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choripan

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Posts posted by choripan

  1. Ford CEO shuts down Tesla Full Self-Driving deal, says Waymo is better

    Ford has long been rumored to be in discussions with Tesla about licensing its Full Self-Driving technology, but CEO Jim Farley has now shut down those rumors. Farley confirmed that Ford talked with Tesla, but he believes Waymo has a better solution.

    Back in 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentioned that he had early discussions with other automakers about licensing self-driving technology, but these discussions didn’t lead to any agreements. In 2023, the CEO announced that Tesla would be open to licensing Autopilot and FSD to other automakers. [rest of the article under spoiler...]

    Spoiler

    However, a few months later, Musk said “automakers don’t believe Tesla Full Self-Driving is real”, but he claimed they will soon.

    In 2024, Musk claimed that Tesla was in discussions with “one major automaker about licensing Full Self-Driving.”

    Ford was rumored to be the automaker in question due to its limited effort in autonomous driving and the fact that it was the first automaker to initiate the adoption of Tesla’s charge connector as the new North American standard.

    The rumors might have been true, as CEO Jim Farley confirmed that Ford was in talks with Tesla about self-driving during a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week.

    He said that he talked with Musk and admitted that both Waymo and Tesla have made progress toward self-driving, but he sees LIDAR, which Waymo uses but Tesla does not, as a critical part of self-driving.

    Farley was directly asked what approach made more sense (via Fortune😞

    “To us, Waymo,” Farley said. He pointed out that both Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, and Tesla “have made a lot of progress” on self-driving, and Farley acknowledged that he has had conversations with Elon Musk. But he stated that Ford considered LiDAR to be an important part of the picture, noting that “where the camera will be completely blinded, the LiDAR system will see exactly what’s in front of you.”

    Ford invested approximately $1 billion in Argo AI, a self-driving startup in partnership with Volkswagen. However, it ceased funding the company in 2022, and Argo AI was subsequently dissolved, with the two automakers integrating their technology.

    After this setback, Ford said it would partner with self-driving companies once the technology is further developed.

    Waymo has first been focused on developing its own vehicles for autonomous ride-hailing, while Tesla has been trying to bring consumer autonomous vehicles to market.

    These different approaches have been reversing lately with Tesla launching a pilot program for its own autonomous ride-hailing fleet after years of failing making its consumer vehicles self-driving.

    Meanwhile, Waymo has recently been securing deals with Toyota and Hyundai about integrating its self-driving technology into their consumer vehicles.

    Electrek’s Take

    Tesla shareholders have been hoping for those talks that Musk has been teasing for years to come to fruition, and have an automaker validate Tesla’s approach to self-driving.

    It looks like it won’t be Ford and it looks like Ford might have been that “one major automaker” in discussion with Tesla.

    As Farley put it, they want to take a careful approach to self-driving, and if that’s your goal, Tesla might not be the best partner.

    I guess all I can say is, "duh." The thing I wonder more is whether Tesla's already at it's dead end with cameras. I think we all, except for the most Tesla-optimistic, have known for some time that there's a ceiling on what you can do with a camera-only approach. This makes me think that we are already there, or damn close to it, with Tesla stuck at SAE Level 2+ and no way to climb higher, even if some reckless Tesla owners treat it like Level 3/4 in practice.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 4
  2. 51 minutes ago, Captainant said:

    The fact of the matter is, any nation operating a nuclear reactor can pretty easily breed plutonium out of U238 and then chemically separate it, rather than dealing with the comparatively extremely difficult isotope separation. That's how we ended up with Little Man - it's far easier to breed plutonium from depleted uranium via neutron bombardment than to separate and enrich U235. 

    Like we all didn't already know this. 

    • Drool 1
  3. 4 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

     

    I will give it credit, the car does good. But with lives on the line, the car has to do excellent. And too many people demonstrate it does not. 

    This is the thing that people miss, and the most important point. It is good, and very few would deny that, but it needs to be damn near flawless. 

  4. 1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

    Look at how the Russians handled the Kursk invasion.  There is a possibility, and I would not be surprised, that Moscow rations missiles and drones over the next few weeks and then hits Kyiv in a month or so with a  lot more than the normal attacks.  But ironically Moscow May have lost quite a few of the missile delivery systems in those destroyed aircraft.

    I'm going to try to post this in as not douchy of a manner as possible -- "Oh, but it's not as good as the gathpacho I had in Barthelona!" -- but I think a substantial portion of the attacks (most? almost all?) are either via Shaheds or ground-launched S300/S400/Iskanders. In my experience being bombed in Ukraine (munitions AND alcohol, holler!) once I hit "translate" on the Ukrainian AF/monitor channels in Telegram to see what they said was incoming, it was essentially always one of those things and never Kinzals or Kalibrs or whatever the hell the orcs fire from jets. Not trying to be contrarian or anything like that, but that's what I saw and now, as I still wistfully check Telegram once in a while wishing I were back there.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  5. On 5/13/2025 at 10:56 AM, MissingInAction said:

    I'm going to assume the Polish friendship was one of the special ones. 

    In my experience those folks cherish friendship like no other. You're family whether you like it or not. Also you will be drunk and well fed. Very very drunk.

    Yes, a very special friendship with the Pole and the Ukrainian. Only special (making out, light petting) with the Colombian and Bulgarian. 1-3-2-4, although the Bulgarian had just a knockout personality. I would party with her at any time.

    • Drool 1
  6. I haven't seen anything about rare earths. That's potentially more important to a lot of supply chains than tariffs, since the former can utterly shut down production, while prices can be raised to account for tariffs, though not ideal.

    Anyone that is following this more closely than me see anything on rare earths? What a stupid own goal.

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