Compare Model 3 rather than S, since S and X are older tech. Model 3 SR is essentially the same weight as its BMW size and performance equivalent, the 330i. The Model 3 LR is roughly the same weight as its BMW equivalent, the 340i. Once Tesla releases the performance packages, the car should be expected to be lighter than most of its size and performance equivalents.
Go find any review from anyone who's driven the Model 3 who says that it "handles like shit", and link it here, please.
Even reviews that want to criticize it for other things generally have to reluctantly admit that the handling is superb. Motor Trend put its handling up against the BMW 330i and it beat the BMW in almost every category tested.
Yes. LIDAR still reflects off of black clothing, just not as intensely as off a white surface. You can experience this for yourself with a laser pointer.
I'm sorry to have to bring reality into your delusion, but that is not how engineering works. You can't just go from level 2 to level 5 without many millions of miles of real world experience.
And you accumulate those millions of miles at level 2. You don't let the driver take their hands off and you monitor their attentiveness to ensure that they can always takeover, until your vehicle is capable of operating at level 5.
That's part of the crazy thing.... she was pushing a bike, radar should have seen her too.
LIDAR should always see pedestrians, easy. But when you're pushing a bike - large object made of interconnecting angular metal structures - across the road, it should be a glowing beacon to radar.
I don't know what sort of junk system Uber has implemented, but it clearly should not be allowed on the road without an audit.
1) Tesla has far more miles on Autopilot than anyone else has on their systems. How many miles today isn't clear, but as of late 2016 there were 300 million miles in active mode and 1,3 billion in shadow mode. Today, those figures are probably more like 1B and 4B. Waymo, by contrast, has driven only 5m miles, and Uber a lot less than that.
2) Only one fatality has been confirmed to be under Autopilot. Concerning the case in China, they refused to let Tesla examine the logs, so all you have to go on is the father's insistence that Autopilot must have been on. Concerning the fatal incident, the NTSB found Tesla to not be at fault, as the driver had a huge amount of time to react to the truck and did nothing, and the system repeatedly tries to ensure that drivers are attentive (Tesla is actually worse than most concerning attention penalties in that it has a "No soup for you!" approach - if you have your hands off for too long and don't touch the steering wheel when it tells you to, it'll actually revoke your ability to use Autopilot until your next charging stop). They also found that Autopilot reduces the rate of accidents.
That said, there's more that manufacturers can do to help ensure attention in Level 2 systems. Model 3 for example has a driver-facing camera included. It's not currently used, but it's expected to be implemented as an eye-tracking attention monitor.
A human simply cannot transition from "not driving for hours on end" to "driving" in a split second. It's been studied quite a bit. Having a human at the drivers' seat in a Level 3+ autonomous system is just safety theatre. Even at Level 2 where you have steering wheel holding requirements and sometimes driver attention montors, and the system doesn't try to handle many common traffic features (so the driver doesn't have the option of inattention), distraction is a real concern. With Level 3+, it's unavoidable. Level 3 shouldn't exist; it's too dangerous. Even Level 4 probably shouldn't exist, in that it can leave people stranded when things go wrong (but it's supposed to always avoid accidents / unsafe situations and pull over safely when it can't handle them). The levels should be 1, 2, 5.
And as for the LIDAR... if it's really so terrible that it can't see (in clear weather) a woman that should have been visible from hundreds of meters away slowly pushing a bicycle across the road, even straight up to the moment that it plows into her.... is the LIDAR on the Uber vehicles sort of like those fake security cameras that people hang on their houses to make thieves think they're being watched? "Hey, we've got LIDAR, you can trust us to drive you!"
What about all their automated car LIDAR magic which is supposed to be better than human?
No freaking kidding. It doesn't matter that it was dark - LIDAR should have seen her from hundreds of meters away, watching her slowly step out into the road and watching her steady march across the road. Instead, it maintains speed without any braking whatsoever, straight into her. I mean, what the heck,Uber?
If you have kids anywhere near where Uber is doing automated driving tests, keep them inside. Seriously... This is just ridiculous. If it can't detect an adult slowly walking across the road, holding a bicycle, even when it's about to plow into her, what is it going to do when a little kid suddenly darts out in front?
Are they even using the LIDAR, or is it just a decoration to make passengers feel better?
It is astounding that LIDAR failed to see that person. I can't even imagine how they went undetected. I really want answers as to why.
BTW, the concept of a "safety driver" on a Level 3+ autonomy system is just window dressing. Distraction is bad enough on Level 2 systems that mandate hands on the wheel and sometimes involve attention monitors. With a level 3+ system, where the person isn't driving at all, distraction is essentially guaranteed (this has been studied; it doesn't matter who you are, you will get distracted sitting behind the wheel for long periods without actually doing anything). A person simply cannot transition reliably from "not at all driving for hours on end" to "emergency driving" in a split second.
That's not the real problem with Level 3.... the real problem is that Level 3 basically says, "You can stop paying attention for long periods of time".... but then suddenly demands that you instantly take over to rescue a situation that the vehicle doesn't know how to deal with.
Level 4 is problematic too, although not as badly. Level 4 says that the vehicle can safely get itself out of situations that it doesn't know how to deal with, but can't drive in all situations. E.g. if it start snowing and the car doesn't know how to deal with snow, it doesn't instantly demand that you take over, but it gently pulls over. Then what? Let's assume that you still have steering controls and the like in the vehicle - do you demand that the person drive? Make them wait out the snowstorm? What if they're inebriated, sleepy, someone without a license, someone too young to drive, no people in the vehicle at all, etc? Basically you still have to have a person in the car who is capable and ready to drive in Level 4 unless they want to be able to get stranded.
I think it's smart of Tesla to take the roadmap of 1-2-5, skipping over levels 3 and 4 entirely. I actually have some concerns with how good the latest autopilot update is turning out to be, which they rolled out last week. Because it's really good, even handling things like construction zones like a champ. And because people aren't going to be as concerned with it, I expect a lot more people to start slacking off when it's driving than they used to, just tapping the steering wheel when the car says to without paying attention. Aka, treating it like it's SAE #3. Model 3 has a driver-facing camera and I imagine they plan to implement it as an attention monitor as a second check that the driver is truly paying attention.
The driving mode-specific performance by an automated driving system of all aspects of the dynamic driving task with the expectation that the human driver will respond appropriately to a request to intervene
Once you get to Level 3 automation, the primary responsibility no longer relies on the "driver"; it relies on the car. It only becomes the driver's responsibility if the car tells them to take control.
Attempted murder or manslaughter, depending on whether you intended to kill them or not.
because you weren't paying enough attention
Then it becomes negligent homicide / involuntary manslaughter.
To counter it you need a "reasonable person" defense - that is, to argue that your average everyday schmuck in the same position as you would have likely killed the person as well - they were just too hard to notice and react to in time. But if the average person would have seen them and stopped in time, then you have no defense.
And in general - expect prosecutors to go for the worst thing they think they can get you on if someone is dead because of you.
What operator? This is a Level 3+ system, not a Level 2 system like Autopilot. There is a person in the driver's seat, but they're not an "operator" unless the car tells them "I give up, you take over."
At the projected rate of delivery, those 500K will receive their vehicles over the next 3 years
Simply false, unless you're making up your own rate of delivery. The projected rate of delivery is:
2,5k/week by the end of Q1 5k/week by the end of Q2 Line 2 built over the course of Q3/Q4, to bring it up to 10k/week
Aka, 2019 starts with 500k/year. That's the projected rate. Now, you may not believe that, but don't call your personal beliefs "the projected rate"
63K had asked for one as of last August
While meanwhile the overall list has grown. The rate of new reservations has always exceeded the rate of cancellations.
As far as profitability, can you point to a quarter where Tesla actually made profit?
Nice, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about margins. Tesla normally earns about 25% margins on S and X. Their net automotive markets are down to around 18% right now due to the Model 3 difficulties, but once they're ironed out that should be back up to 25% for the 3 as well.
The company as a whole is losing money because they're making massive capital expenditures, which is otherwise known as growing. Essentially all rapidly growing companies involve huge capital expenditures, and that's a good thing. To terminate large capital expenditures right now would be to say, "Nah, I've captured enough of the market share, I don't want any more." There's essentially zero investors in Tesla who want them to cut captial expenditures and just sit back on their laurels with the S and X and call that good enough.
About the bond ratings? Tesla is a solid B - junk bond rating [googleusercontent.com].
Sigh.
Sure. Tesla is a bond, not a company. Also, I'm a peanut, not a human! And I'm typing on a dandelion, not a laptop! I mean, while we're busy making ridiculous statements...
You're confusing a bond offering from last year as meaning that Tesla is somehow itself a bond with the rating of one product offered by them literally half a year ago.
Meanwhile, that Tesla weighs at least 5,185 lb and has no more than 6,768 gvwr, which means it can legally tow only 1,600 lb
Please learn how GVWR limits work before talking about them. GVWR is the max for loaded vehicle weight plus tongue weight, not entire trailer weight. The tongue weight is generally 9-15% of the trailer weight. So for a 5000 pound trailer, that's 450 to 750 pounds, meaning that a tow vehicle with a 6768lb GVWR can weigh no more than 6018-6318 lbs. This means that for a curb weight of 5185 lbs the vehicle itself can be loaded with about 1000 lbs of passengers/payload, and tow a properly balanced 5000 pound trailer.
It might be able to handle 5,000 pounds if nothing bad ever happens
It's capable of towing a semi truck (see the above links), but that's of course not the topic of discussion here.
Which returns to the facts that the superchargers are only available along narrow corridors,
Huh? Where are you getting that? There's only a couple places in the world where I'd describe Superchargers as forming a narrow "corridor" rather than a dense grid - Trondheim to Tromso (but there's nothing really to go to to the east of that route, and to the west is the ocean); Beijing to Harbin; maybe the route from Vancouver to Edmonton (although it has some branching); the Australian coast (but that's where people live); etc. But in general it's highly branched / meshlike, with a typical spacing in the countryside of 50-150km, which is way less than the ranges of the vehicles.
Model X isn't towing the kind of loads that pickups are capable of these days either
No kidding. And I bet its specs and pricing will be fairly good... compared to vehicles that existed in 2018, not those that will exist by that point in 2020.
Consumers are moving a lot slower than you demand,
The half-million-long waiting list for the Model 3 says otherwise. That's equivalent to 2/3rds of a year of Ford F-series sales (not a specific F-series, but the whole series combined), sitting on a waiting list just to get one. To say nothing of those waiting for the Model Y. It has nothing at all to do with "consumers moving too slow", it has exclusively to do with the rate of production scaleup.
- losing money on every unit they sell
No matter how many times you write that, it won't make it true.
junk-bond ratings
Tesla isn't a bond. You're referring to a specific bond offering, not even their last one. Their last bond offering got ratings as high as Aaa(sf) (prime, the highest ratings category). Orders on some of their bonds were over 14 times what the company wanted to issue.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a 250 mile commute to work, you're spot on.
Compare Model 3 rather than S, since S and X are older tech. Model 3 SR is essentially the same weight as its BMW size and performance equivalent, the 330i. The Model 3 LR is roughly the same weight as its BMW equivalent, the 340i. Once Tesla releases the performance packages, the car should be expected to be lighter than most of its size and performance equivalents.
Go find any review from anyone who's driven the Model 3 who says that it "handles like shit", and link it here, please.
Even reviews that want to criticize it for other things generally have to reluctantly admit that the handling is superb. Motor Trend put its handling up against the BMW 330i and it beat the BMW in almost every category tested.
Yes. LIDAR still reflects off of black clothing, just not as intensely as off a white surface. You can experience this for yourself with a laser pointer.
1 (not 2) confirmed fatal accidents in somewhere around a billion miles with it on says otherwise.
And you accumulate those millions of miles at level 2. You don't let the driver take their hands off and you monitor their attentiveness to ensure that they can always takeover, until your vehicle is capable of operating at level 5.
That's part of the crazy thing.... she was pushing a bike, radar should have seen her too.
LIDAR should always see pedestrians, easy. But when you're pushing a bike - large object made of interconnecting angular metal structures - across the road, it should be a glowing beacon to radar.
I don't know what sort of junk system Uber has implemented, but it clearly should not be allowed on the road without an audit.
1) Tesla has far more miles on Autopilot than anyone else has on their systems. How many miles today isn't clear, but as of late 2016 there were 300 million miles in active mode and 1,3 billion in shadow mode. Today, those figures are probably more like 1B and 4B. Waymo, by contrast, has driven only 5m miles, and Uber a lot less than that.
2) Only one fatality has been confirmed to be under Autopilot. Concerning the case in China, they refused to let Tesla examine the logs, so all you have to go on is the father's insistence that Autopilot must have been on. Concerning the fatal incident, the NTSB found Tesla to not be at fault, as the driver had a huge amount of time to react to the truck and did nothing, and the system repeatedly tries to ensure that drivers are attentive (Tesla is actually worse than most concerning attention penalties in that it has a "No soup for you!" approach - if you have your hands off for too long and don't touch the steering wheel when it tells you to, it'll actually revoke your ability to use Autopilot until your next charging stop). They also found that Autopilot reduces the rate of accidents.
That said, there's more that manufacturers can do to help ensure attention in Level 2 systems. Model 3 for example has a driver-facing camera included. It's not currently used, but it's expected to be implemented as an eye-tracking attention monitor.
A human simply cannot transition from "not driving for hours on end" to "driving" in a split second. It's been studied quite a bit. Having a human at the drivers' seat in a Level 3+ autonomous system is just safety theatre. Even at Level 2 where you have steering wheel holding requirements and sometimes driver attention montors, and the system doesn't try to handle many common traffic features (so the driver doesn't have the option of inattention), distraction is a real concern. With Level 3+, it's unavoidable. Level 3 shouldn't exist; it's too dangerous. Even Level 4 probably shouldn't exist, in that it can leave people stranded when things go wrong (but it's supposed to always avoid accidents / unsafe situations and pull over safely when it can't handle them). The levels should be 1, 2, 5.
And as for the LIDAR... if it's really so terrible that it can't see (in clear weather) a woman that should have been visible from hundreds of meters away slowly pushing a bicycle across the road, even straight up to the moment that it plows into her.... is the LIDAR on the Uber vehicles sort of like those fake security cameras that people hang on their houses to make thieves think they're being watched? "Hey, we've got LIDAR, you can trust us to drive you!"
No freaking kidding. It doesn't matter that it was dark - LIDAR should have seen her from hundreds of meters away, watching her slowly step out into the road and watching her steady march across the road. Instead, it maintains speed without any braking whatsoever, straight into her. I mean, what the heck,Uber?
If you have kids anywhere near where Uber is doing automated driving tests, keep them inside. Seriously... This is just ridiculous. If it can't detect an adult slowly walking across the road, holding a bicycle, even when it's about to plow into her, what is it going to do when a little kid suddenly darts out in front?
Are they even using the LIDAR, or is it just a decoration to make passengers feel better?
It is astounding that LIDAR failed to see that person. I can't even imagine how they went undetected. I really want answers as to why.
BTW, the concept of a "safety driver" on a Level 3+ autonomy system is just window dressing. Distraction is bad enough on Level 2 systems that mandate hands on the wheel and sometimes involve attention monitors. With a level 3+ system, where the person isn't driving at all, distraction is essentially guaranteed (this has been studied; it doesn't matter who you are, you will get distracted sitting behind the wheel for long periods without actually doing anything). A person simply cannot transition reliably from "not at all driving for hours on end" to "emergency driving" in a split second.
From followup news: "Uber’s self-driving car showed no signs of slowing before fatal crash, police say"
So there goes that defense.
That's not the real problem with Level 3.... the real problem is that Level 3 basically says, "You can stop paying attention for long periods of time".... but then suddenly demands that you instantly take over to rescue a situation that the vehicle doesn't know how to deal with.
Level 4 is problematic too, although not as badly. Level 4 says that the vehicle can safely get itself out of situations that it doesn't know how to deal with, but can't drive in all situations. E.g. if it start snowing and the car doesn't know how to deal with snow, it doesn't instantly demand that you take over, but it gently pulls over. Then what? Let's assume that you still have steering controls and the like in the vehicle - do you demand that the person drive? Make them wait out the snowstorm? What if they're inebriated, sleepy, someone without a license, someone too young to drive, no people in the vehicle at all, etc? Basically you still have to have a person in the car who is capable and ready to drive in Level 4 unless they want to be able to get stranded.
I think it's smart of Tesla to take the roadmap of 1-2-5, skipping over levels 3 and 4 entirely. I actually have some concerns with how good the latest autopilot update is turning out to be, which they rolled out last week. Because it's really good, even handling things like construction zones like a champ. And because people aren't going to be as concerned with it, I expect a lot more people to start slacking off when it's driving than they used to, just tapping the steering wheel when the car says to without paying attention. Aka, treating it like it's SAE #3. Model 3 has a driver-facing camera and I imagine they plan to implement it as an attention monitor as a second check that the driver is truly paying attention.
As I have a friend awaiting trial for manslaughter next week, I imagine I know it better than you do.
SAE Level 3:
Once you get to Level 3 automation, the primary responsibility no longer relies on the "driver"; it relies on the car. It only becomes the driver's responsibility if the car tells them to take control.
Writing about "J-walking" is an offense of both capitals and omitted letters.
What crime is that, perchance?
Attempted murder or manslaughter, depending on whether you intended to kill them or not.
because you weren't paying enough attention
Then it becomes negligent homicide / involuntary manslaughter.
To counter it you need a "reasonable person" defense - that is, to argue that your average everyday schmuck in the same position as you would have likely killed the person as well - they were just too hard to notice and react to in time. But if the average person would have seen them and stopped in time, then you have no defense.
And in general - expect prosecutors to go for the worst thing they think they can get you on if someone is dead because of you.
Ugh... people...
right of way, not right-a-way
jaywalking, not J-walking.
Could you bubble wrap this red herring for me? I'm afraid he might get hurt by your straw man.
What operator? This is a Level 3+ system, not a Level 2 system like Autopilot. There is a person in the driver's seat, but they're not an "operator" unless the car tells them "I give up, you take over."
Simply false, unless you're making up your own rate of delivery. The projected rate of delivery is:
2,5k/week by the end of Q1
5k/week by the end of Q2
Line 2 built over the course of Q3/Q4, to bring it up to 10k/week
Aka, 2019 starts with 500k/year. That's the projected rate. Now, you may not believe that, but don't call your personal beliefs "the projected rate"
While meanwhile the overall list has grown. The rate of new reservations has always exceeded the rate of cancellations.
Nice, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about margins. Tesla normally earns about 25% margins on S and X. Their net automotive markets are down to around 18% right now due to the Model 3 difficulties, but once they're ironed out that should be back up to 25% for the 3 as well.
The company as a whole is losing money because they're making massive capital expenditures, which is otherwise known as growing. Essentially all rapidly growing companies involve huge capital expenditures, and that's a good thing. To terminate large capital expenditures right now would be to say, "Nah, I've captured enough of the market share, I don't want any more." There's essentially zero investors in Tesla who want them to cut captial expenditures and just sit back on their laurels with the S and X and call that good enough.
Sigh.
Sure. Tesla is a bond, not a company. Also, I'm a peanut, not a human! And I'm typing on a dandelion, not a laptop! I mean, while we're busy making ridiculous statements...
You're confusing a bond offering from last year as meaning that Tesla is somehow itself a bond with the rating of one product offered by them literally half a year ago.
Not according to Ford..
Please learn how GVWR limits work before talking about them. GVWR is the max for loaded vehicle weight plus tongue weight, not entire trailer weight. The tongue weight is generally 9-15% of the trailer weight. So for a 5000 pound trailer, that's 450 to 750 pounds, meaning that a tow vehicle with a 6768lb GVWR can weigh no more than 6018-6318 lbs. This means that for a curb weight of 5185 lbs the vehicle itself can be loaded with about 1000 lbs of passengers/payload, and tow a properly balanced 5000 pound trailer.
It's capable of towing a semi truck (see the above links), but that's of course not the topic of discussion here.
Huh? Where are you getting that? There's only a couple places in the world where I'd describe Superchargers as forming a narrow "corridor" rather than a dense grid - Trondheim to Tromso (but there's nothing really to go to to the east of that route, and to the west is the ocean); Beijing to Harbin; maybe the route from Vancouver to Edmonton (although it has some branching); the Australian coast (but that's where people live); etc. But in general it's highly branched / meshlike, with a typical spacing in the countryside of 50-150km, which is way less than the ranges of the vehicles.
What
world
are
you
living
in?
No kidding. And I bet its specs and pricing will be fairly good... compared to vehicles that existed in 2018, not those that will exist by that point in 2020.
The half-million-long waiting list for the Model 3 says otherwise. That's equivalent to 2/3rds of a year of Ford F-series sales (not a specific F-series, but the whole series combined), sitting on a waiting list just to get one. To say nothing of those waiting for the Model Y. It has nothing at all to do with "consumers moving too slow", it has exclusively to do with the rate of production scaleup.
No matter how many times you write that, it won't make it true.
Tesla isn't a bond. You're referring to a specific bond offering, not even their last one. Their last bond offering got ratings as high as Aaa(sf) (prime, the highest ratings category). Orders on some of their bonds were over 14 times what the company wanted to issue.