Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its self-driving robotaxi on the Warner Bros. lot amid widespread anger in the industry over the brand’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, resulting in a rejection of its cars.

  • @[email protected]
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    31 hour ago

    I’m in the market for an electric car. I won’t even consider a Tesla. Mostly because of Musk, and partly because of the shit build quality.

    • RubberDuck
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      713 hours ago

      Wood be cool if some of their pr people got together and setup their own mastodon instance, that they only allow their own people to setup accounts and then they can join the fediverse.

  • @[email protected]
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    2314 hours ago

    I remember seeing reports that Tesla models outside of the cybertruck have tanked. Goes to show which assholes are still clinging to this turd of a brand. Btw I saw that the panels above the door are glued to the body. Lol

    Enjoy your shit cars folks.

      • @[email protected]
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        02 hours ago

        Well for one glue breaks down at borderline random amounts, could last one year could last a hundred also imagone if one came off going 70 on the 15.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 hours ago

          Adhesives are used in many aerospace applications to bond panels and structural elements. Some Lotus racing and street cars chassis are bonded aluminum! Lotus are racing chassis specialists, making chassis for other racing teams.

          The space shuttle’s bottom tile heat shield, which withstood insane temperatures and stresses, were glued.

          Adhesive science is pretty cool. You may want to read up a bit.

          Take a look here. I’ve used their adhesives and 3M, also an impressive range, in a signmaking business I used to own. Not a single sign has failed in decades, weathering rain, snow, wind, very hot summers. We are talking pretty big surfaces, under pretty big loads and stresses.

          • @[email protected]
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            119 minutes ago

            I find your post very cool but I still have skepticism about the application of adhesives here, specifically because they seem to be used on this truck in many places where they don’t need to be. Why use an adhesive over a fastener? In my mind, you generally wouldn’t.

            Also I think signage is a decent comparison to an automotive application but it isn’t a perfect one. You’re basically comparing a mostly static load scenario to a completely dynamic one. It’d be more akin to the aerospace example but even those adhesives are in a very different use case. These cybertruck adhesives have to last 7+ years of thermal cycling and dynamic loading. If these adhesives hold up over time, I’ll be very impressed.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 hour ago

            Im vague aware though my interests lay with metallurgy and old pieces of tech, these two kinda feed into eachother. Anyways my point shouldve reflected moreso on the fact that Tesla has shit build quality that makes the Ford Pinto look like an M1 Abrams in comparison, do you really think they are using decwnt quality adhesive for their vehicles?

    • @[email protected]
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      1610 hours ago

      It’s honestly quite sad to see what the brand has become. I have a model 3 that I got back when elon was just weirdo that smoked weed on rogan’s show and made sophomoric sex jokes. My car is a solid vehicle that feels fun to drive. There were a lot of really talented engineers that built a great product. I’d never buy another though.

  • @[email protected]
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    15 hours ago

    They can’t get their cars to self-drive on their own closed-loop tunnel in Vegas, but they’re revealing a car with no steering wheel…

  • Granbo's Holy Hotrod
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    6218 hours ago

    What’s the plan when all the low skill low pay jobs are automated? With each new advancement, it doesn’t feel cool and futuristic but sad and distopian. Like we all see it…

    • @[email protected]
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      4318 hours ago

      Eventually they end up homeless and then they can be arrested?

      I mean, it’s not a problem until it’s my problem, and then it’s an urgent one. Am I doing this right?

      If only there was a way to Know the crisis is here…

      • @[email protected]
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        1818 hours ago

        And it’s fully constitutional to enslave convicts. So tons of free labor for every company who wants it, and then I guess export everything they help to make since nobody here can buy anything?

    • @[email protected]
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      1016 hours ago

      This would be a good opportunity to highlight free education and/or technical certification for all. Whether it be college (white collar), trade school (blue collar), or something else, an educated work force will be well-equipped to handle such dramatic shifts in advancement.

      • Billiam
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        1015 hours ago

        free education

        Best I can do is siphon more tax dollars away for private education.

          • Billiam
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            28 hours ago

            Yes, but they’re expired because the private school they were for closed due to due to being forced to accept more low-income students.

    • @[email protected]
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      1918 hours ago

      I often wonder this. Who do these companies think will be paying for their goods and services when nobody can afford them? And a little further down that stretch, when they pay so little that working full time still doesn’t cover rent and groceries, who will bother with showing up to work at all? If you’re gonna be homeless and starving anyway, might as well just own your own time and find your own food and shelter on your own terms.

      I don’t think they understand that if they exploit much harder, they’ll be causing a societal collapse that will render their power meaningless. They’re stripmining both America’s labor pools and consumer pools in one fell swoop, and they won’t be invited to neighboring mines afterward. And then the most capable people will understand what is happening and leave, so only poor, uneducated, and underskilled people will remain. Basically Mississippi, but for the whole country.

    • @[email protected]
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      17 hours ago

      Probably what happens in Charles Dickens novel, except everyone has smartphones now.

      But tech bros don’t think literature or history are important disciplines, so they don’t even know what happens in a Charles Dickens novel.

    • @[email protected]
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      17 hours ago

      If you’re not aware, look up the automation paradox: https://ideas.ted.com/will-automation-take-away-all-our-jobs/

      Every* automation advancement has lead to an increase in employment, not decrease. Most often jobs in the immediate sector are lost, but the rise in supporting sector jobs are bolstered.

      Classic examples are the cotton mill and combine harvester. The number of agricultural workers declined, but the number of jobs processing agricultural product increased. Or with ATMs, the number of tellers needed per bank location decreased, but the total employment in the banking sector increased (banks opened more branches, namely in places where it was previously cost prohibitive).

      As more things are automated, what’s being automated becomes cheaper and more prolific, often increasing (or creating) new opportunities. There are so many historic examples of this, it’s hard to justify “this time is different” predictions… Even for things like AI automating white collar jobs.

      *Edit: almost every. It depends a bit on how you count the secondary jobs, and where those are located (automation combined with offshoring results in a net decline in some countries, but increase overall).

      • @[email protected]
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        16 hours ago

        I think the underlying dynamic there is that automation in one industry led to cheaper goods, which led to consumer savings, which led to greater demand, which led to increased employment in other industries that eventually absorbed the displaced workers.

        The differences with the current situation are that, firstly, decades of corporate consolidation have reduced competition and enabled automators to channel most of the savings to corporate profits instead of lower prices; and secondly, the fact that automation is affecting the whole economy at once instead of a specific industry means that an economy-wide increase in demand doesn’t cause a corresponding increase in the demand for labor.

        • @[email protected]
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          614 hours ago

          So if the difference is corporate consolidation… Sounds like that’s the real underlying issue then, not automation.

          Economics has well established that monopolistic behavior by firms harms consumers & the overall economy (that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the first place).

          Don’t conflate the one problem with another, as I agree the erosion of anti-trust laws is a bad thing and needs to be reversed. But that doesn’t mean firms further automating things is now also bad.

          I’d also say “automation affecting the whole economy at once” isn’t unique. The industrial revolution was not isolated to one industry, its effects were economy-wide. Also true for the transportation revolution (trains & steam boats moved everything), telecommunications, and the internet…

          • @[email protected]
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            13 hours ago

            No one’s been arguing against automation per se—the comment you originally replied to was asking what the plan was after automation. Because the marginal effect of automation in the current economy, if corporations are left to their own devices, stands to harm as many as it benefits.

            And yes, the industrial revolution isn’t a bad parallel for what we’re potentially facing now. It brought about some of the most miserable conditions working people have ever endured short of slavery, and it took the labor movement several bloody generations to end the worst of it.

      • @[email protected]
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        216 hours ago

        What happens when we move all the way from manual labor automation and start doing service and information work? Not everyone’s an AI developer

      • @[email protected]
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        116 hours ago

        I dunno, this feels like the whole ‘infinite growth’ problem of capitalism. Sure that’s been true so far, but it can’t continually result in more jobs forever. At some point they’ll just automate too much and it’ll be a tipping point.

    • Snot Flickerman
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      15 hours ago

      Am I the only one who has noticed that direct-to-consumer sales are floundering and business-to-business sales are up?

      They’re just planning on bailing on the consumer market entirely. Expect things like your shopping to be more ad-supported than ever, because they know regular-ass-people don’t have disposable cash.

      Businesses on the other hand, have loads of money to spend, so we’re seeing the economy twist itself into knots to just support businesses buying and selling to other businesses, with taking care of the humans doing the work as an afterthought to be handled by someone else (see: Walmart educating their employees on how to apply for Food Stamps). Why worry about making sales to consumers when businesses have boatloads of money to spend on “services.” So many businesses farm out their “labor” to third party companies these days, everything from payroll to janitorial.

      They already have a plan, they are in the middle of executing it. Our futures will be ad supported, much like One Million Merits of Black Mirror fame. Expect all four walls of your ‘apartment’ to be covered in ads you can’t avoid just so you can afford an apartment. Expect ads and bullshit everywhere to “support” your life while closing doors to consumer access to almost anything. They don’t like poor people having access to information, and right now the only thing they have to fight access to information is disinformation and misinformation. They’ll drop those pretenses once the consumers are locked out.

      “What will happen if their employees are too poor to buy anything?” Nothing, they don’t give a damn that their employees are too poor to eat. They stopped marketing to consumers, they’re marketing to other businesses which have money. They’re genuinely not concerned with what happens to their employees.

      “You’ll own nothing and be happy” is a threat, just not in the way stupid right-wing capitalists think it is.

      Example: NVIDIA is making way more money selling fleets of GPU’s aimed at AI processing to businesses than they are selling video cards to the consumer gaming market. Gamers are like “when will GPU prices ever come down?” They won’t, gamers are not the key market anymore.

  • Drusas
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    112 hours ago

    I’ve been really surprised by how many cybertrucks I’ve been seeing here in Seattle. For a notoriously progressive city, we apparently have an awful lot of Musk fanboys.

    • Flying Squid
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      918 hours ago

      I’m told there’s a hot market for used EVs right now. The batteries are good for a long time and you can get, for example, a used 2020 Nissan Leaf for under $15,000.

          • @[email protected]
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            318 hours ago

            I had one they run but the air cooled batteries and a fast charge connection that is non standard just leaves you frustrated if you try to use it as a full time car.

    • @[email protected]
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      017 hours ago

      Ya I’d grab one if it was like fifty percent off in a heart beat assuming it was one of the awd versions, heck I’d even but a cybertruck if it was like 30 grand at that price I’m using the parts after it self-destructs to convert a different vehicle

    • @[email protected]
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      417 hours ago

      Link works fine? THR is a pretty large industry publication, doubt their servers would go down from lemmy traffic.