Tsla Archive

WSJ: Tesla Finally Has Its First Semi-Truck and It’s Already a Hit With Truckers. "Truckers who drove it in pilot tests say they loved features including a centered driving position, faster charging and longer range for about $100,000 less than other battery-electric trucks. Angel Rodriguez, a 56-year-old truck driver for Hight Logistics in Long Beach, Calif., recently swapped out a 13-gear diesel truck for a Tesla Semi, which is automatic, for a one-month pilot test. “It’s just easier on your body. It’s less stressful because you’re not really having to engage the clutch and the stick shift.” Big F Transport employs five mechanics to service more than 40 diesel-powered rigs and a fleet of trailer chassis in Wilmington, Calif. “If we go all EV we will only need one [mechanic] to service chassis,” said Geovanny Melendez, the carrier’s VP of operations, who went to see the Semi earlier this month at a ride-and-drive event near the Port of Long Beach. Jennie Abarca, co-founder and CEO of King Fio Trucking in Long Beach, Calif., once worked as a truck dispatcher and her husband is a truck driver, so she knows all too well the toll a diesel engine takes on people’s lungs and hearing. She eventually wants to swap out King Fio’s 27 diesel trucks to create an all-electric fleet. King Fio already has 11 battery-electric trucks from Volvo and Nikola. But the company limits those trucks to shorter trips to and from local ports because they only have a range of about 225 miles. The Semi, by contrast, can travel 500 miles on a single charge, according to Tesla. For King Fio that means two or three round-trips a day from Long Beach to warehouses in the nearby Inland Empire or a single round-trip to Las Vegas. She has 20 Semis on order. “The Teslas change everything,” Abarca said. “It opens up a whole different type of delivery that I can make.”

WSJ: Tesla Finally Has Its First Semi-Truck and It’s Already a Hit With Truckers. "Truckers who drove it in pilot tests say they loved features including a centered driving position, faster charging and longer range for about $100,000 less than other battery-electric trucks. Angel Rodriguez, a 56-year-old truck driver for Hight Logistics in Long Beach, Calif., recently swapped out a 13-gear diesel truck for a Tesla Semi, which is automatic, for a one-month pilot test. “It’s just easier on your body. It’s less stressful because you’re not really having to engage the clutch and the stick shift.” Big F Transport employs five mechanics to service more than 40 diesel-powered rigs and a fleet of trailer chassis in Wilmington, Calif. “If we go all EV we will only need one [mechanic] to service chassis,” said Geovanny Melendez, the carrier’s VP of operations, who went to see the Semi earlier this month at a ride-and-drive event near the Port of Long Beach. Jennie Abarca, co-founder and CEO of King Fio Trucking in Long Beach, Calif., once worked as a truck dispatcher and her husband is a truck driver, so she knows all too well the toll a diesel engine takes on people’s lungs and hearing. She eventually wants to swap out King Fio’s 27 diesel trucks to create an all-electric fleet. King Fio already has 11 battery-electric trucks from Volvo and Nikola. But the company limits those trucks to shorter trips to and from local ports because they only have a range of about 225 miles. The Semi, by contrast, can travel 500 miles on a single charge, according to Tesla. For King Fio that means two or three round-trips a day from Long Beach to warehouses in the nearby Inland Empire or a single round-trip to Las Vegas. She has 20 Semis on order. “The Teslas change everything,” Abarca said. “It opens up a whole different type of delivery that I can make.”

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's AI lead, during a GTC discussion, highlighting the fundamental similarity in AI approaches for self-driving cars and humanoid robots: - Hierarchical decision making is useful, but it has to be done as part of the same decision-making process as lower-level controls. - We haven't seen the long tail of humanoid robotics, but Tesla has seen the long tail of self-driving, where high and low-level decisions have to be jointly made at a pretty high framerate. - Optimus's architecture is designed in a similar way, where there's a hierarchy but it's all running as part of the same model and the latencies involved in decision making are well modeled. - This architecture will scale quite well with humanoid robots. - The distinction of the decision-making levels is only in the developer's mind. For the model, it's a continuous space of decision making, where there are dials available to make them more fine or coarse. - Humanoids have more sensor modalities and higher degrees of freedom compared to self-driving, but the fundamental constraints remain the same: you need to make real-time decisions. There's obviously a hierarchy to these control signal outputs, but the lowest frequency cannot be too low, because the safety of the robot cannot depend upon things running at very low frequencies.

Tesla Robotaxi vs Uber on a short 1.4-mile route in Austin, TX: Robotaxi: $6.88 Uber: $16.97 R.I.P Uber.

FSD cruising through Beijing like a pro! Zero interventions

Tesla Cybercab spotted in San Francisco today.