Yes, a bit underwhelming, but it's a recruitment event and you've got to start somewhere. Question is how fast and if they can catch up with BD in terms of control.
I assume they’ll catchup as fast as they catch up with their FSD to Waymo. Which is driving customers for years, while Tesla’s FSD cannot go without intervention for more than few miles, at best, in any more complex environment. And yes, I know Waymo uses HD maps and limited geo area. So does Tesla, and they’re explicitly mapping and testing areas driven by popular influencers.
And it’s assuming that there’s actually a market for humanoid robots. Other than futurology folks getting excited about that form factor, there’s no real market for it, and research shows that humanoids robots are almost never a most optimal answer.
> So does Tesla, and they’re explicitly mapping and testing areas driven by popular influencers.
This seems like a nonsensical swing at Tesla. They have literally 100000s of people on the road with FSD in all of the US.
Claiming that its a few influences is just outright lying.
You are also totally wrong in your understanding of how Tesla FSD works. They are not mapping those areas, save those maps and make them available to other cars. That is explicitly not what they are doing.
More accurate to say that they are building a training set with the input from 100000s of cars driving around literally all over the US.
If you mean catch up as in FSD is making billions while Waymo is losing billions, yes the comparison is apt. Boston Dynamics tech is very impressive but they don't seem very good at commercializing it. Tesla bot may be janky now, but I could imagine it could do some useful tasks in their factories in 5-8 years or so. We'll see, I think the development will take even longer than self-driving, but at least it will be fun to follow the progress if they're as open as with FSD
1. 160k people have bought and recieved FSD Beta at somewhere between $5 and $15k (today's price). Let's say an average of $8k, that means $1.28 billion. More have bought it but are waiting to get access.
2. FSD take rate is estimated as of now to be around 7% of vehicles sold world-wide. At the current price of $15k and the estimated 1.4 million vehicles sold this year, that amounts to $1.47 billion.
Numbers are rough estimates, 50% of revenue is held in reserve until FSD is out of beta, and many haven't received the beta yet, still by any measure they are making and will make billions. What you personally think of the product, or if you think Elon is a "snake oil salesman" is not really relevant.
To strong arm any counter argument, it's possible that all these buyers will realize it actually sucks/doesn't work, sue the company and the whole thing falls apart, but I don't see any indication of it. There are plenty of unhappy and happy customers with FSD, but they've clearly found something that people are willing to pay a lot for and many are happy with it. Clearly it needs to improve much further in order to sell this to the wider public beyond people who think it's fun to babysit an AI.
The product Tesla has sold for money is incomplete with no credible projected date of completion as the general problem of L4/L5 driving has never been solved before. Any profit from pre-selling a solution to a never-before-solved problem which requires an unknown amount of future work to make work as advertised absolutely does not count as “making billions”.
Because it costs the same amount as the “auto-park” feature on a Volkswagen - and it auto parks as well. So think of it as “auto-park feature at market rate, that might self drive in the future, for free” - no brainer
The criticism of Tesla is always devoid of context of the rest of the car industry.
Are you including the amount they're losing by having to recall those vehicles with FSD? Or the fact that there are lawsuits over how FSD doesn't work? Or any number of accidents caused by FSD being clearly buggy?
Like ignoring how poor your breakdown is over it making 'billions' they've been hit by wave after wave of bad PR. Like the various videos and lawsuits over how poor their quality control is and how many lies they've peddled over FSD.
> Are you including the amount they're losing by having to recall those vehicles with FSD?
There has been one "recall" of FSD, which was for including the option to do a rolling stop at stop signs. They fixed this with an OTA update at the request of NHTSA. Total cost: a few dollars
> Or the fact that there are lawsuits over how FSD doesn't work?
Show me the lawsuits that have been lost and how much the damages were
> Or any number of accidents caused by FSD being clearly buggy?
FSD requires supervision, as such accidents are currently the responsibility of the driver. Even so, besides minor accidents there haven't been any confirmed crashes or anyone being hurt yet. With 160k cars on the road you'd expect worse. And again, this doesn't affect how much money they've made in selling the software.
> Like the various videos and lawsuits over how poor their quality control
You mean the video created by Dan O'Dowd of Green Hill Software, a competitor in automated car software?
Your hate doesn't change the numbers. Maybe you're right and everything comes crashing down, who knows. But this is the current reality.
It seems strange that this comment was so aggressively down voted. Anything related to Elon gets the same treatment by HN that I feel that Elon invites a visceral rather than an objective reaction.
Because Elon is snakes oil salesman, who thinks he’s smartest and most important human in the history. He also happens to have some very successful products, that his fan base uses to silence any criticism.
If snake-oil salesmanship is all it takes to land rockets vertically and single-handily kickstart the transition to EVs I'm all for it. We need more snake-oil salesmen leading corporate America!
There can't be any objective discussions about Elon any more =) John Carmack finds Elon to be smart and really knowledgeable (listen to the latest podcast from Lex Fridman). And you would think HN trusts the words from Carmack? But most think Carmack, who knows Elon personally is wrong, and their opinion based on some random internet articles, is right.
Elon is super smart. He’s also a snake oil salesman.
These are not contradictory statements.
Unfortunately he chose his intelligence to enrich himself by fooling others. He could have chosen other options. It looked like that was the direction he was going in. By trying to help people. But it’s clear at some point he realized he can make far more money claiming to do something than by actually doing something and decided to focus on that.
> Unfortunately he chose his intelligence to enrich himself by fooling others.
You make it sound like he's selling ads online or something, not building rockets and electric cars, self-driving software and now robots? Like, if you wanted to make as much money as possible and "fool" people as you say, doing a rocket company and a new car company at the same time, pouring all the $100m you earned from selling your previous company, being months from bankruptcy in both ventures seem like a very roundabout and stressful way of becoming a billionaire.
I don't understand where you people get your world view from, are you exclusively reading click-bait news headlines and coming to the conclusion that Elon=Bad? How about reading some actual accounts of the early days at SpaceX for example? I can recommend "Liftoff", it's very balanced, focuses mostly on the employees of SpaceX and doesn't try to paint Elon as some kind of heroic figure, but gives credit where it's due. He comes off as a highly technical, maniacal, single-minded founder, inspiring but working his staff to the bones, and sure, also has some darker sides to his personality. It's the kind of personality that's required to pull these things off.
People just can't give someone any credit if they don't like the person or they have slightly different political views, I guess it's just the times we live in, zero tolerance.
He's generally a force of good for the world but can come over as a bit of a dick sometimes, there are much worse people out there if you need to hate on someone.
I don’t know. Richest person in the world, whose ego is only thing bigger than his wealth, is pretty good person to direct at least some hate at.
And while some of his lies are just to kill competition/extract money from the rich (like FSD), but some are just disgusting.
With neuralink he was openly telling people for few years that his implants will solve their health issues. Implants that killed most of the monkeys in the labs.
It’s disgusting to lie to people with really serious health conditions, give them false hope and likely have them reject other treatments, because Elon said he’ll fix them. You don’t think it’s a good reason to pour some hate at him?
> With neuralink he was openly telling people for few years that his implants will solve their health issues.
He has invested mostly his own money in that.
Are you claiming there is no medical use what so ever for the technology they are developing?
Based on what knowlage do you make that claim?
> Implants that killed most of the monkeys in the labs.
What data is that based on?
> It’s disgusting to lie to people with really serious health conditions, give them false hope and likely have them reject other treatments, because Elon said he’ll fix them.
What? I have heard most of Neurolinks presentation and not a single time did Elon ever suggest that people just delay other treatments. Neurolink has clearly mostly done animal trials and product demonstrations.
I at least have never heard Musk claim that Neurolink would have a product on the market within a short time period.
And it’s assuming that there’s actually a market for humanoid robots. Other than futurology folks getting excited about that form factor, there’s no real market for it, and research shows that humanoids robots are almost never a most optimal answer.