A different article (What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40786891) gives a lot more context to this story about which many commenters say it is no news at all. Yes, it's not, because the Israelis "have been doing this for decades".

But... (and I'll go to the other article)... "But that isn’t a new story. People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads."

Money comes from advertisement. Distribution/exposure is the problem.

Anyone can use 3d mapping and geofencing. That's not a disqualifier.

As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car, then it's close enough to autonomy to count as "closer" and to be useful.

"Anyone can use 3d mapping and geofencing" - that shows you their limitations and also doesn't qualify for "completely autonomous" standard. - Completely means anytime (regarding weather conditions or time of the day), anywhere (no geofencing) and completely adaptive behavior to the permanently and randomly driving conditions humans deal with while driving. Pattern recognition software alone (A.I.) would never be able to match human driving performances.

"As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car" - the entire gig is way to expensive and requires "time travel" level of scientific achievements, which is 100% fiction and 0% reality.

> doesn't qualify for "completely autonomous" standard

No, but it does qualify for "closer to reality today than they were 5 years ago"

> Pattern recognition software alone (A.I.) would never be able to match human driving performances.

That's okay. A trained human can do much better than necessary, and geofenced pattern recognition software doesn't have to be as good, especially because it should have better reaction times and braking force than a human.

> "As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car" - the entire gig is way to expensive and requires "time travel" level of scientific achievements, which is 100% fiction and 0% reality.

Why?

If you can run a fleet of 300 cars with 30 people, that's already enough to make tons of money once you get well-established. You don't need any scientific improvements for that, let alone the ones you're exaggerating.

"No, but it does qualify for" - please check the statement my comment was responding to. The "1 step forward, 3 steps back" way the automation sector does R&D is not moving towards reality, is moving towards confusing the public to justify their pitch to eventual investors. "That's okay." - Maybe for you, but not for investors and for the market. "Why?" - It's unsustainable, requiring resources (provided at this point by naïve investors) that commercialization can't provide. Just look at the over $100 billion wasted on this hallucination with zero actual returns. Investors expect palpable returns, not promises and delays.

> 1 step forward, 3 steps back

What are the steps back?

They're slow but they're improving. And they don't need to reach their original lofty goal.

> "Why?" - It's unsustainable

Sorry, the "Why" was directed at the level of scientific achievement you claim they need.

"What are the steps back?" - every step forward, no matter in which direction, requires more computing power from a limited computing source that gets power from a limited power source (limited because they are mobile not plugged to a network). By using more computing, the system would prioritize towards the "step forward", allocating less resources to other processes (other sensors or the new electronic system of that vehicle). More computing power (when more essential processes get to have better performance) is requiring more electricity, from a solely electric vehicle with a limited battery capacity, that ultimately would generate shorter battery range available. The more computing power and more battery power you add on any vehicle, the more you increase the vehicle manufacturing or acquiring costs.

"the level of scientific achievement" - every single step, every single minute and every single individual (the financial input), is prohibitively expensive for this R&D project, and it is not justified by any means by the results (the financial output), Companies and investors don't care about progress. They care about profits, and, in case progress would stay in their path to make profits, they'll fight against it. You should check waymo salaries, hardware prices, operations costs, and fleet management costs. From operational POV, every mile covered by those vehicles translates into a price payed by the company, money that are not recovered whatsoever at this point. Vehicle lifecycle, insurance, maintenance, cleaning and the electricity used, adds up very quickly and could go as high as half a billion dollars per year - "Argo has about 1,300 employees and is likely burning through at least $500 million a year, industry participants say." (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/argo-ai-planning-pub...). Now remember how in business, any investor usually expects to make 10 times his or her investment, in this case (the Argo.ai example) meaning that the profits (after all expenses and taxes are substracted) to be around $5 billion per year. This is the reason why Ford decided to shut down Argo, which was burning half a Billion a year with no end in sight. To directly address your statement - the scientific level needed would require way too much money to justify the road to accomplish it. Basically, all those parts interested either do not have those money, or are part of a business model that requires substantial returns on a relatively short term, and cannot afford to finance projects with constantly moving delivery dates for fictional ideas.

Does it matter? They are functional and safe enough for most sunbelt cities. We may not have FSD from day one but what we do have is leagues ahead of what's possible 5 years ago.

What these failing companies are doing for almost 15 years now is 1 step forward, 3 steps back while promising they are 6 months away from the impossible. A.I. is only pattern recognition software statistical tool, that has zero capability of learning by itself from previous experience, and that shows you how any business designed around updating the constantly changing environmental data required to make the robots operate at a decent level, is prohibitively expensive.

This is not news. He is saying that for at least two years now - https://reason.com/video/2020/02/24/george-hotz-fully-self-d...

“ you'll always end up with idiots.” - so hardcore ‘self driving’ cars believers, the people that actually put their money where their mouth is, those that purchase and are eager to use and test the Autopilot and the FSD are - and using your word here - always idiots? Like pipe dream religious cult world saving idiots?

You should try this https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php. Move the map on your location and see the impact radius.

This tells you nothing about number of people that would die as a result. Remember what happened to global trade when 1 ship was stuck in Suesz?

It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve.

It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days

I've played with the nuke map occasionally for years, though I've never taken it too seriously in terms of estimating realistic damage. I'm not sure what targets would be hit, and by which bombs, and even then, the circles don't provide a holistic, long-term description of damage. But it is a lot of fun.

The self proclaimed "Robocar Specialist' is no specialist, is an investor - see the bottom of the article "I founded ClariNet, the world's first internet based business, am Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a director of the Foresight Institute. My current passion in self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google's car team in its early years and am an advisor and/or investor for car OEMs and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I am founding faculty and computing chair for Singularity University, and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe."

And, by the way, in 2020 he was writing .... New Tesla Autopilot Statistics Show It’s Almost As Safe Driving With It As Without - https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...

> And, by the way, in 2020 he was writing .... New Tesla Autopilot Statistics Show It’s Almost As Safe Driving With It As Without - https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...

This is misleading though - to read the title, you'd be wondering why the change in perspective. But if you read the article, it makes note of the fact that these are Tesla's statistics, not anyone else. Some choice quotes:

"The report they publish is highly misleading, and strongly suggests the answer is “greatly safer with it on.” That’s not true, and the most recent quarter numbers show it was probably slightly safer with Autopilot off."

"At first reading, the Autopilot number looks almost twice as good as the non-Autopilot number. The problem is, this is what you would expect, because according to research at MIT, 94% of Autopilot use is on limited access highways."

Your comment seems like a classic ad-hominem—attacking the author rather than the point he is making. I don't see how it's relevant to the content of the video. I watched the whole thing and found it to be non-sensationalist to the point of bordering on milquetoast, with clear claims and backing examples.

(And, although your argument doesn't hold any merit, I do think it's reasonable to call someone with the bio you provided a "robocar specialist.")

You should put that "100 million miles driven" from your charts in perspective.

Do you really understand how much is that 100 million miles in order to comprehend how rare such events occur in real life?

Let’s say there are 100 injuries for ever 100M miles driven. That’s 1 injury every 1M miles driven. Let’s say the average driver drives 10K miles per year. That means 1 in 100 drivers are injured every year. Not super likely, but not super unlikely either.

"That’s 1 injury every 1M miles driven." - so if the driver covers 10.000 miles per year, that driver needs to drive 100 years for him/her to be injured in a crash.

That's not how probabilities work... The probability of being in a crash after N years would be 1 - 0.99^N. So after 100 years you only have a 63% chance of being in an accident. After 50 years, you have a 39% chance.

These guys (pay attention to who they are), when referring to the same calculation but regarding deaths per 100 million miles, disagree with your opinion:

Chris Urmson in his Recode Decode interview – “Well, it’s not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and monitor it decays with time. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they ever see that.” – https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-dri... or Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair – “Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair says you get to 90 percent automation pretty quickly once you understand the technology you need. “It takes a lot, lot longer to get to 96 or 97,” he says. “You have a curve, and those last few percentage points are really difficult.” Almost every time auto executives talk about the promise of self-driving cars, they cite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistic that shows human error is the “critical reason” for all but 6 percent of car crashes. But that’s kind of misleading, says Nair. “If you look at it in terms of fatal accidents and miles driven, humans are actually very reliable machines. We need to create an even more reliable machine.” – https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv... or prof. Raj Rajkumar head of Carnegie Mellon University’s leading self-driving laboratory. – “if you do the mileage statistics, one fatality happens every 80 million miles. That is unfortunately of course, but that is a tremendously high bar for automatically vehicle to meet.” min.19.30 of this podcast interview – http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_...

I was using the stats from the article for injuries, not deaths. I believe the quotes you provided used deaths intentionally because the probability of dying in a crash is so low. Injuries still matter (in my opinion).

"That should be the question."

No. That is NOT the question... because... Autopilot and FSD software suite users are required to remain attentive and ready to intervene in case o a software failure (often seen in many YouTube videos). But because they obviously, become inattentive, Autopilot usage is actually much more dangerous than having the drivers drive their cars by themselves.

It creates complacency because the moment a driver physically removes feet from the pedals and hands from the steering wheel, his or her mind cannot maintain focus on two things at the same time.

What are those two things an Autopilot user needs to perform simultaneously? First is watching the car's surroundings, the traffic around the vehicle. Second is watching and trying to understand software behavior in those constantly changing traffic situations.

No average Joe, college kid, grandma or grandpa is capable of focusing on two things at the same time in constant life and death environment.

Airplane pilots are not average Joes and they are constantly trained to understand flying Autopilot software limitations and capabilities in a lot less stressful and busy traffic environments, two of their main job requirements being discipline and responsibility. That is not the case with the average driver on the road.

I think OP is right with what the ultimate question should be.

Let's agree that a normal driver without autopilot (ND) is mostly attentive, with occasional attention lapses (frequency depending on the individual).

That same normal driver according to MIT, is less attentive when using an autopilot system - let's call this autopilot distraction (AD).

However, the Autopilot system, despite its weaknesses, likely offers some extra safety benefit (ASB) - especially if it can somewhat counteract the attention lapses that a normal driver would have.

So the question becomes, does the autopilot's marginal benefit outweigh the autopilot distraction?

Is: ND > (ND - AD + ASB)?

However, determining this would be difficult without real-world testing. In the real world, the factor which matters most is whether accidents happen (kind of the Overall Survival of this experiment) - which is why testing the real-world accident rate is important - and is ultimately the important question.

Autopilot creates a false sense of safety, as long as the people that payed for it and are eventually using it, are (by their own standards that made them buy it) not good at driving and not interested to get better at it.

But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.

Why a fallacy? Because the human driver drives everywhere, at any time, in any weather conditions and on all drivable roads. The Autopilot goes on and off based on how drivable the environment is by the Autopilot system detection done by the sensors involved. In addition to that, up to this point, almost all of its errors where caught and corrected by its users, so no one could actually estimate what would happen if Autopilot owners would let the software do the driving for 100%, same thing the humans do.

Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel) the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.

I was tempted to not reply, as some of what you wrote feels like it's verging into axe-to-grind / genuinely crazy / TSLAQ territory, but here goes...

> Autopilot creates a false sense of safety, as long as the people that payed for it and are eventually using it, are (by their own standards that made them buy it) not good at driving and not interested to get better at it.

Or... there are people that are good attentive drivers who buy it as a driver aid - to minimise tiredness on long journeys?

> But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.

Yes, the methodology of the safety report is probably flawed, but that's a totally different subject.

> Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel)

...which isn't how Autopilot currently works - you are asked to maintain contact with the steering wheel and have to prove it by providing torque on the wheel every few seconds. (Yes,

> the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.

...really, just... what?

a) where does this (frankly ludicrous) 20 seconds statistic come from? b) you're not accounting for (the many?) people who might not be actively driving when Autopilot is functioning (that's the point, of course) but are still watching the road, mirrors, maintaining situational awareness, etc.

The autopilot system, including the inattentive driver, is the system currently. We don't need to test what happens if ONLY the software drivers, that is not is what happening.

Based on my own observation, Tesla drivers, despite being supposedly inattentive, catch a fair number of errors in autopilot. So they are part of the system.

That factor (human involvement, even if imperfect) coupled with the overall safety of the tesla approach (which includes safety benefits in a whole range of areas) may mean that despite this supposed "expose" of the "inattentive" driver the system is safer overall.

One thing folks "exposing" tesla drivers seem to assume is that non-tesla drivers are very good drivers. They are not. It's takes minutes looking into cars to see this. I was just next to a non-tesla road rager who nearly caused three accidents trying to get at this truck.

If places like MIT did some more actual studies on system effectiveness I'd be REALLY curious at fatality rates etc for folks driving Teslas in a normal way, yes, in driving in ANY kind of weather.

Same thing with emergency vehicle accidents which made the news. How many first responder fatalities were caused by Tesla's vs non Tesla vehicle? It could turn out that many / most are caused by inattentive gas powered no auto-pilot cars that are the ones actually killing first responders.

This is a very tricky presentation of the larger image. The document mentions the "Premium Sedan" category market, not the entire market.

So looking at the Premium Sedan market share in the US (which is arguably the most important market in the world) the numbers show a 1% decline in sales for 2020 - "The midsized car segment continues to lose share in the US car market in 2020. Sales were down 22% in an overall market down 14%. As a result the share of midsized cars drops by 1 percentage point to 10.2%, and in absolute numbers, the 1.5 million sales make this the lowest year of this millennium and long before it." - from https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2020-midsized...

So while the premium sedan category (including Tesla 3) is declining overall, Tesla is reporting to its shareholders the "great achievement" of winning that sales declining race.

It seems that in trying to debunk marketing spin you've deployed even worse spin of your own:

> the premium sedan category (including Tesla 3) is declining overall

Uh... wat? Model 3 sales are growing very rapidly! Trying to argue that they aren't because the category they are being compared to is not is... somewhat weird.

I mean, look. The M3 is now selling more cars than Mercedes or BMW do in the same price segment. That's... pretty impressive, isn't it? I don't think that's spin, the E Class and 3 Series are very successful cars. They seem like a pretty good benchmark.

But yes: it's true that people bought fewer of them during the pandemic. It's also not very surprising, nor very informative about Tesla, who sold far more cars in 2020 than 2019.

Can we please not refer to the Model 3 as the M3, an already well known car from a competing manufacturer in the same segment?

The BMW M3 is a different car than the BMW 3 Series. An M3 is as much a 3 Series as an Alpina B3 is a 3 Series. It is ambiguous in this situation. I had to read the comment several times to figure out if it meant that somehow BMW was selling more M3s than the whole 3 Series lineup.

>> The M3 is now selling more cars than Mercedes or BMW do in the same price segment.

> I had to read the comment several times to figure out if it meant that somehow BMW was selling more M3s than the whole 3 Series lineup.

The whole 3 Series lineup is not in the same price segment as the M3, is it?

How could BMW sell more M3 cars than the total number of cars they sell in that price segment?

The usage is ambiguous because it may mean something like the BMW M3 even at a higher price is now generating more sales than the normal 3 Series lineup but those sales are not included in these numbers.

Using the name of a car from an adjacent price range in the same segment is absolutely ambiguous, especially when Tesla is competing on price/performance.

If you want to abbreviate it then call it a TM3 or something. The M3 has been a car for 35 years and it's too similar to the Model 3 for that not to be confusing.

Sometimes it’s ambiguous. In this particular case not that much, I think. That comment is in the context of “Tesla 3” and “Model 3” mentions in the two preceding paragraphs. (And Tesla is selling as many model 3 cars in one year as M3 cars have been sold by BMW in 35 years!)

The mention of "Model 3" in the previous paragraph is what makes the usage of M3 even more confusing. Why inconsistently use this "unambiguous" abbreviation? Especially in a sentence that references BMW?

It’s in the larger context of Model 3 sales relative to other cars with an unclear definition of what those cars are. They compare sales of the Model 3 to the Mercedes E class! It’s reasonable then to wonder if M3 numbers are or maybe are not included.

Additionally the M3 has been a significant volume seller in the past. There are a lot of E46 M3s in comparison to the rest of the E46 fleet. It would surprise me to learn BMW is selling more G80 M3s than G80 3 Series but with declining sales in the segment maybe the “premium” car is the one retaining sales.

The usage of “M3” is ambiguous because at first glance all of that seems possible, if surprising.

Why are we arguing about this? The M3 is a 35 year old name that is in the same segment as a Model 3. Calling a Model 3 an M3 is always going to cause confusion. It would even cause confusion on the showroom floor of a Tesla dealership.

I think the true “spin” is that you think the E Class and 3 Series are way more important than they are because they USED to be important. That’s the cache Tesla is using.

The Germans will admit the SUV are the US market (look at their lineup) and the day that the Y outsells GL class cars, then I’ll eat humble pie.

For Context: The SUV class of the same relative size sells about 3x the sedan.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210108005349/en/Mer...

> the day that the Y outsells GL class cars, then I’ll eat humble pie.

Do you really have doubt this day isn't coming very soon? 2023 tops. Mercedes SUV are niche luxury. Tesla will only shed away price on the Y's due to declining battery prices, improved manufacturing with gigafactories, and their mission of reducing emissions by getting everyone into EV's.

Don't count out Mercedes' ability to come up with a seemingly overly robust lineup of models that cover every conceivable variation/combination of needs for the luxury SUV consumer.

I mean sometimes I think "who the hell needs a GLB AMG??" but it's one of the few SUVs of that size that seats 7 passengers and serves a need for families in certain EU and Asia markets.

Any given Mercedes SUV may be niche luxury but they cover many many niches with their lineup.

> it's one of the few SUVs of that size that seats 7 passengers

Literally the Model Y also. Not sure if this is the need you're referring to or something else. But Mercedes is far behind on EV's and not even close to Tesla. This switch is happening now, if you haven't noticed all the SUV PHEV, ID.4 launch, and Toyota BZ4x announcement. Once the majority of developed nations aren't using much gasoline, taxes will be raised and Mercedes lack of EV will be critical. I mean they are almost dead last behind Tesla, VW, BMW, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Ford, GM, etc.

I have extreme doubts in the trajectory of the Model Y.

Tesla bundles its sales with the Model 3 (bad sign) & 3rd party data suggests they sold 3k in Q4:20 with negative trending.

I agree EVs are the future, I think Tesla was a major innovator in the space, but has stagnated recently and the blind faith in Musk / Tesla is ultimately bad for the cutover

> Uh... wat? Model 3 sales are growing very rapidly! Trying to argue that they aren't because the category they are being compared to is not is... somewhat weird.

I mean, kind of? It's much more complicated when you look at market over market. Tesla sales in the US haven't really grown much since the summer of 2019, and that's despite releasing a whole new model in that period. They've definitely been selling more cars, but the majority of that growth is fueled by entering new markets, not growing existing ones. That's important, because both types of growth have different levels of sustainability.

Pandemic and working from home. I wasn’t about to buy a new car.

This isn't just the pandemic, the fact that Model Y sales just displaced Model 3 sales in the US should be concerning. Also, given the narrative that Tesla is a supply-limited company, the pandemic really shouldn't change their sales at all.

Greatly increasing the number of horses you sold in a time when people are buying less horses overall is a better achievement than doing so when total horse purchases increased, not a worse achievement.

Not necessarily. If you mean by a "we were running against the wind" sense, sure, but if you mean in a "what should the valuation of your company be" sense, no.

I repeat the more focused point: you don't find it impressive that a car from a manufacturer that was barely on the map five years ago is now beating the Mercedes E Class (edit: C class, sorry) in its own price category?

I mean, by your logic if Tesla isn't impressive for what the Model 3 is doing then Daimler Chrysler must be a flaming disaster, right?

I'm not sure how a Model 3 or a BMW 3 Series can be compared to a Mercedes E Class. The comparable cars there seem to be the Tesla Model S and the BMW 5 Series. The Mercedes equivalent of a BMW 3 Series or a Tesla Model 3 is the C Class.

I agree it's impressive myself. Though they probably mean C or A Class. The E class is larger and quite a lot more expensive than a Tesla 3.

Look at their statement and realize how Tesla is intentionally misleading their shareholders.

If Tesla is so impressive, why do they need to do that?

> This demonstrates that an electric vehicle can be a category leader and outsell its gas-powered counterparts.

ICE is currently 97% of the automobile market. A BEV taking the lead in any vehicle segment is a major milestone. Nothing is misleading about that.

What incorrect idea do you think shareholders may have taken away that is any worse than "Model 3 sales are shrinking" that you tried to imply above?

A company founded in 2003 on an entirely different concept of automobile propulsion has taken the lead in a multi hundred billion dollar market. Hell yes that’s an achievement and it doesn’t need scare quotes.

"has taken the lead"

Has taken the lead on the "premium sedan" category market, where less and less people are buying "premium sedans".

What scare quotes?

Let me rephrase it as "Premium sedan segment would be in free fall if not for Tesla Model 3, a car that didn't exist 4 years ago". People flock to Model 3 despite it being in a less trending segment. They could have got a SUV instead, but they didn't. Sound impressive to me.

taking the lead on a declining market (while producing more cars overall) is impressive, assuming that market isn't due to be completely wiped out.

If the whole market declines but your share of the overall market raises and you overtake everybody else in that market that is clearly an achievement.

Given that this is literally the first mass market car by Tesla, achieving leading sales globally over comparable products by BMW and Mercedes is clearly pretty important.

And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.

This is important to point out after 5 years of FUD about how Tesla has no demand.

> And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.

It's very important to wonder "how much of this is EV demand" vs "how much of this is car specific demand". Tesla's Model 3 sales basically declined in lockstep with Model Y's rise: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/15/tesla-model-3-model-y-o...

It will be interesting to see if Tesla can grow them simultaneously going forward, but it hasn't really seemed to be the case. This doesn't make me bullish on any prediction that the Model Y is going to be the best selling vehicle globally.

That's not accurate in any form. The Mustang was not a sedan, but a coupe, and Ford has not stopped making the Mustang in the current form. You can still order a GT500 with 12mpg city. They added an electric version, the Mach-E, which is more of a crossover format.

I wouldn't call that a version, the Mustang Mach-E is a different product line. Just shares the branding and takes some design cues. It's like an adopted son who gets dressed up like the father, but has different genes

I'm not sure one years data point makes for a trend. Especially not 2020.

I have no data to back it up, but it seems likely that the people who can afford a luxury car are also the people that could afford to stay home during the pandemic. Personally, I'm finding it hard to justify a new car when I'm 6 months overdue for an oil change and not even at half the miles. :-)

He's speaking of the movement from luxury sedans to luxury SUVs and crossovers.

Just because sedans are not the biggest market anymore doesn't mean competition is over or that there is not still a gigantic amount of money in it.

Tesla is of course also expecting to sell more CUV and Pickups in the future and we have seen the sales growth of the Model Y.

Seriously making the argument that being the globally highest selling car in a well known very well specified category with their first ever turley mass produced car after just a few years of production is not an achievement is just insane argument.