[taraharris]

> You are probably too young to remember when Cisco

I am 42 years old. I remember when the SGI O2 was the hot thing to have on your desk, Netscape was the hot new startup, when Mozilla was open-sourced, and when jwz left to burn some of his fuck-you money on saving nightclub in San Francisco. All I could afford was my Linux PC, but I was alive. I remember the entire dotcom boom and bust.

None of that matters. I actually know some of the engineers that work (or have worked) at Elon Musk's companies. They're all extremely smart, talented and hard-working. (One of them hates Musk's guts, one is indifferent, and the rest of them respect him enormously.) Tesla will eventually be the largest company on Earth, and no one else is close.

[ofcourseyoudo]

> Tesla will eventually be the largest company on Earth

This is quite a take. I guess you're basing this on FSD becoming a huge moneymaker for them, but that's unlikely given it's not true FSD and it's only Level 2 autonomy, and Level 3 is probably years away for them. Compare to Mercedes, who just got Level 3 approved in Nevada. It's under very specific conditions, but while it's activated, Mercedes assumes liability. I don't see Tesla doing that before 2026.

[maxharris]

I don't know what Mercedes is doing. If it is so great, why does it have to be geofenced?

[ofcourseyoudo]

So you think Tesla is going to outpace every other company (auto or not) and you have no knowledge of the competition within its specific industry?

[maxharris]

I don't know and that's why I'm asking you. How does Mercedes self-driving work? Why is it geofenced?

[sidibe]

They are trying to make something that works reliably in some conditions. That is harder and better than what Tesla does. All this talk about geofences isn't about whether the car can figure out how to drive anywhere but whether the car can drive reliably somewhere, which is the hard problem which Tesla is avoiding.

IMO adding very unreliable features like FSD should not even be legal. The car should be very good at what it tries to do.

[maxharris]

The question I asked was how the approach Mercedes is taking actually works. Does it use LiDAR? Does it rely on pre-programmed maps? I'm asking for technical details, not normative statements.

[ofcourseyoudo]

You said this:

>Tesla will eventually be the largest company on Earth, and no one else is close.

And yet you have no way of knowing how "close" the "no one" companies are if you have zero knowledge of a competitor that has already surpassed their technology.

Cut the hyperbole and talk about things that you have knowledge of.

[tw98521358]

All those places were full of talented amazing folks. Some of them even were briefly great companies before they burned out and faded away. The point is that none of them were worth the crazy valuations they briefly had.

[maxharris]

Yes, true. They all died because larger and/or better-managed competitors beat them. Tesla's competitors are all several years behind in technology and manufacturing, and many of them have incredible debt burdens that will likely put them into bankruptcy as this downturn progresses.

Tesla with thrive, and only some of their competitors are going to make it through. I hope that's not too controversial (shrug).

[europeanguy]

> Tesla will eventually be the largest company on Earth, and no one else is close.

Is your thesis that A) Tesla will finally develop fsd AND B) no one else will ever be able to?

[maxharris]

My thesis is that Tesla is progressing very well on FSD. Watching the progress happen is as easy as watching some videos on YouTube. It's really cool watching it progress, warts and all. Reminds me of how Google's language translation stuff progressed. They're crowdsourcing the work of teaching computers how to drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q96i2vf8oA

I definitely think that competing companies will catch up, but that it will take them around 5-15 years to do it. (It took Microsoft about a decade to come up with a real competitor to the original Macintosh, for example.) That's an eternity in business, so Tesla will accrue huge gains financially over that period and this first-mover advantage will give them a huge lead with the Tesla Bot.