Tesla Autopilot Crisis Deepens With Loss of Third Autopilot Boss In 18 Months (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It is no secret that Tesla's Autopilot project is struggling. Last summer, we covered a report that Tesla was bleeding talent from its Autopilot division. Tesla Autopilot head Sterling Anderson quit Tesla at the end of 2016. His replacement was Chris Lattner, who had previously created the Swift programming language at Apple. But Lattner only lasted six months before departing last June. Now Lattner's replacement, Jim Keller, is leaving Tesla as well.

Keller was a well-known chip designer at AMD before he was recruited to lead Tesla's hardware engineering efforts for Autopilot in 2016. Keller has been working to develop custom silicon for Autopilot, potentially replacing the Nvidia chips being used in today's Tesla vehicles. When Lattner left Tesla last June, Keller was given broader authority over the Autopilot program as a whole. Keller's departure comes just weeks after the death of Walter Huang, a driver whose Model X vehicle slammed into a concrete lane divider in Mountain View, California. Tesla has said Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash. Tesla has since gotten into public feuds with both Huang's family and the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency investigating the crash. "Today is Jim Keller's last day at Tesla, where he has overseen low-voltage hardware, Autopilot software and infotainment," Tesla said in a statement to Electrek. "Prior to joining Tesla, Jim's core passion was microprocessor engineering, and he's now joining a company where he'll be able to once again focus on this exclusively."

Comments

Re:Too little too soon?

[quantaman]

I suspect Tesla's method of using less hardware will be the main path in 15 years for autonomy, once we have car to car communications and car to traffic control communications as standard equipment in every vehicle and bugs worked out. Some cars with humans or lasers can communicate safe passages and routes through construction, and other road conditions (wet/ice/snow...) And lesser equipped cars can then navigate recently validated routes more safely.

But now the NTSB is very likely going to step into national standards for autonomy, and it doesn't appear Tesla is ready to meet the likely minimum standard, such as redundant navigation (operate without GPS, or without optical recognition.) and redundant systems.

Hardware only gets cheaper, the future of self-driving cars is more and redundant sensors. And no car is going to rely on another car to tell it what is a safe route.

Re:Too little too soon?

[Rei]

Also, the NTSB does not set standard for autonomy. The NTSB is an investigation board. The NHTSA sets standards in the US.

Re:Rats fleeing a sinking ship

[Rei]

PE ratios are great for a company with relatively static business operations in a relatively static field, but they're terribly misleading for growing companies. Ex: in late June of 2014, Amazon had a PE of over 500. Was it a bad buy? Hardly; people who bought it then would be 4 1/2 times richer today.

PE ratios don't cut it for growth companies that are dumping tons of money into capex, expanded options for future sales and building a new market. Quite the opposite , PE ratios paint precisely the *wrong* picture. In such a case, they're more a measure of how aggressive the company is being toward growth.

For such growth companies, the real question is how large of a market they're aiming for and how likely they are to get there. E.g. the reason Tesla shot up so much after Model 3 preorders opened is that nearly half a million people put down real money to wait over a year for a BMW-priced electric car that they'd never even seen in person, much less driven, without any advertising . That's pent-up, untapped demand. That's a market. Tesla is priced based on the potential shown, relative to the risk in getting there. Its current profits are almost irrelevant except for helping fund its route to "there".

One can disagree about the exact market size and the risks. It's expected! But what should not be in dispute is that PE is totally the wrong tool to employ here.