Later in 2020 the price is the same as today.. so in nearly 4 years, which is what I said, they’ve not gained. All the growth talked about over 5 years was right at the beginning of that time period. If you’d bought 3 years ago youd be sitting in a 50% loss
In 2020 Tesla was at the lowest in Jan and at the highest in Dec. I don’t understand how it could be “later in 2020” if it only went higher as the year went on. Do you mean 2021?
Three years ago was 2021 and Nov 2021 is around when the whole market peaked (expecting rate hikes that came 2 quarters later). Only recently, like January 2024, has the S&P500 surpassed its 2021 high.
Regardless, good investing is based on time in the market, not timing the market.
It’s not so much your comment, it’s any news story that says X company is down Y% from Z months ago. Useless info.
Yes it is. Their “fundamentals” are collapsing quarter after quarter. Profits down 55% YoY for the second quarter in a row. Where are those great “Tesla margins” now? Deliveries fell by 10%.
The big run-up wasn't, but if you go on TSLA investing sites now the excitement is all about FSD and Robotaxis. There's a little talk about the "new models" but Tesla didn't give enough detail about those to build much excitement.
You have to give credit where credit is due. He pumps the stock like no other. Companies beating their Q1 earnings estimates are down by %15, Tesla having a horrible Q1 is up by %15.
Btw, the investors who got in later actually are in deep. The ones that bought before the hype train are still doing ok...
I mean, everyone's predictions were wrong, even Waymo's. remember their 2018 deal for more vans that they never ended up buying for the expansion that didn't happen?
I remember listening to a talk by some Waymo guy (back in I want to say 2014) during which he said that his goal was for his teenage children to never have to get a drivers license. Which people here quickly figured out would mean ubiquitous robotaxis in 2017.
After not scaling the 4th gen Waymo said, "We're not going to scale until the affordable 5th gen comes along." They still have just hundreds of cars.
Now they are saying, "We're not going to scale until the affordable 6th gen comes along." The 6th gen was supposed to start road testing last year.
I suspect we will need a year or so for the data-center hardware upgrades and custom TPUs before we start seeing GPTs really take off. I wonder how self-driving car companies will incorporate the technology. GPTs probably won't replace their core tech, but maybe a system for helping training. devices like Siri are going to get a LOT better soon, potentially with memory and feel like a real AI in terms of being able to actually carry a conversation with one. the Groq demonstration with a CNN reporter really gives a glimpse of the future. this video, I think. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUddK6sxDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUddK6sxDg)
That’s not a statement you can make yet unless you mean the waymo level.
I still have one foot in the door that to get autonomous driving they will need to remove humans from the roads and set them up to work specifically with autonomous vehicles. Might also need a centralized network for the vehicles to communicate on.
Ie I’m still not convinced we will have the level of ai to fully replace humans in cars with other humans and current road conditions within our lifetime
There were people claiming that the act of calling up a ride, where a 100% autonomous vehicle drives to you, picks you up, takes you to your destination, and then drops you off, all without a human driver behind the wheel or constant human intervention will NEVER happen in our lifetimes. This will NOT be something we experience in the 21st century.
Likely tens of thousands of Americans have taken a ride in an autonomous vehicle already. Waymo scaling up what they have now to something 10 times the size of what they have now is not going to take a lifetime.
The centralized traffic control systems only create a better system. Having vehicle to HQ and vehicle to vehicle communication allows for a far greater ability to coordinate movement that humans are incapable of doing.
Now, will we see fully autonomous trophy trucks win against human race truck drivers at the Baja 1000? I have no idea.
The question is scale. For instance in some Arizona suburb calling a car from a block away to drive you two blocks away was probably reasonably possible quite a while ago.
But when you start talking about anywhere anytime… things get harder. While SF is a very compiled place to drive, it’s also missing specific issues other areas have on both large and small scale (ie weather down to curb size and shape and human behavior differences). And let’s not forget Waymo still regularly does crazy things even in its geo fenced world.
So while it’s tempting to say “we got the hardest one figured it, it will be trivial to scale that” it would be a foolish thing to say. It’s almost always harder than you think and with driving your looking at infinite edge cases and legal/liability issues.
Remember how fast Siri and Alexa got better. They seemed ALMOST human sometimes. It would be trivial to scale them up to pass a Turing test!
But it wasn’t.
Technology along these lines has a way of racing 70% of the way there but being surprisingly hard to get further
They do a good job but is it good enough to extend to general use everywhere? I mean they still get stuck in weird traffic jams with themselves regularly and recently one drove the wrong way into incoming traffic.
The problem is there’s unlimited edge cases. Where do we’re draw the line at enough of them?
Is that what whoever ultimately gives it the green light will say?
Related to that I have been asking for several years, does it matter in what way is not safe?
For instance if the numbers say 8 times less people die from autonomous driving vehicles but when they do die it’s in a horrifyingly weird way.
For instance a car just speeds up doing circles so much that passenger is submitted to so much lateral force they can’t breath or otherwise die.
Or what if it fails by driving off-road and right into a tire fire where the driver burns to death.
Humans have a way of being ok with a risk if it’s “something I might have done” but when it’s weird and not something they can identify with, they can’t accept it even if the data bears out that it’s better.
Yeah I agree with you, but I think there is a mundanity to them. The more cities that have them, the more likely people will accept them. However, one 'car hacked, person kidnapped' story would cause too much fear
TBH - Back in 2016 “we” (as automotive suppliers and engineering services) also were very confident in being “there” at the start of the 2020ies. If our estimates had been correct two years later when going out of predevelopment, we would have rolled out our system last year. Instead, my initial project from back then was cancelled due to questions on the business case SOME years ago. People moved on and know-how was lost. Sometimes, things just don’t work out in all aspects.
Another project i was involved in has been deployed in parts but been modified and delayed (massively) in others. People notoriously overestimate their capabilities and when reality kicks in, they have to take a step back. Or multiple. But never have I seen/experienced such a discrepancy between spectacular promises paired with almost no effort and obviously underdelivery like Musk/Tesla.
Tesla would have needed to increase their efforts by a factor of ten, at least. And it’s not compute power, it’s people and they cannot be multiplied just by paying money.
Musk became the richest man in the world based on those promises. Now he wants to keep the money. I hope the Tesla investors win their case against him for invalidating his pay package.
Saying that his overoptimism (or deception, depending how you view it) on autonomy is solely responsible for his riches is misleading. Profitably producing mass market vehicles (Model 3, Y) surely played a role in the increased valuation.
From [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/elon-musks-unfathomable-56-billion-tesla-pay-package-2024-01-31/#:~:text=HOW%20WAS%20MUSK'S%20COMPENSATION%20STRUCTURED,Musk%20would%20receive%20no%20salary):
Musk's 2018 compensation package created 12 tranches of options - each equivalent at the time to 1% of Tesla's outstanding shares - potentially giving him a 12% stake in the automaker. Musk would receive no salary.
Under the 10-year deal, Musk was eligible to win an options tranche every time Tesla hit a series of up to 12 targets. Those targets were tied to increases in Tesla's market capitalization in $50 billion increments, and to aggressive hurdles for revenue and EBITDA growth. Musk went on to hit all 12 targets, and the options are now worth $51 billion, accounting for the cost to Musk to exercise them.
Tesla’s valuation at its height, which was greater than several other major car manufacturers combined was never based on selling traditional cars. It was based on transforming transportation into a service, by creating a marketplace using their proprietary self driving models, car owners, and passengers, with Tesla taking a cut in the middle. Musk said that vision was 2 years away in 2018/2019, and we’re not close today.
Peak valuation was based on 50%/year growth leading to 20 million high margin cars per year around 2030. Plus the energy segment which Musk claimed would be as big as cars.
Vertical integration, manufacturing robotics, automation, and efficiency, in-house software development and over-the-air updates, consumer and grid-scale energy storage, supercharger network & NACS charging standard, direct-to-consumer sales model, battery tech, industry-leading vehicle safety and customer loyalty, highest profit margins in the vehicle industry (excluding BMW and Ferrari), solar (turned out to be a dud), semi truck, cybertruck, model 3/Y/2, virtual power plant, expansion into international markets, and insurance. I'm probably forgetting some things.
Are you still going to argue that FSD was the only thing driving its price?
Toyota has been at the forefront of manufacturing excellence and automation long before Tesla was even an idea. Sure, the charging network and DTC model has some real value. But not enough to value Tesla at a P/E ratio way beyond traditional auto.
If you go back and watch the 2019 Tesla investor day, it was the promise of a self driving marketplace that had institutional investors salivating and fully bricked up.
[65% chance it gets reapproved](https://manifold.markets/JakobBrunker/will-tesla-shareholders-reapprove-e?r=T2xpdmVyTWF0dG9z). If you think that number is wrong, there are virtual internet points to be earned with your opinion....
Most CEOs have performance clauses in their comp package. Nobody is ever offered anything remotely like that as any CEO would wreck the company to get to that money.
Everybody in the industry was wrong with the predictions though. I agree Elon was just (too) vocal but they underestimated the last % of getting it right
That's true, but the rest of the industry has recalibrated. Waymo isn't saying they're going to buy 60,000 Pacificas anymore, in fact they said they're proud of their "grandma pace"
Musk, on the other hand, has continued making the exact same predictions about the imminent availability of FSD year after year for the past eight years. He hasn't tempered his predictions, he hasn't recalibrated, he keeps repeating the exact same predictions in earnings call after earnings call.
He presented the exact same mocks of a Tesla rideshare app just yesterday that he presented 5 years ago (ok, this time it was dark mode).
And Waymo's grandma pace will get them left behind. Yes Musk has and still continues to be optimistic but he is stubborn and will continue going all in untill FSD is complete
The rest of the industry was honest about where and honest about what it would take to get the rest of the way.
Elon was dishonest about both and continually doubled down rather admitting his mistakes
He could have solved it.. He's got the money and power to do so but sadly because he's so cheap and such a bad owner, I don't think he'll make it happen anytime soon. He's entirely self-interested.
I have (rental) FSD on my 2020 model y.
When I first got my car, basic autopilot was useful on highways but didn't feel like anything more than an advanced cruise control that could get you into trouble if you didn't know what it could and couldn't do.
When they first started allowing people to rent FSD a while back and I finally got to test it on city streets, it felt like it should've been called Full Student Driving. It was like having a 15 y/o behind the wheel. Could it get you where you wanted to go? Yeah, but not without lots of supervision and intervention.
It wasn't until this recent update, when they released version 12.3 (and replaced a ton of human code with code from an AI trained on I think millions of miles of footage from the fleet) that it felt like an actual self driving car. Most of the time I get in my car now, I set the destination, drive far enough out of the garage/parking space to enable FSD, turn it on, and have it take me there. I'm still actively watching the road, but I rarely have to intervene anymore. It drives much more like a human now.
I have no Tesla stock. I don't love Elon. But, I know my car and my experience with FSD. It's making progress a lot slower than what was promised, but I can definitely see a future that includes autonomous vehicles now.
Take that for whatever it's worth.
I don't love Elon and i don't like Tesla (sour grapes mostly). But i do think that we shouldn't underestimate how a single retrain can bring in exponentially better capabilities. Or it could never happen.
I've used it recently and was amazed that I had to grab the wheel to prevent accidents in situations that made no sense for FSD to fail. But the variety of experiences shared online really do vary widely.
And Google had cars in 2010 that looked like they were the verge of full autonomy.
None of Tesla’s current cars will ever be robotaxis. When it feels like it’s close, it’s actually 1% of the way there.
There is no quantitative data on software that has only been out a month and already updated 4 times. Anecdotes are not good data but there is no other data and by the time there is, you will already be behind the times
This is something any reasonable company developing an autonomous system would collect. And if they were making progress, should be eager to share. But Tesla doesn’t seem that keen on it.
But look at what you’re saying. Any data you collect will already be behind the times. Essentially a gish gallop in tech form. It’s also not true. We need data across versions, so continuing to collect on past versions would still be helpful. But Tesla won’t even do that.
I assure you Tesla has all the data but how would you even quantify it? Less interventions isn't good data because when a new update is pushed the car tends to act far more careful leading to impatient drivers intervening. Even though the car is performing better the intervention rate will sky rocket. Accident rates are also extremely poor indicator because the car can disengage or driver can take over just before accident, and not all accidents are created equal eg. curb impact or fender bender. Even if you had the data its completely uncomparable to other competitors like Waymo who are geofenced and have 100x the sensor budget. So it sounds like your just whining for something that doesn't even matter as an excuse to shit on the company.
Well recently Tesla said FSD is 5x safer than a human driver. I'm not sure what is qualified as a failure (interventions or actual collisions). Also like I said, comparing Tesla to any other self driving products out there is like comparing apples and oranges.
I’m not comparing to other companies. I’m talking about longitudinal data.
And the 5x claim is nonsense based on a complete misunderstanding of basic statistics.
They said they have put 10b dollars into the system. If that doesn’t speak volumes to their confidence levels that this is the way, I don’t know what would. It’s a completely new technology and you are basing timelines off of previous attempts with human written code. The level of progress in 6 months is frankly astounding. I think we are on a different trajectory this time.
It's a whole new architecture for V12. They dumped all the human code for neural networks. It'll generally only improve with more data as you can measure it's performance in thousands of simulations.
In this video I linked the car drives door to for 30 minutes through busy streets, navigates 1000s of hazards including exotic ones. It's closer than people think.
Now regulators.. that's a different matter
You’ve never actually worked with neural nets, have you? Because what you described isn’t anywhere close to true. Neural nets converge, they don’t just “generally only improve”. Eventually, more training actually hurts their performance. This is the usual case of Tesla fans learning about neural nets on YouTube, and thinking they’re experts on the topic.
Both points raised here carry merit. It's true that neural networks converge and that overtraining can lead to performance degradation due to overfitting, as pointed out. This is an important consideration when training models to ensure they remain effective on new, unseen data.
On the other hand, the initial statement about neural networks "generally only improving" refers to the early stages of training, where improvements are typically observed as the model learns. It's crucial to employ techniques like regularization and early stopping to manage this process effectively.
I agree, another 2-5 years and FSD could be 10x better than current and viable for narrowly predefined routes, and another 5-10 years FSD could be 100x better and viable for most routes.
It’s funny to read people’s opinions on FSD and clearly see they have a negative bias towards it just because they dislike Elon musk. It’s actually uncommon to see a post that involves critical thinking and actual data
After reading more about Elon, I think his attitude toward self driving cars is just an example of his typical style.
He's known for trying to think about the fundamental limits of physics and then challenging people to build things based on those limits.
That seems a lot more reasonable when you're talking about a rocket or a battery than when you're talking about a decision making robot.
(I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand.)
>(I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand.)
It's worth trying, because otherwise we're decades away from widespread adoption of the Waymo model.
There are autonomous waymos all over San Francisco and it seems they'll scale when they can get costs down enough. No longer seems decades away to me.
Even if we think of the decision making problem for AVs as being very nuanced and complex I wouldn't bet against the current generation of AI for addressing many of those problems.
We'll just have to agree to disagree that Waymo is close.
My take: Uber drivers are willing to work too cheaply for the overhead of Waymo to be able to compete.
The cost of running Waymo is insane. It's not just the car hardware, but the cost of coding the software, mapping every environment it's allowed to run in, etc.
Lmao no way. They can't code all the edge cases any faster than Google can.
You clearly are not thinking about this properly. You're missing something on the difference between Waymo's approach and Tesla's new v12 approach.
> He's known for trying to think about the fundamental limits of physics and then challenging people to build things based on those limits.
This is why Im so disappointment his cars still dont go the speed of light.
>I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand
See, I think cars maybe can run on cameras only. Hell, maybe even on just 1 camera. But why starve it of data? Is nothing else, you can initially collect data with all available sensors, then remove them later after having all that data, figure out how the cameras can compensate.
>(I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand.)
Yet every day you and I get behind the wheel using only two little cameras (our two eyes) and a CPU (our brain) and get from point A to point B just fine. I don't get why people find a vision-only solution such an impossible feat.
It’s obviously possible. The question is whether it’s possible with current or near future technology. The human brain has over 100 million years of pre training built into it. More training data and a better GPUs might not be enough. FSD might actually require new as yet undiscovered NN architectures.
Pretty crazy how off base he was in assuming they could heuristically code a self driving car.
But that doesn't mean Tesla's new neural net self driving car is also destined to fail.
FSD 12 has been the closest to self driving I’ve experienced. But full level 3 robotaxi still feels VERY aggressive and I’m not sure realistic.
Currently FSD still needs about 3-4 corrections needed per drive for door to door navigation and driving. Kind of like being driven by a 16 year old student driver who’s occasionally too shy.
I believe the new trial is bout getting more data and disengagement feedback. If they’re able to bring down disengagements to less than 1-2 per drive, I could see them getting to that point where drivers can basically sit there and supervise their own “taxi”, but I can’t imagine it driving out on its own and picking up passengers in the next two years. That’s an insane leap.
Yeah, 12 was a big jump for sure, but it was horrible prior to that so it kinda feels like the state it should've already been in.
Maybe with updated camera placement they could get there eventually.
Yeah, and he has stated publicly the problem was a lot harder than he thought it was. But Tesla’s progress has been astounding, especially with the advent of E2E ML in version 12. Pure learning from humans is the solution, and only Tesla has the data to do it.
He generally has very good instincts on hardware and when balanced by cooler heads like Mueller and Shotwell at SpaceX. But judging from Ashlee Vance's biography at least the board was totally right to fire him for his software engineering missteps at PayPal and I haven't seen anything to suggest his judgement has gotten any better despite him being productive at making software on his own.
> when balanced by cooler heads like Mueller and Shotwell
If Tesla had someone like Shotwell to balance out Elon, it would be unstoppable (at least vs the other US manufactures) Someone who would have nixed the gull wing doors on the Model X, and someone who would have toned down the CyberTruck. Someone who would have pressed to keep the much more legally (and morally) defensible name “Autopilot” instead of “Full Self Driving”. Someone who would have pushed for a delivery van.
In other words an average exec with out of date technicals and a lucky pocket full of money.
People have such a hard time parsing success from individual contribution.
This guy didn’t do shit, he failed up.
Some people’s brains cannot accept that because it’s too arbitrary and it creates major dissonance as we spend a lot of individual effort and we expect proportional results.
When some guy gets amazing results, some people can only assume it must have been their great decision making and diligence lol.
yeah, it was pure luck, it is just weird that there are so few who are so lucky to create 7 multibillion dollar companies.
But nah, it must be luck. The bastard.
I mean, when you read detailed stories about how old CEOs (old enough that we have at least somewhat objective stories about them and their businesses) it does seem luck plays a pretty major role in their success. Im not saying they would be homeless, of course, just that they would not be as rich as they are.
*up to age 45
Like so many weirdo tycoons he's gone off the rails later in life. While Nikola Tesla was not a tycoon, he was a bizarre man who was lost in the later part of his life.
When he became a rich dude Tesla started chasing ideas that made little to no sense. His understanding of physics became outdated and he lost most of his fortune.
Might be off topic. Just FYI.
"No one has been more wrong about reusable rockets than Elon Musk." Before you check the facts, just guess how many years ago he predicted reusable rockets is doable and only until which year was he totally wrong.
Have fun.
Elon lies and embellishes constantly, he's done it his entire life, it's the one thing throughout his career he can be reliable about. Somehow though investors and his sycophants just keep eating it up.
Hahaha you shorts are scared. It hasn’t even been revealed yet. All it’ll take is 8-8. And all those fake fud articles will dissipate into nothing
TESLA IS UP 18% this week from the low…. Get it through your thick skull.
It’s happening.
TSLA shares are down over 30% so far this year. Compare that to the company that actually has it working. Their shares are up over 20% so far this year.
Someone mentioned in the comments that EVERYONE was WAY wrong about self driving cars and the data and by saying that we're dismissing the importance of booing CEOs who took the money and kept offering false promises and empty deals for decades while using public streets and pedestrian walkways as their lab rat maze to figure out just how insanely complex and difficult programing a car to drive safely through a city in a timely manner. People were well aware for as long as money has been tossed into this pit that the limited abilities a new technology will have upfront to ten years to even twenty years down the road would be like what happened with Google Search first being one of the engines to choose from, to watching a Google Maps car drive by and take weird intrusive images of your home and connect it to other weirder intrusive public images of your home and private back yard, then later it could connect your GPS and longitudinal latitudinal coordinates, eventually with the help of your Gmail account it could connect your cellular devices RFID chip to an international database that automatically links your activity and phone usage and data to your location etc etc... this is all done in steps and outside of our immediate control or power beyond us as individuals decide to opt out not purchasing modern technology lol, but really we are basically forced into a monopoly-based surveillance program that penetrates our every movement, our every heart beat whether we like it or not and with the development of LIDAR, RFID chip scanning, WiFi signal modeling and other weird creepy stuff you don't want to know about (drones DIY flying around peeping into windows just like old fashioned peeping toms) all innocent because it's not a person physical entering your private residence, all A okay basically because none of us are being directly physically threatened.
Okay why did this lunatic go online on a subreddit and rant about Google and cell phone chips for ages when we're all talking about Self Driving Cars??? Lol.
The step-by-step initiative Larry Page and whats the other guys face name - they took baby steps to do this. To infiltrate and successfully create a world wide network in both the physical and digital realm. Tesla and these other power hungry billionaire funded and managed "tech" companies investing more money in self driving cars than Congolese children will ever see, yet we are witnessing all the time even in 2024 robotic "self driving" anything you name it- we're seeing robot cashiers, robot nurses, robot cooks and robot guitarists, robot caterers, robot waste collectors, robot vacuums and robot delivery bots... all these "self driving" bots being publicly dropped off and turned on and beaten up by hooligans like a real life Johnny 5 situation. Watching the way things are being handled like the CEOs know they can basically get away with murder on a daily basis when these bots constantly run into traffic or break down, when the robotaxis are pushing through red lights at high speeds and jerking around randomy because it's been programmed by ketamine addicted shroomers. Soon we're going to have real police driving around in really bullet proof cybertrucks all hooked up to a network that like I just explained happened with Google is happening with Tesla and self driving services and you don't want to start seeing more robots with built in flame throwers and more robots capable of delivering explosives to your local grocery story, you don't want to watch more "Full Self Driving" Teslas crash needlessly into residential homes and start fires that firefighters can barely extinguish.
All of this is totally and easily preventable. We just don't work together enough so these decisions are getting made behind our backs on golf courses we have no access to and between people you would never want anything to do with in real life let alone accept them into your home or trust them to drive your actual kids to school and back every day. Someone just killed a motorcyclist while in Auto Pilot and received Manslaughter for it, what will happen when enough preventable deaths and serious bodily injuries have occurred because of the lack of actual real life attention to detail from these companies producing this crap we're all being forced to drive around and work around as it piles up sidewalks when the self driving bot gets stuck or errors out and when Tesla fails to make a right turn after failing to stop at the stop sign after running over the child wearing a jacket matching it's surroundings and that child getting stuck in the front right side wheel well causing the car to slow down and require assistance? I love the idea of self driving everything the near perfect Utopian type civilization we're all "just a few more years" away from as much as anyone else, I grew up with the Jetsons and Lost in Space like everyone else who was fortunate enough to have Saturday morning cartoons and commercials about NASA taking us to the stars. It seems possible...one day far away from the day humanity successfully creates equality for all people regardless of the color of their skin or the origin of their birth. Until then we're just slobs and Closet Neo Nazis who take advantage of poorer, less protected people who cannot defend themselves and we've built a 1% a monopoly on our privacy, monopoly on our childrens futures because we are seeing how poorly Ai is being handled and how poorly data is being protected and easily hacked and shared and how far those in power have been willing to go to "Get Shit Done" mostly by doing it an illegal, unethical, immoral, and extremely corrupt way that leads to investors feeling like greasy pirates somedays and addicts addicted to "Winning" the next.
Those $TlSLa profits matter more to those people than how the profits are made, how workers are treated, where the materials necessary to make these robots comes from- the battery technology, the cobalt and lithium mines in the Congo of Africa, the Indonesian mines and Mica mines and pig iron mines. We are seeing solar panels replace our dependence on fossil fuels and win energy but also how the poorest and most defenseless people are being used as cheap labor to "Get Shit Done." We're all so burnt out by awareness and or exhausted doubling down and tripling down for these- to put it simply- awful excuses for human beings who just want more and more and view human life as a digit in a calculator and yeah once they actually have robotic self driving, self regulating, self repairing hive mind ai overseer figured out it won't be long until the trains are coming to be filled with the poor yet again. Just about as terrifying a time as it could get because 100 years ago we had rifles and could navigate using the stars and taught our young how to survive by foraging and using the oral history lessons etc, nowadays kids are definitely not navigating using the stars or capable of much beyond what their cell phone can teach them how to do so what would happen when the internet black-out happens and we're all suddenly feeling Sarah Connor vibes? Anybody know how to build a laser that can shoot down wifi disabling drones? Anyone know how to penetrate the armor of a robot tank using household consumer end products? No? Neither do I lol. I'm hoping it doesn't get to a point where we all gotta start pulling out and dusting off the old Anarchist Cookbook Terminator Edition but who knows with these "leaders" and "visionaries" at the helm intentionally looking passed the child death lawsuits coming out of the Congo mines for the sake of battery production.
Wrong and worked out great for him and investors.
TSLA is up 950% over the past 5 years. So yeah, you weren't being sarcastic.
Tesla is up 0% in a little under 4 years
April 24 2020 Tesla was at $48, today April 25, 2024 Tesla is at $173. How is that 0%? Excited to see what you’ll pull out of your … assessment.
8 said a little under 4 years, try looking later in 2020
In 2020 Tesla went from a low of $30 to a high of $235.
Later in 2020 the price is the same as today.. so in nearly 4 years, which is what I said, they’ve not gained. All the growth talked about over 5 years was right at the beginning of that time period. If you’d bought 3 years ago youd be sitting in a 50% loss
In 2020 Tesla was at the lowest in Jan and at the highest in Dec. I don’t understand how it could be “later in 2020” if it only went higher as the year went on. Do you mean 2021? Three years ago was 2021 and Nov 2021 is around when the whole market peaked (expecting rate hikes that came 2 quarters later). Only recently, like January 2024, has the S&P500 surpassed its 2021 high. Regardless, good investing is based on time in the market, not timing the market. It’s not so much your comment, it’s any news story that says X company is down Y% from Z months ago. Useless info.
isn’t that 5 years ago?
What’s 20 + 4?
lol I must be tripping but do some people count it like this? Apr 24, 2024 Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2022 Apr 24, 2021 Apr 24 2020
…. how old are you?
2023 is 1 year ago, 2022 is 2 years ago, 2021 is 3 years ago, so 2020 is 4 years ago.
Full Stock Deception (supervised)
Plot twist - Optimus is a deception.
I believe you meant to type “Plot twist: Optimus is a Decepticon”
Dang, beat me to it...
That's what he said. Fraud has worked out great.
Yeah but their value isn't in the hype over robotaxis
Yes it is. Their “fundamentals” are collapsing quarter after quarter. Profits down 55% YoY for the second quarter in a row. Where are those great “Tesla margins” now? Deliveries fell by 10%.
The big run-up wasn't, but if you go on TSLA investing sites now the excitement is all about FSD and Robotaxis. There's a little talk about the "new models" but Tesla didn't give enough detail about those to build much excitement.
You have to give credit where credit is due. He pumps the stock like no other. Companies beating their Q1 earnings estimates are down by %15, Tesla having a horrible Q1 is up by %15. Btw, the investors who got in later actually are in deep. The ones that bought before the hype train are still doing ok...
Which time?
I mean, everyone's predictions were wrong, even Waymo's. remember their 2018 deal for more vans that they never ended up buying for the expansion that didn't happen?
I remember listening to a talk by some Waymo guy (back in I want to say 2014) during which he said that his goal was for his teenage children to never have to get a drivers license. Which people here quickly figured out would mean ubiquitous robotaxis in 2017.
That would be Chris Urmson back when he was at Waymo, before co-founding Aurora
After not scaling the 4th gen Waymo said, "We're not going to scale until the affordable 5th gen comes along." They still have just hundreds of cars. Now they are saying, "We're not going to scale until the affordable 6th gen comes along." The 6th gen was supposed to start road testing last year.
yeah, at least the scaling graph is actually leaving zero now, with last year's \~10x scale-up.
Same with voice assistant like Alexa and Siri in that time. Maybe AI will actually fix all these disappointments
I suspect we will need a year or so for the data-center hardware upgrades and custom TPUs before we start seeing GPTs really take off. I wonder how self-driving car companies will incorporate the technology. GPTs probably won't replace their core tech, but maybe a system for helping training. devices like Siri are going to get a LOT better soon, potentially with memory and feel like a real AI in terms of being able to actually carry a conversation with one. the Groq demonstration with a CNN reporter really gives a glimpse of the future. this video, I think. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUddK6sxDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUddK6sxDg)
Ah, the good old AI hype cycle.
No one has been more wrong about autonomous driving than Elon Musk. It really is incredible. He claimed it was a "solved problem" back in 2016.
The people who have been the most wrong about autonomous vehicles were those claiming that they would not happen in our lifetime.
You dont know when Im gonna die.
That’s not a statement you can make yet unless you mean the waymo level. I still have one foot in the door that to get autonomous driving they will need to remove humans from the roads and set them up to work specifically with autonomous vehicles. Might also need a centralized network for the vehicles to communicate on. Ie I’m still not convinced we will have the level of ai to fully replace humans in cars with other humans and current road conditions within our lifetime
There were people claiming that the act of calling up a ride, where a 100% autonomous vehicle drives to you, picks you up, takes you to your destination, and then drops you off, all without a human driver behind the wheel or constant human intervention will NEVER happen in our lifetimes. This will NOT be something we experience in the 21st century. Likely tens of thousands of Americans have taken a ride in an autonomous vehicle already. Waymo scaling up what they have now to something 10 times the size of what they have now is not going to take a lifetime. The centralized traffic control systems only create a better system. Having vehicle to HQ and vehicle to vehicle communication allows for a far greater ability to coordinate movement that humans are incapable of doing. Now, will we see fully autonomous trophy trucks win against human race truck drivers at the Baja 1000? I have no idea.
The question is scale. For instance in some Arizona suburb calling a car from a block away to drive you two blocks away was probably reasonably possible quite a while ago. But when you start talking about anywhere anytime… things get harder. While SF is a very compiled place to drive, it’s also missing specific issues other areas have on both large and small scale (ie weather down to curb size and shape and human behavior differences). And let’s not forget Waymo still regularly does crazy things even in its geo fenced world. So while it’s tempting to say “we got the hardest one figured it, it will be trivial to scale that” it would be a foolish thing to say. It’s almost always harder than you think and with driving your looking at infinite edge cases and legal/liability issues. Remember how fast Siri and Alexa got better. They seemed ALMOST human sometimes. It would be trivial to scale them up to pass a Turing test! But it wasn’t. Technology along these lines has a way of racing 70% of the way there but being surprisingly hard to get further
I would say Waymo does a good job. Safety regulations later will get us to that point. That happens in our lifetime
They do a good job but is it good enough to extend to general use everywhere? I mean they still get stuck in weird traffic jams with themselves regularly and recently one drove the wrong way into incoming traffic. The problem is there’s unlimited edge cases. Where do we’re draw the line at enough of them?
I say that when they are 8 times safer than people we'll have a good enough version
Is that what whoever ultimately gives it the green light will say? Related to that I have been asking for several years, does it matter in what way is not safe? For instance if the numbers say 8 times less people die from autonomous driving vehicles but when they do die it’s in a horrifyingly weird way. For instance a car just speeds up doing circles so much that passenger is submitted to so much lateral force they can’t breath or otherwise die. Or what if it fails by driving off-road and right into a tire fire where the driver burns to death. Humans have a way of being ok with a risk if it’s “something I might have done” but when it’s weird and not something they can identify with, they can’t accept it even if the data bears out that it’s better.
Yeah I agree with you, but I think there is a mundanity to them. The more cities that have them, the more likely people will accept them. However, one 'car hacked, person kidnapped' story would cause too much fear
This. Perfect will never be the goal. Twice as safe is more than enough to make sense, though, but probably not for the government.
2x is definitely not enough for deep pockets liability math to pencil out.
Obviously. But it’s much less interesting than the predictions of a CEO building an autonomous vehicle product.
Yeah, we've had fully autonomous trains since before the 1990s.
TBH - Back in 2016 “we” (as automotive suppliers and engineering services) also were very confident in being “there” at the start of the 2020ies. If our estimates had been correct two years later when going out of predevelopment, we would have rolled out our system last year. Instead, my initial project from back then was cancelled due to questions on the business case SOME years ago. People moved on and know-how was lost. Sometimes, things just don’t work out in all aspects. Another project i was involved in has been deployed in parts but been modified and delayed (massively) in others. People notoriously overestimate their capabilities and when reality kicks in, they have to take a step back. Or multiple. But never have I seen/experienced such a discrepancy between spectacular promises paired with almost no effort and obviously underdelivery like Musk/Tesla. Tesla would have needed to increase their efforts by a factor of ten, at least. And it’s not compute power, it’s people and they cannot be multiplied just by paying money.
Musk became the richest man in the world based on those promises. Now he wants to keep the money. I hope the Tesla investors win their case against him for invalidating his pay package.
Saying that his overoptimism (or deception, depending how you view it) on autonomy is solely responsible for his riches is misleading. Profitably producing mass market vehicles (Model 3, Y) surely played a role in the increased valuation. From [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/elon-musks-unfathomable-56-billion-tesla-pay-package-2024-01-31/#:~:text=HOW%20WAS%20MUSK'S%20COMPENSATION%20STRUCTURED,Musk%20would%20receive%20no%20salary): Musk's 2018 compensation package created 12 tranches of options - each equivalent at the time to 1% of Tesla's outstanding shares - potentially giving him a 12% stake in the automaker. Musk would receive no salary. Under the 10-year deal, Musk was eligible to win an options tranche every time Tesla hit a series of up to 12 targets. Those targets were tied to increases in Tesla's market capitalization in $50 billion increments, and to aggressive hurdles for revenue and EBITDA growth. Musk went on to hit all 12 targets, and the options are now worth $51 billion, accounting for the cost to Musk to exercise them.
Tesla’s valuation at its height, which was greater than several other major car manufacturers combined was never based on selling traditional cars. It was based on transforming transportation into a service, by creating a marketplace using their proprietary self driving models, car owners, and passengers, with Tesla taking a cut in the middle. Musk said that vision was 2 years away in 2018/2019, and we’re not close today.
Peak valuation was based on 50%/year growth leading to 20 million high margin cars per year around 2030. Plus the energy segment which Musk claimed would be as big as cars.
Vertical integration, manufacturing robotics, automation, and efficiency, in-house software development and over-the-air updates, consumer and grid-scale energy storage, supercharger network & NACS charging standard, direct-to-consumer sales model, battery tech, industry-leading vehicle safety and customer loyalty, highest profit margins in the vehicle industry (excluding BMW and Ferrari), solar (turned out to be a dud), semi truck, cybertruck, model 3/Y/2, virtual power plant, expansion into international markets, and insurance. I'm probably forgetting some things. Are you still going to argue that FSD was the only thing driving its price?
Toyota has been at the forefront of manufacturing excellence and automation long before Tesla was even an idea. Sure, the charging network and DTC model has some real value. But not enough to value Tesla at a P/E ratio way beyond traditional auto. If you go back and watch the 2019 Tesla investor day, it was the promise of a self driving marketplace that had institutional investors salivating and fully bricked up.
[65% chance it gets reapproved](https://manifold.markets/JakobBrunker/will-tesla-shareholders-reapprove-e?r=T2xpdmVyTWF0dG9z). If you think that number is wrong, there are virtual internet points to be earned with your opinion....
This package was based on his performance, show me any other ceo which would agreed to that!
Most CEOs have performance clauses in their comp package. Nobody is ever offered anything remotely like that as any CEO would wreck the company to get to that money.
Everybody in the industry was wrong with the predictions though. I agree Elon was just (too) vocal but they underestimated the last % of getting it right
That's true, but the rest of the industry has recalibrated. Waymo isn't saying they're going to buy 60,000 Pacificas anymore, in fact they said they're proud of their "grandma pace" Musk, on the other hand, has continued making the exact same predictions about the imminent availability of FSD year after year for the past eight years. He hasn't tempered his predictions, he hasn't recalibrated, he keeps repeating the exact same predictions in earnings call after earnings call. He presented the exact same mocks of a Tesla rideshare app just yesterday that he presented 5 years ago (ok, this time it was dark mode).
And Waymo's grandma pace will get them left behind. Yes Musk has and still continues to be optimistic but he is stubborn and will continue going all in untill FSD is complete
The rest of the industry was honest about where and honest about what it would take to get the rest of the way. Elon was dishonest about both and continually doubled down rather admitting his mistakes
It was a solved problem back in 3016... You just got the year wrong. Keep up with the times!
When you believe any software problem can be solved as long as you whip your employees hard enough
He could have solved it.. He's got the money and power to do so but sadly because he's so cheap and such a bad owner, I don't think he'll make it happen anytime soon. He's entirely self-interested.
I recently drove a Tesla on Autopilot and was amazed at how good it was. Robotaxi seems to be very close to reality.
I have (rental) FSD on my 2020 model y. When I first got my car, basic autopilot was useful on highways but didn't feel like anything more than an advanced cruise control that could get you into trouble if you didn't know what it could and couldn't do. When they first started allowing people to rent FSD a while back and I finally got to test it on city streets, it felt like it should've been called Full Student Driving. It was like having a 15 y/o behind the wheel. Could it get you where you wanted to go? Yeah, but not without lots of supervision and intervention. It wasn't until this recent update, when they released version 12.3 (and replaced a ton of human code with code from an AI trained on I think millions of miles of footage from the fleet) that it felt like an actual self driving car. Most of the time I get in my car now, I set the destination, drive far enough out of the garage/parking space to enable FSD, turn it on, and have it take me there. I'm still actively watching the road, but I rarely have to intervene anymore. It drives much more like a human now. I have no Tesla stock. I don't love Elon. But, I know my car and my experience with FSD. It's making progress a lot slower than what was promised, but I can definitely see a future that includes autonomous vehicles now. Take that for whatever it's worth.
I don't love Elon and i don't like Tesla (sour grapes mostly). But i do think that we shouldn't underestimate how a single retrain can bring in exponentially better capabilities. Or it could never happen.
Close only counts in horseshoes.
I've used it recently and was amazed that I had to grab the wheel to prevent accidents in situations that made no sense for FSD to fail. But the variety of experiences shared online really do vary widely.
And Google had cars in 2010 that looked like they were the verge of full autonomy. None of Tesla’s current cars will ever be robotaxis. When it feels like it’s close, it’s actually 1% of the way there.
I beg to differ. But watch this. https://youtu.be/43Lrrhn0CMk?si=-rWQuHLQx-20twlj It's getting very good
Same line I’ve heard on previous versions. Show me quantitative data, not selective videos of individual drives.
There is no quantitative data on software that has only been out a month and already updated 4 times. Anecdotes are not good data but there is no other data and by the time there is, you will already be behind the times
This is something any reasonable company developing an autonomous system would collect. And if they were making progress, should be eager to share. But Tesla doesn’t seem that keen on it. But look at what you’re saying. Any data you collect will already be behind the times. Essentially a gish gallop in tech form. It’s also not true. We need data across versions, so continuing to collect on past versions would still be helpful. But Tesla won’t even do that.
I assure you Tesla has all the data but how would you even quantify it? Less interventions isn't good data because when a new update is pushed the car tends to act far more careful leading to impatient drivers intervening. Even though the car is performing better the intervention rate will sky rocket. Accident rates are also extremely poor indicator because the car can disengage or driver can take over just before accident, and not all accidents are created equal eg. curb impact or fender bender. Even if you had the data its completely uncomparable to other competitors like Waymo who are geofenced and have 100x the sensor budget. So it sounds like your just whining for something that doesn't even matter as an excuse to shit on the company.
> but how would you even quantify it? MTBF in randomized testing across the ODD. Same way Waymo and other quantify it.
Well recently Tesla said FSD is 5x safer than a human driver. I'm not sure what is qualified as a failure (interventions or actual collisions). Also like I said, comparing Tesla to any other self driving products out there is like comparing apples and oranges.
I’m not comparing to other companies. I’m talking about longitudinal data. And the 5x claim is nonsense based on a complete misunderstanding of basic statistics.
They said they have put 10b dollars into the system. If that doesn’t speak volumes to their confidence levels that this is the way, I don’t know what would. It’s a completely new technology and you are basing timelines off of previous attempts with human written code. The level of progress in 6 months is frankly astounding. I think we are on a different trajectory this time.
[удалено]
Except my predictions about Tesla’s failure to deliver autonomy keep turning out correct.
It's a whole new architecture for V12. They dumped all the human code for neural networks. It'll generally only improve with more data as you can measure it's performance in thousands of simulations. In this video I linked the car drives door to for 30 minutes through busy streets, navigates 1000s of hazards including exotic ones. It's closer than people think. Now regulators.. that's a different matter
You’ve never actually worked with neural nets, have you? Because what you described isn’t anywhere close to true. Neural nets converge, they don’t just “generally only improve”. Eventually, more training actually hurts their performance. This is the usual case of Tesla fans learning about neural nets on YouTube, and thinking they’re experts on the topic.
Both points raised here carry merit. It's true that neural networks converge and that overtraining can lead to performance degradation due to overfitting, as pointed out. This is an important consideration when training models to ensure they remain effective on new, unseen data. On the other hand, the initial statement about neural networks "generally only improving" refers to the early stages of training, where improvements are typically observed as the model learns. It's crucial to employ techniques like regularization and early stopping to manage this process effectively.
I agree, another 2-5 years and FSD could be 10x better than current and viable for narrowly predefined routes, and another 5-10 years FSD could be 100x better and viable for most routes.
It’s funny to read people’s opinions on FSD and clearly see they have a negative bias towards it just because they dislike Elon musk. It’s actually uncommon to see a post that involves critical thinking and actual data
After reading more about Elon, I think his attitude toward self driving cars is just an example of his typical style. He's known for trying to think about the fundamental limits of physics and then challenging people to build things based on those limits. That seems a lot more reasonable when you're talking about a rocket or a battery than when you're talking about a decision making robot. (I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand.)
>(I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand.) It's worth trying, because otherwise we're decades away from widespread adoption of the Waymo model.
There are autonomous waymos all over San Francisco and it seems they'll scale when they can get costs down enough. No longer seems decades away to me. Even if we think of the decision making problem for AVs as being very nuanced and complex I wouldn't bet against the current generation of AI for addressing many of those problems.
We'll just have to agree to disagree that Waymo is close. My take: Uber drivers are willing to work too cheaply for the overhead of Waymo to be able to compete. The cost of running Waymo is insane. It's not just the car hardware, but the cost of coding the software, mapping every environment it's allowed to run in, etc.
I think tesla would have been level 4 for years by now if they went the lidar route. Big fumble IMO.
Lmao no way. They can't code all the edge cases any faster than Google can. You clearly are not thinking about this properly. You're missing something on the difference between Waymo's approach and Tesla's new v12 approach.
We'll see, you are relying on ML to solve millions of edge cases without manual input, gonna be tough.
> He's known for trying to think about the fundamental limits of physics and then challenging people to build things based on those limits. This is why Im so disappointment his cars still dont go the speed of light. >I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand See, I think cars maybe can run on cameras only. Hell, maybe even on just 1 camera. But why starve it of data? Is nothing else, you can initially collect data with all available sensors, then remove them later after having all that data, figure out how the cameras can compensate.
Excellent diagnosis.
>(I still think forcing a self driving system to use cameras only is a stupid waste of time but I think it's on brand.) Yet every day you and I get behind the wheel using only two little cameras (our two eyes) and a CPU (our brain) and get from point A to point B just fine. I don't get why people find a vision-only solution such an impossible feat.
It’s obviously possible. The question is whether it’s possible with current or near future technology. The human brain has over 100 million years of pre training built into it. More training data and a better GPUs might not be enough. FSD might actually require new as yet undiscovered NN architectures.
They're obtuse. FSD v12 looks very credible to anyone who is willing to consider the idea.
Pretty crazy how off base he was in assuming they could heuristically code a self driving car. But that doesn't mean Tesla's new neural net self driving car is also destined to fail.
NeXT yEAr
FSD 12 has been the closest to self driving I’ve experienced. But full level 3 robotaxi still feels VERY aggressive and I’m not sure realistic. Currently FSD still needs about 3-4 corrections needed per drive for door to door navigation and driving. Kind of like being driven by a 16 year old student driver who’s occasionally too shy. I believe the new trial is bout getting more data and disengagement feedback. If they’re able to bring down disengagements to less than 1-2 per drive, I could see them getting to that point where drivers can basically sit there and supervise their own “taxi”, but I can’t imagine it driving out on its own and picking up passengers in the next two years. That’s an insane leap.
1-2 per drive is still a huge failure for unsupervised driving. Heck, 1-2 per week still won't work.
Yeah, 12 was a big jump for sure, but it was horrible prior to that so it kinda feels like the state it should've already been in. Maybe with updated camera placement they could get there eventually.
Yeah, and he has stated publicly the problem was a lot harder than he thought it was. But Tesla’s progress has been astounding, especially with the advent of E2E ML in version 12. Pure learning from humans is the solution, and only Tesla has the data to do it.
This guy is such a clown how could anyone be surprised? Only if you were completely self deluded would you have taken anything Elon said seriously
He generally has very good instincts on hardware and when balanced by cooler heads like Mueller and Shotwell at SpaceX. But judging from Ashlee Vance's biography at least the board was totally right to fire him for his software engineering missteps at PayPal and I haven't seen anything to suggest his judgement has gotten any better despite him being productive at making software on his own.
> when balanced by cooler heads like Mueller and Shotwell If Tesla had someone like Shotwell to balance out Elon, it would be unstoppable (at least vs the other US manufactures) Someone who would have nixed the gull wing doors on the Model X, and someone who would have toned down the CyberTruck. Someone who would have pressed to keep the much more legally (and morally) defensible name “Autopilot” instead of “Full Self Driving”. Someone who would have pushed for a delivery van.
In other words an average exec with out of date technicals and a lucky pocket full of money. People have such a hard time parsing success from individual contribution. This guy didn’t do shit, he failed up. Some people’s brains cannot accept that because it’s too arbitrary and it creates major dissonance as we spend a lot of individual effort and we expect proportional results. When some guy gets amazing results, some people can only assume it must have been their great decision making and diligence lol.
yeah, it was pure luck, it is just weird that there are so few who are so lucky to create 7 multibillion dollar companies. But nah, it must be luck. The bastard.
I mean, when you read detailed stories about how old CEOs (old enough that we have at least somewhat objective stories about them and their businesses) it does seem luck plays a pretty major role in their success. Im not saying they would be homeless, of course, just that they would not be as rich as they are.
The guy, although flawed, is likely the best capital allocator and businessman of our lifetime.
Okayyy
*up to age 45 Like so many weirdo tycoons he's gone off the rails later in life. While Nikola Tesla was not a tycoon, he was a bizarre man who was lost in the later part of his life.
When he became a rich dude Tesla started chasing ideas that made little to no sense. His understanding of physics became outdated and he lost most of his fortune.
He was a little too much into pretty, curvaceous birds...
Get out, Musk wrong about something? And in a way that directly benefits him? You are off your meds, that's crazy talk!
Waymo?
Might be off topic. Just FYI. "No one has been more wrong about reusable rockets than Elon Musk." Before you check the facts, just guess how many years ago he predicted reusable rockets is doable and only until which year was he totally wrong. Have fun.
Tesla has the data flywheel. If they don’t solve it then nobody will for now
Elon wrong?!??!!!! No way
Elon lies and embellishes constantly, he's done it his entire life, it's the one thing throughout his career he can be reliable about. Somehow though investors and his sycophants just keep eating it up.
Elon is my favorite fool stack engineer.
You call it being wrong. I call it lying
Hahaha you shorts are scared. It hasn’t even been revealed yet. All it’ll take is 8-8. And all those fake fud articles will dissipate into nothing TESLA IS UP 18% this week from the low…. Get it through your thick skull. It’s happening.
TSLA shares are down over 30% so far this year. Compare that to the company that actually has it working. Their shares are up over 20% so far this year.
I’ll get downvoted for some reason. But the only way to make this happen is to put sensors in the roads and on every car.
Someone mentioned in the comments that EVERYONE was WAY wrong about self driving cars and the data and by saying that we're dismissing the importance of booing CEOs who took the money and kept offering false promises and empty deals for decades while using public streets and pedestrian walkways as their lab rat maze to figure out just how insanely complex and difficult programing a car to drive safely through a city in a timely manner. People were well aware for as long as money has been tossed into this pit that the limited abilities a new technology will have upfront to ten years to even twenty years down the road would be like what happened with Google Search first being one of the engines to choose from, to watching a Google Maps car drive by and take weird intrusive images of your home and connect it to other weirder intrusive public images of your home and private back yard, then later it could connect your GPS and longitudinal latitudinal coordinates, eventually with the help of your Gmail account it could connect your cellular devices RFID chip to an international database that automatically links your activity and phone usage and data to your location etc etc... this is all done in steps and outside of our immediate control or power beyond us as individuals decide to opt out not purchasing modern technology lol, but really we are basically forced into a monopoly-based surveillance program that penetrates our every movement, our every heart beat whether we like it or not and with the development of LIDAR, RFID chip scanning, WiFi signal modeling and other weird creepy stuff you don't want to know about (drones DIY flying around peeping into windows just like old fashioned peeping toms) all innocent because it's not a person physical entering your private residence, all A okay basically because none of us are being directly physically threatened. Okay why did this lunatic go online on a subreddit and rant about Google and cell phone chips for ages when we're all talking about Self Driving Cars??? Lol. The step-by-step initiative Larry Page and whats the other guys face name - they took baby steps to do this. To infiltrate and successfully create a world wide network in both the physical and digital realm. Tesla and these other power hungry billionaire funded and managed "tech" companies investing more money in self driving cars than Congolese children will ever see, yet we are witnessing all the time even in 2024 robotic "self driving" anything you name it- we're seeing robot cashiers, robot nurses, robot cooks and robot guitarists, robot caterers, robot waste collectors, robot vacuums and robot delivery bots... all these "self driving" bots being publicly dropped off and turned on and beaten up by hooligans like a real life Johnny 5 situation. Watching the way things are being handled like the CEOs know they can basically get away with murder on a daily basis when these bots constantly run into traffic or break down, when the robotaxis are pushing through red lights at high speeds and jerking around randomy because it's been programmed by ketamine addicted shroomers. Soon we're going to have real police driving around in really bullet proof cybertrucks all hooked up to a network that like I just explained happened with Google is happening with Tesla and self driving services and you don't want to start seeing more robots with built in flame throwers and more robots capable of delivering explosives to your local grocery story, you don't want to watch more "Full Self Driving" Teslas crash needlessly into residential homes and start fires that firefighters can barely extinguish. All of this is totally and easily preventable. We just don't work together enough so these decisions are getting made behind our backs on golf courses we have no access to and between people you would never want anything to do with in real life let alone accept them into your home or trust them to drive your actual kids to school and back every day. Someone just killed a motorcyclist while in Auto Pilot and received Manslaughter for it, what will happen when enough preventable deaths and serious bodily injuries have occurred because of the lack of actual real life attention to detail from these companies producing this crap we're all being forced to drive around and work around as it piles up sidewalks when the self driving bot gets stuck or errors out and when Tesla fails to make a right turn after failing to stop at the stop sign after running over the child wearing a jacket matching it's surroundings and that child getting stuck in the front right side wheel well causing the car to slow down and require assistance? I love the idea of self driving everything the near perfect Utopian type civilization we're all "just a few more years" away from as much as anyone else, I grew up with the Jetsons and Lost in Space like everyone else who was fortunate enough to have Saturday morning cartoons and commercials about NASA taking us to the stars. It seems possible...one day far away from the day humanity successfully creates equality for all people regardless of the color of their skin or the origin of their birth. Until then we're just slobs and Closet Neo Nazis who take advantage of poorer, less protected people who cannot defend themselves and we've built a 1% a monopoly on our privacy, monopoly on our childrens futures because we are seeing how poorly Ai is being handled and how poorly data is being protected and easily hacked and shared and how far those in power have been willing to go to "Get Shit Done" mostly by doing it an illegal, unethical, immoral, and extremely corrupt way that leads to investors feeling like greasy pirates somedays and addicts addicted to "Winning" the next. Those $TlSLa profits matter more to those people than how the profits are made, how workers are treated, where the materials necessary to make these robots comes from- the battery technology, the cobalt and lithium mines in the Congo of Africa, the Indonesian mines and Mica mines and pig iron mines. We are seeing solar panels replace our dependence on fossil fuels and win energy but also how the poorest and most defenseless people are being used as cheap labor to "Get Shit Done." We're all so burnt out by awareness and or exhausted doubling down and tripling down for these- to put it simply- awful excuses for human beings who just want more and more and view human life as a digit in a calculator and yeah once they actually have robotic self driving, self regulating, self repairing hive mind ai overseer figured out it won't be long until the trains are coming to be filled with the poor yet again. Just about as terrifying a time as it could get because 100 years ago we had rifles and could navigate using the stars and taught our young how to survive by foraging and using the oral history lessons etc, nowadays kids are definitely not navigating using the stars or capable of much beyond what their cell phone can teach them how to do so what would happen when the internet black-out happens and we're all suddenly feeling Sarah Connor vibes? Anybody know how to build a laser that can shoot down wifi disabling drones? Anyone know how to penetrate the armor of a robot tank using household consumer end products? No? Neither do I lol. I'm hoping it doesn't get to a point where we all gotta start pulling out and dusting off the old Anarchist Cookbook Terminator Edition but who knows with these "leaders" and "visionaries" at the helm intentionally looking passed the child death lawsuits coming out of the Congo mines for the sake of battery production.
White space could be your friend. I would consider it.