Citigroup and Goldman Sachs underwriting Tesla raise over $2 billion in funding. They held an investor call on Thursday, where CEO Elon Musk and CFO Zach Kirkhorn answered questions about their plans.
Telsa has increased its fund raising to $2.7 billion from $2 billion.
Musk confidently told investors on the call that autonomous driving will transform Tesla into a company with a $500 billion market cap. Tesla is at about $42 billion in valuation. Elon Said Tesla cars will increase in value as self-driving capabilities are added via software, and will be worth up to $250,000 within three years.
Nextbigfuture Coverage of Tesla Autonomy Days
Tesla held its Autonomy Investor Day two weeks ago. They revealed the Full Self Driving Computer and going over all of the technical details. Tesla created customized hardware only for the purpose of a full self-driving computer and they are creating software specifically to maximize that custom hardware.
Elon Musk indicates that later in the presentation and demos that they will show why LIDAR is the wrong solution for full self-driving. He indicates that LIDAR adds costs and complexity that is not needed and does not help.
Elon talked about the importance of keeping the power low and have good heat dissipation.
The FSD system handles 21 times the frames per second to 2300 frames per second versus 110 for the previous Tesla Hardware version 2.5. The system would be 7 times the frames per second of the Nvidia Xavier drive system. All Tesla’s being produced right now are using the new system. Tesla switched over on the S and X one month ago and Model 3 changed 10 days ago.
Full Self Driving Chip and the System
The FSD will fit behind the glove box and will not take up half of the trunk.
Everything is redundant with the system. Cameras or computers could fail and the system will keep working.
The chip is half the size of a GPU and has 72 teraOps per second (trillion operations) of performance.
Tesla Described How the Self-driving Software Was Being Improved
Tesla is able to use the software in customer cards to teach them how to drive in unusual situations.
Tesla Robotaxi Master Plan Details
Elon described costs and details of the master plan for a robotaxi fleet and service at Autonomy Day. Many are criticizing the full self-driving plan and do not believe it will be achieved or will be far, far later. The future of Tesla and the world will be massively impacted if this master plan succeeds or if it does not.
If it succeeds then Tesla makes billions. 1 million robotaxis making $30,000 per car per year for owners and similar amounts for Tesla would be $30 billion per year.
If would also mean about 50 billion robotaxi miles per year within a couple of years of successful full serlf-driving. Uber provided 26 billion miles of ridesharing in 2018.
In the USA, 3.22 trillion miles are driven on roads and there is about 12 trillion miles driven in the world.
Tesla makes their in-house chip for full self-driving. In 2020, they expect to have 1 million cars on the road with the hardware necessary for full self-driving and which could become robotaxis. They believe they will have the most profitable autonomous taxi on the market. Uber and Lyft lose a lot of money on ridesharing. Elon Musk says that a robotaxi using a full self-driving taxi will only cost 18 cents per mile.
The average Tesla car is parked for 22 hours per day. In 2020, owners will be able to use the Tesla app to their car to pick up and drop off passengers autonomously, earning an estimated 65 cents per mile in fares.
By Tesla’s estimates, owners might be able to earn $30,000 in gross revenue from their cars per year. This would be more than $300,000 in revenue over the 11-year lifespan of an average car.
Elon is saying Tesla cars will last 1 million miles. Tesla owners would need to give nearly 500,000 miles or ride at 65 cents per mile for Tesla car owners. Tesla would make more from their share of the robotaxi business and Tesla would have post-lease vehicles dedicated to the robotaxi fleet.
SOURCES- Elon Musk, Tesla, CNBC
Written By Brian Wang, www.nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Navigant rated companies, not just SD technologies. I.e. they included factors like sales, marketing, distribution, SD partnerships, etc – stuff where Tesla’s approach is too ‘out of box’ to get rated well. The Navigant rating might be taken to represent the “conventional wisdom” that the big established players will eventually dominate.
However, the more conventional companies may do very well in the area of SD taxis, because they can be geo-fenced to extremely well characterized areas. Given that this is what Tesla is now touting, the Navigant rating may well be more predictive of success than the number of miles Tesla cars have captured.
There is a reason that this saying is specific about which things are cheaper. It’s because most things are NOT cheaper.
In the three areas where renting is called for, the number of times you actually enjoy the product almost always turns out to be far less than anticipated. Meanwhile they have continuous and high maintenance costs.
A car, on the other hand, should be something you use all the time. If it is a car that you only take out for special occasions, then it may very well be cheaper to look at some rental prices.
Let’s take up a petition!
It is yet to be demonstrated that Tesla did choose the correct sensor suite. Other leading researchers in the field disagree.
Not to say that Tesla is wrong, but they can’t just argue that they have proved their approach was correct, by just assuming that their approach was correct.
I tend to own cars until they become undriveable and unrepairable. If you lease a car, you can’t rely on having the car beyond the period of the lease. And you can’t rely on the cost being stable, either.
Buy your cars used, and let somebody else suffer that abrupt drop in value with you drive it off the dealer’s lot. I just totaled out my Nissan Altima, (Still hurting from the accident!), and the insurance company paid off what I’d paid for it several years back. How’s renting compare to THAT?
I see a problem with renting the car for taxi services. How do you stop the customers from dirting your car if you are not in it? Do you really want to pay 50 grand, and then let some dufus with a coffee cup ruin the seats? And what about regular customers that are not carrying coffee cups, will their usage not ruin the interior just through normal wear and tear?
Withing two years, the interior of the tesla will be smelly and dingy.
Also, if hundreds of thousands of teslas come on line for taxi services, the price of that service will come down, and the profit margin will shrink. I.e. forget about earning 30 grand per year by renting the tesla for automatic taxi service….
I would be disappointed if he didn’t.
Navigant Research rates company AV progress. They have been doing this well for a while now. In March they assessed the three leaders to be Waymo, GM and Ford. Their top 10 did not include Tesla.
If it flies, floats or fornicates it’s cheaper to rent.
The plan to take back cars when current leases end demonstrates one of the reasons I’m determined never to “lease” anything unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.
There was a diagram posted actually here once, Vimeo was number one and Tesla way behind. If you follow the subject in science magazines you will get a note of what other companies are doing. It is all very interesting. Nobody is sitting idle. Sorry not in the mood to google links.
I’m curious who you believe occupies positions 1-3 in the race. I can’t get past Elon’s point that they chose the correct sensor sweet, they chose it early, and they deployed it in hundreds of thousands of cars at (mostly) the customers expense. They are now collecting an incredible amount of real world data from the exact sensor suite that will run the self driving computer. Orders of magnitude more data than any other player in the game. And once they’re comfortable with the ability of the neural net to perform a task, from a simple summon to full self driving, they unlock every car in the fleet with an OTA update. How do you beat that?
There is a point in that. But I would think that whoever is able to lay his hands on this will be quick to implement it, assuming that he has minimal common sense.
His approach is more aggressive and more flexible. Tesla is the only car you can buy with a hope it being full self driving to close to it within 3-5years.
I hope he keeps doing it
Another article and once again you spelled Tesla as TELSA. I check it using Google and yep, you spelled it as Telsa instead of Tesla in… 263 articles on this site.
Why do you keep writing it like that?
There are many very serious players in the race to commercialize autonomous driving. They are all trying different approaches. The collective understanding is that the way forward is not pure artificial data analysis, but a combination of that with huge amount of man generated logic. Plugging a million cars to bigger computers will simply won’t get them to drive autonomously by itself, period. Nvidia is already moving to be build more powerful processors than the ones just implemented by Tesla. So no need to get too excited about it, the war for more powerful computing is a constant ongoing battle. So far Tesla is not first in this race, not even the second nor the third. The Musk specialty is not creating a new technology but find new uses to existing ones. You need to be a simple fool to believe that he has a special aura or a destiny to be the only one in a vacuum that pulls out autonomy driving.
Will it be smart enough to catch the spelling error in the story header?
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENE
Tesla’s Future is Ten Times Better If They Pull Off Self-driving
If someone succeed in conveying this idea (in my reply) to Elon:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bjxlqf/d_reinforcement_learning_fast_and_slow/emcgjum/
, then we all can hope.
These numbers only work IF Tesla’s AI works, AND IF regulators allow operation, AND IF Tesla gets to set the price for the service.
Regulators have a long history of setting cab fare rates. Competition from other AI vehicle deployments could reduce Tesla’s ability to set rates.