“Tesla Is Last In the Driverless Vehicle Race, Report Says” (US News) says that Tesla was good at solving the trivial problems and now the legacy car manufacturers are preparing to strike back with solutions to the hard problems presented by self-driving vehicles.
Suppose that Tesla does run out of customers anxious to pay $130,000 for second-rate tech. What can all of its machine vision programmers do?
How about build AI monitors for restaurant quality of service? The “eye in the ceiling” looks for empty water glasses, empty bread baskets, customers who’ve put down their menus and are ready to order, customers who have put down their silverware and therefore may be considered ready for table clearance.
With minimum wage heading up to $15/hour, restaurants will be short-staffed. A Tesla-developed eye-in-the-ceiling could help the remaining waitstaff allocate their time and effort in the most efficient way possible (also avoid those one-star Yelp reviews!).
Electric Cars do not make economic sense. What is the point of a car which cannot be refueled in 5 minutes at the pump and whose battery cost more than the fuel will cost over 150,000 miles, 10 years of driving or the useful lifespan of the battery itself? Tesla’s customer base are Global Warming Coolaid addicts pure and simple and there is a finite number of those — especially when the global warming scam and the Fake Science behind it is unraveling.
I am not against electric cars or people who enjoy them. Whether it is because you want to feel good and earn “green” creds with your buddies, or you simply like the silence of electric drive, all the power to you. You should be free to build, sell and buy whatever legal product you like. My problem is why are we subsidizing these Coolaid Drinkers and the industries that feed with with up to $10,000 of taxpayer dollars per purchase.
Good lord, let’s make servers lives worse, with a robotic taskmaster barking in their ear.
@philg I think that’s one possible use for these engineers, but it’s possible Larry David solved these problems much more cost-effectively with the introduction of a $10 bell that has a distinct pitch per server on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
@dwight lool – I don’t agree with your point the economic sense of electric cars. If I purchase a gas vehicle that gets 30 mpg combined, and I drive it 150,000 miles the 5,000 gallons of gas costs $12,500 at current prices. A Nissan Leaf battery, for example, costs $5500 to replace I think. This also assumes the battery will fail by 150,000 miles. In my experience, it is very likely a gas engine will require a major service between 100K and 150k miles. In addition, electric vehicles require no oil changes, air filters, spark plugs, etc. that cost money in a gas vehicle on a regular basis.
The electric car thing is really a form of denial. We are running out of cheap energy and soon enough most people won’t be driving cars with any regularity. But Americans want to pretend we can slap up some solar panels and drive electric cars and it will be 1955 forever. This is what Tesla really sells: a techno futurist delusion.
if self driving cars get implemented then they do have the potential to get rid of a third of the whole workforce (interesting, do people think about possible political consequences?), therefore my guess is that Tesla will remain in the race.
AI is a fancy term for “pattern matching”. People in the restaurant business, earning a relatively low wage, have little to fear from a clusters of GPUs hosted by Jeff Bezos. It’s the wizards of Wall Street who skim 100s of billion$ a year based on their ability to make predictions slightly ahead of patterns of trends who should be worried.
Why buy stocks on the Dow or Nasdaq when you could buy them on Amazon.com for slightly less? Why pay a big commission to big bank “market makers” when Bezos’ cloud computing armada will skim a little less?
Have you seen this report, four days after the US News article? A Tesla on autopilot managed to crash into a huge parked fire truck, at 65 mph. Some might think their autopilot still needs some work…
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/22/tesla-on-autopilot-slams-into-parked-fire-truck-on-freeway/
I drive a Tesla and can tell you that it is quite simply a much better car. The fact that it is electric doesn’t in-self matter much to me. Electric benefits do show up in amazing responsiveness, acceleration, reliability, silence, and convenience (never stop at a gas station, just recharge at home) though.
My previous cars have been BMWs, Mercedes, Porshche, Acura, and Honda.
I give a lot of credit to Elon Musk for making a car that is better (sometimes dramatically better) than existing cars in pretty much every dimension except cost. I use my wife’s SUV when I am trying to drive more than 250 miles in one day (almost never).