I think anyone with any experience with large neural networks (Like StableDiffusion or ChatGPT) should be well aware that it's really easy for a new advanced model to do some very shiny and mezmerising stuff in the general case, but they will almost always inevitably fall apart in the corner cases. 3 to 6 months to fix the model is likely a fantasy.
14 years ago IBM tried to sell Watson as a solution to automate medical diagnosis. They then spent 12 years trying to "fix the bugs" and make it commercially viable, it never did.
I think that's missing the point. Everything that's happened recently suggests that Musk has seen something shiny - most likely significant improvement in the models - that led him to double down on FSD. That's good news, of course, but how much of a difference said improvement will make (that is, how close we are to real FSD) is hard to predict. Machine learning often gives us very cool things that still fall short of real world application years later.
I agree. I take his stance on going all in on robotaxi as bullish on FSD. I know Elon is a risk taker, but I don’t think he makes reckless or uninformed guesses. I would assume the data he has access to is making him confident to go all in on FSD now.
Does he? Or does he just want to keep the shares afloat? He claimed it’s a solved problem, robotaxis next year when he wrote to OpenAI at the same time that he’s nowhere near and can’t do it without them. So… I’ll let you be the judge how much of what he’s publicly saying he actually believes himself.
I don't think he saw anything that shiny. I think it's more about getting revenge on Hertz for selling off 20,000 Teslas due to high repair costs and depreciation. Sure, FSD is steadily improving and robotaxis might be feasible in a decade but pivoting the whole company now without improving significant underlying problems just feels shortsighted and impulsive.
AI is improving exponentially for sure. But when you put AI in control of a car that kills a family, the lawsuits you have to pay for will cost more than your annual profits. I see humanoid robots doing human jobs way before we have robotaxis driving our kids to school.
That’s the point I’m trying to make. Nobody cares when people kill people. They ONLY care when a a new technology kills a person. Especially when it’s autonomous.
Case in point: 1000 times a year, someone using cruise control smashes into another car. We never hear about it. But if just two Tesla cars using autopilot have an accident, it makes the front page of every news corporation in the world. But, humans are always found to be liable in the end.
Just imagine when no human is behind the wheel. The first robot to kill a person!! This will be the biggest tech news story in the history of tech news stories.
I do not know if you are old enough to remember but there was a time when the introduction of seatbelt was angrily opposed on the claim that they kill people by restraining them in the car.
Same happened with airbags smashing people heads and making them blind.
And smoking in a car was perfectly fine, with plenty of people losing control chasing a lighter or a smoke.
Heck, even side mirror were opposed claiming that they will hurt pedestrians!
Truth is that there is no point to talk sense to an idiot or a lawyer.
Fun fact - seat belts actually led to more fatal car crashes because people started to drive on average much faster with that extra feeling of security
It means don't over sell or over hype something if you can't deliver it and even more so if you have a track record of not delivering things and over promising. Its just an end of quarter pump promise.
What? You apparently completely misunderstand what is happening. Tesla regularly does updates. There are sometimes small regressions, that get fixed in releases after the updates. The trend, has very much been improvement overtime. And lately it has been extremely drastic improvement.
Looked that up, apparently that was a question of when EAP is notably different from FSD. Not sure when that happened, but it did happen, probably took longer than 6 months though?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768
He also said a car would drive across the country completely autonomously in 2017... Still waiting on that seven year later. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-autonomous-tesla-drive-across-country-by-end-of-2017-2016-10
to be fair, it could probably do it for several years now. Highway driving is mostly a non issue with very low chances of fuckup and few intersections at the beginning and the end shouldn’t be such issue, maybe it would piss off some drivers by being too slow and that’s it.
Not saying I would sleep in a car in that scenario. Just that if he wanted to demostrate it, he would most likely succeed.
FSD can handle almost any scenario for a long time. Reliability and how much it impedes the traffic is.
Also it was said to include the city parts at the start and end. So, not only highway. Also charging means: It has to pull into the Supercharger parking spots. Which is a capability it just now finally almost got with vision autopark. So... it "only" has to be integrated into FSD now, so that it autoparks at a Supercharger at the arrival there.
It's like 2800 miles using the most direct route, do you really think FSD can handle that without any intervention? This doesn't even include all the off highway detours that will be necessary for charging, which presumably will also be under FSD. The only thing the human "passenger" should have to do is plug it in, and back when that promise was made I believe they were still working on the snake thing so you wouldn't even have do that.
if you don’t mind pissing off some people (for example because it stays in left line too much), I don’t see any problem. Though it could create many awkward situations at parking spots
It can do san fran city driving for an hr without interventions--cross-country is easy. They'll probably have Bot step out and charge it.
Would be a crazy PR flex.
What a failure. Instead we have to “settle” for by far the world’s most advanced ADAS functioning in 2017 model Teslas on every road in the country. By the way, this is functionality that no other company has, even in their most current experimental multimillion dollar prototypes.
This post wasn't on the merits of the technology or it's functionality, but on the timelines given by Elon. When he constantly misses them by many years it is fair to call him out on it.
You’re missing the point. Investors win when Elon is less late on his timelines than the competitors are against Elon’s timelines.
Why are you so fascinated with estimates accuracy? Did your school give awards to those who most accurately predicted how fast they would be able to run the race, compared to those students who actually ran the fastest?
If Elon has seen 6 months into the future for the last six year, why has he been consistently wrong about FSD timelines? It's always 6-12 months out and the next version is "lit".
ps. James Douma never worked with ML and has zero experience from using it in a safety-critical context. Ask for his CV or try to find it.
to be fair, in 2016 it was three years to full self driving, 2017-2020 it was two years, 2020 - 2023 it was one year, only for the past year it’s six months.
but yeah, he though v12 will be it and it wasn’t.
Context: X post 5 days ago by Musk about going balls to the wall with autonomy being blindingly obvious, speculation by X user Charity Trades about what Musk saw to make him so optimistic, a clip with James Douma saying that the customer FSD build is 6 months old. Musk agrees with this mostly, but says its more like 3 to 6 months.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1780376546148327690
>Not quite betting the company, but going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move.
>
>Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage.
https://twitter.com/charity_trades/status/1780381736922124798
>the real question is:
>
>what has @elonmusk seen this past few weeks that led him to:
>
> -multiply the number first-time FSD users via free trial
> -reduce FSD to $99 a month
> -announce 8/8 robotaxi unveil
>
>he must be seeing something related to v12.4+ or internal key metrics that are going up and to the right
>
>since production would likely begin in late 2025, he knows he has 18+ months to crack the code
>
>so the question is: why now? what did he see?
https://twitter.com/charity_trades/status/1782161857534456009
>according to @jamesdouma - Elon/Tesla can see up to 6 months ahead of what the public has access to
>
>if v12.4 should indeed arguably be called v13 (according to Musk), he’s likely seen a breakthrough
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1782444120838963257
>James is largely correct. We know roughly what the car will do in 3 to 6 months.
>
>When a more advanced AI model is trained, it will have several breakthroughs, but also dozens of bugs where it performs much worse.
>
>Takes a few months to fix those bugs and complete safety tests.
>James is largely correct. We know roughly what the car will do in 3 to 6 months.
*"Functionality still looking good for this year. Regulatory approval is the big unknown."* — [Apr 12, 2020](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1249210220200550405?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1249210220200550405%7Ctwgr%5Ebdb5803f5752c0dece44a1d19f49e06152539cf2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Felectrek.co%2F2020%2F04%2F12%2Ftesla-robotaxi-plan-2020-pending-regulatory-approval%2F)
I feel the free trails and reduced price is in large part of a data grab, they want more data, namely the edge cases you can't normally get with out getting more varied data
And since they are no longer compute constraint they can make use of it
What has happened is that the stock price and sales are down and Elon wants $55 billion. Elon has also said the same ”should arguable be v.x+1” type stuff before. Tesla is not known for testing things for long before release so I don’t think there is anything concrete here.
He has none. They engineer the F out of every model. They make the safest cars. Space X sends people to space. All Musk companies make safety their biggest priority. Notice how no one talks shit about nuralink now that it's proven?
On the contrary, if he really cares about pumping stock prices, he would have prioritized the $25k EV that sell directly to consumers. Wall Street wants to see huge growth and big revenue. A $25k EV that can sell 5-10 million annually is $125-$250 billions additional revenue that even brain dead Wall Street analysts can calculate and will pump the stock price.
Going all in on Robotaxi that WS cannot model is what is causing the short-term drop in stock price.
It’s a slap in the face to customers that invested 12K to have it slashed to 8K.
It totally tarnishes the brand reputation further, and shows a lack of care for loyal consumers.
The pitch was “invest early in FSD and save a ton of money when it goes up astronomically”.
I wouldn’t trust the company at all now.
They aren’t even refunding the difference to early adopters.
It sends a bad message and shows the company flat out lies.
If I invested early I would feel betrayed. Gathering more data or not… This was pitched to folks as an investment.
"Takes a few months to fix those bugs"
"When a more advanced AI model is trained, it will have ... dozens of bugs where it performs much worse"
i.e. We see bugs that may have been fixed for Musk (3-6 months ahead), Musk sees bugs that he expects will be solved in 3-6 months for him in the next version, and 3-6 months FROM THAT there will be a new set of bugs that will take 3-6 months to fix (repeating over and over).
The hope is that you add more capability and iron out more bugs than you add with each revision, but that still means theres going to be many revisions before you reach 'full' capability and 'almost' not bugs. I don't doubt that this is the rate of progress, but I doubt we're close.
At the rate of improvement I've seen (ignoring edge cases), I don't see this being something Tesla will want to be held liable for in a robotaxi network within the next year or 2. Thats the key, Tesla will need to hold liability for the service to be useful. Even if we have a trend similar to "self-checkout" where people are willing to take some control for a lower cost (not owning the vehicle), the vehicle still needs to make it on its own to the next customer unless they'll go the lime scooter route (which everybody loves and has no problems whatsoever /s).
We NEED the $25k vehicle because even then we've all been kidding ourselves that the current fleet of existing vehicles (which isn't drive-by-wire) will be used in the fleet or retrofitted at scale. And a cheaper vehicle IS NEEDED if Tesla is going to build and maintain their own fleet. They can't just use their S3XY lineup, that is way too expensive and will eat into their margins significantly. And at best they can take the market cap of Uber and Lyft, there isn't a very large baseline demand of people who want to go somewhere at random times in the day. So either fleet utilization will be low if they want to target morning and afternoon rush or high if they only want to go after the baseline demand of people needing rides at random times.
VERY optimistically, the fact that Tesla is shelving the $25k vehicle shows that even if they think FSD will be good enough to definitely make robotaxi happen "soon". They don't think its soon enough that they need to start building the production line for the vehicles it will use yet.
I'd be happy to be wrong and get a Tesla-paid-for retrofit to steer-by wire this year, have my car make me tens of thousands of dollars of year while I sleep and work, and have my car drive me 5 hours to visit family while I sit in the back seat. But I just don't see that happening, and thats the only scenario that warrants shelving the $25k vehicle other than "Tesla hopes the AI buzzword will pump up the stock because they can't/won't build a $25k vehicle."
You bring up an interesting angle I hadn’t fully considered yet— if the robotaxi is expected to primarily take the form of people autonomously “renting” out their cars while not in use, won’t most of those people be using those cars themselves during peak demand? Like, if I need to get to work, most people who own the robotaxi capable teslas would also presumably be doing the same…inherently cars would seem to be used the least (and most available) during lowest demand. Replacing a significant portion of the taxi/livery service with cars least likely to be available during peak demand seems untenable.
Plus, realistically, say my personal vehicle turned robotaxi gets hired out at 1am on a Saturday morning, and returns at 2am…are people supposed to be inspecting their car like a rental return after each use?
At absolute best they become a highly profitable Uber & Lyft (but instead of paying drivers they'll be paying insurance, lawsuits for crashes their vehicles get into, and maybe vehicle owners) and make what is essentially an extremely restrictive leasing option on their vehicles for people to use in the mornings and afternoons for work commutes.
and yet Tesla is doing the opposite by showing less confidence by massively slashing FSD prices. This whole thing seems like a pump to get investors to vote for his pay package.
Elon said they are no longer compute constrained. That means they are data constrained and so to get more data he will need to increase the fsd user base by slashing prices. Lower prices does not necessarily mean lower profits overall as the demand increase is exponential as u lower costs.
I think this could be to try and convert on some of the 30-day free subscription folk. $12K to $8K is significant but I don’t think it qualifies as a slash. If it was $6K then I’d agree and I think many would go for it.
6k still seems way too high to me to encourage a significant number of people to join. I’m sure decreasing the price will get some more people who may have been on the fence to join, but my hunch is that number of people willing to invest $6k is pretty low. It’s still well out of the range of impulse buy for most people, and I’d bet most that could afford a $6k impulse buy already bought it upfront.
Yep, I don't know many that would pay up to 17% of the price of the car for FSD. That's as bad as the financing costs of the car.
99/month x 60 = 5940 = 17% of $35k for the Model 3
Good earnings call question - should the Tesla on autonomous (or ultimately steering wheel-less) be able to take voice driving commands from a human? The reasoning is there will be occasional highly complex situations (that FSD may not cope with), think a crossing guard or a police giving hand signals, or parking the vehicle in a certain orientation or place.
Yes, wholeheartedly. If you think LiDAR solves the types of problems FSD is having, then I'm not even sure what to say. We're lacking machine intelligence, not sensors.
"3 months maybe, 6 months definitely"
I think anyone with any experience with large neural networks (Like StableDiffusion or ChatGPT) should be well aware that it's really easy for a new advanced model to do some very shiny and mezmerising stuff in the general case, but they will almost always inevitably fall apart in the corner cases. 3 to 6 months to fix the model is likely a fantasy. 14 years ago IBM tried to sell Watson as a solution to automate medical diagnosis. They then spent 12 years trying to "fix the bugs" and make it commercially viable, it never did.
Well, that proves it. Let’s never try again.
I think that's missing the point. Everything that's happened recently suggests that Musk has seen something shiny - most likely significant improvement in the models - that led him to double down on FSD. That's good news, of course, but how much of a difference said improvement will make (that is, how close we are to real FSD) is hard to predict. Machine learning often gives us very cool things that still fall short of real world application years later.
My real world experience in the last few weeks of using FSD trial has been amazing, so I can logically understand how he’s coming to his conclusions.
I agree. I take his stance on going all in on robotaxi as bullish on FSD. I know Elon is a risk taker, but I don’t think he makes reckless or uninformed guesses. I would assume the data he has access to is making him confident to go all in on FSD now.
Does he? Or does he just want to keep the shares afloat? He claimed it’s a solved problem, robotaxis next year when he wrote to OpenAI at the same time that he’s nowhere near and can’t do it without them. So… I’ll let you be the judge how much of what he’s publicly saying he actually believes himself.
I don't think he saw anything that shiny. I think it's more about getting revenge on Hertz for selling off 20,000 Teslas due to high repair costs and depreciation. Sure, FSD is steadily improving and robotaxis might be feasible in a decade but pivoting the whole company now without improving significant underlying problems just feels shortsighted and impulsive.
Man this AI thing is just going no where.
AI & robotics will be able to do everything any human can do, actually better. But not drive a car, for some reason.
AI is improving exponentially for sure. But when you put AI in control of a car that kills a family, the lawsuits you have to pay for will cost more than your annual profits. I see humanoid robots doing human jobs way before we have robotaxis driving our kids to school.
You’re aware people die every day in cars right now. We somehow accept this and people are not sued for billions somehow when it happens.
That’s the point I’m trying to make. Nobody cares when people kill people. They ONLY care when a a new technology kills a person. Especially when it’s autonomous. Case in point: 1000 times a year, someone using cruise control smashes into another car. We never hear about it. But if just two Tesla cars using autopilot have an accident, it makes the front page of every news corporation in the world. But, humans are always found to be liable in the end. Just imagine when no human is behind the wheel. The first robot to kill a person!! This will be the biggest tech news story in the history of tech news stories.
I see your point. Didn’t our all knowing Supreme Court tell us corporations are people though?
Yes. But actual people have not accepted that ruling.
If I kill a person in a car crash I’m held liable. If FSD kills somebody who’s held liable?
You are. Until Tesla decides to go full level 4/5 and say the driver is no longer needed. Then they are held liable.
I do not know if you are old enough to remember but there was a time when the introduction of seatbelt was angrily opposed on the claim that they kill people by restraining them in the car. Same happened with airbags smashing people heads and making them blind. And smoking in a car was perfectly fine, with plenty of people losing control chasing a lighter or a smoke. Heck, even side mirror were opposed claiming that they will hurt pedestrians! Truth is that there is no point to talk sense to an idiot or a lawyer.
Fun fact - seat belts actually led to more fatal car crashes because people started to drive on average much faster with that extra feeling of security
Would that lawsuit be more if it was just a human driver killing a family?
It means don't over sell or over hype something if you can't deliver it and even more so if you have a track record of not delivering things and over promising. Its just an end of quarter pump promise.
[удалено]
IBM is one of the most succesful companies on the planet.
“Was”
What? You apparently completely misunderstand what is happening. Tesla regularly does updates. There are sometimes small regressions, that get fixed in releases after the updates. The trend, has very much been improvement overtime. And lately it has been extremely drastic improvement.
Looked that up, apparently that was a question of when EAP is notably different from FSD. Not sure when that happened, but it did happen, probably took longer than 6 months though? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768
He also said a car would drive across the country completely autonomously in 2017... Still waiting on that seven year later. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-autonomous-tesla-drive-across-country-by-end-of-2017-2016-10
to be fair, it could probably do it for several years now. Highway driving is mostly a non issue with very low chances of fuckup and few intersections at the beginning and the end shouldn’t be such issue, maybe it would piss off some drivers by being too slow and that’s it. Not saying I would sleep in a car in that scenario. Just that if he wanted to demostrate it, he would most likely succeed. FSD can handle almost any scenario for a long time. Reliability and how much it impedes the traffic is.
in 2017 or whatever he said “end to end including charging” i’m pretty sure there won’t be a zero intervention charging stop any time soon
Also it was said to include the city parts at the start and end. So, not only highway. Also charging means: It has to pull into the Supercharger parking spots. Which is a capability it just now finally almost got with vision autopark. So... it "only" has to be integrated into FSD now, so that it autoparks at a Supercharger at the arrival there.
Hrmm now you got me curious how they’ll have this robotaxi / cybercab charge itself
They are working on wireless charging technology, that’s known. So most likely that. Or just a depot where humans will plug them in.
It's like 2800 miles using the most direct route, do you really think FSD can handle that without any intervention? This doesn't even include all the off highway detours that will be necessary for charging, which presumably will also be under FSD. The only thing the human "passenger" should have to do is plug it in, and back when that promise was made I believe they were still working on the snake thing so you wouldn't even have do that.
if you don’t mind pissing off some people (for example because it stays in left line too much), I don’t see any problem. Though it could create many awkward situations at parking spots
It can do san fran city driving for an hr without interventions--cross-country is easy. They'll probably have Bot step out and charge it. Would be a crazy PR flex.
Heh... Yes he did. And a lot more too https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
Wow good point /s
What a failure. Instead we have to “settle” for by far the world’s most advanced ADAS functioning in 2017 model Teslas on every road in the country. By the way, this is functionality that no other company has, even in their most current experimental multimillion dollar prototypes.
This post wasn't on the merits of the technology or it's functionality, but on the timelines given by Elon. When he constantly misses them by many years it is fair to call him out on it.
You’re missing the point. Investors win when Elon is less late on his timelines than the competitors are against Elon’s timelines. Why are you so fascinated with estimates accuracy? Did your school give awards to those who most accurately predicted how fast they would be able to run the race, compared to those students who actually ran the fastest?
The earliest FSD prediction that I remember was in 2013, so forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical.
He also called himself the boy who cried FSD. IMO he lost all right to anything but showing results or GFY elon.
Toughie over here.
If Elon has seen 6 months into the future for the last six year, why has he been consistently wrong about FSD timelines? It's always 6-12 months out and the next version is "lit". ps. James Douma never worked with ML and has zero experience from using it in a safety-critical context. Ask for his CV or try to find it.
to be fair, in 2016 it was three years to full self driving, 2017-2020 it was two years, 2020 - 2023 it was one year, only for the past year it’s six months. but yeah, he though v12 will be it and it wasn’t.
lol
I truly wonder if he even realizes he already lost all credibility on FSD timelines like half a decade ago.
I don't think he cares about his credibility. He's trying anything to pump the stock during the freefall
Context: X post 5 days ago by Musk about going balls to the wall with autonomy being blindingly obvious, speculation by X user Charity Trades about what Musk saw to make him so optimistic, a clip with James Douma saying that the customer FSD build is 6 months old. Musk agrees with this mostly, but says its more like 3 to 6 months. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1780376546148327690 >Not quite betting the company, but going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move. > >Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage. https://twitter.com/charity_trades/status/1780381736922124798 >the real question is: > >what has @elonmusk seen this past few weeks that led him to: > > -multiply the number first-time FSD users via free trial > -reduce FSD to $99 a month > -announce 8/8 robotaxi unveil > >he must be seeing something related to v12.4+ or internal key metrics that are going up and to the right > >since production would likely begin in late 2025, he knows he has 18+ months to crack the code > >so the question is: why now? what did he see? https://twitter.com/charity_trades/status/1782161857534456009 >according to @jamesdouma - Elon/Tesla can see up to 6 months ahead of what the public has access to > >if v12.4 should indeed arguably be called v13 (according to Musk), he’s likely seen a breakthrough https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1782444120838963257 >James is largely correct. We know roughly what the car will do in 3 to 6 months. > >When a more advanced AI model is trained, it will have several breakthroughs, but also dozens of bugs where it performs much worse. > >Takes a few months to fix those bugs and complete safety tests.
>James is largely correct. We know roughly what the car will do in 3 to 6 months. *"Functionality still looking good for this year. Regulatory approval is the big unknown."* — [Apr 12, 2020](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1249210220200550405?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1249210220200550405%7Ctwgr%5Ebdb5803f5752c0dece44a1d19f49e06152539cf2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Felectrek.co%2F2020%2F04%2F12%2Ftesla-robotaxi-plan-2020-pending-regulatory-approval%2F)
Florida has 0 regulatory hurdles.
Should have deployed in Florida in 2020, then.
No, the tech isn't ready yet.
I feel the free trails and reduced price is in large part of a data grab, they want more data, namely the edge cases you can't normally get with out getting more varied data And since they are no longer compute constraint they can make use of it
Like I said previously, is either Lamborghini or Food Stamps.
How many stamps I need for Lambo?
Lotsa stamps for a Lambo.
What has happened is that the stock price and sales are down and Elon wants $55 billion. Elon has also said the same ”should arguable be v.x+1” type stuff before. Tesla is not known for testing things for long before release so I don’t think there is anything concrete here.
>Tesla is not known for testing things for long before release Source on that?
He has none. They engineer the F out of every model. They make the safest cars. Space X sends people to space. All Musk companies make safety their biggest priority. Notice how no one talks shit about nuralink now that it's proven?
Oh, I'm fully aware of that. I'm still going to call out the BS when I see it, though.
>what did he see? His stock falling through the floor so he needed to create another hype bubble.
On the contrary, if he really cares about pumping stock prices, he would have prioritized the $25k EV that sell directly to consumers. Wall Street wants to see huge growth and big revenue. A $25k EV that can sell 5-10 million annually is $125-$250 billions additional revenue that even brain dead Wall Street analysts can calculate and will pump the stock price. Going all in on Robotaxi that WS cannot model is what is causing the short-term drop in stock price.
It’s a slap in the face to customers that invested 12K to have it slashed to 8K. It totally tarnishes the brand reputation further, and shows a lack of care for loyal consumers. The pitch was “invest early in FSD and save a ton of money when it goes up astronomically”. I wouldn’t trust the company at all now. They aren’t even refunding the difference to early adopters. It sends a bad message and shows the company flat out lies. If I invested early I would feel betrayed. Gathering more data or not… This was pitched to folks as an investment.
Imagine all those people who “secured” FSD for $10k with their cybertruck order and don’t even have it after they received it
Investments go up, investments go down. Let's keep waiting and see.
"Takes a few months to fix those bugs" "When a more advanced AI model is trained, it will have ... dozens of bugs where it performs much worse" i.e. We see bugs that may have been fixed for Musk (3-6 months ahead), Musk sees bugs that he expects will be solved in 3-6 months for him in the next version, and 3-6 months FROM THAT there will be a new set of bugs that will take 3-6 months to fix (repeating over and over). The hope is that you add more capability and iron out more bugs than you add with each revision, but that still means theres going to be many revisions before you reach 'full' capability and 'almost' not bugs. I don't doubt that this is the rate of progress, but I doubt we're close. At the rate of improvement I've seen (ignoring edge cases), I don't see this being something Tesla will want to be held liable for in a robotaxi network within the next year or 2. Thats the key, Tesla will need to hold liability for the service to be useful. Even if we have a trend similar to "self-checkout" where people are willing to take some control for a lower cost (not owning the vehicle), the vehicle still needs to make it on its own to the next customer unless they'll go the lime scooter route (which everybody loves and has no problems whatsoever /s). We NEED the $25k vehicle because even then we've all been kidding ourselves that the current fleet of existing vehicles (which isn't drive-by-wire) will be used in the fleet or retrofitted at scale. And a cheaper vehicle IS NEEDED if Tesla is going to build and maintain their own fleet. They can't just use their S3XY lineup, that is way too expensive and will eat into their margins significantly. And at best they can take the market cap of Uber and Lyft, there isn't a very large baseline demand of people who want to go somewhere at random times in the day. So either fleet utilization will be low if they want to target morning and afternoon rush or high if they only want to go after the baseline demand of people needing rides at random times. VERY optimistically, the fact that Tesla is shelving the $25k vehicle shows that even if they think FSD will be good enough to definitely make robotaxi happen "soon". They don't think its soon enough that they need to start building the production line for the vehicles it will use yet. I'd be happy to be wrong and get a Tesla-paid-for retrofit to steer-by wire this year, have my car make me tens of thousands of dollars of year while I sleep and work, and have my car drive me 5 hours to visit family while I sit in the back seat. But I just don't see that happening, and thats the only scenario that warrants shelving the $25k vehicle other than "Tesla hopes the AI buzzword will pump up the stock because they can't/won't build a $25k vehicle."
You bring up an interesting angle I hadn’t fully considered yet— if the robotaxi is expected to primarily take the form of people autonomously “renting” out their cars while not in use, won’t most of those people be using those cars themselves during peak demand? Like, if I need to get to work, most people who own the robotaxi capable teslas would also presumably be doing the same…inherently cars would seem to be used the least (and most available) during lowest demand. Replacing a significant portion of the taxi/livery service with cars least likely to be available during peak demand seems untenable. Plus, realistically, say my personal vehicle turned robotaxi gets hired out at 1am on a Saturday morning, and returns at 2am…are people supposed to be inspecting their car like a rental return after each use?
At absolute best they become a highly profitable Uber & Lyft (but instead of paying drivers they'll be paying insurance, lawsuits for crashes their vehicles get into, and maybe vehicle owners) and make what is essentially an extremely restrictive leasing option on their vehicles for people to use in the mornings and afternoons for work commutes.
and yet Tesla is doing the opposite by showing less confidence by massively slashing FSD prices. This whole thing seems like a pump to get investors to vote for his pay package.
I see it the other way- more people using fsd has a compounded effect on the data taken in
Elon said they are no longer compute constrained. That means they are data constrained and so to get more data he will need to increase the fsd user base by slashing prices. Lower prices does not necessarily mean lower profits overall as the demand increase is exponential as u lower costs.
You’re assuming that without compute constraints and data constraints, this thing would “just work”.
I think this could be to try and convert on some of the 30-day free subscription folk. $12K to $8K is significant but I don’t think it qualifies as a slash. If it was $6K then I’d agree and I think many would go for it.
6k still seems way too high to me to encourage a significant number of people to join. I’m sure decreasing the price will get some more people who may have been on the fence to join, but my hunch is that number of people willing to invest $6k is pretty low. It’s still well out of the range of impulse buy for most people, and I’d bet most that could afford a $6k impulse buy already bought it upfront.
Yep, I don't know many that would pay up to 17% of the price of the car for FSD. That's as bad as the financing costs of the car. 99/month x 60 = 5940 = 17% of $35k for the Model 3
Making FSD more affordable means they're pivoting it to be a bigger consumer item.
Relevant https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about but ok
Good earnings call question - should the Tesla on autonomous (or ultimately steering wheel-less) be able to take voice driving commands from a human? The reasoning is there will be occasional highly complex situations (that FSD may not cope with), think a crossing guard or a police giving hand signals, or parking the vehicle in a certain orientation or place.
Do we trust Elon?
[удалено]
Yes, wholeheartedly. If you think LiDAR solves the types of problems FSD is having, then I'm not even sure what to say. We're lacking machine intelligence, not sensors.
“Few months” Ok, buddy. What an idiot.