In mid-2019, Nextbigfuture predicted that 2020 would be year that Tesla would begin dominating the world with dry battery technology. Gali at Hyperchange is predicting that the major announcement from the September 22, 2020 Tesla battery day will be the reveal of a new dry battery factory.
He predicts the initial new dry batteries will go into a new Tesla Model S.
The main benefit will be an eventual massive ramp in battery production combined with steadily lowering costs and steadily increasing energy density.
The Maxwell battery production is supposed to be 16 times better than regular battery production. Tesla is already ramping up production by 50% each year. If Tesla increases this to double or triple for the next five years, then Tesla will have car domination at 15-20 million cars per year and batteries for an equally large battery storage business and abundant batteries for millions of SEMI trucks.
Elon has also discussed improving factories to be 10 to 100 times more productive. Tesla and SpaceX are showing significant improvements in factory production. Major achievable breakthroughs in batteries OR factories OR self-driving for Tesla would boost the company by ten to twenty times. It is more likely that the breakthroughs will be partial in each area and take a few years to fully realize. However, multiple doubles or acceleration of improvement in each key area can combine to boost production and profitability.
Tesla with 10X batteries, 10X factories and self-driving will win in mobility and energy and other technology categories.
No other company involved in any kind of manufacturing or products is even trying to achieve the radical improvements that Tesla is targeting. There are some others working on self-driving but those companies are not working on battery or factory breakthroughs.
Tesla completed the purchase of Maxwell Technologies which will give Tesla higher energy density batteries, lower costs for batteries, double battery life and will allow battery factories to have 16 times the production in the same space.
Self Driving Success Would Turn All Tesla Cars into Robotaxis
Elon Musk wants to make humanity multi-planetary. Dominating and transforming world business and technology is a necessary stage one.
SOURCES- Tesla, Maxwell, Hyperchange, Elon Musk
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com, Brian owns shares of Tesla
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.
Is “dry battery” yet another name for “solid state battery”, formerly known as “solid electrolyte battery”?
Nuclear dead in the US ? It’s still making a lot more power than wind and solar combined – more than twice as much in 2019. It’s a better fit to demand too – for evening air conditioning, night EV charging, or winter heating. Solar is useless for all those, and wind unreliable.
Whats about Ships do we need much better batteries for ships?
Whats about planes, Robots, etc. do we need much better batteries to make their use in them viable?
(or Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini)
If pods travelled directly from go to whoa at full speed, with no traffic stoppages, it should be possible to keep a city mobile with considerably fewer passenger seats. And I’d far rather have them flitting silently above than wall to wall right next to the footpath, usually a ton of metal per occupant, chugging out lung poisons and noise, and making crossing the road a life and death decision. Many drivers in cities now have to walk a block or so to find a park – they could walk a block to a pod station instead. Tunnels would have to be much further below grade than elevated track would need to be above it, to avoid basements and utility lines: that alone would make them slower, and I can’t believe Musk can magically make drilling through rock, then putting in bracing and track, cheaper than running a light track through air. On a personal note, I used to live near Rushcutter’s Bay in Sydney, and occasionally caught the raised track out from the centre of town. I was working further west, and after they opened the new underground line from King’s Cross to Bondi Junction, I caught the train instead of a bus. Only once – I hated starting my day underground. I switched to running or riding to work.
elon said he was going to increse the price of all his self driving cars when the tech matures, right now you’re getting a discount for beta testing.
Peter Lynch, the patron god of investing, once said one should not necessarily invest in the company that makes the hottest newest widgets, as another company might come out with better widgets next week but, instead, one should consider investing in a company that benefits from widgets being improved. Because they will be improved, eventually, always.
Seems to me Tesla is not so much benefiting from making the hottest newest widgets, but is benefiting from rapid improvements in the various widgets it needs for its widgets.
You would need about as many pods as there are cars and you would need about as many tracks as there are roads today. And this would mean making our cities dark and having flickering sunlight as the pods wiz by. An idea beyond stupid.
No, transport as a service, cheap subways (enabled by cheaper tunnels, see Boring company) and increased plantation of trees and plants in the cities is the way to go. We should try to make the life experience of humans better, not worse…
Just one detail. The eye is not transparent far infrared radiation, i.e. LIDARs using such wavelengths are harmless.
About gap analysis.
You could prove that your SW is equivalent to the SW of Tesla by just showing the training data as described above in my previous comment. All random inputs give identical outputs as the Tesla ANN. Add a few million miles of field verification and you are done.
Now, if this method of “copying” is allowed, the legal protection of ANN’s will of course be very weak. We will see if regulators will take a side in this issue.
But even if they would ban the practice, you could still do it illicitly and then make another separate SW gap analysis. You can claim that you trained your network with your own data and simulations, and then show how your SW is equivalent to the Tesla ANN. Problem solved.
I stand corrected. But, just because Tesla needs 6 billion miles for regulatory approval, does not mean that the next one will need it.
In medicine, you need an enormous amount of data to introduce a new medicine. But, once the medicine is on the market, you can market it with different target diseases or different combinations with other medicines. To get these approvals, you just have to make a “gap” analysis, and often no clinical trials are needed. I believe that the situation for self driving SW will be similar.
And think about this from the perspective of different countries. Do you think that the USA government would be comfortable with Tesla controlling 100% of the self driving market, or do you think they would be pragmatic and allow a gap analysis for different companies as to allow competitors? Do you think China would let Tesla have 100% of the Chinese market for a decade?
Since there is a technical way and a very strong political incentive, there is no way Tesla will be allowed to keep a monopoly for any significant time. And I say this as a Tesla share holder….
1) The US isn’t the whole world. (BTW your comment implies you think I’m in the US)
2) It’s true that the decades long smear campaign against nuclear power has been very successful. To the extent that it has been successful that is an ecological disaster. Every other energy source is inadequate to replace much fossil fuel use.
Tracked it Musk said 6 Billion Miles for REGULATORY approval not 1 Billion
QUOTE
July 2016, Musk explained how developing the software is just one step toward full autonomy:
“Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.”
In November 2019, MIT researcher Lex Fridman estimated the fleet had accumulated two billion miles but this was not confirmed by Tesla.
UNQUOTE
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tesla-autopilot-just-reached-a-huge-halfway-milestone-toward-autonomy
So as I said this hurdle will need passing.
Fair enough you posts are eloquent and use information that indicate you are intelligent and knowledgeable, nice to have spoken
1. I do not believe that Musk has said that the regulatory authorities require 1 billion miles as proof of safety. If I remember correctly, Elon said that you need some billion miles of data to make reliable SW. But to answer your question how the competitors will get their SW approved, it’s fairly easy:
(A) Point to Tesla SW. Argue that you do not need as much proof since it is allready an established fact that SW can safely drive cars. This is routinely done with new medicines and regulatory permissions
(B) Get data to proove safety by launching in limited markets, confined areas etc. Start with a market with lax regulations. A chinese competitor could ask the chinese government for a “favor” to relax the requirements for initial (and limited) deployment. In the case of China, they could even be up front with copying Tesla…
Also remember that Tesla will not get regulatory approval for “volume” markets right away, but will have to start small also..
2. No problem, really. Didi Chuxing are already teaming up with NVIDIA on AI [1] for self driving. NVIDIA can make the HW for the cars, no problem. Making an onboard inference machine is not really that big of a deal. Cameras…. The Xpeng 7 already has what, 10 cameras..?
All in all, once Tesla cracks self driving they will have at most 5 years before the competitors are at the same level as they are.
(1)
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/didi-chuxing-teams-with-nvidia-for-autonomous-driving-and-cloud-computing
True: I rarely use the term fanboy because it does tend to suppress critical thought (as well as the inherent sexism of the term).
But seeing as the term was already in use in this thread I went with it.
“Tesla and SpaceX are showing significant improvements in factory production.”
Pretty sure that no one was actually even attempting to mass manufacture orbital rockets as SpaceX are doing now – at least not on their scale.
It stands to reason that there would be vast improvements to be made if next to nothing was being done before, and that’s without employing 3D printing to speed up rocket motor production.
Perhaps it seems bonkers to you, however Ark invest uses technology experts and it clearly does not seem bonkers to them, so one of you is bonkers I see what you pasted but tell me why should I take your word over theirs? Where exactly in the report you cut and paste does it say that the current belief is that car ownership will drop as people switch to buying a ride rather than owning? https://ark-invest.com/analyst-research/self-driving-cars/ you need to understand Arks WHY to deconstruct their argument.
I have lectured on technology I understand its disruption, I think the 4th industrial revolution is real not a game not a well that`s interesting , but real.. `
does Amazon etc seem bonkers after all anyone can replicate their ideas its only online shopping surely, but its not is it?
If as I suspect we are genuinely on route to some kind of singularity its going to be and eventually look bonkers that`s what revolutions do.
And how do you
You need 2 and a lot of cars to get 1 its a nasty circle but cars are lethal, and Tesla has spoken of licensing, so how long to get your own system passed by regulators, how long does Tesla have a technical and more importantly legal lead.
I do however note that as of yet we do not have 100% proof that Tesla will succeed in this area I trust(ish) musk but I like hard evidence.
After Tesla has 70-80% market saturation, will the need for ever increasing battery performance remain? Probably not. The need dies as soon as something becomes “good enough”. There’s no longer any return on investment when spending 20 billion dollars to go from AA batteries that run a car to AAA batteries that run a car. AA is small enough.
Elon may still be on fire for shaping the future to push for better batteries but he’d be the only one. Nobody else would invest 20 billion dollars to improve upon AA batteries that can run your car for 2000 miles.
Priorities come into question too. Elon could spend 3 years going from AA to AAA super batteries or he could spend those 3 years perfecting farming techniques on Mars. Which do you think he’d choose? If it’s not on his top 100 list of priorities he’s unlikely to do it. This is also why he’s paying mostly lip service to the hyperloop concept. He came up with an impressive idea, now someone else do it.
Hopefully we’re near the start of the technological S-curve for batteries. I’d like to see them get much better.
Naturally, Tesla is banking on major breakthroughs in battery technology. If they can make the batteries cheaper, last longer, hold more power, lighter, smaller, etc. then that means everything for their cars. Imagine if you could run a Tesla off two AA batteries that cost 3 dollars and hold a 2000 mile charge. BTW better not try to lick those batteries.
That’s the kind of goal we all want. If battery technology follows a path similar to desktop computers we might have such batteries in 30 years for the price of $500. Still not a bad deal. But can we really get such technology?
Mainly technology is limited first by the need and then by the limits of physics. We have the technology today to make much better battleships than the ones we had in WWII but it won’t happen since battleships are so expensive and have so little military relevance in today’s world. Just because it could happen doesn’t mean it will.
I think the need is there. The world would *LOVE* such batteries. Now we’re at the door of physics. Can physics support all these new wonder batteries they’ve been bragging about? And can Tesla bring them to a commercially viable point of maturity?
This may be the big tech battle of the 2020’s. We should definitely see lots of improvement. The batteries of 2030 will make the 2020 batteries look like a joke. They will almost certainly be good/strong/cheap enough to displace the traditional vehicle market.
I completely agree that ride on top is dumber than suspended, all else being equal. But Teslas that follow tracks and can exit to re-enter city streets already exist. It can be implemented today, one segment at a time. Yes, there will be more constraints on where the tracks can go and the slopes they follow and so on. But they would still take less footprint per passenger mile than current city streets and be faster. It’s good enough.
Sky Trans ( which has been promising a working system next year for a decade or so ) changed its design a few years back, from a pod hanging from a single track, to one hanging from two tracks, wide enough for the pod to go up between them. I suspect this was because switching track to the off-loop for the stations proved trickier than they had anticipated. At the switch point, there is the possibility of either hitting the divider at speed, or of the pod coming off between the guides and falling. Dual tracks would be foolproof – a pod at speed would just go under the off tracks. If the wheel bogies were long enough, braking the back wheels would cause the pod to swing forward and up, enough to engage the off track, where it would slow down naturally from going up an incline. Going back onto the main track would reverse this. It would probably be easier to put a lift up to the station from ground level, avoiding any danger of pods hitting people, and saving all the space that a station fed by lines down to the street would take. Dual, narrower tracks would not block much more sun than one bulkier single one, and would give some redundancy if either a track or a bogie was damaged.
Yes I was aware of the snake dream story, I work as a psychologist so it came up as subconscious processing and how the brain connects ideas via imagination a fascinating subject. My reading and understand was that he had been working fanatically on this problem, the brain has a very large proportion of itself doing visual processing, so it seems probably that if you work hard enough at something and it can be visualized that the brain would create a `image` (more a idea)
QUOTE
There is a big difference between not trusting a source of information, and rejecting information because it comes from a source.
If you take someone as a source of inspiration, and then follow up their thinking with your own fact checking, then that’s perfectly valid.
UNQUOTE
Agreed
I just don`t find terms like `fanboy` useful as I said I am a psychologist who respects my subconscious because I am not sure its not in charge due to current debates around free will that you are probably aware of (I say that as you seem intelligent and well read) .. Fanboy starts to lead to confirmation bias it skews us towards disbelief and I try and keep my internal mind unskewed.
I believe Tesla will indeed succeed and massively, but that is based no my own understanding of Musk himself and the 4th Industrial. I fully understand the Dunning- Kruger effect so if I have not read at least a dozen books on a subject and listened to many lectures by experts I understand I am a idiot .. on these subjects I have read.
Yes, I could use pods for a small subset of my journeys, but, as I said, I would still need a vehicle for the rest of my journeys.
So, two sets of transport systems need to be created: a pod system for some journeys, and a car + road system for the rest. And someone needs to pay for them.
It IS much the same as a subway system, and that’s why subway systems aren’t built anywhere near enough to substitute for cars (in most places).
You lose thirty percent of the power charging and discharging. Plus, you need at least triple the solar capacity of nuclear – first iteration for power from noon to sundown, second for charging batteries for the evening demand peak, third for charging batteries to charge EV batteries with. Nuclear can just chug along and do it all with one unit. Works on cloudy days too !
There is a big difference between not trusting a source of information, and rejecting information because it comes from a source.
If you take someone as a source of inspiration, and then follow up their thinking with your own fact checking, then that’s perfectly valid.
Think of the discovery of the carbon benzene ring. While trying to work out the structure, chemist Kekulé said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a dream of a snake seizing its own tail (it has been suggested that he may have been sampling various chemicals at the time).
So, dream of a snake, say that the molecule is that shape. But then do the hard work of careful chemical analysis to say if it was a valid decision. That’s the difference.
(These days we have atomic force microscope pictures showing the structure, and he was right.)
You cant trust them as a soul source but you don`t just discount what they say … as I said, you can read the Maxwell papers that Gail points out you don`t need his `interpretation` .. or are you saying that merely BECAUSE he is a complete fanboy as is Brian that you yourself would refuse to even read such papers because they are looked at by `fanboys` and thus are irreverent.
The second point is what is a fanboy? … lets say that its 2025 a both of these men have been right and Tesla is $10,000 dollars a share .. are they still fanboys? or are they just prophets (about this not everything),
Fanboy becomes a reference frame and is of no use, because if both ARE right about the trajectory Tesla is on (and remember the fund manager and `Fangirl` Cathy Wood of Ark Invest says the same) then they are going to sound exactly like a what you term a `fanboy` … the real question is is their evidence for what they say .. then the big one do you think its correct and do you buy Tesla stock?
I am not young (58) and lived through the Dotcom bubble which teaches you a lot .. personally I think they are right and have put a good proportion of my cash where my mouth is, at present I am flying high but its early days and time will tell where the truth is.
About the self driving SW. It’s very easy to copy. There are two aspects, the function and the copy right and it’s very easy and perfectly legal to get around both in an easy way.
The competitor buys a Tesla and extracts the code from the computer with all the ANN weights. Second is to make a guessed architecture for the new network. A fast computer then generates some data, random and meaningful and inputs it into the copied network. The output of the copied network is the “answer”. The same data is fed into the guessed ANN. The output of the guessed ANN is compared to the “answer” and an error function is back propagated in a standard fashion in the guessed ANN.
In the end you have a new network that functions *identically* to the original Tesla ANN, but it does not share a single weight with the original network, nor does it share the architecture. That way, you have not breached any copy right laws and the new ANN is perfectly legal.
And before you say that this cannot be done, I will have to point out that it has already been done. NVIDIA has trained an ANN to emulate fluid dynamics for air cooling calculations. The “answer” was given by a standard fluid dynamics program being run on a very powerful computer. The resulting ANN was about 100 times less computationally “expensive” than the original fluid dynamics program, but *no less precise*.
I’ve begun to realize most people are looking at the solution to range anxiety all wrong. Instead of fast-charging solutions, i.e. getting charge times down to gas refill times – 5 minutes, so that charge stations can become as ubiquitous as gas stations – what may really happen is that range will increase to the point where recharging will be more like getting a tuneup than getting gas in a conventional car. For this to happen, recharging has to become at most a once in 1,000 mile thing, though 2,000 miles would be much better.
This is not so far-fetched. See here:
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-tiny-silicon-particles-power-lithium.html
With 2,000-mile range, the worry about finding a recharge station after a 2/3 discharge goes away. No one is going to wait until the last miles of charge unless they are absolutely sure of finding a charging station. With a gas-powered car, you don’t need to memorize where the next gas station is, with an EV you still do. Now, having an EV actually becomes an advantage over a gas-powered car, no more pulling off the road to get gas! And a self-driving car can just keep driving too, a big advantage unless EVs start recharging themselves.
I like the fact that Ark invest is looking for new disruptive technologies, but the price targets for Tesla are completely bonkers. They do not seem to be rooted in realistic sales and profit margins. And I say that as someone who owns Tesla shares..
The global ride hailing market is worth about 200 billion in 2020 [1] and it is expected to be worth 370 billion USD by 2025. So how do you get 300 billion in *profits* from such a market? They would need 100% market share by 2025 and about 81% profit margin…?
(1)
https://www.statista.com/outlook/368/100/ride-hailing-taxi/worldwide
Well, could you not build the system in stages? First you build the connection between your home and church. So you’ll use the pod for those transports. With the accrued money, the next line is build. Right?
Not that I am saying hanging pods are a good idea. It’s not. Covering the view of the sky in a city makes it a dark and depressing place… But from an investment point of view it’s not very different from a subway system and its not an “all or nothing” type of investment…
Give it up. Nuclear is dead in the US. No amount of clicking your high heels together and wishing for it will bring it back.
See Powerwall or similar products from other competitors.
Have you read “The High Frontier”?
We’re going to seriously need to look at upgrading the electric infrastructure in this country to handle all these electric vehicles especially semi’s.
Google – other search engines exist
Amazon – other ecommerce sites exist
Yes they do, but they don’t matter.
Tesla doesn’t have the same dominance and scale yet, but has a good likelihood of getting there.
if I see you talking about O’Neill another time, I’m going to puke.
Read a new book and grow out of this sick obsession.
Always IF: if Tesla doubles production, if Tesla builds a new factory every year, if Tesla’s batteries improve a 50%, ….
You realize that the other companies also do research and have breakthroughs, right ?. So much Tesla fanboyism is annoying.
Someone being a complete fanboy doesn’t make them wrong (coughBriancough), but does mean that you can’t trust them as a source of information.
Pods are an all-or-nothing kind of thing. If the pod network doesn’t cover everywhere I need to go* (home, work, shops, church, friend’s houses, other shops…) then I need another vehicle as well, which means the capital cost of the pods is an extra expense, not a substitute.
*Yeah, I can rent a vehicle for those places I go once a year or so, but more than that and I’ll want some autonomy.
Helps half the fossil fuel electricity too. Big old coal stations love a constant demand.
Your flexible, responsive gas turbine don’t. They like it, but they can do without.
Very weird to think of any high quality car being a VW.
(Unless you count Porsche.)
Interesting. I had to look up cromulent, though.
Even a 3/4 intelligent computer AI wouldn’t have caught it, because a “dry batter factory” is a perfectly cromulent phrase.
If you mean by going to Mars, you clearly do not understand O’Neill. If something else, please state!
He thinks that he can bypass O’Neill Dan.
I don’t think lidar is a way to go. Large ammounts of laser pulses directed towards my eyes from each lidar system is just not good, no matter what they claim.
And if 1 million car owners chooses marketed “feature complete autopilot” at cost lets say 8-10k dollars that is 8-10 billions of dollars of income just for the software with cameras&sensors&chip,…
And if they license that to just 1 or a few other carmakers with much higher production volume that makes a lot of money. They probably will do that and some other carmakers are so much behind they will choose that option.
The fast charging is a potential problem for the grids.
OTOH if the batteries are charged at a modest pace whenever other demand is less than supply, that will help non fossil fuel electricity generation, whether nuclear or the unreliables.
Also, if all the cars on the dealer lots suddenly became EVs, that is EVs became 100% of vehicle market share, then it would take 15 years for the fleet of cars on the roads to become all EV since the current ICE fleet will take that long to wear out. But since it will take 15 years for the EVs to hit 100% market share then it will take 30 years to make the transition. All the time the growing body of EV vehicle owners will be paying for the electricity they use and this will give the cash flow and credit line to build out their systems over this time.
A “ride on top” PRT system introduces a few problems.
1~ The track is wider and overshadows the area below much more. Even that track they have for PRTs at Heathrow airport would be unpleasant in a city centre.
2~ The pods on top are just automated cars, and like cars need very gentle slopes to go up and down in the third dimension. Hanging Pods can even be designed to go up and down vertically. This has consequences for pod parking (unlike trains and buses that just loop around routes all day pods need parking space in or near city centres like cars, if pods can park and stack vertically this dramatically reduces the size of parking buildings).
3~ The pods need wide sweeping and banked curves to turn at high speeds just like cars. Hanging pods can take sharper turns at higher speeds safely.
4~ Hanging pods vs ride on top affects station cost and design.
https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/2008/11/pods-just-gotta-hang.html
And spell checking wouldn’t have caught it.
I think Gali is more of an enthusiast than a propagandist.
As far as low-carbon grids go, electric cars charging at night are great for nuclear-powered grids but not so great for solar grids.
Yum, batter…
Other companies already have functioning factories. I appreciate Mr. Musk’s willingness to re-imagine things but i’m old enough to remember the “alien dreadnought” factory for the Model 3, followed up by the “tent factory” production line.
Anyhow the VW ID4 is coming soon to the US and it will be weird to think of the highest quality electric car being a VW.
Ah, excuse #17 from the official EV and Renewable Energy Skeptics Playbook. We keep hearing this same excuse, that the grid can’t take it. Apply a little logic and honesty to the situation. Two points that escape most people: First, the majority of all charging is done at night, when businesses are closed, factories are closed, and homes (power hungry air conditioners) are for the most part powered down. There’s a surplus of electrically potential there that gets put to bed, along with most of us, that’s just waiting to be utilized. The electric companies welcome a switch to EVs.
Second, not everyone will charge every night anyway. That’s logical and follows current habits. Do you get up every morning, along with your neighbors, friends, family and strangers and head to the nearest gas station in one massive migration to ‘top off’? No, you don’t. You know that 1/3 or 1/4 tank of gas will suffice for the next two or three days or more of driving activities. But you get the point. No one needs a ‘full tank’ every morning.
The Electrical Grid is just not going to handle this huge influx of electric cars. The power delivery systems to the subdivisions and then to the individual homes are going to be overwhelmed.
“Elon Musk wants to make humanity multi-planetary. Dominating and
transforming world business and technology is a necessary stage one.” Understanding O’Neill/Galileo would not seem too difficult for such a smart guy. Life is funny that way!
If you put a track on stilts, you can just use Teslas or other compatible vehicles as the pods. That way you’ve got a PRT system where the vehicles can exit the track and go the last mile to your home or destination. Cheaper to implement – the cars already exist, and the track can be simple and dumb. Faster to implement – you don’t need a full grid for the system to start being useful.
When Musk built a guide system for his cars to follow tracks in tunnels, it got me thinking that he’d just demonstrated a PRT system, and it works just as well without the tunnel. It just needs to be separated from the bikes and people.
With cheaper Lidar and Cognitive radar you might get level 4+ self drive = hands off non attention needed driving on highways in all weather and lighting conditions.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/sensors/automotive-sensors/toshibas-light-sensor-highresolution-lidar
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/echodyne-cognitive-radar-self-driving-cars
But a lot of experts think this still won’t be good enough for roads that also contain bikes, pedestrians, kids.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/self-driving/the-big-problem-with-selfdriving-cars-is-people
Also level 4+ autonomy would enable a Personal Rapid Transit system of slef driving pods hanging from steel beams in the air, overcoming the fact that roads for cars are a largely 2D network.
https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/2009/07/prt-best-idea-that-nobody-knows-about.html
Fair point he is .. but is he right? .. Someone saying this kind of stuff about Google 10 years ago was right about a similar company wrong, thats the do your own research bit and buy shares or not bit.
Brian
First paragraph spelling error you say
QUOTE Tesla battery day will be the reveal of a new dry batter factory UNQUOTE
You obviously mean battery not batter
Hard to judge BUT however makes the breakthrough in self driving is in a amazing position, you wont be able to copy because of patents plus how Machine Learning works .. thus this is like having the first working steam train 2 – 3 years before any competitor whilst all of the railway tracks are already in place .. we dont really have a measurement for what that would be worth.
The main argument on batteries seems to be that its one of the main bottle necks (the speed batteries can be produced because of production methods) with that unlocked and the Gigafactories unlocking the other constraint that being pure production capacity , Tesla can shift up gears.
As you are probably aware ARK invest did a breakdown in January 2020 of what they believed these scenarios would mean in stock price separating them out ..https://ark-invest.com/analyst-research/tesla-price-target/ ultimately its still speculation the price at the moment seems very high and I hold 33 shares but it still seems overvalued (at present ) to me. then again 2-3 years from now 1400 may seem cheap.
I wish Tesla well and hope they do make breakthroughs in battery technology. However, Gali is an out and out Tesla propagandist.
Look, I’m as bullish on tesla as the next guy, but 10x just for getting self driving right? Tesla is priced for a profit of about 30 billion USD (but is not there yet). So to get to 10x, self driving would have to generate 300 billion a year in *profits*. Is that really likely? Same goes for battery tech improvement and 10x of stock value.