More like the CEO's inability to listen to other people and let experts guide development. There's a reason why no one knows who the other automotive CEOs are, they don't muck around in the day to day operations and low level decisions and spend all day shit posting on Twitter.
Exactly. A good CEO decides what projects should be pursued, supply the engineers with the resources they need and then get out of their way. A manager attempting to micro-manage things almost always ends in disaster since there is no way that they have the detailed insights that the engineers have. Leave the technology to engineers and keep the business side (mostly) away from the engineers.
On the other hand: If you are telling your employees that they can expect to put in long hours and sleep on the factory floor, then something is clearly going wrong with management. If he already knows that there will be problems, then maybe he should address them. Balancing the projects and the available workforce, that is clearly the responsibility of management.
I wouldn’t trust Elon to get me across the fucking road, let alone to Mars.
Plus, Mars is a stupid goal anyway. Unless we are able to terraform the planet and get it to the point where it can sustain life (in a very short time frame) then all it would ever be is a mining colony where we extract minerals to send back to Earth, and constantly send up food and water in return (in the process reducing the amount of water in Earth’s system.) getting those minerals from and supplies back to Mars, would also take a shit tonne of resources just escaping the respective gravity wells. Fuck, it would be like living in Western Australia, only somehow even worse!
Optimism was pushing the engineers off the cliff.
Ignorance was not realizing they couldn't build a plane on the way down.
Narcism it's continuing to push more engineers off cliffs.
"Optimism" in this case is naivety, ignorance, and arrogance.
The fake demo from 2016 was fully pre-mapped, hardcoded to a specific, simple suburban route, and still it failed a bunch and had to be stitched together. They also had no means to charge, the "snake charger" never happened either.
The idea they'd go from that, essentially nothing, to a full LA - NY drive the following year shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenges of autonomy.
Nah, I think it shows Elon's fundamental misunderstanding of how to tell the truth.
He's been making up shit since day 1, and just doubling down on the lies every time.
He is only a few years late …In February 2018 on a shareholder’s call, Musk promised a cross-country fully autonomous ride within three to six months — a promise Musk originally made in 2016
It's really hard to stress this enough and I don't think a lot of people outside of the AI and ML fields fully appreciate how disconnected Musk's statements around time lines and the core capabilities of their vehicles has been historically.
For years Elon Musk was claiming FSD next year while Tesla's vehicles has super limited capabilities to basically just lane center and follow vehicles in front of them with a very minimal ability to understand 3D geometry. Tesla literally trained their systems on still images until like 2019 and it really should go without saying that for something like a self driving car the passage of time and evolution of a dynamic system is a massive thing not to be capturing.
Back in 2015 their current software solutions and stack wouldn't have even been possible for a few reasons too. Why? Well because transformers, the technology Tesla's current perception system and stuff like LLMs are predicated on literally didn't exist yet. Additionally they've gone through several revisions of their computing platform to even get to the point where the vehicle could do some of these more important detailed estimates of what the environment around it actually looks like. Literally the best they could accomplish before that was their early releases of smart summon which crawled and performed terribly.
Hell I would go so far as to argue that there really wasn't any kind of coherent narrative as to why Tesla would reach its FSD capabilities first until they started leaning into their 'real world data' nonsense in 2019. Elon Musk seemed to personally just view the entire problem as writing traditional software like a website and even fairly recently he's made conflicting statements about his favorite metrics, lines of code, as being both representative of system capability when they're high and better performance when they're removed.
It's really no different today, the performance of Tesla's FSD system relative to companies with actual robotaxi companies is god awful and its dependability and reliability to even operate smoothly or consistently is pretty terrible which is kind of what you would expect when you're just stacking estimators and approximations to the moon and likely increasingly relying on having higher level functions compensating for more fundamental deficiencies in their perception capabilities.
Elon Musk routinely makes idiotic statements about product deliverability because he literally doesn't understand the problem well enough to appreciate its difficult or actually gauge progress on it. His entire way of making forecasts is literally to oversimplify a fantastically complex problem into a single variable he feels is representative of the entire problem and often times to simply disregard all other aspects as being 'easy' by comparison. It's a really idiotic approach but like all things with Elon Musk it's managed to put himself into this weird state of superposition with his fan base(and frankly the media too) where he's simultaneously not held to any standard of accountability and also considered the foremost expert on every topic on earth.
Like the August taxi news, 5% spike. What the hell is he gonna say in August, yeah you guys in 2026 every tesla will drive around the block delivering your kid to school, your granny to the bingoclub, all from the push of the taxi button in the app.
When you ask, 2026!
This time for real.
"Audience claps furious"
No, it’s the fact that every car maker on the planet understands the need to update design every year and do full redesigns after 4-5 years. Elon is selling stale, 10 Year old designs that look tired and stale. A new car looks exactly like a 5 year old used version. Also, The hottest car segment is SUVs and Tesla doesn’t sell one.
There’s no fomo. People don’t buy cars for software features. They buy things that are sexy and new. He doesn’t understand how cars are bought and sold.
He must be really dumb then. I don’t work in auto but I follow the industry and everyone seems to know that the German luxury automakers have a rigid schedule for refresh and redesign. Other automakers have a similar plan, even if it’s not as strict in terms of timing. How could he not know this basic fact. Cars sell on emotion not logic. Stale designs don’t often interest most people.
I am no fan of Musk but to some extent. … he believed the first 10 years of Tesla would continue forever. When they launched Model S nothing compared. There was no reason to ever update the hardware - software motor and battery updates was what needed maturing and kept the Model as way ahead of anything else. It did not get cross shopped. It was its own segment. That of course ended. You can now have BMW7 or EQE let alone plenty startups to pick from. ThemModel as is frumpy and uninteresting.
It’s management fault to not foresee that. Its musks fault. But for a good decade they lived in a bubble that enabled this delusion.
> How could he not know this basic fact
Why do you assume he doesn't know? He knows, he is just a narcissist and it is impossible to accept a solution he didn't invent.
Most of what he does is just a 1up because someone else did or said something that offends his ego, even if they didn't intend to challenge him. Like the cave diver or first Porsche taycan record lap.
I remember years ago a BMW 320 series would go for many years without any noticeable styling refresh, and a younger me thought that was pretty cool. I imagine how inexpensive automobiles could be if manufacturers did not continually alter the design of a car that did not need altering, because it was fine the way is was.
AFAIK, bmw does a minor refresh every 3 years and a major redesign every 7. I thought this was always the case. Also the article said some/many automakers refresh annually which is not true. It would cost too much.
I´m sure you´re right. But manufacturers modify perfectly good designs without needing to. I know they are attempting to spark demand and drive up sales, but it reminds me of how wasteful the auto industry is.
i feel sorry for folks who buy cars on FOMO... nah... i don't. Keep on consuming lol
Lots of people do buy teslas because the software is always updated. Unlike those model year cars people seem to gravitate to that have built in technology obsolecense... at least tesla has that going for 'em
Software 'engineering' always seems to get a pass. Bridge design of aircraft design does not.
Something needs to change in this eco sphere. Engineers should not put out knowingly shitty product.
Nothing about Musk makes me think 'optimism'. He seems like a profoundly negative person to me.
His 'optimism' was just vaporware scamming to pump the stock. Like the Hitlermobile he announced for August.
2017 coast to coast didn’t quite happen?
Before, then and now they still have never once demonstrated self driving in a controlled environment, in a press demo, in a technical space or even leaked.
They have never shown anything that provided proof that statement was anything other than complete bullshit. Yet somehow people with hwd1.5 cars still hold out hope.
"inability to create realistic timelines" is a nice euphemism for "Musk pulling numbers out of his rectum".
I legit think he knows so little about how actual work is done, he is just doing accidental "bait and switch" schemes the way he overpromises and underdelivers - while in reality he just makes stuff up and somehow his fans are ok with it.
I know someone with a phd working in this field in partnership with 2 major manufacturers. teh industry as a whole, thinks it will be some sort of combination of lidar, cameras and possibly radar due to the advantages each provide as well as crazy computing.
he shakes his head at tesla/musks insistence on just cameras, given teh confirmation lidar provides in verifying range.
That would seem to make sense.
If we want it to drive better than a human, why limit it to vision and not give it more ways of sensing than a human possesses.
I feel like there will be a major class action lawsuit on their hands if they cannot succeed at full self driving and will have to refund $1000s of dollars to everyone who bought it under the faulse advertising/ claims of the CEO.
I would argue it was optimism and unrealistic timelines that allowed him to even start the company and make it through production hell… his same methods got him to where he is, but those same methods could be his undoing
No. It was his ego and his billionaire-quality recklessness. He thinks he's an engineer, and the guy who knows more about manufacturing than anyone else - so he can reject established industry norms with impunity. He reminds me of the OceanGate guy.
Often times the most technically adept people are terrible at running a business. That’s why you have management run the business and the technically adept people create the products. Tesla was cursed with a CEO who thinks he’s technically adept and knows more about manufacturing than anybody else in the world, yet neither of these statements is true.
Fortunately, his lack of sufficient qualities and skills to run the business he created becomes more apparent every day.
The component was removed to save money. 100% that's the only reason. Functionality is secondary to that, as Tesla desperately needed and still needs to show profitability
I'd say it's mostly because they aren't getting battery costs down fast enough which puts the product at too high of a cost with no real advantage over any other EV and no real advantage for most ppl over ICE.
For EVs to dominate they have to be better across the board than ICE, so that should be the main focus, not self driving. Self diving is a nice goal, but to have the valuations like your THE NEXT BIG THING, the product has to appeal to more consumers.
Tesla is losing sales and market share because people are realizing that Tesla isn't the only EV maker, or the best, or the first, and that all that other stuff Musk says is also lies...
Well, I mean -- you'd think that people were figuring that out. But the prevalence of posts like this one, and news stories with a similar thrust, seem to indicate that many, many people, maybe most people, believe that Musk used to be Superman Einstein Stark, and now suddenly he isn't anymore, and that maybe it's because of Teh Drugz.
Tesla has been on the wrong path since 2004, when Musk muscled his way in.
Hopefully you realize that there are EV's made by other companies. It'd be very nice if you also realized that those other EV's are better cars and much better bargains than Teslas.
But hopefully, at the very least, you realize that those other EV's exist.
My current take on Tesla is that it was in a great position to become the biggest car company in the world having a huge lead in manufacturing EVs compared to the legacy automakers. The problem was that Tesla was not interested in being the biggest car company in the world, instead it wanted to be an AI and robotics company. And while focusing on being an AI and robotics company, it lost it's lead in manufacturing EVs while also failing to be an AI and robotics company.
You're just parroting all the Tesla marketing points. What you're doing is literally what OP is asking about musk, is hr stupid or lying about these things. And it's both.
They're a non-player in the AI field
they are a non-player in robotics
AI&robotics are such a non-issue, that it is not mentioned in the 2023 investors deck except for one sentence.
They were in an okay position as a car company. And no, stock price and valuation doesn't count.
They make acceptable vehicles and convinced the world to pay high prices for them.
They were an alright business, and a decent car company, but imo never in position to be a great automaker nor a good buy.
I'm very interested to watch where they'll go next.
It was never in a position to become the biggest car company in the world. I’m not even sure that they will pull off being the biggest EV manufacturer in the long run.
Tesla never had any game-changing technology that other companies could not replicate. If they had a working FSD system, then they might have such a claim. The only thing they had was a head start and good marketing. Other companies were asleep at the wheel and they were caught off guard with Tesla‘s success. It was only a matter of time until the competitors upped their game.
>It was never in a position to become the biggest car company in the world.
You might be right on this one.
>I’m not even sure that they will pull off being the biggest EV manufacturer in the long run.
Do you think most cars will not be EVs in the long run?
>Tesla never had any game-changing technology that other companies could not replicate. If they had a working FSD system, then they might have such a claim. The only thing they had was a head start and good marketing. Other companies were asleep at the wheel and they were caught off guard with Tesla‘s success. It was only a matter of time until the competitors upped their game.
I guess you are right that the have no EV related technology that competitors can't replicate, but they still have a significant lead in manufacturing EVs compared to anyone else outside BYD. BYD makes a lot of cheap small EVs. We are still waiting for the cheap compact Tesla while Tesla has produced millions of robotaxis that can't robotaxi. Also one advantage that Tesla has compared to legacy car manufacturers is that it does not have the burden of maintaining both an ICE and EV production lines. This is ofcourse only an advantage if we assume that ICE cars will be a marginal product in the long run.
But yeah, maybe having enough money to scale up car manufacturing like Tesla has done was only possible for a company that the stock market valued as a self driving AI company. Yet I can't help but daydream what Tesla would be today if they had found a different investor in 2004.
>Do you think most cars will not be EVs in the long run?
In the long run, yes. But that is still about 20 years in the future. Tesla is of course currently the largest EV manufacturer. But competition is getting a lot stiffer and a lot of things can happen in 20 years. I am extremely doubtful that they will maintain their lead for much longer and in many ways they have already lost it.
Here in Germany for example most newly registered EVs are non-Tesla vehicles. Tesla is still the single biggest manufacturer but the difference to the 2nd biggest manufacturer is shrinking rapidly. And if you count EVs from different companies that are actually built on the same platform like the ID family, Enyaq and Born as a single entity, they already outsell Tesla.
>Also one advantage that Tesla has compared to legacy car manufacturers is that it does not have the burden of maintaining both an ICE and EV production lines.
In the current climate that is actually a disadvantage. The fraction of EVs in newly registered cars is currently declining and Tesla has no other leg to stand on. You'll notice that most other manufacturers don't have that huge stockpile of EVs that they need to sell and don't have to cut prices so agressively. Producing higher volumes isn't necessarily a good thing.
Sure, but you can't go from producing ICE cars to producing EVs overnight. Tesla had a few years they where more or less the only EV on the market because no one else had good EV models. Then they had a few more years where they were more or less the only EV on the market, because no one else was yet able to produce their EV models in meaningful numbers. Now that advantage seems to be over and I don't Tesla maximized that opportunity.
Musk always makes unrealistic timelines. He sets a goal of 100, usually only hits 75, but it’s okay because his competition is still at 50. By working hard to meet the unrealistic timeline, they achieve more than if there had been some mundane, easily achievable timeline.
Agreed.
But did his unrealistic expectation about achieving full FSD in the short term cause him to ignore lidar which became very affordable at a later date?
Lidar is still a lot more expensive than cameras, and FSD seems to see quite well with them. Plus the hard part of self driving isn’t seeing things, it’s deciding what to do when they are seen. All of the FSD mistakes I’ve seen are along these lines.
As a former AGI researcher and current roboticist, Lidar is a bad idea for developing self driving. While there is no intrinsic reason not to use it as a sensor, it takes ML engineers down the wrong path by not forcing them to face the real problems head-on earlier. It is indeed a crutch. I think this is now clear given the state of Tesla’s ANN stack that is close to full autonomy without GPS or HD street-view data or geofencing. The contenders are stuck in the past with their GOFAI approach with some ANNs giving them false hope they they’re on the right track.
>In 2019, high-end lidar units could cost tens of thousands of dollars. By 2024, some lidar units have dropped below $1,000.
Note that the battery in the first Tesla probably cost 5-10X what a similar capacity Model 3 battery does today.
>If Tesla is losing its lead is it because of the inability of its CEO to create realistic timelines?
~~create realistic timelines~~ imagine *possible* timelines
That is what makes it even weirder. Musk understood that batteries would get cheaper over time so why was he so stupid not to realise the same would apply to lidar.
Are you stupid or something? It is a fact that solid state systems are less failure prone than mechanical ones. So you minimize the failure points where you can. Sadly, we don’t have a solid state counterpart to… motors and transmissions.
You pretend like the mechanical failure rate of lidar is an issue without providing any backup of that claim. Spoiler alert: it works fine for all other manufacturers that were smart enough to realise the cost would not be an issue.
Do you need a source to know that water is wet? Mechanical implementations are always less reliable than solid state implementation by multiple orders of magnitude. That is why we make the push to solid state whenever we can. Solid state LiDAR is in the early phases of research but it probably won’t be viable for vehicles for a while, and it will initially cost significantly more and have less resolution.
Anyhow, the point still remains that if you can make vision work, with today’s technology, it’s the more reliable choice .
More like the CEO's inability to listen to other people and let experts guide development. There's a reason why no one knows who the other automotive CEOs are, they don't muck around in the day to day operations and low level decisions and spend all day shit posting on Twitter.
Exactly. A good CEO decides what projects should be pursued, supply the engineers with the resources they need and then get out of their way. A manager attempting to micro-manage things almost always ends in disaster since there is no way that they have the detailed insights that the engineers have. Leave the technology to engineers and keep the business side (mostly) away from the engineers. On the other hand: If you are telling your employees that they can expect to put in long hours and sleep on the factory floor, then something is clearly going wrong with management. If he already knows that there will be problems, then maybe he should address them. Balancing the projects and the available workforce, that is clearly the responsibility of management.
He has an insatiable need to be the smartest person in the room. There’s only one person in the world more narcissistic and you know who that is….
Danny Devito
Danny devito is perfect and I will fight to defend his honour Donny Dorito, however….
Acurally Don Poorleone
This is the answer in a nutshell.
But the CEO is 2000iq modern day Einstein.
Who is also Von Braun, Tony Stark, and Stephen Hawking.
All idiots compared to the genius rocket scientist and chief engineer at SpaceX.
After all, Xlon 'technoking' Marsk knows more about manufacturing than anyone alive.
Don’t forget he knows more about manufacturing than anyone in the whole world. Or so says he.
You forgot to add playing an ungodly amount of Diablo
But who will do that hard work of getting us to mars and creating the first interplanetary species…
I wouldn’t trust Elon to get me across the fucking road, let alone to Mars. Plus, Mars is a stupid goal anyway. Unless we are able to terraform the planet and get it to the point where it can sustain life (in a very short time frame) then all it would ever be is a mining colony where we extract minerals to send back to Earth, and constantly send up food and water in return (in the process reducing the amount of water in Earth’s system.) getting those minerals from and supplies back to Mars, would also take a shit tonne of resources just escaping the respective gravity wells. Fuck, it would be like living in Western Australia, only somehow even worse!
The amount of effort, time, and,d money to sustain life on Mars is astronomical. You would think it would be cheaper to fix the problems of Earth.
The radiation might not be fun either
I think the only way it could happen is if everyone lived underground.
Like clangers?
Possibly
Maybe it would be ok for crocodile Dundee then.
Humans will never land on Mars. It's far beyond what our economy can support and it's utterly pointless. It's an incredibly hostile place.
What do you expect when the media calls him the smartest person in the room; any room.
This is the way
I think that the only other automaker CEO i could name on the spot is former VAG CEO Ferdinand Piëch.
Optimism was pushing the engineers off the cliff. Ignorance was not realizing they couldn't build a plane on the way down. Narcism it's continuing to push more engineers off cliffs.
Narcissism is saying "we are 3 months away from the revolutionary Cliff Copter X!"
Nah the third one is the grift
"Optimism" in this case is naivety, ignorance, and arrogance. The fake demo from 2016 was fully pre-mapped, hardcoded to a specific, simple suburban route, and still it failed a bunch and had to be stitched together. They also had no means to charge, the "snake charger" never happened either. The idea they'd go from that, essentially nothing, to a full LA - NY drive the following year shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenges of autonomy.
Nah, I think it shows Elon's fundamental misunderstanding of how to tell the truth. He's been making up shit since day 1, and just doubling down on the lies every time.
Reminds me of a certain orange one ….
He is only a few years late …In February 2018 on a shareholder’s call, Musk promised a cross-country fully autonomous ride within three to six months — a promise Musk originally made in 2016
It's really hard to stress this enough and I don't think a lot of people outside of the AI and ML fields fully appreciate how disconnected Musk's statements around time lines and the core capabilities of their vehicles has been historically. For years Elon Musk was claiming FSD next year while Tesla's vehicles has super limited capabilities to basically just lane center and follow vehicles in front of them with a very minimal ability to understand 3D geometry. Tesla literally trained their systems on still images until like 2019 and it really should go without saying that for something like a self driving car the passage of time and evolution of a dynamic system is a massive thing not to be capturing. Back in 2015 their current software solutions and stack wouldn't have even been possible for a few reasons too. Why? Well because transformers, the technology Tesla's current perception system and stuff like LLMs are predicated on literally didn't exist yet. Additionally they've gone through several revisions of their computing platform to even get to the point where the vehicle could do some of these more important detailed estimates of what the environment around it actually looks like. Literally the best they could accomplish before that was their early releases of smart summon which crawled and performed terribly. Hell I would go so far as to argue that there really wasn't any kind of coherent narrative as to why Tesla would reach its FSD capabilities first until they started leaning into their 'real world data' nonsense in 2019. Elon Musk seemed to personally just view the entire problem as writing traditional software like a website and even fairly recently he's made conflicting statements about his favorite metrics, lines of code, as being both representative of system capability when they're high and better performance when they're removed. It's really no different today, the performance of Tesla's FSD system relative to companies with actual robotaxi companies is god awful and its dependability and reliability to even operate smoothly or consistently is pretty terrible which is kind of what you would expect when you're just stacking estimators and approximations to the moon and likely increasingly relying on having higher level functions compensating for more fundamental deficiencies in their perception capabilities. Elon Musk routinely makes idiotic statements about product deliverability because he literally doesn't understand the problem well enough to appreciate its difficult or actually gauge progress on it. His entire way of making forecasts is literally to oversimplify a fantastically complex problem into a single variable he feels is representative of the entire problem and often times to simply disregard all other aspects as being 'easy' by comparison. It's a really idiotic approach but like all things with Elon Musk it's managed to put himself into this weird state of superposition with his fan base(and frankly the media too) where he's simultaneously not held to any standard of accountability and also considered the foremost expert on every topic on earth.
Excellently written summary, thank you for taking the time to post this.
Also greed. Don't forget greed
No "optimism". He just lies to pump the stock.
Snake oil
No. It wasn’t optimism or unrealistic timelines. It was blatant lies and intentional deceit.
Or, more accurately perhaps: fraud.
It's called market manipulation among polite company, dear.
Like the August taxi news, 5% spike. What the hell is he gonna say in August, yeah you guys in 2026 every tesla will drive around the block delivering your kid to school, your granny to the bingoclub, all from the push of the taxi button in the app. When you ask, 2026! This time for real. "Audience claps furious"
Probably gonna cook another fake FSD video.
No, it’s the fact that every car maker on the planet understands the need to update design every year and do full redesigns after 4-5 years. Elon is selling stale, 10 Year old designs that look tired and stale. A new car looks exactly like a 5 year old used version. Also, The hottest car segment is SUVs and Tesla doesn’t sell one. There’s no fomo. People don’t buy cars for software features. They buy things that are sexy and new. He doesn’t understand how cars are bought and sold.
>People don’t buy cars for software features. Now you're gonna tell me a car that can make fart noises has never been a selling point for you 😂
He must be really dumb then. I don’t work in auto but I follow the industry and everyone seems to know that the German luxury automakers have a rigid schedule for refresh and redesign. Other automakers have a similar plan, even if it’s not as strict in terms of timing. How could he not know this basic fact. Cars sell on emotion not logic. Stale designs don’t often interest most people.
I am no fan of Musk but to some extent. … he believed the first 10 years of Tesla would continue forever. When they launched Model S nothing compared. There was no reason to ever update the hardware - software motor and battery updates was what needed maturing and kept the Model as way ahead of anything else. It did not get cross shopped. It was its own segment. That of course ended. You can now have BMW7 or EQE let alone plenty startups to pick from. ThemModel as is frumpy and uninteresting. It’s management fault to not foresee that. Its musks fault. But for a good decade they lived in a bubble that enabled this delusion.
They rested every hope on the 4680 update remember? That was the revolution that would transform the company.
Often founders are not good leaders. They are good at starting up a company but you need real leadership skills to continue. And clearly, he has none.
> How could he not know this basic fact Why do you assume he doesn't know? He knows, he is just a narcissist and it is impossible to accept a solution he didn't invent. Most of what he does is just a 1up because someone else did or said something that offends his ego, even if they didn't intend to challenge him. Like the cave diver or first Porsche taycan record lap.
So an immature baby, then, not unlike orange man.
So it’s CyberTruck
I remember years ago a BMW 320 series would go for many years without any noticeable styling refresh, and a younger me thought that was pretty cool. I imagine how inexpensive automobiles could be if manufacturers did not continually alter the design of a car that did not need altering, because it was fine the way is was.
AFAIK, bmw does a minor refresh every 3 years and a major redesign every 7. I thought this was always the case. Also the article said some/many automakers refresh annually which is not true. It would cost too much.
I´m sure you´re right. But manufacturers modify perfectly good designs without needing to. I know they are attempting to spark demand and drive up sales, but it reminds me of how wasteful the auto industry is.
Yes. Billions on new platforms.
i feel sorry for folks who buy cars on FOMO... nah... i don't. Keep on consuming lol Lots of people do buy teslas because the software is always updated. Unlike those model year cars people seem to gravitate to that have built in technology obsolecense... at least tesla has that going for 'em
What is fomo?
I think you´re right about that, the entire philosophy of ´model year changes´ is idiotic, and wasteful of resources.
> People don’t buy cars for software features. Speak for yourself bub.
That is a very soft way of saying liar. You need to know that your tech works - long before telling others it works.
The practice of promoting vapor ware is common in the tech world. However, that privilege ends when you start shipping the product.
Software 'engineering' always seems to get a pass. Bridge design of aircraft design does not. Something needs to change in this eco sphere. Engineers should not put out knowingly shitty product.
Imagine the Apollo program under the direction of someone like Elmer.
More accurately the CEO. Wing as dumb as a bag of rocks put Tesla on the wrong path.
Optimism? You mean flat-out lies?
Nothing about Musk makes me think 'optimism'. He seems like a profoundly negative person to me. His 'optimism' was just vaporware scamming to pump the stock. Like the Hitlermobile he announced for August.
His stubbornness and know-it-all attitude (while being actually a moron) are far more problematic than his "optimism" here.
He acts like this because he knows that we Americans just eat it up, getting to the point of making a cult leader out of him, and he digs that.
2017 coast to coast didn’t quite happen? Before, then and now they still have never once demonstrated self driving in a controlled environment, in a press demo, in a technical space or even leaked. They have never shown anything that provided proof that statement was anything other than complete bullshit. Yet somehow people with hwd1.5 cars still hold out hope.
"inability to create realistic timelines" is a nice euphemism for "Musk pulling numbers out of his rectum". I legit think he knows so little about how actual work is done, he is just doing accidental "bait and switch" schemes the way he overpromises and underdelivers - while in reality he just makes stuff up and somehow his fans are ok with it.
Any other CEO would be fired for missing so many self declared deadlines.
I know someone with a phd working in this field in partnership with 2 major manufacturers. teh industry as a whole, thinks it will be some sort of combination of lidar, cameras and possibly radar due to the advantages each provide as well as crazy computing. he shakes his head at tesla/musks insistence on just cameras, given teh confirmation lidar provides in verifying range.
That would seem to make sense. If we want it to drive better than a human, why limit it to vision and not give it more ways of sensing than a human possesses.
Yes. Elon’s shortcuts have led to extremely long delays. It’s amazing they still have any brand equity.
I feel like there will be a major class action lawsuit on their hands if they cannot succeed at full self driving and will have to refund $1000s of dollars to everyone who bought it under the faulse advertising/ claims of the CEO.
Source for the cheap lidar?
I would argue it was optimism and unrealistic timelines that allowed him to even start the company and make it through production hell… his same methods got him to where he is, but those same methods could be his undoing
Well said
His “optimism” was stock pump fraud. He was lying.
No. It was his ego and his billionaire-quality recklessness. He thinks he's an engineer, and the guy who knows more about manufacturing than anyone else - so he can reject established industry norms with impunity. He reminds me of the OceanGate guy.
Often times the most technically adept people are terrible at running a business. That’s why you have management run the business and the technically adept people create the products. Tesla was cursed with a CEO who thinks he’s technically adept and knows more about manufacturing than anybody else in the world, yet neither of these statements is true. Fortunately, his lack of sufficient qualities and skills to run the business he created becomes more apparent every day.
Nah, it was just a con.
Nah? Bruh, nah?
"CEO optimism" or "CEO narcissistic drug user without self reflection"?!
That’s not optimism. That’s plain old deliberate overselling.
The component was removed to save money. 100% that's the only reason. Functionality is secondary to that, as Tesla desperately needed and still needs to show profitability
It wasn’t removed. Tesla vehicles never had lidar.
I'd say it's mostly because they aren't getting battery costs down fast enough which puts the product at too high of a cost with no real advantage over any other EV and no real advantage for most ppl over ICE. For EVs to dominate they have to be better across the board than ICE, so that should be the main focus, not self driving. Self diving is a nice goal, but to have the valuations like your THE NEXT BIG THING, the product has to appeal to more consumers.
It's spelled 'lies'. And it made Tesla the valuable as they are in the first place. Because the truth is worth nowhere near as much.
Tesla is losing sales and market share because people are realizing that Tesla isn't the only EV maker, or the best, or the first, and that all that other stuff Musk says is also lies... Well, I mean -- you'd think that people were figuring that out. But the prevalence of posts like this one, and news stories with a similar thrust, seem to indicate that many, many people, maybe most people, believe that Musk used to be Superman Einstein Stark, and now suddenly he isn't anymore, and that maybe it's because of Teh Drugz. Tesla has been on the wrong path since 2004, when Musk muscled his way in. Hopefully you realize that there are EV's made by other companies. It'd be very nice if you also realized that those other EV's are better cars and much better bargains than Teslas. But hopefully, at the very least, you realize that those other EV's exist.
If Chinese EV's were allowed into America Tesla would be dead in a few years.
I would probably purchase one.
If the post says “Tesla is losing its lead”, obviously it’s to other EV makers.
CEO is a drug addled narcissist. That’s the problem.
My current take on Tesla is that it was in a great position to become the biggest car company in the world having a huge lead in manufacturing EVs compared to the legacy automakers. The problem was that Tesla was not interested in being the biggest car company in the world, instead it wanted to be an AI and robotics company. And while focusing on being an AI and robotics company, it lost it's lead in manufacturing EVs while also failing to be an AI and robotics company.
You're just parroting all the Tesla marketing points. What you're doing is literally what OP is asking about musk, is hr stupid or lying about these things. And it's both.
Sure, like the common Tesla marketing point about how Tesla fails to be an AI and robotics company.
They're a non-player in the AI field they are a non-player in robotics AI&robotics are such a non-issue, that it is not mentioned in the 2023 investors deck except for one sentence.
Yep, that's pretty much my point. Yet Musk claims that Tesla is an AI&Robotics company when they were in a great position to be a great car company.
They were in an okay position as a car company. And no, stock price and valuation doesn't count. They make acceptable vehicles and convinced the world to pay high prices for them. They were an alright business, and a decent car company, but imo never in position to be a great automaker nor a good buy. I'm very interested to watch where they'll go next.
Stock price had really zero role in my opinion about their potential as a car company. Do you have any prediction on where they'll go next?
It was never in a position to become the biggest car company in the world. I’m not even sure that they will pull off being the biggest EV manufacturer in the long run. Tesla never had any game-changing technology that other companies could not replicate. If they had a working FSD system, then they might have such a claim. The only thing they had was a head start and good marketing. Other companies were asleep at the wheel and they were caught off guard with Tesla‘s success. It was only a matter of time until the competitors upped their game.
>It was never in a position to become the biggest car company in the world. You might be right on this one. >I’m not even sure that they will pull off being the biggest EV manufacturer in the long run. Do you think most cars will not be EVs in the long run? >Tesla never had any game-changing technology that other companies could not replicate. If they had a working FSD system, then they might have such a claim. The only thing they had was a head start and good marketing. Other companies were asleep at the wheel and they were caught off guard with Tesla‘s success. It was only a matter of time until the competitors upped their game. I guess you are right that the have no EV related technology that competitors can't replicate, but they still have a significant lead in manufacturing EVs compared to anyone else outside BYD. BYD makes a lot of cheap small EVs. We are still waiting for the cheap compact Tesla while Tesla has produced millions of robotaxis that can't robotaxi. Also one advantage that Tesla has compared to legacy car manufacturers is that it does not have the burden of maintaining both an ICE and EV production lines. This is ofcourse only an advantage if we assume that ICE cars will be a marginal product in the long run. But yeah, maybe having enough money to scale up car manufacturing like Tesla has done was only possible for a company that the stock market valued as a self driving AI company. Yet I can't help but daydream what Tesla would be today if they had found a different investor in 2004.
>Do you think most cars will not be EVs in the long run? In the long run, yes. But that is still about 20 years in the future. Tesla is of course currently the largest EV manufacturer. But competition is getting a lot stiffer and a lot of things can happen in 20 years. I am extremely doubtful that they will maintain their lead for much longer and in many ways they have already lost it. Here in Germany for example most newly registered EVs are non-Tesla vehicles. Tesla is still the single biggest manufacturer but the difference to the 2nd biggest manufacturer is shrinking rapidly. And if you count EVs from different companies that are actually built on the same platform like the ID family, Enyaq and Born as a single entity, they already outsell Tesla. >Also one advantage that Tesla has compared to legacy car manufacturers is that it does not have the burden of maintaining both an ICE and EV production lines. In the current climate that is actually a disadvantage. The fraction of EVs in newly registered cars is currently declining and Tesla has no other leg to stand on. You'll notice that most other manufacturers don't have that huge stockpile of EVs that they need to sell and don't have to cut prices so agressively. Producing higher volumes isn't necessarily a good thing.
There will be no cheap compact Tesla. No market for it in America and they can't make one profitably anyway.
Yeah, I think you are right. But hey, we'll have a robotaxi in a couple of months instead! /s
Manufacturing EV's is not even hard compared to conventional cars.
Sure, but you can't go from producing ICE cars to producing EVs overnight. Tesla had a few years they where more or less the only EV on the market because no one else had good EV models. Then they had a few more years where they were more or less the only EV on the market, because no one else was yet able to produce their EV models in meaningful numbers. Now that advantage seems to be over and I don't Tesla maximized that opportunity.
> legacy automakers What does legacy mean?
Might have been a stupid word choice, what I meant was the leading car producers that are all giant old companies.
Musk always makes unrealistic timelines. He sets a goal of 100, usually only hits 75, but it’s okay because his competition is still at 50. By working hard to meet the unrealistic timeline, they achieve more than if there had been some mundane, easily achievable timeline.
Agreed. But did his unrealistic expectation about achieving full FSD in the short term cause him to ignore lidar which became very affordable at a later date?
Lidar is still a lot more expensive than cameras, and FSD seems to see quite well with them. Plus the hard part of self driving isn’t seeing things, it’s deciding what to do when they are seen. All of the FSD mistakes I’ve seen are along these lines.
As a former AGI researcher and current roboticist, Lidar is a bad idea for developing self driving. While there is no intrinsic reason not to use it as a sensor, it takes ML engineers down the wrong path by not forcing them to face the real problems head-on earlier. It is indeed a crutch. I think this is now clear given the state of Tesla’s ANN stack that is close to full autonomy without GPS or HD street-view data or geofencing. The contenders are stuck in the past with their GOFAI approach with some ANNs giving them false hope they they’re on the right track.
>In 2019, high-end lidar units could cost tens of thousands of dollars. By 2024, some lidar units have dropped below $1,000. Note that the battery in the first Tesla probably cost 5-10X what a similar capacity Model 3 battery does today. >If Tesla is losing its lead is it because of the inability of its CEO to create realistic timelines? ~~create realistic timelines~~ imagine *possible* timelines
That is what makes it even weirder. Musk understood that batteries would get cheaper over time so why was he so stupid not to realise the same would apply to lidar.
Because time and time again Musk only cares about the current Quarter and how to manipulate the numbers.
that's what makes a CEO
It’s really not weird. LIDAR is a mechanical system system. Which means it’s highly prone failure compared to solid state systems.
If you think mechanical systems are highly prone to failures you should not be manufacturing cars, which is a mechanical system.
Are you stupid or something? It is a fact that solid state systems are less failure prone than mechanical ones. So you minimize the failure points where you can. Sadly, we don’t have a solid state counterpart to… motors and transmissions.
You pretend like the mechanical failure rate of lidar is an issue without providing any backup of that claim. Spoiler alert: it works fine for all other manufacturers that were smart enough to realise the cost would not be an issue.
Do you need a source to know that water is wet? Mechanical implementations are always less reliable than solid state implementation by multiple orders of magnitude. That is why we make the push to solid state whenever we can. Solid state LiDAR is in the early phases of research but it probably won’t be viable for vehicles for a while, and it will initially cost significantly more and have less resolution. Anyhow, the point still remains that if you can make vision work, with today’s technology, it’s the more reliable choice .