Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My! While Dorothy’s list of animals are not included in Elon Musk’s latest tweet regarding animal recognition by Tesla’s Neural Network, dogs, cats, and horses are included.
Speaking to Tesla’s object recognition abilities, it appears that Tesla is preparing to release an update that includes new visualizations of various animals that may stray across the car’s path.
As far as animal recognition, Teslas currently only visualize dogs, but it will often display a dog even if it's another animal.
This is due to a lack of training, where the car can't yet differentiate between a dog, a horse or a cat. It can be easily fixed by training their NN by adding and categorizing photos of addition animals.
It looks like we'll soon get new animal visualizations. The most obvious may be animals that are regularly found near streets, such as deer, horses, possums or other creatures.
While automotive competitors have made gains in developing electric vehicles after years of lagging behind Tesla, one cannot deny that Tesla’s neural networks are cutting edge.
These neural networks give Tesla the ability to gather live data from over one million participating vehicles. They utilize these vast datasets of real-world data to train their AI algorithms to identify objects that may be a hazard to drivers.
Tesla claims that "a full build of Autopilot neural networks involves 48 networks that take 70,000 GPU hours to train."
While users have noticed drastic improvements in the car’s ability to recognize various car types (as seen by improved visualizations in 2022.16), the likely addition of new animals is an interesting addition.
With FSD Beta 10.12, Tesla added numerous visualization updates. Will more animals be added in FSD Beta 10.13, which is expected in about two weeks?
While too early to tell, it remains exciting that the objection recognition abilities of Teslas continue to improve.
The car knows that something is there, just doesn’t know that they’re horses yet, but it will. Dogs, cats and many other animals will also be recognized.
Tesla’s new partnership with gas and electric company PG&E in California will give Powerwall owners the opportunity to earn money while giving energy back to the grid.
The virtual power plant (VPP) is a connection of distributed energy storage systems that work in tandem to give energy back to the grid to avoid dirty and costly peaker power plants. Essentially, when the grid is being strained, then the VPP can kick in and draw power from Powerwall owners enrolled in the program, and other distributed energy storage system owners, to use clean energy and avoid brownouts across the state.
Here are some of the advantages with this new VPP with PG&E:
Stabilize California’s Grid: The extra capacity your Powerwall provides could help avoid or reduce blackouts in a severe emergency. This way, Powerwall can keep the lights on for both you and your community.
Clean the Grid: Tesla will dispatch your Powerwall when the grid is in critical need of additional power. That is when the least efficient generators would typically come online.
Unite as a Tesla Community: Team up with other Powerwall owners who are accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy and help form the largest distributed battery in the world - potentially over 50,000 Powerwalls. As part of the VPP, your Powerwall will have an outsized positive impact on the grid over traditional demand response programs.
Maintain Your Energy Security: Powerwall will discharge during VPP events but won’t discharge below your Backup Reserve. Adjust your Backup Reserve to control your contribution while maintaining backup energy for outages.
Earn Compensation: Through the ELRP pilot, you will receive $2 for every additional kWh your Powerwall provides during an event. You don’t have to change your energy usage behavior to participate.
In 2021, Tesla piloted a test VPP program in California for Powerwall owners to voluntarily opt-in without compensation. The test VPP program would then pull energy from the Powerwalls when the grids needed it.
“Become a part of the largest distributed battery in the world and help keep California’s energy clean and reliable,” reads a statement from Tesla. “Opt-in to the Tesla Virtual Power Plant (VPP) with PG&E and your Powerwall will be dispatched when the grid needs emergency support. Through the Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP) pilot, you will receive $2 for every additional kWh your Powerwall delivers during an event. Adjust your Backup Reserve to set your contribution, while maintaining backup energy for outages.”
With Tesla and PG&E’s new VPP program owners will receive $2/kWh, which is quite significant. For comparison, where I live in Southern California, Tesla charges $0.58/kWh for supercharging during peak hours.
According to Electrek, “they could earn anywhere from $10 to $60 per event or more for bigger systems.”
Tesla stated that they have roughly 50,000 Powerwalls that may be eligible for this new program.
In an interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the Cybertruck design has now been finalized. Musk didn’t get into details about the design, but gave a rough timeline for production of the Cybertruck.
With the design now "locked", he estimates production will begin “the middle of next year, roughly 12-months’ish” which would put the first Cybertruck deliveries in the second half of 2023.
Musk did not say when the final design will be revealed, but recent sightings of the alpha builds give us many hints as to what to expect.
When discussing the Cybertruck design Elon said they “got too carried with the…,” before pausing, hinting that they have added a number of new features not included on the original prototype.
While it's not clear what additional features Elon was about to mention, we have an idea of what is to come.
One of the most controversial additions has been the side mirrors, which are required by law, although Musk has said that they will be easily removable by owners.
Another controversial feature of the Cybertruck is the windshield wiper. While we have only seen the large single wiper, Musk did say that the final design would be different than what has been seen on recent builds.
Tesla did patent a laser beam windshield wiper, but we'll likely see something more traditional on the Cybertruck.
Another feature we could see on the final build are doors with no handles. At the Cyber Rodeo, Elon opened the Cybertruck door by pushing a button on the side of the truck. The doors also seemingly open and lock depending on proximity to the vehicle.
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