From someone who couldn't shut up about Tesla's non-mistake this is hilarious. I agree with your sentiment but show consistency, please.

Woman walks in front of car where the car has no possible time to stop: not a mistake/problem with the autonomous driving.

Both "Autopilot" and automatic emergency braking doesn't see a giant ****ing truck in the middle of its path, doesn't slow down or automatically brake even after slamming into it, decapitating the driver, plowing across lanes of traffic and through a field and continuing for hundreds of feet rather than braking? That's a mistake/serious problem with your autonomous driving software, bro.

And that's just one of their mistakes/problems (truck lust, random lane swerving on curves and bright lights, total AEB fails on half lanes, taking exit ramps instead of following the road, concrete barrier affinity, etc etc), all documented above.

The bolded is proof is that you're utterly unhinged on everything to do with Tesla. The fact that you not only believe this but also don't see how your claim above would look to others is amazing. You are in cult level denial at this stage.

Spurious why do u say non mistake for tesla?

Because that's what it was rated as. The authorities called it a mistake by the driver. It was obviously a mistake in the software but it was more that went wrong.

https://blog.caranddriver.com/a-tesl...topilot-crash/

Something similar will come from the report about the Uber accident, I bet.

I'd hate to see what an actual mistake would look like.

Here's the accident that Spurious says is an autonomous driving "non-mistake" by Tesla, equivalent to an autonomous driving car hitting woman stepping in right in front of a car with no time to brake:



Events:

- Both front radar and cameras, autopilot as well as a emergency braking, were so well designed that they miss a gigantic truck blocking its path
- It passes under the truck without even slowing taking off the roof and the driver's head
- It continues driving at full speed with a HeadlessMan dummy in the seat (cf Starman dummy), presumably with Harry Potter still playing
- It follows the road for a while and then veers off the road for some unknown reason, through a ditch, across a field, still going at full speed with braking not activating.
- It takes out a fence, still going at full speed with braking not activating
- It takes out another fence, still going at full speed
- It finally crashes heavily into a power pole and slides to a full stop

Every single system including backups failed here, and it's a "non-mistake" according to Spurious.

Imagine if that had happened around pedestrians. The only reason Musk hasn't killed multiple people with his cowboy attitude to safety and horribly inadequate/unsafe systems is pure luck.

Pure luck and way less cars on the road


I laughed a ton at that post, thanks

As the NTSB report says, "The Tesla’s automated vehicle control system was not designed to, and could not, identify the truck crossing the Tesla’s path or recognize the impending crash. Therefore, the system did not slow the car, the forward collision warning system did not provide an alert, and the automatic emergency braking did not activate."

The system was designed for limited access highways only. It should not have been engaged in that situation.

Right which is why it's amazing (or negligent if you prefer) Autopilot didn't have a geo-lockout to prevent engaging the feature on roads it explicitly wasn't designed for.

Not to mention calling it autopilot to start with

Right but it doesn't say much about Tesla's autonomous driving development. It's true that it didn't recognize the truck pulling out in front of it, but that wasn't a failure. It wasn't designed to detect that situation, as the NTSB report notes and that cuck Toothsayer fails to understand.

The failure was not having the geo-lockout or sufficient mechanisms to ensure driver engagement, which again the NTSB report mentions.

Not recognizing giant obstacles on a highway is a failure of emergency braking and autopilot. Continuing to drive for hundreds of feet at full speed and crashing through multiple obstacles without slowing down is a failure of emergency braking. Thank you, SenorKeed, and Spurious, for providing both laughing material and proof of what utterly unhinged Musk fanboys you both are.

Let me give you an example. Tesla fails to properly follow line markings on a closed highway when there are dips in the road or a light flare. When it loses sight of lanes because of these things, it starts swerving dangerously to find the lane again. I've documented this being posted multiple times on the Tesla forum by owners. This is:

a) A failure/problem with their autopilot
b) Not a failure because it wasn't designed to keep track of lane markings in these conditions!

You guys are comedy gold. Keep doubling down on your indefensible positions.

Right, who you going to believe, the NTSB, the most respected government agency in the world, or Tooth sayer, some guy from the internet

Tesla fan beliefs vs reality. Start of 2017 bull case prediction about where Tesla would be at the end of the year, financially
Let's go through this line by line:

Hit 13% of bull target on GWh. Revenue enormous miss as well. Margin and GP aren't easy to get line items for given that SG&A isn't broken down by segment.

Delivered 1764 Model 3 vehicles, of 57,000 projected. Hit 3% of bull target.

Hit bull target exactly (101K). However, this is stable production, so no surprises there. Bulls and bears would have agreed on this number.

Gross margin seems to be a fairly big miss (19% headline, but some M3 loss)- impossible to tell as it's not broken down and dishonestly accounted for anyway (production costs are counted as R&D in a separate line item)

Hit 0.1% of bull target as far I can see (a few employee installations). Close to zero installations, no revenue.

Overall:

Total gross profit was $2.2 billion (60% of predicted)
Net profit was -$1.9 billion ($2.8 billion less than predicted, more than total revenue!)

All of Tesla's three new products that bulls thought would ramp in 2017 have been massive failures in production and/or sales.

One way have maybe been keeping my investing nice and simple is by sticking with companies who are turning a profit Although these days, do still have to worry about the market overall - and so have been reading a bunch of stuff. Have become quite fond of the articles over at Seeking Alpha, and they seem to have quite a bit of coverage of TSLA ...

Can maybe understand why Tesla gets so much attention - they sought to bring electric cars to the masses, when it wasn't clear that would be possible to do profitably? And in doing so, they really moved the world forward with a giant technological leap. Was in California over Christmas, and it was really neat to see a community embrace new technology with investments in infrastructure to support the shift towards clean energy - there were free charging stations in a lot of public places, like at the airport and certain shopping malls. For some reason, forgot to take pics while there, but managed to find a bunch on the internet of how different things look like in places where electric vehicles have been embraced ...

Apparently California sells carbon credits to companies who emit greenhouse gases, and they've been using the proceeds to pay for stuff like charging stations and electric car rebates. Which is nice, because isn't that supposed to be one of the justifications for government - that the world is better off when companies are required to pay for their pollution, and that companies who offer better alternatives should be offered subsidies for not costing the government cleanup costs? Were electric car programs also getting more help from the Federal goverment when Obama was President? If so, that's unfortunate that extra funding has dried up while Tesla's still struggling to become profitable ...


Saw this article about TSLA from David Einhorn, who plays poker sometimes when he's not running his hedge fund

It's interesting, because apparently GM developed a working electric car in the 1990's, and wound up shelving the program because they felt it wouldn't be profitable. Which opened the door for Tesla to make this giant technological leap forward of bringing electric cars to the masses - but at the end of the day, guess Elon Musk does also have to find a way to turn Tesla into a profitable venture ...

Will be quite interesting to watch and see how things unfold! Maybe costs may come down as more resources are devoted to improving technology? But wow, things sure don't sound good right now for Tesla with their roll-out of their new more affordable Model 3 Guess people will be watching to see how much progress Tesla is making towards increasing production, and will be viewing increasing setbacks as signs that Tesla may not be moving in the right direction towards profitability?


Have never invested in TSLA, and likely won't in the future - but the idealist in me would kind of like to see a company that took a chance on doing something financially risky have things turn out okay. On the other hand, there was someone posted an article on Seeking Alpha today who says that TSLA may have done some creative accounting to get their stock price to rise in the past - which is really not cool! (The Technicals Of Tesla: https://seekingalpha.com/article/415...chnicals-tesla) If Tesla wants to see their share price rise, they'll have to improve their production efficiency - not sure what their chances are, but things really don't sound so hot for them right now!

Electric cars have been the biggest change to happen to cars in who knows how long - will sure be interesting to see how things go for Tesla with this new Model 3 ...




PS. The Seeking Alpha article's hilarious, for anyone who likes TA - the author writes about his 2yr long attempt at trying to turn a profit shorting TSLA, and he makes comics out of his charts and graphs

PPS. Happy first day of Spring! Not so spring-like just yet in my neck of the woods, but hopefully it won't be too much longer

There are 100s of kit car manufactures out there selling all sorts of niche cars. Tesla was yet another one, and it was nearly a decade before Musk actually joined the company... and pushed the Tesla founder and CEO out of Tesla. (A story that no one seems to have details about.)

Last I checked, Tesla was using generic battery chemistry and buying electric engines from someone else and slapping it into Lotus Elise body. Over the years they licensed and build more parts themselves, but I doubt that Tesla is some treasure trove of electric car secrets. As one of the posters mentioned, Tesla is trying to stay solvent and build some cars. They don't have massive piles of extra money to plow into basic research.

What is Tesla's competitive advantage? To me, it's branding and Musk. They have a darling of a CEO that can't do wrong - for now. But opinions can be fickle and who knows what skeletons he has buried in his Apartheid family.

Instead of Tesla moving the world forward, it's really the government incentives and contracts that are creating companies like Tesla, SolarCity, Boring Company, Space X. No one seems to notice the huge lobbying representation Musk/Tesla have in Washington, DC. Washington, DC is where his businesses start and end.

Autonomous cars (that don't require driver oversight) are about as realistic as flying cars. Tech folks all know that the most difficult problems for machines are things that humans can do intuitively and easily. (and vice versa.) There are fun examples of this. Robotics geniuses at Carnegie Mellon/Berkeley/etc have been working on a robot that can fold laundry for at least a decade with marginal success at best. Simple things for humans are often incredibly hard for machines.

I also doubt that anyone will allow autonomous cars that are just better than humans. Better is not good enough. With humans behind the wheel, people have legal recourse when things go wrong. Every(?) other autonomous feature that involves human life is nearly flawless, not just better. That is something that cars will not be able to do for decades given the road conditions and judgement involved.

I would be interested in TS's take on dc's view of the world.

What would possess someone like TrustySam to make a driveling post like that? It must have taken the better part of an hour and it contributes literally nothing of value to the discussion, other than maybe how a typical ignorant observer views Tesla. Sam, feel free to enlighten us on what specific advances Tesla has brought to the world of electric cars.

And while I'm here typing stuff, I'll address SenorKeeed's absurd contention that Tesla's autopilot death is nullified because it happened on an unauthorized type of highway. Firstly, it's negligent to expect people wouldn't use it on anything but controlled-access highways, and if non-compliance is potentially fatal, it should have been geo-disabled or never allowed in the cars at all. But more importantly, it demonstrated how faulty the software is—even on controlled-access highways. Imagine that instead of the semi in question legally crossing the roadway, it had been jackknifed across the road of a controlled-access highway after an accident. Would the software have decided to see it then? Tesla got bailed out (at least in simple minds) by a technicality.

Can you share your information on where you get all this facts from? I just starting reading this book https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Spa...ords=elon+musk . I want fact check with someone that knows what he talking about since I can't trust this author who has incentive to lies while someone on forum will have no biases and really good infor.

The existence of that book is so tilting

The idea of my post was to highlight that Tesla made electric cars available for purchase, but in doing so they chose to advance clean energy technology and innovation where profitability would have otherwise held businesses back. Was referring to the introduction of EV's to market as being the advancement of technology, not new product innovation per se. However Tesla does apparently hold a number of patents such as this one - gains in innovation tend to be incremental.

So advancements to society were made by ignoring profitability. If Musk hadn't gone ahead and pushed forward with his vision of bringing electric cars to market, who knows how much longer it would have taken for them to reach market, if no one was working on them because car manufacturers were able to successfully lobby governments into backing down on EV car mandates.

That's relevant because Tesla's now at a juncture where profitability can no longer be ignored, and he's got to deliver. So my point was that while it may have been advantageous to the world to put a vision ahead of the profitability question at first, to continue to ignore the profitability question at this point would seem like it might be dangerous for anyone invested in TSLA?

The second part of my post was the discussion of the short - even with production problems, is TSLA still a problematic short because of the Musk mania? Wanted to document the mania because was trying to figure out if this time may be different. The Seeking Alpha article shows the struggle one person's gone through in trying to make money shorting TSLA over the last 2 years, and he says he feels like this time may be different, but he's also a little bit scared because he's been burned so many times before when the stock price looks like it should have tanked and instead wound up rising



It sounds like Tesla was founded in 2003, with Musk as a silent investor who wrestled control from the founder in 2009 and was able to secure the funding from the government to bring cars to market?

It's generally accepted that Tesla's competitive advantage was their first mover advantage, but that's since been lost as their competitors have surpassed them, so yes Elon Musk's branding appears to be all that's left. It feels like it might have been a mistake to branch out into so many directions like autonomous driving and solar cells at the expense of setting up a production line that could bring the cars to market in line with the vision? But who's to say ...

They just need some kind of fine print in the EULA that says "WARNING: autopilot will not stop for hell or high water when not on approved roadways."

I find it puzzling that there are still new charging stations being put in at malls and supermarkets. These stations are only useful for cars which get <100 miles of range, which will soon be obsolete. For cars that get 200+ miles of range these stations are pretty much worthless. I feel that they are put in more for the optics. Kind of like a billboard in front of the store that says "look how green we are!" even though they have minimal value.

lol

Sam, you act as though Tesla's founding were some noble act to bring environmentally friendly cars to market while eschewing monetary incentives. There's little evidence to support that Musk is a philanthropic environmentalist, despite his branding himself as such to accord with his persona as the savior of humanity to his legions of followers. Musk wasn't forgoing his own money to pervade Teslas throughout the world—he was taking advantage of tax-payer money by getting the government to subsidize his eco-friendly automotive shell game. Then he took advantage of public investors—and continues to do so—to prop up a company that is hemorrhaging money and has made what I see to be insignificant contributions to automotive tech.

Any car manufacturer could have taken a glider (the car without the engine) from another company (Lotus in Tesla's case), and gotten a battery from a battery manufacturer (Panasonic or whoever they used), and made a performance electric car. No one else did because it wasn't economically feasible. But if you're going to use other people's money (the tax payer or the gullible investor), you may as well build an empire for yourself and see how long you can keep the scheme afloat. That's not noble environmentalism—it's closer to egotistic capitalism. Now that batteries are becoming cheap enough to make non-Leaf-tier cars, the big players are coming in and doing so.