Not so great news for Tesla

[Gomev]

This might be an interesting watch maybe in 30 min chapters over the next week or so, quite a detailed exposure of the real Elon Musk ....... The master of fluff, total B/S and the Con game if you believe what is in the You Tube movie length doco

T1 Terry

I think I can guess from the clickybaity title which way that's going to go.

 

[NikLiverpool]

Problem with Tesla at the moment is the lack of variety. Not everybody wants either a saloon or an SUV.
Software they are great. Batteries they are falling behind. While the majority of batteries are from third parties they are not moving quick enough on charging speeds and there is no indication that Tesla is actively looking into solid state ones.
Lastly, the quality of the cars is decent. Just this. Price wise only the new standard versions reflect their real value. The rest are massively overpriced.
Oh, and the change with FSD and removal of autopilot as a free feature will piss a lot of customers off.

As for the robots think of the elderly. We have a massive elderly care issue. I for one would welcome a robot which would help and assist me in my later years.

 

[Gomev]

People wanted better cars and EVs are better cars for most people. The key isn't the EV bit per se, it is what it does for the cost of ownership and the driving experience.

Musk didn't come up with the idea, it was around for decades as we saw with GM's EV1 in the 90s, but the technology wasn't ready. Interestingly, he didn't found Tesla, he bought into it early on.

Now you can say:

- People don't want their cars taken away but they do want the option to be self-driven or not to own a car in a city where self-driving taxis are ubiquitous.

- People don't want a robot in the home but they do want the chores done for them.

We'll see if he is right!

Once again whilst I agree people just wanted better cars but how did we know that EVs were better then? I think that makes the EV part very relevant as the only real change to the car from others available, same as now, is that the drive train is different.
So at that time all cars of whatever power source could get better and have, it was the change to EV that made the difference. There was no charging infrastructure to speak of so making it harder to want or even think this would be the future for the masses and not just a toy for the rich few. At the time I was fascinated and it's only really with hindsight you see this as a scalable development.

 

[tsedge]

As for the robots think of the elderly. We have a massive elderly care issue. I for one would welcome a robot which would help and assist me in my later years.

Would you really rather have a robot than a human? I'd prefer the human every time. Now if the only option is a robot that's different.... but then we should be asking do we really want a society where the caring isn't done by human beings?

The techno-utopians say "yes" or at least "if I don't do it someone else will", but that doesn't mean we should let everything they want to do come to pass.

 

[tsedge]

Once again whilst I agree people just wanted better cars but how did we know that EVs were better then? I think that makes the EV part very relevant as the only real change to the car from others available, same as now, is that the drive train is different.

It was well known before EVs that electric motors were a far better powertrain, the trick was being able to make them sufficiently efficient and able to operate with longevity at high rpm without gears.

So at that time all cars of whatever power source could get better and have, it was the change to EV that made the difference. There was no charging infrastructure to speak of so making it harder to want or even think this would be the future for the masses and not just a toy for the rich few. At the time I was fascinated and it's only really with hindsight you see this as a scalable development.

There was no great mystery about charging infrastructure. We knew it could be built, the question was when would the demand exist to justify the investment. Note that EV charging is actually a much simpler build than ICE refuelling stations.

EVs were predicted for 50 years or more. They were not a surprise, the only question was "when"?

 

[NikLiverpool]

Would you really rather have a robot than a human? I'd prefer the human every time. Now if the only option is a robot that's different.... but then we should be asking do we really want a society where the caring isn't done by human beings?

The techno-utopians say "yes" or at least "if I don't do it someone else will", but that doesn't mean we should let everything they want to do come to pass.

I would actually prefer a robot to a human for taking care of me.
A robot will not get tired, will not be angry or yell at me if I piss my pants, will not be carrying his own problems and worries and it will be there for me 24h, 7 days every week of the year.

 

[tsedge]

You are assuming you get a nice robot!

But at the same time, you will not have real human company, someone you can talk to who knows what it is to be human and can give you genuine empathy and conversation, not a fake facsimile.

I am strongly of the view that even when true AI appears (we which certainly don't have today), people will not want to interact with it or value its contributions anything like as much as a real person.

 

[salty]

Would probably be like talking to the complaints dept of MG UK. Same thing repeated on loop. It's a CH-AR-AC-TE-RI-ST-IC

 

[Martinonline]

@NikLiverpool, you have never met 'Marvin the Paranoid Android'.

 

[tsedge]

@NikLiverpool, you have never met 'Marvin the Paranoid Android'.

Oh no, now you've made me think about the MG Marvin R, cheap but hard to persuade it to do anything without a lot of grumbling!

 

[NikLiverpool]

@NikLiverpool, you have never met 'Marvin the Paranoid Android'.

Not really. On the other hand I wouldn't say no to this

 

[LenEV2016]

You are assuming you get a nice robot!

But at the same time, you will not have real human company, someone you can talk to who knows what it is to be human and can give you genuine empathy and conversation, not a fake facsimile.

I am strongly of the view that even when true AI appears (we which certainly don't have today), people will not want to interact with it or value its contributions anything like as much as a real person.

Id rather try and have a conversation with an ai robot rather than some of the halfwit under class that dodge about our town centres and estates like an episode of the walking dead

 

[tsedge]

Id rather try and have a conversation with an ai robot rather than some of the halfwit under class that dodge about our town centres and estates like an episode of the walking dead

That's because you think ai will be nice and intelligent - but true AI will have personalities far more varied and weird than the average human!

 

[Gadget Geek]

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, referred to AI using the metaphor of a "language calculator".

 

[tsedge]

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, referred to AI using the metaphor of a "language calculator".

Yes, current attempts at AI seem to be about the level of intelligence of a calculator.

I don't buy most of what Sam is selling, in practice I've found LLMs to be nothing like the hype they generate.

They are interesting but a dead end technology as far as intelligence is concerned and far less useful than claimed.

There is such a desire to believe the future is here that the real hallucination problem lies inside humans.

LLMs are completely impractical at scale with their compute, dataset and energy requirements, so the future will lie somewhere else.

 

[LenEV2016]

That's because you think ai will be nice and intelligent - but true AI will have personalities far more varied and weird than the average human!

I'd still take them over some of the feckless haunting our streets

 

[Gomev]

It was well known before EVs that electric motors were a far better powertrain, the trick was being able to make them sufficiently efficient and able to operate with longevity at high rpm without gears.

All very true but not exactly something the man in the street spent his idle hours thinking about.

There was no great mystery about charging infrastructure. We knew it could be built, the question was when would the demand exist to justify the investment. Note that EV charging is actually a much simpler build than ICE refuelling stations.

EVs were predicted for 50 years or more. They were not a surprise, the only question was "when"?

I have to agree there was no mystery about the charging infrastructure, there simply wasn't one 17 years ago.

Hydrogen vehicles have been predicted for just as long, is the question for those still "when" ? Of course not. Prediction doesn't equal realisation so not inevitable even if not a surprise to some.

I think a lot of your thoughts are easy to see with hindsight, certainly for me, and looking back if you look hard enough maybe the signals were there. However, I don't believe the general public in this country or most others ever imagined or thought about EVs as mass market product let alone ancillary factors like charging infrastructure and efficiency of electric motors 20 years ago. Let's face it some still don't.

 

[chowbenter]

 

[tsedge]

All very true but not exactly something the man in the street spent his idle hours thinking about.

No indeed. But it was an area I was specifically interested in and have followed for over 30 years. So HAD the man in the street been interested, he/she could have known.

I have to agree there was no mystery about the charging infrastructure, there simply wasn't one 17 years ago.

Hydrogen vehicles have been predicted for just as long, is the question for those still "when" ? Of course not. Prediction doesn't equal realisation so not inevitable even if not a surprise to some.

Hydrogen infrastructure is far, far more difficult and expensive due to the extreme difficulties making, transporting and storing hydrogen, with its tendency to boil off and escape. It is extremely pernicious and this was never likely be a good idea for personal transportation. It could now be done for some applications due to the advancing technologies, but today compares poorly with EVs for many applications, so it has missed the boat.

The problems with hydrogen were well known from the start. I was following the research and the practical applications. While there was a period where it was unknown whether batteries or hydrogen would win out because both had big technical challenges, that was a long time ago now. Since around 2010 it has been pretty clear what will win - at least for cars and smaller vehicles.

Hydrogen could still have some transport applications (e.g. trains/planes), but the likely scope keeps shrinking as battery tech advances further and further and faster and faster.

Politicians kept banging on about hydrogen in the UK simply because we had little investment in batteries/EVs and they needed to cling to something as an alternative to cover up the fact that they didn't really have a coherent plan.

Again, this is something I've been interested in for a very long time. The information is out there for those interested and there's a whole bunch of channels and blogs about these issues.

I think a lot of your thoughts are easy to see with hindsight, certainly for me, and looking back if you look hard enough maybe the signals were there. However, I don't believe the general public in this country or most others ever imagined or thought about EVs as mass market product let alone ancillary factors like charging infrastructure and efficiency of electric motors 20 years ago. Let's face it some still don't.

Well, with hindsight it is easy to say anyone's argument is hindsight! But I can assume you I've had the same views a long time for the same reasons.

I agree on the general public, most are completely ignorant of even how EVs work.

 

[siteguru]

Hydrogen would never really work for planes - the energy density is nowhere near high enough, so a plane would have to carry far more weight in liquid hydrogen than it currently does in Avgas to achieve the same flying times/distances.