Rockets may be easier to develop than a product for the mass market. Car manufacturers have had many decades of optimizations of their processes. It’s very hard to catch up.
The bar for success is different too. A rocket which safely delivers its cargo 99.99% of the time would be a huge step forward. A car which safely delivers its cargo 99.99% of the time would be taken off the roads.
It’s funny you mention 99.99% - because 40,000 people are killed by car crashes in a year in the United States, which is actually .012% of the population. So cars actually do a bit worse than your stat...
If a majority of the population used a rocket daily then the numbers would be different. The number of people killed per space flight is probably a little higher than the number if people killed per drive in a car.
Can't find it now, but Musk said something like "For a rocket, manufacturing is 10 times harder than building the actual rocket. For cars, it's 100 times harder".
This is not that surprising, the incumbent manufacturers have decades of experience, vast amounts of know how and optimized supply chains. There's a reason why no new manufacturers have emerged.
The claims sound bold because he never made them. The poster is misquoting.
Elon said that Tesla would have a version of the software that could do full self driving by the end of this year. Then he very clearly spelled out that it would not be available to consumers until regulators approve it at some later date (possibly years).
He also stated that advanced summon would be rolled out last week, but then it didn’t happen.
Why? We (the general public) don’t know exactly but rumors are that some issues were uncovered and Tesla decided to slow down the rollout of this feature until the issues are fixed.
That’s good that they slowed down the rollout. I’d rather wait for a safer, better version of the feature than get a dangerous version, if that’s part of the issue.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this picture except for people interpreting forward-looking statements as 100% locked-in promises. They are not promises.
In technology, people predict stuff all the time and sometimes the predictions come true on time; other times they take longer. Perfectly normal stuff but outsiders don’t always get this. Elon has correctly predicted plenty of stuff that has come to pass. Not always on time, but it is a given that schedules can slip in technology.
There is a lot of software in cars, but cars are not software. Making cars is a lot harder from a business perspective than doing AI. In the end software is just a file that gets loaded into a module - one step in a very long chain.
I doubt that will happen. The paradigm shift for a “smart” car vs just a car is nothing like a flip phone vs a smart phone.
Besides being able to drive you home when you’re drunk, what can you smart car do for you that you couldn’t already do with a regular car? Cruise for parking? These are just minor conveniences and for large swathes of the population, they’re likely not welcome either.
> Save millions of lives by being safer driving than humans?
That’s not a perceptible change. It’s a wonderful thing and I’m all for people not dying, but people aren’t suddenly going to notice the difference. It’s not like people entering a car think “Am I going to die?!” every time they go to work.
> Drive you home the rest of the time?
Again I don’t see this as being more than a convenience. At beta it leads to more screen time zoning out with a Netflix a la train commuting.
> Drive you cross country overnight while you sleep?
The vast majority of people can’t afford to take a week off to travel across the country so they would not notice this.
> Come and pick you up at the airport after a holiday?
Again a convenience, not a major change. One can already call an Uber from the airport.
> Make you money during the day as an autotaxi while you're not using it?
I don’t see this being as popular an idea as people make it out to be. The phrase “Make money while you sleep” has been pitched for years and in the case of renting your car out overnight, doesn’t factor insurance costs and the race to the bottom on pricing . Once that catches up there won’t be much money to be made.
> Save your life by avoiding accidents you didn't see?
Again this is a great thing but not perceptible to the daily user.
> Radically bring down the cost of taxis and car hire for those who don't own a car?
It’s already lower than the cost of ownership thanks to VC money.
> In our lifetimes all cars will be electric driverless cars in at least some countries. It may not be Tesla but the future is coming.
Electric has nothing to do with “smart”. It can be a gas engine. It can be a fuel cell. It could be something we don’t even know about yet.
All these conveniences mount up, I sincerely think they are in aggregate a significant selling point for most people.
Electric has nothing to do with “smart”.
This is the same mistake big automakers are still making. Electric is the future, it is also radically simpler, allows for automated recharges etc. It's be very hard to build an autonomous gas car.
No question this is coming. But I think the current car manufacturers are very well positioned to ride that wave. I don’t see much room for startups there.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out - it's quite possible other manufacturers will see the light and start producing autonomous cars (they certainly have a production advantage at the moment), but I think the advantage Tesla has is that they own the whole stack and know where they're going.
Manufacturing is understood and still hard because you have to execute well every day. With software once you are done it’s easy to replicate. Guess why the phone market is donated by hardware manufacturers? Because it’s hard to produce a phone at low cost and good quality. Same is true for cars. The development is relatively easy but producing is hard.
Current smartphones are an evolution of the PDA idea that started with the Apple Newton, Palm Pilot and others. People always dreamed of a handheld device that would enable them to communicate and get information. What do you expect a car to do other than carting people around? Once it can go autonomously from A to B what else will people use a car for?
