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Tag: self-driving cars

  • The $50 Billion Musk Referendum

    The $50 Billion Musk Referendum

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    The pay package is just one in a series of measures that shareholders have already been asked to vote on by proxy, ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Others include whether Tesla’s incorporation should move from Delaware to Texas, whether the company should soften its hardline stance on labor negotiations, and whether the company should preemptively impose a moratorium on using minerals mined from the seabed.

    Yet none have been as divisive as Musk’s pay. Deep rifts among investors have been exposed in the lead-up to the vote. Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm has backed the pay package, as has billionaire investor Ron Baron. “Tesla is better with Elon,” Baron wrote in an open letter last week. “Tesla is Elon.” Yet the deal’s opponents include two influential proxy advisory groups, which guide institutional investors on votes, as well as shareholders from the Nordic countries, where Tesla has clashed with workers over labor rights.

    Norway’s trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against the pay deal, as will the country’s largest pension fund, KLP. “While we acknowledge that the company has grown significantly and successfully during the performance period, we still note that the total award value remains excessive,” Kiran Aziz, KLP’s head of responsible investments, told WIRED, adding the fund will vote in favor of the motion urging Tesla to engage in labor negotiations. “Recent [dispute] between Tesla and the company’s workers in Sweden as well as Tesla’s history of accusations of interference with workers’ rights is of great concern and shows that the company needs to do better work in the area.”

    Behind the scenes of the vote, lobbying has been intense. Tesla has paid for ads on Google and X, which is owned by Musk, telling investors to “protect your investment” and support the proposal, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In April, Tesla also launched a website urging shareholders to vote against the Delaware court decision and support the pay package. “The Court’s decision, if implemented, means that Elon would not receive any compensation for the tremendous accomplishments that have generated significant stockholder returns in less than six years,” the website reads.

    “This is the most advertising I can remember from any proxy solicitation,” says Robert Anderson, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law. He believes the Musk effect—the CEO’s ability to attract endless publicity—has contributed to this situation. But the pay package and the proposed Texas move are both unprecedented in the business world, he adds. “Either [of] those things by themselves would be pretty significant, even if he were not a public figure.”

    The vote will be decided by a mix of institutional investors as well as an unusually large cohort of retail investors, who control around 44 percent of the business. Among shareholders, there are concerns that if Musk does not win his compensation, “his attention might drift to some of his other ventures a little bit more,” says Anderson. Musk managed to juggle multiple ventures for years, but he has been more publicly distracted since acquiring the social media service Twitter and renaming it X. There, his visible turn to right-wing politics has garnered new fans and left some old ones behind.

    Whatever happens this week, Tesla and Musk may emerge looking a bit less superhuman. For years, the two have insisted that Tesla is a tech company, with a Silicon Valley–style startup scrappiness. “We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company,” Musk told investors—or voters—in April. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company … fundamentally, it’s just the wrong framework.”

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  • Elon Musk Can’t Solve Tesla’s China Crisis With His Desperate Asia Visit

    Elon Musk Can’t Solve Tesla’s China Crisis With His Desperate Asia Visit

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    Elon Musk will be pleased that his surprise jaunt to China on Sunday garnered many glowing headlines. The trip was undoubtedly equally a surprise to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had been scheduled to offer Musk the red carpet on a long-arranged visit.

    The billionaire blew off India at the last minute, citing “very heavy Tesla obligations.” Indeed, Tesla has had a tumultuous couple of weeks, with federal regulator slap-downs, profits halving, and price-cut rollouts—yet, in a very public snub that Modi won’t quickly forget, the company CEO made time for Chinese Premier Li Qiang.

    And well Musk might. Tesla needs China more than China needs Tesla. After the US, China is Tesla’s second biggest market.

    However, ominously, in the first quarter of the year, Tesla’s sales in China slipped by 4 percent in a domestic EV market that has expanded by more than 15 percent. That’s enough of a hit for any CEO to jump in a Gulfstream and fly across the Pacific for an impromptu meeting with an with a Chinese Premier.

    Globally, Tesla has lost nearly a third of its value since January, and earlier this month, Tesla’s worldwide vehicle deliveries in the first quarter fell for the first time in almost four years. As they are wont to do, Tesla investors continue to complain over repeated delays to the company’s rollout of cars with genuine driverless capabilities.

    One of Tesla’s stop-gap technologies—an now heavily discounted $8,000 add-on—is marketed as Full Self-Driving or FSD. But, like the similarly confusingly named Autopilot feature, this still requires driver attention, and may yet still prove to be risky.

    Among the deals said to have been unveiled at Sunday’s meeting with Li Qiang was a partnership granting Tesla access to a mapping license for data collection on China’s public roads by web search company Baidu.

    This was a “watershed moment,” Wedbush Securities senior analyst Dan Ives said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. However, Tesla has been using Baidu for in-car mapping and navigation in China since 2020. The revised deal, in which Baidu will now also provide Tesla with its lane-level navigation system, clears one more regulatory hurdle for Tesla’s FSD in China. It does not enable Tesla to introduce driverless cars in China or anywhere else, as some media outlets have reported.

    Press reports have also claimed that Musk has secured permission to transfer data collected by Tesla cars in China out of China. This is improbable, noted L Warren Capital CEO and head of research Junheng Li, who wrote on X: “[Baidu] owns all data, and shares filtered data with Tesla. Just imagine if [Tesla] has access to real-time road data such as who went to which country’s embassy at what time for how long.” That, she stressed, would be “super national security!”

    According to Reuters, Musk is still seeking final approval for the FSD software rollout in China, and Tesla still needs permission to transfer data overseas.

    Li added that a rollout of even a “supervised,” data-lite version of FSD in China is “extremely unlikely.” She pointed to challenges for Tesla to support local operation of the software. Tesla still “has no [direct] access to map data in China as a foreign entity,” she wrote.

    Instead, Tesla is likely using the deal extension with Baidu as an FSD workaround, with the data collected in China very much staying in China. Despite this, Tesla shares have jumped following news of the expanded Baidu collaboration.

    Furthermore, Li said there’s “no strategic value” for Beijing to favor FSD when there are several more advanced Chinese alternatives. We tested them.

    “Chinese EVs are simply evolving at a far faster pace than Tesla,” agrees Shanghai-based automotive journalist and WIRED contributor Mark Andrews, who tested the driver assistance tech available on the roads in China. The US-listed trio of Xpeng, Nio, and Li Auto offer better-than-Tesla “driving assistance features” that rely heavily on lidar sensors, a technology that Musk previously dismissed, but which Tesla is now said to be testing.

    Although dated in shape and lacking in the latest tech, a Tesla car is nevertheless more expensive in China than most of its rivals. Tesla recently slashed prices in China to arrest falling sales.

    Musk’s flying visit to China smacked of “desperation,” says Mark Rainford, owner of the Inside China Auto channel. “[Tesla] sales are down in China—the competition has weathered the price cuts so far and [the Tesla competitors have] a seemingly endless conveyor belt of talented and beautiful products.” Rainford further warns that the “golden period for Tesla in China” is “at great risk of collapsing.”

    Tesla opened its first gigafactory in Shanghai five years ago, and it is now the firm’s largest—but the auto maker has been playing tech catch-up in China for some time. In addition to Xpeng, Nio, and Li, there are other Chinese car companies in advance of Tesla on autonomous driving, as Musk will see if he visits the Beijing Motor Show, which runs through this week.

    Beijing is now arguably the world’s preeminent automotive expo, but Tesla is not exhibiting, a sign it has little new to offer famously tech-hungry Chinese auto buyers. Pointedly, the Cybertruck is not road-legal in China, although that hasn’t stopped Tesla from displaying the rust-prone electric pickup in some of its Chinese showrooms.

    Likewise, Tesla has just announced plans for a European Cybertruck tour. But, just like in China, the EV pickup cannot be sold in the EU, either—and according to Tesla’s lead on vehicle engineering, it likely never will be.

    Speaking on tighter pedestrian safety regulations in the EU compared to the US, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, told Top Gear that “European regulations call for a 3.2-mm external radius on external projections. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to make a 3.2-mm radius on a 1.4-mm sheet of stainless steel.”

    The “Cybertruck Odyssey” tour—as Tesla’s European X account calls it—may titillate Tesla fans, but it could well prove to be about as useful as shooting a Roadster into space.



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  • Tesla Autopilot Was Uniquely Risky—and May Still Be

    Tesla Autopilot Was Uniquely Risky—and May Still Be

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    A federal report published today found that Tesla’s Autopilot system was involved in at least 13 fatal crashes in which drivers misused the system in ways the automaker should have foreseen—and done more to prevent. Not only that, but the report called out Tesla as an “industry outlier” because its driver assistance features lacked some of the basic precautions taken by its competitors. Now regulators are questioning whether a Tesla Autopilot update designed to fix these basic design issues and prevent fatal incidents has gone far enough.

    These fatal crashes killed 14 people and injured 49, according to data collected and published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal road-safety regulator in the US.

    At least half of the 109 “frontal plane” crashes closely examined by government engineers—those in which a Tesla crashed into a vehicle or obstacle directly in its path—involved hazards visible five seconds or more before impact. That’s enough time that an attentive driver should have been able to prevent or at least avoid the worst of the impact, government engineers concluded.

    In one such crash, a March 2023 incident in North Carolina, a Model Y traveling at highway speed struck a teenager while he was exiting a school bus. The teen was airlifted to a hospital to treat his serious injuries. NHTSA concluded that “both the bus and the pedestrian would have been visible to an attentive driver and allowed the driver to avoid or minimize the severity of this crash.”

    Government engineers wrote that, throughout their investigation, they “observed a trend of avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver.”

    Tesla, which disbanded its public affairs department in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment.

    Damningly, the report called Tesla “an industry outlier” in its approach to automated driving systems. Unlike other automotive companies, the report says, Tesla let Autopilot operate in situations it wasn’t designed to, and failed to pair it with a driver engagement system that required its users to pay attention to the road.

    Regulators concluded that even the Autopilot product name was a problem, encouraging drivers to rely on the system rather than collaborate with it. Automotive competitors often use “assist,” “sense,” or “team” language, the report stated, specifically because these systems aren’t designed to fully drive themselves.

    Last year, California state regulators accused Tesla of falsely advertising its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, alleging that Tesla misled consumers into believing the cars could drive themselves. In a filing, Tesla said that the state’s failure to object to the Autopilot branding for years constituted an implicit approval of the carmaker’s advertising strategy.

    NHTSA’s investigation also concluded that, compared to competitors’ products, Autopilot was resistant when drivers tried to steer their vehicles themselves—a design, the agency wrote in its summary of a near two-year investigation into Autopilot, that discourages drivers from participating in the work of driving.

    A New Autopilot Probe

    These crashes occurred before Tesla recalled and updated its Autopilot software via an over-the-air update earlier this year. But along with closing this investigation regulators have also opened a fresh probe into whether the Tesla updates, pushed in February, did enough to prevent drivers from misusing Autopilot, from misunderstanding when the feature was actually in use, or from using it in places where it is not designed to operate.

    The review comes after a Washington State driver last week said his Tesla Model S was on Autopilot—while he was using his phone—when the vehicle struck and killed a motorcyclist.

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  • China’s Best Self-Driving Car Platforms, Tested and Compared

    China’s Best Self-Driving Car Platforms, Tested and Compared

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    I experienced the City NGP function under XNGP in a P7i in Shanghai, and later in a G6 in Guangzhou. With my second experience I soon realized it was a tale of two cities. In Shanghai it was quite smooth, and at least one of the interventions made was due to me being disoriented rather than the car. In a few other cases it was me being overly cautious.

    While in Shanghai the system appeared to cut out for no obvious reason only once or twice, this happened far more frequently in Guangzhou. One possible reason for this is that the torque in the system is unable to overcome the hand on the wheel, and so the system might think you are making an intervention. Nonetheless, in Guangzhou it got stuck behind a stopped car, and on one occasion seemed to be heading for an ebike waiting to cross the road rather than entering the road it was turning into.

    Two-wheeled traffic in Guangzhou in general seemed to present a challenge for the system. Unlike in Shanghai, the roads of Guangzhou do not have good separation between cars, bicycles and mopeds. At the best of times in China these road users are unpredictable, usually paying scant regard for traffic lights, road regulations, or their own safety. With the absence of dedicated or segregated lanes for them, XNGP seemed to struggle. But this was last year, of course, and the system may well have been significantly improved since then.

    Forward Thinking

    Moving forward, data will be the deciding factor in both the speed of change and also the capabilities of the systems, and it is here that Li might have the winning advantage. XPeng’s XNGP is available on only the Max versions of four models. In the case of Nio, all second-generation cars have the necessary hardware, but users need to pay the equivalent of $530 per month to use the system.

    In contrast, Li does not charge for its system, and all L9 and Mega cars have it as standard. For the L7 and L8, there are AD Max and AD Pro versions, with the latter missing lidar but still offering NOA Highway. Factor in that Li has sold nearly 500,000 of its second-generation cars—and in December sold 50,035 cars versus 20,115 and 18,012 for XPeng and Nio respectively—and this may help the company build leadership thanks to the sheer volume of data captured.

    However, in December, Nio unveiled its first in-house-developed autonomous driving chip, which will be in its ET9 flagship sedan coming 2025. The 5-nanometer chip, called the Shenji NX9031, has more than 50 billion transistors, supports 32-core CPUs, and is supposedly comparable to four Nvidia Drive Orin X chips.

    Fighting back in January, Li Auto announced that it will be using Nvidia’s Drive Thor autonomous driving chip in its 2025 next-gen EVs, as a successor to the Drive Orin. Drive Thor supposedly has 2,000 TOPS of performance, eight times that of Drive Orin.

    Finally, aside from such advances in chip technology and autonomous coverage rollouts in China, Asian brands will clearly not be content to stay in their home countries. Last month, XPeng, already expanding into Europe, confirmed its intentions to bring its self-driving tech worldwide in 2025. “We look forward to enabling overseas users to access XPeng’s autonomous driving already available in China,” Xiaopeng He, the firm’s founder and CEO, said.

    XPeng’s ambitions are not confined to its own cars, either. In July last year, Volkswagen announced an investment of $700 million in XPeng, purchasing a 4.99 percent stake in the company. The plan is to collaborate with XPeng to develop two VW-brand electric models for the midsize segment in the Chinese market in 2026.

    The contrast between XPeng and Apple’s now defunct Project Titan, both founded 10 years ago, could not be more stark.

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