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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

electrek.co

251–260 of 458 posts

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#251
post #215

Bipedal robots are dumb. A robot that can only walk around my house is still useless. A robot that can wheel or track or even park in front of my dryer and fold laundry would be incredible. Yet every demo is Robot Jumps And Dances, not Robot Does Something Useful. My theory is that bipedal motion is the "easy" problem, and fine motor control is the hard problem. That makes me bearish on Optimus: A car with questionab…

It seems very rational to assume bipedal motion is easy and fine control is difficult. Some babies can walk from 9 months. No 9 month olds are playing Beethoven's 5th on the Piano.

A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.

There was millions of years of very strong selective pressure making humans evolve to learn to walk easily. There has been very little selective pressure making humans be good at learning tic tac toe.

Often whether something seems difficult or easy to humans has more to do with how well evolution has prepared us for it than with the inherent difficulty of the problem.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in US? Country built around car-ownership?

It is built around driving cars, but not necessarily car ownership. From what I gather through movies and television, cities like New York City don't really have car owners, but there are a lot of taxi cabs. Now Uber and Lyft have moved into small towns that never had taxis.

I’m not sure that is a good example - NYC is an outlier and it has 45% of households owning cars.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#253
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it. See 'reusable rockets' and 'having paralysed people control things with their minds' for other examples. HN often seem to think there's Elon fans downmodding things but it seems more like a case of irrational hatred.

More examples, please! Reusable rockets is the load-bearing example, I don't think that argument works without it. You could maybe squeeze in "he kickstarted the EV market".

maybe? Tesla is the biggest reason there are any electric vehicles on the road today, I haven't heard of anyone (knowledgeable) who has even hinted otherwise. I can understand not liking Elon, but trashing the companies he's formed and the marvels they've created is just proof you don't value a truthful understanding of the world.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#254

I'm surprised that I feel like this is the right move for them. Competing on the cars seems like a bad idea now that EVs are kind of a commodity market.

Is it a bad idea for Toyota, or Honda, or Hyundai/Kia, or GM, or Ford, or even Rivian and Lucid?

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#255

I have no issue understanding why Musk does that, he's gone from “weirdo with lost of enthusiasm and charisma” to “batshit crazy, so full of himself there's basically no negative feedback loop anymore”. What I don't understand is why are the Tesla shareholders accepting his bullshit?

Because without Musk's reality distortion field, Tesla stock would lose most of its value.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#256

This "Elon Musk lost interest" is very, very naive take. Actually I think this new directions demonstrates how great decision making they have at Tesla. Today and even more in the future they have no way of competing with the Chinese manufacturers. It is simply physically not possible. So they are rightfully pivoting and moving away from the race to the bottom that is ensuing.

So, they're pivoting to competing with China on manufacturing robots? Yeah, that'll pan out...

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#257

They might actually be going all-in on a robotaxi future, i.e. betting on a future where car-ownership is not the default.

in US? Country built around car-ownership?

Most people^ don’t actually want to own a car and deal with breakdowns, maintenance, repairs, fender benders, etc etc.

They want the convenience and freedom a car provides. Right now in many places the best way to get that is ownership, so we suck it up and buy a horribly depreciating asset that causes headaches.

That could quickly change if someone can figure out how to make using a car just as convenient while also cheaper.

^ of course there are car enthusiasts who will always want to own, but that’s a tiny fraction of car owners.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#258
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch… …oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.

> so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch Not just watch a launch, but go to O'Hare to launch and go to Sydney in ~30min. In September 2017 they said we'd be flying Earth-to-Earth on a BFR last year .

Technology sometimes takes longer than estimates.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#259
post #228
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying SpaceX doesn't make money? I have no idea about Neuralink but the first sounds pretty odd.

Where did I say that? I was using the classic idea of the flying car as an example of a thing that has been out of reach as an as a product for normal people and may not actually be successful if it were to really be sold. Replace flying car with whatever example you want. To put it in a different way, you could be so busy figuring out how to do it that you don’t figure out that a business case doesn’t actually exist…

> > Are you saying SpaceX doesn't make money?

> Where did I say that?

> > > Just because you can figure out how to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to make money at it.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#260

I'm surprised that I feel like this is the right move for them. Competing on the cars seems like a bad idea now that EVs are kind of a commodity market.

Is it a bad idea for Toyota, or Honda, or Hyundai/Kia, or GM, or Ford, or even Rivian and Lucid?

Yes, they wouldn't be able to retain share price whatsoever if they announced this.
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