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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

#381

Post by ec109685 »

Invictus0 wrote: post #244
ec109685 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Even without full level 5 self-driving, these chips allow Tesla to control steering and breaking in many situations. Humans don’t have lidar and we are able to navigate the world. If the windows of the car was replaced by a low latency screen, showing exactly what we’d see if we looked out the window, we could drive just fine, so cameras do provide enough data to self drive. You just need a smart processor.

The bar is not "being able to navigate the world". The bar is doing so 10x more safely than a human, and currently the human deaths-in-car-crash rate is something like 1.2 per 100 million miles driven [0]. For scale, that is the same distance from the Earth to the sun, and equivalent to 4000 trips around the equator. I understand it is theoretically possible to beat this without a LIDAR but you are seriously understa…

Injury rate / accident rate is a good proxy for deaths, so you don’t need as much data as 1.2 in 100M would imply.

Also, given humans drive a lot, even with those astronomical odds, if you drove 15k a year for 60 years, you’d have an almost 1% chance of dying in an auto accident.

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

#382

Post by philwelch »

michaelt wrote: post #224
TeMPOraL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like this wasn't a publicly known fact, a strategy they officially wrote about.

Pretty sure the Roadster and the Model S were the luxury cars, and the Model 3 was supposed to be the affordable, non-luxury one.

It’s in the same price range as an Audi A4, Mercedes C300, BMW i3, Audi TT, and Lexus ES. It’s an entry level luxury car. It’s twice as expensive as a Volkswagen Jetta, Toyota Corolla, or Honda Civic.

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

#383

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

Bendingo wrote: post #348
natch wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The power of marketing is incredible. Tesla doesn’t advertise. Guess who does? The car companies that you seem to think have a better price/value offering. Hmm, so yes, the power of marketing is incredible indeed.

Fixed: Tesla's marketing is so powerful, that they don't even need to advertise.

Fixed: Tesla's products are so good, they don't even need to advertise.

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

#384

Post by t0mas88 »

vardump wrote: post #277
t0mas88 wrote: post #191

This feels very much like a marketing fluff piece pushed by Tesla PR. Take this gem: "Young companies like Tesla, on the other hand, are not shackled to suppliers and are free to pursue the best technologies available." Try the automated windscreen wipers on any big car brand, they're mostly made by Bosch and they work, even on a 15 year old car. Then Tesla came along with their own approach, guess what, they didn't…

> Because I noticed I was accepting a lot of things from them that I would never have from BMW or Audi. Could you elaborate a bit, please? I'd like to know what I'd miss if I chose Tesla.

Interior:

- Quality in general with a lot of rattling sounds and cheap materials. Asked them to fix a few of these, service was super friendly, but they never really got it fixed. Not easy to describe but the magnitude of this is really worse than a low-end VW. Which is super annoying if you live in a place with non-perfect streets. (And the engines being quite makes it worse because it's more noticeable)

- Seats were not what other brands offer in adjustability etc. I didn't mind so much in the test drive, but it's annoying if you drive a lot (this has been fixed in the newer generations so you should be fine now).

Software:

- Automatic windscreen wipers just not working, for which they promised an update. Took almost a year for them to work.

- Entertainment system crashes, had to sort of reboot it sometimes to get things back to work.

Mechanical:

- Adjustable suspension failed twice, about a year apart. They claimed it was my fault for driving over speedbumps, but our other car (BMW 5 GT) is older, has the same system, and never failed.

- One door handle failed, which I think was a build quality issue, it just didn't come out anymore.

- Sunroof was leaking after winter, which took them multiple attempts to fix. And after that it had annoying wind noise at highway speed as if something was misaligned. Did not bring it back again after that because I was a bit done with it, just bought another brand as a next car.

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

#385

Post by marsokod »

The big question for me is whether they reused it for SpaceX Starlink. The satellites are in low enough orbit that common COTS should work without any issue, and the automotive grade HW is usually well suited in these environment. And they would benefit from volumes.

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

#386

Post by t0mas88 »

boojums wrote: post #350
nicpottier wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard range is $40k, AWD long range is $50k. Paint is $1000 extra for anything but black, $2000 for red. Where are you getting $64k?

The poster mentions euro, so I would guess the poster is using local prices.

Indeed. The other brands prices are also higher here.

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

#387

Post by t0mas88 »

tomatocracy wrote: post #380
t0mas88 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices here are incomparable to the US due to tax, but a model S starts at 90k if you accept it being only available in white (nobody does at that price). If you pick any other color, reasonable rims and a "luxury interior" as you would expect on cars in this price range it's 110k to 120k euro. That's more than a full option BMW 5 series or Audi A6 and comparable to a very high-end Audi A8 or BMW 7 series. Not sure a…

Yes. The A and B class Mercedes are like they're made by a different manufacturer compared to the S class or something like the Mercedes-AMG GT.

Exactly. It makes some sense because they're also in a different price range, but Mercedes is risking the quality reputation of their brand of this is your first encounter with their cars.

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

#388

Post by tomatocracy »

t0mas88 wrote: post #387
tomatocracy wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The A and B class Mercedes are like they're made by a different manufacturer compared to the S class or something like the Mercedes-AMG GT.

Exactly. It makes some sense because they're also in a different price range, but Mercedes is risking the quality reputation of their brand of this is your first encounter with their cars.

True, but it’s been like that for a long time with the A/B class. It’s quite surprising - I can’t think of another brand that has such a wide quality differential between the low end models and the mid range (let alone high end).

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

#389

Post by erikpukinskis »

matahwoosh wrote: post #299
taylodl wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue this is Tesla's real business - battery production. I don't believe they intend to stay in the auto market forever. They're in the market to create demand for quality electric cars, goad the traditional auto makers into making them, and then selling those traditional auto makers the batteries they need to make them work well. I believe that is Tesla's long-term business plan.

Batteries are a commodity, so I doubt Tesla would want to reduce themselves to an OEM and shrink their margins. Their energy business might eventually be bigger than their automotive one, but either way I think they will continue selling vertically integrated products.

Batteries with 20% more watt hours for the weight than the rest of the market are certainly not a commodity.

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

#390

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

It’s eight cameras, you can’t stream a million cars times 8 cameras at full resolution times 24 hours a day, back to the mothership over 4G. It’d be way too expensive.

You need to do your learning on the car and stream back the error component to the mothership.

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