- When you think about buying a new car,
it starts out with a lot of excitement.
I've been there, we've all been there.
Then comes the financial part.
You're often a little bit
worried about the payment,
maybe this car's a bit more
expensive than you're used to,
and then you start to rationalize it,
saying oh well, I'll have
less coffee every month
or something like that,
which that's a bad idea for the record.
Then you start to worry
about the resale value
and the depreciation
you're gonna take a hit on
when you buy a brand new vehicle.
And, if you're like me, you
quickly just change the subject,
start thinking about something
else and forget about it,
and come back to it later.
Well, Elon and the
self-driving team at Tesla
may be changing that experience
for all of us going forward.
Let's dive in.
(upbeat, funky music)
Tesla just announced that
they're have robo-taxis,
these are the fully autonomous Teslas,
driving people around,
starting late next year.
But in Elon time, let's see,
carry the two, plus the thing,
okay maybe 2021, but they're
estimating, and, as they do,
rather optimistically,
late next year, late 2020.
And they've been able to do this
by creating an entirely
new processing chip
designed perfectly for
handling visual input
and running neural networks.
What's that, you ask?
Well, in order for the
car to drive itself,
it needs to handle input from
lots of cameras and sensors,
then process that input into
a decision as to what to do.
Of course this needs to
happen in a split second
as you're driving down
the highway traveling,
and people try to cut in front
of you, as you can see here.
And it also needs to predict
what the road will be up ahead,
beyond the corner or even over the hill,
which is essentially what you're doing
based on your own past driving
experiences on that road
or roads like it.
You see, our brains are special.
They infer or guess what's gonna happen
in any given situation
based on past experiences.
Now those experiences
are things you've personally dealt with,
or they could be something that
someone else told you about,
or something maybe you saw
on a video or somewhere else.
Your brains are just
constantly doing this.
Right now, you're wondering
what I'm gonna say next,
what is coming up next in this video.
It's gonna be good,
but the point is is that
the computer, the car,
needs to also be able to do this.
And so, while your brain
has millions and billions
of neurons firing at every second,
the car needs to be able
to process information
in a similar way.
And this is essentially
what Tesla's self-driving team has done,
they now have a fleet
of over 400,000 vehicles
driving all over the world collecting data
in the semi-autonomous
mode called auto-pilot.
They use this fleet to find examples
of what to do when the car
encounters a new situation
that it hasn't yet seen before.
This is called fleet learning.
For example, when you have a tow truck
towing a tow truck towing a tow truck,
or when a bus makes a
u-turn on the freeway,
which happens apparently. (laughs)
Or when there's a random stoplight
in the middle of the road
meant for one lane but not the others,
that actually confuses
human drivers very often.
Now all of these things are really hard
for a self-driving car to figure out,
but us as humans handle them perfectly.
Well, more or less perfectly.
And Tesla feels now, with
the new processing chip
that's able to do this kind of handling
of this information and
decision-making fast enough,
with enough redundancy,
they believe that that is enough,
combined with their algorithms
and everything else,
that by late next year,
they'll start seeing these on the road,
and you could deploy your car
into what they call the Tesla Network,
kinda like an Uber service,
and it could make you money
when you're not using it.
Here's how the math breaks down.
Tesla estimates a gross
profit per mile of 65 cents
with that being 50% of the
time for your personal use.
This would have an annual
mileage of around 90,000 miles,
which is a lot,
but the new battery packs
that they're developing
are rated to go one million miles,
along with the motor and drive train,
which are already rated to
travel at one million miles
without really breaking down or failing.
This gives you around
$30,000 a year in profit
if you followed this exact measurement.
Now, of course, these will change,
so don't take this as gospel.
Now if you drove this much,
I estimate that you'd pay around
$4800 per year in charging,
if you lived in California,
plus maybe around $1600 in tires,
because you'd be burnin'
through 'em pretty quickly,
another 1500 in insurance or maybe more,
and perhaps $500 in maintenance.
These cars do take some
amount of maintenance,
and when you're traveling
90,000 miles in a given year,
it's gonna require something.
This means that each year
you would net around $21,600.
So, with the purchase price of $40,000,
you'd be cashflow positive
in under two years.
Not bad, right?
Well, there is more to
running a taxi service
than just driving people around.
Here's my friend Harry
from the The Rideshare Guy
explaining one of the big
challenges Tesla's likely to face
when they go to deploy the Tesla Network.
- Alright, thanks Ben.
So, I've been driving for Uber and Lyft
for almost five years,
and I've probably talked
to over 50,000 drivers
during that time through my
blog and YouYube channel,
The Rideshare Guy, and while
driving isn't rocket science
like Elon might be used to,
it's definitely a little bit
more challenging than it looks,
and I think one of the
toughest parts about driving
is the pickup and drop off.
And this is something that
I think robo-taxi fleets
like Tesla are trying to develop
and even other car companies,
I don't think any of
them are thinking about
a lot of the manual input
that goes into being a driver,
and especially pickup's and drop offs.
So when we see these fleets launch,
most likely they're gonna be deployed
in high density, downtown
type environments
because really, that's
where all the demand is.
And right now, when you're picking up,
or if you've ever
requested an Uber downtown,
the driver has to make a lot of choices.
There's no where to park, so
do I pull over in a red zone,
do I double park, do I
go around the corner,
do I drive a block away?
Passenger probably isn't gonna like that.
So, there are a lot of these situations
that the car is gonna have to figure out.
Are autonomous vehicles
gonna be allowed to break
the law in those situations?
My guess is that they won't be able to,
so do we have to completely
redesign cities now
and get rid of street parking
so that autonomous vehicles can park.
So you can sorta see,
this is just one part of
picking up riders, (laughs)
there's a whole bunch of other issues.
I mean if you've ever driven
Friday, Saturday night,
you know that you gotta
deal with the pukers,
and I'd love to see how
Tesla is gonna figure out
how to handle someone who
pukes in the back of the car.
So we'll see what happens.
- How would you handle
someone puking in the car?
(grunts)
In any event, it's an exciting time,
and one I'm guessing that
we're gonna look back upon
as kind of a pivotal
moment in our society,
in at least regards to vehicle ownership
and how we move around cities
and even more rural areas.
I'm curious what you think though.
Would you actually send your
car off to make you money
while you're not using it?
Are you comfortable with that?
Or would you maybe buy a separate vehicle
just for this purpose and maybe
use it on your own occasion,
knowing that this is a car meant for that,
and if it gets dinged up
or whatever, that's fine.
I'm really curious because
beyond just the technical side,
there is a human side to this,
and by looking at the data
and trying to understand
what's going on here,
I think it's an interesting
discussion we can have,
so leave me a comment down
below and let me know.
And don't forget, when you free the data,
your mind will follow.
I'll see you guys back
here in the next one.
(upbeat music)
Hey, thanks for watching the show,
and thanks to Dandelion
Energy for supporting it.
Dandelion Energy is
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using geothermal energy.
It's really cool, really interesting,
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more at teslanomics.co/de
and I'll see you guys
back here in the next one.
