Tesla Archives - The Next Billion Seconds

mpesceNovember 21, 2024November 21, 2024

The Next Billion Cars – The $100,000,000,000 Lie

In 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk instructed his team of engineers to ‘hard code’ the first demo of what would become ‘Full Self Driving’. A faked video drove panic across the entire automotive sector, leading to massive (and mostly failed) investments in technologies for autonomy.

mpesceDecember 20, 2023December 19, 2023

The Next Billion Cars – Year in Review

The year of ‘brolectrification’, artificial intelligence working its way into car dashboards, a Chinese EV invasion – and Cybertruck’s domination. At the end of 2023, what have we learned? Co-host Sally Dominguez and Special Correspondent Drew Smith sit down with Mark Pesce to augur the entrails of a very weird year, then look forward to the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show.

mpesceFebruary 2, 2023February 1, 2023No comment

The Next Billion Cars – Autonomous Vehicles: Learning to Crawl

In 2016, Telsa made a video touting their ‘self-driving’ software – faked. Every major manufacturer promised self-driving cars by 2021 – none are even close. Will the nirvana of driverless cars ever come – or will it remain a temping mirage, forever just over the horizon? Mark is joined by co-host Sally Dominguez and Special Correspondent Drew Smith as we speak to GIO boffin Steve Cratchley, and reconnect with Ken Goldberg – does Ken still believe autonomous vehicles are a decade or more away? Are we advancing toward autonomy – or stalled in the high-speed lane?

Here’s the deeply disturbing footage of the 8-car pileup on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge on Thanksgiving Day – possibly due to a failure in a Tesla’s self-driving feature.

A Tesla engineer testifies that the firm’s 2016 video touting its self-driving software was faked. That led to Tesla warning its investors that it’s being investigated by the US Justice Department.

Mercedes is the first car maker in the US cleared for ‘Level 3’ autonomy – in Nevada.

And back in 2022, Mercedes told the press it would be taking full legal responsibility for its driver assistance features…

And of course y’all should be listening to Drew’s other podcast, “Looking Out“…

Thanks to series sponsors GIO and BMW Electromobility.

mpesceSeptember 22, 2020September 21, 2020

The Users’ Guide to the Future #5 – If your car can phone home, can it be stolen?

Now that everything is connected, things know where they are & can tell us. Does that mean nothing gets stolen, or will thieves find new ways to work?

It should be getting harder to steal – but connectivity helps thieves, possibly even more than it helps us protect ourselves from theft.

Louise Sampson is the Executive Manager of Fraud and Intelligence at Suncorp Group.

mpesceMarch 13, 2019March 12, 2019

THE NEXT BILLION CARS Episode 3: The Next Billion Volts

Tesla drove electric vehicles from impractical to inevitable. Powertrains will soon feature a mix of hydrocarbons, hydrogen – and batteries.

Co-host Sally Dominguez toured China in a hydrogen-fueled Mercedes:

Sally felt as though she might have been driving a small hydrogen bomb around rural China…

But at least it wasn’t one of these clown cars! (Well, ok, so it is…)

The history of the automobile isn’t exactly the history of petrol – even if that’s what Carl Benz used in his internal combustion engine, there have always been lots of alternatives, including the Stanley ‘Steamer’:

1912 Stanley ‘Steamer’ (photo credit: Stephen Foskett)

The London Electrobus Company pioneered electric public transport over a hundred years ago – promoting itself as the cleaner alternative on London’s dirty streets:

Automobiles can even run on compressed air, as in the TATA/MDI OneCat:

Special correspondent Drew Smith talks to automotive design legend Mate Rimac about what it takes to design electric automobiles.