Elon Musk Promises a $25,000 Tesla in 3 Years—Again

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-promises-25000-tesla-3-years-again


What happens when you load more than 200 Tesla shareholders—increasingly rich shareholders—into a Fremont, California, parking lot, and set CEO Elon Musk loose in front of them to talk about the company’s upcoming battery tech? They honk. A lot.

The unusual shareholder meeting, courtesy of the Covid-19 pandemic, had a few big applause—or honk—lines. One: Tesla had begun to design and produce its own batteries, Musk said. The other: Tesla would produce a $25,000 electric vehicle “about three years from now,” according to Musk. The car, he said, would also be autonomous.

It’s no wonder that Musk’s ambitious announcement elicited such an ear-piercing response from shareholders. The design and manufacture of the battery inside an electric car is arguably its most important element. The battery determines how far the car can travel between charges, how quickly it tops up, and how fast it can accelerate. And the battery, which today accounts for about a third of the cost of the company’s Model 3, is the car’s most expensive component. Bring the cost of the battery down by refining its chemistry or hacking its supply chain, and you bring down the cost of the car. Bring down the cost of the electric car, and you make it easier for anyone to buy one.

Musk said the cost of Teslas—the Model 3, Tesla’s cheapest car, starts at $38,000 before subsidies—limits their appeal. “A lot of people want to buy a Tesla, but they simply don’t have enough money,” he said. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, fewer than 2 percent of the vehicles sold in the US last year were battery powered.

Tesla’s promises come with the usual caveat: Musk has never been one to underpromise and overdeliver. He told an interviewer in 2018 that Tesla could roll out a $25,000 EV in three years. Tuesday, he pushed that deadline back by two years—because, Musk said, it’s a challenging goal.

But the Tesla battery project appears to be underway. Musk confirmed rumors that the company has built a pilot battery production facility at its Fremont factory. The company also has plans to build out a lithium mine and a cathode plant in North America, moves that will shrink the travel for the materials that end up in batteries by 80 percent. In all, Tesla said production improvements would reduce the cost per kilowatt-hour of its batteries by 56 percent.

Tinkering with the infrastructure of the electric vehicle business is key to making the cars competitive with their gas-guzzling rivals. Tesla can try to reduce the cost of materials in its batteries, “but eventually, the amount by which you can reduce that cost is limited,” says James Frith, an analyst who heads energy storage research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “One of the final levers that you can pull is to try and reduce some of the margins within the supply chain.”

How a chaotic skunkworks race in the desert launched what’s poised to be a runaway global industry.

Tesla has worked with Panasonic, LG Chem, and more recently, the Chinese battery company CATL to produce batteries. But taking control of more of the battery-making process should allow the company to squeeze more savings out of the supply chain.

Still, Tuesday’s battery presentation was filled with plenty of hedging, with Musk and co. warning many times that the technology they were presenting would likely take years to implement. Despite sharing plenty of details about its newest battery breakthrough, the company didn’t show off a prototype. Observers noted the slightly subdued tone, a contrast to the bombastic presentations and projections that have occasionally gotten the company in trouble with public officials. Tesla shares nearly 7 percent in after-hours trading.

The native battery effort is proof that Tesla is optimistic about electric vehicles, but sees batteries as possible future supply constraints. Case in point: Musk stressed on Twitter this week that his company would keep working with its battery partners, including with Panasonic at its Nevada Gigafactory.

“Projections of global electric vehicle demand suggest that there will be massive demand in the global supply chain, which will create much more competition,” says Alissa Kendall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Davis who studies the environmental effects of industry. “You can see why Tesla is nervous, and why they want to support their own battery technology.”


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September 22, 2020 at 10:12PM

Photoshop will soon use AI to add dramatic skies to your boring photos

https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/photoshop-ai-sky-replacement-tool/

Take a picture of a person in front of pretty much any kind of sky and you have two options. You can let the person stay relatively dark— but allow the clouds to shine—or you can properly expose your pal, and have the sky get blown out and lose most of its color and detail. Smartphone cameras automatically try to combat this conundrum by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels, and then quickly mashing them together to try to even things out every time you press the button. The results, however, can still look rather unnatural.

Now, Adobe has released a sneak peak of its upcoming Sky Replacement tool, which uses AI to analyze a scene and automatically swap out underwhelming areas of sky. Like all of Adobe’s AI-driven initiatives, Sky Replacement relies on Adobe’s Sensei technology, which also allows it to do things like automatically removing objects from pictures without leaving a weird hole, and instantly selecting complex objects with unpredictable edges.

Sky Replacement automatically isolates the parts of the image it believes are sky. Then, you can pick from a number of included sky images—or upload your own—to take its place. Once you’ve selected a source image, you can change its size or orientation.

While manually replacing a sky isn’t that tricky with modern Photoshop tools, the AI-powered automatic mode makes the effect more believable. The most important tweak adds a color shift to the foreground objects in the photo so that they more closely resemble the scene as it would look in real life, if that phony sky were authentic. A golden hour sky looks weird if the objects in your image have the decidedly blue twinge that comes from shooting under cloudy conditions.

The sky doesn't have a lot of character, even if it wasn't slightly blown out to properly expose the model.

The sky doesn’t have a lot of character, even if it wasn’t slightly blown out to properly expose the model. (Adobe /)

The new sky affects the entire image's colors.

The new sky affects the entire image’s colors. (Adobe /)

Photographers have been doing this for years, and there are already several pieces of software that achieve a similar effect. Skylum’s Luminar 4 software is another AI-powered photo editing suite that has built-in sky replacement via artificial intelligence. Luminar also sells different sky packs as downloadable content if users want more options for editing their photos. The Romantic Skies pack, for instance, will set you back $25 and get you 20 high-res skies to insert into your images.

Adobe, however, is still the heavyweight in the photo editing space and its Sky Replacement tool leverages the familiar Photoshop workflow that so many editors, photographers, and artists are married to. When you apply the tool, Photoshop provides you with access to the adjustment layers that it used to achieve the effect, so if you want to fine tune the final product, you can dig into it just like you would any other adjustment layer.

When this lands as a standard feature down the line, it will likely appeal to real-estate photographers and others who shoot in a mixture of indoor and outdoor settings where contrast can overwhelm a camera’s dynamic range. Like any new tool, it will likely improve with time, but it will also likely get better as users feed it more of their own sky images. Adobe clearly tested the stock images that will ship with the feature, but it will be interesting to see how the AI reacts once users start feeding in their own source images.

Adobe says the Photoshop Sky Replacement feature is coming down the line, but you can use it in Luminar now, which costs $67. Some creators have already started selling their own packs of sky images on services like Etsy for photographers looking to expand their library of replacements. Or, you could just get up before sunrise, learn how photography works, and shoot the real thing.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

September 23, 2020 at 10:21AM