Clicking on the article for humor's value, I continued to read:
> However, Edmunds.com, Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell questions the value of purchasing a self-driving car before regulations catch up. Caldwell said that, meanwhile, competitors could introduce better solutions, potentially making Tesla’s hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.”
It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.
Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market.
These same people have written that Tesla will be left in the dust as its competitors beat it to the market because it can't keep up with their manufacturing, and thus being first to market is only an advantage if you're not Tesla.
You can't win.
As much as I anticipate more cool stuff from Tesla, one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time.
I actually laughed out loud when I saw the Headline of this submission "Tesla released a video of a car driving itself" being the number one entry on HN - sorry but this speaks volumes about the "neutrality" of HN regarding Tesla.
Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.
It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.
The iPhone is synonymous with smartphone technology because its debut was a quantum leap ahead of the competition at the time (Blackberry, Palm, etc.). Google was working on a phone that used a physical keyboard until they saw the iPhone announcement and then quickly modified Android to ape iPhone/iOS.
I'm really sick of people trying to downplay Apple's innovations as nothing more than slick packaging and marketing. It's a stupid meme that refuses to die.
Exactly. I would go as far as saying it's simply infotainment.
Here is a test that I would use to determine the value of this. If it wasn't infotainment, it probably wouldn't need to be set to a soundtrack and would stand on it's own w/o music. The music creates an emotion and helps stave off the boredom.
Cameras are cheap and I suspect the 12 cameras have overlap to help with depth perception and maybe even fault tolerances. I suspect as soon as LIDAR becomes a better solution for the price (if that happens) that Tesla will use them. Or maybe a hybrid of both so they can use the strengths of both as needed.
For example with the parking would the car know if the other vehicle has a driver and when that driver moves or is about to move?
But what stops that iPhone metaphor for me is Design, Materials and Finish. Apple Products look and feel like luxury. Where as Tesla only achieves that on the software side - and in your pocket.
Source: I owned Windows CE / windows mobile devices since as early as 2001 if I recall correctly.
Source: I owned Windows CE/Smartphone/Mobile devices starting with the Samsung i600 and was actively using a Treo 700w when the iPhone was released.
It's probably because there is a substantial gap between what Musk spins, and reality.
Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing.
Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.
Because genuine competition in the Soviet Union was not allowed. Don't want to wait for Mr. Musk's Magical Mystery Car? Then buy a damn Honda Civic or something. A huge pre-order list is notable when it occurs in a context where people have many other options not involving a long wait. It proves the existence of real demand, not "demand-because-of-a-lack-of-alternatives". Proving this demand is important for a small company which is trying to scale up.
The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning.
When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.
Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks.
Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In what way are they "winning" against Detroit? Certainly not in revenues, profits, miles driven or cars produced.
Yes, they "own" one segment": high end electric vehicles. No one there is close. But Detroit owns many others. Why does the one that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?
Because it kind of is when we're talking about an electric car. Tesla's competitors can't come up with those numbers for EVs combined (even with hybrids). GM is expected to make 30,000 Bolts for next year, for instance (and it may or may not sell all of them).
That said, I'm skeptical the Autopilot 2.0 hardware is a "Level 5 autonomous system". I think a good rule of thumb would be to subtract about "one level" from what Musk promises, as he always tends to be a little overoptimistic, even if what he creates still ends up being better than the competition.
Take the first Autopilot, which Musk said is "Level 2". It's probably more like a real Level 1. It only works under very specific situations, and even when those specific situations are met (a highway) it can still fail, because Tesla may have accounted for US highways but not European ones, or other road quirks. See the recent Autobahn accident because the Autopilot couldn't properly identify "yellow lines" as opposed to white ones.
So yeah, I expect this to be more like Level 4 ... three years from now (as ready for mainstream use, not just a demo). I don't think we'll see true Level 5 until the 2020s. I think there are still many unexpected things Musk and his engineers aren't foreseeing right now.
Check your sources, we're at well over a million EV/PHEVs[0] combined nowadays and the model S is a bit over 10% of that. It's been a while since I last saw an EV parking spot with chargers that was empty.
Now that I checked it, the Leaf alone is past those numbers for the Model 3.[1]
[0] http://gas2.org/2015/09/22/1-million-electric-cars-now-in-th...
[1] http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/channels/Global-Sales...
When we get to level 4 the game is over, it's just an adoption curve at that point.
That seems to be Ms. Caldwell's point: Without the software or regulations in place, it's impossible to know if the "equipment is ready." I don't disagree with her on this one.
(And I am long TSLA.)
He's doing what he does best: forcing a hard change on an established system.
Autonomous driving not allowed? Well, we'll give them "Autopilot"-- make sure to keep your hands on the wheel! Nope, it's not autonomous, it's Autopilot! It just happens to have all the hardware needed to be fully autonomous, and Autopilot will "gradually gain new capabilities." Questionable? Sure. Best way to make an extremely hard industry transition? Almost definitely.
It would be a chicken and egg problem if he didn't do this. Can't test the system extensively beyond the lab without regulations, can't have a system that doesn't meet regulations because it hasn't been tested enough yet. He's just sidestepping this dilemma.
All this in spite of tremendous uncertainty not just with regards to the regulatory environment but to the not yet fully developed capabilities of their own software.
But saying it's an "autonomous car" because it has the sensors and computers just isn't so. When it gets the software, then it's an "autonomous car."
To use GPs analogy to the iPhone1: If Apple had just shipped the hardware without iOS, it wouldn't have been the iPhone.
Yeah, well... it's not really autonomous. It's a slightly better cruise control + assisted lane change. In fact the "Autopilot" marketing term makes it sound much more like fully autonomous driving than it actually is.
Elon Musk does what he does best alright: make billions. The rest is just educated guesses at best.
At worse, any attempt to "explain" marketing strategy as some sort of passionate drive to improve the technology, or similar, is just so much cold-reading yourself at for the benefit of a commercial company's bottom line.
So I think it might be from an investment standpoint; just think of Tivo they made the DVR, but once others saw what they were doing there are plenty of other DVR choices and Tivo didn't win the category.
Tesla might be forging ahead and blazing the trail for others, who will actually capitalize on it.
I think that the Tesla brand is sexy enough that they'll maintain their niche (as Tivo has to some extent), I'm not sure if that will translate into investment returns.
When Tivo was a simple as plugging in the analog coax signal from your cable or antenna, it made a lot of sense. But once the signal from the cable company needed digital decoding, it hurt them, despite Tivo having a better UI.
Other manufacturers aren't simply responding to Elan.
These other car companies have had so much more time and resources, and they have not pushed the way Tesla has.
"How does Edmunds make money? Edmunds sells advertising to marketers who have contextually relevant messages for site visitors. Also, car-shoppers who visit Edmunds have the opportunity to request price quotes from dealers and providers of insurance, financing and extended warranties. Edmunds is paid by the automakers, dealers and other service providers for the lead referrals." http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html
The resell value may be less than a comparable "normal" car, and there's the risk that some government regulation makes all the technology in a Tesla today obsolete or illegal to use in the future.
(and I believe Tesla quietly killed their promise to artificially inflate resell values by footing the bill themselves a while back)
Some people naturally won't care about resell value - of course, others will.
They will always say such things.
I see the opposite Musk seems to be the new Steve Jobs people are crazy over him and seem to think he can do no wrong.
Traditional car investors look at certain tried and proven market indicators to judge stocks. When new tech comes along, they don't know what to think. So they think here and there like in this case.
The real value in bringing self driving tech here is to provide cool features to the buyer, not necessarily bring the stock of the company up. If investors do not know how how to place value on this, I only shrug.
That said, if some company had manufactured bluetooth hardware last year way in advance of the release and full spec, I would argue that it was a pretty bad move. Clearly this is not a perfect analogy, but it should illustrate that this can seem counter intuitive. Building in the cost of beta tech that doesnt fully work and is not legal is a huge gamble. I just wouldn't personally bet against tesla and for the reasons i outlined; it is likely the right call
