How long can Tesla's self-produced chip road go?
At least from the perspective of tangible products that have already been on the road, Tesla Inc. has long been considered the leader in autonomous driving.
The automaker first introduced the autopilot in October 2014. After trials, it did not have a full autopilot function and could be said to be an auxiliary function. This means that Tesla wants the driver to pay attention to the road while driving and put his hand on the steering wheel.
Autopilot is now considered a secondary driving function. The equipment currently powered by Tesla's autonomous driving platform is produced by NVIDIA.
However, Tesla has made it clear that he hopes to build his own chip to achieve his ambition in the field of autonomous driving. That's why it digged Jim Keller from AMD two years ago. Prior to this, Keller played an important role in developing A4 and A5 processors for Apple.
For the past two years he has been Vice President of Tesla and a leader in the Autopilot platform. Last Tuesday was Keller's last day at Tesla, which was another key figure for the automaker to leave during the year. Pete Bannon will take over the hardware program of Autopilot, and Andrej Karpathy will be responsible for the autopilot software.
Tesla's autonomous driving strategyWhat I have been unable to understand is why Tesla feels that it should build its own hardware. Although the products currently used are not tailor-made for Tesla, they perform quite well, especially for NVIDIA products.
NVIDIA can be a leader in autonomous driving.
In the speech of NVIDIA founder and CEO Huang Renxun, it is clear that the company has put a lot of energy and money into the product.
At present, Tesla's funds are not sufficient. The company's production dilemma highlights the company's financial stress, despite CEO Elon? Elon Musk predicts profitability and positive cash flow in the third and fourth quarters, but it is unclear whether the automaker can achieve this.
In fact, this seems to go through a long period of time. For Tesla, short-term profitability did not help because it was carrying $11 billion in debt and is currently generating negative free cash flow. The company's recent recruitment boom on the production line may also weigh the company's gross margin, although it is possible to meet production targets, but this does not help the company's finances.
Sorry, I am digressing.
So what kind of situation does Tesla face now? It's hard to say what it will do now. Keller's absence does not mean that the company will give up producing its own chips, of course, I still don't know why it continues to advance. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop these chips, and it may take longer. Is Tesla thinking that it has something that no other industry has?
This is the only explanation I can think of. Just like the production line, perhaps the best way is for Tesla to admit that he made a mistake.
What needs to be clarified is that I am not saying that it is a bad idea to press and not to see if it can produce better results. I just think that investing huge amounts of money in this project is not a good idea, especially when Tesla lacks funds, and NVIDIA has almost created a powerful autonomous driving ecosystem.
It's like Tesla's own production of tires, or the smelting of aluminum itself, which is useless. To build a car, it should be:
A + B + C = D; sell it to E and get the profit of F.
It’s hard to know how easy it is to do – we are not saying that it is easy to make a car. But Tesla has no reason to increase the difficulty.
A car consultant recently dismantled a Model 3. He likes this car very much, but he thinks Tesla is completely wrong. If it works with a manufacturing contractor, the carmaker may use Model 3 to crush its competitors, "to beat all opponents completely."
The same is true for autopilot hardware. NVIDIA is the best, and Tesla can use it to build the best hardware products. Autopilot software is what it should do and stop trying to beat NVIDIA in its own game.
This is useless work. Even if it is useful, it is not clear whether it is worth the time or money cost of returning.
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