engineered these crazy locks

I would joke that since they don't work then I doubt any engineering went into them at all. But I know that isn't true.

So I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by "crazy locks"? I did a lot of work investigating the manufacturing equipment and their use, so I remember a bit about their components, design, and assembly; but I did not work with those directly so I could be missing something entirely. I don't remember there being anything groundbreaking about the mechanics of the door locks. But the general build always felt... "thinner". Most manufacturers stay away from minimum standards by at least the standard deviation or two, so if the required gauge was 18 ± 1, a typical mfr would use 20+. Tesla would use 18. On the nose. That was a lot more common in automotive but even hyundai/kia used wide margins for safety. All that to say, I have a hard time believing the door locks were so complex that a sizable investment would be anything other than reinventing the wheel, but even moreso that it was even worth the superfluous cost.

One of the last jobs I had there was a machine that they picked up third hand and cobbled together with some very sketchy safety systems that wildly failed requirements. I was there for days and it was one of the more extensive reports I've ever made on a single installation. The control system was designed by the onsite engineers and passed flawlessly. But they had a lot to do to get the equipment usable.

Musk thinks everything should be electric because it's cool.

I strongly disagree. Things are getting more and more electric across all manufacturing because it is cheap. A single touch screen that drops in place under a snap on bezel with a premade cable harness and some programming time is so much faster and cheaper than designing, installing, wiring, coding, and testing physical buttons or mechanical linkages. PCBs can be tested in a negligible amount of time.

Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper.

No. Sorry, but no. The locks were going to be electrically operated no matter what. But the inclusion of standard mechanical components would increase the cost significantly.

very common, cheap technology

Yes, but that would be electrical components. It's not very intuitive, I agree. But cost is the sole reason things are becoming more "electronic". Electronics are extremely cheap compared to their analog ancestors. And not only that, but since very few mfrs are using off the shelf mechanical components, they are now less supplied and harder to get. So their cost is going up. Electronics are going down.

I don't know the engineering endeavors that he may or may not have been directly involved with. I'm not entirely sure what "from on high" means, but I would presume you are referring to his net value and authority. In that case, I would say he is no different than literally any other CEO. He made decisions that made him a profit. That's what they do. GE is a great test case for this. Nearly destroyed the company in the long term so that board members see a small financial gain in the short term, then dump the carcass on the next guy. It's just money. That's all.

Or just a snow covered road

I stopped reading when you suggested 20 gauge was heavier than 18 gauge.

Rookie mistake you can't come back from.

Lol, I saw that after I sent it, but was absolutely not confident enough to change it. I don't work in that field any more so that is not the only thing about materials that you probably know better than me. And I'm sorry for the wall of text. My bad.

No. Window retracting on door opening is no different than other cars with frameless windows. Most lowering the window may damage the weatherstripping but is no impediment to door opening.

True that the door latch itself is just a solenoid. I actually forgot the the outside handles don’t do anything but give you something to pull on.

The worst part of the manual door release is that it’s different on each model. For mine, the front door manual release is easily accessible to the point I have to tell people not to use it. Back door is a problem though

Luigi: lol same

I mentioned the retracting window isn’t exclusive to Tesla. The issue is with how they work when they no longer retract and that appears to be a Tesla problem. It’s not an issue if the window has power.

Tesla forum No power, broken window.

Random article where parts of the car had power and others didn’t. Broken window as result.

Another article about broken windows using the mechanical release with lack of power.

Yes, electronics are very cheap... But remember the part where they also have a mechanical mechanism? They have two systems, where most cars have this very simple lock that connects to a tiny motor assembly. It's literally a piece of plastic and a few wires

The tablet thing is true, they've changed cars to computerize everything, and once you've done that you can connect everything over a network. Every button needs to do back to a chip to become a digital signal, so before you had these complex one-off wiring harnesses for everything

But the tablet thing is again, common. It makes sense, it's just worse

But Elon is a unique case. Elon likes to actually make decisions, because he thinks he's Tony Stark. He actually goes down into teams and hangs out, and they have to just work around whatever decisions he makes. It's present in all of his companies, but you can see it most in Twitter, because they didn't have time to build a team to strategically distract him when he comes to visit

This absolute idiot has spent the last month trying to get grok to be a literal Nazi. First, he added a bunch of white genocide to the prompt, making it change the topic to that from any question for a few days.

Now it's responding all confused, and saying things like "I never gave Jeffrey Epstein tours of spaceX or Tesla" when asked it Elon did it. Seems to me they fed Elon's tweets in the RAG system in a amateur way

He micromanages and meddles constantly... That's what he does at his companies

For a counterexample, Jeff Bezos. He was heavily involved in the fire phone, and had some genuinely cool ideas... But the priorities were all wrong, so it flopped. He learned his lesson

• When the sun shines in your eyes, do you not put on sunglasses? Cameras can't do that.

• When you have dirt in your eyes, do you not rub it out? Cameras can't do that.

• When something is obstructing your view, do you not move you head to the side until it is not? Cameras can't do that.

Humans are much more than cameras and a brain.

And even if they were, shouldn't we aim for something better than we currently have?

Do you have an example of another serious company working on the problem that also has concluded that lidar is unnecessary? Because I don't.

I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, the consensus (excluding Musk of course) seems to be that lidar is necessary for proper functioning and safety in poor visibility situations, like in rain, fog or general darkness. I think the odds are good that the judgment of an overwhelming majority of companies is more correct than the judgment of Musk alone. Particularly considering Musk's proven track record of cost cutting that puts users' lives in danger, for example not being able to manually open the doors of burning Teslas.

Lidar has strengths that complement where video has weaknesses. That seems like a good thing. However it is bulky and expensive, and not yet produced at scale. Those are bad things. Whether it really makes a difference in simplifying the machine learning, only those developers know. You have to balance the pluses and minuses, and just because one company came up with something different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Maybe it won’t work without lidar but maybe it will - in the meantime Tesla has saved like $1,000/car times however many million they produce. If they succeed, then they have a solid cost and scalability advantage

The deciding point is if someone does develop general self-driving. Will those who are behind be able to swallow their pride and modify their approach?