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Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

bloomberg.com

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Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#121

Post by hef19898 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #117
hef19898 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With these low volumes the sound move would be to buy chips from someone else. Just like Aston Martin is sourcing engines from third parties. Heck, even Mercedes is using Renault engines and BMW used Peugeot engines in Minis for years. And engines are a core competency of both, BMW and Mercedes. Chips for Tesla, not so much.

The thing is that no one makes a chip like Tesla wants that is tailored to their workflow. Tesla, by going with the 14nm process and inexpensively licensing core IP (i.e. for the ARM cores) and only customizing the NN portion, is able to keep chip dev costs low enough so that in the end they're saving a little money on unit costs, getting a power/performance benefit, and as a bonus is building in-house expertise that…

Regarding the last point, not really. It gave BMW access to smaller engines then they had in-house. AFAIK they switched to BMW engines once this whole down sizing started and they had the engines in house. And MINI sales were never an issue, so the idea was sound.

Aside from some potential benefits down the road coming from proprietary chips I don't see why Tesla would do it. Also the use cases are so similar that the use of in-house chips will hardly be a competitive advantage. So why burn additional cash on it if you can't afford it?

Tesla, and Musk, are risking everything by loosing focus and discipline. Even at SpaceX with their in-house satellite is goeing that way now. No idea why you would do that either.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#122

Post by notfromhere »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #115
notfromhere wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Tesla is going to enter an industry that actively loses money based on an autonomy play that doesn't exist and isn't even legal on most U.S. roads?

Do you lose money if someone else owns the cars and you're just facilitating transactions with software you own and infrastructure you must operate regardless to provide service to your vehicle owners?

It's not free, and given how Uber/Lyft/etc have made exactly zero profits despite tens of billions of dollars in capital, not a line of business you want a struggling manufacturing company hemorrhaging cash to pursue.

It's delusional stupidity, and no one should actually take Musk seriously.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#123

Post by sunstone »

This article is a little disingenuous. The margins on model3's have been reported at 20% and they've been hugely successful in the market.

So now it makes sense to ramp up in China, in Europe and Japan etc. This obviously takes upfront investment before the product can be produced. All companies with a popular product face this kind of financing hurdle.

The difference now is that the end game of the automotive industry is now a fair bit clearer than it was even a few years ago. Most of the pieces are on the table you just have to put them together. Musk understands this, it appears that most other automotive makers are still in denial.

Tesla will need a lot more financing before this game is done. Telsa is the current favorite, and up one set to nil, but with a lot of game left to play.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#124

Post by tim333 »

dragontamer wrote: post #69
Judgmentality wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no one knows what the heck Google / Waymo is doing. All we know is that its working, today, in Phoenix Arizona, where anyone can use Google / Waymo's taxi service TODAY. This is false. There are, to the best of anyone's knowledge, a handful of people in the Waymo One program (I'm fairly confident it's less than 10). Everyone in the Early Rider program is still under NDA. In order to be accepted to either, you h…

My point is that Waymo has taken large and public steps forward. People have seen the Waymo cars (and have to deal with them) in Phoenix. No one has ever seen a "Full self driving" car from Tesla, despite the fact that hundreds-of-thousands of people have paid $5000 for the promise of future hardware to be installed onto their car. My point is: other companies are ahead, and have demonstrated capabilities above and b…

I'm not convinced one way or the other which is ahead out of Tesla and Waymo. Waymo have low interventions per mile but don't seem able to deal with heavy traffic for merging or turning. Tesla have had issues driving into things but are out there in heavy traffic.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#125

Post by tim333 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #3
brianpgordon wrote: post #2

> a fleet of self-driving vehicles that will make their way into the robotaxi service as soon as next year. So... are we living on the same planet? Does Musk seriously think that Tesla will have solved full autonomous driving, with no LIDAR, and have commercialized a functioning robotaxi service, by next year ? This is so far outside of the realm of possibility that it's like saying he's going to Pluto next week.

It's either a lie or psychotic delusion, I refuse to believe he is that uninformed and ignorant about the current state of autonomous driving.

I think he's counting on 'exponential improvement'. You can sort of see where they are going - they have features like summon in a car park or changing lane in traffic that sort of work and they are gradually going to tick off the various driving test skills you need at which point it will sort of work. Then he's hoping it will get reliable as the network learns. It's that last point that may be over optimistic.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#126

Post by DennisP »

moogly wrote: post #105
Reedx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but you can't dispute that humans don't have LIDAR. It's just a matter of time before AI can drive better than humans even if using similar vision. Especially in aggregate (e.g., factoring in distracted drivers).

Humans don't only have vision. Humans have an ocular-vestibular system that makes it possible to perform SLAM[1]-like processing; when in motion, your balance and visual input like the parallax effect can help the brain build a mapped 3D volume and determine your position, orientation and velocity and your relation to other objects within that volume. VSLAM, visual SLAM, which is what you have to employ if relying la…

Every smartphone has a gyroscope and accelerometer. Surely Teslas have them too, feeding into the model with the other sensors.

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#127

Post by [deleted] »

notfromhere wrote: post #122
toomuchtodo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you lose money if someone else owns the cars and you're just facilitating transactions with software you own and infrastructure you must operate regardless to provide service to your vehicle owners?

It's not free, and given how Uber/Lyft/etc have made exactly zero profits despite tens of billions of dollars in capital , not a line of business you want a struggling manufacturing company hemorrhaging cash to pursue. It's delusional stupidity, and no one should actually take Musk seriously.

[deleted]

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#128

Post by DennisP »

StrangeDoctor wrote: post #94
DennisP wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but lots of animals with much smaller visual cortexes also manage to avoid running into things.

But not when moving at highway speeds with many other moving objects.

Small birds chase each other around, fly through thick forests or jungle, dodge predators including larger birds, and fly in large flocks. Based on the squabbles I see from my front porch, they seem to at least match human drivers on reaction time.

I'm not convinced absolute speed is that important of a variable, when comparing to something much smaller dealing with closer distances, but some birds actually do reach highway speeds and beyond: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-fastest-birds-in-the...

But the fastest relative to size might be the hummingbird, which can fly 30mph backwards: https://www.ponderweasel.com/what-bird-can-fly-backwards/

The Anna's hummingbird has been clocked at up to 50mph in a dive, or 385 body lengths per second. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-hummingbird-thats-faster...

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#129

Post by fmihaila »

tim333 wrote: post #125
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's either a lie or psychotic delusion, I refuse to believe he is that uninformed and ignorant about the current state of autonomous driving.

I think he's counting on 'exponential improvement'. You can sort of see where they are going - they have features like summon in a car park or changing lane in traffic that sort of work and they are gradually going to tick off the various driving test skills you need at which point it will sort of work. Then he's hoping it will get reliable as the network learns. It's that last point that may be over optimistic.

> I think he's counting on 'exponential improvement'.

Here he is, on record, stating that he believes Tesla has essentially solved the problem ('game, set, and match'):

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI&t=1778

Re: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer

#130

Post by gamblor956 »

DennisP wrote: post #80
gamblor956 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the article originally said, so it appears that it's been updated since then. Good think I quoted the relevant section of the article in my comment... That being said, existing self-driving cars already have some cameras at that level without displaying the sort of accuracy the researchers found, which relates to the methodology issues other commenters have noted.

The researchers described a new way of processing the data, claiming a dramatic improvement over previous methods.

In accuracy, over existing visual systems, but still worse than LIDAR and at the cost of several processing-intensive intermediate steps.

In any conceivable situation where you'd use this, it would actually be better to just use LIDAR.

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