Tesla as an environmental benefit/project is the easiest analysis in the world

1. No meaningful impact is going to be made environmentally by electric cars until enough are built to start meaningfully displacing gasoline

2. That won't happen until the cost of production is lower than current cars - consumers decide which cars get bought and cars are expensive, so cost is the limiting factor for mass adoption

3. The cost of production depends solely on battery chemistry (energy density and cost)

4. Battery chemistry has nothing to do with Musk. There are tens of billions annually flowing into battery research and a million electric cars a year already being sold, not to mention laptops and phones and everything else; Musk's contribution to this is tiny and utterly irrelevant

5. Essentially, Musk has burnt billions of dollars and done tremendous environmental harm making taxpayer-subsidized performance sports cars for rich people, and setting himself up as a messiah.

Incredibly, most people can't follow basic facts and logic. Battery cost parity is looking like 2022; total cost of ownership parity is looking like 2019. Musk has done nothing to improve this, as the money he's caused to flow into battery research has been tiny compared to what's currently there.

What's more, if the billions in taxpayer subsidies he got directly to build sports cars for rich people went to funding basic engineering or science related to batteries, that would have a FAR better and more direct outcome in bringing about mass manufacturing of electric cars.

It's all bull****, basically. A bit like Musk "leading" in autonomous driving which I also called out as bull**** years ago for very simple fundamental reasons. People can't think or derive even basic truths from first principles...I'm not sure why. The above is obvious in a few seconds of thinking and not even debatable.

This is a trading thread - my post was designed to flesh out the beliefs of upper bound of the investment pool, who put the valuation of TSLA as high as $500 ...

It may be relevant because 40% of the investor pool are non-institutionals, who may not be trading on either fundamentals or technicals?

Am not sure how the possible inner workings of Elon Musk have bearing on the trading of TSLA - guess are you saying that the mania may not be that strong because people may see him more as a capitalist? Who knows - was just playing devil's advocate, and to do that requires putting oneself in the shoes of other people. Like i said before, have never invested in TSLA - it's always looked terrible as an investment ...

The beliefs of the upper bound of the investment pool are pure unhinged crazy/pumpers. Munster for example was saying Tesla leading in autonomous ride sharing could be a trillion dollar industry. This is impossible, because:

- Tesla are far behind in autonomous driving and have no research money to throw at it (this was obvious ages ago but the media and Musk's own PR were putting him in the lead, so it was easier to sell)

- Tesla don't have the manufacturing capabilities to put that many cars on the road, and won't for a decade

- The majors wouldn't be far behind even if Tesla did somehow impossibly magically win.

Then there were Tesla energy predictions - building out the whole grid type stuff, and so on. You can see a few posts up some conservative bull predictions. Pure unhinged crazy. But when you have millions of breathless fans, reality doesn't matter - any painting of a rosy picture of Tesla's trillion dollar future gets breathless rednecks to buy. Then you sell secondaries into them and collect your millions in fees (most of the pumpers have commercial relationships with Tesla and underwrite secondaries).

In a way it's been like a large cap version of a penny pump and dump.

Probably Mystery solved

No kidding.

They're popular because the charges are oftentimes free, and many people would prefer to not pay for electricity because many people tend to be price conscious.

But to some, yes those charging costs may possibly feel de miminis, and they may never feel the need to charge away from home.

video is out

https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-dri...s-l-1823970417

Damn, feel like self drive tech should have avoided but think most humans also hit her. Straight up walked out of the darkness into a fast moving car wtf, did she expect the car to stop for her?

This might sound obvious/dumb but think Tesla is classic case of price being kept artificially high to offload as much stock as possible to retail investors/musk fanboys at ridiculous prices. As long as the Musk hype train stays strong so will the share price. (Musk hype strong = more people becoming aware of him/tesla and some of those will want to buy stock at any price) Shorts might have to wait 1-5 years and more upswing before Tesla really starts to unravel and **** hits the fan.

This is an extremely frustrating news release. Human eyes have much better dynamic range then cameras do, this video does NOT show what a human would of. I would bet on a human driver avoiding her.

Try going into a dark room and comparing what you see to your phones camera.

The video is not fair because it likely doesn’t capture the moment an attentive human drive would spot a person in he middle of the road, because of the dark lighting and the sensors on the camera.

TBH I think almost all human drivers without a car in their left blind spot avoids this collision in day time. At night it’s impossible to know without properly studying the situation. I’m sure investigators will close the road down at night and do their own tests with the same make/model and dummy cyclist to see if there is sufficient time for an attentive drive to avoid a collision

Most drivers are no more attentive than the guy in that video.

That driver is actually a woman (la goblina). Uber is very lucky that it was a homeless woman they hit, because I think had it been someone with upset family members, they would be settling a lawsuit for big money. The driver looks to be texting and only intermittently glancing up at the road, which I'm sure was a violation of the terms the city stipulated requiring a fully attentive driver to be behind the wheel. From that video, the woman comes into view, illuminated by the headlights, fifty feet from the car. And I was very surprised to see that the woman appeared not from the shoulder, but from the adjacent lane, so she'd been in the road for a while, and as others mention, I bet a human paying attention would have seen her even though the car's camera doesn't appear to. It seems very unlikely that a big swath of road on a two-lane highway like that would be totally enveloped in darkness.

I think you missed my point. Most drivers are no more attentive than the woman in that video.

LOLZ

The only LOLZ is how daft you are. That's what the police were saying at the time.

I think 80+% of human drivers hit this woman without slowing given the lighting and the suddenness. It was going at 45mph. The other 20% slow somewhat. Few if any avoid a collision.

Definitely an autonomous driving failure in this case, assuming they had LIDAR. But not a bad one as it performed on par with a human driver to a sudden condition change in very bad lighting.

This is nowhere close to missing a giant ****ing truck, in full daylight, blocking the entire road with 10+ seconds to see it, then running off the road and crashing through two fences at full speed and no braking, before coming to stop only because it crashed hard into a power pole.

lol at using a night time view from a dash cam to determine how a human driver would react.

80% hit rate without slowing and almost 100% collision rate is somehow the most laughable thing you've posted in this thread.

Pretty powerful light and shade there...you go momentarily blind as you go under isolated street lamps in dark areas, there's a flare effect for both humans and cameras.

Thank you, that's a great compliment. From stopping and starting the video it looks to be about 2 seconds from the time she becomes a faint ghost to the impact. Humans stink at reacting and then hitting the brake:
It takes a ****load of time to see, process, and then move your foot onto the brake and actually hit the spot when it gets applied hard and braking is activated. That's for people concentrating in a controlled trial 100% of the time. I think my assertion that 80% of drivers there would hit at full speed is pretty reasonable.

Still using terrible footage for your analysis i see.

I can barely make out the passenger seat in the video due to the horrific camera lighting.

80% of drivers not even slowing down as someone walks across the street at night (with street lamps and not stepping off a curb but already crossing an adjacent lane). Still hilarious.

A dashcam is not human sight but the woman is very difficult to see there.

By they way I wouldn't expect Uber autonomy to be any good. It's basically ripped off Google tech that's been in development for mere months, without a lot of the mature software and bug fixes from years of careful real world testing that google has done

Uh bro, as the NTSB notes, Tesla's Autopilot system was not designed to detect a truck pulling out in front of it. It was simply not designed to react to that situation. Whereas the level 4 car certainly is or should be designed to react to that pedestrian.

A human eye has an effective dynamic range of about 12-14 stops. A dash cam might have 5-7. Using that video to estimate what a person paying attention would see is foolish.

Your position is ridiculous, sir. Something marketed as "Autopilot" with "Fully Self Driving" 3-6 months away, and having emergency braking and object detection should detect a big ****ing truck right across the road, even at the incredibly low bar of claiming it's level 2 and not attempting a 2/3 hybrid as Tesla are clearly trying to market.
I disagree. We also know our experience on dark roads with occasional intersection lights - you're near blind coming into those lit areas looking out into the darker areas. It's not so much a range thing as a focus effect imo.

I think the most damning thiing about that video is the apparent lack of any corrective action once the person is fully visible. We wouldn't expect a human to react in time but an autonomous should have sub second recognitiion and braking - it should have been braking hard just before hitting her. It appears to have just continued on oblivious. So from that perspective I guess you could say this a pretty big fail.

https://imgur.com/a/ud3w8

This seems like a pretty big fail to me. If this was a normal driver and the cops found the driver was texting at the time of impact, I would think charges would be filed. If the driver was unimpaired I would hope it would be found to be no fault of the driver.

Autonomous vehicles are going to have to be much much better than human drivers if they are going to be accepted by society. In this case it is obvious they weren't. At the instant of the capture above, the car should have been better than many humans and breaking hard.