Why Joe Biden Is Asking Elon Musk & Tesla For Help!
We’ve got a couple of smaller stories to fill you in on today: FSD Beta hits a post, The Boring Company breakthrough in Vegas, a new battery development at Giga Texas, Joe Biden might actually talk to Elon Musk and Starlink gets an upgrade. So let’s get going.
Biden-Appointed Official calls on Tesla for Chip Help
Word on the street is that Joe Biden and the United States government might actually be ready to ask Elon Musk and his crew for advice on how to overcome microchip shortages.
In an interview with CNBC, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that the U.S. would seek the help of anyone who could help the country defy the chip and semiconductor shortages that have plagued industries for nearly two years. Raimondo’s focus will be the American automotive sector, which Tesla has been able to combat through in-house advances and other strategies.
Raimondo said in the interview, “None of this is personal. Anyone who has good ideas or is willing to help us, absolutely we want the help.”
Tesla, of course, has a pretty awkward relationship with the current U.S. government. Joe Biden really likes to talk about electric cars, he does it often - But, despite being the global leader in EVs, Biden has failed to say the word “Tesla” even once since taking office. Which is weird.
Even more weird, the President has given General Motors most of the credit for introducing electric cars to the market. He told CEO Mary Barra that she led the United States’ electrification efforts, while GM delivered just 26 electric vehicles in Q4 2021.
Anyway, it seems like Raimondo is hoping Elon can forget about the constant snubs and offer them some helpful advice. He told Bloomberg, “These issues are way too important for anyone to have, you know, feelings hurt. Like – let’s just do the work. And as I said, anyone who has good ideas or is willing to help us, absolutely we want the help.” Raimondo added that Tesla had navigated the chip shortage better than any other due to its roots as a tech company, not an automaker.
So could this be the first step towards fixing the broken bridge between Elon Musk and Joe Biden? I’m not quite willing to bet on it yet but it would be nice to see Tesla get some love from the U.S. government for all the great work they’ve been doing.
What’s Going on With FSD?
It’s been a rough week for Tesla’s Full Self Driving program, we’ve got updates and rollbacks and at least one crash. So, this particular chapter of the story picks up on January 10th, that’s when the NHTSA had a sit down meeting with Tesla representatives to talk about the issue of ‘rolling stop signs’ during FSD Beta driving sessions.
This is a functionality that has been part of the Beta software since its release in October 2020. Though it does have to be enabled in the vehicle menu, the stop sign rolling is not a default setting. In recent versions of FSD Beta there has been a setting to control the level of quote unquote aggressiveness that FSD will employ when driving, the more aggressive levels would include rolling stop signs.
And of course by rolling stop signs they mean the exact same thing that 99% of drivers do when they arrive at a stop sign with no other vehicles or pedestrians in the way, we slow down very drastically to just a crawl, but don’t sit there at a dead stop if there’s nothing to stop for.
Anyway, once the NHTSA found out this was going on, they decided that was not something they are a fan of. Now, we don’t know what was said during that meeting on January 10th, but we do know that one week later, Tesla made the decision that they would proceed with a voluntary safety recall of the rolling stop functionality.
And for the record, this is how Tesla describes the feature in question: “The “rolling stop” functionality is designed to allow the vehicle to travel through an all-way-stop intersection without coming to a complete stop when several operating conditions are first met.” Then there is a laundry list of conditions, I’m not going to read them all, maybe we can just put them on the screen here. And then go on to say, “If all the above conditions are met, only then will the vehicle travel through the all-way-stop intersection at a speed from 0.1 mph up to 5.6 mph without first coming to a complete stop. If any of the above conditions are not met, the functionality will not activate and the vehicle will come to a complete stop.”
So, basically it’s just trying to perform as close to human behavior as possible. Pretty much the same decision making process a person would take approaching a stop sign in day to day driving. There’s a debate here about whether or not we actually want robot cars to drive like people, but let’s save that for another day.
Either way, a recall notice was published by the NHTSA that says the claim will affect 53,822 vehicles, which we can assume is the total number of cars running FSD Beta. The NHTSA statement basically says the function will be disabled by a firmware release and the disablement will carry forward in later releases. So, it’s still baffling that we have to refer to firmware updates as recalls, but I guess that’s the only word that the NHTSA are allowed to use. They probably need a government mandate or something to update their dictionary.
And that brings us up to FSD Beta version 10.10, the rolling stop roll back release. Obviously user experience will vary, as with just about any piece of technology, but I also just watched AI Addict’s car crash into a post, and in all my hours of watching FSD Beta videos over the past year and a bit, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a physical collision. Of course, there have been plenty of near miss situations that have been captured very clearly, so we had to know that eventually someone’s reaction time would come up short and a crash would happen. That’s fine. He should have had more control over the car, because from watching the video we can see that hit coming a mile away. But people screw up, that’s what we do.
It’s still troubling that the system made such a fundamental error at this point in its development - not only did it fail to detect an object, it also failed to navigate a pretty clearly marked road and it’s not clear where the car was trying to go except maybe into the segregated bike lane or maybe into the tree? Either way, it’s a pretty gnarly combination of bad optics and bad timing.
Particularly at the same time that phantom braking in Tesla cars has come back to the limelight thanks to a Washington Post article. So, we all know anecdotally that instances of phantom braking increased last year - that is any time that the vehicle under Autopilot of Full Self Driving just brakes for seemingly no reason, like there was nothing in front of the car, but it decided to jam on the brakes anyway. The Post did some investigating and put together this chart that shows a massive and very sudden spike in the number of monthly complaints to federal regulators of phantom braking reported by owners of the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. It looks like a very scary graph. Because it does show a gradual ramp up before a massive spike from October to November. Of course, looking at the actual number of reports really brings this back down to perspective, even in the worst month of November, the number of reports was 51. Out of the hundreds of thousands of Model 3 and Model Y owners, just 51 reported a problem in November, by December it was down to 32 and for January 2022 it was 24 people. So that’s not to say there is no problem, obviously some people are affected, but the vast, vast majority of users are either not having the problem or are not troubled enough by it to pursue a report.
Take from all that whatever you will.
The Boring Company’s Prufrock Reaches Resorts World Vegas
The Boring Company has made a literal breakthrough in Las Vegas as the Prufrock One tunneling machine emerges from the ground outside the Resorts World hotel on the Vegas strip.
This new tunnel is a direct connection from the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop that is currently operating. In time, this tunnel will create underground road connections between dozens of private properties in the city.
In a statement from the company they wrote, “Vegas Loop tunnel exit: 190-meter turn radius along a vertical grade transition. Prufrock maneuverability is critical to ensure passenger drop-offs are super close to hotel main entrances for best Loop passenger experience.” They should probably hire someone to write these for them.
Anyway, this is a really cool sign that the ‘Teslas in tunnels’ concept is growing exactly the way the Boring Company said it would. In the past, they’ve had to backtrack and cancel basically every project they ever announced - But that trend changes in Vegas. Hopefully it doesn’t stay there.
Tesla to Build Giant Cathode Factory at Giga Texas
Tesla has applied to build a giant new facility, seemingly to produce cathode materials for battery manufacturing, next to the GigaFactory in Austin, Texas. This cathode plant will likely contribute to Tesla’s 4680 production plans in Austin.
In the building application obtained by media outlet, Electrek, it says that it is going to be used as an “Industrial Use Facility”. It looks like 32 acres of land will be used for the facility that Tesla have apparently codenamed, “Project Cathode”. Which is not a very good secret code.
The project is also listed as being on a parcel of land next to the Colorado River where Gigafactory Texas is located.
This is in line with something that Tesla Senior Vice President of Engineering, Drew Baglino said back at Battery Day in 2020, quote, “We’re gonna go and start building our own cathode facility in North America and leveraging all of the North American resources that exist for nickel and lithium, and just doing that, just localizing our cathode supply chain and production, we can reduce miles traveled by all the materials that end up in the cathode by 80%”
Starlink Premium: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Earlier this month, the SpaceX Starlink website was updated to include a new, higher-performance option - Starlink Premium. This is the first time SpaceX has added the choice for different tiers of service on its satellite internet service, previously there was only one single product offered.
On the site, SpaceX describes Starlink Premium as having “more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users, including businesses.”
Elon Musk himself tweeted recently about the new terminal, writing, “This is twice the area of our standard phased array with a broader scan angle.”
Standard Starlink has an expected download speed of 50 to 250 mbps, and an expected upload speed of 10 to 20. While Starlink Premium roughly doubles those speeds, with expected download speeds of 150 to 500 mbps and expected upload speeds of 20 to 40.
Folks can order now to make a reservation, and deliveries are supposed to start in the second quarter of this year, so sometime after March.
The high performance terminal itself looks pretty similar to the existing, second generation terminal - which is rectangular now, SpaceX have done away with the first generation, round dish for Starlink. The updated system is smaller, lighter and more energy efficient.
The high performance receiver features improved resistance to extreme weather conditions. Users will also benefit from 24/7, prioritized support.
Starlink’s standard package was already a little bit pricey, with a $500 USD hardware cost and a monthly fee of $100. Not cheap, but SpaceX claimed they were still selling it at a loss, so still a very good deal for the consumer. Especially as many users would be limited to other lower speed and higher priced satellite internet options without it. This Performance tier is definitely not for the average user - After a $500 deposit, the service will cost $2,500 for the hardware and $500 per month for the service. This is a steep price for sure, but could still be worth it in business situations if you can make more money with the service than without it.
