I agree with your analysis.

Technology stocks are notorious for this pattern. Amazon didn’t make a plug nickel for a good decade, as far as we know Tesla’s only pulled a small profit in one quarter, and for anyone who remembers the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, very few of those companies were even producing revenue.

I view SAE Level 3 as an incredibly dangerous model that should never be implemented outside of research projects.  There are some fundamental principles of human attention that cannot be ignored.  (and Tesla’s Autopilot is a great example of how it can go wrong)

The line is whether or not these give the driver the _impression_ that they can disengage from the task of driving.  I don’t think the systems above do that, and they fall a fair distance short of “autonomy” (as in the car making decisions about lane, etc) in ways that would cause a human driver to disengage from the…

Punny!

I respectfully disagree. We have far too many examples of automation making the wrong decision based on problems either in the input data, or the interpretation.

I continue to be a proponent of systems that augment the driver, rather than supplant them. Don’t give the driver less to do, give them more precise, detailed information to make decisions with.  Automation that goes “hey, do you see that deer off to the side?” is more useful than automation that compensates…

Nice car, but not $9K nice - even in really good shape.  I’d think about a  price somewhere in the $4K tops.  (although the comment about the gaskets is a little suspect - I’d give the engine a closer than normal inspection)

You’re really taking this personally, aren’t you? Wow. Just wow.

Oh FFS. Grow up.

I live in an area which sells more trucks per capita than anywhere else in my country.  The vast majority are not used as working trucks.  Not even close - it’s not a secret here, it’s well known reality.  Guys looking for a working truck are mostly buying 3-5 year old leasebacks.  

You don’t read very well, do you? I didn’t say that. What I did say is that the vast majority of pickups on the road today aren’t needed by their owners. I didn’t say that they _couldn’t_ buy them, only that if they looked realistically at their _needs_, they aren’t necessary.

Actually, our house is pretty much sized for what we need. Unlike many of my peers who bought much larger houses “because they could afford it” (and promptly lost the house when the next oil price crash hit). My house _is_ paid for, and mysteriously I don’t drive a Canyonero sized vehicle either.

Probably 95% of the people who drive F150s could do just fine with a small body truck for their occasional weekend runs to Home Despot.  One thing North American drivers need to get out of is the “Everything is Bigger In Texas” mindset - and that really applies to truck purchases.  

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Musk is an ideas man - and he has a lot of worthy ideas. That doesn’t mean that he’s a good _business_ man. He should have stepped out of the CEO role several years ago.

Whatever you might think of mid-80s Chrysler products, Iacocca’s direction saved the company’s ass.  Moving away from that formula was a huge mistake in so many ways. 

I know practically nothing about large trucks, but it almost looks like an International Harvester logo on the grill, and I note IH logos on the Jeep’s windows ... so that might explain the origins of the grill. 

Which is the software developer’s equivalent of “that’ll buff out”, right?

First Gear: Vehicle Autonomy Now!

For those drooling over the WWII-era Merlin engine: