Knowing Musk- he’ll announce a FSD ‘visual and neural net’ version of the Tesla- and out will come a Tesla driven by a human driver. Like the dancer dressed as a robot. How he’s as wealthy as he is, I have no idea.
I think you are letting Elon’s incompetence in how our government works color your thinking. Just because he is so clueless on that front doesn’t mean his companies are also clueless. He also seems to have very top-notch and highly-motivated people working for him.
With regard to promising FSD within two years for the last ten years and within a year for the last six, the thing to do is listen to the other people at Tesla working on FSD. Elon is always grossly optimistic on really hard things that others doesn’t think are possible (FSD, landing and reusing rocket boosters, brain interface chips, tunnel-boring equipment in miles per day instead of days per mile, to name a few). Part of that is setting very-stretch goals, but he actually believes there’s a chance he could meet those. He acknowledged that trait is saying that his companies turn “impossible” into “late.” The problem with saying “he’s been wrong about that so many times” is that they do seem to eventually get those to work.
The cars at launch will be “Robotaxis”: Model Y’s with no driver. What they will not be is “Cybercabs”: the new two-seater cars with no steering wheel still in development that had prototypes shown and driven at the Robotaxi event 10/10/24. Eventually, Cybercabs will dominate any successful Robotaxi network because their amortized cost per mile will be less than the about $0.15 of the Model Y. Since about 90% of rideshares are just one or two people, Cybercabs can handle those. Even once Cybercab are in full production, there will still be the need for larger cars for when there are more than two people.
Waymo and Tesla took very different approaches to the problem. Waymo went for LIDAR to get precision mapping of the environment around it combined with very detailed maps of where it would be operating. Tesla went for radar and cameras initially, but the radar angular resolution was too poor to be helpful. Radar cannot tell the difference between a car stopped in the road and a car stopped beside the road. It can tell that there is something large, that it is stopped, and exactly how far away it is, but cannot tell if it matters or not. The radar was dropped not to save cost, but because it gave so many false alarms that it had to practically be ignored.
The advantage for Tesla is the cost of a couple of thousand dollars for the inference computer along with all the cameras. That is much cheaper than the additional $100,000 that Waymo spends. The result is Tesla decided to put it into every Tesla built. Not having it as an option cuts manufacturing changes from car-to-car and brings the unit cost of FSD hardware down due to the much higher volume. It also means that Tesla has over two million cars on the road that customers could eventually “hire out” to the Robotaxi fleet to earn money when they are not using it. Initially, Tesla will only be using company cars. They don’t need the large number until it proves successful and needs to scale up. Their plan is to start with 10-20 and geofenced to a area of Austin with only easy turns. They expect to be up to several hundred cars within a few months. Waymo has 700 cars nationally and has an order for 300 more next year. Tesla currently produces about 400,000 cars a quarter (all of which are Robotaxi ready), but that will go up if they start producing Cybercabs in volume
Waymo is already operating driverless taxi fleets and have been for a number of years. They started with by-invitation and for their own employees for a while before offering paid rides to the general public. Tesla has been doing the same thing in California for a while for their own employees, but with a driver there that could take over if necessary. All driverless fleets need to have the ability of a remote teleoperator that can direct the car if necessary. The teleoperator is not monitoring the car, but rather is there to do something when the car reports it doesn’t know what to do. In some cases, this could just be giving a direction to the car (turn around or back up, go around some obstruction, take a different route) or in others, it might be to remotely drive the vehicle. The question is how often that is necessary. With Cruise, after they went under, it came out that their teleoperators were doing something an average of every two miles or so. That doesn’t scale. If you have one teleoperator for every 100 cars, that could work with a small fleet, but to scale to a large fleet, interventions would need to be low enough that there are a lot fewer than one remote driver per hundred cars.
Regarding LIDAR vs cameras, generally, the precision of LIDAR (knowing where things are to a tenth of an inch) isn’t critical to being able to drivie. 4K video is sufficient to know where to go and what to avoid. The really big benefit is having eight cameras instead of just seeing one direction at a time. I’m a little surprised that there aren’t cameras looking sideways at the four corners of the car. That would increase visibility even more when needing to stick ones nose out to see if it is clear to go. The cameras also go farther into the infrared (I can see a lot more at night in my backup camera than my mirror). Tesla does have some test cars fitted with LIDAR for precision truth data for validating the 3D model the software generates from the cameras.
All true. Now that Musk has skulked away from Washington, he will once again be among you Texans. Maybe he’ll restore Tesla. Maybe he’ll focus on a Mars trip. He could just hang out at his fertility farm, but from what I understand, that doesn’t hold his attention long either.
When you believe you’re an invincible god figure, no one can tell you anything. I’d like to think his experience in politics knocked him down a peg or two, but I’m dubious.
He needs to pick one or two projects to throw himself into and stop trying to control how the world spins.
Can’t we just deport this MFer? Send him back to S. Africa. After all he has overstayed his temporary visa. Oh, I forgot he bought his right to stay by funding DJTs election. Finally, FDT!
he is the office not the avengers the right path is how do you lower the cost of lidar that should be the priority as a the tech works but is expensive figure out how to lower the cost. We have this issue with Solar power Panels cost about a 1000 dollars each the problem wasn't the technology but the capacity to produce The government invested in expanding production capacity of the 12 companies green lit 2 failed but the rest thrived and the cost of the unit dropped to a 100 bucks a panel. This is the thinking with electic lithium ion batteries, other such innovations and why we have a 100% tarriff against chinese electric carts.
Umm...Calling Musk Michael Scott is too flattering. I've been saying for a while (since Doge anyway) that he thinks he's Tony Stark but is actually Lex Luther.
We all hate Musk now because he has ketamine-addled delusions of omniscience and is the DOGE guy. Fair. I will also say this, FSD, in it's latest incarnation, is freaking magic. My biggest problem with it is, we disagree on the correct lanes around NYC bridges and tunnels. Otherwise, I just let it do it's thing.
I should probably care more about all of this, but what always ends up horrifying me the most about Mask is when I see him showing up in things like The Avengers or (worse) on The Big Bang Theory or on Rick and Morty. For that last one, Musk himself voiced the character Elon Tusk during the fourth season, whose intentional ridiculousness was compounded by an unintentional layer of mediocrity. (According to me, at least.) These appearances take for granted that Musk is a benevolent and caring genius, and it enrages me every time. You can skip his scenes, of course, but it's still annoying to have to skip them.
JVL: I'm still reading through the Ed Zitron article. But...
What if the disease that Donald Trump is a symptom of is clueless managerialism? If there's a throughline from Friedman's time to now, it's people being rewarded not only in spite of not knowing that the hell they are doing, but specifically because they don't know what they're doing and are very persuasive about it?
It's also at the heart of what's driving AI. AI chatbots could free the clueless managers from what little work they have left for themselves in the Fortune 500 C-suite. It's not a tool for us plebs -- anyone who actually works for a living, from doctors on down to grocery clerks. It's a way to appropriate more and still do less for it.
It’s not just Waymo. Amazon is also a decade ahead of Tesla in the robotaxi game with their Zoox subsidiary. Zoox even has bespoke vehicles that make sense for a world where a FSD should not require a driver’s seat with full steering column and steering wheel. It’s more like the back of a Vauxhall London cab. Chevy Cruze was also in this game until they had a horrific deadly accident in SF.
The whole point about FSD is that by removing human error you dramatically increase safety. So it’s beyond dumb to say that humans rely on vision and their organic brains to drive so that’s all the programmed and limited intelligence of a car should require and yet promise increased safety.
And we have a Grifter in Chief whose financial acumen bankrupted every company he ever ran, some more quickly than others. Don't bother telling me about the companies he is involved with that are still afloat, tariffs will probably take care of them. Confidence tricksters generally manage to sock away enough illegal gains to carry them through to the next scheme, and on it goes. Yay.
Elon may have solved our current dilemma already with his Billionaires in Space program as his rockets continue to blow up. We shall see whether SpaceX assumes the same trajectory as Tesla.
Thanks for the great column today JVL! Glad to see you take down Elon for the poser he is. Also glad you directed people to Ed Zitron. JVL, please do a similar piece about Sam Altman and the other so-called "AI" Masters of the Universe who keep promising that AGI is coming "next year."
I love when universes collide and that JVL referred people to Ed's piece. I think JVL originally introduced me to Ed's writing in another Triad, and I'm thankful that there are a few vocal critics of the AI and tech madness that seems to captivate everybody else.
Is an autonomous self driving vehicle a priority? I'm truly interested in answers.
Knowing Musk- he’ll announce a FSD ‘visual and neural net’ version of the Tesla- and out will come a Tesla driven by a human driver. Like the dancer dressed as a robot. How he’s as wealthy as he is, I have no idea.
I think you are letting Elon’s incompetence in how our government works color your thinking. Just because he is so clueless on that front doesn’t mean his companies are also clueless. He also seems to have very top-notch and highly-motivated people working for him.
With regard to promising FSD within two years for the last ten years and within a year for the last six, the thing to do is listen to the other people at Tesla working on FSD. Elon is always grossly optimistic on really hard things that others doesn’t think are possible (FSD, landing and reusing rocket boosters, brain interface chips, tunnel-boring equipment in miles per day instead of days per mile, to name a few). Part of that is setting very-stretch goals, but he actually believes there’s a chance he could meet those. He acknowledged that trait is saying that his companies turn “impossible” into “late.” The problem with saying “he’s been wrong about that so many times” is that they do seem to eventually get those to work.
The cars at launch will be “Robotaxis”: Model Y’s with no driver. What they will not be is “Cybercabs”: the new two-seater cars with no steering wheel still in development that had prototypes shown and driven at the Robotaxi event 10/10/24. Eventually, Cybercabs will dominate any successful Robotaxi network because their amortized cost per mile will be less than the about $0.15 of the Model Y. Since about 90% of rideshares are just one or two people, Cybercabs can handle those. Even once Cybercab are in full production, there will still be the need for larger cars for when there are more than two people.
Waymo and Tesla took very different approaches to the problem. Waymo went for LIDAR to get precision mapping of the environment around it combined with very detailed maps of where it would be operating. Tesla went for radar and cameras initially, but the radar angular resolution was too poor to be helpful. Radar cannot tell the difference between a car stopped in the road and a car stopped beside the road. It can tell that there is something large, that it is stopped, and exactly how far away it is, but cannot tell if it matters or not. The radar was dropped not to save cost, but because it gave so many false alarms that it had to practically be ignored.
The advantage for Tesla is the cost of a couple of thousand dollars for the inference computer along with all the cameras. That is much cheaper than the additional $100,000 that Waymo spends. The result is Tesla decided to put it into every Tesla built. Not having it as an option cuts manufacturing changes from car-to-car and brings the unit cost of FSD hardware down due to the much higher volume. It also means that Tesla has over two million cars on the road that customers could eventually “hire out” to the Robotaxi fleet to earn money when they are not using it. Initially, Tesla will only be using company cars. They don’t need the large number until it proves successful and needs to scale up. Their plan is to start with 10-20 and geofenced to a area of Austin with only easy turns. They expect to be up to several hundred cars within a few months. Waymo has 700 cars nationally and has an order for 300 more next year. Tesla currently produces about 400,000 cars a quarter (all of which are Robotaxi ready), but that will go up if they start producing Cybercabs in volume
Waymo is already operating driverless taxi fleets and have been for a number of years. They started with by-invitation and for their own employees for a while before offering paid rides to the general public. Tesla has been doing the same thing in California for a while for their own employees, but with a driver there that could take over if necessary. All driverless fleets need to have the ability of a remote teleoperator that can direct the car if necessary. The teleoperator is not monitoring the car, but rather is there to do something when the car reports it doesn’t know what to do. In some cases, this could just be giving a direction to the car (turn around or back up, go around some obstruction, take a different route) or in others, it might be to remotely drive the vehicle. The question is how often that is necessary. With Cruise, after they went under, it came out that their teleoperators were doing something an average of every two miles or so. That doesn’t scale. If you have one teleoperator for every 100 cars, that could work with a small fleet, but to scale to a large fleet, interventions would need to be low enough that there are a lot fewer than one remote driver per hundred cars.
Regarding LIDAR vs cameras, generally, the precision of LIDAR (knowing where things are to a tenth of an inch) isn’t critical to being able to drivie. 4K video is sufficient to know where to go and what to avoid. The really big benefit is having eight cameras instead of just seeing one direction at a time. I’m a little surprised that there aren’t cameras looking sideways at the four corners of the car. That would increase visibility even more when needing to stick ones nose out to see if it is clear to go. The cameras also go farther into the infrared (I can see a lot more at night in my backup camera than my mirror). Tesla does have some test cars fitted with LIDAR for precision truth data for validating the 3D model the software generates from the cameras.
All true. Now that Musk has skulked away from Washington, he will once again be among you Texans. Maybe he’ll restore Tesla. Maybe he’ll focus on a Mars trip. He could just hang out at his fertility farm, but from what I understand, that doesn’t hold his attention long either.
When you believe you’re an invincible god figure, no one can tell you anything. I’d like to think his experience in politics knocked him down a peg or two, but I’m dubious.
He needs to pick one or two projects to throw himself into and stop trying to control how the world spins.
Can we convince him to be a passenger on his first rocket to Mars?
Can’t we just deport this MFer? Send him back to S. Africa. After all he has overstayed his temporary visa. Oh, I forgot he bought his right to stay by funding DJTs election. Finally, FDT!
he is the office not the avengers the right path is how do you lower the cost of lidar that should be the priority as a the tech works but is expensive figure out how to lower the cost. We have this issue with Solar power Panels cost about a 1000 dollars each the problem wasn't the technology but the capacity to produce The government invested in expanding production capacity of the 12 companies green lit 2 failed but the rest thrived and the cost of the unit dropped to a 100 bucks a panel. This is the thinking with electic lithium ion batteries, other such innovations and why we have a 100% tarriff against chinese electric carts.
Umm...Calling Musk Michael Scott is too flattering. I've been saying for a while (since Doge anyway) that he thinks he's Tony Stark but is actually Lex Luther.
We all hate Musk now because he has ketamine-addled delusions of omniscience and is the DOGE guy. Fair. I will also say this, FSD, in it's latest incarnation, is freaking magic. My biggest problem with it is, we disagree on the correct lanes around NYC bridges and tunnels. Otherwise, I just let it do it's thing.
I should probably care more about all of this, but what always ends up horrifying me the most about Mask is when I see him showing up in things like The Avengers or (worse) on The Big Bang Theory or on Rick and Morty. For that last one, Musk himself voiced the character Elon Tusk during the fourth season, whose intentional ridiculousness was compounded by an unintentional layer of mediocrity. (According to me, at least.) These appearances take for granted that Musk is a benevolent and caring genius, and it enrages me every time. You can skip his scenes, of course, but it's still annoying to have to skip them.
We’ll get FSD Teslas right after infrastructure week. Or at least concepts of FSD.
JVL: I'm still reading through the Ed Zitron article. But...
What if the disease that Donald Trump is a symptom of is clueless managerialism? If there's a throughline from Friedman's time to now, it's people being rewarded not only in spite of not knowing that the hell they are doing, but specifically because they don't know what they're doing and are very persuasive about it?
It's also at the heart of what's driving AI. AI chatbots could free the clueless managers from what little work they have left for themselves in the Fortune 500 C-suite. It's not a tool for us plebs -- anyone who actually works for a living, from doctors on down to grocery clerks. It's a way to appropriate more and still do less for it.
AI is the techbro manifestation of the E4 Mafia.
It’s not just Waymo. Amazon is also a decade ahead of Tesla in the robotaxi game with their Zoox subsidiary. Zoox even has bespoke vehicles that make sense for a world where a FSD should not require a driver’s seat with full steering column and steering wheel. It’s more like the back of a Vauxhall London cab. Chevy Cruze was also in this game until they had a horrific deadly accident in SF.
The whole point about FSD is that by removing human error you dramatically increase safety. So it’s beyond dumb to say that humans rely on vision and their organic brains to drive so that’s all the programmed and limited intelligence of a car should require and yet promise increased safety.
Zoox is the kind of name you see on a list and think to yourself, "Am I going to have to get vaccinated for that if I travel overseas?"
What insightful writing and excellent takedown of the charlatan Elon and tech industry bro who think they can take over the world. Thank you, JVL.
And we have a Grifter in Chief whose financial acumen bankrupted every company he ever ran, some more quickly than others. Don't bother telling me about the companies he is involved with that are still afloat, tariffs will probably take care of them. Confidence tricksters generally manage to sock away enough illegal gains to carry them through to the next scheme, and on it goes. Yay.
Elon may have solved our current dilemma already with his Billionaires in Space program as his rockets continue to blow up. We shall see whether SpaceX assumes the same trajectory as Tesla.
Smoke and mirrors is all I see
Thanks for the great column today JVL! Glad to see you take down Elon for the poser he is. Also glad you directed people to Ed Zitron. JVL, please do a similar piece about Sam Altman and the other so-called "AI" Masters of the Universe who keep promising that AGI is coming "next year."
I love when universes collide and that JVL referred people to Ed's piece. I think JVL originally introduced me to Ed's writing in another Triad, and I'm thankful that there are a few vocal critics of the AI and tech madness that seems to captivate everybody else.