The following is part fact (Michelin CrossClimate+ data) and part fiction (feature request hint to Tesla), and just my way of getting boring information across in a hopefully not so boring way. Mr. Me: me. Colin: 2019 Model 3 Long Range RWD named after a small security guard robot in … [continued]
The dialog below is inspired by Steven Mark Ryans’ brilliant take on Elon Musk’s Neuralink progress update on Friday, August 28th, 2020.
Mr. Me: me.
Colin: 2019 Model 3 Long Range RWD named after a small security guard robot in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Colin is captured and gets its reward circuits rewired by one of the main characters to find ecstatic pleasure in anything its master commands of it.
My Tesla Model 3 is named “Colin,” named after a small security guard robot in the Douglas Adam’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy that is captured and gets its reward circuits rewired to find ecstatic pleasure in anything its master commands of it! However, it seems Colin has limits.
In June 2019 after Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day, we did a deep dive into Tesla’s HW3 chip that explored the various capabilities and potential of the HW3 processor system on a chip (SoC). I may have geeked out a little and made that a bit too technical, so I will try not to repeat that mistake in this article. Long story short, HW3 is a total beast. It is very different from the NVIDIA chip Tesla was using in the previous generation.
There is a long-standing argument about whether Tesla is a car company or a tech company. This argument is typically made in the context of how Wall Street should value the company. If Tesla is just a new kind of carmaker, it should be valued at something significantly less than its annual revenue — maybe 25% to 50%, like Ford and GM. Alternatively, if Tesla is a tech company, then it could be valued significantly higher. Google, for example, is trading at about 6 times its revenues today, Facebook at 8, Microsoft at 9, and Salesforce at 10 times. Tesla trades at around 3 times its revenues with some profits, while Uber and Lyft trade around 4 times revenues and have never been profitable.
So, imagine you are driving along in your fancy high-tech car, minding your own business, with your yet-to-be-feature-complete full self-driving software activated, and suddenly the car slams the brakes to a full stop, like a donkey that had an epiphany that what it was doing just didn’t serve any purpose and therefor just refused to move any further. The silicon brain of your clever-as-a-donkey-robo-car just slammed on the brakes because it saw this through one of its cameras:
