So I think what we've determined is that that Tesla is a Status Kia. Lexus used to the the Status Toyota, right, and they have much better reliability ratings. Pretty sure they never catch on fire, last I checked.
My FIL just traded in a 2023 Tesla he bought new for 65k, and only got 29k in trade in...for a new Toyota Hybrid.....and said when he looked around it was like 28k on average - his car was in perfect shape with under 10k miles. Tesla's value is dropping fast. DD
He completely alienated Tesla's base. Not a lot of MAGA types were ever going to move from Rams to Teslas. Oh well, as Springsteen said, "poor man wannabe rich, rich man wannabe king."
This is true. I will not question his talent as a businessman. He is the wealthiest man in the world and has lead abs founded a number of outrageously successful businesses. I question the ethical means he takes and from what I can tell, he isn’t a very stable or good person. However most tycoons are not. So then the question is why is Musk letting this happen to Tesla. Well everyone laughed when Musk bought Twitter, but it’s pretty clear at this point he did not buy it for pure profit. He bought it to be able to gate keep and influence media, social discourse - for the purpose of politics and a larger control of policy than mere money. With Tesla, I suspect that while his company is having severe difficulty - it is worth it to him based on the access to an incredible amount of data through DOGE that no one else on the earth has. We don’t know what he has and what he will ultimately do with it. He also has basically more influence than any other American except Trump right now.
The data heist is big money. No doubt. Twitter is interesting, it's not only about tangible influence on people. People aren't even that interested in Twitter which is why ads never worked great there. That purchase was also about filtering discourse to create the perception that certain things are normal or wanted. It's like having the ultimate lobby working against the true desires of the people. A tool against democracy. He can take those filtered viewpoints and use it as a springboard for social media discussions, podcast topics, blog posts, newspaper articles, etc.... propaganda ground zero. People in America want certain things (abortion, healthcare, parental leave, min wage hikes) but money works against democracy (from both sides). It's always been like this, but, since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, people like Musk scare me because if you think about what they want, true democracy is their obstacle. And now they can buy policy and seats in broad daylight. Musk wants rich smart people to breed and invent. He wants to give them access to capital. He views using resources on the poor or average as inefficient. He's obsessed with work, not family. He has a self-admitted medical disorder related to processing empathy. Nobody relates to this, nobody would vote for this = democracy is his obstacle.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/07/steve-wozniak-says-tesla-is-worst-at-improving-driver-tech/ Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak says a software’s user interface is “the most important thing”—and on that metric, Tesla fails miserably. An early Tesla adopter, Wozniak has since soured on the carmaker and CEO Elon Musk after a number of software changes he says destroyed the driving experience. Wozniak detailed his complaints in a recent interview.
I love my Model 3, but it's fair criticism. How a company that regularly updates their software doesn't make simple use improvements is beyond me.
This has been covered. Tesla is skipping the short term improvements and iterations. All development is going into FSD and AI. Grok is due to be integrated into TeslaOS later this year. SG Take: Virtual assistants have been one of the sought after holy grails for a couple decades. Speech recognition is the next hot thing. Google has all but stopped developing it. Siri is a mess. I forgot whatever Amazon's assistant is called. HoweverThat said, OpenAi and Grok 3 have been promising solutions. 3-5 scond latency is too high but it is promising as a virtual assistant for a vehicle.
Grok onboard a car sounds heavily gimped. You'd need at least 16gb ram for it to be smart enough to run on your phone. 64gb on something like an apple m4 chip is decent but a bit pricey on the bottom line. It all depends on whatever tegra chip they throw in along with the ram requirements. But it's a ram hog and would have to play nice with the system if they cheap out with only one chip and unified memory. P.S. LLMs are way to easy to jailbreak and shouldn't be trusted sharing the same OS that operates your 3000lb hunk of metal and volatile batteries running at 70-90mph. And I'm taking from the pov of being ok with letting the buggers run wild on your phone that has every and anything that identifies you as a living breathing person.
Grok is not replacing FSD in any form. Have you used FSD? The dataset required to run the input interface for the OS is very minimal compared to a complete LLM dataset. It's the inference that is a challenge. Just like in the early days when people thought a mouse would be cumbersome compared to a track pad, it will be a struggle to get people off screens and use voice. We already see boomers struggling to replace screens with physical buttons. Buttons and knobs have always been annoying. Full LLM libraries can be app based. And with the likelihood of every tesla connecting to Starlink, bandwidth won't be an issue 99% of the time.
Weird because they make minor improvements all the time, just not to the interface. But now I can use my non-existent apple watch as a key.
