cross pond high tech

Tesla has remotely disabled driver assistance features on a used Model S after it was sold to a customer, Jalopnik reports. The company now claims that the owner of the car, who purchased it from a third-party dealer — a dealer who bought it at an auction held by Tesla itself — "did not pay" for the features and therefore is not eligible to use them.

Two years ago Tesla began accepting $1,000 deposits for its new, lower-priced Model 3 electric car, with the expectation that customers would likely receive their vehicles in 2018. Hundreds of thousands of people have reserved one.

But perhaps due to extended production delays, many customers have been asking for their money back.

As of the end of April, some 23 percent of all Model 3 deposits in the U.S. had been refunded, according to new U.S. data from Second Measure, a company that analyzes billions of dollars in anonymized credit and debit card purchases.

These cancellations aren’t necessarily bad for Tesla, since its production rate is nowhere near as high as it needs to be to fulfill the more than 450,000 reservations it still has. Last quarter, it delivered just 8,180 Model 3s.

 

Earlier this week, Tesla remotely upgraded select Florida Tesla owners’ cars to expand their mileage capacity in an effort to ease and assist with Hurricane Irmaevacuation efforts. The move was praiseworthy and appropriate, but at the root of the gesture lies a terrifying prospect of our automotive future.

 

Tesla briefly sold a 60 and 60D trim level of its Model S and Model X vehicles. These models had 75 kWh battery packs installed, but were software limited to have less range to artificially create a more affordable entry-level tier for buyers. Buyers still had the option to upgrade to the full capacity for a charge if they changed their minds, and Tesla would “unlock” the capability via an over-the-air software update.

 

With category four Hurricane Irma headed straight for Florida, Tesla unlocked the full capacity of 60 and 60D model owners in Florida to give them about a 30 mile range boost while evacuating. It was genuinely helpful and an extremely savvy public relations move for the company.

 

But what it also previewed is our imminent future of unprecedented corporate control over how we drive and what we drive. I briefly mentioned it in the article yesterday, but it’s not hard to imagine a worst case scenario where a company or corporation becomes a critical decision maker in disaster scenarios, like with Hurricane Irma, out of consumer and government control in a critical moment.

 

Now, I’ve never been one to play into the fears of autonomous driving or ridiculous theories of car hacking, though I recognize vehicle computer security as one of the most important developments in the automotive industry going forward. But this issue is concerned with the relationship between the company and the company’s product.

 

What would happen if Tesla didn’t unlock the range of those cars? It’s not likely that any of the owners would become stranded, as Electrek reported most of Tesla’s charging network was still functional at the time. But that could have easily been the scenario, and then we face a situation where people were physically capable of evacuating sooner but limited by an option box they didn’t check. We now face a reality where we know our vehicles may hold more potential than we have access to, and that gets complicated in life or death scenarios

 

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Cleantechnica has compiled the event video plus tons of liveblogging highlights from the event : there is a trove of insight about where Tesla is going and how they are going there.

They have designed their own FSD (Full Self Driving system) that doesn't need a LIDAR and "learns" from shadow mode driving of the whole deployed Tesla fleet. This is how they will be able to deploy Robotaxi mode with just a software update.

 

For instance,

“Early testing of new FSD hardware shows a 21× improvement in image processing capability with fully redundant computing capability.

“This is all done at a modest cost while delivering a fully redundant computing platform to all of Tesla’s vehicles currently in production.”

General summary from Kyle: “Our shit is really, really fast and we built it better than anyone else.”

Elon notes that Tesla finished this design 1½–2 years ago and then started on the next system design. They are not talking about the next design now, but they’re about halfway through it.

Some additional technical notes from Chanan Bos:

“An enthusiast Intel desktop i7 processor with 8 cores has 3 billion transistors, Tesla’s new chip has 6 billion. But that is till less than some crazy 18 core Intel ships like Skylake-X which has 8.33 billion transistors. An iPhone has about 2 billion.

“So SRAM is much faster but is more expensive and has less storage compared to DRAM.

“Nvidia Xavier (available early 2018) had 30 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second). Tesla’s FSD chip has 144 TOPS.”

 

Elon Musk has unveiled a prototype underground tunnel in Los Angeles which is designed to transport cars at high speed around the city.

The tunnel is only a mile (1.6km) long at the moment but the goal is a network to ease chronic traffic congestion.

Modified electric cars would be lowered into the tunnel and travel at speeds up to 150mph (240km/h), Mr Musk says.

The tunnel has been built by Mr Musk's Boring Company, which boasts state-of-the-art engineering techniques.

 

Mr Musk, best known as the head of Tesla electric cars and the commercial SpaceX programme, arrived at the launch on Tuesday in a Tesla car modified to work on the "loop" system.

He was cheered by a small crowd as he emerged from the car at one end of the tunnel bathed in green and blue interior lights.

 

The plan envisages modified cars being lowered into the tunnel network by lifts and then slotted into tracks on the "loop".

"The profound breakthrough is very simple: it's the ability to turn a normal car into a passively stable vehicle by adding the deployable tracking wheels, stabilising wheels, so that it can travel at high speed through a small tunnel," Mr Musk said.

 

 

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Alana Semuels, of The Atlantic, told the BBC World Service that Mr Musk had yet to unveil the technology that would allow vehicles to travel at such high speeds through the system.

"At first he said we're going have these tunnels and transport people in pods, now he's saying we're going to transport them in cars, so I'm not sure even he knows how it works," she said.

A British driver has pled guilty to dangerous driving after a fellow driver took video of him sitting in the passenger seat, while his Tesla S 60 drove on its own with Autopilot, according to BBC News (via Jalopnik).

Bhavesh Patel was spotted by a fellow driver sitting in the passenger seat while his Autopilot was engaged on the M1 near Hemel Hempstead on May 21st, 2017. The Hertfordshire Police note that the car was set to drive at 40 MPH, and that Patel had left the steering wheel and controls unattended, and that there was heavy traffic on the road at the time of the incident.

Patel has pled guilty to the offense, and has been banned from driving for 18 months, and will be required to pay a £1,800 fine, carry out 10 days rehabilitation, and to perform 100 hours of community service. Hertfordshire Police officers testified at his court hearing that he said that what he did was “silly,” but pointed to his vehicle’s “amazing” features when he was interviewed. He reportedly had owned the car for five months at the time of the incident.

Here is the 57 pages PDF memo released by Elon Musk on his much awaited Hyperloop project