Also this seems to very much be them suffering from the 90/10 problem that some many software projects suffer from: you can do 90% of the work with 10% of the effort but that also means it takes 90% of the work to do the other 10%.
Earlier people from the outside perceived Tesla as being ahead of everybody else on this because they just started before just about everybody else, were riding the easy part of the curve were you’re constant delivering improvements because you’re just tackling the easy bits, and they were probably even doing a rush job and taking shortcuts to maintain that apperarence of being ahead of the rest because that maintained an appeareance of Tesla as a Tech Stock rather than an Auto Industry Stock, hence with market valuations 10x or 20x higher than they would others which meant sky-high Tesla Stock Prices justified by how “technologically ahead” they were in a “key future technology” - the company was just executing a typical conman strategy of looking like they were making it in the hope that their early-mover status and the increasing investor funding that strategy pulls in would allow them to actually make it before everybody else or at least with a larger installed base, similarly to how Theranos was doing only unlike that company Tesla did just the right balance of deceit and reality to just be on the right side of the Laws for Fraud.
Tech companies absolutelly can get away with doing this during the early and easy parts of the project because for non-experts it looks like they’re doing fast progress - which is why Startups nowadays (which is an Era of way more bullshitty and even fraud in the Industry than, say, pre-2000) commonly do things exactly like this - but then they reach the hard part, progress speed naturaly goes down a lot (the project transitions from the 90%-results/10%-work speed to the 10/90% one) plus all the the early shortcuts (a.k.a. Technical Debt) come due to be paid for: “out of control car careening down the hill” meet “concrete wall”.
Finally, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they’re stuck down a dead-end for the technology which is the wrong way to reach level 4 and have to go back and redo much if not most of that work they did as a rush job to keep impressing investors and ill-informed customers with how “ahead of the pack” the were. Under the leadership of Musk I suspect that they will never be able to reach level 4.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
This will be the reason Tesla falls behind the rest of the automotive industry, wasting money on vanity projects instead of developing better vehicles.
The 3, Y, and the huge number of Chinese EVs being sold around the world have shown there is a huge market for affordable, practical electric vehicles, and what are they developing? A vehicle that won’t be able to fulfill it’s intended role for a decade almost everywhere.
Peter1986C@lemmings.world 3 weeks ago
When I see EVs (southern Netherlands) they are mostly model S or non-Teslas from mostly VW. Autonomous vehicles aren’t even allowed here AFAIK.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
My understanding is that the only places in the world where self-driving vehicles are actually legal is the UK and weirdly Tehran or something very odd like that.
But that’s all just a technicality, most jurisdictions say you can’t have them because we haven’t verified their safety. The UK says you can have them but only in very limited testing scenarios (limited speed, limited to certain roads in a mapped area). But they both effectively amount to the same thing.
AA5B@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think the focus on AI is what will be the problem. Sure, AI is cool, and sure you need advances for self-driving, but you’re a car manufacturer and can’t neglect car manufacturing
Aceticon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
All that stuff is what justifies Tesla being treated as a Tech Stock rather than an Automotive Stock and hence having Stock Prices which are 10x or 20x what an auto-maker with similar Revenue and Margins would have.
Dropping the techno-bollocks that underpins their “we’re disrupting the Auto industry with our Technology and will become the Google of cars” story and just focusing on being good at making electric cars would mean loosing the huge “we’re a Tech Stock” premium that keeps Tech companies’ stock prices high even when they’re loosing money (the valuations are justified by the expectation that they will one day dominate entire markets, like Google or Apple), and hence accepting their stock falling 90%, from Uber style valuations to Ford style valuations.
I doubt shareholders will ever accept that, hence I expect Tesla will just keep “faking until you make it” all they while they get farther an farther away from making it, until eventually they crash far harder (possibly even cease to exist in the next decade or two) than it would happen if they just settled down to be just another auto-maker.
AA5B@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They were a tech company because they developed cars with features and technology no one else ever had. The stock stayed too high because they were delivery 50%+ growth every year and legacy manufacturers weren’t even trying to compete. The stock was truly excessive because of a long term roadmap to bring the future into present reality. Funding for ai was part of the competitive advantage, when it was used to add features to their cars.
AI for its own sake is not a good place to be and will only suck attention and funding from the core business
Humanoid robotics may be a vision of the future and I’m excited that someone will make that attempt, but it has nothing to do with cars. It’s a distraction of funding and attention at the expense of the core business
Previously Musk developed a portfolio of companies, so each can go for their own attempts at the future with less impact on each other. It’s just basic business sense. For example, a solar company could go bankrupt without affecting a car company. Now he’s taking a leap of fantasy and I don’t see any sign of the solid technical base other of his companies started with, and he’s doing it as part of a company that had been succeeding
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
If you want to be the google of cars you shouldn’t be building cars, but become Bosch.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Thing is, I quite like the idea of a self driving car. I do whitewater kayaking, and I’d love to be able to do a trip and have my car meet me at the end.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious this isn’t happening any time soon though, and developing a vehicle that is totally reliant on the technology doesn’t seem like a smart idea.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…