Driven to Improve

"Watch this," Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, told us as he raced Jason Calacanis, driving a top-of-the-line Corvette through the streets of Santa Monica in the first street drag race done in a Tesla on February 18, 2008. Good thing the video hasn't survived, since speeds in excess of the speed limit were quickly reached and Calacanis was left in the dust (he soon became an early investor in, and owner of, his own Tesla). Elon was behind the wheel of serial model #1 of the first Roadster Tesla produced. What we learned on that ride has become a deep part of Tesla's story and gave us insights into Elon's philosophies early on. Yes, he was demonstrating the advantages of electronic motors. He bragged that a Tesla, with its high-torque electric motors, could accelerate faster from 0-60 mph than his million-dollar McLaren F1.

He bragged about something else, though, that stuck with us all these years: electric motors could be programmed never to slip, unlike most gas engines, which have to "wind up" 400+ parts to apply torque to the pavement. We got a look at this recently as the co-author, Robert Scoble, drove his Tesla Model 3 through the snow in Yosemite. It never slipped, even while going uphill in icy conditions.

Photo credit: Robert Scoble. Elon Musk, left, and Jason Calacanis check out the first Tesla only days after Elon got it off of the factory floor, before heading out for a street race where Elon demonstrated how much faster it was than Calacanis' new Corvette.

Today, Elon is bragging about Tesla's safety: every new Tesla comes with eight cameras, along with several other sensors, and he is adding new self-driving features every month to the fleet of hundreds of thousands on the road, thanks to an over-the-air update system that is way ahead of other automakers. In early 2019, he announced the production of a new kind of Machine Learning chip with 21 billion transistors on board; he says these will make Teslas the most advanced cars on the road and will make them much safer than those that only have a human to steer them.

It's called Autopilot, because as of 2019, a human is still needed to drive the car in city traffic and needs to be available in case other situations arise. It doesn't navigate around new potholes, for instance. That's a temporary step, though, as Elon has demonstrated full self-driving features where the car can drive without human intervention.

Industry observers like Brad Templeton, who worked on Google's autonomous vehicle program and who also owns a Tesla Model 3, say that Elon is too aggressive with his timeline and that it may take most of the 2020s to make it safe enough to remove humans from the equation completely.

Photo Credit: Robert Scoble. Some of Tesla's Autopilot/Full Self Driving Programming team hang out with Scoble's son at a Salinas Tesla Supercharger and talk about the future of autonomous cars.

What does this have to do with Spatial Computing and especially our Prime Directive? Everything. The techniques Tesla's engineers are developing (along with others like GM's Cruise, startups like Zoox, or the former Google team that now is starting a company called Waymo) are very similar to the techniques that Finman uses to enable a virtual Harry Potter to walk around the real world, and are similar to the techniques that Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and others will use to guide users around the real world in Spatial Computing glasses that will soon come to the market.

Teslas are already saving their users' lives, as you can see on YouTube, as Teslas automatically stop or drive around potential accidents, even at high speeds. Don't discount the many hours given back to their owners as cars automatically drive in traffic during commutes. Those hours represent lives, too. Hours, er, lives, that can be used to do other things.

In Chapter 3, Vision One – Transportation Automates, we'll dig deeper into the other changes that soon will come as humans won't be needed for cars to move around as the Machine Learning/AI that runs the self-driving technology is put to work doing other things.

Things like going to an Amazon distribution center to pick up packages in a much more secure way than having a delivery person leaving them on your front porch, where they are easy to steal. Even in 2019, the computers in a Tesla also watch for people tampering with the car and can automatically record, say, someone breaking a window to steal something inside, and share that with owners via an app on mobile phones.