The Tesla model 3 now qualifies for the full $7500 credit not just $3750. With $40.5k MSRP, selling at 37.5k on their website, now the cost is $30k after the federal credit. Very tempting.

 

Software is where the money is. Each additional sale is pure profit; there is no incremental cost to manufacture. Once you are ahead of the pack, it may take a competitor too much time and $$ to code their own. And the legacy car companies sub out their smart components; they have no in-house expertise!
And building out the Supercharger network was a critical business investment.

 

I think you are spot on and I wouldn't doubt it since I've seen it so many times.
Dead giveaway is when the oem as little or no technical data available, only replacement parts for plug and play and wiring info if you're lucky.

Good luck buying something as simple as a radio **** or replacement lcd screen without buying the whole unit...
Other than the people who farmed it out for someone else to design it, nobody else in the company has a clue on how anything works. lol

 

Legacy auto has no control over most of the software in their vehicles. The silicon and code is owned by the module supplier the auto maker has to get permission from said supplier to make changes, if change is even possible.

This is a neat move by Tesla.

 

For Tesla licensing FSD to others.... Tesla is so far ahead of any other company when it comes to FSD for one simple reason. Every single Tesla on the road today, regardless of if it is equipped with FSD or not, is built with cameras that take in every aspect of its surroundings while you drive. All of that data can be constantly sent to Tesla to feed part of the engine for FSD (road data). I can't imagine another company wanting to get into the autonomous game and not thinking they would have to leverage (license) Tesla's tech.

 

Every single Tesla made in the last few years has FSD already, it's just a matter of activating it. Basic Autopilot even has auto steer (I have auto steer turned off). They are collecting so much road data, it's just a matter of time

 

"all your data are ours"

tesla is like facebook on wheels. that giant data sucking sound...

can't wait for the first divorce plaintiff to subpoena location data from tesla.

 

Exactly correct. Every Tesla is made the same (just cosmetic differences like wheels, interior color) - every one of them could have other features with the flip of a software switch. Musk knows that the game to domination is by having as many cars on the road as humanly possible because the data each car collects is wildly valuable, especially as it pertains to autonomy.

 

That is rapidly changing. It's the precise reason VW, BMW, and Mercedes amongst others all announced their next-gen vehicles are all going to have manufacturer-maintained operating systems. As Mercedes says, "Based on a purpose-built chip-to-cloud architecture, MB.OS benefits from full access to all vehicle domains: infotainment, automated driving, body & comfort, driving & charging."

 

Well, that's the world we live in. It's give and take, no free lunches. Collecting all that data also has it's upside...it makes making improvements much easier. Think of all the crashes that can be prevented, preemptively fixing failures, and collecting revenge **** at the same time

 

absolutely, and ai models need craptons of data.

 

The Germans are way ahead of the pack of the legacy automakers

 

Wow, that's a huge undertaking, but awesome.

The problem in my world is user level abstraction bloat killing all performance gains at the embedded software inside the hardware & the hardware itself.

I would never dream of trying to write an operating system let alone embed that operating system in special made custom ASIC chips, they
will need a team of good people to do that- I'm talking way up there in talent which I'm sure they can afford if they want to.

I don't know how Tesla does it but if they are running their own bare bones linux system or their own custom fork I can see that working ok(or other bare bones OS).
Proven and supported kernels and interface forward toward the user level and work well backward interfacing with the embedded software at the hardware level.

The recipe for speed is not always a faster processor or more cores in the processor or wider bit data bus but that's the approach I've been seeing for many years
because it is so much more work to gut everything and start over- thus the layers and layers of processor clock instruction gobbling abstraction and bloat. haha

 

Just because a vehicle runs on a proprietary OS such as QNX or is powered by someone else’s silicon doesn’t mean the vehicle manufacturer doesn’t own or control data. Any other manufacturer could have done what Tesla etc did using off the shelf components and operating environments. The reason they didn’t and are now playing catch up (and may struggle to catch up) is mostly down to a lack of vision. Tesla thought bigger and bolder and really understood the power of big data before most others.

 

There's more to it than that. Sourcing components from various vendors results in a software kludge at best and a nightmare at worst. They don't talk to each other and certainly cannot work well together. Tesla is vertically integrated, unlike the others.