Just reading the first few comments.... I really don't get the Tesla hate. Is it hacker-ish contrarianism? Have they done something? What's the deal HN, why are we cheering against the home team?
Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.
Tesla (and spacex) set extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do. They take big risks. They're not interested in reducing risk. They're interested in a business plan that leads to a mass migration of icbs to electric (or humans to mars). The nature of ambitious goals is that sometimes you don't hit your marks. The nature of risk taking is that you might fail, and have to do fast paced adjustments to recover.
Riskiness also means (literally) that Tesla comes with some chance of total failure. If they lose two or three big bets in a row, it could be game over. There are no cash cows or guaranteed income streams. Tesla is not Toyota or Microsoft. If you own Tesla, you need to be ok with that risk. Don't like it? Perfectly reasonable. Sell.
Personally (not an investor or customer), I think these companies are awesome. If GM disappeared tomorrow, nothing that I care about changes. If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs. If McDonald Douglass rocketry disappears, someone else will launch rockets for the US military. SpaceX... that hurts our chances of landing people on the other worlds anytime soon.
None of this risk profile stuff would even be controversial if Tesla was a fund. A fund manager can be as risky as she likes, provided that's the stated investment goal. Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope? .. at least on hacker news?
Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?
Personally I don't disagree with the notion of taking huge risks and going all out. Tesla and SpaceX have made the world a better place in my view, and they've definitely made the world more interesting.
That said, the overhyping, recklessness and hubris at this stage on the Tesla front seems like instead of helping achieve the wildly ambitious goal, they're making it more likely to fail. If Tesla was slightly more reasonable, and extended their timelines out a bit, it's entirely likely they'd be selling more, better cars.
At some point the company needs to mature a bit and become a little more structured, especially when you're dealing with devices that can literally kill people. I don't think at this stage they'd be less likely to hit their marks if they just got a little more down to earth, on the contrary I think it would help them.
And like it or not, a fund manager can be risky because they're making dozens of bets. Musk has 2, and both are in areas that can directly harm people if things go sideways, it's not the same thing.
>That said, the overhyping, recklessness and hubris at this stage on the Tesla front seems like instead of helping achieve the wildly ambitious goal, they're making it more likely to fail. If Tesla was slightly more reasonable, and extended their timelines out a bit, it's entirely likely they'd be selling more, better cars.
I think Musk and Tesla are in the middle of a real life trolley problem. It is certainly true that people have died as a result of Autopilot. It is also certainly true that lives have been saved by Autopilot. There is no statistics to tell which group is larger, but Musk and Tesla obviously think the second group is larger. If that is true, everything that further delays progress is something that is causing people to die on net. They are instead flipping that switch and possibly killing people, but overall they are saving lives. Thousands of philosophers would have a better take on the ethics of that decision than I would, but that is clearly where the motivation for Musk's aggressiveness is coming from.
>. It is also certainly true that lives have been saved by Autopilot. There is no statistics to tell which group is larger, but Musk and Tesla obviously think the second group is larger.
The Tesla deaths per mile statistics are not that much better than overall US statistics and that involves all sorts of weather and road conditions that Autopilot does not. In addition, the death statistics also include older and or cheaper cars that do not have the recent safety features. A much better comparison is with vehicles costing the same as Teslas and comparing their crash statistics.
How about comparing Teslas before Autopilot to Teslas after Autopilot?
> ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data supplied by Tesla for all MY 2014 through 2016 Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles equipped with the Autopilot Technology Package... The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation.
Those stats aren't for autosteer (which is the point of contention) alone, and include AEB which no doubt saves lives.
This brings me to a crucial point. Nobody doubts that assistive technology save lives. Not just automatic emergency braking, but even lane keeping assists. What Tesla does is however take lane keeping assist and give it more responsibility of actively driving the car. It's not clear if that is safe. Even if it's safe, it's not clear if it's safer. You shouldn't be comparing autosteer to just a human, but a human with lane keeping assist. The difference is between the human driving actively, and the car driving itself actively.
> Those stats aren't for autosteer (which is the point of contention) alone, and include AEB which no doubt saves lives.
What are you basing this on? AEB was available before Autosteer, and it says in the report that the 40% improvement was after Autosteer installation.
> What Tesla does is however take lane keeping assist and give it more responsibility of actively driving the car.
Autosteer specifically is new, but the precedent for "active control" isn't. TACC takes just as active a role in driving a car as Autosteer, and most people feel it is net helpful (regardless of manufacturer, but especially in Tesla's case because it can see things via radar that a human cannot, e.g. a second car ahead slamming on the brakes). Heck, a lot of people think even standard cruise control is net helpful! It's not clear to me why longitudinal control is okay to do actively but latitudinal control isn't; both require attention and vigilance. My belief is that people are more skeptical of active latitudinal control because it is so new. It's understandable, but it's not an intellectually satisfying reason to hold back the technology.
> Tesla’s oft-touted figure is flawed for another reason, experts say: With this data set, you can’t separate the role of Autopilot from that of automatic emergency braking, which Tesla began releasing just a few months before Autopilot.
I hold the same view for TACC. And cruise control doesn't require reducing attention. That is the prime difference, active (longitudinal or latitudinal) control that encourages users to reduce attention but still relies on them, and leaves then liable is dangerous.
Hey, thanks for that citation. That was really helpful for me to understand this critique of the data. My reading is that the 40% figure still represents the switch to Autosteer, but because the first cohort contains both AEB and non-AEB data, we don't know how much of that 40% improvement to allocate to Autosteer vs how much to allocate to AEB. Makes sense.
It's too bad that NHTSA didn't present the AEB-only cohort in the report (i.e. pre-AEB vs AEB vs AEB + Autosteer instead of just pre-Autosteer vs Autosteer).
I respectfully disagree about TACC and Autosteer (or put another way: my experience with them leads me to the opposite hypothesis, and thus my burden of proof is flipped from yours). Hopefully between Elon's promised quarterly reports, NHTSA's current and future investigations, and Tesla putting more cars on the road, we'll get better data on this moving forward than we've gotten to date.
Thanks, this discussion is going well. I want to add that it wasn't nhtsa, it was Tesla's data which nhtsa cited without any fact checking. But since Tesla has been parroting nhtsa's citation, they have since then withdrawn their support for Tesla's data. You would have read that in the article. Further we need to compare not only pre-aeb vs aeb vs aeb+autosteer, but also aeb+lane_keeping_assist, which we unfortunately won't have.
So, let me reiterate -- we agree that autosteer is lane keeping assist given more responsibility. If that's helpful to the driver or dangerous as it distracts him is a debate were should have with better data, which we don't have. Unfortunately, I personally don't trust Tesla giving data without any hidden unsaid caveats, given their behavior till date.
However, there is another topic we should talk about. Do you think improving autosteer lane detection with vision will make a car driverless capable? Because that's precisely Tesla markets their technology as, with coast to coast drive, or cross country summon, or driverless taxis. I personally don't believe a line following robot is enough for self driving. Infact, I like Google's approach more, where they drive only when the road is free of any object (3d mapped by lidar).
Even then, I don't think that's enough either. For example, say a ball bounces on front of you. I stop expecting a child or a dog running after it. I think driving means interacting with the environment, and responding appropriately to it, and would require a general AI.
> Thanks, this discussion is going well. I want to add that it wasn't nhtsa, it was Tesla's data which nhtsa cited without any fact checking. But since Tesla has been parroting nhtsa's citation, they have since then withdrawn their support for Tesla's data.
Yeah, I had read that previously. I understand NHTSA not wanting to be seen as a primary source of data that it did not collect, but I don't think Tesla handing over that data changes anything material here. I don't see how the source of the raw data is relevant to the report, barring a case of fraud or massive incompetence among those interpreting it.
> So, let me reiterate -- we agree that autosteer is lane keeping assist given more responsibility. If that's helpful to the driver or dangerous as it distracts him is a debate were should have with better data, which we don't have. Unfortunately, I personally don't trust Tesla giving data without any hidden unsaid caveats, given their behavior till date.
I hear you. I would distinguish though between Tesla citing data and crafting a story around it (e.g. what they did with the 1:340M miles figure), vs Tesla providing raw data upon request to a regulatory body like NHTSA or an advisory body like NTSB, and then having those bodies draw their own conclusions. So long as Tesla isn't committing fraud and the investigative methods are statistically sound, the source of the data shouldn't matter. I like this model because, by enabling Tesla to be the data source in a way that is trustworthy, we can get access to much more of it (and much more quickly) than if we had to know all possible queries in advance and force it to go through a third party. For all the recent riffraff between Tesla and NHTSA involving the recent accident, both parties have a long track record of saying they work well together.
> However, there is another topic we should talk about. Do you think improving autosteer lane detection with vision will make a car driverless capable? Because that's precisely Tesla markets their technology as, with coast to coast drive, or cross country summon, or driverless taxis. I personally don't believe a line following robot is enough for self driving. Infact, I like Google's approach more, where they drive only when the road is free of any object (3d mapped by lidar).
I agree that Tesla's neural network needs to do much more than line following, but I don't couple that with a LIDAR approach.
One reason I am so bullish on Tesla is that I think the conventional wisdom about self driving is grounded more in marketing and fundraising than in engineering. The great thing about LIDAR is that you can build a prototype-level self-driving car and put it on a real road relatively quickly. The problem with LIDAR is that its utility breaks down much faster than that of vision. If you want to drive in conditions where humans drive today -- heavy fog or rain, sleet, snow -- you can't rely on LIDAR; you have to do that with cameras and radar. Once you've achieved a system that can do that, LIDAR becomes largely redundant; in good conditions it's telling you what you already know, and in bad conditions it's telling you less than that. So I am a big fan of Tesla's philosophy here (and of Comma.ai's for the exact same reason). This isn't just projection, btw -- Nvidia has a neural network that's been outperforming humans at camera-based object detection in bad weather for over two years now. I'm not aware of anybody achieving that with LIDAR.
> Even then, I don't think that's enough either. For example, say a ball bounces on front of you. I stop expecting a child or a dog running after it. I think driving means interacting with the environment, and responding appropriately to it, and would require a general AI.
I think you're right that with self-driving cars, we will see new classes of accidents that we don't experience with human drivers. However, because humans are such terrible drivers in everyday situations, it is likely a huge net improvement to improve the general cases and have more failures around the edges. This is why examples like the beach ball, or even the Trolley Problem, don't move me. Those situations are exceedingly rare, and optimizing for them will only get us to a local maximum in the mission to save lives. The global maximum is to mitigate the consequences of e.g. texting and driving, or falling asleep at the wheel.
I largely agree with you, but disagree with the last part. The comparison shouldn't be just humans, but humans aided by the exact technology working as an assist.
So, I don't expect the huge improvement when going from lane keeping assist to autosteer.
Because that data isn't limited to just Autosteer but also includes Autobreaking and the other safety features which are more likely to have played a role in the accident reduction.
There's no evidence that Autosteer has saved any lives, but there is evidence that it's taken at least 4.
> Because that data isn't limited to just Autosteer but also includes Autobreaking and the other safety features which are more likely to have played a role in the accident reduction.
See my response to your sibling comment. AEB was available earlier than Autosteer, and it says in multiple places (both in the summary and in the graph) that the 40% figure is since the release of Autosteer. If I am misunderstanding or misreading the report, please tell me.
> There's no evidence that Autosteer has saved any lives, but there is evidence that it's taken at least 4.
That's not an accurate summary of the evidence. There are reports all over reddit, TMC, Twitter, Electrek, etc. of Autopilot preventing accidents. There are accounts of Autosteer in particular swerving when a truck drifts toward a car. If we're going to consider one-off anecdotes that go badly, we have to consider the ones that go well, too. And there's a lot of confirmation bias to fight to do that, because "Car Doesn't Crash And Erupt Into Flames" is not a headline you will ever read.
Would you say that scientists should jump immediately to human trials on life-saving drugs since it will speed up progress and save lives, and that any deaths incurred along the way are worth it?
Isn't that self-evidently false? On at least a superficial level it's a constant part of the conversation. It has in many ways precipitated the debate around self-driving cars by putting the technology in the open (for better and worse and also it's not-quite-there but still!). There's a really strong argument to be made that Tesla has accelerated the development of electric cars at more mainstream manufacturers and pushed large-battery technology substantially forward.
Even if Tesla vanished tomorrow, it would be very hard to say it has had no impact.
Interestingly, I see this from the exact opposite view. I'm surprised it's taken this long for the rubber to meet the road. Tesla sells the most electric vehicles, but it's hardly the sort of delta you describe ("extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do"). Nissan and Tesla both hit the 300,000 car mark in January/February of 2018. And let's not forget the recent NTSB report, which revealed that "Autopilot" is just a better-marketed version of the lane-keeping everyone else is doing.
As to SpaceX--it's an extremely interesting attempt to tread a well-worn path. Commercial exploitation of space travel is a really neat concept. But again your comparison is completely unmoored from reality. SpaceX disappearing will "hurt our changes of landing people on other worlds anytime soon?" Who exactly do you think got us into space, then to the moon? Who is responsible for almost all the progress in space exploration to date, including developing the RP-1 based rocket designs that SpaceX is refining half a century later? It was U.S. defense contractors! It's worth keeping in mind that the Saturn V developed by Boeing/NAA/Douglas in the 1960s could hurl three times as much weight to the moon as the Falcon Heavy. To date, the only proven model for treading new ground in space is large defense contractors spending gobs of State money.
The real question is: why does Tesla/SpaceX generate so much sophomoric positivity?
Achieving an order of magnitude cost reduction for proven technology is impressive, even given the intervening half century of progress. But similar achievements are routinely made in other industries. It doesn’t justify the breathless fanboyism Space X engenders.
But similar achievements are routinely made in other industries.
You're applying generalizations to specifics. It is true that other industries have seen order-of-magnitude cost reductions. The companies that bring those innovations are frequently (and correctly) celebrated (see Henry Ford, et al.). SpaceX is that company in this industry, which has otherwise been stagnant for generations. Add to this the fact that space exploration has been aspirational and charismatic as a industry, and you have your justification.
Maybe because people think space is cool and there's been close to zero progress for decades before they came along? Or maybe because the goal is something more than just making money, something that clearly set them apart from the other entities in the field, at least when they started.
>Or maybe because the goal is something more than just making money
Maybe they view their payoff date in a longer term fashion, maybe the way they will make their money is 'cool' but Space X isn't more charitable than any other company.
I think you've got a lot of things wrong about Tesla. The legacy multi billion dollar use companies in the ULA have been using many russian rocket engines and have not really innovated much, other than having a good success rate. Tesla has been lucky to survive, there are many failed new car companies, and only because they have such an awesome product have they been able to attack the entire industry, sales, production, gas stations. They have tons of problems to deal with, like any big company, but their product is excellent. The thing I can't understand is the semi-religious fervor about people shorting them.
Actually, defense contractors haven't designed any new rockets and found themselves dependent on a Russian design (which were arguably better).
They contractually had the option to build their own derivative but punted and then found themselves with a Senate banning future imports. Now they want $5B to design a new rocket, or maybe use Bezos' design.
The SLS is nothing more than a patched up space shuttle launch system with a capsule on top. Except that it will cost a lot more to launch. Not much new ground there.
But is it the problem Space X is solving? It's easy to make costs come down when you're just refining 50+ year old technology that you know will work. That's a whole different ballgame from what it'll take to push new boundaries.
Contractors are not some naturally occurring mineral, a side effect of some budget. They are companies, people. At present, they are companies comfortably using their existing operations to keep doing what they've been doing since the 70s. I think that it matters who that company is, what their future strategy is. It matters that they care about reusability, creating technology that scales to larger missions... basically, people matter.
In any case, I don't think you can compare Nissan to Tesla. You can always reduce things to parity along some metric, but in this case I just don't think 2018 sales volume is most of the story.
So what matters is the wishful thinking, not the pioneering work SpaceX’s competitors actually accomplished? What matters is that Tesla plans to bring EVs to every household in the future, not that it’s shipped about the same number of EVs as Nissan to date?
Look at your own post for why Tesla/SpaceX engender negativity. GM revolutionized the landscape of America. Douglas Aerospace helped design the most powerful rocket ever. And you denigrate those companies and their actual achievements by pointing to the things Musk says he’s going to do. And that’s exactly how Musk has positioned himself. So is it any surprise when people react negatively to him when information is revealed that suggests a gap between promises and reality?
I think I might have overstated things, or not given credit where due. The contractors played a big role. They have not, however, been pushing things forward. Space exploration was stagnant, imo. I also consider NASA and the Soviet program to be the primary "mover," though of course that could be argued.
On cars, no that's not what I thunk. I don't think this divides into 2018 sales volume and bullshitting hype. There is also impact on the industry, consumer perception and the active effect on the price performance of batteries. There's important proofs (to the public) of concept, that electric cars can stand on their own in every respect.
Nissan... they fulfilled a demand for low spec cars with short ranges, a relatively nonscalable source of demand too. I don't think that Nissan's sales are as relevant as Tesla's in the overall scheme of changing most cars from ice's to electric. That's not to hate on nissan. I have a nissan.
I think we understand eachother, but disagree. You think of Tesla and spacex as similar to their competition, but with lots of underserved hype. I see them as different, mostly because of risk tolerance.
I guess this is also a matter of worldview. I think we have a serious problem of too little risk & failure, and the ability (of very large companies) to avoid risk almost entirely.
SpaceX set a goal of reusable rocket or bust, fairly literally and explicitly. I don't think other contractors would have. I don't think we get to mars unless someone does.
If mars is just hype and bullshit to you, then meaningfully reduced cost per orbital kg.. I dunno thoug. I *do" believe the claim that he's after a mars service. Why else risk the house?
> So what matters is the wishful thinking, not the pioneering work SpaceX’s competitors actually accomplished?
Another way to look at it is that what matters is the pioneering work that SpaceX has actually accomplished (and stands to accomplish) that none of their competitors has (primarily, drastically lowering the cost of reaching space while achieving high and increasing launch rates).
> What matters is that Tesla plans to bring EVs to every household in the future, not that it’s shipped about the same number of EVs as Nissan to date?
Without any intended sarcasm, I would answer this question with 'yes'.
So...you're comparing reducing the costs of getting into space with the achievement of developing the technology that actually made it possible to get into space?
The latter is a revolution. The former is just an incremental evolution. Laudable, but nowhere close to the same level of accomplishment.
> So...you're comparing reducing the costs of getting into space with the achievement of developing the technology that actually made it possible to get into space?
Not at all. I am just pointing out that the popularity of SpaceX stems from much more than just ‘wishful thinking’. In a short time and against all odds, they’ve established themselves as the leading space launch provider, and they have a realistic chance to vastly increase that lead in the years to come. Speaking of pioneering technology, they are the first and so far only entity to launch, land, and reuse production orbital rockets on a regular basis. This may well prove to be a revolution, especially considering how many experts said it was impossible.
Handwaving their accomplishments away because too many people cheer them too loudly strikes me as unfair and disingenuous.
Not a problem, though, give it another 5-10 years and it will be extremely clear what SpaceX has achieved.
For example, here's the CNES (French space agency) Director of Launchers discussing SpaceX's achievements, and his desire to design Ariane NEXT to be similar to Falcon 9:
> For Falcon 9 for instance, they use a toss-back trajectory. An engine is relit while going against the aerodynamic flow, which is actually quite complicated to achieve. We worked on that with ONERA, the French national aerospace lab, and realized it’s pretty complicated.
and, right after talking about how SpaceX's design stages lower, has a common engine between stages, and allows experimentation in landings:
> Prometheus can be used in a new architecture which we call Ariane Next. It will have 7 such engines on the first stage and 1 on the second stage, and can be used in expendable or reusable mode, allowing to experiment reuse easily. The objective is to learn by testing, which is not a European speciality.
There's no greater endorsement than by a competitor.
Sure, it was cool to see, but it was inevitable that someone would do it. Once Dean Kamen demonstrated self-balancing wheelchairs and Segways, anyone paying attention could foresee subsequent applications such as self-landing boosters.
There are a lot of smart people in the world who, with the same backing that Musk received, could lead a company to achieve those goals. Without spreading themselves so thin that they make mistakes affecting thousands of people. Our tendency to elevate and idolize people who are aggressive and self-promoting leaves little room for those blessed by the absence of those traits.
It's ridiculous that on a day when thousands face unemployment that there are excited stories about flamethrowers being shipped.
Pioneered by the MDC DC-X in the 1990s, with considerably less computing power available.
Space-X have done great work in making landed-recovery practical and reliable but they're again building on top of work originally done by the DoD-contractor model.
Musk and Tesla have marketed their autopilot and handled autopilot accidents very poorly. Musk has been indignant at suggestions that Tesla needs to raise more money this year. That attitude in the face of a financial situation that seems to obviously require an influx of cash (while dealing with major production issues) has not helped their public perception.
I think, he's started to quell too many disagreeing opinions. That's why people started seeing him as delusional. And his business seems to suffer from that. You need opposing views.
I get that you have to push forward strongly for a vision to succeed, but there seems to be a fine line between strongly pushing a vision and ignoring all important criticism. And right now he's no longer on the right side of that line IMHO.
That seems to be the price of success. People made him a hero and this is the result.
I've become increasingly annoyed by Musk's personality, ego, Twitter tantrums and his deceptive statements. I used to be a big fan and follower of anything Elon-related. Still a fan of SpaceX.
Having said that, I think they make well-designed, innovative and inspiring products. Build quality and financials are terrible though.
> A fund manager can be as risky as she likes
This is off-topic but... am I the only one that finds this cringey and forced, given that it's such a such male-dominated field?
FWIW, I'm a woman and I'm a big fan of singular they.
It is also possible to avoid pronouns altogether at times. It's more work to both do that and not sound stilted and weird. I have made my peace with occasionally sounding stilted, such as A fund manager can be as risky as a fund manager likes.
When I had a corporate job, some training examples advocated finding ways to rewrite the sentence to sanitize it of gender rather than using awkward constructions like he or she. It's more work, but if you do it habitually it gets easier.
Yeah, I use "they" most of the time. When I can't think of a phrasing that wouldn't sound weird I occasionally just use "he" or "she", depending on which is more likely. It's not a huge deal.
I want you to run with this thought wherever it takes you:
1. Tesla is heavily shorted.
2. Tesla and SpaceX are disrupting heavily entrenched industries (and we could argue a lot about how much or how effectively, but let's not).
3. It's become apparently easy to mobilize armies of artificial opinion on the internet, who in turn mobilize real people due to groupthink and the human love for picking sides and shouting about it.
I am not suggesting in any way that there isn't anything valid to criticize or that anyone who does so is a sockpuppet, but if there aren't any such campaigns by moneyed interests to tarnish those brands online I would be extremely shocked.
The interesting thing is ... I have had similar thoughts but exactly the other way around. Sometimes the fanboyism is so strong I figure it must be subsidized.
I feel ambivalent myself, I have no vested interest in Tesla succeeding or failing. Objectively, the numbers paint a pretty sober picture of their future and I wouldn't consider investing any of my money there. But ... I think it would be cool if they succeeded. I've never been particularly interested in any electric car, Tesla or not, but anybody willing to push the technology forward is appreciated.
Even if Tesla was engaging in similar games, there's a lot more money and resources on the opposing sides, because he's created a lot of opposition. I'm not a fan in general of one person having ridiculous amounts of money or power because the human psyche never deals with that well, but I would rather such a person attempt to push progress forward rather than hide from the world with other rich folks and idly hoard. Elon Musk has become the bike shed of rich people because he's doing flashy, obvious things.
Tesla is heavily shorted but there is still way more long position stock. Shorters hiring astroturfers seems vaguely plausible but no more likely than people with long positions doing the same thing.
I very highly doubt that Honda is hiring people to make negative forum posts about Tesla.
Trust me, I was never stayed by groupthink. Infact the groupthink has almost always been Tesla fanboyism.
I personally was set off by Elon musk's claims about autonomy, every since he started claiming them in 2015. I still don't think a line following robot should be allowed control of a car, and good forbid not have a human driver behind it.
I would generally agree, but on HN? With people hyping as much Uber for hairbrush type products that will "change the world" Tesla and SpaceX hype is fairly warranted.
I feel like the old criticism leveled against Steve Jobs definitely applies here -- the so-called "Reality Distortion Field." It seems extremely prevalent around Tesla. Even though IMHO Steve Jobs was far more charismatic. Musk has a rabid following that is very unwelcoming towards anything perceived as slightly critical of him or his companies.
I never understood the fanboyism on HN. Tesla builds electric cars with a subpar autopilot. They are nice cars but it's far from revolutionary. Tesla is not SpaceX.
Tesla is not Apple, the car industry is not Nokia. Many people on HN seem to be confused here. I do think SpaceX should be renamed Tesla though, it would help selling Tesla cars.
I actually think the Apple comparison is quite apt; it's the novel application and extension of existing technologies into desirable consumer-level products. Not an Apple product/feature announcement goes by without a chorus of people shouting about how it's not really an invention because some other company already has it buried in their product. Can't the same be said about virtually everything Tesla is doing in the electric car space?
And yet, in both cases, there is something much more compelling about it than the competitors' products. It doesn't matter if you're a fanboy, an anti-fanboy, or somewhere in the middle-- from where I sit, they both have a similar niche where they stand out, and get excessive press coverage for both the good and bad things they do.
true, but Apple had its dark days too, and fundamentally much of their vision was the same back then as it was when they hit it big -- user friendly, design forward, closed ecosystem, etc.
Also, Tesla does well between car development cycles. If they can ride it out, they can print money too. The problem is whether they can get BETTER at developing new cars with less investment, and ramping more quickly, driving true volume. They might print money for a few quarters once Model 3 production is up, but that depends on there being an endless stream of buyers, and in cars, we know that's not the case.
Musk's greatest skill is as a self-promoter, conflating technological progress with the success of his business ventures. Many fall for this marketing.
> Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?
Interesting isn't it? It's almost like someone turned on a switch and suddenly there is rampant anti-elon musk sentiment. What has elon musk done recently?
and the "journalists" have been waging a war against him. There is a ridiculous amount of news industry workers here ( one of the reasons for the rampant censorship here and on other social media sites is to accommodate the news industry ). The news companies have social media teams pushing their narrative all over social media along with their third party affiliates and ngos.
The media's current punching bag is zuckerburg ( hence the nonstop facebook stories here ). But zuckerburg is giving in to the media, so I suspect the new punching bag will be elon musk.
Expect a lot of negative stories, comments and threads about tesla and elon musk going forward. At least until musk apologizes or gives in to the media.
Alternatively, Musk does a lot of bad things and the journalists are rightfully calling him out for it.
Musk is notoriously anti-union, continually over-promises then under-delivers, has continually treated his wives as trophies, and has designed a worse subway just because he doesn't want his knees to touch some peasant's knees. He's just another shitty billionaire
That's true. Musk, like all people, have their positives and negatives.
But he's always been this way. The question is why the sudden change in sentiment?
And as bad as elon musk is, the journalists are much worse. I'd rather have a world full of elon musks than journalists.
> Musk is notoriously anti-union
To be fair, no entrepreneur in a fledgling/new industry is pro-union. Actually, no entrepreneur is pro-union.
> continually over-promises then under-delivers
That's shareholders' concern, not ours.
> has continually treated his wives as trophies
Welcome to humanity. Are you going to blame his wives who loved to be trophies? Seems like personal business between consenting adults.
> and has designed a worse subway just because he doesn't want his knees to touch some peasant's knees.
As opposed to the elitist journos who love to slum it with the peasants right?
> He's just another shitty billionaire
Who the media loved. For nearly 20 years, the media wasn't too concerned with his anti-union stance, his trophy wives, his failure to delivery on his promises, etc.
There is no need for insults. I said elon musk has positives and negatives. How is that being a bootlicker?
And I never said I supported the objectification of women. I said I believed in independent free choice of both men and women. If a woman chooses to be a trophy wife, that's her right as a free individual. If a man chooses to marry a trophy wife, that's his right as a free individual.
Whether a man wants to marry a man or a woman wants to marry a woman or a billionaire wants to marry a trophy wife or a trophy wife wants to marry a billionaire, it's their right. As long as they are consenting adults. If consenting adults doing what they want bothers you, then the problem is with you, not them.
I dunno... I'm beginning to think HN sees this as hype=overhype.
On failing... thats unconsciounable. Of any place, this should be the site where we don't hate on failure. Failure is a definitive property of risk. Risk is the one thing that makes Musk unique, at the scale he's acting on. He puts everything on the line for a chance at an ambitious goal. This is exactly the ethic I come to this site for.
Apparently Musk really pissed off the media with his talks about creating a media ratings/fact-checking site. I'm actually following it closely because I'm also working on a fact-checking project.
Maybe the hate predates this incident and has little to do with it, but a few weeks of negative articles can do a lot to change some people's attitudes. At one point CNN had an opinion piece on the homepage titled "Elon Musk is Humiliating Himself" - that can't be helpful.
Yes, but this seems new and improved. Media articles were mostly gushing over him for the longest time, now there seem to be much more negative articles and comments floating around. It seems somewhat engineered.
It's his repeated blatant disconnection from reality (a.k.a. technically not lying, but...) in his remarks regarding production levels of the Model 3, regarding Tesla's financial state, and most importantly, regarding the capabilities of "autopilot" and refusal to take responsibility for technical failures in said "autopilot."
I wouldn't say HN is mad at him so much as wanting him to be responsible and own up to reality. He's supposed to be an engineer, and Proper engineers don't engage in "spin." Furthermore, "spin" has to be somewhat believable, whereas Musk has had a recent history of blatant falsehoods. Just like HN calls out anyone else when they're wrong (that is, disconnected from reality), HN is calling out Musk now that he's verbally disconnected from reality. HN has a low BS threshold.
Several days before Tesla raised cash he said there's "zero concern, and I mean zero" about 10k/week by the end of 2018.
According to documents from some lawsuit by ex-employees, he was told repeatedly that 5k/week is impossible by the end of 2017, but despite that knowledge, he publicly stated that as Tesla's guidance.
After Tesla got fired from NTHSA investigation, he issued a press release stating they decided to leave the investigation. After that, NTHSA had to clarify what really happened.
>Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.
He's selling things that he can't produce now, and possibly won't ever be able to produce. If you think this is simply about missing a few deadlines, you aren't following along close enough.
Telling people profits are around the corner for years on end, that self-driving is around the corner for years on end, that you'll build a mass-market $35,000 car for years on end, all the while collecting money to do so. Being very coy about disclosures. Playing the Trump "fake news" card (every negative article is fake!).
I remember coming to HackerNews and reading about Theranos, and anyone who claimed it wouldn't work was sexist or couldn't dream big enough. We are lazy bums, and these people are changing the world! Who are we to criticize?
>If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs
Five whole years of setback? Versus the hundreds of thousands of jobs related to GM, as well as their world class self-driving tech and decent EV programs? Maybe you need to reassess what you "care" about.
>Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope?
If he didn't want to be accountable to shareholders, he should have kept the company private. Why is it that HackerNews acts like companies go public as a favour to the rest of us poor schlubs?
My problem has always been that he pushes these altruistic goals "green earth"/"space travel" and then executes it with the most extreme version of capitalism available. It's like an ad campaign to him.
The most extreme (or normal actually) version of capitalism is to milk anything riskless. Build moats. Lock in customers create network effects and entrench your position regardless of how good your future products will be.
Musk is criticised for doing exactly the opposite. Risking shareholders money by (for example) insisting on going to mars, when there are lower risk options available.
Musk has been acting like a wealthy douchebag on Twitter with Trump-style meltdowns about fake news, especially concerning the (excellent, quality journalism) reports about unsafe practices and union busting at his factories.
Basically, he's an empathy deficient exploitative narcissistic a-hole, an laying people off fits that picture perfectly.
He's used his public profile as a Barnum-esque celebrity to bury and bully away legitimate criticism of him and his companies' on any number of fronts, from worker mistreatment to the dangerous state of his self-driving program.
The problem is that most unbiased news sources have been corrupted. Reddit has fallen, and hackernews is about all that's left. That means that the trolls have begun showing up here.
Trolls have gotten more skilled, and are able to convert new trolls without people realizing they have become trolls. You just have to get people angry a few times, and they'll do anything you want. Once they've calmed down, they'll continue doing the same thing for the sake of consistency.
Musk has pissed off the media by calling them out on their lack of ethics, so a storm is coming for Musk that will look very similar to what happened to Gamer-gate when they called out the media. The media literally branded them as women-haters with zero evidence and it stuck.
Few and far between. Whenever I hear this, it's always "oh, they take subsidies".
The only ones I've heard that haven't been trolling are concerns about their financial reports, which are always "concerns about financial reports" with no additional information.
Ok, go ahead and be concerned that the stock is inflated. It's not a real conversation.
Like, for example, look at what happened last week. We were bombarded by an avalanche of negative Elon/Tesla articles. It was consistent. "Tesla Factory is HELL". Like, I must have read "HELL" 3 or 4 times last week. This followed by a failed coup attempt to oust him from the board of directors. Turns out that there were billions of dollars invested in shorts that Tesla stock would plummet.
There was a coordinated effort to tank Tesla and oust him as CEO last week that failed. The result was that stock spiked and the short-sellers lost like 1.5B.
This is the kind of shit that goes on week after week with Tesla.
> Few and far between. Whenever I hear this, it's always "oh, they take subsidies". The only ones I've heard that haven't been trolling are concerns about their financial reports, which are always "concerns about financial reports" with no additional information.
I would add to that concerns about the current state of their automated driving implementation, as well as the way they are marketing it. I think a lot of those concerns are justified, and I say this as a pretty hardcore fan.
They have also been handling the response to the autopilot glitches pretty terribly. Someone should just tell Musk to shut up when someone dies in one of his cars and not immediately rush in to defend the technology. And especially don't twist the truth to make the dead guy look worse. Either suck it up and admit that the technology remains a work-in-progress, or ... perhaps a better choice ... say nothing at all beyond "our sincere condolences to the family of so-and-so"
His strategy is to fix the issue quick, and to prevent people from capitalizing on these opportunities to sink his company. You don't think Ford is throwing money at anyone who will bad-mouth Tesla?
NHTSA will spin their wheels for a year on an investigation, and accomplish absolutely nothing.
I don't recall Ford, or any other manufacturer of note, publicly bashing a victim of a crash of one of their cars. Like telling the whole world that he had his hands off the wheel in the moments leading up to the crash while knowing that it had been nearly 20 minutes since he had been warned about it. Musk tried to use misinformation to deflect from his own knowledge [which was not yet public] that in fact the car erroneously switched into a lane-that-is-not-really-a-lane and then accelerated.
I know you're spending a lot of time white-knighting for Tesla on HN today, but c'mon, quit being so disingenuous about this. They are not at all perfect and in fact have made some spectacular missteps.
I agree that there are concerns. I just don't think any of my concerns ever start with a news article. Every time I read an article like this, and think "Oh no, a legitimate concern" it ends up being overblown.
If this layoff article ends up being a legitimate source of concern, it'll be the first time out of like hundreds of articles a month.
And yeah, I'm with you on the state of driving implementation. I think the criticism that calling it auto-pilot is misleading is a legitimate concern, for example. I would call it co-pilot until it's fully automated, and call it auto-pilot once you can take your hands off the wheel. That would be consistent with the naming-scheme they have chosen, wouldn't diminish brand value, and would be more accurate.
But again, it's just every time I read one of these articles, the comments are saturated with anti-Tesla hate that is either coming from Russia, Big Oil, or some day-traders trying to bring the stock down $10 so they can buy a turn a quick profit for the day.
Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.
Tesla (and spacex) set extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do. They take big risks. They're not interested in reducing risk. They're interested in a business plan that leads to a mass migration of icbs to electric (or humans to mars). The nature of ambitious goals is that sometimes you don't hit your marks. The nature of risk taking is that you might fail, and have to do fast paced adjustments to recover.
Riskiness also means (literally) that Tesla comes with some chance of total failure. If they lose two or three big bets in a row, it could be game over. There are no cash cows or guaranteed income streams. Tesla is not Toyota or Microsoft. If you own Tesla, you need to be ok with that risk. Don't like it? Perfectly reasonable. Sell.
Personally (not an investor or customer), I think these companies are awesome. If GM disappeared tomorrow, nothing that I care about changes. If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs. If McDonald Douglass rocketry disappears, someone else will launch rockets for the US military. SpaceX... that hurts our chances of landing people on the other worlds anytime soon.
None of this risk profile stuff would even be controversial if Tesla was a fund. A fund manager can be as risky as she likes, provided that's the stated investment goal. Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope? .. at least on hacker news?
Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?