Tag: Tesla

Will Tesla Generate Its Own Chips?

The Motley Fool reports that Tesla has hired away to top-notch chip designers from Apple, and also that Elon Musk is being coy about whether Tesla wants to design its own chips.

The Motley Fool concludes that this is insane and chip-making is not Tesla’s business.

That seems about right to me, but one question is whether Tesla hired these chip designers as carrots or sticks.

The carrot approach is that, by having amazing chip designers on staff, Tesla can better work with NVIDIA and other manufacturers, guiding product development.

The stick approach is that Tesla might like to credibly pressure chip manufacturers, as a means to getting what it wants.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive.

Tesla Updates Its Summon Feature

I once read a magazine article that relayed the First Law of Ice Cream Truck Driving: “Backing up kills kids.”

I don’t know how specific that law is to ice cream trucks, but it is true that thousands of kids die each year from “backovers”.

Which is why it’s great that Tesla’s Summon feature, which retrieves the car from its parking space, might help make backing up safer.

Unfortunately, Consumer Reports noticed several flaws with the feature, which could have put kids lives in danger.

But never fear, Tesla has already fixed them.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on February 12, 2016.

Tesla and the Price of Gas

CNN reports that Wall Street is worried about how Tesla will weather record-low gas prices. CNN calls it “Tesla’s worst nightmare”.

Color me unconvinced.

Tesla, even with the Model 3, is not competing on price. They’ve succeeded in building a car that competes on quality and technology and brand.

At the margin they’ll certainly lose a few customers due to a higher total cost of ownership, but I hardly see this as Tesla’s worst nightmare. I think gas could go to $0 and Tesla would still sell a ton of cars.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on February 4, 2016.

OTA Software Upgrades

One of the best things about owning a Tesla, at least if Twitter is to be believed, is the fact that every vehicle gets over-the-air software upgrades.

At first glance, this seems almost trivial. Everyone who owns a smartphone gets OTA upgrades, and they are as much a pain as a pleasure. Most of the time, it’s not even clear what benefit the upgrade delivers, so I usually chalk it up to some sort of invisible security patch.

But Tesla has been rolling out new features at such a clip, particularly its autonomous driving features, that users marvel that “it’s like I got a new car overnight”.

I’m not sure how long this can last — after all, we’ve already seen with mobile phones that the novelty plateaus eventually — but for the moment it seems like an exciting part of owning a Tesla, or any vehicle receiving periodic OTA upgrades.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on January 21, 2016.

Tesla Summon Feature

Tesla continues to push the boundaries of autonomous driving with its new Summon feature:

Tesla released today the version 7.1 of its software for the Model S and X. The new update includes everything we told you about when Tesla started testing the build with beta testers last month: UI improvements, a new self-parking feature, ‘Driver Mode’ and Autopilot restrictions, but the automaker is also introducing the “Summon” feature, which enables the Model S to drive itself without anyone in the car.

And this:

Once it will be combined with Tesla’s upcoming robot charging station (here’s a video of the prototype), the Summon feature is expected to eventually eliminate any hassle having to do with charging your electric car.

Brave new world.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on January 11, 2016.

Hiring Growth

Companies in the auto-tech space are growing fast.

A former Uber exec suggests that over half of Uber’s 4,000 current employees may have been hired in the last six months.

Tesla has over 1,000 open jobs, and has grown so much that it has run out of parking spaces at its headquarters.

Nonetheless, Matthew DeBord at Business Insider believes that Tesla hasn’t hired enough staff in the traditional auto-manufacturing roles.

Musk’s company will probably be able to build and deliver roughly 50,000 vehicles this year. Next year, the total could get close to 75,000–100,000. But these are pretty small totals compared with the major players. Ford and GM build that many cars in a month and could easily assemble far more, if the market demanded it.

On yet another hand, however, Tesla’s new Nevada gigafactory is huge and holds space for all those manufacturing employees.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on January 3, 2016.

Garage Start-Up

The Internet is a-twitter with the news that George Hotz has built his own self-driving car and claims he will unseat MobilEye as the supplier of autonomous driving technology.

Elon Musk makes the important point that getting self-driving technology to work 99% of the time is much different than getting self-driving cars to work 99.99999% of the time.

Nonetheless, this seems pretty impressive. I don’t think I’d be worried if I were MobilEye or Tesla, but I am impressed by George Hotz.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 18, 2015.