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Comment by davej | Hacker News Reader

That's insane. One-third of Tesla's market cap and they seem to be far behind in self-driving, battery tech, charging infrastructure and product development.

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But unencumbered by Tesla's billions in financial, technical, and logistical debt...

As with Tesla, Rivian is being judged by its hoped future successes, not its actual track record to date.

As Russ Hanneman would say, they're a "Pure Play".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

tesla owes something like 9.5 billion in loans. i think they can just sell some more stock. instead they seem to want to raise capital.

Pretty smart they aren't sinking any $$$ into self-driving moonshot tech. Keep lean, build a high-performance tight truck/suv with current driver-assist tech.

Self-driving is the future. Mankind will one day realize 1.25 million deaths a year from crashes is unacceptable. Tesla is on the forefront of that, it would be dumb not to be sinking money into it. If they don't now, they'll lose their lead, lose marketshare, and lose their training data.

You do realize that everybody still drives knowing the risk? The driving force behind self-driving cars is convenience, it will never be safety -- especially when the fist $x decades of mass-adopted self-driving cars will be more dangerous than human drivers. If safety was that important and the political capital existed to actually change things then we could make a huge dent with just the things we know right now.

Current self-driving cars are already orders of magnitude safer than human drivers. I agree convenience is likely the largest driving factor but safety is definitely emphasized.

I think we should all be able to agree that there are no commercially-available "current self-driving cars" - there are cars with ADAS, but they are far from self-driving. And if you tried to let your "self-driving car" actually drive itself on the typical routes that a person takes through the course of a month (not on a closed course), you would never arrive, either because you died in a crash or because the car gave up.

(NB: I own a Tesla Model 3 and have the various "self driving" options.)

Per what data? Human-driven cars cause 1.25 deaths per 100 million VMT in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... Even Waymo is nowhere near 100M miles driven: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsilver/2018/07/26/waymo-ha...

There's not nearly enough data to make a claim like that.

Self-driving is a safety feature. It's a really advanced form of driver assistance, which is a safety feature. ABS, Forward Collision, Lane Assist, Blind Spot detection, these are all safety features. Self-driving is a combination of all of those with extra radars and cameras and AI.

Safety features can also be considered a convenience, but that doesn't mean they aren't safety features.

Humans zone out, they get tired, they have slow reaction times, they only have 2 eyes, they get complacent. Computers do not.

Self driving is way safer where are you getting the fact that a human reaction are faster than a computer

Where are you getting that all of these accidents could have been prevented with faster reaction times?

I mean if you're right and reaction times are all that matter then we don't actually need self-driving cards for the safety benefits, just somewhat improved emergency collision avoidance/braking systems. Much easier problem to solve.

Putting unproven self-driving software into public use won't lead to a reduction in deaths. If Tesla were serious about preventing traffic deaths rather than pushing whizbang tech out before it's ready, it could push a software update that makes it impossible for its cars to speed on surface streets tomorrow.

tesla wants to stay in business as a company, that would kill them, as it would any company. you might not be aware that on non-freeway roads, tesla won't let you 'auto-drive' more than 10 miles over the speedlimit. you can just 'drive' any speed you want, but you can't engage autopilot more than 10 over on side streets.

I talked to the Rivian Engineer this year and he said it would have Level 3 autonomy.

But they are though. Who would buy a pickup without Auto pilot like feature when ones available. That includes the fact that Tesla already has the best range for price.

Compare Tesla's market cap to Fords. Tesla is far behind in producing cars in volume, service centers, repair parts, product development, making actual profits on a sustained basis. It's lunacy.

Ford did after all have a 100 year head start. Is it realistic to expect a 16 year old company to have the same level of everything as a 116 year old incumbent?

Pointless comparison really, you're comparing a startup (in automotive industry context) to a company established in the 1900s. Tesla's revenue growth is 40x Ford.

Anyone can grow revenue quickly losing other people's money. The point I'm trying to make is TSLA is extremely overvalued, future earnings will never justify it's multiple, if the company even has future earnings at all.

By they have a higher growth rate which is important

Tesla's market cap is 44.77 Billion USD. So about One-sixth.

Sorry, you're correct. I was looking at 2018 revenue, not market cap.

Behind where Tesla claims to be in self driving, or behind where Tesla is with self driving?

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