This is unsolved tech & will be a radically new product with very different cost structures vs current options; the future is highly uncertain.
This justifies a huge disparity in opinions but many may have too high certainty in their views.
Key questions:
1) Will self driving cars require 2x or 20x average human safety to achieve regulatory approval in a given jurisdiction? 2) Will it take 1 year or 20 years to get to this level of safety?
3) Is the Tesla-like deep learning heavy, hardware lite, incremental progress on driver assistance, general solution approach best? Or is the Waymo-like deep learning lite, hardware heavy, moonshot leap, geofenced approach better?
4) What is the current monthly rate of progress for each company in errors per mile? What bottlenecks might this progress hit in the future? What de-bottlenecking steps do companies have up their sleeve to solve these?
5) Will self driving taxis A) Take a niche share of the taxi/ride hailing market, B) Take nearly 100% share of this market or C) Dramatically increase the size of this market by reducing personal vehicle ownership and taking share from public transport.
6) How will consumers balance factors such as privacy, affordability, safety, entertainment, time utilisation into their preferred transport solution?
7) How easy will the self driving software/hardware/infrastructure/network solution be to copy? Will this be a winner takes most market with network effects, feedback loops, first mover moats etc, or will it be a crowded market?
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1) Tesla's Autopilot driver assist product is now largely feature complete, but how much further does it have to progress to achieve reliability 3-5x greater than the average human & allow removal of human supervision?
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2) This is the March of 9s.
Tesla’s self driving strategy from the start was chosen & optimised for this moment now; putting a system & infrastructure in place without data or hardware bottlenecks to allow largely automated progress for a feature complete AP on the March of 9s.
3) But how far do they have left to March?
Is Tesla 99.9% there, does it have 9,000x further to go or its it 33% there? It’s all a matter of perspective.
And most importantly does this all mean is Tesla 1 year away or 10 years away from Robotaxi level reliability?
1)A big question from Battery Day was how advanced were Tesla’s chemical engineering based innovations?
(Particularly vague references to new sulphate free processes).
Key to many of the advances, yet it wasn’t widely known that Tesla even had Chemical Engineering R&D teams
2) Part of the lack of detail in this section was likely due to protecting IP & partly because it would have gone over the audience’s head even more than the rest of the material. But was it also because these projects were less advanced than the rest? It is hard to know.
3) High level of speculation follows below.
In my view many of the cathode raw material innovations may have spun out of R&D work on Battery recycling, Battery materials & even waste water treatment at Giga Nevada.
I may be very wrong, but this looks like a proof of concept of Tesla's proposed new Lithium Clay + Salt + Water method. 1) The method appears to have been discovered by accident by SGS working on the Clayton Valley Lithium Project in Nevada, without them noticing the consequences
2) SGS discovered that for some surface lithium clay samples you could leach lithium in water, but then that this didn't work for other subsurface samples. cypressdevelopmentcorp.com/site/assets/fi…
3) They decided the reason for this discrepancy must be because surface samples must have had "some component of surface enrichment in the form of water-soluble salts".
4)Then they finished and said ok, water doesn't work, we have to use expensive acids instead.
Tesla likely started the Roadrunner cell project in ~2013 & built general battery cell expertise since foundation in 2003. They have also acquired & hired decades of experience.
The analyst/media takeaway from Battery Day looks that Tesla only started the cell project ~a year ago
Tesla has many huge challenges still to solve (with big delay risks) to ramp Kato road cell production to 10GWh by the 3Q21 target (& full rollout of all the BD innovations isn't targeted until 3Q23) but I see a very large misunderstanding on how far they’ve already come already
Tesla revealed 50+ separate but elegantly entwined cell & raw material R&D projects. They're in varying stages of development & Tesla couldn't explain detail in 90mins (& for competitive reasons) but @elonmusk, Drew, @tbc415 & hundreds more achieved a huge step to ending ICEs