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Tesla's 'Master Plan, Part Deux' Includes Trucks, Buses and Ride-Sharing (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Los Angeles Times: After teasing Part 2 of his "master product plan" for over a week, Elon Musk finally delivered. Los Angeles Times reports: "In a blog post published on the automaker's website, Musk introduced a multiyear, four-pronged strategy that includes new kinds of Tesla vehicles, expanded solar initiatives, updates on Tesla's 'autopilot' technology and a ride-sharing program. Commercial trucks, buses, a 'future compact SUV' and a 'new kind of pickup truck' will be added to Tesla's fleet of electric cars. A heavy-duty truck called the Tesla Semi and a shrunken bus that Musk called a 'high passenger density urban transport' vehicle are in early development stages 'and should be ready for unveiling next year,' he said. The smaller bus would be designed without a center aisle, with seats close to the entrances, and would be able to automatically pace themselves with traffic, the post said. The bus driver would become a 'fleet manager.' Musk also used the master plan to defend his bid for rooftop solar power provider SolarCity and said he aims to make Tesla's Autopilot robotic driver-assist system 10 times safer than cars that humans drive manually. Musk also plans to move Tesla into the popular ride-sharing business, not only with an Uber-like fleet but also with an app that lets Tesla owners rent out their vehicles when they're not using them, perhaps defraying a portion of their auto loans. This will happen, he said, 'when true self-driving is approved by regulators,' a turn of events that's at least several years away."
Or wise up and use such safety features as safety features not as default state.
Just because you have Anti-Lock brakes and All wheel drive. It doesn't mean you can drive like you would normally in snowy/icy conditions. These features that kick in make sure you are safe when an problem occurs, not as your main state.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
to see the Tesla hating Luddites flail.
He hasn't finished the first master plan yet.
He should try trains. It might be easier to get the autopilot working.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's pretty much all been done, hasn't it? Even electric pickups have been done. They've been done with independent rear suspension, with or without unibody, cab-forward, cab-over, mid-engine, rear flat engine, etc etc etc. Granted, most of those were concepts, but some of them were production somewhere, somewhen, or even still are. What could possibly be new and still reasonably be called a pickup?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with this "Sharing" Economy is that they had been abused to become a major income source.
It was intended for commuters to find people going to the same place. However it morphed into an unregulated taxi service.
The same thing with Air B&B Rent out your home while you go on vacation. Turned into a make shift hotel service.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've been dreaming of it ever since I saw the movie.
...it'll be at least 20 times safer than people who drive automatic.
Autopilot does exactly what Tesla claims it does. It doesn't do what some people seem to think it does, but that's hardly Tesla's fault.
Technically, it's an unregulated limousine service.
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What is it with this guy? He announces all kind of grand plans before he can even demonstrate he has the basic things right.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Depends... For example, many countries distinguish between licensed cabs and private hire car (limo) services: cabs need a license and meet minimums standards, and the fares are often fixed. They can do curbside pickups if you flag them down, while private hire cars have to work through a dispatcher. That's where the discussion starts: the cabbies (and some legislators) have argued that having an app that instantly routes the nearest car to your location amounts to flagging down a driver, if there are enough of these cars roaming the streets.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That's a bit different. In the first case, Tesla is doing all the hard work and running the cars seems to be just going 5% extra. If you want to buy a record label that's a heavy investment.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most people who spend more then $15K on a car will want it for all purposes and won't want to artificially limit themselves into short trips.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Where are the interconnected cars we were/are promised?
Where's the open standards that would allow - say - a Ford 20 miles ahead to warn an Audi or a Toyota of an icy patch, a crash or traffic slowdown?
Hell, GM has had OnStar for ages and it cannot do that even within its own brand.
Seems like the OEMs and the Googles, Apples etc. are too busy duking it out as to who will control the customer and her information to actually give two shits about what we actually want and need.
I'm guessing if a significant number (unlikely) of Tesla cars, bus and trucks get built than at least they'll be talking to each other.
Uber's only value is its network effect.
Anyone can copy the Uber app and model and competes against it. Most will fail because the network effect is a big barrier to entry.
Just like Facebook.
It is a beta feature that requires driver attention. Looking at accident rate I'd say it is clearly safer than human drivers (3-4 accidents in 130 million miles).
Are you seriously unable to tell the difference between an official company sponsored concept and some fanboy renderings?
"grand" implies "ambitious" and "plan" implies "future". If you just want a quarterly update then google for that.
Not sure how that's abuse, but that's none of my business.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
What are you comparing to? Is there a statistic on how many manual accidents would happen on open highway just following the vehicle in front with no passing?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most people with 2 cars would be perfectly fine even if one of them was a range-limited EV.
I would also say that most people wants clean air to breath.
How many families can afford to use a $150K car as their second vehicle? There was recently an article that most families can only afford $10K for their primary vehicle. If I buy a vehicle, then the one I bought before is no longer reliable enough for long trips so I need the new one to do it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I meant a regular (non-Tesla) EV would be fine a second vehicle for most people. A Tesla is a fine first vehicle for most people. Don't forget many people spends as much on gas as on their car.
A lot of people have two cars and both are reliable enough for a long trip.
Ok I googled on "accident statistics for only the easy part of highway driving that Autopilot will work on" and didn't find that break down. The only stats are for highways in general, for much of which Autopilot will turn itself off and make the driver handle manually.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Actually autopilot works on city streets as well. It reads speed limit signs, it follows the car in front of it, it stays in lane... The only thing I can think off that it does not do is to obey traffic lights and stop signs.
With Tesla building trucks, terrorists will become optional with the self-driving mode.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Not 100% true. John Zimmer, founder of Lyft, actually have a real rideshare platform before selling it to Enterprise (car rental, vanpool, etc.) to focus on Lyft. Zimride, as it was called, was widely adopted by a number of cities and university campuses to facilitate carpool matching with the option of reimbursement. Lyft was founded to make money.
Buses are notorious for slurping fuel and stopping every few blocks. Every time I've seen the thick black cloud of smoke as they pull away from a stop, I'm reminded that they're a prime candidate for regenerative braking. I'm glad to see Tesla taking the effort to scale their technology to a platform that could greatly benefit from it. I hope they do well. Even if they're not plug-in hybrids with huge battery banks, just the ability to reuse the kinetic energy of braking would be huge.
F9-001: Success
F9-002: Success
F9-003: Success
F9-004: Primary mission success, secondary mission scrubbed due to ISS safety rules
F9-005: Success
F9-006: Success (first v1.1 flight)
F9-007: Success
F9-008: Success
F9-009: Success (first flight with landing legs)
F9-010: Success
F9-011: Success
F9-013: Success
F9-012: Success
F9-014: Success
F9-015: Success
F9-016: Success
F9-017: Success
F9-018: Success
F9-020: Failure, RUD at T+150s
F9-021: Success, first v1.1 FT, first successful landing at Canaveral
F9-019: Success
F9-022: Success
F9-023: Success, first successful landing on droneship
F9-024: Success
F9-025: Success
F9-026: Success
F9-027: Success
One failure. Out of twenty-seven, for a success rate of 96%. Unless you want to count landings as necessary for success, in which case they have a 19% success rate - but by that metric, Soyuz, Proton, Atlas, Delta, Titan, Redstone, Saturn, Ariane, Athena, and Zenit all have 0% success rates, and only Energia-Buran and STS also have a non-zero success rate, with 50% and 98%, respectively.
Over that same period North Korea fired four missiles (claiming to have fired even more but not supported by evidence) and launched two orbital rockets. The missiles may or may not have failed - they fell vastly short of their design range but that may have been deliberate - and both rockets worked, although their payloads may have failed. At least, this is all the info I could find - there's no convenient list of every launch attempt they've made, and I suspect most failed launches are never revealed.
I'm not sure what you mean. You can't compare Autopilot's safety on sections of road that it won't even be able to be used on.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
What's not free-market about it, aside from the fact that if they'd printed outright lies they could have been sued? I really doubt that that's the kind of government intervention in free markets you were referring to. One of the colossal problems with free-market ideals is that the consumer will *never* have all the information, nor will the very partial info the have be representative or properly weighted by importance, nor will the (partial, sensationalized, and unrepresentational) information be unencumbered by bias.
The vast majority of people do not, on an everyday basis, make rational decisions. This is true when deciding what to have for breakfast (see the absurdly sugar-rich and/or fatty things that pass for "breakfast" in most of America, at least), it is true when deciding on political candidates (I'm not even going to mention major candidates; in states where primaries select delegates instead of directly voting on candidates, Trump lost some delegates from regions that otherwise favored him because some of his potential delegates in those regions had foreign-sounding names), and when deciding what car to buy. Instead, we mostly rely on heuristics: I should eat this because it tastes good, I shouldn't vote for this delegate because their name doesn't sound like the names of people who think like me, I shouldn't buy a Tesla because somebody on Slashdot said they'll go out of business soon, etc. Often, it is rational to use heuristics; they're less mentally expensive than rational cost-benefit analyses. For major decisions (or ongoing behavior), though, it's really not... and yet we do anyhow.
What's more, people (most commonly salespeople, marketers, lobbyists, politicians, con artists, evangelists, and the rest of that ilk) are skilled at exploiting weaknesses in those heuristics. They appeal to emotion, exploit widespread ignorance, craft popular narratives that spread virally, present easy answers, use ad hominem attacks, try to get people to confuse them with trustworthy sources, and (when they can get away with it, which is pretty often) outright lie. You might think that all the bullshit would cancel out and the truth would win in the end, but not all positions are equally privileged in peoples' minds. Just as a comforting lie is much more believable than a painful truth for most people, it is much easier to tear down somebody else's reputation on distortions than to build up your own on truth.
We see that today, all the time. A lot of it's medical (anti-vaccine, homeopathy, "miracle" diets, etc.) but it happens in every other field too. One I see all the time, professionally, is products advertised as "secure" or "private" when they are the polar opposite of that. Even in pure science, it happens as people compete to be credited on publications and to horde the limelight for accomplishments they don't want to share, thus raising their status higher than it should be, to the detriment of us all.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
> Tesla is doing all the hard work and running the cars seems to be just going 5% extra.
I think your selling that short to say it is 5% extra. You need chargers, parking, inventory, insurance, maintenance, advertising.
It did seam obvious Tesla is wanting to manage fleets of rentals, and include owners cars in them. But Uber has the app, the advertising, the eyeballs, the insurance all in the works.
If people are not getting into accidents with Autopilot because it is going slower then it's not really preventing accidents, it is just facilitating a trade off. A human driver can also drive slower if they choose.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This makes sense. Tesla is building a battery factory that will be able to build a LOT of batteries. Developing additional uses for their batteries is a natural brand extension.
You can't compare Autopilot's safety on sections of road that it won't even be able to be used on.
Such as? What streets exactly does autopilot fail to work on? Autopilot won't stop for stop signs and street lights, but anywhere else it will work just fine.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The app sure sounds like a central dispatcher to me...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It needs clear lane markings, and can only be used in clear weather for one thing. I'm assuming it won't take a risk of passing another vehicle in an oncoming lane which is something dangerous people usually do. If there weren't many situations where it couldn't be used then the driver wouldn't need to have hands on steering wheel at all times.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.