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Master Plan, Part Deux
241–250 of 705 posts
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber's been likely working on self-driving cars, potentially in partnership with Google. What Tesla has as an advantage though, is an assembly line to produce lots of quality cars. In other words, Tesla will likely be ready for the future of transportation before Uber.
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
Data isn't that hard to gather. Uber has more robotics scientists than all the others combined.
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weeellll, except for that $30B loss from 2006-2008 [1] leading to them taking a $5.9B government "loan" in 2009. (It should also be noted that while not directly dipping into the $80B bailout pot, Ford told Congress that not bailing out other companies threatened Ford's continued existence. [2]) Plus they were second only to Toyota in the amount of money they drew from cash-for-clunkers - not exactly standing on thei…
Well Tesla also relies on government subsidies as well a loan (which it paid back early, as did Ford). Also Ford is more than a 100 years old, so it's bound to have a bad period. We'll have to see what happens when tech companies are that old ( or will they even survive)
So what we're concluding is that a company has difficulty remaining competitive unless it fully abuses the system within which it operates? Hmm...
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh? Don't you think buyers of premium cars expect more in the way of difficult-to-manufacture details?
I do. It just doesn't mean it's true or necessarily a requirement. Nor does it mean the car is better. A better locksmith takes less time to open a door.
Did you just utilize an analogy concerning destruction to make a point about production?
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#245"A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle. The first Model 3 factory machine should be thought of as version 0.5, with version 1.0 probably in 2018." What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. T…
shhh, everyone knows ford is an antiquated company run by morons who think a computer is just a fancy light box and tesla is going to run them out of business within 5 years.
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#246"A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle. The first Model 3 factory machine should be thought of as version 0.5, with version 1.0 probably in 2018." What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. T…
shhh, everyone knows ford is an antiquated company run by morons who think a computer is just a fancy light box and tesla is going to run them out of business within 5 years.
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Nope. That car just does lane keeping - it doesn't even do turns or lane changes. This is all stuff solved 20 years ago. And even then it only achieves 98% autonomy on lane keeping - this is a task that needs 100% accuracy. You should not be running into the median every couple miles. Furthermore, they augmented the data with left/right-offset cameras to supplement the data with examples of "bad" camera views. This i…
> 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.
So why not several autonomous subsystems that use specialized purpose-built cameras and don't need annotators? I'm not saying that like it's easy - obviously it's not. Just seems scalable.
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#248Why is residential solar important to the plan? Aren't large solar installations a more cost effective way of switching houses already on the grid to solar energy.
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Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google may have a lot fewer miles, but they're much higher quality miles. The sensor suite on their car is much superior, so they're getting much better data. Even if the eventual Google car uses cheaper sensors, the data they get from the superior sensors helps a lot training the algorithms.
I don't see how this will work though. Unless you plan to equip all those future cars with the same high quality sensors as those on the Google ones (which I've heard are prohibitively expensive). If those sensors eventually do become really cheap, then Tesla could use them too and negate any advantages Google might have had.
They're already cheap (see elsewhere in this thread for links). Tesla has opted not to implement them because Elon thinks LIDAR isn't needed [1]. Of course without LIDAR you get situations like autopilot running into white tractor trailers because it can't see them...
[1] http://9to5google.com/2015/10/16/elon-musk-says-that-the-lid...
Re: Master Plan, Part Deux
#250> "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?
Suburbs destroy public life, create anxiety and a sense of atomization, and turn natural spaces into scar tissue. Even if you could perfect transportation technology, suburbs are the least optimal configuration for humans to live in the world.