Thoughts on TESLA

[NW-Bound]

"Humans are underrated" - Elon Musk on 4/14/2018

By you, Elon, not by others.

The context was in his own admission that his effort to over-automate his factory misfired. My career was in aerospace, something that is always low-volume and high-priced, and I was in R&D at that. So, I do not know much about mass production, but have read that Musk tried to do something other car makers tried and abandoned.

It is true that unless one pushes the envelope, no progress can be made. But on the other hand, one must also be smart enough to know what others have tried before, in order to attempt to improve on it. Why re-learn mistakes from the past?

Of course, one can also be so arrogant to think that others failed because they did not know what they were doing. If one sets out to prove to others that they are wrong, without knowing exactly what they did or have done, the chance of repeating the same mistakes will be high.

 

[Ready]

After waiting more than 2 years since I put my deposit down, my Model 3 is now ready for delivery. The only problem is, I don't really want it any more. I think there are others in the same situation. The car I thought I was buying was $35K, but now the car has been "upgraded" and the real price (with autopilot) is $54,000.

I'm sure there are still enough people out there willing to pay the $54,000 price for a while, but at some point I think they are going to run through those sales and the folks who are left are going to want their $35K car, which may or may not even materialize.

So I guess I'm just going to sit on it for now and do nothing. DH looked at the car in the showroom and thought the interior looked cheap and plastic like. I have to somewhat agree. It's a decent interior for a $35K car, but not for a $54K car.

 

[samclem]

It is a rare thing that a true "visionary" is also a great manager--the attributes required to be outstanding at each just don't overlap very much. And being a great leader (as opposed to a great manager) requires yet another set of attributes. So a guy like Musk usually requires a top notch team of others, and the willingness to accept their advice. I don't know if that is happening at Tesla--by Musk's previous predictions/pronouncements, it appears that it is not.

"Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so."
-Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

 

[jazz4cash]

After waiting more than 2 years since I put my deposit down, my Model 3 is now ready for delivery. The only problem is, I don't really want it any more. I think there are others in the same situation. The car I thought I was buying was $35K, but now the car has been "upgraded" and the real price (with autopilot) is $54,000.



I'm sure there are still enough people out there willing to pay the $54,000 price for a while, but at some point I think they are going to run through those sales and the folks who are left are going to want their $35K car, which may or may not even materialize.



So I guess I'm just going to sit on it for now and do nothing. DH looked at the car in the showroom and thought the interior looked cheap and plastic like. I have to somewhat agree. It's a decent interior for a $35K car, but not for a $54K car.

What happens if you don't complete the purchase? I'm sure there are lots of folks that would jump at the chance to buy it. Your thoughts summarize hundreds of posts on seekingalpha (mostly from short sellers).

 

[frayne]

It is a rare thing that a true "visionary" is also a great manager--the attributes required to be outstanding at each just don't overlap very much. And being a great leader (as opposed to a great manager) requires yet another set of attributes. So a guy like Musk usually requires a top notch team of others, and the willingness to accept their advice. I don't know if that is happening at Tesla--by Musk's previous predictions/pronouncements, it appears that it is not.

+1. Good article in Bloomberg this week concerning Tesla and their production issues. As long as Musk keeps over promising on production numbers without addressing the root cause(s), I don't see things going anywhere but downhill.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-04-17/tesla-suspends-model-3-production-again-video

 

[Ready]

What happens if you don't complete the purchase? I'm sure there are lots of folks that would jump at the chance to buy it. Your thoughts summarize hundreds of posts on seekingalpha (mostly from short sellers).

I could just cancel and get my $1,000 deposit back. I could buy the car and try to resell it for a profit, but I can't be bothered with that. I could try and sell the position, but that gets sticky because Tesla will only let me transfer the position to a family member. Or I can just sit tight and let my position ride and see if I change my mind if they begin building the $35K base model.

They have no cars to test drive. Perhaps if I had a chance to drive one I might change my mind. It seems ridiculous to expect me to buy a car that I can't drive first, but that's pretty much where Tesla is right now with the Model 3. They suggested I test drive one of their S cars, but in my mind that's a very different car and wouldn't tell me anything about the driving experience of a Model 3.

 

[gerntz]

That my tax dollars are going to this company to the tune of $7500 per car. What a waste.

 

[kcowan]

Of course, one can also be so arrogant to think that others failed because they did not know what they were doing. If one sets out to prove to others that they are wrong, without knowing exactly what they did or have done, the chance of repeating the same mistakes will be high.

I have a fellow graduate who thinks he knows better than anyone. So he continually reinvents the wheel and is then amazed!

 

[jazz4cash]

I could just cancel and get my $1,000 deposit back. I could buy the car and try to resell it for a profit, but I can't be bothered with that. I could try and sell the position, but that gets sticky because Tesla will only let me transfer the position to a family member. Or I can just sit tight and let my position ride and see if I change my mind if they begin building the $35K base model.

They have no cars to test drive. Perhaps if I had a chance to drive one I might change my mind. It seems ridiculous to expect me to buy a car that I can't drive first, but that's pretty much where Tesla is right now with the Model 3. They suggested I test drive one of their S cars, but in my mind that's a very different car and wouldn't tell me anything about the driving experience of a Model 3.

Your observations on the list price vs. base price were spot on with comments from other Tesla boards. One other component of the price is the expiration of the tax credit which is forecast to be around 3Q18 when Tesla hits 200k deliveries (I think). That gives you something to leverage if you even want to deal with the hassle factor.

 

[bobandsherry]

Just leave or hang up? That's the road to "pursuing new career choices", aka unemployment.

Reminds me of what Jamie Dimon would preach at JPM/Chase. Jamie's changed the tune a bit now by calling for meetings to have an agenda. But either way, you don't show up then your manager gets a call. You explain to your manager why you didn't attend or left meeting early and it's then told to you to just "be a team player". Sound bites from Musk and Dimon are just that and sound great in headlines and message to shareholders, but in reality have to teeth to it.

 

[mistermike40]

I'm having visions of Michael Keaton in Gung Ho.

 

[jazz4cash]

Ouch. When I transferred from engineering to sales, I was shocked that meetings were called with no agenda, no minutes, almost no preparation compared to what I was used to. In operations, the quality control agenda evolved to mandatory daily meetings to review the status. It was like the start of shift rollcall meetings you see on the TV police shows. Sometimes they were done in a couple minutes, but it worked IMO.

His other rant on not using acronyms.....good luck with that when dealing with techies.

 

[Breedlove]

Tesla will = Enron

 

[bobandsherry]

Tesla will = Enron

Time will tell.... but the history in auto manufacturing has seen established brands go bust and upstarts that went bust.

LIST OF RECENT DEAD, DEFUNCT & BANKRUPT CAR COMPANIES

Bigger list: List of defunct automobile manufacturers of the United States

 

[Zathras]

I could just cancel and get my $1,000 deposit back. I could buy the car and try to resell it for a profit, but I can't be bothered with that. I could try and sell the position, but that gets sticky because Tesla will only let me transfer the position to a family member. Or I can just sit tight and let my position ride and see if I change my mind if they begin building the $35K base model.

They have no cars to test drive. Perhaps if I had a chance to drive one I might change my mind. It seems ridiculous to expect me to buy a car that I can't drive first, but that's pretty much where Tesla is right now with the Model 3. They suggested I test drive one of their S cars, but in my mind that's a very different car and wouldn't tell me anything about the driving experience of a Model 3.

The short range version is due out near the end of the year, so you can certainly hit the ‘hold my spot’ button.
The more people that do this, the quicker the short range version will begin production.

And by all means, if you don’t want to buy before a test drive, don’t. They don’t expect you to. They are giving you the chance to
There are plenty of people that are comfortable buying before driving the vehicle. Once there aren’t, or once Tesla finally gets the production scaled up enough, test drive vehicles will be available.
Test driving will certainly tell you something about how the 3 drives. But there are also a lot of differences. So I would hold out till you can test drive a 3.

 

[Totoro]

Of course, one can also be so arrogant to think that others failed because they did not know what they were doing. If one sets out to prove to others that they are wrong, without knowing exactly what they did or have done, the chance of repeating the same mistakes will be high.

I think he may have estimated wrongly that in car manufacturing the same 'fixes' were needed as with SpaceX: tightly integrated vs. long supply chains, reusable modular vs. tailored, conservative vs. using latest automation.

Hope he makes it, or least keeps SpaceX afloat. In any case, he has a nightmare job and an even worse boss (himself).

 

[bobandsherry]

Another Tesla exec running for the hills....

Not good when so many exec's are departing, they know more than we do... And the consider that the competition is readying EV's to compete.

The Model S is now 7 years old, the style is now dated....

And this is the "new" Model 3:

Compare those to the other EV's that are coming:

Jaguar I-Pace

Audi E Tron Sportsback

Porsche Mission E

Tesla has a lot of headwinds coming....

 

[Totoro]

The Mission E is a car I could see myself buying if this actually will end up like the previews.

For reference: I'm in a Kia Picanto right now ..

 

[NW-Bound]

Another Tesla exec running for the hills....

Not good when so many exec's are departing, they know more than we do... And the consider that the competition is readying EV's to compete.
...

I just followed the above link. It was a VP in charge of the autopilot who quit.

An article from WSJ back in Aug 2017 told of 10 engineers and 4 top managers in the autopilot engineering group quitting. This article was quoted in an arstechnica Web page.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas...ssent-among-its-engineers-1503593742?mod=e2tw

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/08/report-tesla-is-bleeding-talent-from-its-autopilot-division/

"Weeks before the October 2015 release of Autopilot, an engineer who had worked on safety features warned Tesla that the product wasn’t ready," the Journal reports. In a resignation letter, the engineer, Evan Nakano, warned about "reckless decision making that has potentially put customer lives at risk."

Another engineer raised concerns after he experienced strange driving behavior with a prototype vehicle in May 2015. The car was driving so erratically that a police officer pulled him over, suspecting drunk driving. The engineer was sober, but he warned colleagues about problems with the vehicle. Later, he says, he was "dismissed for what he was told were 'performance issues.'"

 

[bobandsherry]

I just followed the above link. It was a VP in charge of the autopilot who quit.

An article from WSJ back in Aug 2017 told of 10 engineers and 4 top managers in the autopilot engineering group quitting. This article was quoted in an arstechnica Web page.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas...ssent-among-its-engineers-1503593742?mod=e2tw

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/08/report-tesla-is-bleeding-talent-from-its-autopilot-division/

Interesting..... not so sure self driving will be a reality, so many unique circumstances to try to code into the cars AI, not to mention the changes in infrastructure that occur (think of all the construction that goes on, short and long term). I can see better driver assistance in the future, but not totally self driving except in very unique and controlled environments.

 

[NW-Bound]

No, not quite. Self-driving technology as envisioned by Waymo, the leader in this technology, is different than that imagined by Musk.

Tesla does not use lidar, while everybody else does. Just a couple of months ago, Musk maintained that he believed a car could drive itself using just vision cameras, and needed no lidar. He called lidar a crutch that other developers used.

Obviously, no engineer could deliver what Musk wanted, that is to make a computer able to interpret a video image as smartly as a human can with his eyes. Hence, they all quit.

I guess Musk will have to learn to program AI himself. But he is busy at the moment ripping out the robots in his car production line, and trying to train and add 400 new workers a week.

"Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. Humans are underrated", said Musk recently.

 

[NW-Bound]

Regarding over-automation at Tesla factory, one should read this:

Overrated Human Elon Musk Says 'Humans are Underrated'

 

[samclem]

From a macro "human vs robot" comparison, it's amazing how much capability (processing power, sensor acuity, flexibility) a human offers for less than $50/hr. Sure, a robot does the very simplest tasks faster and with more accuracy, but if the situation has any ambiguity . . .

If Musk can't even get robots to do nearly >everything< needed on a factory floor, where he can control every single variable and arrange everything to best suit the machines, it tells me we are a long way off from having self-controlled AI machines running loose in the 99% of the world that is more chaotic.

 

[NW-Bound]

Yes. It is the ambiguous cases in the real world that Waymo has been working on for the last several years. The terminology, which may come from CMU where much of the SDC technology was pioneered, is the "edge cases".

But while the robot cars may not be as smart as a human driver, the designer can still make them safe by erring on the side of caution. For example, if the lidar detects an object on the road which it excels at but cannot identify, the computer needs to use vision cameras and AI to determine what that object is. And of course that is not fool-proof either, and may take a while to be as good as a human. So, they will have to program the car to stop, or to go around it, instead of driving over it.

You have a good point about the factory robots having it much easier in a controlled environment. Musk initially said that his goal was to have as few humans in the production chain as possible. Having the humans in there with the robots just slow the latter down. Hah!

We have seen laymen as well as experts getting so enthusiastic about computers and machines, so the above is not all that unusual. Because the machines can multiply two numbers together in one billionth of a second, they believe the machines will also be able to do other things a lot better than humans can.

Sadly, they found out that they had not been able to teach the computer to recognize a highway barrier using a camera, even when it was painted with alternating black and yellow stripes. And that is not something to drive into at full speed.

With a lidar, the computer does not try to tell whether that obstacle is a barrier, or a truck, or anything. It's a big solid object, something not to run into. And that is very useful information.

 

[Totoro]

It tells me we are a long way off from having self-controlled AI machines running loose in the 99% of the world that is more chaotic.

From a first principles perspective, how far off are we really?

Wet-ware:

• Number of neurons in the human neocortex: about 20 billion.
• Max. fire rate of one neuron: 100 hz
• Power use: about 40 watt at full load
• Cost: 16 years of generic training time, a few extra years of specific training time. After that $50/hr.
• Sensing capabilities are poor: 20Mpixel for the eye for example at 30 cm distance.

Hardware:

• Number of transistors on one NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080ti: 12 billion. You can put two in one motherboard. On par.
• Max. switching rate of one transistor: >1 Ghz (millions of times faster)
• Power use: about 1.2 kw. x30 hungrier, yet doable at $.20 usd per kwh.
• Cost: $800 USD, a few days of training time. After that free.
• Sensing capabilities: for a few $100 you can surpass any human sensing equipment.

What this tells me is that the hardware capabilities are there. We only need a decent architecture and the production facilities retooled once we have that. Not a small task, but in the realm of doable.

With one caveat: connectivity and 3D architecture. Neurons are much better at that.

We might be 5 years off, or 50 years, but the raw capability is already here. And the warning part: going from worse than an unmotivated drunken idiot performance to better than your dream worker will happen within days.