Should I buy TSLA shares?

I don’t know how other cars behave on the road, but I’ve been driving a model 3 for almost a year, and it’s like having a co-pilot. The steering wheel vibrates when you’re driving out of your lane. The car beeps if it sees something dangerous. Cruise control keeps distance to the car in front. If a car is entering the highway and you’re on the right lane, it will brake strongly to let the other car in (in this regard it’s pretty paranoid, I guess that’s a common cause of accidents).

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All luxury brands have these features. Also, you only show data for Tesla but not for other brands.

I recalled a few articles from Norway, where EVs (incl Teslas) are pretty common now, which contradict your claim:

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Thanks for the link. It’s hard to say what the “damages” really are based on the article. I can tell that I already have “damaged” both my summer and winter rims. The car is wide and long and I’m a newbie driver so I scratched the rims multiple times in a parking garage. Is the display distracting - yes. Especially if the voice recognition does not understand what song you want to play and you absolutely have to play that song :wink: . Or if your girlfriend does not know how to cancel the current route and navigate to the next supercharger :smiley: . Luckily nothing bad happened to me yet.

But come on, let’s not blame cars for having big screens and high acceleration. Otherwise we should also remove radio and all in-car entertainment systems, including hands-free calling.

Tesla’s own figures?

Why don’t they provide any context? What’s up with the curious distinction between “accidents” (Tesla) and “crashes” (NHTSA)? “Multiple requests to Tesla to … clear up the definition of “accident” in this report… have gone without answer over an extended period”.

Besides that, what are they trying to prove? I have little doubt that the combination of a human driver assisted by Tesla’s “AutoPilot” can lower accident rates.

That doesn’t change the fact that Musk keeps claiming year after year that their system is - or will very soon be - something that it is not: fully self-driving. And some are drinking the kool-aid, are playing games or falling asleep at the wheel.

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12 posts were split to a new topic: Cruise control & speed cameras

A post was merged into an existing topic: Cruise control & speed cameras

Effective as of March 15, 2021, the titles of Elon Musk and Zach Kirkhorn have changed to Technoking of Tesla and Master of Coin, respectively. Elon and Zach will also maintain their respective positions as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer.

Source : Tesla’s latest SEC filings.

It looks like this company is taking regulatory filings with utmost seriousness.

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I agree. Not only do these designations („Technoking“) sound as being similar functions to principal officers. They‘ve also filled the roles with their current CEO and CFO, respectively.

It is indeed assuring that they‘ve taken seriousl and fulfilled their (likely) duty to file with the SEC.

Hmm… interesting idea…

image

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Master of Coin is the well deserved title

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Perhaps Tesla Inc. is becoming a crypto fund?

Indeed TSLA has made a lot of money with BTC. So much money, in fact, that BTC profits are bigger than earnings coming from selling cars/energy/solar panels/what-have-you during the whole cumulative history of the company. Well done!

Let’s push the thought experiment a bit further:

  1. Management realizes that there is much more money to be made in the crypto space than in its current business.
  2. TSLA liquidate all its non-crypto assets : factories, machines, inventories, etc, and manage to sell them at the value carried on the books.
  3. Management restructure the company in a crypto holding, and reinvest the liquidation proceeds in BTC/ETH/etc.
  4. The market capitalization converges towards the net asset value of the crypto holdings, which would be around $21 billion. The share price is now $22.
  5. In a subsequent SEC 8K filing, the company states that effective immediately, the titles of TSLA investors have changed to Archdukes of BagHolding.

Careful what you wish for…

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I’d miss the robotaxis.

Wouldn’t the correct designation be Technomage? Being the master of FIRE and all of that. :wink:

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An Electric Horseman riding into a fire sunset.

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Videos of users testing the new version of FSD are being released on Youtube. It is both exciting and underwhelming

  • Exciting because when I see what human ingenuity is able of doing, I cannot stop thinking about future progress
  • Underwhelming because it is nowhere near production ready.
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I think the driving scenario from the first video (many lanes, many parked cars, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights) is already a quite demanding one. Put a tram somewhere in there, wipe out some lane markings and it’s close to the toughest driving conditions you can imagine.

Indeed it’s not impressive. I still think the right approach to solve it is through machine learning. You cannot program every scenario, you have to let the car software do its magic also in unimplemented situations. For this you need millions of miles driven with human feedback correcting erroneous neural network.

I’m puzzled as to why some automakers still try to achieve FSD with LIDAR. A human can manage with two cameras, why can’t a car manage with 8? (I wonder though, if they will have to implement some camera wiping mechanism to remove dirt/water) LIDAR is expensive and bulky. Recently Elon said, they will even try not to rely on radar, I guess all in the effort to save costs. The same question applies to pre-mapping a street. A human does not need that, doing this to the car is just cheating, and does not scale well.

By the way, the non-fsd Model 3 that I’m driving displays traffic lights and even reacts to them. When you stand at a red light and it turns green, the car will make a “ding” sound to let you know it’s time to drive. But often times, when waiting I look at the screen, and there the light rapidly changes from red to green to turned off, plus everything it renders shakes like it’s some hallucination.

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I’m puzzled by the reverse :slight_smile: Why cripple yourself voluntarily? (as expected lidar cost went down by an order of magnitude or more, it’s like 500 bucks now)

Sounds a bit like luddite thinking, refusing a technology out of principle. Imagine doing that for e.g. GPS (expensive, a paper map is fine to navigate around, humans handle it easily).

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Good point about falling costs, didn’t know that. I read that right now you can get a LiDAR system for $1000, on the way to have it for $500, or even $100 in the long run. If LiDAR proves superior, that is terrible news for Tesla, which has equipped cars with cameras, and probably it would not even be possible to put LiDAR anywhere.

But the question is if LiDAR is really the right tool for the job. Yes, it can make a 3D map of the surroundings, of the shapes, but it’s not be able to discern a flying plastic bag or a falling leaf from a real obstacle. It will not recognize street signs, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings. It only answers the question: is anything in my way? (and it can easily give a false positive in case of the mentioned plastic bag).

That’s why people use a bunch of inputs: usually camera + radar + lidar. They work under difference circumstances, you usually merge all the inputs into one scene.

E.g.

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