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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#291

Post by Saline9515 »

mekdoonggi wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse. Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add r…

Also, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.

Almost all developed economies are running into a fertility crisis right now, with labor shortages already appearing in the frontrunners of the trend, such as Germany.

Human work is going to cost more in the future, and immigration from countries such as Thailand or Vietnam is already slowing down. Even a mediocre robot will be sought after if it is the only choice you have.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#292

Post by Saline9515 »

duskwuff wrote: post #137
TylerE wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the remote house keeper can be in some super locl 3rd world country where the prevailing wage is a few bucks a day.

That's a pretty profoundly dystopian concept. If the only way this technology is viable is as a way to exploit labor at a distance - count me out.

What is the difference between being a teleoperator in India for a californian family robot, and being a software dev for a company selling SaaS products to the US market?

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#293

Post by Saline9515 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #204
lallysingh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.

> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages. Dual-professional households could hire a maid and pay for marriage counseling and still save money compared to a $20k robot plus whatever a subscription would run.

Maids are unaffordable in most rich countries that do not have access to ultracheap foreign labor or/and have stringent labor regs.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#294

Post by PolygonSheep »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #40
this_user wrote: post #10

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon. Realistically, he shoul…

I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T. Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors. This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford…

> they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models.

I'd read somewhere that it was mainly because Henry Ford was dogmatic that the Model T was perfect, all the car anyone would ever need forever.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#295

Post by falcor84 »

Nevermark wrote: post #76
TacoCommander wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel steps: Step 1: SpaceX IPO Step 2: Trillion dollar payout Step 3: Nothing matters any more

SpaceX is rockets, now global satellite internet, ... To credibly harness off-world resources at any scale, there are going to need to be automated refueling depots and many kinds of robotic automation for resource extraction. With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources. That would also completely remove the lid on how many $ trillions of market cap SpaceX could accrue. So I fin…

If cooling is such an important factor compared to everything else, I would assume we should see data centers in Antarctica long before we see them on the Moon.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#296

Post by mrguyorama »

ianburrell wrote: post #167
worik wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the Asteroid Belt looking amazing for quantity and accessibility of resources. Watch out universe, here we come! What could possibly go wrong, mining asteroids? An awful lot, when we start messing with orbital dynamics in the asteroid belt. But Space X can externalise those risks. It will probably be centuries before disturbed orbits start to threaten Earth... So who cares? Me.

I always wonder what resources from asteroid belt do we need on Earth. We have plenty of iron and aluminum for building things. Lithium and rare earths aren't available in asteroids. Gold isn't worth grinding up whole asteroid. Asteroid resources would be useful for building in space, but that is getting a step ahead.

Asteroid mining in our current economy is about pointing at the market price of an extremely low supply element that isn't that high demand in the first place and forgetting to talk about what a supply glut does to price.

Everyone is laboring under this subtle belief that space industry will be just like scifi speculated, but scifi stories always treated space like the ocean, with lots of interplanetary trade and easy travel and no consideration of energy (because it makes for good storytelling) but the actual energy budgeting and consideration of gravity wells is the exact opposite of ocean transport.

Global trade works at all because buoyancy and fluid physics make ocean vessels stupidly efficient at transport.

Moving any matter through space is stupidly inefficient.

The tyranny of the rocket equation constrains everything.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#297

Post by mrguyorama »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #284
burnte wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter if it was or wasn't, it was a failure that GM never followed up with. Why it was a failure is also irrelevant, because whether you feel it was a technical failure or killed by GM, GM never did anything with the project or knowledge. Effectively it was a curiosity.

If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.

>If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding

They didn't, and this is just absurd.

Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?

We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.

Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.

They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.

Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#298

Post by jfoster »

scottyah wrote: post #253
Qwertious wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with you, but I find it interesting that BYD got started around the same time as Tesla. They took quite different paths to international distribution.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#299

Post by jfoster »

q3k wrote: post #110
dzhiurgis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla processes as many miles in 2 days as Waymo in its entire lifetime. Waymo will be crushed in few years.

We've been hearing this 'Tesla has so much data!! Tesla FSD and robotaxis any day now!!' bullshit for probably a decade now.

They are certainly far behind their original schedule, but do you mean to suggest that they are not making progress?

If the original schedules hadn't been made public knowledge, the progress they have made would seem quite fast-paced.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#300

Post by mrguyorama »

duskwuff wrote: post #137
TylerE wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the remote house keeper can be in some super locl 3rd world country where the prevailing wage is a few bucks a day.

That's a pretty profoundly dystopian concept. If the only way this technology is viable is as a way to exploit labor at a distance - count me out.

This is the reality now. It is the entire point of globalized labor.

Global trade right now is literally about exploiting labor at a distance.

Our shit didn't get made in China because they were inherently better at making shit!

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