The magical realism of Tesla
YOU HAVE to hand it to the “technoking”. For all his impish self-aggrandisement, mockery of deadlines, baiting of regulators and soon-to-be-sideline as a “Saturday Night Live” comedy host, Elon Musk is deadly serious about technology. So serious, in fact, that as he was discussing the nitty-gritty of neural networks on an earnings call on April 26th, he did not miss a beat when what sounded like his infant son let out a wail in the background. The record net profit of $438m in the first quarter, the seventh consecutive one in the black, came as almost an afterthought.
Such is the allure of Tesla’s whirring money machine that many now give the benefit of the doubt to Mr Musk’s more eccentric claims. His latest involves artificial intelligence (AI). In the future Tesla will be remembered not just as an electric-vehicle (EV) and renewable-energy pioneer, he says, but also as an AI and robotics company. He bases this on a belief that it is close to cracking the challenge of self-driving cars using just eight cameras, machine learning and a computerised brain in the car that reacts with superhuman speed. He calls full self-driving “one of the hardest technical problems…that’s maybe ever existed.”
Amid the techno-optimism, though, Tesla also faces the dreary reality of everyday life. Though it expects to deliver about 50% more vehicles this year than in 2020…
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