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They shut down model x and s production to retool those Fremont lines for Optimus robots. They actually are making them btw. They’re using them in their own factories currently just like they used the Tesla semi for like two years for their own freight before selling them to the public.

> They shut down model x and s production to retool those Fremont lines for Optimus robots.

Another narrative that also fits the facts is that demand for their cars is so bad that they had to idle the X and S lines at that factory and they used Optimus as an excuse.

If demand was booming they'd set up a new facility to manufacture Optimus rather than dismantling a car factory


They’ve wanted to shut down the s and x lines since the y and 3 were first being manufactured at scale. His timelines are always wrong but Elon has said this for years.

That must be why the Model Y is the best selling car in the world - low demand.

Tesla’s machine vision research wing became xAI and the compute and resource were transferred over. SpaceX then bought cursor.ai, a small but goated frontier lab. They merged cursor with xAI and it’s now SpaceXAI. So each Tesla uses models trained by SpaceX AI.

The model s has always had Inconel in the frame for strength since relatively early on. But the Inconel came from SpaceX. Inconel is primarily used in aerospace applications. It made the frame of the model s so strong it broke the NTHSA machine used to test rollover strength. Look this up it is easy to verify.

SpaceX materials science has always been a big part of Tesla’s success since the very early beginning. Likewise inversely.


Ok I looked this up because I found it very strange.

Inconel would not be a good choice for an automobile frame. Not only is it expensive and heavy it also can be pretty brittle. You want a frame that's strong but ductile so that it will absorb impact energy.

From what I've been able to find, Tesla uses inconel in some battery components. This makes sense because the thing inconel is really good at is staying strong even when very hot. This is why it's used in turbines and jet engines.

This thread points out that inconel is not unused in the automotive world, high-end ICE cars have used it for their exhaust systems. Another advantage of inconel in this application is that it's highly corrosion resistant:

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/inconel.50251/

So in summary: Tesla uses inconel where it makes sense to use it (to deal with high heat) and so do other automobile manufactures.


You’re absolutely right and I clearly remembered this incorrectly. I conflated the model S actually breaking the NTHSA press that crushes cars to test rollover strength with the fact that the model s does use Inconel. My apologies. I wasn’t acting in bad faith, just remembered wrong.

Inconel is indeed extremely hard and thus brittle. Used for high wear and grind parts on heavy machinery, not for framing.

I checked a few sources (including grok) for your inconel in struts claim as it seemed unlikely. They all said it was false.

Certainly there has been crossover in both directions, most famously in Musk forcing SpaceX to buy Tesla cybertrucks (18% of production at one point).



I can’t see any documentation of income ever being used on an S.

Given that it costs 10x more than aluminum, it is highly unlikely to be useful as a material in a production car.

The frame breaking the NHSTA story is correct but is just well-designed aluminum.

I’m happy to be shown a reference I’m wrong.


from an archive of the “Three dog day” Tesla blog post that’s now deleted. Took me a few to dig up, but I wanted the primary source for you.

https://archive.is/Q7FFk

“”” That was combined with upgrading the main pack contactor to use inconel (a high temperature space-grade superalloy) instead of steel, so that it remains springy under the heat of heavy current. The net result is that we can safely increase the max pack output from 1300 to 1500 Amps. What this results in is a 10% improvement in the 0 to 60 mph time to 2.8 secs and a quarter mile time of 10.9 secs. Time to 155 mph is improved even more, resulting in a 20% reduction. “””


Teslas are some of the safest cars on the road. Even if you dislike musk (he’s not a good human), the record stands pretty solidly on their side.

When the NTHSA did the rollover test on the Tesla Model S, it broke the machine they use. It was estimated that it would take the weight of nine model S vehicles ontop of a model S for the roof to collapse. Tesla patented millimeter wave radars in the seats and got approval to install them. They now know if a large adult, small adult, child, animal, or groceries are in a seat. The airbags are reconfigured on the fly depending on what is in the seat. Consumer reports did a test and found Tesla wasn’t great in slam the brakes stopping distance, and did a report about it. Tesla confirmed and did some testing. They had a software update in less than a month to dramatically improve it to generally best in class. They have so many safety features many of which are now mandated in new vehicles that were not required when Tesla started producing vehicles.

Just look at some of the utterly insane Tesla crashes where in most cars all would he dead and folks walk away from them in the teslas. Some of the Teslas use a very special composite metal named Inconel in the frames. Look it up. Inconel is most commonly used in high performance aerospace applications like space rockets, and Tesla is the sole automotive manufacturer in the world with access to a large supply of it and know how. The Tesla model S plaid seats were designed to withstand 9Gs of lateral force, a thing no other street legal car in the world can do. Tesla asked the seat manufacturer that makes most all of the seats in the world to support this and they laughed at them. So Tesla made their own, and it’s safer than any of the other ones due to its design. Don’t trust me, verify this with google. It isn’t hard.


Pretty much precisely what the US did during the Cold War. To do so, we had to outspend the Soviets, and by a LOT. But the world buying US treasury bonds was basically a credit card for us to finance the above things that result into the world’s strongest military.


KREE!


Care to explain for those of us unaware?


The island of New Guinea is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It hosts roughly 7% of all global species, with 60% of them being endemic. Peopled by Melanesians, it's one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, with over 1000 languages.

The east of the island became independent (from Australia) in 1975 and is now Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, the western half was handed over to Indonesian control following the end of Dutch rule, a status formalized through the controversial, UN-backed 1969 "Act of Free Choice" in which a tiny, handpicked group of local leaders voted under military duress to integrate with Indonesia.

Indonesia has been conducting a decades-long genocide of the people of West Papua. It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn. Slaughter the Papuan people, replace them with Javanese, then bulldoze their forests to grow palm oil.

For more, read the abstract (or the entire paper) here: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/for...

There's a timeline of the history of the "conflict" here: https://www.papuapartners.org/west-papua

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/west-papuan-separatis...


It's ignored because Indonesia annexed West Papua when it was a Soviet client. When it annexed East Timor later, it had switched to being a US client. So this second annexation received a great deal of bad press - including, critically, the Australian far left, whose campaign led to Australia pressuring Indonesia to let it intervene militarily in 1999.


>It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn.

Is it not rather down to identity? If the victims had paler skin and a different religion, we'd never stop hearing about it. But unfortunately for Papuans their complexion is too dark for international media to care and the perperators are with "You-Know-Who".


No I don't know who "You-Know-Who" is, speak plainly.


Happily upvoting you for agreeing on principal with me. I shall likely join the flogging as a result.

I’m sure it will hurt my 11k internet point account.


“Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?”

-- Galatians 4:16


I’m a bit surprised they didn’t add zwave into this comparison.


They're probably only comparing open protocols. If one doesn't care if their protocol is proprietary then sure one might consider zwave. But it's hardly "surprising" that it's left out.


The funny part is that people think that Zigbee and Matter are open :)

All three of them have their shortcomings. Matter requires an unsecured IPv6 network to operate; I have my doubts about it having any longterm future.


> The funny part is that people think that Zigbee and Matter are open :)

How is Matter (APL2) over OpenThread (BSD-3-Clause) not "open"?

> Matter requires an unsecured IPv6 network to operate

How is this network "unsecured" exactly? Thread IS encrypted and authenticated.


What? The entire specification is in this git repo maintained by the home assistant team. Also, they’re on the zwave board now. It’s wholly open, but wasn’t maybe 4-5 years ago.

https://github.com/zwave-js/specs


Source available is not the same as open. Source available does not mean non-proprietary.

Just like HDMI, if you want to build a device that uses Zwave, you must pay for the privilege.


You pay to have it tested and certified to use the trademark. This is why so much zwave kit from different vendors works perfectly where as zigbee it’s more of a crap shoot if different vendor’s gear works well together.


That would be great if it were true, but my experience has been that Zwave devices have consistently flaked out while Zigbee have been more solid.


yes, and also that if someone is buying stuff new, it should be exclusively zwave800 stuff. example hardware on the "hub" end would be:

https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/

https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zst39-z-wave-long-range-usb-sti...

the zooz is this internally: https://www.silabs.com/wireless/z-wave/800-series-modem-soc/...


another protocol/wireless stack? Why can't we settle down to something that is at least "good enough"?


Because zwave is proprietary. There's money to be made here! Can you imagine the lost profit potential if people standardize on an open protocol like ZigBee?


It is so proprietary in fact all of the spec is on github:

https://github.com/zwave-js/specs


Even with a spec on github, a protocol can still be proprietary, e.g. if companies have to pay to use it legally in products


Try to build a device and not pay the tax stamp.

You can see it in products like inovelli where zwave is always more than zigbee.

https://inovelli.com/collections/z-wave-light-switches-red-s...


Do you really need long antenna? I noticed zwave can act as a mesh.


Most likely it's not a super robust transmission mode like LoRa (that works down to -145dBm). Having a well designed antenna with a good pattern help a lot then.


I'd like to use z-wave but as an Australian we have different allowed frequency bands (specifically the USA-market gear uses frequencies that are reserved for telecom use over here, and anything that can interfere with the ability to call emergency services is Very Illegal), and thus the few devices that get built supporting the AU rf bands are overly expensive due to the (lack of) economy of scale.

As a result my home automation stack is a mix of zigbee, Matter (over both Wifi and Thread), and just plain WiFi. All of which uses the 2.4Ghz (and 5Ghz but mostly 2.4 for the IoT stuff) ISM band(s) and is thus cheap and plentiful.

Not sure how many other regions suffer the same issues, but I suspect that z-wave will be outcompeted by the more modern alternatives in the coming years.

/rant


Hey mate, Z-Wave in Australia operates on the 919.8 MHz regional frequency, which is different from the US (908.4 MHz) or Europe (868.4 MHz). They have AU certified zwave kit.


Doesn't zwave use a different frequency, and zigbee and thread are both 2.4ghz? Perhaps that makes it a more fair comparison?


Yes, zwave is in the much less congested 900mhz range. It is a fair bit more reliable as it doesn’t compete with:

- WiFi

- Bluetooth

- microwave ovens

Additionally, it’s a bit more strict with certification so you can easily use multiple vendors for zwave whereas with zigbee it’s often a terrible experience since vendors implement things differently in ways that are not as interoperable. In fact, for a device to be certified by the zwave alliance, it must pass strict conformance testing to ensure backwards compatibility and interoperability.


All it costs is significantly more money and less options.

If you limit your pool of zigbee devices to just more reputable companies, you'll end up with around the same amount of options as zwave and they'll be reliable but significantly cheaper.

You also have the option to find some super cheap stuff that works just fine. That usually requires some research but not much. You can also build ESPHome devices for zigbee but that's pretty niche, to say the least.

Having previously been all zwave then moved and tried to go matter but ended up with zigbee, I wish I never listened to people saying what you are. As far as I'm concerned, zwave doesn't know it's dead yet and Matter isn't going to fulfill it's promises because the corporate interests that wouldn't give you local control with zigbee aren't suddenly going to change their minds because it says matter now.


My entire “smart” home setup is built with Matter over Thread. It’s fully local. No internet access required. With Home Assistant onboarding can be done without a smartphone now. Devices without official certification work but probably only in Home Assistant.


My Matter over Thread stuff keeps occasionally falling over in Home Assistant and becoming unavailable, probably a router issue as I’m using a homepod mini but still endlessly frustrating.


I’m using ZBT-2 with HAOS on RPi 4 4GB. It’s rock solid in a crowded apartment complex. Devices are 90% IKEA and 10% Aqara. Definitely try that antenna and don’t connect additional border routers. Let HA own everything.


My whole setup is, suboptimal, to put it delicately. It’s just running on a NUC that’s crammed inside my AV cabinet, antennas would be crammed in there as well. I mostly buy zigbee stuff but it’s hard to ignore how cheap the Ikea Matter over Thread kit is.


Dunno, personally I have found HA + MoT to be strictly worse than Z2M. It's the classic case of the Douglas Adams quote:

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices.

I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.


I never had any problems with Thread that couldn’t be fixed by pulling batteries from a crashed Ikea device and I have very little interest in how the protocol works.

Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children.

Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor? I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.


But Matter _is_ locally-controlled. Matter-over-Thread is better as there's no side channels to abuse; Matter-over-Wifi also guarantees local control though the presence of Wifi means a high probability of some additional onboard software bloat the manufacturer can use to enshittify the product if you're not careful.


On Europe the 860MHz band is subject to more restrictive transmission duty cycles, LBT or FHSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-range_device#SRD860

In the US you also have the FCC reshaping the 900 MHz for industrial broadband and NextNav. So there will be more competition.

https://www.nemko.com/blog/fcc-reshapes-the-900-mhz-band-for...

https://www.landisgyr.com/br/pt/home/knowledge/blog/Navigati...


This is both good and bad, and no surprise its an American standard. Lower frequencies have higher range, which is good if you live in a house (because range), and bad if you live in an apartment (because interference and crowded channels). So it will compete with itself, and everything on the ISM band (which you have no control over).


Also, Z-wave’s frequency is a bit better at handling things like metal electrical boxes - useful if you live in an older home.

Anecdotally, I have Z-wave, Zigbee, and WiFi devices. Z-wave and WiFi are far more reliable than zigbee.


Zwave frequencies, as well as regulations, vary between countries/regions. This means that equipment isn't interchangeable, something I'm currently running into - I can't get a zwave electronic door lock for Japan while I could easily have bought one in my home country. But I wouldn't be able to bring it if I wanted to.

Zigbee is basically the same everywhere, however the 2.4GHz band is of course somewhat congested.


some zigbee controllers even support being converted to thread via a firmware update


smlights do that! they are great.


hey buddy! are you a coder?


RIP Gerrit


I found the single gerrit user, who downvoted me :)


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