AI/ML components change rapidly. What happens if they decide to use an entirely different approach. They develop a new chip? Still seems excessive to develop custom chips for unfinished/experimental tech like self-driving: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/18514308/tesla-full-self-...
Point is they are doing it. Tesla does it. Apple does it. Microsoft does it. They are all developing their on hardware, and it's paying off, especially in Apple's and Tesla's use case. Research and development is the cornerstone of new innovation. Who cares if it's new tech. Not sure what you mean by "unfinished". They have a product that works. It's new and could use improvements, but Point is, they are doing it and winning. We can't sit around and wait for Ford and GMC, but these guys are being ran by dinosaurs. Stuck in the stone age, waiting for ICE to make a comeback. Here's the crutch of it all, ICE is pretty much out, with the old waterfall model, dead, old tech, EV is far more simple and a heck of a lot better. This whole ICE mentality where you release a car and it's "complete", has to go. This is why we have 'recalls'. Your car should continue to receive updates and improve as you drive it off the lot. Security updates are necessary, UI updates are necessary, performance and economy updates are necessary.
> This is why we have 'recalls'. Your car should continue to receive updates and improve as you drive it off the lot. Security updates are necessary, UI updates are necessary, performance and economy updates are necessary.
Did you ever try to rollout change to millions of units of anything, with individual owners of each item, operating in vastly different environments and with additional modifications from those owners?
Rolling updates is A HUGE issue, if you need reliability. It’s not a random app. It’s, for majority of the people, second most expensive purchase in their live (only behind a house). Messing up with that is very very risky.
This is less of a risk than it might appear. To be sure, it would be expensive to replace the computer part of the entire installed fleet. But the (potentially) full self-driving option is very richly priced, and sells with an incremental margin of 100% when component replacements are excluded. The sensor & computer package are included with all production cars, regardless of whether the FSD option is purchased.
Additionally, Tesla still grows their sales and customer base exponentially. This means that most significant changes in strategy during the production ramp-up will require (in the form of deprecation of now-obsolete production resources) only a small fraction of the investments required to achieve their full, steady-state production capacity.
The same argument holds for the potential case of major changes in battery technology. (Replacements of current fleet excluded, which would not happen for batteries). If Tesla's current battery technology is obsolete in 5-10 years, that's not a very big deal as their sales are expected to be a multiple of today's by then, and the new technology would be phased in during the expected production ramp. (If Tesla fails to grow by a multiple of today's sales, they have largely failed).
Based on their AI chip presentation, the important thing is that they have a software/hardware integrated design relationship. Your comment assumes they do this once and never again.
I seriously doubt Tesla is not actively improving the chip, and if they need a fundamentally new software approach, then they have the process/iteration loop established.
