Investor's Corner
Why Tesla Autopilot will ultimately prove the self-driving industry leader
Tesla took an early lead in the race to develop vehicle autonomy, and its Autopilot system remains the state of the art. However, the technology is advancing more slowly than the company predicted – Elon Musk promised a coast-to-coast driverless demo run for 2018, and we’re still waiting. Meanwhile, competitors are hard at work on their own autonomy tech – GM’s Super Cruise, is now available on the CT6 luxury sedan.
Is Tesla in danger of falling behind in the self-driving race? Trent Eady, writing in Medium, takes a detailed look at the company’s Autopilot technology, and argues that the California automaker will continue to set the pace.
Every Tesla vehicle produced since October 2016 is equipped with a hardware suite designed for Full Self-Driving, including cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and an upgradable onboard computer. Around 150,000 of these “Hardware 2” Teslas are currently on the road, and could theoretically be upgraded to self-driving vehicles via an over-the-air software update.
Above: In its current state, Tesla’s Autopilot requires a hands-on approach (Youtube: Tesla)
Tesla disagrees with most of the other players in the self-driving game on the subject of Lidar, a technology that calculates distances using pulses of infrared laser light. Waymo, Uber and others seem to regard lidar as a necessary component of any self-driving system. However, Tesla’s Hardware 2 sensor suite doesn’t include it, instead relying on radar and optical cameras.
Lidar’s strength is its high spatial precision – it can measure distances much more precisely than current camera technology can (Eady believes that better software could enable cameras to close the gap). Lidar’s weakness is that it functions poorly in bad weather. Heavy rain, snow or fog causes lidar’s laser pulses to refract and scatter. Radar works much better in challenging weather conditions.
According to Eady, the reason that Tesla eschews lidar may be the cost: “Autonomy-grade lidar is prohibitively expensive, so it’s not possible for Tesla to include it in its production cars. As far as I’m aware, no affordable autonomy-grade lidar product has yet been announced. It looks like that is still years away.”
If Elon Musk and his autonomy team are convinced that lidar isn’t necessary, why does everyone else seem so sure that it is? “Lidar has accrued an aura of magic in the popular imagination,” opines Mr. Eady. “It is easier to swallow the new and hard-to-believe idea of self-driving cars if you tell the story that they are largely enabled by a cool, futuristic laser technology…It is harder to swallow the idea that if you plug some regular ol’ cameras into a bunch of deep neural networks, somehow that makes a car capable of driving itself through complicated city streets.”
Those deep neural networks are the real reason that Eady believes Tesla will stay ahead of its competitors in the autonomy field. The flood of data that Tesla is gathering through the sensors of the 150,000 or so existing Hardware 2 vehicles “offers a scale of real-world testing and training that is new in the history of computer science.”
Competitor Waymo has a computer simulation that contains 25,000 virtual cars, and generates data from 8 million miles of simulated driving per day. Tesla’s real-world data is of course vastly more valuable than any simulation data could ever be, and the company uses it to feed deep neural networks, allowing it to continuously improve Autopilot’s capabilities.
A deep neural network is a type of computing system that’s loosely based on the way the human brain is organized (sounds like the kind of AI that Elon Musk is worried about, but we’ll have to trust that Tesla has this under control). Deep neural networks are good at modeling complex non-linear relationships. The more data that’s available to train the network, the better its performance will be.
“Deep neural networks started to gain popularity in 2012, after a deep neural network won the ImageNet Challenge, a computer vision contest focused on image classification,” Eady explains. “For the first time in 2015, a deep neural network slightly outperformed the human benchmark for the ImageNet Challenge…The fact that computers can outperform humans on even some visual tasks is exciting for anyone who wants computers to do things better than humans can. Things like driving.”
By the way, who was the human benchmark who was bested by a machine in the ImageNet Challenge? Andrej Karpathy, who is now Director of AI at Tesla.
===
Note: Article originally published on evannex.com by Charles Morris; Source: Medium
Electric vehicle maker Lucid Group has denied rumors of an imminent bankruptcy after a report from this morning sent the stock on a dramatic drop on Wall Street, seeing losses of more than 40 percent during trading hours.
Lucid’s Director of Communications, Nick Twork, responded to the report from Eletric-Vehicles.com, which stated the company’s restructuring advisor, AlixPartners, was asked to review two decisions: taking Lucid shares private or filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The report also claims AlixPartners told the Lucid board to “concentrate on Gravity production while improving its quality, and to temporarily hold back the Lucid Air, the sedan that has defined the company since its launch.”
Twork said:
$LCID The rumors are completely false. The company has sufficient liquidity to carry its operations well into next year, as recently published in its last quarterly filings, and it has not formed any special Board committee to explore the scenarios reported today. Our focus is…
— Nick Twork (@ntwork) July 14, 2026
Shares rebounded after the response to the report, halving its losses as the trading day neared 3 p.m. Eastern.
Lucid has struggled to get its sales off the ground and into more respectable numbers, but the company is in its early years, when things are hard to begin with. It is also backed by several notable investors, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has nearly limitless money and likely would not ditch an investment of this size so soon.
Lucid shares were down just 14 percent at the time of publication, a far cry from the 55 percent its losses topped out at during the day.
Tesla received a price target upgrade just on the heels of what was a crazy successful quarter for its automotive business, as the company reported a delivery beat of over 15 percent for Q2.
Jefferies analysts are upping Tesla’s price target (NASDAQ: TSLA) to $400 from $375, while maintaining their “Hold” rating on shares, and the strong automotive deliveries from Q2 is a big reason. However, there are some other catalysts that Jefferies believes position Tesla for a strong position in the second half of the year.
Strong Deliveries
Tesla reported 480,000 deliveries for Q2, while Wall Street was between 395,000 and 405,000, as an overall consensus. It was an incredibly strong quarter from a delivery perspective, and Tesla sold well more than it produced during the three months.
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
While vehicle deliveries are not necessarily looked at in the light that they used to be, Tesla still maintains a lot of advantages for keeping deliveries strong. With the loss of the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year, Tesla still maintains a strong demand case for its EVs.
Robotaxi Performance
Tesla has been operating Robotaxi for over a year now, as it launched in Austin in mid-2025. That program has expanded to Houston and Dallas, the San Francisco Bay Area, and, most recently, Miami, Florida, the suite’s first appearance in the Sunshine State.
While the Robotaxi suite is still in its early phases and Tesla is working through things like fleet size and wait times, the company has been able to undercut the pricing of its competitors and has a great safety record.
Merger Speculation with Tesla and SpaceX
This is perhaps the biggest topic that many are speaking about with Tesla and SpaceX, and it is the one thing that seems to be on the mind of every investor.
Jefferies warns that growing talk of a Tesla-SpaceX merger could cause Tesla stock to trade more like a SpaceX proxy, which may disconnect it from underlying automotive fundamentals. SpaceX has a lot going for it, especially its compute deals that have been widely publicized as of late.
Profitability in New Projects Could Take Some Time
Tesla has a few long-term ventures in the pipeline, most notably the Optimus project and Robotaxi, which is launched but will take several years to expand to a meaningful level that resonates with everyday people.
This is something that investors need to be careful of. Tesla’s projects could take some time to round out, so Jefferies advises that these may carry initial losses, rather than immediate profit. Seasoned Tesla investors have echoed something like this for a long time; they knew going in it would not be an open-and-shut strategy. It was going to take time.
These new projects are no different.
Investor's Corner
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope heads to orbit this August aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with massive scientific ambitions.
SpaceX is set to play a central role in one of NASA’s most anticipated science missions in years. The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle in the world, will carry the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is now in final preparations inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where on June 26 technicians used a crane to lift the observatory into a specialized stand for fueling and pre-launch testing.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, whose career helped shape how the agency approaches space science.
NASA chose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because of Roman’s needs to reach a specific orbit far from Earth, well beyond where a standard Falcon 9 can deliver it. The Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, has since become NASA’s go-to option for missions that need serious muscle without the cost and complexity of older launch systems.
Celebrating SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Tesla Roadster launch, seven years later (Op-Ed)
Roman will carry a field of view at least 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning it can photograph enormous swaths of the universe in a single shot rather than the narrow slices Hubble captures. That difference in scale is significant. While Hubble reshaped our understanding of the cosmos over 30 years, Roman is built to work faster and wider, surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies at once.
One of Roman’s most compelling capabilities is its potential to discover and photograph planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and with enough precision to directly image planets that would otherwise be lost. That means scientists could study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of distant worlds rather than simply confirming they exist. Combined with Roman’s sweeping field of view, the telescope could detect thousands of exoplanets, and some of those planets may be in habitable zones where liquid water could exist. No telescope currently in operation has this level of power and capability. That capability alone could change what we know about other worlds, and perhaps finally answer the question: are we the only intelligent lifeforms in existence?
What Roman actually finds once it reaches orbit is an open question, and that is exactly what makes this launch worth watching.
Lucid denies rumors of bankruptcy after over 40% stock drop
Tesla owner attempts resale of Model S Signature Edition for over $260k
