Friday, May 27, 2022

To understand why Elon Musk is having such a bad month, you have to understand the role of FSD

In 2017, we talked about how Elon Musk's wholly undeserved reputation as a brilliant inventor and engineer was essential to his success.
Finally, it is essential to remember that maintaining this “real-life Tony Stark” persona is tremendously valuable to Musk. In addition to the ego gratification (and we have every reason to believe that Musk has a huge ego), this persona is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Musk. More than any other factor, Musk’s mystique and his ability to generate hype have pumped the valuation of Tesla to its current stratospheric levels.

Back then we thought a market cap of $50 billion was "stratospheric." Turned out we hadn't seen anything yet.



A couple days ago, we talked about flying exoskeletons, those wild proposals (often based on old sci-fi shows) that Elon Musk uses to pump Tesla stock and, to a lesser extent, the valuation of SpaceX. For the car company, Musk has focused on three of these, only one of which, Full Self Driving (FSD), remains viable as a next big thing.






For a couple of years, cybertrucks (inspired, of course, by an old sci fi movie) were the product that was supposed to revolutionize the industry and push Tesla into the stratosphere. They were the subject of tremendous hype, but since the 2019 unveiling, multiple competitors (particularly the Ford F-150 Lightning) have beaten them to market, it is difficult to maintain the next big thing framing.

More recently, Musk has been trying to drum up excitement for a proposed Tesla robot named, of course, Optimus. The effort has not been going well. Elon is promising functionality far beyond anything we've seen, but, at the moment, the only things he has to show are some flashy CGI (much of it fan-generated) and, I kid you not, footage of a dancer in a robot suit. No one outside of the fanboys seems to be taking the robot seriously and of those who do, a disproportionate share seem to be primarily focused on its potential as a sexual partner. (this is not something you want to do a Google image search on.)


"Our cars are... semi-sentient robots on wheels"



Full Self Driving was the first one in and the last man standing. Every year for the past eight, Elon Musk has been promising that Tesla was a year or two away from level 5 autonomy. Even now, no one is close to level 5 and at no point in the past decade has Tesla been the leader in the field (currently it's not even in the top four), but that didn't stop the company from putting FSD on the road.




Is this legal? That's a topic of some debate. The regulators have been slow to move but the wheels are starting to turn. 

Russ Mitchell writing for the LA Times.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration currently is investigating 42 crashes involving robot-controlled automated driving systems. Of those, 35 are Tesla vehicles and seven are from other carmakers.
...
Tesla has been selling Full Self-Driving with a growing list of features since 2016. In recent years it’s been increasing the number of people it allows to use its “beta” version. In Silicon Valley parlance, beta means a program that functions but may contain bugs and isn’t ready for broad public release.

On YouTube, Tesla customers testing the technology on public roads continue to post videos that show it quickly veering into oncoming traffic over double-yellow lines, failing to stop for semi-trucks making turns in front of the vehicles, heading toward metal poles and pedestrians, and much more.

In compliance with DMV regulations, companies such as Waymo, Cruise, Argo, Motional and Zoox have used professionally trained test drivers as a safety backup while testing their own autonomous-driving systems. The companies report all crashes to the DMV and also report what are known as “disengagements,” moments when the robot system fails or otherwise faces a situation that requires human driver intervention.

Tesla’s exemption from those regulations is a matter of definitional parsing by the DMV. The agency, through public documents and prior statements by its media relations department, has said Full Self-Driving is a driver assist system, not an autonomous system.

The feature falls “outside the scope of DMV autonomous vehicle regulations” because it requires a human operator, Gordon told Gonzalez in a five-page letter in January. He noted that DMV regulations apply only to fully autonomous cars but said the agency would “revisit” that stance.

Regulators cracking down on FSD could devastate Tesla's stock, as could a sufficient amount of bad publicity.


"Crash Course" is a collaboration between FX and the New York Times, and while I'm no fan of the paper (stick with the LAT or the WP), their head automotive writer, Neal Boudette, is very good and has been one of the best reporters on this story.

We've got regulators and aggressive reporters. How about a senate candidate? Even I didn't have that one on my bingo card.


Why is FSD falling behind the rest of the pack? The long answer is very long, but the short answer is computing power and LIDAR



There is, as the saying goes, always a tweet.

We have been talking about the rise (and hopefully fall) of the Silicon Valley tech messiahs for about ten years which has required a lamentable amount of time to be spent on Elon Musk. Based on that I am reasonably certain he doesn't really understand the terms "local maximum," "neural nets," or "AI," but the valuation of Tesla depends on people thinking that he does.

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