181–190 of 705 posts
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Say what you will about their "antiquated" business practices, but Ford consistently does one thing that Tesla never does: it turns a profit
You know why Ford turns a profit? Because they've gotten those economies of scale. If/when Tesla does, I'm sure they'll make a profit, too.
Ford was immediately profitable, was it not? Even before implementing an assembly line?
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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...
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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
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.
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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 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.
> "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…
If you're human, you're 99.999999% likely to die.
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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...
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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...
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.
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.
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You know why Ford turns a profit? Because they've gotten those economies of scale. If/when Tesla does, I'm sure they'll make a profit, too.
>You know why Ford turns a profit? Because they've gotten those economies of scale. Ford was immediately profitable, was it not? Even before implementing an assembly line?
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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 cull…