Master Plan, Part Deux • Hacker News Board

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#171

Post by beambot » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:05 AM UTC

JeffL wrote: post #41

thucydides wrote: post #23

> "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 ca…

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?

Or better yet: Reclaim parking lots and roadways and turn them into urban green spaces and parks!

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#172

Post by 8611m » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:06 AM UTC

rjdagost wrote: post #132

danhak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk

Say what you will about their "antiquated" business practices, but Ford consistently does one thing that Tesla never does: it turns a profit

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

1. http://revenuesandprofits.com/amazon-vs-walmart-revenues-and...

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#173

Post by parasdpain » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:07 AM UTC

pdq wrote: post #139

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…

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.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#174

Post by tansey » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:08 AM UTC

argonaut wrote: post #163

sudoscript wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amou…

> 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.

Except that is exactly what Nvidia did, and it worked out fine for them: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#175

Post by dpcx » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:08 AM UTC

femto wrote: post #126

> via massive fleet learning 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.

Likely. They gave away all of their patents (https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you), so it's likely they'd be willing to share this data.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#176

Post by beambot » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #101

My points of skepticism: 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 highw…

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:

http://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2014/03/26/...

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#177

Post by arcticfox » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:10 AM UTC

chinhodado wrote: post #123

ams6110 wrote: post #101

My points of skepticism: 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 highw…

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 dep…

That's the point: it's for people that want to own a Tesla but can't afford it.

Not for people that can afford to own a Tesla and have it sit idle waiting for them 90% of the time (like all of today's owners).

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#178

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:10 AM UTC

thucydides wrote: post #23

> "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 ca…

[deleted]

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#179

Post by nl » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:11 AM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #75

sudoscript wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's also the matter of that laser scanner on some cars - usually costing more than the car...

Not anymore.

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]

[1] http://www.teraranger.com/products/teraranger-lidar/

[2] https://www.pulsedlight3d.com/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/12/0...

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#180

Post by mtgx » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 3:11 AM UTC

yish wrote: post #112

paulsutter wrote: post #15

> 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…

How much data has Google and Apple collected using LIDAR and such on their mapping/street view vehicles?

It's in the millions. Tesla's is in the hundreds of millions/close to a billion.