311–320 of 705 posts
Obscured under " Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning " is the cold hard truth that that learning will be paid for in lives - mostly of Tesla drivers possibly of others. The rates of accidents in manual vs current version of autopilot may work out to be favorable - (and that is still under debate) - but there certainly will be people who will die (and have died) d…
Uber is betting on car manufacturers to have autonomous driving in place, while it builds up a worldwide user base of logistics (moving people and goods from X to Y). It doesn't care if vehicles are driven by a horse or by electricity. Tesla is building the vehicles and energy source for the vehicles, and building the autonomy in to them, but it's betting on a user-base acquisition via hardware (vehicle) ownership an…
Good points except that we are a century, if not centuries from carbon fuel reaching a point where people start to worry. And companies like Toyota are investing in alternatives fuels like Hydrogen, so it not as straight forward as you state for Tesla.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There are 30,000 motor vehicle deaths in America each year. In perhaps 30 years, fully autonomous vehicles could cut all of that needless carnage to nearly nothing. There is a huge assumption underlying this: That computer systems would be more intelligent than humans. I believe the opposite: Computer systems will be much dumber than humans, and increase the number of accidents if ever adopted on large scale.
It's not a question of intelligence, but of attention. Few crashes are caused by wrong inferences; most are caused by lapses in attention or impaired judgement. Computer systems do not necessarily suffer from those.
Elon Musk is like the cat who tried to jump from the sofa to the top of the bookcase, fell to the floor in a tangle of wildly gyrating limbs, and is now sitting there quietly licking its paw like it was intending to do that all along. Even with his brilliance he's fooling no one into thinking the SolarCity merger was actually in his plan- there are some synergies, sure, but they're easily outweighed by the added corp…
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…
I agree that the power densities for long-haul, BEV trucking simply don't make sense, even with platooning technologies. Intermittent fast-charge stations plus catenaries, with off-grid battery capabilities, would be a possibility however.
Another option would be for always (or nearly-always) tracked operation, with what's effectively a cargo-streetcar function within cities and suburbs, and traditional rail off.
Functions such as field-to-depot transport would almost certainly still require fueled vehicles.
Elon Musk is like the cat who tried to jump from the sofa to the top of the bookcase, fell to the floor in a tangle of wildly gyrating limbs, and is now sitting there quietly licking its paw like it was intending to do that all along. Even with his brilliance he's fooling no one into thinking the SolarCity merger was actually in his plan- there are some synergies, sure, but they're easily outweighed by the added corp…
There are Nepotism conflicts between the boards of the two companies... Not a plan? If anything, it swings/stinks too far to the other side. IMHO... http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/tesla-elon-musk-solarcity/
> "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.
I'm genuinely surprised at the quality of Musk's writing and the presentation of certain ideas. He clearly insisted against copyediting, and that was probably a mistake judging by the output. I suspect that he was attempting to eschew the formality of typical press releases, but this 'Master Plan' (which is itself a somewhat juvenile moniker) feels like something that warranted rigor.
I'm genuinely surprised at the quality of Musk's writing and the presentation of certain ideas. He clearly insisted against copyediting, and that was probably a mistake judging by the output. I suspect that he was attempting to eschew the formality of typical press releases, but this 'Master Plan' (which is itself a somewhat juvenile moniker) feels like something that warranted rigor.
I can't figure out what you're trying to say. You think it's bad he wrote it himself, or good? Are you saying his writing it himself was a mistake, or wasn't? And it does or doesn't sound formal enough? It needs rigor and doesn't have it, or it does have it?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurem...
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1263107
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/0650...