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Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

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Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#141

Post by Kirby64 »

xvf22 wrote: post #123
pmorici wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chevy Bolt is priced the same as the Tesla Model 3 and has less 'luxary' features. For example if you want leather in the Bolt that's extra where as it is standard on the 3. Other things the Bolt doesn't have at that price are Autopilot, DC Fast Charging, etc...

The leather is tied to the range in the model 3.

No it's not. All Model 3's produced have the same exact seats (besides the minor revisions).

You may be thinking of the originally proposed SR/SR+ half leather and half linen or whatever they were talking about. They scrapped that.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#142

Post by SEJeff »

rebelde wrote: post #102
soygul wrote: post #18

Article praises Tesla's custom AI chip. It is something many criticize as a waste of development resources, while they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task. Tesla's real advantage is their battery production. No one else can compete with them on battery price or production volume at a similar quality: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/teslas-competitors-play-catc...

Oh, the article gives numbers! Tesla: $158/kWh Competitors: "more than" $200/kWh Model 3 SR+ has a 54 kWh battery. Tesla advantage = (200 - 158) * 54 = $2268 per car. Yes, an advantage today, but not too bad.

The Maxwell Technologies battery technology is allegedly 10x cheaper to manufacture due to no oven or liquids and as a result, and also lighter. Elon says the "holy grail" of batteries is being able to develop an automotive grade battery at <= $100/kWh. The Maxwell tech looks to be below that, but we'll find out specifics on the upcoming Battery Investor day.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#143

Post by h2odragon »

ghaff wrote: post #64
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #11

This is the industry that took years to adopt the CD player, it’s not that hard to be technologically ahead of them. Whether that actually translates into more sales of cars is a different question.

Assuming that was the case, it wouldn't surprise me that might have something to do with the reliability of early CDs across a wide range of temperature conditions and use given vibrations, potholes, etc.

The aftermarket filled the hole quickly and with the full range of quality available. Many people put the early "discman" portable players on the dash and used FM modulators to get that signal to the car radio.

When "factory CD" units started to appear they were multiples of the price of aftermarket units, and initially of such low quality initially that the FM modulators sounded better. The disc handling on some of the early units was ludicrous, too: "just get my CD out please" was common.

* edit: also people used "CD to cassette adapters" which are worth mentioning because of how ingenious they are. Its a headphone plug on one end and a cassette shell on the other, the headphones drive coils that excite the tape player's read head.

Source: installed car audio as a sideline in the late 80s early 90s.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#144

Post by hef19898 »

soygul wrote: post #18

Article praises Tesla's custom AI chip. It is something many criticize as a waste of development resources, while they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task. Tesla's real advantage is their battery production. No one else can compete with them on battery price or production volume at a similar quality: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/teslas-competitors-play-catc...

Isn't Tesla getting batteries from Panasonic? because I had the impression tesla has now a scale advantage.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#145

Post by SEJeff »

wil421 wrote: post #54
soygul wrote: post #18

Article praises Tesla's custom AI chip. It is something many criticize as a waste of development resources, while they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task. Tesla's real advantage is their battery production. No one else can compete with them on battery price or production volume at a similar quality: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/teslas-competitors-play-catc...

Battery production seems like a problem that can be solved right now with money. VW and Toyota could partner with a 3rd party (like Tesla and Panasonic) and build factories. Custom silicon seems like a much harder problem for VM/Toyota. Unless a supplier can build something for them I don’t see either company innovating like Tesla. Basically Tesla’s secret sauce is the Tech not the EV components.

It isn't just production, but is also the chemistry. Tesla has the lowest amount of cobalt and nickel in their batteries of any battery manufacturer in the world. It makes their batteries cheaper, but also use less rare earth minerals (which are difficult to get ahold of at their scales). Tesla isn't sharing their chemistry, which is demonstrably better than anything LG Chem or Samsung, etc has been able to come up with. As a result, their batteries are actually better.

You can scale up manufacturing of inferior batteries, but you still will have an inferior product.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#147

Post by Retric »

soygul wrote: post #137
onepremise wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task. They did use off-the-shelf components. They performed poorly and they resulted to developing a custom die with the right components to handle the task of computer vision. They explicitly stated this in multiple interviews. The off-the-shelf solution was crap.

AI/ML components change rapidly. What happens if they decide to use an entirely different approach. They develop a new chip? Still seems excessive to develop custom chips for unfinished/experimental tech like self-driving: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/18514308/tesla-full-self-...

Once you cross the 1+ million chip threshold, custom chips stop being such a big deal.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#148

Post by vlan0 »

londons_explore wrote: post #95
KaiserPro wrote: post #48

This is grand, apart from the build quality of the mechanics is ~10 years behind. Go to a tesla showroom, Look at the doors of the model three. Note that they don't line up. Look at the paint job, notice that there are bumps and chips, especailly on the edges of the doors. This is on a _demo_ car, stuck in a showroom. these should be perfect. Even a budget Kia has better build quality than this. Its not the isolated…

Yet most cars you buy today don't even have Wifi - a technology that's been around for over 20 years. There's no API for controlling them apart from a CAN bus which is barely documented, not wireless, not routable over networks, can't even deliver video feeds, and dates from 1986. It feels like car technology stopped when the generation of those born in the 40's retired. Ever since then, younger generations have been…

>It feels like car technology stopped when the generation of those born in the 40's retired. Ever since then, younger generations have been focussed on the internet, computers and phones, and the car has become a tool like a pencil - it works well enough, and new models only see incremental changes.

What kind of "car technology" are you talking about? It sounds like you're talking about traditional tech, not tech that increases the ability of the driver on the road.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#149

Post by SEJeff »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #89
swiley wrote: post #12

6 years ahead electronics here means AI ASICs. I thought that was weird, I know Toyota cars have radar and I’m not sure about Teslas. IMO as an armchair observer the sensor array is far more interesting than any of this. Personally, if I were to buy another car (and hopefully I don’t have to any time soon) I’d want the processing electronics to be off the shelf not weird custom stuff that’s going to have all kinds of…

> I’m upset about this because it’s (IMO) more of a marketing thing (and maybe a way to have some leverage over 3rd party repair shops) and not really a technical improvement. The number of "tech people" that think Tesla has some chip building advantage over the likes of companies like NVIDIA is astonishing. Tesla's marketing compares their chip to older NVIDIA boards. NVIDIA has better tech available off-the-shelf:…

Where you're defining better as faster, however, it uses enormously more energy, which impacts overall driving range. It doesn't need to be faster past a certain point. They've already got enough bandwidth to run the entire set of self driving neural networks in duplicate at production speed on the current FSD hardware version 3 computer. There is a point of diminishing returns wrt speed and I think we're quickly approaching if not already surpassing it. Now it is down to efficiency, which the Nvidia solution gets utterly spanked by Tesla's computer on. Ever ran CUDA simulations? GPUs always use enormous amounts of power to do anything, but they're incredible at floating point math.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#150

Post by soygul »

hef19898 wrote: post #144
soygul wrote: post #18

Article praises Tesla's custom AI chip. It is something many criticize as a waste of development resources, while they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task. Tesla's real advantage is their battery production. No one else can compete with them on battery price or production volume at a similar quality: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/teslas-competitors-play-catc...

Isn't Tesla getting batteries from Panasonic? because I had the impression tesla has now a scale advantage.

Gigafactor is also producing the battery cells (though it might be Panasonic's tech) as well as the packs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Nevada

> the production rate of battery cells in the Gigafactory had reached 3.5 million '2170' cells per day.

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