Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business

Once self-driving has been generally "cracked", with the normal mobility of talent, most other car manufacturers will catch up on a timespan that's too small for the first-mover to completely dominate the market with that alone.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_(company)

Tesla’s brand is toxic and seeing declining sales, China is doing the manufacturing, and no one is going to license Tesla’s inferior unproven technology compared to Waymo.

One potential moat is just the amount of data from real drivers that Tesla use to train their models via imitation learning. If this turns out the be important and needed for a general solution (which I believe it will), then only companies that manufacture cars at scale can hope to compete. And at this point, only Chinese companies are forward looking enough to put the right hardware for self driving (and the ability to collect training data) into their cars by default. Tesla has the vertical integration that makes this whole thing much easier: they make the cars, the inference compute, the software AND the training clusters. Can you imagine GM or Ford building a GPU cluster for a couple of billion?

Now I think of Tesla.

But from my news bubble, and my perception of much of Europe... it seems to me that it is very likely a regulation like this would happen in Europe, probably through a well-meaning green initiative.

Funny how perceptions of others can be so drastically different!

In that case, there would be absolutely no way we could allow manual driving. The benefits are just too great. Obviously I'm talking about a best case scenario where things actually work as they should.

Many people enjoy writing code 'manually' too. But overwhelmingly, people opt to have LLMs write most of it for them. There is no way in hell I'm ever reading api docs or writing python scripts by hand ever again with gemini, unless gemini craps the bed and i'm forced to do so.

listen man i'm a petrol head too... look, when FSD comes out as-standard, this turning-the-steering-wheel malarky is done-zo. its over. yes theres people who enjoy driving a car, but if you offerd people full self driving in every car with no price premium, 99% of the population would never touch a steering wheel again.

>but over here in Europe

bro, Europeans love daddy government to come and ** their ** up. all you have to do is tell the euro "FSD decreases traffic accidents by 5%!" and they will do the policing themselves.

I can already hear it: "erm excuse me, is your car not FSD? you know, you're endangering myself and others by driving that on the road, right? do you have a license for your manually-operated car?"

They can, and have been.

> Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?

This has nothing to do with industry. Calculators were actually a PAID position and they went away, regardless of the number of people that enjoy mathalons.

> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.

This is incorrect, historically and practically.

Roads and highways, in an economic metaphor, are rivers of money. They provide capital velocity as well as smoothing labor and consumer availability.

Due to the economy of scale, mass transportation and self locomotion is the only practical transport for people at the highest densities. GOODS, on the other hand, require a powered engine to move in and out. Those stacks of soda can't be transported by subway. The sodas produce trash, that also can't travel by subway. Roads themselves and trucking, in general, have kept personal vehicles in service. Cars still exist in London and New York, over a century later for this very reason.

Motorized bikes dominate many cities in Asia. I can see that becoming a preferred mode in western cities, over time. After that, I could also see personal driving becoming regulated out of existence (ie huge fees to run a personal vehicle in a hyper-urban area). Maybe, just maybe, grassroots political will could have pushed cars off the road (so to speak) when the climate crisis was a meager priority, but I have lost faith in that avenue.

It would be even less straightforward in the US than in Europe. Many cities are 100% car-dependent.

1. Not as many as you think, IMHO.

2. Those folks can perhaps not turn on the self-driving feature.

3. Even those that do may have times where it is a chore (stop-and-go traffic).

> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.

If self-driving can be shown to be statistically safer than hour human-driving then your insurance company may offer you discounts for always using it. No government regulation needed: those bearing the risks will incentivize you to do the less risk-y thing.

Just because you enjoy something doesn't make it the right thing to do or allow. This as a person who does not believe Tesla has the right formula to actually achieve FSD and that a pure vision approach would never work in the way they want it to (no interventions, all weather, etc).

There will come a time when technology advances enough that self driving with be an order of magnitude safer than human driving, and we will have to battle with the fact that allowing humans to do so will be objectively worse for society. That may not actually be anytime soon, but it may happen.

Maybe, maybe not. It's quite remarkable how far he's been able to go with camera only. And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well. There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR. At worst, the camera tech has kept Tesla at the front of where the industry has actually been going the last 5 years.

Looking at the bigger picture, I'm not sure you can point to someone who has made as many good bets in different engineering fields as Elon. Elon is the opposite of the Gell Manning effect: you think he's wrong about areas you are educated about, and he proves you wrong. You can find my posts on HN mocking SpaceX for going with an oxygen/RP1 rocket as if we were back at the dawn of space travel. Boy was that wrong!

If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.

Now there is none of that, not many people talking about him in a political light and I'm certain public sentiment about him has gone up given it is now already more publicly acceptable to talk about things adjacent to him and his companies.

There will be die hards who will never change, but its clearly apparent on social media he is no longer getting anywhere near the hate he used to, and even people who previously weren't are now publicly praising things like Grok and recent SpaceX missions.

but it is the most engaging and entertaining! X.com vindicated yet again...

It is as though people need it to be true that someone holding opposing opinions CANNOT possibly also be smart and competent, it's like the ideology possessing his detractors can't conceive of opposition as intelligent. (Notice that this is a phenomenon from left leaning to right leaning, though the right to left version of this phenomenon is something along the lines of: 'this person is smart but ${"evil" | "lacking common sense"}'). I'm fascinated by this.

That might be useful with GPS. I am thinking of some worst cases.

And of course, that doesn't help you avoid all the others out there without it, facing over-bright oncoming headlights, and guessing which way the road bends.

And deer.

Remember the motto: Drive carefully. The life you save may be mine.

According to Martin, he is their first major investor.

According to mainstream media, he is the co-founder.

I'd call him the second, but the fanboys would be majorly pissed.

Please don't attack a straw-man.

Quarter over quarter, vehicle deliveries increased 14%.

That's most definitely not a "collapse."