Tesla’s stock (TSLA) is free-falling today as its newly unveiled robot is getting ridiculed, but Elon Musk claims people don’t understand the value.
Tesla’s stock is down 8% today while the Nasdaq is up 2%. This is one of Tesla’s biggest drops of the year, and it comes off of two separate events that happened since the last market close on Friday.
The second event contributing to Tesla’s stock falling is the AI Day event held late on Friday.
The market is still digesting the event, but the general consensus appears to be disappointment, mainly that Tesla didn’t communicate clearly how much closer it is to its goal of delivering a self-driving system.
Tesla did disclose some significant progress with its Dojo supercomputer program and impressive new technologies to improve its self-driving program, but there’s still no clear path to delivering on its promise.
Then there’s the Tesla Bot.
After pulling opinions from analysts and social media, it appears that the consensus is mainly that the two prototypes unveiled were mostly underwhelming.
One of them couldn’t even walk, and the other was barely able to walk and wave to the crowd. Tesla did release some videos of the robot completing other tasks, but those were mostly unimpressive, and it looked like purpose-built robots would make more sense for those tasks.
Musk again said that “only a few people understand the value of Tesla Bot,” and he believes that the humanoid robot can eventually increase economic output by an order of magnitude.
Electrek’s Take
Some of the critics of the Tesla Bot are missing an important point. Yes, it is unimpressive in many ways, especially if you compare the prototypes to what Boston Dynamics has shown so far.
I have seen dozens of comments similar to this one over the last few days:
But Tesla is not trying to make a robot as agile as Boston Dynamics’s products. The company is trying to make a robot that can be useful and manufacturable on a large scale in order to keep the costs down.
We don’t know how much Boston Dynamics’s bipedal robot costs, but we know they’re selling the much smaller dog robot for $75,000, so it’s fair to say that it would be much more expensive than Tesla Bot, which is supposedly going to be “less than $20,000.”
But it’s a fair question to ask about how useful the Tesla Bot could be. I think it’s clear that Tesla is focusing on a fairly high level of dexterity in the hands, the ability to move from one location to the next, and a high level of ability to understand and navigate its environment through Tesla’s computer vision capability.
I do think that there are many use cases for a robot being able to do that.
However, I just don’t understand Musk’s claims that “only a few people understand the value of Tesla Bot,” and I think it comes with a fundamental problem with Musk’s feedback loop.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time thinking about the value of a cheap, useful bipedal humanoid robot understands just how much value it would bring to the economy.
If there’s doubt about the project, there are mainly doubts about Tesla’s ability to deliver such a product, especially because of how behind the automaker is on its self-driving program.
Some skepticism on that front is healthy, but if Tesla can deliver on the product, then yes, the impact is going to be tremendous.
But it looks like Musk needs to reevaluate his own credibility when it comes to that stuff with anyone who is not a superfan. Tesla fans on Twitter telling him how great FSD Beta is and taking everything he says as the gospel is taking a toll.
It results in him thinking that people can’t see his vision just because they have doubts regarding whether or not he can deliver the vision.
Now he has this habit of retweeting people directly quoting him word for word and commenting something like “that’s true” or “exactly,” which is just bizarre.
Musk can deliver on his vision as he has done many times in the past, but he needs to better manage expectations because he has obviously done a terrible job at that with the Tesla Full Self-Driving program.
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The State of Michigan has announced a new partnership with wireless EV charging specialist Electreon and Commercial EV manufacturer Xos, Inc. Together, the companies have secured funding from the state to expand wireless charging availability for commercial vehicles, including UPS trucks in Detroit.
It’s been nearly a year since the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the City of Detroit, and Electreon ($ELWS) unveiled the first wireless EV charging roadway in the United States.
Michigan installed Electreon’s wireless inductive-charging coils (seen below) on 14th Street in Detroit between Marantette and Dalzelle streets to charge EVs equipped with Electreon receivers as they drive on the road.
At the time. MDOT and Detroit officials said the road would be used to test and perfect Electreon’s wireless EV charging technology in a real-world environment before “making it available to the public in the next few years.”
While the public will not be able to take advantage of wireless charging just yet, commercial EVs are gaining access thanks to a new partnership between Electreon, Xos ($XOS), and the State of Michigan.
Michigan progresses as US wireless EV charging leader
When Michigan announced the first wireless EV charging road in the US last year, officials shared hopes that the Great Lakes State and the city of Detroit could become leaders in the innovation and and deployment of such nascent technology.
Following a press release from Electreon, the State of Michigan confirmed details of the new partnership, which now includes commercial EV developer Xos, Inc. as well. The new commercial partnership is supported by $200,000 in funding from the Michigan Mobility Funding Platform (MMFP), building off the state’s “Make it in Michigan: economic strategy, developed by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) to invest in the state’s people, places and projects.
Through the partnership and coinciding state funding, Electreon will extend its wireless EV charging network and use cases in Michigan. Additionally, Electreon’s technology will be integrated into delivery step vans from Xos in order to “demonstrate wireless charging technological value and its potential to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) in the electrification of commercial truck fleets.” Stefan Tongur, vice president of business development for Electreon, elaborated:
We’re excited to demonstrate how Electreon’s technology can optimize electric fleet usage and showcase the seamless integration of wireless charging into daily fleet operations, minimizing downtime and enabling charging across time and location. We’re proud to do this work in Michigan, a state fostering innovation and sustainable transportation solutions.
In addition to expanding wireless charging on Detroit’s first “electric roadway,” the Michigan project will enable the installation of stationary wireless charging at a UPS facility in Detroit. Xos co-founder and CEO Dakota Semler also spoke:
We are proud to partner with Electreon and support UPS to demonstrate the potential of wireless charging in commercial fleets. This innovative approach will revolutionize how we power our electric vehicles and drive fleet electrification forward.
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The iconic British luxury automaker is undergoing a major brand overhaul. With its official debut around the corner, Jaguar’s electric 4-door GT, the first of its new series, was spotted testing on British roads. The new images give us a closer look at what we can expect from the revamped Jag brand.
Jaguar’s new electric GT makes its first appearance
After building internal combustion-powered sports cars for over 75 years, Jaguar will become an all-electric luxury brand from 2025.
The company announced earlier this year that it will start fresh with an entirely new range of EVs. After killing off the F-Type, E-Pace, XF, and soon the F-Pace SUV, we are finally getting our first look at what the new branding will look like.
Jaguar’s new electric 4-door GT was caught testing on British roads. The camouflaged prototypes reveal a radically different look than the Jag models we are accustomed to.
You can see one of the biggest changes is the low-riding, extended silhouette, as opposed to the crossover SUV and sedan models like the F-Type and I-Pace, Jaguar’s first EV.
The front and rear bumper designs also appear much more aggressive and bold than previous models.
Jaguar’s electric GT is being put through the paces ahead of its debut. It has already completed tens of thousands of testing miles (virtual and real-world) and will soon hit public streets worldwide.
The new model will be built in Solihull, UK, where Jaguar recently ended production of its gas-powered models.
It will be the first to ride on Jaguar’s new JAE (Jaguar Electric Architecture), which will underpin its upcoming lineup of high-end luxury EVs with prices over £100,000 ($130,000). The electric GT will have a range of over 434 miles (700 km) and upwards of 575 hp, making it Jaguar’s most powerful car of all time.
Jaguar will debut its Design Vision Concept at Miami Art Week on December 2, 2024. Next Summer, it’s expected to make its official global debut ahead of deliveries in 2026.
What do you think of Jaguar’s new design based on what’s shown? Are you excited about the brand overhaul? Let us know in the comments below.
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Tesla has pushed a new (Supervised) Full Self-Driving update with the promised end-to-end neural networks for highway driving.
However, it’s only for newer vehicles.
“End-to-end” is what Tesla refers to as neural net-powered AI driving the vehicle from vision to controls rather than the controls being explicitly coded. It’s already the case in all widely released versions of (Supervised) Full Self-Driving (FSD) for city driving, but not for highway driving, which uses another software stack.
Tesla originally planned to deliver it for highway driving in October, but it was only delivered to a small number of vehicles.
In its latest AI roadmap, Tesla said that it would come the first week of November instead.
Now, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of self-driving and AI, said that the latest release with end-to-end highway driving (v12.5.6.3) has been widely pushed to HW4 vehicle owners:
With the latest release (v12.5.6.3), FSD is using end-to-end neural networks for driving across highways, city streets and parking lots, and has now shipped widely for AI4 vehicles. Highway driving should be smoother, more natural and even safer than the previous explicit control stack. Check out the different driving styles to set speed and lane change preferences. Enjoy and let Tesla AI know if you have any feedback.
However, there’s no word for the millions of HW3 vehicle owners.
In fact, the only thing promised to HW3 vehicles, which Tesla now called AI3, in its last roadmap is this:
Improved v12.5.x models for AI3 city driving
As we have often reported this year, Tesla has reached the limits of the HW3 computer and now needs to optimize the code with every release despite still being far from its promise of unsupervised self-driving.
Electrek’s Take
This is annoying cause I could really use end-to-end on my HW3 car. I am on v12.5.4.2 and it has been a regression from v12.5.4.1 for me, especially on highways.
Yesterday, it almost drove me off-road when taking my highway exit, which is always a bit shaky because it is a short exit and FSD often swings itself into it. It’s a bit awkward, and my girlfriend never likes it, so I disengage FSD before taking the exit when she was with me, but this time, she wasn’t, and I had the new update.
It again swung left before going right into the exit, but this time, it went way too far, and I was in the shoulder by the time I took control.
I took this exit hundreds of times with FSD and it’s the first time it did that.
I am starting to think we won’t see much more improvements to FSD with HW3 cars and there’s no retrofit computer in sight.
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