Tesla

[GoCougs]

Mostly gimmicky tech that's not up to automotive standard, plus marketing of existing tech making it seem cooler than what it is, sounds like Apple...  And even the autopilot isn't the best in the market, just most well known and also done in probably the most irresponsible way in term of the name of the technology plus implementation.  There are better autonomous driving techs out there such as the "Super Cruise" that Cadallac has, that's not done as irresponsibly as what Tesla implemented.

Confusing revenue and profit. oh noes.

The world's the limit absent business fundamentals - what could a GE, Boeing, Ford, et al, have built if profit and other business fundamentals were not a concern.

Anyone could build a Tesla. Nobody would buy it.

GM is building a better product. The Bolt does look sorta dorky, but at least it's affordable and has legit quality, and Super Cruise is way out in front of "Auto Pilot." GM's probably losing money on every one, but at least it's not sinking the company a la Tesla.

[r0tor]

Pathetic products like the Leaf and Bolt are why (outside of Tesla) nobody cares about electric cars.

[NomisR]

So good marketing now makes your actual product bad?  Good grief this world is sad...

Good marketing makes poor quality products being perceived as good. 

[r0tor]

Also looking at Tesla's financial statement, their product revenue vs cost of revenue show they are making cars profitably (better the GM actually). They are currently suffering from high R&D and operating costs (for an automaker of their size).

[CaminoRacer]

"If you just ignore the insane overhead, this thing is profitable!"

[GoCougs]

oh boy this again

[GoCougs]

Pathetic products like the Leaf and Bolt are why (outside of Tesla) nobody cares about electric cars.

Pretty much true.

But the Bolt and Leaf are what you get when a corporation has to mind its business. Tesla doesn't do that, and viola, you get products that cost only about 60-70% of what they need to cost to create a viable business.

When Tesla dies, what will you do then? Will you come back to this thread and apologize?

[MX793]

Also looking at Tesla's financial statement, their product revenue vs cost of revenue show they are making cars profitably (better the GM actually). They are currently suffering from high R&D and operating costs (for an automaker of their size).

If a company that produces goods is losing money when the accounting term ends and all of the income and expenses are tallied, then they aren't producing their goods profitably.  R&D and operating costs are part of producing and selling cars.  As much a part of making cars as the cost of steel or batteries or tires used in the actual product.

[r0tor]

If a company that produces goods is losing money when the accounting term ends and all of the income and expenses are tallied, then they aren't producing their goods profitably.  R&D and operating costs are part of producing and selling cars.  As much a part of making cars as the cost of steel or batteries or tires used in the actual product.

Standard SEC financial statents break out revenue and cost of revenue.  Cost of revenue is anything related to components, manufacturing, delivering, and advertising for your products producing revenue.  They are showing a 20% profit margin on their cars.  This is in line with Mazda and double GM/Ford.

SEC also breaks out R&D costs and general business type overhead.  Comparing them to Mazda which generates much more revenue, their R&D is proportionally higher as is their overhead.  Most of which is fairly easy to contribute to only having 3 products on sale and developing 2 or 3 more (which is abnormal for a car company to be doubling their model range).

[MX793]

Standard SEC financial statents break out revenue and cost of revenue.  Cost of revenue is anything related to components, manufacturing, delivering, and advertising for your products producing revenue.  They are showing a 20% profit margin on their cars.  This is in line with Mazda and double GM/Ford.

SEC also breaks out R&D costs and general business type overhead.  Comparing them to Mazda which generates much more revenue, their R&D is proportionally higher as is their overhead.  Most of which is fairly easy to contribute to only having 3 products on sale and developing 2 or 3 more (which is abnormal for a car company to be doubling their model range).

That's great.  At the end of the day, there's money in and money out, and if you are selling product profitably, money in > money out.  Splitting money out into "cost of revenue" and overhead is semantics.  At the end of the day, the money you pull in from whatever it is you sell needs to direct and indirect costs of producing that product.  If you are unable to sell your product or service for enough to cover all of your expenses, then you are selling at a loss.  And it's not like Tesla saved up a bunch of money from running in the black for several years and then had one or two red quarters as they sunk some of those saved reserves into R&D or facility upgrades.  They have, since inception over a decade ago, been running well in the red.

[12,000 RPM]

So good marketing now makes your actual product bad?  Good grief this world is sad...

No, bad product makes product bad

Using public roads as a beta testing ground is also bad business

https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/tesla-navigate-on-autopilot-automatic-lane-change-requires-significant-driver-intervention/

And r0tor you are a savvy investor. Tesla's bottom line is shit. Why it's shit is kind of irrelevant.

[MX793]

I just tallied up Tesla's earnings/losses over the past ~8 years.  They have cumulatively lost over 6.2 billion dollars since 2011.  For every dollar in revenue brought in from the start of 2011 to date, they've spent $1.12.

[12,000 RPM]

Hater math

[r0tor]

No, bad product makes product bad

Using public roads as a beta testing ground is also bad business

https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/tesla-navigate-on-autopilot-automatic-lane-change-requires-significant-driver-intervention/

And r0tor you are a savvy investor. Tesla's bottom line is shit. Why it's shit is kind of irrelevant.

Who has not passed on the right?!  Who has not cutoff someone?  It sound like the system is actually performing like an average US driver.

The only hope that automous driving has of working is massive data feeding into machine learning algorithms due to the complete randomness that is human drivers - trouble is that machine learning needs to see an event before learning how to react to an event. This takes massive amounts of actual cars on actual roads going through real world driving scenarios reporting data back... In this aspect Tesla is a quantum leap ahead of everyone else.

[GoCougs]

Huh? GM (Cruise Automation) and Google (Waymo) are way ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving (even so, it will never work, so there's that).

Tesla's problem is they've had a brain drain/shield, for obvious reasons - top talent doesn't want to work there, and what top talent is there, is leaving for Google, Uber, Cruise, Zoox, etc.

[r0tor]

If Tesla is behind Google - then where are the products on the street?

Reading reviews GMs supercruise is limited to only devided lane highways (Tesla is not) and only out performs Tesla base on driver monitoring... Which if you are going to fully autonomous driving is a bit weird to spend so much effort making sure the driver is waiting to step in

[12,000 RPM]

Who has not passed on the right?!  Who has not cutoff someone?  It sound like the system is actually performing like an average US driver.

Isn't the whole point of autonomous driving to improve safety? What is the point of Autopilot if it's no better than the average awful American driver? 

[12,000 RPM]

If Tesla is behind Google - then where are the products on the street?

Rushing a dangerous, incomplete product to market doesn't put one "ahead"

[GoCougs]

If Tesla is behind Google - then where are the products on the street?

Reading reviews GMs supercruise is limited to only devided lane highways (Tesla is not) and only out performs Tesla base on driver monitoring... Which if you are going to fully autonomous driving is a bit weird to spend so much effort making sure the driver is waiting to step in

You've no doubt Googled various comparisons and rankings of autonomous driving tech, and now know that GM and Google are at the lead.

Waymo and Cruise have lots of miles. Thing is of course, they're being smart(ish) about it, and making sure their product works(ish) before letting loose on the public, unlike Tesla.

Autopilot's doom is its failed technology. It simply uses only 2D cameras. Cruise and Waymo use a mixture of LIDAR, radar and 2D cameras. To make it work(ish) you need 3D data.

Musk isn't an engineer, and is s psycho, and things will only get worse as talent flees and avoids Telsa.

[r0tor]

Humans use a couple of 2D cameras pretty well.

[Eye of the Tiger]

Humans use a couple of 2D cameras pretty well.

Pretty well?

[GoCougs]

Humans use a couple of 2D cameras pretty well.

No, humans don't have "a couple of 2D cameras." Humans have stereoscopic vision (i.e., sensing depth perception), hearing and physical sensation (i.e., detecting motion), a brain and tons of experience, all of which combine to result in an extremely resolute and high bandwidth 3D perception and computation system. As to sensing, this is what 2D cameras + LIDAR + radar are trying to accomplish, and that which Tesla Autopilot will never accomplish. This is why Tesla is behind and will forever remain behind. To replace the brain, there needed is lots of machine learning (= just clever programming + statistics + BIG/FAST number crunching) and Google has the largest machine learning infrastructure and computing system on the planet (not sure where Tesla is on that, but given the brain drain, also likely very far behind).

[r0tor]

So yea, humans have a couple 2d cameras with an incredible processor.

It's also not about how much number crunching power you have, but data to actually crunch.  Waymo has lived in select markets rather than globally and will suffer from lack of data diversity.

[12,000 RPM]

Waymo's technology also hasn't been involved in fatal crashes so there's that. Have to crack eggs to make omelettes. Hopefully you or nobody you love will become one of Tesla's "learning opportunities".

[r0tor]

A lot Waymos life has been spent at speeds less than 25mph... Let's hope it didn't have fatal accidents

[NomisR]

If Tesla is behind Google - then where are the products on the street?

Reading reviews GMs supercruise is limited to only devided lane highways (Tesla is not) and only out performs Tesla base on driver monitoring... Which if you are going to fully autonomous driving is a bit weird to spend so much effort making sure the driver is waiting to step in

Yes, Tesla while inaccurately naming their system "autopilot", has blamed the customer every single time something has gone wrong... of course it's the customer's cause that our cars crashed with autopilot on, because they weren't paying attention.....

[NomisR]

The problem with Tesla "autopilot" is limited by the computing power and the fact that it's actually battery powered.  For the vehicle to be able to properly be fully autonomous, you need a lot of computing power which at the same time drains the battery, and in the case of Tesla, it's even worse because you'll have significantly reduced range.  The only thing that Tesla has is a cobbled togther existing technology that's fine tuned to work together that exists in most mid to high end vehicles, it's downright dangerous to call it autopilot.  The next true change in autopilot technology would likely be the roll out of the 5G network providing that it can have the coverage, speed and latency as promised.  With that, you can remove significant amount of computing away from the vehicle itself and into the cloud, that would save a lot of space and energy required to do so. 

[r0tor]

Your seriously saying you would rather trust your life to cloud computing then on board computing?

[12,000 RPM]

The problem with Tesla "autopilot" is limited by the computing power and the fact that it's actually battery powered.  For the vehicle to be able to properly be fully autonomous, you need a lot of computing power which at the same time drains the battery, and in the case of Tesla, it's even worse because you'll have significantly reduced range.  The only thing that Tesla has is a cobbled togther existing technology that's fine tuned to work together that exists in most mid to high end vehicles, it's downright dangerous to call it autopilot.  The next true change in autopilot technology would likely be the roll out of the 5G network providing that it can have the coverage, speed and latency as promised.  With that, you can remove significant amount of computing away from the vehicle itself and into the cloud, that would save a lot of space and energy required to do so.

Your seriously saying you would rather trust your life to cloud computing then on board computing?

Two equally bad posts back to back

[BimmerM3]

For the vehicle to be able to properly be fully autonomous, you need a lot of computing power which at the same time drains the battery, and in the case of Tesla, it's even worse because you'll have significantly reduced range.

Source?

Obviously computing takes some amount of power, but I wouldn't expect it to be very significant when compared to what's needed to propel a 3500+ lb vehicle.