing seats out of desperation. I've was hearing the planned capacity was many, many times smaller than the current ridership. It can take lots of money, political sway, and quite a few years to catch up.
... not having a seat is reason #1 why people ditch public transport in Europe (dense areas, hot & sweaty rides, not able to read a book or work on a computer, not able to sleep). Give a seat to everyone and you'll have more commuters.
Absolutely. I'm on board with some of this document, but the public transportation part makes no sense. What Musk is suggesting would make public transit less effective.
It's not clear to me either, but he also wrote "it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses", so I think the implication is that one bus will become many individual cars with traditional doors.
Either way it'd be a lot heavier than the one, two or three doors that buses have these days. But then, weight probably won't be that big of a factor given how it'd need to have a floor full of batteries anyway.
But then half you lose easy access for the half of seats not on the sidewalk side. There's not a good way to lose the aisle without condensing down to only a couple seats across.
Tesla isn't a car company. It's building Rome. All great "startups" are not some good idea executed well. They are companies with a long term vision that generate ideas to execute that will get them there. Anyone might steal an idea or copy a product, but no one can steal a mission or a destination far in the future. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google... all started as or at some point became "build Rome" companies.
After reading this master plan yesterday, I came to work today thinking along the same lines.
I feel like Musk's actions are a great example of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message". Tesla is not a car company. They're doing cars because it's a way into their actual business. He wants them to invest in solar power because it's another way that ties into a general plan.
Uber is betting on car manufacturers to have autonomous driving in place, while it builds up a worldwide user base of logistics (moving people and goods from X to Y). It doesn't care if vehicles are driven by a horse or by electricity.
Tesla is building the vehicles and energy source for the vehicles, and building the autonomy in to them, but it's betting on a user-base acquisition via hardware (vehicle) ownership and/or eventually some form of subscription to the "Tesla" club.
Carbon-based fuel(s) will eventually run out. Tesla via SolarCity will be in an incredible position of offering energy, so I'll be looking at how well their plan of putting Solar on every roof works rather than autonomy / vehicle manufacturing / sales. I think this is likely going to be their make or break asset.
Good points except that we are a century, if not centuries from carbon fuel reaching a point where people start to worry. And companies like Toyota are investing in alternatives fuels like Hydrogen, so it not as straight forward as you state for Tesla.
Most Hydrogen is generated from natural gas today and for the foreseeable future... It's no more an alternative source than Electricity, probably less, because we don't have Nuclear Hydrogen plants.
France [1], Japan [2], India [3], Israel [4], Iran [5], and even North Korea [6] have developed and launched rockets that successfully put satellites in orbit.
I like Elon as much as the next guy, but this mythologizing is just too much.
"the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX"
RubberSpoon is correct that the reference must be to re-entry. I'd like to add that the UK also put a single satellite in orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow
I'm genuinely surprised at the quality of Musk's writing and the presentation of certain ideas. He clearly insisted against copyediting, and that was probably a mistake judging by the output. I suspect that he was attempting to eschew the formality of typical press releases, but this 'Master Plan' (which is itself a somewhat juvenile moniker) feels like something that warranted rigor.
I can't figure out what you're trying to say. You think it's bad he wrote it himself, or good? Are you saying his writing it himself was a mistake, or wasn't? And it does or doesn't sound formal enough? It needs rigor and doesn't have it, or it does have it?
He should have written it with more formality and more rigor. Tesla is a public company and there is already a perception among investors that this is a facade. Musk needs to reposition Tesla as less of a personal experiment/quest and more of a legitimate enterprise that acknowledges its fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Tone and communication are very important in this regard. This release failed to adopt a tone and style of communication commensurate with the severity of Tesla's present situation. Instead, it feels like Musk is treating Tesla as he might a startup. In short, he's being facetious. I doubt the stock will plummet as a result of this, but it was certainly a missed opportunity to reassure investors.
1) It appears that Musk genuinely believes that he is acting as a fiduciary with _long term_ outlook. If the investors don't like the time scale, they can put their money somewhere else. Fuck 'em.
2) In most cases, "formality" and "rigor" only works to mask unfortunate realities and incompetence. Being plain spoken need not imply ignorance nor thoughtlessness. I may not be a sophisticated investor, but Musk's ability to so clearly outline the plan (and proven track record of executing such plans!) gives me great confidence.
3) I view the entertainment and excitement that Musk provides is a small, but welcome dividend that I'm happy to share with non-investors alike. I feel sad for you that you can't or won't appreciate it.
Well in SV I've often seen informality leveraged to mask Kool-Aid. 'If I'm talking like the cool kids, how could I possibly be punking you?' Bit of a cliched strategy really. Clearly some people still fall for it.
This is the same guy joking about smoking crack and listening to Tupac while writing this plan, I don't think he really cares about making a good impression to anyone
Yea. The point is maybe he should care if he's running a company whose market capitalization is related to investor perceptions. Time will tell I guess. And, Tesla may still prevail.
I don't think there is a cutoff point in company size or whatever above which writing suddenly needs to become sterile. What you have is actually more a cultural thing I think. People thinking that a "professional" message is needed, when straightforwardness would be a superior goal. (On the other hand, a good reason to aim for "professional" is that everything released by a company has a consistent voice/tone.)
Notice that Musk runs his companies the same way - by trusting what's really important vs what isn't. And anyone who has invested in Tesla is already familiar with his irreverent character. (See this[1] interview for example).
You are arguing for a more formal and rigorous statement because it would have certain advantages. You should also note that a less formal and less rigorous communication as a rhetorical strategy has it's own advantages.
So unless you do a more thorough analysis comparing the two strategies regarding this particular article of communication, your criticism is just quick opinion without "sufficient"[1] effort to limit any prior biases[2].
[1] Quoted because I have no quantification measure.
[2] If you are a communications expert then of-course this particular criticism against your quick opinion is not justified.
I'm not a shareholder, but his tone always strikes me as honest and smart. I hate reading corporate statements full of vague and formal language, and always feel that they're hiding something with it.
> "Create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.
We can't do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together."
I don't really see how this answers the question as to why they need to merge? Why can't their just be a partnership?
I hear about bus drivers and truck drivers getting into accidents due to drowsiness enough that it's a constant worry whenever I'm on the highway next to one. I wonder if I'd feel safer if i saw a Tesla Semi knowing that were wasn't a human behind the wheel.
Should autonomous vehicles be identified as such (special lights or label) so that real humans can know not to be erratic around it?
This comment reminds me of the various (likely apocryphal) laws when cars were still new and shared the road with cars.
Cars we considered the new weird thing that needed to take special steps to not spook horses or their riders/drivers.
Now, of course, the situation is reversed and horses often are required to have special visibility gear to be seen more clearly by cars.
So, perhaps in the future there will be some sort of indicator light that turns on when the idiot driver turns on manual driving mode so you (edit, or your car!) can give them a wide berth.
> So, perhaps in the future there will be some sort of indicator light that turns on when the idiot driver turns on manual driving mode so you (edit, or your car!) can give them a wide berth.
Agreed. Don't mark the autonomous vehicles. Mark the ones to be more concerned about: the ones with a human driving.
Should humans be monitored and have driving privileges revoked if they drive erratically?
Historically yes, if you cause problems your licence is revoked and in some cases your vehicle is seized.
I look forward to the rise of the machines, with humans losing driving privileges for simple things like wandering across lanes without signalling, running red lights, hitting pedestrians or bumping other vehicles in the parking lot.
I don't think they should be identified. Look how drivers treat learners of they're marked - the marking are supposed to indicate 'this driver is inexperienced, be patient and expect them to do the wrong thing' but people treat it as 'please tailgate and honk until they stop out of fear'
- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
- Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
- Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
- Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it"
I take this as...
Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous semitrucks transporting cargo across america.
Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous public buses transporting people around a city.
Have my car join a fleet of uber-like autonomous teslas while i'm not using it.
Haven't seen such a clean, crisp plan that has been implemented flawlessly by a company. Makes me reconsider how I should think the next time I'm asked to write a vision/mission statement for anything-company/product.
> A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle.
How does one calculate this? Does there exist some canonical Productivity-Equation?
Less of a master plan, and more a list of goals. The original was awesome because it clearly laid what Tesla wanted to accomplish "Consumer electric vehicles" and how. This just lays out the what.
> increased passenger areal density [on buses] by eliminating the center aisle and putting seats where there are currently entryways
I can't picture the layout he's describing here - not sure if it's been discussed in more detail elsewhere - anyone got a better idea or a reference image?
The best part of this is automated semi trucks. I think that's the perfect sort of business for Tesla to be in.
I have a lot of trouble understanding the public transportation part. The ideas presented fall apart when you remove the baffling assumption that traffic congestion decreases with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles will expand the possible set of drivers. That will dramatically increase the amount of vehicles on the road. If anything our future with autonomous vehicles will be unbearable gridlock.
No, look at the whole system. Instead of four people with four cars (or even two cars and a couple bikes), you can have one autonomous shared cab driving an optimized route.
This assumes that everyone is sharing cars. What if they don't? Then you simply have what we have now plus the addition of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to drive (people without licenses, 13 year olds, 80 year olds etc).
I'm very curious what the pickup offering will be like, and compare to existing offerings from the big 3, since it is a "a new kind of pickup truck". I think the segment of the pickup market that is mostly an SUV, but occasionally needs to haul/tow stuff could be well served by Tesla. They also have plans for a semi, so maybe they'll actually be able to compete for actual work trucks that haul/tow on a regular basis too; but the energy density of the battery compared to gasoline/diesel makes me doubtful.
This isn't really that interesting. There's nothing here that hasn't been said already or at least very strongly suggested by Musk. The last master plan was interesting because no one had ever really made a successful electric car company, so no one imagined it could be anything but a rich person's toy, so Musk's claim that he could make a desirable mass production car was a huge shock.
It's also very sloppy; it's not an actual plan, with goals and steps that logically follow each other. The last master plan had a clear logic to it: you used the margin of each successive step to fund research and development further down in order to increase the use of electric cars and limit global warming. This is more like a wish list than a plan. "We want to make semis." "It'd be great if we also provided the solar part of the stack because it dovetails with this other initiative we're doing." "Once we have solar, we can do this new thing." Etc, etc. Unlike the first master plan, I can't gauge how long any of this will take or whether it is feasible. I can't gauge what the actual strategy is any better than I could yesterday. And isn't that the point of a Master Plan?
Hopefully Tesla will be able to achieve this new plan. Looking back at the first 'master plan' from 2006, it's clear that it failed pretty badly as Tesla Motors wasn't close to being able to self fund its goals over that time.
Since the first master plan was published in 2006, Tesla Motors has raised money privately (during its near death experience in 2008), sold a 10% stake to Daimler (which was recently divested), went public which has a side effect of raising even more (though the main reason to IPO in most cases liquidity to existing investors), and since then have continually raised money from the public market every year or two. There's probably private and public capital raisings since 2006 that I'm forgetting too (and they raised other capital streams like debt, such as the DoE loan)
The very lofty stock price of Tesla in recent years has helped it fund Model S, Model X and Model 3 designs, development, manufacturing (at large scales) and delivery, as well as the building of a large battery factory which Tesla owns a stake in. This constant fund raising has kept Tesla alive and I don't argue that it was very good corporate governance by Elon Musk and team to get Tesla Motors to where it is now (approaching the delivery date for the first Model 3 shipments and having a huge capacity to manufacture battery packs).
However, it's still a failure in its attempt to bootstrap the funding of Model 3 based on sales of previous models.
Of course, Tesla and SpaceX has consistently ended up achieving great things, even if the timeline is optimistic and the budget ends up blowing out. But issuing stock and eventually debt can only stretch Tesla so far. Hopefully Tesla can become a more sustainable business before that happens.
Was self funding ever part of the plan? One can take it for granted that the company has to survive economically for the plan to work, but besides that why say the plan must be funded in a particular way?
Yes, self-funding was a definitely the core part of the plan. Here's the original "master plan" text from 2006 [1]
Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use *that* money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
Don't tell anyone.
I think the term "that money" ('that' is italicized in the original) is pretty clear he means funding from the profits of the prior models. (Elon Musk has definitely articulated the funding thing in interviews.)
Also, the summary Elon Musk has just posted continues using the same italicized emphasis:
Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
Use *that* money to create an affordable, high volume car
OK, but swap 'investment' for money and it still makes sense. Does it seem likely that someone like Elon Musk would refuse to leverage investment and insist on funding all growth and r+d from profits only? That would take decades surely?
For rates of process and cost improvement with scale, look to J. Doyne Farmer's work, and particularly Wright's Law (Moore's Law is a special case, and less accurate), which looks at cost improvements with volume increase through learning functions.
Elon Musk is like the cat who tried to jump from the sofa to the top of the bookcase, fell to the floor in a tangle of wildly gyrating limbs, and is now sitting there quietly licking its paw like it was intending to do that all along. Even with his brilliance he's fooling no one into thinking the SolarCity merger was actually in his plan- there are some synergies, sure, but they're easily outweighed by the added corporate complexity.
But I mean, he's Elon Musk. He could still pull it off.
His biggest problem by far (excepting, perhaps, Model 3 production targets) will be regulations. It makes a nice story when you talk about the relative risks rationally, but there's no chance whatsoever American politics will deal with the issue in a rational fashion. Autopilot may retroactively become illegal in places people currently get away with it; cars driving themselves around is a different and titanic can of worms. What if a terrorist gets their hands on a Tesla and stuffs it full of explosives?
The specifics probably weren't in his plan, but in various interviews he's talked about the consumption of energy (vehicles) and the generation of energy (solar) as being two sides of the same coin. Elon is the one that told his cousins to start a solar company after all.
IIRC he originally saw three major fields to move forward on: the Internet, Transportation/Energy, and Space. By the sounds of it he was thinking of these as early as high school, to at the latest some time after he sold his first company (Zip2). He did the Internet thing pretty well, now he's working on the other two. This is someone who does think on these scales. Keep in mind, as the article itself points out, that you're an idiot if you think starting a car company is a good idea. Energy was the whole point all along. A company for its own sake isn't in Elon's DNA. That would probably just be too boring for him.
Whether this specific merger is a good idea or not is a different question. And I also don't think the emergence of cheap supercomputers in the form of geek-subsidized graphics cards and their applicability to a particularly effective machine learning genre would have been predicted by anyone.
I don't completely buy into the idea it was intentional, but I think there's a really good possibility. Especially at the beginning, people questioned if electric cars were better for the environment or just shifting the source of the pollution. His response was that electric is a flexible energy source that can be generated from many different processes, many of which are very environmentally friendly including solar.
I think SolarCity is part 2, now that cars are running on electricity, it's time to make the electricity clean.
Can we talk about what I see as the most important driving force behind acceptance of full or partial electrification of transportation? Heavy duty and transport. Specifically I think Tesla would be best off getting school buses to full EV or even partial EV capability.
Using a Cobb County Georgia as an example, stats posted awhile ago listed over a thousand school buses traveling almost seventy thousand miles a day. Seventy thousand miles a day! Since the buses have to load/unload at schools and such its easy to establish charging points to include fast top offs where five or six minutes of charging can extend enough to the next time. Then between major routes, elementary, middle, and high school, longer charge periods can be done.
Get kids and parents used to silent electric buses and you go a long way to establishing a generation on them. Get autopilot to work well in that environment and you get to sell them on two innovations at once
> The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release
Doesn't Tesla charge a large fee to have autopilot enabled on your car? Isn't that equally morally reprehensible?
> We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.
So he is essentially say, in at most five in a half years, they'll be ready for fully self driving cars?
Fleets, Mr. Musk. Centrally owned fleets of vehicles, where you can make your sales case based on total cost of system ownership rather than sex appeal.
It's a tall order, but can you set your sights on those "long life vehicles" presently used by the US Postal Service in urban and suburban areas, or maybe similar vehicles in Europe. Those machines return to base daily and usually are unused at least 8 hr/day. Massive buildings with large roofs.
Cop cars. Lots of slow speed cruising combined with a very occasional need for high speed and agility. Return to base every shift. Location awareness.
These sales cycles will be long, and probably a pain in the neck for your major account teams. But you're in it for the long haul.
Master plan part one made sense: it all lead to Tesla as it is today.
But master plan part deux seems odd: what exactly does "One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app" for solar have to do with the Tesla transportation part?
Tesla needs batteries. SolarCity does not need batteries except in jurisdictions that make having a battery significantly favorable over having one. Also, the high energy density batteries that Tesla needs are, IMO, mostly unnecessary for stationary use. Compare Powerwall prices to lead-acid -- lead-acid wins hands down. Sure, the lead acid batteries are heavy, but that's not a problem if you plunk them in the basement or crawlspace.
This is a big part of why we're at such an exciting point with autonomous vehicles: there are several highly promising, meaningfully different methodologies contending right now, including Google's top-down approach, Tesla's incremental approach, and even Comma.ai's maverick pure-learning approach.
I am in no position to question EM. But I was hoping he would give some good explanation for spending resources on SolarCity acquisition but nothing. Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was bought other than some hand wavy explanation about inherent difficulties of two separate companies working together. It still doesn't seem like a good purchase for Tesla specially at the moment. Solar car and SolarCity seem to only have the word solar in common :) TBH I am still fuzzy how expensive purchase of SolarCity can benefit a solar car manufacturing even in long run.
That's not what he said. Solar cars are dumb. They're good for tech demos, racing across the Australian Outback on a sunny day in the summer, but useless for normal commutes in traffic.
Musk said Tesla has always planned to provide solar energy. SolarCity provides solar energy. The odd part to outsiders is, why now?
I think Musk's investment in SolarCity was being threatened by the end of subsidized net metering. He needed to speed up the time table for energy storage to keep the company in business. SolarCity had the solar panels, but Tesla had the batteries. It would be a poor customer experience for SolarCity to have to negotiate with Tesla for the Powerwall, and it would be a waste of time and money for SolarCity to start its own battery sourcing.
If Musk could get the market valuation and accelerate the world's weaning from fossil fuels this way, it's a big bonus, but all this leveraging is pretty risky.
If you're interested in learning more about the reasoning for the SolarCity acquisition, I can recommend listening to the conference call recording about that: http://edge.media-server.com/m/p/makhvjt8
I see. It’s not just a bailout, to stave off SolarCity’s looming demise, though it is partially about that. It’s also expected to be profitable, because they could consolidate SolarCity’s sales operations into Tesla’s existing showrooms, and sell a complete package that’s more attractive than solar panels or PowerWalls on their own.
Not entirely contradictory with my previous guess; being profitable by laying off the sales department is basically saying the company will not soon be profitable by itself; but Musk is so certain that it’s a good deal for the respective companies that he’s promising to recuse himself from the vote.
The other interesting aspect is that they don’t expect the sale to close and the details to be official for several months. It’s actually near the beginning of the negotiating process, with due diligence and stuff yet to be done. Since Musk is a large shareholder of both companies, they decided to announce it publicly this early.
> Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was bought
Do note that it was only a proposal and nothing has been accepted yet with the deal, so it's an offer only - in fact, if you look at SolarCity's stock price, it's weighted toward investors believing that the deal does not happen.
I feel like there must have been a few pages left off the beginning and this whole post was a summary of an article that doesn't exist. I guess that's just Elon Musk's train of thought.
Why is residential solar important to the plan? Aren't large solar installations a more cost effective way of switching houses already on the grid to solar energy.
Adoption. By offering a standalone solution that can be adopted at the grassroots level they hope to drive adoption faster than any other way.
This is why they're including batteries instead of telling customers to feed excess energy back into the grid. Feeding into the grid is technically more efficient and doesn't require all those batteries, but does require the headache of interfacing with your local utility.
> Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it
In cities, everyone needs their car at exactly the same time, that's why we have congestions. When I'm not using my car, no one else needs one (that's an exaggeration of course but not by much).
So in order to get to sustainability, we need to understand why remote working (for instance) hasn't happened yet.
Battery-powered trucks and buses seem like a logical next step, since there's not much competition there yet (save some obscure small players) and weight is less of an issue.
[I'd still like to own a fully autonomous mobile home that drives me to work while I am eating breakfast in my bath robe or taking a shower and then moves me to a beach while I'm sleeping on Friday nights. Well, one can hope, right?]
For a bit of a reality check, go take a look at Financial Times coverage of Tesla.
Tesla will require regular infusions of capital over, say, the next 5 years. The only source for that is more equity, and to do that you need to actually start meeting some of your self-declared profitability goals. Up to now, Tesla hasn't.
The tactic of diverting attention with "but look, here's this great awesome world-changing thing we'll do next" has worked so far but it's rapidly getting old. In general, the frequency with which sleights of hand are starting to be employed is concerning. Remember the "but don't just take my word on it — I myself will be buying $20M of new stock!" thing? Sure you will to reassure investors, given that loss of confidence will cost you personally far more than $20M.
SolarCity? "If Musk thought Tesla really needs a solar company, he might as well buy a good one. But it doesn't" [FT Lex]. Given how important it is that they are able to keep raising capital through equity offerings, taking the risk of freaking the investors out with SolarCity acquisition (otherwise expected to go into bankruptcy protection by next year) makes sense only if letting SC fail presents a bigger risk of the same. The Musk fairytale would certainly take a hit from a SC bankruptcy.
And Musk setting these crazy numbers goals practically guarantees he's setting TSLA shareholders up for disappointment.
Non-profit-making Amazon has been raised as a counterargument in the comments on this thread; the amount of trust the market has extended to Bezos for the time that it has is practically unprecedented; and Bezos has worked hard to make that happen by making investment/direction choices & providing information to earn the trust of the market. Musk, to the contrary, is doing everything to the opposite.
Now, what's the likelihood of a macro downturn within the next 2-5 years? Massive. That might trip up the availability of capital a bit—those refundable $1000 deposits too but who cares about them (by the way, much of T's capital has been raised during the period of literally historically unprecedented low cost of capital)
I didn't even begin to talk about competition. Or that Panasonic, T's critical gigafactory partner, isn't just sitting around twiddling thumbs (or the Chinese).
So, it'd be prudent to curb your enthusiasm. There might not be a part trois.
Musk doesn't primarily raise capital by selling prospects of eventual dividend. He openly doesn't care at all about profitability, he only cares about the oft-stated SpaceX/Tesla goals, and is pretty much willing to take any money and opportunity that comes his way, be it public rounds or government support. Musk raises capital by selling the prospect of the achievement of his stated goals. Part of the investors care about Musk's goals, and another part invest in Musk because they think that other people caring about Musk's goals sets Tesla's market value.
Is Tesla going to make this data freely available, to accelerate the development of safer autonomous driving software? Given that it's "morally reprehensible to delay release" of autopilot, it is also morally reprehensible not to publicly release such data if more groups working on the task will lead to safer software.
Nice plan, good luck! If that happens, though, I can't see why owning a car at all, ten to twenty years from now: just make an enormous fleet of electric unmanned buses running up and down every major road on Earth, uh? No jams, no accidents, only a regular and pre-determined flow of vehicles. One planet, one network.
> The world could be a better place for so many people, but somehow a bunch of other people think it's okay to continue doing them until they die.
The other day I came across an article in which a school prohibited their students clapping when cheering, instead making the cheer in quiet with a fistpump or something like that.
The stated reason for this was that some of their pupils were noise sensitive and it made them feel bad/anxious/terrified.
Now, regardless of whether this particular story is true like that, it illustrates something interesting.
There is a whole bag of human behavior that has the possibility to affect their environment negatively. I would go so far to say
> Being alive is an interruption to your environment
You can't not be a nuisance. Nor should you strive to be. That doesn't mean you should be as annoying as possible to everyone you meet, but it means to recognize that we live in a society in which people are different, and specifically to your point, have different trade-offs when it comes to acceptable risk and freedom.
That you have different trade-offs doesn't give you a moral high-ground, over people "thinking it's ok until they die". And I'm not totally relativist here, I think there should be limits and that some trade-offs are wrong.
It's just that that goes both ways between recklessly irresponsible and fascist government limiting everything dangerous, and there is a lot of space in between the two.
I'm a left-wing guy, but the older I get the more I have the feeling, getting my life rid of socalist projects (public healthcare, retirment funds, etc) lets me live a more lefty life, haha.
Forgive me if this is a silly question but when he talks about "beautiful solar-roof-with-battery", is he talking about car roofs or roofs of buildings?
An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.
I haven't figured it out, but my intuition is that the increased energy requirements of a tractor trailer mean that there isn't enough area there either.
Back of napkin, it looks like you get ~3*15 meters of roof which seems to translate to 10 kW of output under good conditions and then you need something like 150 kW to rumble up the highway.
Well trucks still have a lot of low hanging fruit for becoming more aerodynamic.
Plus you could use the sides of the trailer for some power too.
Finally even if 10kw can't power the truck. It could extend its range by some amount. Plus that's still a significant amount of power you don't need to buy. 2-3 rooftops worth?
Those improvements are presently not done because of cost. Grid electricity is a lot cheaper than diesel.
I guess electric trucks would still put a lot more effort into avoiding air resistance because of the lower energy per unit mass of batteries (the aerodynamic improvements can be pretty directly traded for either range or cargo capacity).
I think present day solar cells are a combination of too expensive and too heavy to bother with. That could change in the future.
I have thought the same thing -- that trucks could be more aerodynamic. So why aren't they? The economics of freight are such that any measurable improvement in fuel economy is worth a lot. Why do we not see super streamlined semis? Maybe there's some non-obvious reason? I don't know.
> Traffic congestion would improve due to increased passenger areal density by eliminating the center aisle and putting seats where there are currently entryways
I don't see how automation reduces the need to get on the bus.
I was hoping to see another zero to one approach with the master plan where he is taking on some other industry goal. I totally get that part deux is still very, very ambitious and one that no other company can truly realize. But if we're just talking about Musk's master plan, I'm curious why he didn't talk about the synergies with his other company, SpaceX. Tesla and SpaceX both rely on vehicles & transport while SpaceX and Solar City both revolve around innovation in energy/physics. I'm wondering if Tesla's mission/vision will dwarf SolarCity's when solar harvesting in space could be one of many opportunities to partner with SpaceX. /rant
I suspect Tesla will move into aircraft and oceancraft in the long-run, if you're interested in "other industries." He's mentioned the electric jet enough times. And why would he create a new company for it when he's got all the expertise and business structure at his fingertips already?
Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth? Even if there were a way, it's not necessary or effective. He's said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country. Why bother putting them in space? No advantage.
However, SolarCity IS likely to provide the panels for SpaceX's satellites, of course. So there is that form of solar harvesting in space.
> Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth?
This has been investigated several times and the most promising technique involves using maser downlinks to transfer the energy.
> He's said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country.
Ok that's a start. That takes care of the energy needs of 3.5% of the Earth's population, once they have sufficient storage capacity to see them through the night.
Geostationary space-based solar collection can work 24 hours per day, with much higher efficiency and minimal storage requirements, right over the areas of peak demand even when the ground is obscured by rain and cloud. No deserts required.
If there were a way to collect additional solar energy in space and somehow get it back to earth, that is now a net increase in energy, which will ultimately end up as heat, being delivered to the planet. At a large enough scale and over time this would be a global warming contributor.
Solar power collected on earth is just using energy that is already being delivered to the surface -- no net change.
At some point we will need to take an active part in regulating the planet's weather and various climates. Orbiting solar panels on orbits that pass between us and the sun, that can be selectively turned edge on, or perpendicular, to the sun, would let us control solar influx to particular surface regions, limiting energy input in specific places while also harvesting that energy and enabling us to put it to use as needed without increasing total energy/heat input.
Satellite solar panels are very specialized devices that use different technology from ground-based ones. For a start, efficiency is much more important on satellites because of space and weight limitations, so they're generally multi-junction gallium arsenide solar cells rather than the cheaper single-junction silicon used in ground-based solar power.
Sorry, but solar space harvesting is a post Asteroid Mining kind of tech... Not really "Synergy" for few Decades. (and acceptance of Nuclear space propulsion)
Come to think of it, if you can transfer the energy... Just put the reactors in space?
Last year I pitched Playa (http://getplaya.com/) at Launch conference and was laughed off stage by Jason Calacanis. My example use of the technology was that your autonomous vehicle would be able to contract itself out as an 'uber', earning you money while you slept. Today Tesla announced that this is part of its plans for the future and everyone is going wild.
We're now going a step further and building a next-gen interface for that autonomous future. #Asteria.
Obscured under " Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning "
is the cold hard truth that that learning will be paid for in lives - mostly of Tesla drivers possibly of others.
The rates of accidents in manual vs current version of autopilot may work out to be favorable - (and that is still under debate) - but there certainly will be people who will die (and have died) due to a premature roll-out of Autopilot and their trust of it. This is some bloody cold calculation
While it's true people are going to die on autopilot, what you need to compare it with is the number of people who would otherwise have caused collisions the autopilot avoided. Statistically if it isn't already safer than the average driver it's very close.
There are 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes in the US every year. Self driving cars might end up being safer even if we were all perfect drivers.
I think the fundamental error here is assuming the existing car ownership model. I think the future is autonomous taxis (or Ubers). This actually reduces congestion, eliminates the need for parking, and plays to the strengths of electric vehicles. Building a master plan based on families owning cars is, I think, skating to where the puck was ten years ago (car ownership is dropping in the Western world, especially among the young).
This only works in well connected/urban areas though.
Waiting for 15 minutes or longer whenever you need to get somewhere is not acceptable for a lot of people. Also, cars act as mobile lockers for your stuff. Etc.
Autonomous taxi's will supplement the car owner model, but that model in and of itself is not going anywhere.
Don't underestimate the aversion people have for "public" transport, many people I know bend over backwards to not use a shared form of transportation.
Solar powered cars are only working well in Urban areas, and they don't make economic sense, they're simply a form of guilt-free conspicuous consumption.
There will definitely be people who need their own vehicles, but typical families (and typical families live in urban or suburban areas) won't.
They still need to sell cars for the next couple of years. When they've mentioned autonomy and removing the steering-wheel (some) people get upset because they want a car they can drive themselves.
So if they tout the idea of people not owning cars too much that is will only antagonize people in the short term.
If the ownership model changes they can easily adapt. I think they are very aware of the car ownership statistics and how cars being shared is a fundamentally better model in most cases.
If the basis of your model is ramping up to major production levels at a loss to sell things people won't need once you're ramped up, I think you have a problem.
There's tradeoffs everywhere. Sure, if your car is out giving someone else a ride, it can't give you one either. But most of the time when you get in your car, you know ahead of time that you're going to do that, so it's pretty easy to tell your car to become available when you need it. And the benefits to owning it include having it available exactly when you need it (instead of having to call a car and stand around waiting for it to come pick you up), having it be able to sit around on standby for if you don't know if you're going to need it or not, or personalization of your car, etc. Similarly, if you're regularly driving longer distances than just hopping around San Francisco, it's probably more cost-effective to own a car than to use Uber. And once you go outside of major metropolitan areas there's a lot less coverage by ridesharing services, and it's reasonable to expect there to still be low coverage by Uber-owned autonomous vehicles.
I hope I will live to use that bus, which won't be handled by driver, who thinks that he is god in the bus and can do whatever he wants while he has steering wheel in his hands. i hope, this will bring few things which will improve my commute:
- on time performance (I'm yet to leave bus stop in the morning on-time after about 10 years -- bus is always late);
- less traffic in the bus terminal, where drives always make wrong assumption and create traffic where it could have been avoided;
- safer commute (not that it isn't safe enough now, but there are drivers who prefer driving way too fast).
It would seem Tesla's ride sharing service is more about getting more of the public into a Tesla with a side effect of selling more cars. Electric vehicles aren't essential to autonomous ride sharing--market share and technology are. Uber's app is already installed in orders of magnitude more phones than Tesla right now.
A ride in an autonomous vehicle should be far less expensive than a ride in a manually driven Uber vehicle.
If the end goal for both is a fleet of autonomous vehicles and a strong app to facilitate the use of that fleet by the public, I would much rather be in Tesla's position. Having a fleet and needing to create an app sounds a lot more promising than having an app but no fleet. Tesla will be able to get an app up and running far sooner than Uber will be able to get a fleet.
> Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it
I really like this, but the laws of supply and demand still apply. If you live in a sparsely populated area there's not going to be much for your car to do.
Great for those in urban centres, but then if you lived there why bother owning at all when there will be more cabs to hail?
> It's almost as if he's delivered on everything he promised
hasn't Tesla repeatedly missed price points and delivery dates.
Or are those not promises.
I actually think most of what he is talking about is pretty doable. The ones I'm skeptical of are his talk about the massive factory improvements (in a few years too?) and the magic buses with no aisles or entrances.
By what measure are Tesla and SpaceX the "two most difficult companies in America"
I'm actually curious about the bus, too. Sounds weird. But I trust his judgement, I'm sure it'll be great. He has a track record, you know.
Regarding missed promises, if you're saying that as if to suggest that what he's promised isn't nonetheless coming true at a pace faster than anyone else could have possibly delivered, I think you're wearing blinders.
Regarding "most difficult".......are you aware of other companies working on something as technologically and logistically and legally challenging as SpaceX and Tesla????
The weird minicars are not what they've been road testing. The ones they've been road testing for ML look like regular cars.
And they have yet to hit a pedestrian or decapitate a driver with a semi. Be real; Tesla's is basically a smarter cruise control. It can't actually deal with complicated scenarios.
Some people will always be petty. It says more about them than the object of their critique. You can cure cancer and someone will complain it took you long enough.
We should always be thoughtful and critical of ideas regardless from whom they are coming, but autonomously landed first stage rocket boosters returning from orbit is a _big_ fucking deal. There may be some blind worship, but we are not talking about a charlatan here.
If I am on a self-driving car and it meets with an accident, there might be a case to be made against Tesla if I consider myself a very safe driver. Even though on an average self-driving might cause less casualties but that figure might not hold good compared to what my personal accident rate is.
And this should be good enough for law enforcement to nail Tesla.
I think, like everyone else, that Musk is probably the smartest entrepreneurs of our time. In this case though, maybe he is over his head a bit:
- Getting Tesla 3 to production volume will not be easy.
- Autopilot is NOT good enough to be used in production. This can be fatal to Tesla if FCC catches up. Tesla needs to quit Autopilot and focus only on getting Tesla 3 out. Tesla 3 will face competition sooner rather than later and market dominance is not guaranteed.
- SolarCity has absolutely no synergies with this business. It should be sold off.
- SpaceX is again a distraction given how hard it will be for Tesla 3 to roll off.
I won't mind being wrong at all, and I have been wrong before. But this is what I feel about the whole thing right now. There are real issues with driverless cars and google has scaled back for this very reason.
Elon is very smart, but even Jobs didnt get it right with Next.
What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. That's realistic. His two top production guys quit when he announced 2018 as the delivery date for the Model 3. His new production head, from Audi, may have given Musk a reality check.
Tesla produced about 50,000 cars in 2015 with 13,000 employees, about 4 cars per employee. Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee. Toyota produced about 9 million cars with 344,000 employees, about 26 cars per employee. So Tesla needs to get their productivity per employee up by 4x - 7x to play with the big guys. Clearly Musk has done the same calculation.
Now, though, he's admitting that they can't do it by 2018. This is prepping the stockholders for bad financial news. Tesla is going to burn a lot of cash through at least 2022.
There's no reason that Tesla can't get their productivity up to at least Ford levels in time. Ford has a much broader product line, and Tesla's car isn't that complicated mechanically. But it's not instant.