"Others familiar with the rollout stressed that O’Dowd’s team has privately been adamant he’s not trying to unseat freshman Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla, who was appointed last year when Kamala Harris ascended to the vice president job. Instead, O’Dowd’s play for the Senate is likely being carried out as a cost-saving measure and to significantly enhance the likelihood that networks will air his TV spots. Running for office entitles him to the lowest available ad rate in the run-up to the election — a perk that could save him considerable money depending on the ultimate spend. But a bigger advantage, two people familIar with his plans said, is the higher degree of first amendment protection a political run could give him for his loaded claims against Tesla."
Given his challenges at running companies without massive handouts & subsidization, he might be a great fit for US politics. Shame that he can’t be president, we deserve him even more than Trump.
The very large boast from https://danodowd.com tells me he is either a joke or detached from modern security:
I designed and wrote the core security system for our nuclear forces, military and commercial aircraft, Top Secret encryptors, laptops for FBI field agents, and military cellphones and radios. This software has been certified by the NSA to Common Criteria EAL6+, a higher level of security certification than achieved by any other software. Has your security “expert” ever designed and written the security software for a system that never fails and can’t be hacked? Or, do they claim that no one can write software that never fails and can’t be hacked? I do it every day.
Looking more at his website, he worked his whole life in a pretty narrow scope - military RTOS systems, and he extrapolates his experience on everything.
This happens relatively often for an experts in a one field. They extrapolate and make foolish statements on a entirely different field. Vaccine science is a very good example...
On one hand he is voicing valid concerns. On the other hand, with everything wrong in the world I can't fathom why someone would find this so important to center their senate campaign around it or for a billionaire to focus their energy on stopping it. This guy is doing both when the effort could be spent countless other ways that would save/improve more lives.
It's so odd to see Musk become a boogeyman for the political left. I'm hard pressed to name a single individual that's doing more to combat global warming than Musk is via fleet electrification.
Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people, while massively enriching himself.
He openly manipulates markets without facing consequences, busts union activities, pushes to production over worker safety, uses extremely misleading marketing contrary to public safety, avoided paying taxes for years while becoming the worlds richest person... and you find it odd that the political left doesn't deify him to the same degree as the tech bros?
They have produced 2 million cars thus far. They're so demand slammed that orders are for 9 months out. They just finished building Giga Berlin and Giga Austin which is going to 2x their production to more than 1 million cars / year within a couple years. They already have plans for a $25k/yr car in a couple years. And every single car manufacturer considered EV's a no-go until Tesla started shipping Model S's en masse. There is no modern EV push, no "all cars sold must be EV by 2040" in many developed countries, without Tesla.
The question isn't about why he's not deified by the left. It's why is he treated as a boogeyman, which granted, isn't surprising given his behavior. But I suppose there is a point as to why he's disliked more than Bezos, Zuckerberg, or the Waltons.
I don't think he's more disliked than Bezos, or Zuckerberg. Unlike with Bezos and Zuckerberg, Elon at least seems to have a personal mission beyond earning a lot of money, whether it is a lie or not. Out of curiosity, who are the Waltons? I couldn't figure it out even through search.
How can you still write nonsense like this: "Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people"?
> How can you still write nonsense like this: "Musk used massive government subsidies to produce a small number of luxury electric cars for wealthy people"?
Technically still correct even if the intent was to use the wider margins to enable growth. But more to the parent comment's point, Musk used tax credits intended to incentivize EV purchases by everyday users to inflate the prices for his cars in order to extract more value from buyers/governments.
Proven true by the fact that he had to cut pre-rebate prices after Tesla cleared the sales thresholds for the tax rebates.
Tesla sells 5% as many cars as Toyota (valued at $0.25B vs $1.25T). They would need to increase deliveries 50% year over year for the next 8 years just to match Toyota's deliveries this year. They make a small number of cars. The cars they make are luxury cars based on their selling price. Primarily wealthy people buy these cars.
Ergo, it is a factual statement to say that (1) Tesla sells a small number of (2) luxury electric cars to (3) wealthy people.
310 is 14.4% of 2148, and it implies an annualised rate of 1240k per year.
Tesla production and deliveries are growing exponentially, Toyota deliveries are shrinking.
Last year in Q1 toyota delivered much less compared to 2020 and while this year it’s recovering it’s still delivering 170k less cars in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2020.
Tesla just opened two new factories and this can feasibly double its capacity by next year.
It's not lying, it's just based on the prior year's data. Allow me to update it for EOY2021.
In an average year, Toyota ships between 8 and 10 million cars, and has for a long time.
Tesla's year over year percentage increase in cars shipped has been trending down, of course, as they grow with the exception of last year.
However, last year, Tesla shipped 935K cars. Since it's just Q1 of 2022 I don't think it makes sense to make any extrapolations as to how many they will actually deliver this year, so let's use that number. I think that's generous given, you know, everything.
So, Tesla ships 9%-ish as many cars as Toyota.
To get from 900K to 10M per year, an 11X increase, would take:
- 27% year over year growth for 10 years.
- 30% year over year growth for 9 years.
- 35% year over year growth for 8 years.
- 40% year over year growth for 7 years.
- 50% year over year growth for 6 years.
As deliveries increase and the market is saturated growth rates will drop.
And that's to get to the same deliveries as just Toyota today (a company valued at 250B), when Tesla is valued at the sum total of the market cap of every other automaker on the planet, plus a utility company, plus the battery arm of Panasonic, plus a solar panel manufacturer.
The global auto market delivered 67M cars last year, of which Tesla accounted for 0.9M, or 1.3%. For comparison Porsche delivered 0.3M last year. Same ball park.
Even if Tesla doubled their deliveries this year and next year, they'd still sell a fairly small number of expensive electric cars to rich people. And that's a big if since right now is just about the single hottest auto market in history, and their deliveries remained flat quarter over quarter.
That's not quite true. From googling really quick, Ford sold 726k F-150s. In that same year, Tesla sold 936k cars. If you're comparing the number of cars Ford sold last year, you'd be closer but still incorrect by a few thousand cars. Ford sold about 1.91 million cars in 2019 while Tesla has sold 2.3 million cars by the end of 2021. I wouldn't consider 2 million cars a small number.
The people who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the existence of ozone hole.
Why? Because the subsequent reduction of ozone-depleting emissions has done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any other measure taken, I believe roughly commensurate with the reduction you'd get from switching all power plants to renewable energy.
Is it odd, though? Anyone who gets loud without signaling unambiguously that they're one of them, gets called out for something. It's the same reason I'm about to get
> It's so odd to see Musk become a boogeyman for the political left. I'm hard pressed to name a single individual that's doing more to combat global warming than Musk is via fleet electrification.
I have no opinion on the following:
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Pretty easy to imagine when you consider he's pushing to re-open social media platforms to the kind of abuse that (they believe) had a hand in taking down a political candidate.
He positioned himself in favor of absolute deregulation of speech by human individuals, or depending on your view, a suppression of free speech for some corporate entities by compelling them to share disagreeable viewpoints.
All the good things you are ascribing credit to Musk for is done by workers of companies he bought, he didn't found or invent most of these companies. It's great that he thinks SciFi is cool, but in reality he's more of an Edison than a Tesla.
Electrification of cars is useful -- but nothing compared to actually building livable cities, pushing bicycles, public transit and nuclear energy. That not only does far more for global warming, but it makes living in cities far more enjoyable. He's actually slowing progress towards that with his asinine tunneling projects for single-occupant vehicles.
However even if you disagree with that take, the fact is, FSD is unsafe. It's kinda fun, but it's tried to kill me a few times, and there's myriad YouTube videos of it trying to kill people.
[edit] Elon's vision of the future is hardly some eco-leftist utopia. It's a fairly right-wing personal property forward world where inequality continues to be perpetrated by making people own (very expensive) electric cars to get around, and socializing the cost of free parking onto the poor. He's not a left-wing icon.
He's not a villain either, he's just a great marketer.
> He's actually slowing progress towards that with his asinine tunneling projects for single-occupant vehicles.
From wiki:
> According to Musk, the company's goal is to enhance tunneling speed enough such that establishing a tunnel network is financially feasible.
No fan of Musk, but if a company can bring down the cost of tunneling so that it works well for single-occupant vehicles, that would be a huge deal for multi occupancy vehicles as well. This is a goal worthy of support, at least.
The fact that The Boring Company spends its efforts trying to build another iteration of a personal rapid transit system [1] as opposed to trying to win contracts for tunneling projects makes me think that they actually value their not-mass transit system design more than actually building better tunnels for existing systems. This is reinforced by the fact that the few times they have bid for transit proposals (e.g., the Chicago O'Hare express route), they're explicitly proposing noncompatibility with existing transit systems. And also the fact that the main way they seem to be trying to achieve cheaper tunneling principally by making smaller diameter tunnels rather than actually improving the ability to make tunnels similar to existing tunnels more cheaply.
[1] Amusingly, I think the Las Vegas one the company built may be the first PRT system to not be automated. For a guy who keeps touting futurism, failing to achieve similar capabilities to antecedents from 50 years ago is pretty ironic.
That's just Elon's marketing. He's comparing the cost of digging a (very narrow) tunnel, with no emergency egress, to the cost of a fully-realized subway system with stations. In fact he's costing it out using commodity tunneling hardware. [1]
So? If they can make that model work, it is still a big deal. I'm a bit tired of everyone thinking that only software can be disrupted. It could also be that they have no way of making this work, and will fail. That isn't weird for a startup either.
Well my point is, a thin tunnel using existing commodity tunneling equipment, without egress, that you put a private $50,000 car into hardly seems like a big "disruption." In fact, it sounds like one extra lane of freeway with a roof on it.
Why not beta test whether adding one extra lane of freeway, but covering it with a roof, improves traffic? I'm betting it won't.
Express lanes with limited access of course do, and tunnels are a great way to save the city above for new routes. But even barring that, I don't see a future for cities that doesn't involve moving more transportation infrastructure underground (for both buses and private vehicles).
New capacity actually doesn't decrease traffic it increases it. It's called induced demand. [1] A sustainable future depends not on private cars in tiny tunnels, but subways and trains.
Research by Kent Hymel of California State University of Northridge found that adding one percent more road capacity produces the exact same increase in the amount of vehicle miles traveled.
Do you have any examples of "livable cities"? People often point to Europe, but having lived in 3 different European cities (London, Zurich, Ljubljana) all of them are much better with a car (especially with a family - imagine shopping a weeks of groceries by bike!) (with the possible exception of London Zone 1 but well you use taxis "outsourced cars").
If your issue is groceries and packages, why not simply lean on services that deliver groceries and supples by truck? Instacart and Amazon? And then you don't really need a personal car right?
I fail to see how an Instacart driver driving a car is any more eco friendly than me driving a car. (Operationally… maybe less cars means less resource usage, but that’s not the biggest contribution to climate change… and there are other positives of owning your own car, e.g. trips)
Should be significantly more efficient to have 1 truck load up and provide groceries and packages to everyone on a road than say 50 cars right?
Further you don't need to own a car to go on trips, car shares solve that! Just rent a car for the weekend when you want to leave town, or take a train.
he’s a libertarian billionaire with a bunch of worker abuse claims at his companies, and you can’t imagine why the left doesn’t like him? I’m amazed anyone likes him.
I heard a rumor that the guy just wanted to run these TV ads about Tesla, and that he became a political candidate first because political ads have certain legal protections other ads don't, so Tesla can't easily get an injunction to stop them from running. Any truth to that?
You know what the term RTOS is, yet have not heard of Green Hills Software, but are also qualified to say they are a competitor to "Tesla Autopilot" (which they are obviously not)?
I saw the ads yesterday. But he picked the wrong issue to fight. He has a point. Tesla is being a bit reckless but the issue is not big enough for most people to care. Most people don't own a Tesla and even if they do full self driving is clearly marketed as experimental even if you get a different idea from the CEO as he pushes the technology.
He's built himself a bubble where the people around him think it's a big deal but ultimately he's just wasting his money.
I smell a rat. Could this guy be a stalking horse? Run as a Democrat on a crazy platform so as to discredit Democrats? And/or aim to stir up such outrage against a self-driving prohibition so that congress passes a contrary law to have the feds pay for research into self-driving cars? (Sorry if this sounds like tin-foil hat stuff - it's been a long day...)
The self driving thing is pretty much the only engineering/marketing angle I cannot get behind. That makes this very conflicting for me.
I wonder - If Elon had to come out tomorrow and say "Sorry, we are terminating the self-driving program, effective immediately", what the impact would be to the biz and markets.
I was initially on Tesla's side of this debacle. Innovation is good and Tesla is definitely innovating. Over time it's becoming more clear that Elon pushes for engineering marvels to happen on an unrealistic timeline. I suppose it's a net positive as the team is driven to fulfil their potential. If they could start doing that without driving over pedestrians it would be even better.
FSD (Fools self driving) is the deception created by Tesla, misleading customers to purchase a package (and even hiking prices for upgrades on some unlucky customers) that does not work as advertised, malfunctions and has mountains of safety hazards which also is putting the lives of other drivers at risk.
This contraption is long overdue for a formal investigation.
One does not need to be a beta tester or a crash test dummy to see enough reports and tests from others over the years, risking their lives on using this 'safety-critical' beta quality software to know that this contraption needs to be investigated and the reports speak for themselves. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Since the software halts when it detects the driver is no longer supervising it, I'm curious as to how you can interpret this as "risking their lives."
Where in the links I posted did it ever 'halt'? The only time it halted was when it confused the moon with a yellow traffic light in the middle of the high way. Totally not putting drivers lives on the road at risk. /s
The rest of them crashed or ran over an object; especially when the car was driving at night; suggesting a lack of proper night vision present at all. Again when used at night in one of the videos even with the driver attentive, it's a full on crash.
Perhaps is that why the regulators have formally investigated this faulty software [0] since they also think that it is a danger to have it malfunctioning on the public roads, putting the lives of other drivers at risk?
So you're telling me (even despite all the evidence) that it functions as advertised with no serious malfunctions in the software and that it is not showing to be a risk on the public roads such that the regulators are not considering to launch a formal investigated over the dangers of this supposed safety-critical system?
I don't think you're ready to even begin to refute the evidence around this.
errr who are the people advising this guy that Tesla self driving technology is in the top 10 list of political issues in anyone’s list, anywhere?
I’m a Tesla owner, and I’ve got concerns about their self driving tech being flaky, and I still can’t get myself to care enough that it’s an issue worth wasting a CA senate seat on.
is this a case of a completely sheltered billionaire thinking their pet issue is remotely important to the masses?
>"The government continues to allow Tesla to put unregulated, dangerous, and defective software on the street in the hands of 60,000 untrained drivers,"
That is accurate, one only needs to look at the self driving behavior on display in Youtube videos by what appear to be largely untrained people but it's an odd thing to center an entire campaign around.
Would have been better to expand this to a more general debate about algorithmic decision making. From policing software, to surveillance, and self-driving among other things. There are many areas where citizens have become unwilling participants in software beta tests, not just when it comes to driving.
He didn't get rich by giving it away though? He also gave a bunch of it to already wealthy institutions like Cornell, so even the philanthropy is kind of typical billionaire nonsense.
"The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, or objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness."
Right. "paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity" That makes sense. Buying ads isn't a massive right wing-Russian conspiracy. But who cares now? lol.
This is why. Sweet deal on the airtime.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/16/don-odowd-elon-musk...