That’s a really weird statement. Personally, I take all predictions with a huge grain of salt, and even more so when the predictions are heavily qualified. As someone famous once said, it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
I ran across this really old article about SpaceX. 2005–before they’d even launched a single rocket. Before they’d even blown up their first three Falcon 1s. And yet he’s talking about Falcon 5, Falcon 9, “Southwest Airlines of space”, NASA contracts, and even the frikkin’ BFR (though amazingly, not a peep about reusability).
Of course, much of this did not come to pass–the Falcon 1 only made it to orbit once, Falcon 5 was cancelled, the Merlin 2 is defunct, etc. But a few of the predictions did happen, and those are doozies. The Falcon 9 is a reliable workhorse, and by any standard SpaceX is the Southwest airlines of space (even to the point of standardizing on a single, inexpensive, medium-sized vehicle). NASA is one of their best customers. And it looks like the BFR is really going to happen.
One prediction was very wide of the mark–Musk predicted capping out at 500 employees. The current SpaceX headcount is 7,000.
SpaceX is not Tesla, obviously. The point is that any bold predictions are bound to be mostly wrong. Three out of a dozen? That’s an amazing record if, by any reasonable standard, the predictions are almost certainly false. Winning three out of twelve spins on a roulette table is fantastic if you’re betting on 00.
Have you used autopilot for any significant stretch yet?
I just did a trip to Napa by way of hwy 37 to 101. There’s a 12 mile stretch of mostly 1 lane that backs up all the time. I must say putting on autopilot and having it keep with the stop and go makes the traffic experience so much nicer. Logged about 60 miles worth of autopilot on this drive and it was great.
I don’t trust it in local roads, but on the freeway in traffic it is wonderful.
Oh, come on. He’s not making predictions about who may win the Super Bowl in 2021. He’s making predictions about what his company, that he’s in charge of, will be doing in the next few months or couple years. And he’s wrong a LOT.
And come to think of it, it isn’t much of a prediction if it is about things that you are doing. If I say I’m planning a trip to Italy next spring, that isn’t really a prediction in the usual sense of the word. Saying that the weather will be great during my trip, OTOH, is a prediction.
My only significant trips have been to my parent’s place and back, which I’ve done a few times now. It’s around 140 mi each way and I use Autopilot for almost all of it. Low traffic, just long stretches of boring freeway. It does a great job. I use the auto lane change as well, which is handy on the 2-lane parts of I-5 since there are always a ton of slow trucks on the right.
I’ve only used it in dense traffic a few times; not enough to get a huge benefit from it yet but still nice. God, I wish I had it last year coming back from the eclipse in Oregon. I was stuck in traffic for 12+ hours, often crawling along more slowly than I could go in first gear. Those situations don’t come around all that often, fortunately.
I agree that I don’t really trust it on local roads. Too much risk of drifting into a curb or divider or something, plus it doesn’t work with stop lights. No problems with well-marked highways, though.
The countdown begins. Tesla has officially passed the 200k US sales mark, so there’s now a confirmed schedule for Federal EV rebates. As expected, cars delivered this year (next two quarters) will get the full $7500 rebate, dropping to $3750 for the first half of next year, and then $1875 for the second half.
Dude needs to put down the Twitter. The irony is that Musk had an interview recently where he said needs needs to stop attacking people on Twitter that he perceives are attacking him. Thai guy said Musk can shove the sub up his ass; a better person would have left it at that.
One flaw with Twitter is it allows you to destroy a reputation you could spend a decade building in 60 seconds with an ill advised tweet. Musk will now, for the rest of his life, be seen as slightly less credible because of this outburst. Really, anyone famous - whether it be Trump or Musk - should have professional image filtering service. There ought to be a service you can purchase, where you log into their servers instead of twitter itself, and someone sworn to confidentiality and using a computer system that can’t show what you really said can prevent you from drunk tweeting or saying something stupid.
Yeah. For better or worse, Twitter manages to scrub off the veneer most celebrities have. It’s not like that there’s any big mystery that celebrities are human and say stupid shit occasionally. Narcissistic ones more often than most. But with a celebrity it gets recorded for all time and everyone knows about it.
I know that some people I admire, like Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman, could be assholes at times as well. But somehow with Twitter it’s more in your face. Harder for kids to have heroes now, though maybe that’s a good thing.
The difference is that with Feynman or Sagan, we have their carefully produced and edited video lectures. We have their published books. All edited out of anything that would be embarrassing.
Sure, other people knew Sagan and Feynman, and maybe some of their private papers contain some dirt. But secondhand accounts aren’t hugely credible, people mis-remember stuff all the time and only see a small window of all the things that happened.
We don’t have a firsthand view of them being an unedited asshat. I kind of want to be defensive of Musk here, he obviously poured a lot of effort into that solution to the cave rescue, and is probably quite overworked at the moment.
Still, calling a white guy in Thailand a pedo is uncalled for. The vast majority of single men who do go as sex tourists to Thailand are going to be having sex with sexually mature women. Heterosexual sex, that is, the man boys are only a niche.
I mean, to be fair, some of the prostitutes working in Thailand may not quite be 18. And you can make the point that asian women develop and age differently and there may not be any visibly discernable difference between a 17 year old and a 40 year old…
My armchair psychology is this: Musk was abused and bullied as a kid, and learned that if someone hits you, you hit back 10 times as hard. Not a bad strategy for a 12-year-old. But somewhere along the road to being a billionaire, that becomes no longer a great strategy. Sure, he has the right to be offended; the other guy wasn’t being particularly mature, either. But Musk has a lot more to lose by taking the low road.
In actual Model 3 news, there’s been a small update to the Munro and Associates Model 3 teardown effort.
The guy got a lot more impressed as they reached the end of their teardown and finished the report. “A lot of crow being eaten around here” (good on him to admit a change in opinion as the facts come in). Estimated 30% gross margins on the 3. That’s a little lower (but within the ballpark) of the German teardown, which was more like 40%, but that may just reflect a change in accounting for labor, etc. Pretty good either way.
One question on the rearview mirror: they compared the costs of the mirrors across three cars, with the Model 3 being the cheapest. Dr. S, out of curiosity, is the M3 mirror just a completely standard mirror, or does it have features like autodimming?
Funnily enough, when I sat in the 3 a couple weeks ago, I was impressed at so many things, but when I looked at the rearview mirror I actually thought: “Huh. That looks like a completely standard mirror from an auto parts store.”
The rearview mirror does auto-dim (as do the side mirrors). However, that’s the only advanced feature. There’s no compass or LCD for directions or anything like that.
Well, saving $70 from an i3 mirror that also autodims, but also has a compass and the garage door clicker on it, does seem to be a very smart use of money. I don’t see that a compass and a clicker really add $70 of value.
Indeed. No need for a compass when you have a huge map. And the garage door button pops up automatically on the screen when in range of your garage. This is pretty much an ideal use of touchscreen buttons; it’s not something you care about at all anywhere but at home (context sensitive), and it’s a control you only ever need at very low speeds or a stop. A physical button would be silly.