Is this the shifting of the narrative?
"People" aren't underestimating the problem. It's widely known to be an extremely difficult problem.
Musk said he'd have it done by now, and actually sold the technology. People have been skeptical of it for the better part of a decade.
Literally every company working on the problem a decade ago was over-optimistic, but many pursued a strategy that would keep the technology only for company-owned vehicles, which I find less satisfactory. The whole point of personal cars is independence. We already have buses and transit vans if we want mass transit. If you want self-driving to actually save all the lives it supposedly could, it has to be scalable to everyone.
Musk is terminally optimistic on AI generally, including paranoia about AGI. I don’t expect let-the-driver-sleep self driving for a good 10 years, but it’ll be never if no one tries. The technology does not advance by itself.
And Falcon 9, with droneship landing and fairing recovery now routine, is really a workhorse. Remarkable how much they fly it.
You'll know Starship is about ready to launch after they've completed static fires for both stages.
SpaceX will need to get FCC/ITU approval for the G2 satellites. T-Mobile is seeking agreements with international carriers. I think those are probably required for the proposed system to be viable. Spectrum management bureaucracies in other countries, and opposition from competitors will slow things down. It will require a lot of money to get worldwide operating agreements in place, and some of the money will be bribes to the right people.
Amazon will probably have to heavily subsidize Kuiper.
I reckon they hope the market is big enough for multiple providers.
While this particular idea seems theoretically possible, as far as I know there haven't really been proper tests of it yet. So I could imagine it theoretically working, but being really bad (which may honestly be enough).
There's probably a reason Apple seems to be doing hardware adjustments for their satellite communication.
Laser links exist.
Yeah, of all the projects of Musk's to be skeptical of, this one seems the most plausible and mundane.
I was alarmed to see how often pedestrians, and even cars passing while waiting at a traffic light, would just randomly wink out of existence while still in the car's path, or nearby. Sometimes it would show cars parked at the curb to the sides, and other times nothing, even with our car being the same distance away. And yet somehow at one point it consistently displayed a traffic cone that was on the sidewalk against a building. Didn't really give me much confidence in Tesla's self-driving software if the object detection bits can't even get that right. But again, I don't know what software was running on that car, may not have been the latest-and-greatest.
I don't think I'd trust even the FSD beta to drive my car 95% of the time. Or 1%, even.
This is not Full Self Driving, or remotely close to it. Having to take over for any tricky situation is antithetical to FSD's purpose. Besides the fact that "thousands of miles" is a microscopic scale of driving. That's a vacation for some people.
>A lot of these bad situations I think are easy fixes
Ah yes, easy fixes. Just have to catalog all the "bad" situations!
Taking over for tricky situations alerts Tesla to those situations and allows them to rank and fix the issue.
1,000's of miles might be nothing, but then multiply it by the tens of thousands of drivers using it everyday and yes Tesla basically is aware of all the tricky situations and is working to resolve them.
I really don't understand people like you who criticize companies trying to push things forward. At least they're trying, why be so unsupportive?
Though in this case I would say the remaining problems in FSD become exponentially more difficult the closer to 100%.
Why am I critical? Because Elon Musk reminds me of bad bosses and product managers in my career. They act like PT Barnum to the public and throw tantrums internally.
I also strongly dislike Musk's rejection of Kanban and Toyota Production System principles.
After all, Musk was fired as CEO by the PayPal board after Engineering mutinied against his ill-advised plan to migrate to .net and Windows.
Yet more tantrum like behavior with Twitter and Tesla return-to-office has definitely soured many of my colleagues recently.
As for SpaceX, their reputation for getting things done is rock solid right now. If they manage to get starship going, that will be a major leap in launching capabilities. But even just getting the star link network operational, or delivering people to the space station have been enormous accomplishments already.
The only thing that's remarkable about this announcement is how unremarkable it is relative to Elon Musk's other accomplishments. It's a radio on a satellite that connects to a phone. Doesn't sound like rocket science. I'm sure the antennas etc. are amazing but that is essentially commodity technology that he's simply launching to orbit. Doing that cheap enough that stuff like this makes sense to even consider doing is the true accomplishment.