On Thursday last week, I had a conversation with a friend about autonomy. He didn't know about crews, Waymo, or Tesla's full self-driving, but he was adamant full self-driving cars are a decade plus away.
I share this because over the weekend, Elon and Tesla showed us a real breakthrough in their full self-driving technology and strategy that has dramatically changed my view on when and how Tesla will solve for autonomy. The public of course is still clueless and now even more so.
Even if you've been following along all weekend, we need to reiterate certain points and I want to make sure everyone understands and commits to long-term memory what happened this weekend. The importance of what we learned cannot be overstated.
First, let's just acknowledge the transparency of Elon and the team. To hop on a space to answer unscripted questions with unscripted answers about Tesla's FSD technology and then to live stream an alpha build of FSD12 for millions to see while Elon and Ashok narrated with incredible insight. This is just so cool for so many reasons and a serious departure from what any legacy auto company CEO has ever done.
So FSD12. We've heard it's AI end-to-end photons in control out. Neural nets being fed high-quality video data to learn exactly like a human would, removing all heuristics and nearly all manual or handwritten C++ code. With V12, the car does not know what lane lines are, what stop signs are, what pedestrians are, but yet it intuitively drives smooth like a human because of the vast video data the AI has been fed over the years.
So now solving for problems is just a matter of growing the fleet from Tesla's 4 million today that will hit 10 million soon because all of these vehicles can gather data that Tesla then curates to pick the highest quality or the best drivers to then train the AI rather than handwriting code or instructions for what the car should do in every situation.
And this does not mean the system is uncontrollable on the contrary actually. It's just now Tesla programs the data instead of programming the code. It's all about data curation and then updating the weights. Large amounts of mediocre data don't improve driving. That would actually make it worse. Tesla does still use normal software, C++ and Python, to decide what data to select from the fleet, but human labelers do have the final say on what data is good enough.
Tesla will also begin shipping models to cars in shadow mode so every time the driver does something differently than the AI would have done. Tesla can get that data back which is more valuable than collecting random data. Every time there is an intervention it will automatically be uploaded to the training to update the weights. And Tesla's solution now does not need any map data and it will still work without any internet connection. Which of course is crucial as you need your car to drive safely even in areas without cell phone coverage.
With this clip on the V12 drive the car pulled over to the side of the road to park without being told. It just knew from prior video data it's been fed that at the end of a route that's the human behavior. Find a safe place as close to the GPS pin as possible. This is also where we learn Tesla RoboTaxis will eventually be able to recognize you by using a picture if you want so the car can look and wait for you. It'll also be able to recognize the Starbucks logo and drop you off near the entry of your destination even without map data in parking lots.
So Tesla could actually delete the entire navigation system and just give the car a GPS point and the car can navigate to it just like a human would even in location that's never been before.
And this bike scene was pretty impressive. Again there are no explicit instructions or code telling the car how to handle a cyclist. The car is just reacting based on how other good drivers behave around cyclists.
Nothing but nets baby. And how about here where the car chose to lane with fewer vehicles without any code telling it to just acting like a human on its own. And yes there was one intervention but to focus on this one instance from an otherwise great smooth 45 minute drive is just disingenuous. There's a reason this has not yet been released to the public. Tesla will fix this by feeding it more video footage of intersections just like that. They'll update the weights and it'll be fixed.
Now I'm hearing some folks say that well the competition is just going to copy what Tesla is doing. This is wrong. Elon has said the designing in the cameras, the liquid cooled Tesla computer, and the high security internet gateway will probably take major car companies three years. And that other car companies will probably want to use Tesla's online vehicle management system on the server side too. But this is only part of the solution. Elon has warned others LIDAR is not optimal for cars but no one has listened.
Elon also said they're well aware the Chinese like to copy Tesla's technology. The thing is Tesla designed its own hardware and that means their software will only run on that specific hardware. As with Apple you can't just copy the code, you need their hardware too. And I would add you also need a vast high quality data set as well.
So tell me how is cruise going to get data with around 400 vehicles compared to Tesla's 4 million vehicles and growing that are being driven by customers every day. Having a vast fleet of cars for FSD training is a massive Tesla advantage. And remember Tesla designs its own silicon hardware in house. So how are any of these other companies going to get that? The answer is they can't unless they license it from Tesla.
So this notion that every other automaker is going to solve FSD when Tesla does is even more ridiculous now given what we've learned this weekend. Not only that but Tesla having its own chip design means they optimize for its usage down to the microsecond. And Tesla currently has drivers testing globally in places like New Zealand where there's inclement snowy weather. With version 12 the car will automatically increase following distances in the snow because you guessed it, it'll learn from video data of good drivers doing the same thing. Without ever needing to be told hey it's snowy out so do X, Y, and Z from manual code. Just like how on Elon's drive the speed was set to 85 but the car automatically new to only go 40 on roads that were not highways. It was purely intuitive. It slowed down for speed bumps and maneuvered cautiously around cyclists and pedestrians. It navigated a new construction zone and handled around about all without any code telling it to do so.
Yes you need a vast amount of video training data and billions of dollars of training hardware and the know-how on how to run that hardware so this is definitely not easy. Speaking of that Tesla's AI team has a 10,000 unit H100 cluster going live today and this week. Elon said it's not a trivial thing to get this online. They have a competent team working 24-7 and it's still very difficult to get networking and cabling to work. These new H100 chips are designed for things like video training and are up to 30 times faster than the prior A100 chip. Tesla does actually own these as well. Each H100 costs around $30,000 so this cluster alone is $300 million.
Many other companies that say they have these are actually renting them but not Tesla and it's the owning and maintaining that's the hard part. Elon talked about a silicon shortage this year and that's part of why Tesla is simultaneously bringing its in-house supercomputer dojo online. So it's going to be a combination of Nvidia and Tesla hardware for Tesla's training. The takeaway though is Tesla's compute capabilities are so far ahead of any other car company you still can't see second with a telescope. Tesla plans to spend $2 billion with a B this year on training compute alone to acquire hardware and this is going to be the case for a number of years and Tesla will probably spend even more than this next year.
Right now FSD is compute constrained and Tesla to no one's surprise is moving aggressively to solve for this. Let that sink in $2 billion on training hardware alone. Do you think Ford, GM, Waymo or Cruz can spend that much when they're still losing millions and billions on EV and autonomy already? Now yes Elon did talk about some challenges like an upcoming electricity generation shortage and transformer shortages as well as long lead times of one year for those transformers. And of course regulators are always a looming question mark.
Speaking of how about that stat only 0.5% of people come to full stops at stop signs yet NHTSA is still forcing Tesla to artificially pull data from typically bad drivers to come to complete stops. This is just silly. In Elon said over time the percent of energy being used at data centers for neural net training will be 80 to 90 percent. So yes the world will be compute constrained for a while and there's plenty of room for both Nvidia and Tesla's dojo. Elon did say hardware 4 will lag hardware 3 by at least another 6 months as the focus is getting FSD on hardware 3 working super well and provided internationally.
Tesla will have to retrain using the higher resolution V4 cameras because the photons are different giving a different bit stream. Elon did say a real 6 months though and maybe even less.
Hardware 4 will use more power than hardware 3 but the incredible thing is V12 is so efficient that the Model S Elon was driving on hardware 3 was running around 100 watts of inference compute.
All of the inference or on-car processing is local. So again if Tesla were offline there would be no difference. No internet connection is required for a Tesla to drive on a road it's never seen before.
Tesla is running at full frame rates on hardware 3. 8 cameras at 36 frames per second and this pure vision V12 actually runs faster than the version that is the mix of normal software C++ and AI aka version 11. It could actually run faster than 36 frames per second. Tesla guesses 50 frames per second but it's unnecessary since roads are designed around 24 frames per second.
So on Tesla's custom AI computer only 100 watts of power is needed a very small amount to achieve self-driving. Compare this to the competition with dozens of sensors, radars and LiDAR and the power use goes way up as well as the cost.
Remember not all self-driving systems are created equally. A show himself said this end-to-end neural net approach will result in the safest, most competent, most comfortable, most efficient and overall the best self-driving system ever produced. It's going to be very hard to beat it with anything else.
A shock also quietly mentioned soon, Tesla will add instructions or commands so you could say things like lane change from the left most lane or pull over here and the car should recognize those commands.
V12 also means great things for actually smart summon. In comparably better parking lot control is coming because again V12 does not need map data which parking lots usually don't have. The cars will just learn to navigate through parking lots like other good human drivers have done.
And it's this same software that will transfer over to Tesla's Optimus Bot, the ability to feed it data of certain tasks and the bot will just understand what to do by mimicking what other humans have done.
So we have all of this incredible groundbreaking breakthrough type stuff happening yet mainstream media is crickets on the entire situation. They really just don't get it. The public also has no idea and does not understand what's coming but to the few of us on the planet that do understand it's a gift to watch Tesla's progress on solving a problem humanity has never solved for.
Prior version jumps of FSD have been over hyped but V12 is actually different and worthy of all the hype. No human code, no heuristics, just flat out AI neural nets learning to drive like the best drivers do.
Drop a Tesla with V12 anywhere on earth and it's going to understand how to drive over time as Tesla testers feed the AI the proper video data. So now Tesla just focuses on scaling the fleet and the compute power.
It's not an easy path but the path is now crystal clear. What Tesla has figured out cannot be replicated or duplicated anytime soon if at all. Tesla will be the first to solve for autonomy and it's not going to be close. This weekend will go down in history as the one where Tesla showed the world it has figured out self driving. Now they just have to refine it.
And I know that was a lot so here's a quick refreshing palette cleanser. I enjoyed Tasha's take today on the Supercharger network being the gateway drug for other Tesla platforms like licensing autopilot and FSD. Joke Tettmeyer also gave us a drone flyover of Tesla's lithium refinery in Corpus Christi so want to show a few clips.
A good sense of the amount of construction and changes that have happened in under four months since that groundbreaking.
自从那次突破性的开始以来,不到四个月的时间里,我们对建设和变化的程度有了很好的感知。
Now one of the things that I did notice here is there's some ponds very large ponds that have been created since the construction has begun and you can see them right here in the middle of the screen and the bottom of the screen. And there's one at the top of the screen as well. That one sort of trapezoidal shaped the ones down here are kind of triangular shaped.
But as we continue to fly right now kind of on the west side facing towards the south this gives you a really good view of how the entire site has transformed. The last time I was here was in April and there was nothing it was just fields there had been no earthwork there was nothing at all completed.
This might be a furnace or a kiln but I really don't know and since I haven't really had any experience with this site up to this point in time I would like to ask if my viewers know what these are but the building would be on the left where that kind of white mixes being installed in the middle where you see the vertical structures is most of the main refinery that will proceed from this point across to the right of the image. Now as we get a little closer to these vertical structures and this slab that's being built I'll zoom in so you can get a good sense of the activity that's going on. Also this gives you a good sense of the scale of the height of those two concrete structures that have been constructed and the work that is underway right now.
Korea Economic Daily said Hyundai will develop ultra-fast chargers with its own technology to catch up to Tesla. They're seeking to get their 350 kilowatt chargers certified with the Korean government to debut them in the market this year. They're calling these ultra-fast luxurious charging stations E-PIT stations and each one will be equipped with four to six units of 350 kilowatt chargers but they require their charger suppliers to use expensive materials to build high-end chargers. This premium strategy has heightened charger building costs preventing Hyundai from finding suitable charger suppliers and it's become a major hurdle to the fast penetration of these E-PIT stations. Each E-PIT station is going to cost more than the typical 113,000 to build an ordinary 350 kilowatt charger. We'll see if Hyundai chooses to roll this out globally outside of Korea because they did say they were going to be part of that consortium in the United States setting up their own 30,000 fast charging locations.
We're now at 23 countries around the world that have passed the 5% full BEV adoption rate. Just one year ago when Bloomberg did this analysis they had 19 countries passing that rate so in the last year we added another four to the list. Those being Canada, Australia, Spain, Thailand, and Hungary and they're also saying EVs can surge from that 5% threshold to 25% in just four years. If the US follows this trend 25% of new cars will be fully electric by 2026. So this was a pretty cool chart on the far right column. You see the first quarter at 5% and look at Sweden. They hit that milestone quarter to 2021 and fast forward just about two years and they're sitting at 38% EV market share. So from 5% to 38% in two years. And here's the bottom of the list looking at the US hitting that 5% threshold just two quarters after Sweden but we are only at 7% BEV market share. And they said India may be next up to crack this list as EVs made up 3% of new car sales in the last quarter.
Tesla has two upcoming trials starting this year for accidents that did involve fatalities. The first one starting mid-September in California. They're accusing Tesla of knowing that autopilot and other safety systems were defective when it sold the car. The second trial starting early October in Florida. They're saying autopilot failed to break steer or do anything to avoid the collision according to the lawsuit Tesla has denied liability for both accidents blamed driver error and said autopilot is safe when monitored by humans Tesla said in documents drivers must pay attention to the road and keep their hands on the wheel. There are no self-driving cars on the road today. Earlier in April Tesla actually won a trial it was not involving a fatality but the jury said Tesla did warn drivers about its system and driver distraction was to blame. These will certainly be cases to watch because if Tesla gets favorable rulings then maybe future ones won't come up but if Tesla is found to be liable or negligent and has to pay out punitive or compensatory damages then you would imagine more cases like this will probably come in the future.
Mercedes who has come out and said they're adopting the NACS will also be rolling out their own charging stations with the NACS and CCS starting later this year. In the fourth quarter to be specific and today Mercedes said they'll offer 400 kilowatt charging at their stations but how many cars can actually accept that rate anyway. The first locations will be in Atlanta, Chengdu in China and Manheim Germany. They're aiming for 2000 chargers installed worldwide by the end of next year. After the Chinese EV company announced it will be buying DD's smart card development business in a deal worth $744 million dollars. X-Beng is getting DD's expertise with riot hailing and autonomous technology and as part of the deal X-Beng will launch a new EV brand called Project Mona. The cars will be relatively cheaper on $20,000. The companies will work together on marketing, financial services deals charging and of course a robot taxi network.
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