1x Tsla Discussion Threads

[llef] 14/1/2024 15:44

cfb2, in your commentary on Hertz, you didn't mention the higher then expected repair costs for EVs that they cited.

"The rental car company cited Tesla’s price cuts negatively impacting the resale value of its EVs, and higher than expected repair costs for EVs as a reason to slow its pace of electrification"

[cfb2] 14/1/2024 15:33

I have provided statistical proof that EVs are less likely to combust. It's not 1 or 2 cars different, it is almost two orders of magnitude! I am quoting facts rather than feelings, or supposed intuition, or insinuation. Obviously it's not as simple as both cars have 12v batteries therefore they have a similar chance of catching fire. Having done some hasty research, the most common cause for ICE vehicle fires is arson but after that a leak of the fuel line, then it's tyres/brakes.

Yes, if an EV is put in a fire it's a problem for an EV resulting from the Lithium in the batteries and a long intense burn, but then an ICE car is full of petrol that explodes, quite often taking out every car in the vicinity. Personally I'd rather have the car warning me to get out a few minutes before it goes into thermal runaway than being engulfed in a fireball. But to each their own.

Different EV manufacturers have taken different approaches for the batteries. For the Tesla they are now part of the structural integrity. Having the battery mounted low does put it at risk of going over an object that can get through the reinforced underside of the car. From collisions, if the mega castings are sufficiently damaged to damage the battery then the car is likely to be a write off anyway. Experience with other manufacturers varies significantly from this.

[hosede] 12/1/2024 10:28

Johnwise
Spot on I think. small EV town cars with ca 100km range could be useful - that is where the polution is worst, but 3 ton monsters with huge batteries no!

[johnwise] 11/1/2024 20:55

VIA peterbarnes35

Hertz to sell one third of it’s EV’s — customers don’t want them and they cost too much to fix

With the western world hurtling into new cars that are more costly, inconvenient, slower to refuel, and prone to burning down carparks and cargo ships, it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the socialist car market started to show.

[hosede] 07/1/2024 13:34

Whatever the performance of the Co., a big part of Tesla's attraction has always been Musk himself. The implication that his aura may be slipping could weigh heavily on the share price over the coming months.

[hosede] 03/1/2024 14:01

Clocktower
That's true as long as they are making a positive margin on each sale. An article I saw somewhere (forgotten exactly) suggested that in China, variable costs on one model had risen above the selling price in the last couple of months

[skinny] 03/1/2024 07:38

This may be of interest to some on here :-

[clocktower] 02/1/2024 21:10

Hosede, it certainly does matter how many the sell, if they sell “X” they are losing “Y” on everyone they sell but if they sell “Z” then they make Profit on every sale, as the fixed costs are only covered once they reach the sweet spot and above.

It is therefore better to sell volumes at lower margins than a few that they make big profits on per unit.

[hosede] 02/1/2024 19:49

Sounds like hair-splitting to me. Who cares a toss how many cars they sold? Business is about making PROFITS

[cfb2] 02/1/2024 19:28

BYD sold 1.6m EVs, Tesla sold 1.8m EVs.

They have included BYD's hybrid (ICE car with a battery) sales to come up with that headline.

However, BYD did beat Tesla in the last quarter:
BYD sold 526k to Tesla's 484k

[skinny] 02/1/2024 18:09

Tesla overtaken by China’s BYD as world’s biggest EV maker

[cfb2] 02/1/2024 15:13

Happy New Year.

Radar or Lidar do not improve a robotaxis' outcome in your scenario. Tesla's cameras at least provide video of the vandals. On a Tesla it is quite difficult to disable all of the cameras simultaneously and the car is able to drive with multiple cameras disabled (you see a message telling you to clear a camera sensor in FSD).

If this is shown to be a problem then robotaxis could swivel the sensor out of the way until the car needs to move. Might be that robotaxis need a self cleaning mechanism for the cameras anyway. They certainly need a way to automatically close the doors when the passenger leaves them open; Tesla made a comment to this effect in a presentation.

There are plenty of locations around the world where you'll get mugged if you happen to wander there. There will be no go areas for taxis and robotaxis, and people will complain they can't hail a taxi from certain areas.

In my area there are little robots on wheels that go around making deliveries to houses. If they need to cross a pedestrian crossing then they'll ask people walking past to press the button to allow them to cross. They only have a couple of cameras and I never hear of them being vandalised.

[hosede] 02/1/2024 11:30

A fairy story from the future
Once upon a time a whole fleet of Robotaxis were heading out to pick up customers, when a group of disgruntled ex taxi drivers (or teenagers out for a lark) halted them in narrow sreets, sprayed black paint on the cameras and ran off.
Within a few minutes the town was gridlocked -Bad
The owner of the vehicles had to send drivers out on foot to get each one going again - very costly - very bad
Meanwhile the customers who had ordered the taxis to take them to the airport all missed their flights and demanded compensation Very Very bad
But they all lived unhappily ever after

The point I'm making is that empty Robotaxis would be extremely vulnerable to malicious interference. Radar or Lidar might be better, but otherwise I can't think of a way to prevent it.
Happy new year all

[cfb2] 24/12/2023 19:39

The legal action for not providing FSD in the UK certainly has merit as beta versions of the FSD software has only been rolled out in the US. Elsewhere that £7-12K payment has only bought you a promise. Tesla have played brinkmanship with their customers by saying once it works the price will go up to tempt customers into paying early but it seems that patience is running out.

Tesla are concentrating on the US before training it elsewhere. In theory, once it works, rolling out the software abroad should be down to feeding the neural network with video training for driving in the appropriate country. Traffic rules, reading signposts, lane markings, etc. should be deduced by the neural network.

In addition, version 12 (the first non-beta version) was rolled out to Tesla staff in December. It is expected to be rolled out to real customers piecemeal in January/February 2024. Apparently version 12 is the first version to not have a beta tag. What that means is anyone's guess. I doubt Tesla will provide car insurance for drivers.

[hosede] 24/12/2023 15:16

Musk himself said that without FSD Tesla was nothing - but Nobody listened.
It's just a car company Struggling to make its way among the vastly too many others in the World

[cfb2] 10/12/2023 14:34

Yes. I have worked at, or one step back from, the leading edge of technology as a consultant for 30 years.

What the team at Tesla have done with FSD is inspiring. So far I have not seen an approach from a competitor that gets close to what Tesla have achieved. I expect the only way other OEMs will achieve self driving is to license the technology from Tesla.

I get annoyed by analysts and the media feeding investors with the unfiltered tripe fed from GM's PR department. Very few of the analyst companies appear to have people capable of comprehending what is really going on with the technology for themselves.

[hosede] 10/12/2023 14:29

cfb
You obviously know a lot about it. Do you work in this "area"?

[cfb2] 10/12/2023 14:12

Cruise "self driving" is nothing more than a party trick and is nowhere near automated driving. They have mapped out the roads to the nearest 10cm with Lidar. All they do is follow routes trying to avoid other cars and pedestrians with set programmed sequences for how to react when an event occurs.

Cruise's approach is exactly why they had that grisly accident in San Francisco. To summarise, a pedestrian was hit by a human driver but the pedestrian ended up in the path of a Cruise car. The car detected the object and immediately stopped but then went into it's set sequences to pull over to the side of the road in an emergency, whilst dragging the pedestrian under the car.

Cruise reported the incident but cut short the video and report when they continued with the pedestrian under the car. It was the deception that got their license to operate revoked.

Cruise's approach is analogous to a blind person navigating a room, as long as nothing changes in the room there is no problem. If you put a box in their path they are likely to trip up on it.

Tesla's approach is to train a neural network with millions of clips of carefully manicured examples of captured driving to learn what to do. They also have the ability to generate scenarios to feed into their training data. The cars will be driving the same way humans do, eyes look at the road (ok, 8 eyes facing around the cars but it is similar...!) the optical data is fed into the neural network and out pops movements for the steering wheel, pedals etc.

The more data fed into the neural network the better the car driving becomes. This is why Tesla need Dojo running as fast as possible.

Almost a year ago Tesla were reporting it took about a month to train with a million video clips. They seem to be aiming at around 5m clips for the first release of FSD V12. I think they'd like to get around 1m clips processed in 24 hours, or around a 50x speed up.

I'm not sure that Dojo is being used for training their neural network at the moment because Tesla were buying up as many NVIDIA GPUs as they could get their hands on.

If Dojo isn't yet a replacement for Tesla's NVIDIA GPUs then this might explain why Ganesh Venka has just left the company.

[hosede] 10/12/2023 10:03

But GM seemed to be fractionally in front - though now they've withdrawn cruise I think

[cfb2] 09/12/2023 02:05

He left over a month ago. Laughable that Bloomberg article suggests him leaving is a blow to their efforts on Dojo. Do they think think the Dojo team consists of 10 people working in a garage?

Working for 5 years on leading edge technology development in Tesla must seem like a lifetime of work.

[hosede] 07/12/2023 21:48

News continues to be negative. Musk himself said that without FSD Tesla was nothing - It has enough csash to survive for a long time but....

[hosede] 07/12/2023 12:44

Bolshie Europeans! But a problem likely to become more serious as time goes by