Will we be making another disappointing and unmet entry in the timeline this evening?
intercst
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“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
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Ya but I like Roosevelt and am not embarrassed by him.
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Add another entry to the timeline!
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Sounds a lot like dreaming.
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Robovan wins every time. That is where the money is. But it does not matter. Any claims FSD as being “close to being completed” is FOS–and everyone familiar with “what it takes to do it” knows it. I have been following transit development for 50+ yrs. FSD is DOA.
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Is he?
I don’t think there was ever any issue of whether fully autonomous electric taxis would be a valuable thing to have. The question was always about Tesla’s progress towards actually having that type of product. Tesla provided no new information last night about that. Seeing the design for the vehicle is fun, but whether (or when) any of this happens depends entirely on the software and the AI driver, not the shape of the car the software/driver is housed in.
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So? People were wrong about Tesla in 2018 - that doesn’t make the new Roadster go into production, or scale up mass adoption of the Solar Roof. Wrong predictions of failure in the past do not make future successes any more (or less) likely.
Tesla has a solid Level 2 driver assistance software package. They don’t have a software package capable of operating without a driver. Oh, sure - give them a fixed route on the non-public streets of a studio backlot and a few weeks to prepare, and they can have the Level 2 system operate without a driver in that exact location. But that system isn’t ready to operate without a driver in real world conditions.
So, many observers were looking for some information about where Tesla is on the path from Level 2 ADAS to Level 4 or 5 AV. They didn’t get any last night, other than Musk’s statements that he felt they’d have autonomy in CA and TX by end of 2025. But at this point, hearing that Musk thinks his cars will be autonomous by end of next year is literally the most predictable thing in the world - he’s been saying that since 2017. Hence, this thread…
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Something happened to the guy. I don’t know what, but he has fallen. He has broken promise after promise after promise. I don’t know how this happened but it has to be acknowledged. The original Roadster was great, BUT IT WASN’T HIS CAR. The Model S was very good. The X was hit and miss, particularly with the gull wing doors that should have never happened. The 3 was mostly good but the styling was off. Or rather, too close to the S and it did not transition well to a smaller car. And, the 3 and the Y have poor ride quality, quality control issues, and parts availability issues. The CyberTruck is a laughing stock and appears to have some serious issues.
We never got the Model 2. Or the second Roadster. Solar Roof has gone nowhere. Home battery business is very weak. The Semi is basically dead. Boring Company is doing what exactly? And FSD, it’s just a long series of broken promises and yesterday did NOTHING to change that fact. “Two more years, this time I’m serious”. He is Lucy, yanking the football, and we have lots of Charlie Browns here who keep stepping back up to kick the ball.
That 2-door coupe? Look at those tires, with almost no sidewall. And no apparent room for suspension travel. The ride quality will be a joke even worse than the Model 3/Y. And that bus? Honestly? Where is the ground clearance? Please, tell me how that will navigate real-world city streets and not beach itself.
Wake up people. You’re being duped. The guy started off great, there is no denying that. None whatsoever. But he’s gone off the rails. Something went seriously wrong here.
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Elon Musk is a stunningly brilliant entrepreneurial inventor engineer. He is a political idiot and a moral midget.
This is normal. See the founding Ford and Rockefeller.
I am thrilled with his accomplishments, SpaceX more than even than Tesla. His heroic attempt with the Boring Company was more important to me than all the rest, and I still have not given up on its success, which would transform day to day life even more than his rockets, batteries, space based info net, and autos combined.
Life is compicated. Humans are mostly either dull or only border line sane. After I resigned myself to this reality I became happier and a better investor.
d fb
(posting differently today because I am fighting off a nasty herpes zoster attack and trying to escape/distract from my body into thought and communication.)
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Okay, I’m intrigued. Why would cheaper tunneling transform day to day life more than any of his other projects?
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Avoiding traffic congestion in cities. Tunnels are in 3-dimensions, so you can have several at varying depths.
Of course, more mass transit and less cars will relieve the congestion, too.
intercst
I see that the current quote has Tesla stock down about 8% on a day the overall market is up.
It seems investors were unimpressed with the Robo-taxi event.
But if Tesla owners in California and Texas actually have autonomous FSD by year end 2025 (as Elon promised), and can sleep while traveling on the freeway I’m sure it will rebound.
intercst
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But how does that allow you to avoid traffic congestion in cities?
I mean, it’s nice and all if the tunnels are somewhat cheaper. But if you’re using them for mass transit, you’re still going to need to pay for (and locate) the stations…as well as all the rolling stock and operating costs.
If you’re using them for passenger cars, you have a massive capacity problem. Not just in the tunnels themselves, but at the exits. Eventually all those cars have to exit into city streets, and having another tunnel into a congested city is going to back up just as much as all the other roads and tunnels leading into that city.
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If tunnels are really cheap, you could have 5 stacked up layers of street networks under a city, duplicating what you have on the surface.
intercst
No one here is saying Tesla is going bankrupt. People here are saying that Tesla’s autonomous driving technology is not sufficiently advanced to support a fully autonomous vehicle like the Robotaxi.
That’s not controversial because Musk said himself it isn’t ready. Showing us what a physical Robotaxi looks like is cool, but the part everybody wanted to see was how it operated. We didn’t get to see that and we still don’t know when we will.
I see shares of Uber and Lyft are up about 10% this morning so apparently a number of investors were unimpressed by the announcement.
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Sure…but how do you get out of the tunnels? I mean that both in terms of congestion and physically.
As to the first, if the city streets are congested, then any car that’s trying to leave the five layers of tunnels is going to have to exit onto congested city streets. Which means they’ll have to queue. So instead of waiting on the city streets to, say, enter an intersection you’ll just be waiting in your tunnel to enter the intersection.
As to the second, if your vehicle is in a tunnel some 70-80 feet underground (the uppermost tunnel under the subway system)…how do you get it out? You have to build ramps out of the tunnels. And those ramps are going to require you to clear a lot of surface space.
If the vehicles aren’t leaving the tunnels, then all you’ve done is recreated the subway, just with higher operating costs and lower capacity. Which again, isn’t going to “solve” congestion.
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Oh it’s so much more than that.
The standard width for the Boring tunnels is 12 feet. One car wide, with a couple feet on each side. If you want to double that lane width, you quadruple the costs. The running machine has to be twice the diameter, but also twice the height. You have quadruple the spoil to deal with because your tunnel is also higher and deeper. You need twice the casing material, but they also have to be thicker because your arch is supporting more weight.
You’re not going to relieve a lot of congestion with “one car lanes.” Oh, you might create a premium ($$$) path to and from the airport from a particular location or two, but then you need entry and exit points which are sure to be, um, congested.
A Boring tunnel, underground, costs about the same as a 6 line highway above ground, so unless there is some magic reduction in cost, it’s a novelty/vanity project for a few special cases. Las Vegas. Disney World. Musk’s own factory. That kind of thing.
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