Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced at the company’s shareholders meeting on Thursday that the company is moving its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. Tesla is building a new building in Austin. The factory has been around for more than a year. Musk said that Tesla will continue to operate its electric car factory in Fremont, California. In fact, he even plans to increase production there by 50%. He said: “But to be clear, we will continue to expand our activities in California…so this is not a question of Tesla leaving California”.
Musk had previously threatened to withdraw all Tesla’s operations from California because he disagreed with the containment-in-place order that the state relies heavily on in the early stages of the new coronavirus pandemic. Tesla even sued the county where the company’s California factory is located. Musk moved to Texas last year because SpaceX increased its operations there. Tesla started to build its next American Gigafactory outside Austin in 2020 and made incredible progress during the year. “We will create an ecological paradise here… on the Colorado River,” Musk said, referring to how the company plans to open part of the land to the public.
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According to Musk, Tesla chose to build a factory in Austin rather than elsewhere because employees are more willing to move there. “It’s hard for people to afford (California) houses. People have to come from far away…there is a limit to how large you can be in the Bay Area” Musk said. Tesla’s location in Austin is close to the local airport, which Musk said is very convenient.
Current autopilot is far from perfect – Musk
The Full Self-Driving (FSD) control beta software was first “rolled out” to testers and customer volunteers. In the current version of FSD Beta 9.2, Tesla allows electric vehicles in some situations to automatically control the wheel in an urban environment and overcome their own unregulated intersections. However, Elon Musk recently criticized the version of the software. According to him, it is far from perfect.
In addition, the head of Tesla added that the team of specialists is very active in improving the software. The main task now is to unify the program code for controlling the car both on city streets and highways; but this takes a lot of time to retrain the neural network, as Elon Musk notes. Recently, NHTSA, the U.S. road safety agency, launched an investigation into 11 incidents. These accidents all involve Tesla electric vehicles that killed one person and injured 17 others. In all episodes, Active Driver Assistance functions seem to be active prior to the collision.
