Haq's Musings

Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://www.southasiainvestor.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ

Showing posts with label Tesla. Show all posts

Monday, August 24, 2026

AI on Wheels: My Experience With Tesla Full Self Drive (FSD)

Recently, I saw a news story suggesting that “more and more seniors are using Tesla FSD (full self drive)”. This prompted me to share my own experience with my readers.

Tesla FSD Warning

My wife and I have been regularly using Tesla Full Self Drive (Supervised FSD) software for several months now. It is a subscription costing us $108.16, including tax, per vehicle. Our experience has generally been positive. We set our destination in the navigation system and let FSD drive us. It pulls out of our driveway, takes us wherever we want to go, and parks on the street, in a parking lot, or in a garage. On occasion, though, we have had to take control when we felt it was necessary, often in response to Tesla warning to “take over immediately”.

Tesla Sensors. Source: Car and Driver Magazine

Both of our Tesla Model Y vehicles use hardware version 3 (HW3). In addition to a computer, HW3 includes 7 cameras and four ultrasonic sensors. We get frequent Tesla software updates, downloaded over the air. As of today, we're on software version 2026.21.6, including FSD v14.3.7. The latest hardware version on new Tesla vehicles is HW4. Tesla recently outlined details on Full Self-Driving (FSD) v15, describing it as a major "step-change" in capability featuring a 10-billion parameter neural network. Tesla confirmed that current Hardware 4 (AI4) computers will natively support v15 and unsupervised features, targeting a late 2026 to early 2027 rollout window.

Tesla FSD Speed Modes. Source: Jowua

Tesla FSD allows you to choose a driving mode. The choices include Sloth (least aggressive), Chill, Standard, Hurry and Mad Max (most aggressive). Here are more detail on each speed mode:

Sloth: The most cautious setting. It stays strictly at or slightly below the speed limit, favors slow right lanes on highways, and avoids proactive passing.

Chill: A relaxed, smooth profile. It generally targets the exact speed limit and makes fewer or less urgent lane changes.

Standard: The balanced, default setup. It typically drives roughly 5 to 7 mph over the speed limit (traffic permitting) and maintains an average commuting pace.

Hurry: A faster profile designed for quicker travel times. It allows higher offsets above the speed limit and executes more assertive lane changes to pass slower vehicles.

Mad Max: The most assertive profile, built for heavy gridlock or aggressive urban environments (like dense city traffic). It proactively navigates gaps, moves swiftly around traffic flow, and executes maneuvers with higher urgency.

We drive mostly in Standard or Hurry modes. The best part my wife likes is how smoothly it changes lanes even in high traffic conditions. One particular place where it has eliminated her stress is on Oakland Maze, where her route requires 5 quick lane changes to go from one freeway to another.

Waymo Robotaxi With LiDAR mounted on top

There have been several instances where we have had to intervene to take control of the vehicle. These include loss of control when the front camera is blinded by direct sun at certain times of the day. This problem would probably not occur if Tesla vehicles were equipped with a LiDAR scanner that uses laser light pulses to measure distances and create accurate, 3D digital models of objects and environments. Robotaxis like Google's Waymo and Amazon's Zoox use LiDAR devices to achieve fully autonomous driving. However, like the rest of Tesla's vehicle lineup and Full Self-Driving stack, the recently announced Cybercab robotaxi also relies entirely on a vision-based camera system and onboard AI to interpret its surroundings.

In other instances, our Tesla car ran a stop sign that was blocked by a parked truck. It failed to read "STOP" painted on the road surface. At a local Safeway supermarket, it attempted to park in a shopping cart corral. A couple of times after pulling out of our driveway, it took a wrong turn but found its way back to the correct route after taking a detour.

Rapid development and deployment of AI applications like Tesla full self drive and various robotaxi services, including Waymo and Zoox, have broad social and economic implications. It is likely to make transportation safer, but it also threatens the livelihoods of tens of millions of taxi and truck drivers around the world. There have already been protests by drivers' unions in many major cities like London and New York.

Thursday, July 21, 2022

My Family's Contribution to Climate Action: Rooftop Solar and Electric Vehicles

In response to growing reports of extreme heat and floods around the world, my wife and I are doing our part to reduce our carbon footprint: We now have rooftop solar panels as well as two electric vehicles. In fact, we have had rooftop solar since 2019. My wife Yasmeen traded in her Toyota Prius Hybrid car for an all-electric Chevrolet Bolt in 2019, and I have recently traded in my gasoline-powered Mercedes sedan for a Tesla Model Y 2022. Both of us see these actions as the least we can do to help our future generations. We all need to help bring about the clean energy revolution.

My New Tesla Model Y 2022

Our rooftop solar panels have been generating enough electricity to power our home for the last three years. The SunRun solar app we have shows that our solar panels generated 8,500 kWh of electricity in the last 12 months, reducing CO2 emissions produced by 6,622 pounds of coal and 676 gallons of gasoline.

Rooftop Solar Panels on Our House

Silicon Valley where I live is at the forefront of the nascent clean energy revolution led by Tesla. Tesla is more than an electric car company; the company also supplies solar panels and batteries. Other automakers are also taking their cues from Tesla. China's BYD Auto has only recently been surpassed by Tesla in production volumes. Auto giants General Motors and BMW are both building electric cars and planning to build "gigafactories" like Tesla's to manufacture battery packs for vehicles and homes. Pakistan is building up renewable power generation capacity. The country has also recently announced its National Electric Vehicle Policy that offers incentives to transition to clean energy.

The global transportation sector is a major polluter and in 2020 produced approximately 7.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Passenger cars were the biggest source of emissions that year, accounting for 41 percent of global transportation emissions.

CO2 Emissions by the Transport Sector. Source: Statista

Bloomberg estimates that batteries and electric transmission account for about 40% of passenger cars’ costs. European demand is met by mainly Japanese and South Korean battery makers like Panasonic, LG Chem Ltd. and Samsung SDI Co. In the U.S., Tesla has built its own battery cells at its Gigafactory to manage costs and satisfy demand for the cars it produces. Chinese demand for battery packs is met by BYD.

My wife and I have taken it to heart to think globally and act locally. Each of us can make our own modest contribution to helping fight global climate change for the sake of our future generations. We owe it to our children and grandchildren. The time to act is NOW!

Saturday, February 5, 2022

Bill Gates and BMW Back Pakistani-American Mujeeb Ijaz's Battery Startup

Our Next Energy (ONE), a two-year-old Michigan startup founded by Pakistani-American Mujeeb Ijaz, has received $25 million in initial investment from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and German automaker BMW. Storage battery technology is a key area of innovation to bring about clean energy revolution. Mujeeb Ijaz has engineered a way to achieve longer ranges for electric vehicles from lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries, a more stable but less powerful chemistry than the nickel-based batteries currently used by most automakers. Mujeeb's brother Mansoor Ijaz made headlines in 2011 when he wrote a Financial Times Op Ed regarding his conversations with Husain Haqqani who was serving as Pakistan's ambassador in Washington. Mujeeb's father Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz was a Pakistani experimental physicist and a professor of physics at Virginia Tech.

Mujeeb Ijaz, Founder CEO of Our Next Energy (ONE)

Mujeeb Ijaz, Pakistani-American founder and CEO of ONE, is a 30 year veteran of battery systems technologies. He has worked at Ford Motor Company and Apple. Mujeeb holds 31 U.S. patents in the field of battery technology and energy management systems. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech. Mujeeb recently demonstrated a prototype of its new battery in a Tesla Model S, driving 752 miles (1,210 kilometers) on a single charge.

ONE’s key innovation is the way it designs battery packs. Ijaz, a veteran of Apple’s secretive car project, said he’s landed his first customer, an EV startup that makes medium-duty delivery trucks, according to Seattle Times. He declined to name the customer but said production will start in November 2022. The growth of the electric-vehicle market has brought challenges for the industry, including a shortage of batteries and soaring prices for raw materials such as nickel and cobalt, the latter of which is fraught with ethical issues. Nickel, the metal the auto industry largely relies on today to provide power and range, is prone to fire, a risk the industry is spending billions to control.

Another notable leader revolutionizing the auto industry is Sajjad Khan, Pakistani-German, who is leading German luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz's entry into the electric vehicle market with six new all-electric “EQ” models, according to media reports. Sajjad Khan was born in Karachi and graduated from NED Engineering University with a degree in computer science.

Silicon Valley is at the forefront of this clean energy revolution led by Tesla. Tesla is more than an electric car company; the company also supplies solar panels and batteries. Other automakers are also taking their cues from Tesla. China's BYD Auto has only recently been surpassed by Tesla in production volumes. Auto giants General Motors and BMW are both building electric cars and planning to build "gigafactories" like Tesla's to manufacture battery packs for vehicles and homes. Pakistan is building up renewable power generation capacity. The country has also recently announced its National Electric Vehicle Policy that offers incentives to transition to clean energy.

Bloomberg estimates that Batteries and electric transmission account for about 40% of passenger cars’ costs. European demand is met by mainly Japanese and South Korean battery makers like Panasonic, LG Chem Ltd. and Samsung SDI Co. In the U.S., Tesla has built its own battery cells at its Gigafactory to manage costs and satisfy demand for the cars it produces. Chinese demand for battery packs is met by BYD.

High-capacity battery pack costs have dropped nearly 40% since 2015, according to Wood Mackenzie data as reported by Wall Street Journal. The prices of lithium and vanadium—two of several key raw materials that are used in such batteries—also have declined over the past year or so.

Battery storage costs have fallen nearly 90% in the past decade, according to NextEra Energy. Cost reductions are expected to continue to only $8 to $14 per MW-hour by 2022, or about a penny per kW-hour. For perspective, the average kW-hour of electricity costs about 13 cents for retail users.

NextEra Energy forecasts that post-2023, wind plus energy storage costs will be $20 to $30 per MW-hour, and solar plus energy storage will be $30 to $40 per MW-hour. Natural gas is expected to match the solar-plus-storage costs.