Article  What’s happening at Tesla? Here’s what experts think.

Can things be turned around at Tesla, or is this the beginning of the end?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/cha...d-layoffs/

INTRO: No car company in recent years has been able to generate more news headlines than Tesla. Its original founders were among the very first to realize that lithium-ion laptop cells were just about good enough to power a car, assuming you put enough of them in a pack, and with critical funding from current CEO Elon Musk, the company was able to kick-start an electric vehicle revolution. But those headlines of late have been painting a picture of a company in chaos. Sales are down, the cars are barely profitable, and now the CEO is culling vast swaths of the company. Just what is going on?

Always erratic, Musk's leadership has nevertheless seen the company sell electric cars in volume, profitably. What's more, Musk has at times been able to inspire faith in and devotion to his company's products in a way that makes the late Steve Jobs look like a neophyte—after the Model 3 debuted in 2016, 450,000 people gave $1,000 deposits to Tesla for a product that wouldn't go into production for at least 18 months.

Of course, that example also illustrates a long-running concern with the company and Musk's investment-attracting pitches: overhyping and underdelivering. By 2018, more than one in five reservation holders wanted a refund after cheaper models were delayed and delayed.

But things have been on a bit of a downward slide recently. After having the long-range EV market almost to itself for some years, there's now stiff competition from car companies in the US, Europe, and China. That has caused Tesla to engage in a prolonged series of price cuts that have seen the company's profit margin—once the envy of the industry—reduced to a measly 5.5 percent. (The average automaker profit margin last year was 8.9 percent.)
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Tesla has tried to stave off that decline by making its cars cheaper to build. Where possible, the company has stripped content from cars to reduce the cost of putting them together. Some of that is merely annoying to the driver; turn signals that were stalks are now capacitive buttons on the steering wheel. Some is more serious. Tesla has abandoned the radar and ultrasonic sensors that everyone else trying to build partially automated cars, let alone fully autonomous ones, think are necessary. Instead, the company is relying on optical cameras alone. And that has caught up with it—both of Tesla's driver assists have been the subject of recalls after numerous crashes and at least 13 deaths.

But this week has been a weird one, even for experienced Tesla watchers... (MORE - missing details)

Tesla is currently holding its annual shareholder's meeting at the Gigafactory in Texas.

And the results of two super important shareholders' votes were just announced:

1. First, the shareholders formally approved Tesla moving its legal domicile from Delaware to Texas.

2. And second, the shareholders formally re-approved Elon Musk's performance based compensation package that was originally approved by shareholders in 2018 but then overturned retroactively by a Delaware judge who claimed it was excessive.

Even though Elon was drawing $0 salary as CEO and would only receive an admittedly huge stock award if production, profitability and the stock price met what seemed like impossible targets. But Tesla indeed met those targets, surpassed automobile companies like GM in valuation, and many TSLA shareholders got rich: If you invested $10,000 at Tesla's IPO, you would be a multimillionaire today. (How many CEOs of struggling unprofitable companies make millions a year and have massive 'golden parachutes'?) But it was Elon the Delaware judge went after, clearly for political "lawfare" reasons. Elon indeed got a larger chunk of the company, but he didn't cost investers anything. He only made money if they made money.

When the latter result was announced just now, the crowd at the shareholders meeting rose to their feet in a standing ovation. It was a moving moment.

https://x.com/DaveWarnedYou/status/1801362634391884039

Elon says "We would be nothing without our fans!"

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1803602473921175603

It seems that Tesla is building a huge new data center in Austin Texas that will house a supercomputer custom designed by Tesla in-house to train the new and more powerful neural network computers that will soon be installed in new Teslas, so as to make them even smarter & further improve their self-driving abilities.

The supercomputer will have about a zillion GPUs, some from Nvidia and others designed and manufactured by Tesla themselves. (Tesla is a high-end chip company? I thought they were a robot company... or a car company... or something... GM doesn't look like this. )

Well, GPU's get hot, especially en-masse. Hence the air conditioning fans.

(spot the cybertruck)

(Jun 24, 2024 09:17 PM)Yazata Wrote: Elon says "We would be nothing without our fans!"

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1803602473921175603

It seems that Tesla is building a huge new data center in Austin Texas that will house a supercomputer custom designed by Tesla in-house to train the new and more powerful neural network computers that will soon be installed in new Teslas, so as to make them even smarter & further improve their self-driving abilities.

The supercomputer will have about a zillion GPUs, some from Nvidia and others designed and manufactured by Tesla themselves. (Tesla is a high-end chip company? I thought they were a robot company... or a car company... or something... GM doesn't look like this. )

Well, GPU's get hot, especially en-masse. Hence the air conditioning fans.

(spot the cybertruck)

Fans look like the Soylent Green vats from the movie.

(Jun 24, 2024 09:32 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote:

(Jun 24, 2024 09:17 PM)Yazata Wrote: Elon says "We would be nothing without our fans!"

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1803602473921175603

It seems that Tesla is building a huge new data center in Austin Texas that will house a supercomputer custom designed by Tesla in-house to train the new and more powerful neural network computers that will soon be installed in new Teslas, so as to make them even smarter & further improve their self-driving abilities.

The supercomputer will have about a zillion GPUs, some from Nvidia and others designed and manufactured by Tesla themselves. (Tesla is a high-end chip company? I thought they were a robot company... or a car company... or something... GM doesn't look like this. )

Well, GPU's get hot, especially en-masse. Hence the air conditioning fans.

(spot the cybertruck)

Fans look like the Soylent Green vats from the movie.

That comes after the AI's get out of control.

I think Musk should buy Blackberry who have sensor and infotainment tech imbedded in most if not all the Chinese EV market. Last I heard they are in 24 of 25 EV manufacturers. Tesla may be the only one who isn’t using this tech. Blackberry don’t make phones anymore and are also into cybersecurity business. Wonder what he would do if the competition had to come to him for this tech? Found this from ‘22.

https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/company...n-vehicles

I don't like the looks of the Cybertruck. Too boxy. And they just had their 4th recall!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cyber...qbUYYvGw1Q

Peter Thiel on Elon Musk:

“You know, when Elon was building both Tesla and SpaceX in the 2000s, people thought he was just really, really crazy. I think even those of us who had worked with him at PayPal, I mean, there’s this PayPal book that David Sacks and I thought of writing, and the Elon chapter was titled something like, “The Man Who Knew Nothing About Risk.” There are all these crazy Elon stories I could tell... If one of the two companies had succeeded, you would say, “Well, maybe he still got really lucky,” but when two out of two companies that people thought were completely harebrained in the 2000s, when they both succeed, man, you have to somehow reassess it, and somehow, the rest of us, somehow, are too risk averse, or there’s something about risk he knows that we don’t, or something like this.”

First photo of the inside of the "dojo", the supercomputer that Tesla is building to digest all the on-the-road experience downloaded by a million Teslas, then use it to train new and better neural network computers in new cars, as well as to download the training as upgrades back into existing cars.

Photo by Elon

nsNS

Tesla's first product was their original roadster. (Only a few were made. There are a couple of them here in my town and one is in space orbiting the Sun.)

Well, Tesla is planning to reintroduce a new roadster next year.

Elon teases it...

"I think the roadster demo will be mind blowing. It might be the most mind blowing demo of anything ever!"

"It's kind of applying rocket engineering with Tesla EV engineering to make something really special."

When asked by Tesla Owners Silicon Valley "I heard it can fly a little",

Elon replies "Yeah" and smiles...

I believe that the car will include spaceship style cold-gas thrusters to improve acceleration and cornering. Unclear how street legal that will be. But it should outperform any other car on the road, including those on the drag strip.

https://x.com/teslaownersSV/status/1818810396347940999