‘Self-driving is hard’? No Duh, Elon
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Instead of acknowledging that self-driving is hard, Musk sold Tesla as some magic wunderkind of technology, ignoring when it fell short, and overselling it’s capabilities as somehow light years ahead of the competition. It ultimately turned out that the competition, having collective centuries’ worth of experience said “We need to be really cautious with this technology.”
As such, a lot of good was achieved for the environment.
The self driving would have been cherry-on-top.
Consumption needs to decrease to be actually greener.
An electric car is arguably much better then a diesel or gas powered car.
> This could make it worse than normal cars in many ways.
Care to detail how this would be worse?, your comment doesn't make much sense. Tesla can't keep up with demand, cars are bought, used and sold second hand to be driven as well... (they aren't thrown away). This is displacing a lot of gas/diesel powered cars.
> Consumption needs to decrease to be actually greener.
You might mean consumption of fossil fuels needs to decrease. Which is happening.
People will still need to drive, electric cars just moves us from fossil fuels to renewables like solar panels or wind farms much faster.
It depends on how you define better, though. For a city, yes, there is no air pollution coming directly from an electric car, but it's significantly more polluting in the manufacturing process compared to an ICE car due to the special materials needed. An example is lithium, which uses solvents and chemicals that are toxic during the mining and manufacturing process, which then produces extremely bad waste that's hard to deal with (and often isn't, causing significant problems for the local area). This is a particularly bad problem for electric cars since they need very large batteries. This process (and others) need to be improved significantly and recycling programs need to become a better alternative to simply creating the materials from scratch to really say that electric cars are unequivocally better than ICE.
Looking over environment aspects of production below, all the recent studies disprove what was assumed so far and your comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_aspects_of_the_e...
One such: "A 2020 study from Eindhoven University of Technology mentioned that the manufacturing emissions of batteries of new electric cars are much smaller than what was assumed in the IVL study (around 75 kg CO2/kwh) and that the lifespan of lithium batteries is also much longer than previously thought (at least 12 years with a mileage of 15000 km annually). As such, they are more ecological than gasoline-powered internal combustion cars.[58] [59] "
This doesn't even take in account recycling.
As for harmful chemicals during mining and manufacturing - it's the same for any other mining operation like gold and so on, states put in place laws that you cannot use harmful chemicals and other solutions are found. (cyanide in gold mining comes to mind)
This only works if you actually have an alternative. What if your process requires benzene and there are no alternatives?
Perhaps it's just my general disinterest in modern cars, but I don't really see what distinguishes Teslas from other electric vehicles. It has four wheels and a big touch screen, like all the other cars.
Non-Tesla chargers means a fillup takes hours rather than minutes. It's going to take a while to catch up.
There weren't any fully electric cars for sale before Tesla.
They've only started to appear recently as other car companies see the writing on the wall and they don't want to become obsolete. Just looking at Tesla's market cap vs the rest shows you where the market is going.
Tesla is still far ahead. Just look into buying an electric car and compare.
> Just looking at Tesla's market cap
Hype does not translate to vehicle quality. Tesla's market cap is a statement about the current economy, not their electric cars.
> Just look into buying an electric car and compare.
There are other options, and they're getting excellent reviews. They just don't have the same cult following. Large car manufacturers who are allegedly playing catch-up have built excellent, affordable electric cars, and have announced more interesting models.
It's not like Teslas are outstanding cars for the price either. Much has been written about their build quality, among other flaws.
I just see Tesla as a flash in the pan. Ford released really good electric cars like it's no big deal, and announced a few more. Other manufacturers are doing the same. They'll build cars people will want, at prices people can afford. I don't see what edge Tesla has on them.
We now have a massive electric-car company that is doing a lot of good for the environment and forcing other companies to change.
We also have SpaceX with their awesome reusable rockets.
Sure, self-driving is hard... And Tesla doesn't have full self driving. But almost everyone is aware... Hell, I bought due to a top gear review where Clarkson made fun of it as being a gimmick, everything else on the other hand is great
I’ve seen people on HN use the excuse “humans only use vision to drive”, reaffirming Musk.
We’d like self-driving to be a solved problem in some form sooner rather than later. Millions are hurt or die in cars every year. It’s ok if we “cheat” with Lidar, etc
Of course, we are ignoring the fact that people are paying extra for what they think will eventually give them self-driving.
this is a problem because it introduces the same kind of bait-and-switch anti-consumer behavior we see with the sale of pre-release games, but on an automotive investment level.
"Buy this car and it'll have additional feature X in year Y. Don't listen to the non-believers, me and my team have this solved."
"Woops! Turns out that was harder than I thought, sorry to all the folks that bought this car under the premise that they'd get feature X. Better luck next time, it wasn't contractual; just some over-promised under-deliveries, you understand! It's marketing to lie to your face!"
I think that ship has sailed a long time ago... especially after emissions scandal.
Also, have you looked at marketing in general?, is anyone actually telling the truth anywhere?
At least this was a promise that they'll do their best.
> "Buy this car and it'll have additional feature X in year Y. Don't listen to the non-believers, me and my team have this solved."
Does anybody buy 50K+ cars on promises?, especially since all reviews are very honest.
For me, they're gimmicks... but the inner child in me seeing the celebration mode on model X makes me want to buy it. Then I research it and find it's actually a great car, sure, no full self driving, but for 10K on top of 150K+ the features added are great.
Have a look: https://youtu.be/pXvIzWhEWvA?t=400
They can't keep up with demand, all their inventory is sold, so it's displacing a lot of regular car sales.
Well he is just a bull shitter like any salesman selling cars or before that aluminum siding.
So while self driving might be hard (as in Hard AI) the notable failure are actually in the "easier" parts.
Examples from memory (that may be faulty and not specific to a company): Car hits cyclist crossing street. Car runs into stationary vehicles Car turns into semitruck
Isn't "scene construction" part of AI?
From a technical angle: computer vision and object recognition are AI.
From a philosophical angle: part of human conscientiousness, and intelligence, is to exist in a spatiotemporal frame. This is one of Kant's points[0]. Our intelligence constructs scenes from our sensory input, but we have things like object permanence which have a deeper understanding than simply what our senses show.
People learn these things for a long time and we actually have a proper model of the world for exactly that reason.
The incidents that I have described would actually be resolved by 3d scanning technology (not saying that thats the correct approach either)
Self-driving has always and obviously been hard. Bitcoin has always and obviously been environmentally harmful. Language won't be obsolete four years from now.
He's not someone innocently and optimistically making sincere announcements. He's knowingly misleading people for profit.
1) Hyperloop wasn't even realistically possible given the laws of physics.
2) What happened to tesla Truck?
3) Solar Roof turned out to be a failure.
4) 100K promise to deliver a person on Mars. As a reference to take 1kg to low-earth orbit (ISS) costs around twice as much.
5) Where are all the self-driving cars?
You only need high-school physics to debunk half of the stuff he comes up with.
All Musk companies failed to produce profits or positive FCF, they were all sold to bigger fools who didn't look under the hood.
At Paypal for example there wouldn't have been a hood at all if it wasn't for the board firing Musk and bringing in Peter Thiel.
SolarCity exactly the same, solely the bigger fools now were the shareholders of the other publicly traded company which fails to make positive FCF