To apply my first point to reality: put an Optimus in its current state/capability, on a commercial 0-turn lawn mower, plug Optimus into the mower's power takeoff, and have someone in another country remotely pilot the mower. That right there is worth every commercial lawn service having at least one on their crew TODAY.
The appeal of hot swapping an operator real time on the equipment you already own, whether it's a push lawn mower or a huge mining truck, provides enormous value right out of the gate. Especially in tasks where the Optimus can handle 90% of the task autonomously but needs to step aside or oversight for the last 10% of the job. Compare to a business model that requires purchase of all new very expensive and unique equipment.
I agree but it is frustrating watching Elon like Michael Copperfield but thinking it is real like a 4 year old.
I don't see a clear advantage of Tesla against other competitors if he will launch it in a couple of years.
There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding.
Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while.
Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.
When you see the bits and pieces of behind the scenes for Boston Dynamics it's clear that's where a lot of the magic actually is (and also if you look at how say, Atlas moves) - by necessity it looks much more "natural" because to get any power or speed behind the motions the whole robot needs to actively compensate the movements (obviously having enough power behind the drive system to actually do it is also critical).
However there are cases where this can work well, say in a factory handling dangerous chemicals with the teleoperator in an adjacent room. Or maybe it's doing some sort of task where delays and connectivity loss are acceptable.
"This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago!" Bill Gates responded. "I can't believe this! What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches, the beautiful women playing in the water!?"
"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.
also ED-209 from robocop, "You have 20 seconds to comply."
(112 points, 1 day ago, 108 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41831009
(89 points, 2 days ago, 92 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with 300 ping, no latency compensation, uphill both ways.)
We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".
Incredible
If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...
I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.
...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.
I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.
yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea
There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.
And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.
Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.
And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.
Driving at 60mph with shaky internet connection? Absolutely.
Piloting a robot to fold laundry? Maybe not.
Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).
The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).
Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrLuUxv9gE (also remote controlled for now, while being trained)
I think "AI" did control their walking. Although calling that AI is probably a stretch.
Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making.
Humanoids are way more limited by energy storage and actuation. Animals are absurdly efficient.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
Your risk analysis on this is completely wrong. If there is some vetting here this is fine. No different than a babysitter or a handyman off the Internet
I would assume that several of the pro-elon accounts on most social media are actually either bots or shills. You don't need many shills to get real people interested.
1x NEO looks awesome and far more advanced than this version of Optimus. I'm bullish on 1x. Tesla has a manufacturing advantage though. There were 50 units of Optimus at the event and I expect that there are only a few fully working units of NEO made so far. Also, Optimus has been improving quickly. It's possible Tesla could catch up in a few generations.
That's the ecosystem that surrounds most actual IoT devices - I can't see home robots being any different.
I happen to know a senior person at a autonomous delivery robot company, which employs a team of people for just this purpose, because even delivering pizzas around a college town in a small little robot needs this. For things like (actual example for them) a sofa that was being thrown away and was just left on the sidewalk, and so a human needed to confirm that it was safe to move around it. And so far as I'm aware, Tesla isn't doing this, which is why I think that their autonomous taxi idea is nonsense.
1: Personal experience from being driven in a Waymo, I hit the assist button when we got stuck by some double parked cars in a parking lot. By the time someone answered the car had already extricated itself, but it didn't start that until after I hit the button.
IIRC, that wasn't a control problem but a mechanical failure of a gearmotor shaft.
The 'fake it till you make it' fraud will just make everyone building so-called AI companies look bad and heavily faked with events like this.
But there is still time for the Theranos of AI to reveal themselves. (It is not Tesla Inc.)
P.s. If you found the content in one article to be better than another, it would be helpful to steer folks towards the more informative one. In this case, the above Bloomberg article is pretty substantial compared to the one you've linked as a "dupe". Take care.
I sort of hope that it's not that often, but I also thought the amazon store was automated.
While ignoring the question the first time, he did confirm that they were being assisted by a human. Perhaps not as clear as 'remotely operated', but that's about how I took the answer. YMMV.
Where is that.. it's not available to anyone I know and was that actual real tech running or just faked demos? The tech playbook is hype even if it's not real and or really exists ... hype it up .. make them pay for the promise of something they think exists but it doesnt. Similar thing here Musk following the technology/startup playbook ... hype hype hype make people think it's real .. boost stocks as Open AI boosted it's subscription revenue Im sure in April of a promise of something that may or may not exist.
More importantly, the robots were limited to doing no real work. They just feebly pick up objects and place them somewhere else, which I am pretty sure doesn't require AI.
For example, the vid shows the robot pouring hot water into a glass with a massive funnel strapped to it. Why not have the robot fill the kettle, place the teabag itself, etc? It seems like the kind of thing that should be developed before walking and talking and telling jokes.
What if the refrigerator, microwave, etc. could interface directly with the robot. For example, the refrigerator has some type of robotized shelf that is able to bring a rack of orange juice to the front before the robot comes over to grab it? What if the microwave is able to focus the microwave beam on the food to cook it evenly?
It also irks me how the robots are just humanoids. Like for example, why have a head with two eyes. Does it need to wear a helmet? Does it need exactly 2 eyes at exactly human-like placement to achieve stereopsis? Why not have 3 eyes? Did the designers think about the form of the machine at all, or did they just produce robots in the form that is associated with the most hype and thus will bring in the most investor capital? Is this really the ideal form for interfacing with humans? With other robots?
I am just very skeptical of these companies that want to go from zero to doing everything. By the time they accomplish a robot that can do "everything", who is to say that they will even be able to privatize it? The "everything robot" might just be built out of general-purpose components and software at that point. Why not just make a machine that does a limited set of tasks well and then build from there?
Sorry https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ has me coping and seething at the AI space
I did startups and played this hype and create fake content/news to boost metrics and saw results. And yet i signed up twice lol
Nice piece of machinery, though. Boston Dynamics' humanoids were clunky electrohydraulic mechanisms borrowed from their horse-type robots. All-electric is now possible and much simpler. Schatft was the first to get this working, and they had to liquid-cool the motors. Don't know if Tesla has to liquid cool. They do that in the cars, so they certainly understand liquid-cooled electric motors.
I suspect that body balance and possibly walking were automated. It's hard to balance a teleoperated robot manually, and robotic biped balancing has been working for years now.
I think the chassis of the robot should also have compliance, humans certainly do have squishy spines. I mean imagine you're on the street and you have to share sidewalk space with these things. Running into it would hurt.
All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price. But I think the extra 4 years of delay (for the base model vs the announced availability date of 2021) is the bigger issue.
But ultimately all that matters from Tesla's perspective is that they are selling. My understanding is that even the current top end expensive models are selling about as many units as all other electric trucks combined.
If this was fake, how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated? They might as well be too to get the stock price up?
There is no way to know. I am really doubting Tesla now. It wouldn’t surprise me that, in order to prevent mishaps during the event, everything is remotely operated…
People will say: that’s not true. But where did Tesla clearly specify this upfront?
I saw the initial fullscreen disclaimer. But that might also apply to the robovans right?
Friendly reminder that in 2017 he was saying a car would drive autonomously from LA to NY in a year. It is now 2024 and that has not happened.
Friendly reminder that Tesla Semis are still not fully delivered and running.
Friendly reminder that the Roadster 2 is not rolling off the production line (people put down deposits too)!
If they ever were that should have ended when FSD was first 'delivered'. With a possible carve out for SpaceX?
That price was announced with a significant lead time, so at least 5-6% inflation was built in already.
> and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
It wasn't available that exact moment, but it existed.
> All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price.
I'd put the inflation-adjusted price at $46k, and not use the $7500 to reduce the difference, making $63k a 36% increase. Or I'd apply the $7500 to both and get 44%.
Also it was announced at the end of 2019 for 2021 and the inflation rate in 2019 was 1.8% so there's no way they accounted for 6% inflation. 4% at most.
That still isn't really "autonomous," but it's a lot closer than anything Tesla has done. My question, though, is how frequent the interventions actually are.
However now Tesla cars are protected by a 100% tariff on competitors, and Elon is campaigning for Trump who is now promising 200% tariffs on imported goods.
The gigapress sounded like a good idea when I first heard about it bc it could reduce manufacturing costs, yet Tesla does not seem to have realized any significant improvements in 2024 from it, and needs massive protectionist policies to compete.
It's interesting to imagine the price and performance we'd be seeing (and all the new dealerships and service centers popping up) of Chinese engineered and manufactured EVs if it weren't for the tariffs. Surely there would be some very capable options in the $20K range that would eat the Model 3's lunch. But Elon has government protection to the rescue and so he doesn't have to actually win at engineering or manufacturing, only lobbying.
If Tesla's jacking up the price because of that rebate, they get NO credit for it. 63k is what they are charging and what I will judge them on.
And I don't think the exact moment it applies really matters.
Didn't he say "this is not a pusher?"
And Boring Company salesmen...
OpenAI is just very comfortable lying right around the time google is doing a big public announcement.
Where is Sora? Everyone and their dog has video gen out now, Sora is conspicuously absent.
Shotwell has SpaceX catching rockets with chopsticks, while being able to keep Elon from f*cking it all up by "sleeping on the factory floor" or whatever other stunt he is pulling.
Tesla looks like a complete stock fraud sham for at least 5+ years (remember buying SolarCity because cousins?), then Boring and, Le Sigh.
Dude literally did a "We, Robot" event and then copied the "I, Robot" movie designs. He isn't even trying anymore, this is just his "rocket fuel" scam for whatever other shiny object he desires.
I'm super frustrated that someone set "good" things in motion, and we are letting them Mullenweg it all up.
And that doesn't in any way take away from the fact that it's damn cool that they went from "guy in spandex suit" to a walking, dextrous, low latency telepresence robot in a few years.
I hate Musk's new politics (which is obviously what this is all about) but I feel bad for the engineers involved: I suspect everyone was stoked to show off their impressive progress, and a few marketing people decided to under-emphasize the telepresence and made them all look like jerks.
> how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated?
How do you even know they were anything? It is fairly easy to mock up a concept vehicle (I mean it is still a lot of work, but nowhere near what it takes to build an actual one). You can build the shell and interior and put it on any chassis you want.And let's be real, that robovan couldn't survive a pothole. If you watch the video of people walking out it does not look like the clearance is meaningfully different than their shoes. It is also suspicious that it doesn't seem to rise much after all the people get off. I don't have good angles from that video, so just a flag but not enough to conclude without more evidence (but this is exactly what you'd see if they built it like you do a parade float).
For the robots, I thought it was obvious they were teleoperated. Just the way they talked with people was far too natural.
Don't get me wrong, Tesla and SpaceX have done some great things. But how many times can you c̶r̶y̶ ̶w̶o̶l̶f̶ promise self-driving vehicles next year before people stop trusting you all together? I get you gotta hype (but do we? and how much?) but you gotta fulfill those promises. In 2015 he promised FSD in 2017, in 2016 he said <2018, in 2017 he said 3 but no more than 6 mo, then later that year said 2 years, and I think it's been "next year" ever year since. It's a hard problem but you can only over promise so much. And over promising like this just makes him seem like either a conman or out of touch/naive.
For what it's worth, it was quite clear to many that the robots are teleoperated and it still serves as a demonstration of the hardware.
There wasn't really misrepresentation here, at least as far as the ro ots are concerned.
Given the staggering amount of mishaps that have been showcased, I would dispute this
In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc. So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.
The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.
Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.
The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .
Yup. Exactly. The term for this is "Telechir":
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-93104-8_...
My kids have been around lots of robots of all kinds. The very first comment they made while watching the event was: "The robots are being remotely operated. There's no way that's autonomous."
Nice looking machines. Far from being practical outside of a highly controlled environment. This does feel like progress though.
lots of people confuse it as the shippable product already. no sir, it's not like that.
Actuation is still a massive problem in humanoid robotics. We have over 650 muscles. A humanoid today can't even approximate that. Sure, a robot might not need that many actuators to be extremely useful. However, to be general enough to be able to interact with any human environment, the number of required actuators will not be trivial.
Add to that gearing, couplings, driver electronics, encoders, thermal management, calibration, noise, maintenance and other per-actuator requirements and the picture quickly becomes overwhelming.
This is an area that is still looking for a significant breakthrough.
Tesla is trying to have disposable body parts that are remotely controlled so their workers get hurt less often due to RSI or other assembly line accidents. It’s not like they’ll fix their safety culture if the occasional robot destruction keeps volume up and injuries down.
Generally speaking, the only demos that are not of the scripted and human-in-the-loop kind are simple ones. Even food delivery robots have remote drivers. Warehouse and floor cleaning robots are probably the two main examples of reasonably autonomous operation in a relatively constrained environment. Welding and assembly robots just play back a script, not unlike a CNC machine.
He's literally the richest person on Earth. It's as if you're pretending you don't know what Santa Claus is about.
I've heard of Santa Claus, but what does he do exactly?
Boston dynamics went back to building arms on wheels.
- Small, powerful 3-phase servomotors are cheap and easy to obtain. Mass production of drone motors has advanced small motor technology considerably. Tiny motors use to be either toy-grade junk or expensive Swiss precision. That's improved.
- Motors with built-in encoders are, at last, available. Encoders used to be fragile plastic boxes stuck on the end of the motor. Also, thermal sensing inside the motor is common, so you can tell if you're overheating it.
- Permanent magnets are small and powerful, and have such high coercitivity that you don't have to worry about demagnetizing them if you over-drive the motor. The main limit on motor power is cooling. You can way overdrive a motor momentarily, like muscles.
- Motor controllers are now small and cheap, They cost about $1000 per motor two decades ago. The power semiconductors are small. Controllers can be programmed to use very high power levels briefly, monitoring thermal sensors.
It would be nice to have good linear actuators. Linear motors do exist, but never really became a big thing.
the risk-averse, cowardly, snivelling product design is really one of the most odious things about the whole Tesla shitshow. they had the opportunity to completely redesign the automobile from scratch, but chose to meekly clone the exact same bog standard sedan design everyone else converged on 50 years ago, clinging to some form response about safety despite the front of a Tesla crumpling like paper in any collision anyway
Yay, twice as expensive.
And power tethers on robots suck so hard. Try it sometime, you’ll hate it.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/byd-got-3...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/business/economy/forced-l...
Eventually AI eventually could take over, sure. What I see today is they can have humans control the robots for tasks that can easily injure humans.
The conclusion Isaacson himself reached is that Musk has an extraordinary need for intensity and challenge, to the extent that he becomes uncomfortable and unhappy if there isn't something big riding right on the edge of going spectacularly wrong. This is a trait that most people don't have, and it's ideal for doing the kinds of things he does. But don't mistake that need for intensity for being unstable or dishonest.
While high torque motors got way cheaper, especially with MIT Cheetah "clones" getting easily available, they're still at least 200-500 a pop (depending on the torque needed for each articulation) from what I could find.
I might not know where to search for the real gems though. Where do you search for cheap powerful servomotors?
He also hired an investigator to try and find any dirt on the rescue worker. Now he says this is just his way of having fun.
Anyways, you mentioned something about being disturbed. Please do continue.
I find it incredibly silly that 20+ years after the first more advanced "AIs" in games like Half Life, we're still far from a point where I can fire up a game of Dota 2 with bots and have the bots behave constantly well at an intermediate level, so that I can turn Dota 2 into a solid single player experience (I don't have the time nor the patience, anymore, for managing a team of toddler brains for 30-60 minutes).
You can see a Tesla upper body controller here. Not sure if it's what they used for the event, but probably something like that. https://x.com/TroyTeslike/status/1845047695284613344
They have an asset and take out a loan against the asset (e.g. stocks). Say $10M. This does not count as income. Then they spend the money on what they want and refinance the loan with another loan, say $20M on their grown assets. Then you spend more money, again with no income, so no taxes. When the asset goes up, you refinance. When the assets crash, banks can have the assets. Again, you've spent the money without income. One of the many tax "avoidance" schemes (this one is for income, others are for inheritance tax or VAT avoidance) of very rich people (those with no real income, not professionals with very high income).
You can read about it e.g. in the leftwing-marxist-propaganda Forbes Magazin:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhyatt/2021/11/11/how-americ...
When you die, you never pay back the money, the strategy is called "Buy, Borrow, Die" for a reason:
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich...
I kind of expected them not to have human like robot AI or driving yet but the robo taxi surprised me by not seeming very practical. Would you want to be in an machine learning controlled vehicle where the doors rise up and probably can't be opened without computer assistance? Driven by software known for crashing into fire trucks and the like? At least Waymos have proper doors and backup lidar/radar to stop them hitting things.
Most of the US car manufacturers would have gone out of business in 2008 if the US government had not bailed them out. How can anything China is doing to help BYD compare with that? Yet Tesla still needs 100% tariffs on BYD vehicles to compete?!
Environmental regulations and alleged "slave labor" in China hasn't bothered the US government or US consumers for decades (most consumer goods are manufactured in China) yet somehow it matters tremendously in 2024 and necessitates 100% tariffs to protect US firms from competition?
Most of us lived through the era when the price per performance of computer hardware decreased rapidly and there was rapid price deflation on hardware that was only a few years old.
Right now, in 2024, American consumers should be benefitting from the far simpler design of EVs and car prices should be dramatically lower due to the benefits of EV tech. Car prices should have deflated but thanks to US policies entry level cars cost close to $30K now. The average price of a new car is $47,000
No, EVs do not need to be fancy, aluminum, giga-pressed luxury items! It's a battery and an electric motor and it should cost a LOT less than an internal combustion vehicle that has hundreds of precision moving parts.
We've seen the high quality engineering and low cost manufacturing China is capable of with scooters, hoverboards, etc. The essence of China's industrial policy is that in a few years some of those engineers start being able to design EVs that outcompete Tesla. Meanwhile in the US we are bringing back steel mills and coal fire power plants!
>So now one of the things we wanted to show tonight was uh that Optimus is not a canned video. It's not walled off. The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please please be nice to the Optimus robots. So you'll be able to walk right up to them and um they'll serve drinks at the bar and uh you'll directly - I mean that's it's it's a wild experience just to have humanoid robots and it's they're there they just in front of you. Uh so yeah with that um let's party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6dbxPlsXs&t=1355s
So he didn't actually say autonomous. I think you'd have a job proving fraud there.
If you want to make a energy-unconstrained robot into a fully functional android, you have much bigger, fundamental problems.
There are others. Controls is hard! You need investment and to solve difficult engineering problems. But we have a pretty good idea that those things are solveable and can demonstrate success b/c they are engineering challenges, not things we fundamentally don't have an approach for yet.
The full self driving was one year away for 15 years now.
Batteryswap charging, beating fuel pump station demo - clearly fake.
Tesla Truck beating rail - few trucks made to carry potato chips/crisps ie 99% air.
Solar roof tiles.
Optimus being used in Tesla factories.
The bus had an inch of clearance. What kind of road that prototype was designed for. Besides the wheels had tires painted over gold to look better. Lookup the pictures.
Do you even remember tesla roadster? Its coming out next year, trust me bro.
Cybertruck... more like clusterfuck. Offroad truck brickable by a carwash.
How do people have trust in any claims by Musk?
Let me translate it for Musk fans. He repeatedly tried to ruin a life of a hero, because he felt insulted. Its also fun.
Nearly all robots in actual use have tethers, it's really not a big concern. Further there are other methods of providing power, such as induction. For any situation where long range mobility is really a concern, you probably don't want a humanoid robot to begin with.
"Where can I put my feet safely?"
"What is the orientation and 6 higher order velocities of my body?"
etc.
I've been told that a perfectly observable / estimable system is trivially controllable. It's one of the reasons I believe perception is upstream of everything - interaction dynamics alone are nearly impossible to just wave away with models.
I don't even work in perception. But I know that everything is fine until you try to go online with perception in the loop. Then you are behind the perception team's debugging nearly all the time.
Why does Canada also have 100% tariff? Why do you think the tariffs are only for Tesla? Again, all US car companies have a fairly ludicrous government mandate [1] for EV production:
> In April, the EPA finalized its “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles for MY 2027 and Later” rule that could effectively call for 44% of new vehicles in 2030 and 56% of new vehicles sold in 2032 to be EVs. This rule greatly exceeds the current real-world consumer demand for EVs. Also, the rule projects that gas-powered vehicles (including hybrids and plug-in hybrids), now currently 92.9% of the market, could be reduced to 29% by 2032.
Chevy, Ford, and Toyota lose billions [2][3][4] per year making EV. They need this too. Tesla is the only US car company that profits from EV sales. Tesla, by every metric, needs it the least.
> necessitates 100% tariffs to protect US firms from competition
ICE cars are made of metal and plastic. There's a nice local and global market for these. BEV need lithium and cobalt. The US makes 2% of the lithium worldwide, with its single mine in a single location [5]. Lithium is 30-50% the final cost of a BEV. China makes 7%, but the Chinese companies have helped secure 80% of worldwide production [6]. Chinese companies owns 15 of 17 cobalt mines in DRC, where 80% of cobalt comes from [7]. The line between where a Chinese company ends and the CCP begins can be very very blurry. This is the result of very smart investment in China, and a big fuck-you to the environment and labor (making imports illegal [8]), like the good old days of the US.
> Meanwhile in the US we are bringing back steel mills and coal fire power plants!
China is responsible for 95% of new coal plant construction [9].
> giga-pressed luxury items
The giga pressing is to make them cheaper. Many car companies are looking at this for cost saving, including Toyota [10].
I agree with cars being too expensive. I've never looked into the breakdown for why. But, for the realm I work in, China is no longer much cheaper for labor. I suspect that's related.
[1] https://www.nada.org/legislative/epas-de-facto-electric-vehi...
[2] Ford loses over 4 billion with EV: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/28/ford-embraces-hybrids-as-it-...
[3] Chevy over 4 billion loses with EV: https://fortune.com/2024/04/24/gm-earnings-beat-gas-ev-elect...
[4] Toyota loses 4.7 billion with EV: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota....
[5] US only lithium mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine#:~:t....
[6] China lithium monopoly: https://orcasia.org/article/602/chinas-monopoly-over-lithium....
[7] China 80% rare earth, 15/17 coral mines in DRC: https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2023/06/01/china...
[8] Battery import illegal forced labor: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-imports-auto-parts-face-...
[9] China 95% coal plant construction: https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-...
[10] Toyota giga casting: https://insideevs.com/news/671943/toyota-giga-casting/
Just because Musk has financial success does not mean he isn't awful. In fact, financial success is probably one of the worst indicators of being a person of high integrity.
Which is probably fine, but it does mean it will never make it to a lot of areas.
I think the lithium/cobalt argument is a bit of a straw man, since the generally accepted view is that the US likely has an abundance of such deposits but simply has not opted to do significant extraction.
Also, from the standpoint of the security risk associated with China controlling the supply, the US coudl also opt for strategic reserves of key items at a much lower cost than the cost of tariffs on the economy.
An easy way to help EV companies would be to stop spending trillions of dollars on petrolium-related wars. If you do the math, gas should cost at least double at the pump what it typically costs. The rest of the cost is the massive military operations needed to keep prices what they are. Those operations are not free by any means and are certainly not budgeted (so they are still yet to be paid for).
So in the supposedly capitalist US we have thousands in subsidy for EVs and Trillions in subsidies for petrolium related military operations, and now 100% tariffs on competitive EVs, etc. Why? Because China is evil? Because Saddam is evil?
at this point there has to be some assumption that the confusion on your side lies in that all the rest of us think demonstrate that he is a "bad person" are things that you think makes him a "good person", so there is probably no point in supplying them
Honestly, I'm not even super pissed at the start-ups that do this because it's "ride or die" for them. But I'm more pissed at big players doing this and experts in fields who push the over hype. Who retweet demos that are obvious fakes. It creates a lot of distrust because there's no clear "trusted authority". Sure, authority shouldn't be the only reason to trust but we can't be experts in everything (there's always trustworthy experts but good luck average person with no domain knowledge differentiating them). The system doesn't work without trust. I just hope this is recognized before it gets catastrophic. Because it is a global phenomena
Very trivial actually. The ones approaching wage parity are tech workers in big cities (what I deal with). The ones working as slaves are literally digging holes, sometimes in other countries. The battery supply chain contains both. The part that makes it easy for China to make cheaper batteries is the digging holes and fucking the environment part of it.
> the US coudl also opt for strategic reserves of key items at a much lower cost than the cost of tariffs on the economy.
They could, but they would, again, have to ignore environmental and labor concerns, which would require first changing federal laws that ban imported goods that used forced labor (see previous links).
> An easy way to help EV companies would be to stop spending trillions of dollars on petrolium-related wars.
Unfortunately, 93.2% of the 283 million cars on the road are ICE. This "easy" way involves a short term severe disruption, especially of the lower levels of the economy. But, I agree completely that subsidizing EV companies (including Tesla) and strategic foreign investments in REE is probably a better long term bet than building nice bombs.
I think the realistic result of all of this is that the economic pressures force the next gen of batteries to not use lithium or cobalt, or anything that China has 80% control of.
Cheers!
Reaction of the stock market to Tesla's "demo" was very negative. TSLA stock dropped about 10% immediately after the demo and has been flat since.[1]
The leaps that would be required to make a mannequin with motors intelligently interact with crowds (in groups no less) at a publicity event cannot be solved with 2x funding jumps, and I'm arguing they are largely perception-, sensing-, mapping- and self-modelling- based.
When a human makes eye contact with you and signals something with their hands - it is so responsive that you are certain that they are talking to you. With the robots, it was ambiguous.
Did someone put a low pass on the movements on top of a laggy remote control loop?
I did see that a few other people seemed to get more vague answers, notably including MKBHD. It seems strange that there wasn't consistent messaging.