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Master Plan, Part Deux

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Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#411

Post by akira2501 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #270
akira2501 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans spend a million days each year in the hospital due to injuries sustained in motor vehicles. Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger. Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-2…

Blind "cause of death" stats are fairly meaningless. I believe a better standard is to look at QALY -- quality-adjusted life years. That deducts relatively little for, say, a heart-attack at age 85 (you're already at your maximum life expectancy), but would put a heavy weight to, say, a pre-teen girl crippled by an auto accident, but surviving for life. https://plus.google.com/+MarlaCaldwell/posts/BUZH36tmjso http://…

True, and that's a fair way to look at things. To me, the overall picture is that young men are exceptionally self-destructive when compared to anyone else.

While self driving cars are part of the picture towards reducing deaths in this group, it's incomplete; and you might do just as well with better parental controls and driver behavior reporting embedded into vehicle control software. Some of this is already available, but I have a feeling it's used far less often than it otherwise could be; which speaks to differing levels of parental involvement in the safety of their teenagers.

At the same time nobody's discussing taking motorcycles off the road and we're not at a point where we can put the requisite technologies in motorcycles to grant them the same safety we're supposing automated vehicles will possess. These vehicles in particular kill a disproportionate amount of young males.

Even if we do add these technologies to a motorcycle, you can still buy an ATV, or a snowmobile, or a farm tractor or any number of other off-road gasoline powered gadgets that can quickly become lethal.

I have nothing against the advancement of the safety of human society through technology, but I don't like the taste of the automated vehicle kool-aid that gets passed around and I'd like us to hedge our bets. That's all.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#412

Post by cmarschner »

anjc wrote: post #358
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, citing employee numbers is somewhat meaningless without any data on the number of non-employees working in your supply chain. Could indeed very well be a case of outsourcing differences rather than a difference in productivity.

No industry counts the number of employees within a supply chain. It might be impossible and it's half the point in having separate SC entities...it's irrelevant to a car manufacturer how many miners various aluminium companies feel they need to hire, say.

In the end one would have to measure employees per value-add, so subtract costs for goods and services delivered.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#413

Post by dingaling »

aerovistae wrote: post #65
orky56 wrote: post #52

I was hoping to see another zero to one approach with the master plan where he is taking on some other industry goal. I totally get that part deux is still very, very ambitious and one that no other company can truly realize. But if we're just talking about Musk's master plan, I'm curious why he didn't talk about the synergies with his other company, SpaceX. Tesla and SpaceX both rely on vehicles & transport while Sp…

I suspect Tesla will move into aircraft and oceancraft in the long-run, if you're interested in "other industries." He's mentioned the electric jet enough times. And why would he create a new company for it when he's got all the expertise and business structure at his fingertips already? Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth? Even if there were a way, it's not neces…

> Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth?

This has been investigated several times and the most promising technique involves using maser downlinks to transfer the energy.

> He's said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country.

Ok that's a start. That takes care of the energy needs of 3.5% of the Earth's population, once they have sufficient storage capacity to see them through the night.

Geostationary space-based solar collection can work 24 hours per day, with much higher efficiency and minimal storage requirements, right over the areas of peak demand even when the ground is obscured by rain and cloud. No deserts required.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#414

Post by puranjay »

thucydides wrote: post #109
akira2501 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you're an American you're more likely to die from suicide than you are from motor vehicle related injuries. You're more likely to be poisoned than to die in a motor veh…

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. And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we'll be spared? Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.

I'm thinking more of the public mental health victories. The reduction in stress would be MASSIVE.

Also, you can sleep in the car, which would greatly solve our sleep deprivation problem, which would boost productivity massively.

Commuting is the worst part of my day by a big margin. If I can get 2 hours of extra sleep instead, I'd be way more productive

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#415

Post by kybernetikos »

> The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.

I don't think this is the correct comparison. A car used correctly is safe. We have huge numbers of road accidents because most people are unable to reliably use a car correctly. The value of an 'autopilot' functionality is that it should be much better at using the car correctly in the real world than a human.

What matters is not how many accidents result when using autopilot 'correctly', but how many accidents result from using autopilot in the real world.

Also, because autopilot is primarily used on particular road profiles, it's not fair to compare accidents per autopilot mile directly with accidents per human driver mile. You need to adjust for the fact that autopilot is not used during more complex driving anyway.

I'd be very interested to know what the statistics are for those, since the recent press has given me a (potentially incorrect) impression that autopilot has lead to a relatively large number of serious accidents compared to the number of cars deployed.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#417

Post by puranjay »

lowglow wrote: post #226

Last year I pitched Playa ( http://getplaya.com/ ) at Launch conference and was laughed off stage by Jason Calacanis. My example use of the technology was that your autonomous vehicle would be able to contract itself out as an 'uber', earning you money while you slept. Today Tesla announced that this is part of its plans for the future and everyone is going wild. We're now going a step further and building a next-gen…

The problem with your idea was that it wasn't SOCIAL or VIRAL or could leverage SEO, like Jason likes his businesses ;)

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#418

Post by PinguTS »

rz2k wrote: post #346
Animats wrote: post #64

"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…

How about the employees at all of the subcontractors each of the incumbent manufacturers uses for completed components? Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it's actually pretty meaningless on its own. Being boring, and looking at sustainable production co…

At first that seems right. But there is a big BUT. Even Tesla has outsourced a lot of components. A lot of the components except the drivetrain is being outsourced. There are only 2 manufacturers for airbags in the world. There is only 1 good quality manufacturer in the world for the in car rearview mirror. There is only 1 manufacturer for the Homelink system with its best features developed by an Audi engineer I personally know. (All the Homelink systems in the premium cars are this only one system and I know the 2014 numbers sold to Tesla at that time.) The brake system in the Model X is from Bosch. And so on.

So Tesla is at the same level of outsourcing like every one else. So actually you can compare the numbers.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#419

Post by robmcm »

tikl1 wrote: post #405
sandworm101 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Number of employees per car output It's a very important metric. The number of man-hours per item is a good stand-in for production costs. It isn't perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works. I'm interested to hear of how much staff time is put to new production/development and how much is dedicated to maintaining the current fleet. I have to believe that Toyota walks away in that area too.

The point is that in nowadays automobile industry a HUGE part of the production is made outside the constructors facilities by contractors. So considering only car constructors employees is a pretty inaccurate estimation of man-hours/item in that scenario. EDIT: comma satan

Would it be fair to say this outsourcing is similar regardless of company.

Perhaps if some of the larger manufactures have in house teams for things others outsource, it will be largely insignificant given their larger size.

Essentially it's not significant.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#420

Post by dredmorbius »

carterehsmith wrote: post #387
dredmorbius wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford is subsidised by 100 million year-old bottled, well, barreled, sunlight. (Tesla's subsidised by lithium salt concentrations in Bolivia, but that's a rather smaller overall subsidy.)

Isn't Tesla also subsidized by the government?

That's not the subsidy I'm referring to.

How much would it cost you to create a barrel of crude oil?

Not "extract from the ground", the usual meaning of "producing oil", which borrows rather more from "produce the evidence" than "manufacture the good". But actually start with high-entropy substrates and some energy source and synthesize oil.

Why do markets not account for this cost?

(Hotelling's Rule is ignored, and is, moreover, based on faulty logic. Curiously, Bohm-Bawerk, an Austrian Economist, gets far close to the truth in his theory of value, an exceedingly rare case in which I find myself agreeing with any Austrian principles.)

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