The friction caused by integration points between two companies in that sort of arrangement is usually a significant pain point for customers.(Anecdotal evidence, based on working in an energy startup in Australia for a few years).

&gt; &quot;Create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.We can&#x27;t do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together.&quot;I don&#x27;t really see how this answers the question as to why they need to merge? Why can&#x27;t their just be a partnership?

It&#x27;s almost as if some people are skeptical!

Natural counter to the people who worship at the feet of their god king musk.

I&#x27;m still waiting for him to deliver on his original promises. Like creating a profitable electric car company.I give him credit for SpaceX, but Tesla&#x27;s main product so far has been hopes and dreams.

Some people will always be petty. It says more about them than the object of their critique. You can cure cancer and someone will complain it took you long enough.

I swear to god he could do it all just as described and there will still be people who have nothing to say but &quot;meh.&quot;Blows my mind.

Meh.Sure, stuff sounds neat, but where are you going to get the capital from?Another secondary share offering?I guess the most concrete thing I saw was new factory for Model 3. Shouldn&#x27;t that be your only priority?Not designing an electric semi truck on paper to entice Joe Q Public into stepping up for another secondary share offer?

Note the Tesla focus on solar, since wind power doesn&#x27;t work so well on Mars :)

&quot;So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
- Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
- Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
- Enable your car to make money for you when you aren&#x27;t using it&quot;I take this as...Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous semitrucks transporting cargo across america.Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous public buses transporting people around a city.Have my car join a fleet of uber-like autonomous teslas while i&#x27;m not using it.

Aha! But how would you create a TeslaFactoryFactoryFactory?

AbstractTeslaIndustry is my personal convention in this case.

Why abstract? Its pretty concrete, so more like TeslaFactoryFactoryImpl.

Anyone else think AbstractTelsaFactoryFactory?

Tesla&#x27;s other advantage is a global fleet that is actively logging millions of real-world miles a day.  I don&#x27;t think that can be understated at this stage.

I also think that Tesla will have an easier time acquiring top talent in both the autonomy software and manufacturing. Uber&#x2F;Google have to partner with Old Guard automotive companies.

But with Tesla&#x27;s open policies, such as open sourcing all their patents, maybe they will happily supply Uber with all the self driving cars Uber might want, plus the API&#x27;s to remotely control them?

Also millions of miles of fleet learning a day, which Uber doesn&#x27;t have, since they don&#x27;t own the cars. Self-driving cars is a supervised learning problem, and he who has the data wins

If Tesla can pull off this transportation + energy revolution, it would be a trillion dollar company

Uber&#x27;s been likely working on self-driving cars, potentially in partnership with Google. What Tesla has as an advantage though, is an assembly line to produce lots of quality cars. In other words, Tesla will likely be ready for the future of transportation before Uber.

I&#x27;m sorry, I&#x27;ve read&#x2F;watched every interview or press release or tweet he&#x27;s given in the past 5 years. I couldn&#x27;t tell you exactly where individual bits came from.

He mentioned them in the blog post (Title 2, paragraph 3).

Where has he mentioned semis or buses?  I thought I had been paying close attention.

Not very soon, there are better places for Solar Panels than roads...

Almost certainly not. Except for, say, powering auxiliary electronics, concentrations of solar power are far too low for on-vehicle collection.Put the panels alongside the road. Not on the vehicles. Not on solar freaking roadways, which are the stupidest idea since stupid. But in medians, on extant construction, and in concentrated high-insolation solar farms (deserts, etc.).We&#x27;re going to need one hell of a lot of panels.

Do you think they&#x27;ll have solar panels on the trailer?  Would they have to roll them on&#x2F;off when they switch trailers?

Re: diesel pollution&#x2F;electric semis (tangent)The Tesla Autopilot crash in Florida has led directly to the Missouri governor&#x27;s veto of a bill to allow big rig platooning--a semi-autonomous technology that lets trucks travel in close pairs (or more) for aero&#x2F;fuel efficiency and safety benefits.The backlash is going to get worse before broad public acceptance gets better. The rest of the US ain&#x27;t SV.Veto: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trucker.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;autonomous-tech-honeymoon-over" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trucker.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;autonomous-tech-honeymoon-over</a>Platooning: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peloton-tech.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peloton-tech.com</a>

But Tesla won&#x27;t sell them to him, man. Why would they, when Elon&#x27;s just said he&#x27;s going to create their own autonomous fleet? Why would they hand it over to Uber? Of course they&#x27;re competing! Elon&#x27;s just said they&#x27;re going to make a fleet of autonomous electric taxis!Travis wasn&#x27;t being literal; he knows there aren&#x27;t going to be 500,000 available for a single company to buy for many years. And even if it weren&#x27;t redirecting profits, Tesla still wouldn&#x27;t allow a single entity to buy up the entire output of their factories, preventing nearly all consumers from getting any. That would be crazy. And Travis knows that. He was more just expressing Uber&#x27;s enthusiasm about the idea of autonomous electric cars. If he could, he would, but he knows he can&#x27;t.

I don&#x27;t think Uber and Tesla are competing in any way. In fact, Travis Kalanick stated he would buy half a million Teslas if they became fully autonomous[0].[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greencarreports.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;1098997_uber-ceo-to-tesla-sell-me-half-a-million-autonomous-electric-cars-in-2020" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greencarreports.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;1098997_uber-ceo-to-tesl...</a>

To anyone who&#x27;s paid close attention to Tesla and to Elon&#x27;s various offhand remarks to the press and on Twitter, this was all easy to see coming, every bit of it.But now that he&#x27;s confirmed it all officially: this NUTS. This is so awesome. The press is going to go crazy with this.I wonder what will happen to Uber...seems like it will be hard for them to compete with the rates of cars that don&#x27;t have to pay their driver a living wage, nor pay for gas.Electric semis-- THANK GOD. I live in Chicago and I can&#x27;t tell you how sick I am of the massive exhaust plumes billowing over me as they pass by, and the roaring of their engines on the street outside my apartment.

Well, Microsoft&#x27;s mission statement was once &quot;A computer on every desk, running Microsoft software.&quot;  Mission accomplished, 20 years ago.

I&#x27;ve read a fair share of criticisms against Tesla, and many of them are founded on solid points.However, in the grand scheme of things, this really does seem like I am watching history unfold. I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;ve ever truly believed the &quot;grand mission statement&quot; of a company before so much as I do Tesla&#x27;s. Mostly because, when it has come down to it, Musk has proved that he really means it. Silicon Valley has made the joke a billion times of start-ups saying they&#x27;re trying &quot;To make the world a better place.&quot; The difference with Tesla (and probably also SpaceX) is that if they succeed, it seems they really will make the world a better place. ..and probably cement Musk a pretty good paragraph in the history books, it seems.

I&#x27;m on board with most of this.  The goals here are obviously ambitious by any standard, and would seem totally absurd if put forth by anyone who didn&#x27;t happen to berth a private spacecraft with the ISS earlier this morning.

I hope I will live to use that bus, which won&#x27;t be handled by driver, who thinks that he is god in the bus and can do whatever he wants while he has steering wheel in his hands. i hope, this will bring few things which will improve my commute:- on time performance (I&#x27;m yet to leave bus stop in the morning on-time after about 10 years -- bus is always late);
- less traffic in the bus terminal, where drives always make wrong assumption and create traffic where it could have been avoided;
- safer commute (not that it isn&#x27;t safe enough now, but there are drivers who prefer driving way too fast).Oh well, this is only dreams.

&quot;...transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager...&quot;Does he really think that ?

Most Hydrogen is generated from natural gas today and for the foreseeable future... It&#x27;s no more an alternative source than Electricity, probably less, because we don&#x27;t have Nuclear Hydrogen plants.

Good points except that we are a century, if not centuries from carbon fuel reaching a point where people start to worry. And companies like Toyota are investing in alternatives fuels like Hydrogen, so it not as straight forward as you state for Tesla.

Uber is betting on car manufacturers to have autonomous driving in place, while it builds up a worldwide user base of logistics (moving people and goods from X to Y). It doesn&#x27;t care if vehicles are driven by a horse or by electricity.Tesla is building the vehicles and energy source for the vehicles, and building the autonomy in to them, but it&#x27;s betting on a user-base acquisition via hardware (vehicle) ownership and&#x2F;or eventually some form of subscription to the &quot;Tesla&quot; club.Carbon-based fuel(s) will eventually run out. Tesla via SolarCity will be in an incredible position of offering energy, so I&#x27;ll be looking at how well their plan of putting Solar on every roof works rather than autonomy &#x2F; vehicle manufacturing &#x2F; sales. I think this is likely going to be their make or break asset.

Google actually publishes stats on their self-driving cars. They&#x27;re currently just shy of three million miles in the last seven years, only some of which are from autonomous mode: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;&#x2F;selfdrivingcar&#x2F;files&#x2F;reports&#x2F;report-0616.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;en...</a>

how many miles of data has googled accumulated is a unanswered question. Also does that mean 6B miles combining all autonomous vehicle manufacturers?

Some quick napkin math: 3 million miles a day gets you 6 billion miles in 5 and a half years (not counting the ~100mm miles they already have). Since the daily mileage rate will only be growing exponentially, it&#x27;s not unreasonable to assume that Tesla hit this number in under 3 years.Not sure how they came up with 6 billion as the magic number, but if that&#x27;s accurate, that&#x27;s very soon. It also helps that there are no real government stakeholders in preventing the proliferation of self-driving cars. People just need to generally believe that they are much safer than human drivers, which of course is not true yet.

It&#x27;s in the millions. Tesla&#x27;s is in the hundreds of millions&#x2F;close to a billion.

How much data has Google and Apple collected using LIDAR and such on their mapping&#x2F;street view vehicles?

I don&#x27;t know where you live, but my daily commute is never the same. They either start&#x2F;end at different times, or I have to take different routes, or the weather is different. I think it would take a lot longer than 3 years before they start seeing actual diminishing returns on mileage collection.

I can&#x27;t imagine that the data from carefully selected scenarios would be anywhere near as valuable as the data from random, unpredictable, real world driving.

It seems to me the data tesla are collecting are not unique. How many times logging the same driver driving the same 20 mile commute before you&#x27;re in diminishing returns?With deliberately chosen conditions, scenarios, and routes, it seems to me Google could be collecting data that are just as useful although maybe covering much a smaller number of miles.

Great metric to establish that seems reasonable and is heavily skewed in their favour.

Geohot is pretty much claiming to do that!<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;6&#x2F;11866868&#x2F;comma-ai-george-hotz-interview-self-driving-cars" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;6&#x2F;11866868&#x2F;comma-ai-george-ho...</a>

I recommend watching this [0] ted talk on the subject. In it, you&#x27;ll see that Google, last year, already had solved bicyclist hand signs, lane markings, unforeseen obstacles, etc. And they did it __without__ human annotators. Just some straight up convolution neural networks.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road?language=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...</a>

What does that data give you? Raw sensor data + steering angle + acceleration&#x2F;braking is not particularly useful in of itself. Nobody is trying to shove large amounts of data through a blackbox model and directly trying to predict car controls from images. This is not MobileEye&#x27;s approach and almost certainly isn&#x27;t Tesla&#x27;s approach. The bottleneck is data that is decomposed and labeled in greater detail (lane markings, obstacles, bicyclist hand signs, etc) - and you need human annotators for that.

Almost every other car manufacturer is working on autonomous vehicles.  They will eventually start to contribute to the number as well.

&gt; 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.This seems very significant for Tesla vs competitors. Yes Google has a strong technology lead today, but how long will that last when Tesla is collecting more miles of data every day than Google has collected in 5 years? (Sincere question) Not to mention Apple and existing car vendors, who each have 0 million miles of experience.Tesla should reach 6 billion miles very quickly once the model 3 is out.

&gt; Should autonomous vehicles be identified as such (special lights or label) so that real humans can know not to be erratic around it?Great idea. Would do wonders for marketing the capabilities too.

I don&#x27;t think they should be identified. Look how drivers treat learners of they&#x27;re marked - the marking are supposed to indicate &#x27;this driver is inexperienced, be patient and expect them to do the wrong thing&#x27; but people treat it as &#x27;please tailgate and honk until they stop out of fear&#x27;

I think you meant &quot;when cars still shared the road with horses.&quot; Right? :)

&gt; So, perhaps in the future there will be some sort of indicator light that turns on when the idiot driver turns on manual driving mode so you (edit, or your car!) can give them a wide berth.Agreed. Don&#x27;t mark the autonomous vehicles. Mark the ones to be more concerned about: the ones with a human driving.

This comment reminds me of the various (likely apocryphal) laws when cars were still new and shared the road with cars.Cars we considered the new weird thing that needed to take special steps to not spook horses or their riders&#x2F;drivers.Now, of course, the situation is reversed and horses often are required to have special visibility gear to be seen more clearly by cars.So, perhaps in the future there will be some sort of indicator light that turns on when the idiot driver turns on manual driving mode so you (edit, or your car!) can give them a wide berth.

&quot;simple things like ... hitting pedestrians&quot;That doesn&#x27;t seem very simple to me.

Should humans be monitored and have driving privileges revoked if they drive erratically?Historically yes, if you cause problems your licence is revoked and in some cases your vehicle is seized.I look forward to the rise of the machines, with humans losing driving privileges for simple things like wandering across lanes without signalling, running red lights, hitting pedestrians or bumping other vehicles in the parking lot.

Humans would probably be more erratic if the vehicles drew attention to the fact that they were self-driving.

I hear about bus drivers and truck drivers getting into accidents due to drowsiness enough that it&#x27;s a constant worry whenever I&#x27;m on the highway next to one. I wonder if I&#x27;d feel safer if i saw a Tesla Semi knowing that were wasn&#x27;t a human behind the wheel.Should autonomous vehicles be identified as such (special lights or label) so that real humans can know not to be erratic around it?

I&#x27;m not seeing it. That seems like a lot of doors to build.

But then half you lose easy access for the half of seats not on the sidewalk side. There&#x27;s not a good way to lose the aisle without condensing down to only a couple seats across.

The buses could have falcon wing doors, just like the Model X: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;40o2Uvd.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;40o2Uvd.jpg</a>

Yeah, higher densities on public transports can be achieved by standing rather than sitting. For instance, BART has been testing removing seats to fit more people into each train carriage [1].[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ww2.kqed.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;04&#x2F;bart-tests-new-seat-layout-to-ease-crowding-on-trains" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ww2.kqed.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;04&#x2F;bart-tests-new-seat-layo...</a>

Absolutely. I&#x27;m on board with some of this document, but the public transportation part makes no sense. What Musk is suggesting would make public transit less effective.

... not having a seat is reason #1 why people ditch public transport in Europe (dense areas, hot &amp; sweaty rides, not able to read a book or work on a computer, not able to sleep). Give a seat to everyone and you&#x27;ll have more commuters.

Also sounds like it&#x27;s written by someone who has never used public transport his entire life. In my bus in the morning 70% of the passengers are standing not sitting.

It&#x27;s not clear to me either, but he also wrote &quot;it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses&quot;, so I think the implication is that one bus will become many individual cars with traditional doors.

I didn&#x27;t understand what enables them to get rid of aisles inside buses?  People still need to reach their seats right?

&gt;If the cars aren&#x27;t causing pollutionThere&#x27;s the rub

Electric cars cause pollution; they run on mostly coal or natural gas and have very toxic-to-mine, manufacture, and dispose-of batteries. They also emit just as much particulate emissions as normal cars: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;electric-car-particulate-matter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;electric-car-particulate-m...</a>The way to &quot;save the planet&quot; is to not drive. Driving a 5000# vehicle around thinking you&#x27;re doing good for the environment is just the marketing genius of the car industry in 2016.

Or better yet: Reclaim parking lots and roadways and turn them into urban green spaces and parks!

&gt;Without need for parking, commercial districts could get denser and denser, and people could have nice large homes far away for cheaper than ever.If people are living farther away from their jobs, you&#x27;re likely to get more congestion, not less.

Suburbs destroy public life, create anxiety and a sense of atomization, and turn natural spaces into scar tissue. Even if you could perfect transportation technology, suburbs are the least optimal configuration for humans to live in the world.

Maybe that would be a good thing?  Without need for parking, commercial districts could get denser and denser, and people could have nice large homes far away for cheaper than ever.  If the cars aren&#x27;t causing pollution or gridlock, what&#x27;s so bad about living in the suburbs?

Cities already tend to have limited parking. We might see more parking structures located in cheap out-of-the-way locations rather than near places people want to go. And street parking could go away in favor of consolidated parking structures, freeing up road space for both car traffic (with extra lanes) and foot traffic (widen sidewalks).But I think it&#x27;ll have an even larger effect on suburban areas. Shopping centers, strip malls, and similar will no longer need to have massive flat single-story parking lots, freeing up a huge amount of space. Likewise for major employers, and commuter parking lots for mass transit.

Parking becomes mostly obsolete, freeing up huge amounts of central city areas.

There are 30,000 motor vehicle deaths in America each year. In perhaps 30 years, fully autonomous vehicles could cut all of that needless carnage to nearly nothing.And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we&#x27;ll be spared?Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.

I wonder how many of those cancers are due to petrol car pollution ;-)

&gt; Compared to 1950, motor vehicle death rates have more than halved.This is due to safer cars, no doubt.I&#x27;d love to see some stats between 2008 and 2015, which I believe would show the abundant increase in distracted drivers thanks to smart phones.

&gt; If you&#x27;re an American, you&#x27;re twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.If you&#x27;re an American you&#x27;re more likely to die from suicide than you are from motor vehicle related injuries. You&#x27;re more likely to be poisoned than to die in a motor vehicle crash. You&#x27;re 16 times more likely to die from heart disease or cancer.Compared to 1950, motor vehicle death rates have more than halved.

It may create more sprawl, but 2 of the big complaints I&#x27;ve heard about living in a city is how hard it is to get around, and it&#x27;s hard to have a car that allows you to leave. Autonomous cars would solve both of these problems while freeing up cityscapes to also be more walkable&#x2F;bikeable (you have to do something with what was former car parking).This future is interesting because both living way out in the suburbs AND living in a city both become more attractive.

That means there are about 70 persons on this planet currently who are not going to die?

So you&#x27;re telling me there&#x27;s a chance...

If you&#x27;re human, you&#x27;re 99.999999% likely to die.

Honest question: are any of the large European cities seeing the &quot;white flight&quot; phenomenon with the influx of poor middle eastern and african immigrants?

It&#x27;s more that it&#x27;s time consuming than boring, which obviously gets worse with urban sprawl. Sure, I can do all my &quot;down time&quot; entertainment, but I can&#x27;t schedule anything else while I&#x27;m commuting which is the real issue.Though many US city demographics are different to anywhere else in the world due to white flight - the &quot;wealth donut&quot; around a poor inner city rather rather than people getting poorer as you move further out in the suburbs.

I know what you mean about SUVs and trucks feeling safer and more comfortable. Objectively however, their handling characteristics and weight distribution (particularly the very light rear weight in pickups) make them quite a bit less safe in terms of what they will do in a high speed evasive action situation.

&gt; Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we&#x27;re not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.I was just thinking about this today (and have been for a while now), but with regards to vehicle comfort.I drive a small sedan, but have ridden in pickup trucks and SUVs. They are far more comfortable than the sedans the way they sit taller, have far more room, and feel like a small bubble protecting one from the rest of the world.This is a danger on two fronts: safety, and comfort leading to more driving. If we continue to make cars more comfortable, we continue to abstract the idea that we are zipping around in 3,000 pound death machines, thus leading to more reckless or risky behavior.As autonomous vehicles roll out to the public, no doubt people will expect computers, internet, and television to be front and center. Others may take naps during commutes. But with this, rather than curing the disease that is longer and longer commutes due to policy that encourages sprawl, entertainment will just treat the symptoms.

autonomous or not, taking the bus is still going to be a craptacular experience.

Well.... public transportation requires infrastructure which is not always around. In the south-east USA, for instance, there are public buses here and there but they rarely go for more than a few miles, and there are no trains or subways to travel mid-distance or between cities.So grey-hound or car rentals are your best bet unless you already own a car.

I&#x27;m a huge fan of public transit. It is of limited utility in land-use patterns typical of modern American cities, or, far more so, suburbs.If you can take a vehicle directly to your destination, or a short walk from it, things works pretty well. If you need to transfer, even once, you can easily double trip time (consider a typical commute is ~20 minutes one-way).Scheduling transfers with shared-roadbed (e.g., bus, light rail) systems is all but impossible.Prior to the creation of early transit systems (horse-drawn omnibuses, either wheeled or tracked), few cities had a cross-section of more than 1-2 miles, as 1 miles is about a 20 minute walk. Streetcars (horse, electric, steam) extended that based on their average speed, typically 5-15 mph, with a 5-10 mile commute becoming possible though still usually less, and those commutes forming along rail lines, hence a hub-and-spoke city layout (see for example Chicago). Dense grids such as New York&#x27;s were unusual.Personal (or small-ridership) vehicles can go directly point-to-point, and make longer, flexible-route commutes possible (I&#x27;m not saying this is a good thing, merely a fact), though requiring parking, chauffers&#x2F;cabbies, automatic vehicle control, etc.). In an interesting parallel, one reason there were so many horses in late-19th-century America was because of railroads. You had 30-60 MPH transit along fixed routes, but limited movement within cities or towns. So horses, wagons, and coaches to get to and from railway stations for goods and people. Petrol-powered automobiles replaced horses before they substituted for trains, though railroad use was already in decline by 1920 (rising one last time due to fuel rationing in WWII).Upshot: there&#x27;s a place for public transit, but almost certainly only with massively revamped land-use within urban and suburban regions.

Because I don&#x27;t want to be crammed into a tight space with several dozen other people?

I don&#x27;t understand, why would you need self driving cars if you don&#x27;t want to drive?  Public transport is here, is cheaper and safer.  Also it allows to multitask.

Is that why the streets are empty and you can always find a parking space in London? How about downtown Shanghai? Or Rome? Or the suburbs of Guadalajara? This qualifies as some of the rest of the world and all of the places mentioned are traffic nightmares. It must be all of the walkers clogging up the roads.As far as the rest of the world loving it, that&#x27;s ridiculous. The mom in rural Kenya walking miles each day for water.. I bet she&#x27;d love a car. When you have to get to a meeting and its 40C outside, I&#x27;m sure a brisk walk would be just adorable.Not everyone can afford to live within walking distance.

Proven technology around since the beginning of time - walking. The rest of the world love it. We should give it a try.

There&#x27;s also a significant tort issue. Consider the case where a drunk driver kills himself and someone else. Now consider the case where an autonomous vehicle kills its passenger and the passenger in another car.A jury needs to award damages against A) the grieving widow of the drunk driver or B) A large corporation. I suspect the latter will be at least an order of magnitude higher. This means that until autonomous vehicles are an order of magnitude safer, the car companies will have to absorb more damages than the sum of what all of their customers would have.

&gt; A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.Car-for-car I&#x27;d easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident).The problem is that a typical person doesn&#x27;t care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are &quot;normal.&quot; We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and&#x2F;or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber&#x2F;Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve.Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone&#x27;s built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn&#x27;t yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.

While the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved annually, worldwide, due to self-driving vehicles is more than enough to justify hurrying toward that goal, self driving technology will have enormous secondary effects, only some of which can be reliably predicted.Your concern about sprawl could come true, or vehicles could switch largely to on-demand access, where urbanization will provide the critical mass for on-demand vehicle use, making the exurbs relatively more expensive.

As a counterpoint, we&#x27;d also have the need for fewer roads and parking lots, and hence cities could become even denser.

&gt; &quot;When used correctly, [partially autonomous driving] is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves&quot;If you&#x27;re an American, you&#x27;re twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.I do wonder, though, how this would reshape our cities - if we&#x27;re not careful. Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we&#x27;re not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.On the whole, though, it&#x27;s a beautiful thing.

&gt; Traffic congestion would improve due to increased passenger areal density by eliminating the center aisle and putting seats where there are currently entrywaysI don&#x27;t see how automation reduces the need to get on the bus.

Actually aircraft could be a very real possibility of you read up on his ideas.

Master Plan, Part Trois:Solar-powered, autonomous spacecraft.

Buildings. A car roof isn&#x27;t enough area and isn&#x27;t pointed in the right direction.

That&#x27;s a great point. I&#x27;d imagine they need 3-4 times the power of a car but have 100 times the surface area. It seems like that could actually work.

That clicked when he talked about Tesla Semi. A roof installation on the trailer would make sense and might generate a &#x27;useful&#x27; amount of power.

Forgive me if this is a silly question but when he talks about &quot;beautiful solar-roof-with-battery&quot;, is he talking about car roofs or roofs of buildings?An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.

Check out this video around 1h22m: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;6WyaO29XDf8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;6WyaO29XDf8</a>

Are there any more details on the factory factory?  I didn&#x27;t understand that part.

I feel like there must have been a few pages left off the beginning and this whole post was a summary of an article that doesn&#x27;t exist. I guess that&#x27;s just Elon Musk&#x27;s train of thought.

This is a big part of why we&#x27;re at such an exciting point with autonomous vehicles: there are several highly promising, meaningfully different methodologies contending right now, including Google&#x27;s top-down approach, Tesla&#x27;s incremental approach, and even Comma.ai&#x27;s maverick pure-learning approach.

It&#x27;s interesting that they portray self-driving capabilities as something that can be turned on or off, unlike Google&#x27;s where it&#x27;s just always on.I think in the long run Google might be building the correct solution for greater number of people.

If there were a way to collect additional solar energy in space and somehow get it back to earth, that is now a net increase in energy, which will ultimately end up as heat, being delivered to the planet. At a large enough scale and over time this would be a global warming contributor.Solar power collected on earth is just using energy that is already being delivered to the surface -- no net change.

&gt; Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth?This has been investigated several times and the most promising technique involves using maser downlinks to transfer the energy.&gt; He&#x27;s said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country.Ok that&#x27;s a start. That takes care of the energy needs of 3.5% of the Earth&#x27;s population, once they have sufficient storage capacity to see them through the night.Geostationary space-based solar collection can work 24 hours per day, with much higher efficiency and minimal storage requirements, right over the areas of peak demand even when the ground is obscured by rain and cloud. No deserts required.

Satellite solar panels are very specialized devices that use different technology from ground-based ones. For a start, efficiency is much more important on satellites because of space and weight limitations, so they&#x27;re generally multi-junction gallium arsenide solar cells rather than the cheaper single-junction silicon used in ground-based solar power.

I suspect Tesla will move into aircraft and oceancraft in the long-run, if you&#x27;re interested in &quot;other industries.&quot; He&#x27;s mentioned the electric jet enough times. And why would he create a new company for it when he&#x27;s got all the expertise and business structure at his fingertips already?Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth? Even if there were a way, it&#x27;s not necessary or effective. He&#x27;s said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country. Why bother putting them in space? No advantage.However, SolarCity IS likely to provide the panels for SpaceX&#x27;s satellites, of course. So there is that form of solar harvesting in space.

Sorry, but solar space harvesting is a post Asteroid Mining kind of tech... Not really &quot;Synergy&quot; for few Decades. (and acceptance of Nuclear space propulsion)Come to think of it, if you can transfer the energy... Just put the reactors in space?

I was hoping to see another zero to one approach with the master plan where he is taking on some other industry goal. I totally get that part deux is still very, very ambitious and one that no other company can truly realize. But if we&#x27;re just talking about Musk&#x27;s master plan, I&#x27;m curious why he didn&#x27;t talk about the synergies with his other company, SpaceX. Tesla and SpaceX both rely on vehicles &amp; transport while SpaceX and Solar City both revolve around innovation in energy&#x2F;physics. I&#x27;m wondering if Tesla&#x27;s mission&#x2F;vision will dwarf SolarCity&#x27;s when solar harvesting in space could be one of many opportunities to partner with SpaceX. &#x2F;rant

It&#x27;s too bad you&#x27;re forced to live in the wilderness then

&gt; Enable your car to make money for you when you aren&#x27;t using itI really like this, but the laws of supply and demand still apply. If you live in a sparsely populated area there&#x27;s not going to be much for your car to do.Great for those in urban centres, but then if you lived there why bother owning at all when there will be more cabs to hail?

I see. It’s not just a bailout, to stave off SolarCity’s looming demise, though it is partially about that. It’s also expected to be profitable, because they could consolidate SolarCity’s sales operations into Tesla’s existing showrooms, and sell a complete package that’s more attractive than solar panels or PowerWalls on their own.Not entirely contradictory with my previous guess; being profitable by laying off the sales department is basically saying the company will not soon be profitable by itself; but Musk is so certain that it’s a good deal for the respective companies that he’s promising to recuse himself from the vote.The other interesting aspect is that they don’t expect the sale to close and the details to be official for several months. It’s actually near the beginning of the negotiating process, with due diligence and stuff yet to be done. Since Musk is a large shareholder of both companies, they decided to announce it publicly this early.

If you&#x27;re interested in learning more about the reasoning for the SolarCity acquisition, I can recommend listening to the conference call recording about that: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edge.media-server.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;p&#x2F;makhvjt8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edge.media-server.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;p&#x2F;makhvjt8</a>

That&#x27;s not what he said. Solar cars are dumb. They&#x27;re good for tech demos, racing across the Australian Outback on a sunny day in the summer, but useless for normal commutes in traffic.Musk said Tesla has always planned to provide solar energy. SolarCity provides solar energy. The odd part to outsiders is, why now?I think Musk&#x27;s investment in SolarCity was being threatened by the end of subsidized net metering. He needed to speed up the time table for energy storage to keep the company in business. SolarCity had the solar panels, but Tesla had the batteries. It would be a poor customer experience for SolarCity to have to negotiate with Tesla for the Powerwall, and it would be a waste of time and money for SolarCity to start its own battery sourcing.If Musk could get the market valuation and accelerate the world&#x27;s weaning from fossil fuels this way, it&#x27;s a big bonus, but all this leveraging is pretty risky.

&gt; Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was boughtDo note that it was only a proposal and nothing has been accepted yet with the deal, so it&#x27;s an offer only - in fact, if you look at SolarCity&#x27;s stock price, it&#x27;s weighted toward investors believing that the deal does not happen.

I am in no position to question EM. But I was hoping he would give some good explanation for spending resources on SolarCity acquisition but nothing. Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was bought other than some hand wavy explanation about inherent difficulties of two separate companies working together. It still doesn&#x27;t seem like a good purchase for Tesla specially at the moment. Solar car and SolarCity seem to only have the word solar in common :) TBH I am still fuzzy how expensive purchase of SolarCity can benefit a solar car manufacturing even in long run.

the question is how to keep those cars clean though

A certain amount of optimism is a necessary prerequisite of being an entrepreneur. Nobody would ever do it if they knew from the start how hard it would be.

The standard joke is that Elon runs on Mars time, so &quot;1 year&quot; for him is about 1.9 standard years.

I&#x27;ve only mildly followed him, but I remember hearing he is extremely aggressive with his timelines. Is he normally so far off on his estimates?

Sure, but that&#x27;s still ~3x more per employee than Tesla.

Calling it a logical fallacy that a premium car takes longer to build because it is premium.

You are comparing premium tesla sedans with ford and Honda cars, of course premium car will take longer to build. Porsche for example produced 189,000 cars [1] in 2014 with 19,000 employees. And the average price of Porsche car is also lower than Tesla&#x27;s.
[1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.porsche.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;release.php?id=897" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.porsche.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;release.php?id=897</a>

This, citing employee numbers is somewhat meaningless without any data on the number of non-employees working in your supply chain. Could indeed very well be a case of outsourcing differences rather than a difference in productivity.

Say what you will about their &quot;antiquated&quot; business practices, but Ford consistently does one thing that Tesla never does: it turns a profit

&gt; have outsourced their sales as well via an antiquated dealer model.That&#x27;s not outsourcing, that&#x27;s distribution. Every industry in the world has similar distribution channels. They still have a large sales department.

so your thinking Tesla isn&#x27;t buying completed components from third party suppliers? Really? That antiquated dealer model also protects consumers against manufacturers who would otherwise ignore them as large companies can. It also would probably do well against an executive who tends to mock customers (and even lose in court with having to buy cars back)Sorry, but you don&#x27;t understand Tesla&#x27;s manufacturing or that of any automaker. A large amount of the assemblies are outsourced. For the larger companies even drive trains and transmissions can be but that is rare. Ford and GM cooperated on ten speed transmissions recently so that is a benefit of such sourcing.

Ford can have fewer employees per car because they&#x27;re at full scale, they&#x27;ve outsourced nearly all their engineering and have outsourced their sales as well via an antiquated dealer model.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hf15nMnayXk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hf15nMnayXk</a>

SolarCity is not exactly a success story[1]. The more likely scenario is Tesla continues to burn through even more money after purchasing it.1 - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.shareholder.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;AMDA-14LQRE&#x2F;2472560984x0x874113&#x2F;E0EA9067-0A3F-4CBB-813F-704CFF4D1D1F&#x2F;SCTY_Q4_2015_Shareholder_Letter_FINAL.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.shareholder.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;AMDA-14LQRE&#x2F;247256098...</a>

Solar offers even longer time to payoff&#x2F;profit. It&#x27;s a long term bet... even longer than Tesla&#x27;s current profile IMHO.

I think some of this might be offset by the fact that this plan doesn&#x27;t seem to focus on just cars. A solar product described in the first step of the plan could help fund the cars.

employees per car is irrelevant metric as business lines are totally different. Exclude people working on  the charger network, dealerships and home products (powerwall) and then it will be more or less apples to apples comparison.

shhh, everyone knows ford is an antiquated company run by morons who think a computer is just a fancy light box and tesla is going to run them out of business within 5 years.

&gt;&gt; Number of employees per car outputIt&#x27;s a very important metric. The number of man-hours per item is a good stand-in for production costs. It isn&#x27;t perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works.I&#x27;m interested to hear of how much staff time is put to new production&#x2F;development and how much is dedicated to maintaining the current fleet. I have to believe that Toyota walks away in that area too.

At first that seems right. But there is a big BUT. Even Tesla has outsourced a lot of components. A lot of the components except the drivetrain is being outsourced. There are only 2 manufacturers for airbags in the world. There is only 1 good quality manufacturer in the world for the in car rearview mirror. There is only 1 manufacturer for the Homelink system with its best features developed by an Audi engineer I personally know. (All the Homelink systems in the premium cars are this only one system and I know the 2014 numbers sold to Tesla at that time.) The brake system in the Model X is from Bosch. And so on.So Tesla is at the same level of outsourcing like every one else. So actually you can compare the numbers.

How about the employees at all of the subcontractors each of the incumbent manufacturers uses for completed components?Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it&#x27;s actually pretty meaningless on its own.Being boring, and looking at sustainable production costs and what consumers are willing to pay is far closer to what matters than the shorthand of looking at employees per car.

They might succeed in meeting goals, if many customers cancel their pre-orders thanks to this &quot;beta&quot; (sorry, version 0.5) &quot;announcement&quot;...

I can&#x27;t wait for that announcement, because I&#x27;m going on a full throttle stock buying frenzy in that instant.

&gt; Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee.This is an awesome analysis. Do you happen to know the numbers for BMW, the most frequently compared &quot;like&quot; to Tesla that I&#x27;ve seen? (or a similar luxury company)

&quot;A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle. The first Model 3 factory machine should be thought of as version 0.5, with version 1.0 probably in 2018.&quot;What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. That&#x27;s realistic. His two top production guys quit when he announced 2018 as the delivery date for the Model 3. His new production head, from Audi, may have given Musk a reality check.Tesla produced about 50,000 cars in 2015 with 13,000 employees, about 4 cars per employee. Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee. Toyota produced about 9 million cars with 344,000 employees, about 26 cars per employee. So Tesla needs to get their productivity per employee up by 4x - 7x to play with the big guys. Clearly Musk has done the same calculation.Now, though, he&#x27;s admitting that they can&#x27;t do it by 2018. This is prepping the stockholders for bad financial news. Tesla is going to burn a lot of cash through at least 2022.There&#x27;s no reason that Tesla can&#x27;t get their productivity up to at least Ford levels in time. Ford has a much broader product line, and Tesla&#x27;s car isn&#x27;t that complicated mechanically. But it&#x27;s not instant.

A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests...This is the part I really want to see.

Could you clarify?Tesla needs batteries. SolarCity does not need batteries except in jurisdictions that make having a battery significantly favorable over having one. Also, the high energy density batteries that Tesla needs are, IMO, mostly unnecessary for stationary use. Compare Powerwall prices to lead-acid -- lead-acid wins hands down. Sure, the lead acid batteries are heavy, but that&#x27;s not a problem if you plunk them in the basement or crawlspace.

Master plan part one made sense: it all lead to Tesla as it is today.But master plan part deux seems odd: what exactly does &quot;One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app&quot; for solar have to do with the Tesla transportation part?

I&#x27;m very curious what the pickup offering will be like, and compare to existing offerings from the big 3, since it is a &quot;a new kind of pickup truck&quot;. I think the segment of the pickup market that is mostly an SUV, but occasionally needs to haul&#x2F;tow stuff could be well served by Tesla. They also have plans for a semi, so maybe they&#x27;ll actually be able to compete for actual work trucks that haul&#x2F;tow on a regular basis too; but the energy density of the battery compared to gasoline&#x2F;diesel makes me doubtful.

Now let&#x27;s just wait and see if SpaceX&#x27;s full vision comes to fruition.

Haven&#x27;t seen such a clean, crisp plan that has been implemented flawlessly by a company. Makes me reconsider how I should think the next time I&#x27;m asked to write a vision&#x2F;mission statement for anything-company&#x2F;product.

Its so rubegoldbergtastic it puts all other successful entrepreneurs in history to shame, which is to say I&#x27;m incredibly bearish on it.

That&#x27;s the point: it&#x27;s for people that want to own a Tesla but can&#x27;t afford it.Not for people that can afford to own a Tesla and have it sit idle waiting for them 90% of the time (like all of today&#x27;s owners).

Agree with part 3. I fail to see why anyone who is willing to pay a premium for a Tesla car would be willing to let random strangers into their (new) car, unless the benefits far outweighs the cost&#x2F;risks, but in that case, if the other car user has to pay a high price to use a Tesla for his commute, why not just use Uber instead?This can probably only work when the car is old such that its value has already been depreciated significantly.

A semi travelling a very slow speeds would need his own lane or it would significantly increase the risk of accidents (unless every car on the road is autonomous).Solar on the roof is most likely rather insignificant and will also just add weight.

Even though he said Semi, I don&#x27;t think he meant an interstate tractor-trailer. I expect to see a replacement for the typical urban box truck, that is used to make local deliveries.1. It&#x27;s local, so it&#x27;s always near a charger 
2. They&#x27;re smaller, so easier to build in their existing factory space 
3. Possibly the biggest perceived win for the environment, as people wouldn&#x27;t see exhaust soot anymore right outside their window 
4. Stoplights - the box trucks spend more time accelerating from a light, so they need torque. Something that electric motors have from a dead stop.

&gt; Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highway speeds where air resistance is at a maximum.Why would a self-driving cargo vehicle drive at highway speeds? A human truck driver can only drive 11 hours&#x2F;day, an autonomous vehicle can be on the move 24&#x2F;7 and so could travel at slower, more efficient speeds while completing trips on similar time scales.&gt; To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.Don&#x27;t forget about the solar roof unit. There is a lot of surface area on a trailer. This could offset some of the energy requirements along with other technology such as regenerative breaking. Also consider that a supercharger network might be constructed.&gt; Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.I disagree. The evidence is to the contrary technically speaking. The matter is more subjective on the social front, but we&#x27;ve seen how popular attitudes change to technology. It might be a fatuous example but consider how it was once uncool to be online and then MySpace happened, and consider how it was anathema to be anywhere near online dating, the archetypal hallmark of a loser, then Tinder happened and now it&#x27;s almost de rigueur in the mainstream.&gt; Enable your car to make money for you. I don&#x27;t want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes.Insurance (including public liability insurance) is already a thing. Insurance is priced according to risk, so when autonomous vehicles are here and much safer than human drivers the insurance will be priced as such.&gt; If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don&#x27;t want to wait for another one.The post alluded to making your car available when you&#x27;re at work etc. I expect the intention is ensure it has returned to you by the time you want to go home.&gt; I don&#x27;t want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat.These are valid concerns I share too.

I can&#x27;t speak for everywhere, I&#x27;ll admit. Where I live, the owner is responsible, as I have learned firsthand by involvement in several accident scenarios where the vehicle owner was not driving at the time. You must purchase insurance for each vehicle you own, and if you allow another person to drive your vehicle you retain the liability.I&#x27;m sure there are some exceptions e.g. if your vehicle is stolen, or in cases of a clear contract such as a vehicle lease or rental.Subject to the foregoing, it seems entirely reasonable that if I allow a random stranger to use my car while I&#x27;m at work, that is my decision and my responsibility. And I would not do it.

In the UK, under section 151 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, the owner&#x27;s insurers are liable for third party injuries or losses caused by a thief driving the vehicle. They can try and claim back their losses from the thief, but that&#x27;s unlikely to make them whole. So the legal owner will end up with a claim on their insurance.

&gt; Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes. So legal liability laws will have to change.This, at least in most of the United States, is not a correct statement of the law. Absent something like Negligent Entrustment[1] or Vicarious Liability[2], one&#x27;s ownership of a vehicle does not determine if one is liable if damage is caused while another is operating the vehicle. Some might be under this impression because we tend to purchase insurance &quot;for a vehicle&quot;, however liability is placed upon a negligent driver (not owner). Somewhat of a discussion of this is found here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claimsjournal.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;249762.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claimsjournal.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;249762...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Negligent_entrustment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Negligent_entrustment</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vicarious_liability" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vicarious_liability</a>

Where do you live that this is not the case? I know some states have (or had) a &quot;no-fault&quot; approach to automobile liability claims but I thought it was a minority and perhaps had been mostly abandonded?Who else would be responsible, if not the owner?

&gt;Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes.Ummm... Where the hell do you live where this is the case?

Autonomy is a big win for semis -- even just platooning (drafting) is a huge win. Two startups in this space: Otto &amp; Peloton.As for power density... going to a turbine engine feeding electric power systems is a sufficiently big win compared to straight-up diesel ICE. There&#x27;s a big industry group looking into this:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;corporate.walmart.com&#x2F;_news_&#x2F;news-archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;walmart-debuts-futuristic-truck" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;corporate.walmart.com&#x2F;_news_&#x2F;news-archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;...</a>

Your point #3 sounds a like lot homeowners, before AirBnb figured out a way to address most of their concerns.

&gt; 1. They&#x27;ll be able to line the entire trailer with batteriesBut that&#x27;s an enormous inversion of expense that falls on the trailer owners. The tractor-trailer model works so well because it concentrates complexity and cost in the tractor.At present trailers are mechanically fairly simple and require only routine servicing with a basic toolkit. They draw power from their tractor. An owner can maintain a fleet of trailers to match their peak demand and are immediately available. Just charter a tractor and away they go.Battery-equipped trailers will be much more complex, heavy and maintenance-intensive. More expensive but with a smaller payload and prolonged periods of unavailability whilst charging. The cost of haulage charters will have to reduce by magnitudes to make that an attractive preposition.

Most criticisms of Tesla are so...amateur. They try to point out obvious issues which Musk and team must have thought out on day 1.People still treat this company as if it is some stoner&#x27;s living room project, not a multi-billion dollar organization that built the best electric car on the planet while its sister company built a reusable rocket

Why would lining the trailer with batteries be a better option than a removable battery on the tractor?

1. They&#x27;ll be able to line the entire trailer with batteries. Elon&#x27;s pretty good at physics and engineering: if he says this can be done better than existing gas-powered semis, you&#x27;re not going to be able to prove him wrong with some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, as if he hadn&#x27;t considered this. Obviously he has and knows it will work. Tesla didn&#x27;t get this far on vague conjecture.2. Maybe so, but it will happen, and the delay won&#x27;t really hinder Tesla. They&#x27;re not dependent on it. It&#x27;s not like they can&#x27;t sell cars without it. It&#x27;s just another tier of advancement to be reached in time.3. Maybe you don&#x27;t want anyone using your car (nor would I), but that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s optional. A lot of people will love this. Owning a car of that level of quality for a greatly reduced price thanks to earned revenue. I assume the app will let you monitor its location, and you can anticipate when you&#x27;ll need it back again and call it back before that time arrives. Or....just take someone else&#x27;s car if you&#x27;re in such a rush :) Sharing is caring.

A future for semis which have a 4-8 km off-grid range, and operate largely as self-assembling intermodal train rigs for long-distance transport, either on existing railcars or with a streamlined wheelset mechanism, might work.I agree that the power densities for long-haul, BEV trucking simply don&#x27;t make sense, even with platooning technologies. Intermittent fast-charge stations plus catenaries, with off-grid battery capabilities, would be a possibility however.Another option would be for always (or nearly-always) tracked operation, with what&#x27;s effectively a cargo-streetcar function within cities and suburbs, and traditional rail off.Functions such as field-to-depot transport would almost certainly still require fueled vehicles.

Maybe one way on trucking side would be do to things a bit differently. Instead of one tractor pulling the cargo from start to finish, use electric&#x2F;autonomous vehicles on those parts of journey where they are the most efficient choice and leave the rest to diesel&#x2F;humans. Like things are done in container world, where the same container can travel via different modes of transportation during its journey.

&gt; 1. SemisI think that highways in the future will become electrified and then teslas semis will be able to charge as they go on the highways.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-23603751" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-23603751</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scania.com&#x2F;group&#x2F;en&#x2F;worlds-first-electric-road-opens-in-sweden&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scania.com&#x2F;group&#x2F;en&#x2F;worlds-first-electric-road-o...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nikolamotor.com&#x2F;one" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nikolamotor.com&#x2F;one</a>

If you assume that trucks can be fully autonomous, then cost efficiency may be achieved by more trucks carrying less weight since driver wage is no longer a part of the equation.

Operations like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zipcar.co.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zipcar.co.uk&#x2F;</a> could have the same issue and seem to do ok.

3. Seems like the biggest issue to me. If you&#x27;re an Uber&#x2F;taxi driver you have the ability to stop the car and kick people out. Your presence is what mostly deters the riders from doing untoward shit. Just think about everything drunk people would do if a driver was absent.Whatever counter Tesla might have in store to prevent this, it would have to involve them analyzing&#x2F;monitoring&#x2F;recording the behavior of people in the vehicle, which would be a huge privacy nightmare that nobody wants to be a party to.

My points of skepticism:1. Semis. A typical long haul semi gets well under 10MPG. In some cases not much more than half that. They are heavy and need a lot of energy to move. A Tesla Model S weighs 4650 lbs and has a range of a couple of hundred miles. A semi truck can weigh up to 80,000 lbs. That is a lot of weight to get rolling and a lot to pull up a grade. Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highway speeds where air resistance is at a maximum. To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.2. Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.3. Enable your car to make money for you. I don&#x27;t want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes. So legal liability laws will have to change. If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don&#x27;t want to wait for another one. I don&#x27;t want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat. I feel that my car is an extension of my home. It&#x27;s personal space that I don&#x27;t want to share with random strangers.YMMV.

He is saying the government will be ready to approve them then.

&gt; 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.So he is essentially say, in at most five in a half years, they&#x27;ll be ready for fully self driving cars?

&quot;He wasn&#x27;t voted in; the other party was voted out&quot;He won the 2013 federal election as the leader of the Liberals, that&#x27;s fairly conclusive.&quot;The leadership here isn&#x27;t dire&quot;We disagree.&quot;Besides, if you use &#x27;dire&#x27; for something as beige as Turnbull, what have you got left for something like Erdogan&#x27;s latest activities in Turkey?&quot;Criminal? The question is whataboutery.

Abbott is the last person anyone should quote to support an argument. He wasn&#x27;t voted in; the other party was voted out. His policy for everything was &quot;No!&quot;, and once in power, found out that &quot;No!&quot; didn&#x27;t cut it anymore. He did do a lot of damage, but his leadership was so bad that he was ejected by his own party in his first term despite them using that &#x27;they ejected in first term!&#x27; argument in their election campaign to win power. That&#x27;s kind&#x27;ve promising, actually... the party was worried about the public enough that they&#x27;d eject a lunatic leader.The leadership here isn&#x27;t dire, it&#x27;s just boring (in global terms) and a bit of a soap opera. The country is still a great place to live. If you look beyond the media, there is leadership - for example, in Gillard&#x27;s tenure, more articles of legislation were passed than in any previous government, including some key items, despite the media loudly claiming (with plenty of misogyny) that the minority government was hamstrung and paralysed.Turnbull is not the guy I want in right now, but his leadership is hardly &#x27;dire&#x27;. Besides, if you use &#x27;dire&#x27; for something as beige as Turnbull, what have you got left for something like Erdogan&#x27;s latest activities in Turkey?

&quot;Coal is the future&quot; - Tony Abbott, Australian PM, 2014.There are many things to take from Musk&#x27;s master plan part deux, but the most important for me is the intent and aspiration.I live in Australia, the leadership here is absolutely dire both political and economic. A relentless cycle of vested mining interests and climate change deniers espousing at length on the cattle exports to Asia suffering if marriage equality is passed.Maybe Musk succeeds, maybe not, but here&#x27;s someone with vision, a plan, and he&#x27;s going to have a fair swing at it.

Its the same reason why Kodak invented the first digital camera and didn&#x27;t put it in the market. We see the same pattern over and over again and if you work at any of these huge corporations, you understand that the main duty of the executives is to protect their profit centers at all costs. Any product that is capable of cannibalizing on the profit centers will face a tough road to success and at the worst, get culled early.Then a startup comes along, reinvents or polishes that product and is very successful. Eventually it turns into a BigCo. And the cycle repeats.

Tesla and SpaceX are specifically &quot;Hard&quot; technology... Most tech startups are Soft(ware). See: UberSpaceX market share (Tesla too for that matter) will NEVER have a &quot;hockey stick&quot; growth chart... The tech is too hard

Tesla and SpaceX required a lot of startup capital (relative to most other technology startups). Yes, their ideas are simple, but few people have the capital to implement those ideas.Additionally, the existing players in the rocket market didn&#x27;t have much incentive to innovate given how few players there were. Your guess is as good as mine on why the automobile industry didn&#x27;t continue much EV research after the 90s.

Is he putting (or planning on putting) solar panels on cars as you mentioned?  I think the &quot;solar-roof-with-battery product&quot; he was referring to was solar city + powerwall on a house.

I&#x27;m always surprised when we get insight into Musk&#x27;s plan, not because they&#x27;re complicated but because they always come across as &quot;no duh, why aren&#x27;t we already doing these things? weren&#x27;t we already on track to do these things decades ago?&quot;As much as the Internet transformed society, I also can&#x27;t help but feel like we were on the track to have achieved these things and got distracted by our global communications and selfie-cat picture delivery network and are only now starting to come to our senses as the ubiquity has occurred and the ecosystem of necessary applications has become fleshed out, matured and developed a commercial angle.If you look at his pre-hardware days, he built basically a e-phonebook when paper phonebooks were still all the rage and a couple payment companies. Both no-duh companies in hindsight.Musk&#x27;s plans feel like he&#x27;s taking a derailed train, applying some common sense grease (solar panels on electric cars? MADNESS! Reusable rocket stages instead of throwing away the entire ship? ~~CRAZY!~~) and getting our civilization going again.He&#x27;s also really really public about his plans and telegraphs his moves years in advance...and yet very few seem able to execute anywhere near his league.I sometimes feel if things had shaken out differently and Steve Jobs was younger than Musk and was running a successful Apple, Musk might try to recruit him with a &quot;do you want to sell cat picture delivery boxes for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?&quot;I don&#x27;t know if Musk is going to succeed in the long run, and I hope serious competition finally shows up (because that makes each of his industries healthier), but seriously,it&#x27;s about fucking time.

In other words, if you&#x27;re a Tesla driver, you&#x27;re safer driving the car yourself than driving it with autopilot.

Here&#x27;s a probably equally badly made statistic. Tesla estimates their cars had driven 130 million autopilot miles before the fatality. Some googling suggests the first non-autopilot Tesla S fatality was in july 2014 and this graph ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideevs.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;Tesla-Model-S-One-Billion-Miles-Line-Graph-june-2015.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideevs.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;Tesla-Model-...</a> ) suggests that was around 400 million miles driven. So the autopilot is 3.33 times &#x27;worse&#x27;?Who knows, but if Tesla feels they have a moral duty to leave on autopilot if it is safer, they equally have one if it is more dangerous. It seems they are pretty happy to be in dark about which it is while they test their system.

&quot;I should add a note here to explain why Tesla is deploying partial autonomy now, rather than waiting until some point in the future. The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.&quot;That&#x27;s a hell of a statement and I want to see much better stats than that. Just looking at the total distance per death in human driven cars and comparing it to the autopilot total distance is a gross simplification. At an absolute minimum you have to start by only comparing driving on similar roads. Tesla simply keeps hiding behind &#x27;if used correctly&#x27; which includes the driver being alert and ready to take over - if we restrict human driving stats to similarly ideal conditions the accident rate will also drop. Additionally driver demographics is a big deal as is the safety features of the car itself.

Well honestly, the entire plan can be read as either the work of a highly ambitious genious or a raving madman.

My favorite quote:&quot;Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.&quot;

Nice plan, good luck! If that happens, though, I can&#x27;t see why owning a car at all, ten to twenty years from now: just make an enormous fleet of electric unmanned buses running up and down every major road on Earth, uh? No jams, no accidents, only a regular and pre-determined flow of vehicles. One planet, one network.

I would have thought you&#x27;d want to go for delivery vans before semi-trailers.

But they aren&#x27;t sharing their accident data...

Likely. They gave away all of their patents (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tesla.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;all-our-patent-are-belong-you" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tesla.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;all-our-patent-are-belong-you</a>), so it&#x27;s likely they&#x27;d be willing to share this data.

&gt; via massive fleet learningIs Tesla going to make this data freely available, to accelerate the development of safer autonomous driving software? Given that it&#x27;s &quot;morally reprehensible to delay release&quot; of autopilot, it is also morally reprehensible not to publicly release such data if more groups working on the task will lead to safer software.