Elon Musk Supports Ford's EV Strategy, but Warns of Tough Margins

By Kevin Armstrong
Elon Musk warns Ford of tough margins on new vehicles
Elon Musk warns Ford of tough margins on new vehicles
TED

It should not be surprising that Elon Musk is lending his support to Ford. The long-established automaker has faced challenges in transitioning to electric vehicles. It revealed massive losses on EVs last week. While critics were quick to jump all over the legacy automaker, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk praised Ford's EV strategy on Twitter.

Ford's Model E Reports Losses Amid Shift to EVs

Ford's first-quarter results for 2023 revealed a loss of $700 million before interest and taxes for their Model E division, which is responsible for the development of electric vehicles. The EBIT margin for Model E was -102.1%, more than twice the -40.4% margin recorded in the fourth quarter of 2022. Ford only delivered 12,000 electric vehicles in the first quarter, resulting in a loss of $58,333 per clean car sold. Ford's Model E business is expected to lose $3 billion before taxes in 2023.

These losses have been attributed to higher costs related to engineering, spending, and inflationary pressures. Ford also reported weak sales volumes due to scheduled downtime at their Cuautitlan assembly plant in Mexico, which aimed to increase the Mach-E capacity to 35 jobs per hour.

Elon Musk Defends Ford's EV Strategy on Twitter

Recently, Tesla was compared to Ford from 100 years ago. When Henry Ford created the assembly line, it revolutionized auto manufacturing and put several car makers out of business. While Musk understood the comparison, he disagreed with ending the competition. Tesla has opened all of its patents to competitors, staying true to its mission: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass-market electric cars to market as soon as possible. 

Responding to a tweet criticizing Ford's negative margins on electric vehicles, Musk acknowledged the challenges of transitioning to new technologies and praised Ford's EV strategy as "smart." He also highlighted the high demand for the electric F-150 Lightning.

This exchange occurred amidst a price war between Tesla and Ford. Tesla has lowered its vehicle prices six times this year, forcing Ford to cut the Mustang Mach-E's price by up to 8% to remain competitive.

Ford's Goals for Model E and Electric Vehicle Fleet

Despite the setbacks, Ford has set ambitious goals for its electric vehicle lineup. The company aims for a global EV production of 600,000 units by the end of 2023 and two million by the end of 2026. By 2030, Ford anticipates that 40 to 50% of its vehicle fleet will be electric, with a pre-tax profit margin of 8% for its Model E division.

Despite Ford's current struggles in transitioning to electric vehicles, the company has ambitious goals for the future, and even Musk believes in its strategy.

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Tesla’s Optimus Robot Learns to Walk Without Vision [VIDEO]

By Karan Singh
Optimus Falls - but catches itself!
Optimus Falls - but catches itself!
Not a Tesla App

Tesla recently showed off a demo of Optimus, its humanoid robot, walking around in moderately challenging terrain—not on a flat surface but on dirt and slopes. These things can be difficult for a humanoid robot, especially during the training cycle.

A Look Behind the Curtain

Most interestingly, Milan Kovac, VP of Engineering for Optimus, clarified what it takes to get Optimus to this stage. Let’s break down what he said.

Optimus is Blind

Optimus is getting seriously good at walking now - it can keep its balance over uneven ground - even while walking blind. Tesla is currently using just the sensors, all powered by a neural net running on the embedded computer. 

Essentially, Tesla is building Optimus from the ground up, relying on as much additional data as possible while it trains vision. This is similar to how they train FSD on vehicles, using LiDAR rigs to validate the vision system’s accuracy. While Optimus doesn’t have LiDAR, it relies on all those other sensors on board, many of which will likely become simplified as vision takes over as the primary sensor.

Today, Optimus is walking blind, but it’s able to react almost instantly to changes in the terrain underneath it, even if it falls or slips. 

What’s Next?

Next up, Tesla AI will be adding vision to Optimus - helping complete the neural net. Remember, Optimus runs on the same overall AI stack as FSD - in fact, Optimus uses an FSD computer and an offshoot of the FSD stack for vision-based tasks.

Milan mentions they’re planning on adding vision to help the robot plan ahead and improve its walking gait. While the zombie shuffle is iconic and a little bit amusing, getting humanoid robots to walk like humans is actually difficult.

There’s plenty more, too - including better responsiveness to velocity and direction commands and learning to fall and stand back up. Falling while protecting yourself to minimize damage is something natural to humans - but not exactly natural to something like a robot. Training it to do so is essential in keeping the robot, the environment around it, and the people it is interacting with safe.

We’re excited to see what’s coming with Optimus next because it is already getting started in some fashion in Tesla’s factories.

Is Tesla Close to Licensing FSD? GM Quits Cruise, BMW Praises Tesla

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

In a relatively surprising move, GM announced that it is realigning its autonomy strategy and prioritizing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) over fully autonomous vehicles.

GM is effectively closing Cruise (autonomous) and focusing on its Super Cruise (ADAS) feature. The engineering teams at Cruise will join the GM teams working on Super Cruise, effectively shuttering the fully autonomous vehicle business.

End of Cruise

GM cites that “an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” and “considerable time and resources” are required for scaling the business to a profitable level. Essentially - they’re unable to keep up with competitors at current funding and research levels, putting them further and further behind.

Cruise has been offering driverless rides in several cities, using HD mapping of cities alongside vehicles equipped with a dazzling array of over 40 sensors. That means that each cruise vehicle is essentially a massive investment and does not turn a profit while collecting data to work towards Autonomy.

Cruise has definitely been on the back burner for a while, and a quick glance at their website - since it's still up for now - shows the last time they officially released any sort of major news packet was back in 2019. 

Competition is Killer

Their current direct competitor - Waymo, is funded by Google, which maintains a direct interest in ensuring they have a play in the AI and autonomy space.

Interestingly, this news comes just a month after Tesla’s We, Robot event, where they showed off the Cybercab and the Robotaxi network, as well as plans to begin deployment of the network and Unsupervised FSD sometime in 2025. Tesla is already in talks with some cities in California and Texas to launch Robotaxi in 2025.

GM Admits Tesla Has the Right Strategy

As part of the business call following the announcement, GM admitted that Tesla’s end-to-end and Vision-based approach towards autonomy is the right strategy. While they say Cruise started down that path, they’re putting aside their goals towards fully autonomous vehicles for now and focusing on introducing that tech in Super Cruise instead.

With GM now focusing on Super Cruise, they’ll put aside autonomy and instead focus solely on ADAS features to relieve driver stress and improve safety. While those are positive goals that will benefit all road users, full autonomy is really the key to removing the massive impact that vehicle accidents have on society today.

In addition, Super Cruise is extremely limited, cannot brake for traffic controls, and doesn’t work in adverse conditions - even rain. It can only function when lane markings are clear, there are no construction zones, and there is a functional web connection. 

The final key to the picture is that the vehicle has to be on an HD-mapped and compatible highway - essentially locking Super Cruise to wherever GM has time to spend mapping, rather than being functional anywhere in a general sense, like FSD or Autopilot.

Others Impressed - Licensing FSD

Interestingly, some other manufacturers have also weighed into the demise of Cruise. BMW, in a now-deleted post, said that a demo of Tesla’s FSD is “very impressive.” There’s a distinct chance that BMW and other manufacturers are looking to see what Tesla does next. 

BMW chimes in on a now-deleted post. The Internet is forever, BMW!
BMW chimes in on a now-deleted post. The Internet is forever, BMW!
Not a Tesla App

It seems that FSD has caught their eyes after We, Robot - and that the demonstrations of FSD V13.2 online seem to be the pivot point. At the 2024 Shareholder Meeting earlier in the year, Elon shared the fact that several manufacturers had reached out, looking to understand what was required to license FSD from Tesla.

There is a good chance 2025 will be the year we’ll see announcements of the adoption of FSD by legacy manufacturers - similar to how we saw the surprise announcements of the adoption of the NACS charging standard.

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