All manufacturers have for some time been required by regulators to report any accident where an autonomous or partially autonomous system was active within 30 seconds of an accident.
That is not correct. Tesla counts any accident within 5 seconds of Autopilot/FSD turning off as the system being involved.
Regulators extend that period to 30 seconds, and Tesla must comply with that when reporting to them.
It's a one-time performance based compensation package split into multiple tranches, with options worth 1% of stock being provided as payment for each one, with up to 12 in total.
The AI didn't leak anything, it's hallucinating and connecting dots that don't exist, like the the US exit of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It's putting it up there right next to the founding of SpaceX and writing as they were connected, but that's just completely ridiculous.
And the suggestion that "his Mars colony will have it"(nuclear missile defense) is not supported by the article referenced at all. The only thing it's saying is that if there were a nuclear war, Mars would be safer than the moon as the flight time makes it much easier to react to.
Autopilot did not even exist as a public feature in 2013. It was first mentioned as being in development then, but the cars didn't even have any hardware for it until September 2014.
There is a reason accidents are done on a per mile basis, so let's make a quick example to show why.
There is two cars, car A and car B. Each driven by 1000 drivers each year.
Car A: The drivers drive a total 10000 km each year, and 20 people get into one accident each, averaging one accident every 500 km.
Car B: The drivers drive a total 1000000 km each year, and 40 people get into one accident each, averaging one accident every 25000 km.
Which car is safer? According to this opinion piece it's car A. But anyone that has even surface knowledge about statistics would realize that it's car B.
It would take only 500 km in car A for someone to have gotten into an accident on average, while for Car B it would be 25000 km. Drivers of car A are therefore on average 50 times more likely to get into an accident. Statistically, if car A was driven as far as car B, every single driver would have had two accidents each.
Conclusion: It is impossible to reach the conclusion in the title given only accidents per total number of drivers. More data is needed.
They did not say Starship was a requirement for Starlink, they said they could use it when ready to speed up the rollout.
SpaceX has been launching the Gen2 satellites, originally intended to be launched on Starship, on Falcon 9 instead.
> and I suspect at an inflated price compared to purely commercial launches
They do cost more than commercial launches, but that is because they have extra requirements that commercial customers don't, and that adds a bunch to the total cost to fly those missions.
> You are fully aware that the launch cost of the JWST is an insignificant part of the mission budget.
The reason for that is the folding contraption.
And the sunscreen.
And the very delicate instruments.
And the requirement to be extremely lightweight.
All those things combined is what led to the decades long development timeline, and the incredible cost.
If you instead have 150 metric ton of payload capacity to orbit, you don't care that you could shave 100 grams of one component. Not even several metric tons of extra weight would be an issue, when you have so much spare capacity you could just add an extra 10-20 metric ton of fuel to compensate.
Starship allows a paradigm shift in spacecraft design where weight is no longer your most important target. Nor your second or even third.
Instead you can use off the shelf components that might be twice the weight, but 1/10th the cost.
If JWST was designed today with Starship just around the corner, the final cost would have been a lot lower.
Yes, the cost would probably still have been much higher than the launch cost, but it would probably have been a lot closer $1-2 billion than the $10 billion it costed in the end.
Starlink is not intended to replace terrestrial connectivity. It is intended to provide service to everyone on the planet that can not get terrestrial connectivity, and those areas that can never get terrestrial connections, like oceangoing vessels and airplanes.
But let's crunch some back of the envelope numbers.
SpaceX currently are allowed to launch 7500 Gen2 Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 can fit 22 of them in one launch, requiring ~341 launches. The satellites have a planned lifetime of 5 years, meaning the entire constellation would have to be replaced in that time frame.
So costs then. Musk has given out $15 million as best case marginal cost for Falcon 9 back in 2020. But let's be conservative and say $25m per launch currently. That's $8525m in total for launches.
The satellites themselves are estimated to cost between $200-300k each for the original v1, but the v2 probably costs a bit more, so let's say $500k each. That adds up to $3750m for the satellites.
So the totals then is $12275m over the span of 5 years, or ~$2.5 billion yearly.
The subscription cost is currently $110, but it fluctuates depending on the capacity in an area, so let's just use $100 as a simple round number. Each subscriber would bring in $1200 a year in revenue, so that means SpaceX would need ~2.1 million subscribers to cover the cost of replacing their currently allowed 7500 Gen2 satellites. It doesn't include the SpaceX operated ground stations that connect to the rest of the internet, but they're probably a smaller part of their total costs. The user terminals are now being sold at a profit.
As of last month, SpaceX announced they had over 2 million subscribers, and reports from earlier this year indicated that they have passed the operational break even point for Starlink, which means my conservative numbers are much higher than the real numbers.
There's also a lot of countries where it's not available yet, and given that it's a global system, the marginal cost for connecting a new country is very low, only requiring ground stations to be built.
So to conclude, yes, the numbers add up and they're in a good spot right now. Once they get Starship operational the numbers should change dramatically though, since launch costs are the main cost right now, and Starship would reduce that significantly.
Not necessarily. Tesla actually developed a proprietary alloy for their giga casting that removed the need for heat treatment, as the large castings tended to deform during it. On the plus side, also meant they could remove that process step.
Article didn't give any details how Toyota would handle it though.