Will the definition of FSD be slowly reworded, or are they careful to never state the delivery date for it in contracts. Or will Tesla rely on traffic authorities not approving the technology, so they can say that they've delivered but government won't let customers use it.
SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.
We need more people like him in charge.
Especially Elon put all his money on the line a few times. And he is definitely not just an idea guy.
Tesla's main success story seems to have been the US, presumably due to very lackluster competition. The US isn't a huge market for electric cars, tho.
The Model T wasn't the first car, but it was the first widely accessible and usable one for the masses. Tesla's innovation is more comparable to that.
That said, Elon should have never been in charge of a public company. He's good at challenging the status quo and should keep doing that in new markets. He's a terrible person to be in charge of an established company (which tesla very much is now!)
> Tesla's cumulative production of the Roadster reached 1,000 cars in January 2010
So about the same time as the Nissan Leaf, a rather more masses-friendly car...
The Tesla options are all extremely high performance cars. They're luxury oriented but the interiors left a bit to be desired. Either way the overlap between the market Tesla capture and the leaf captured are almost non-existent.
Hard pass.
This is a terrible idea. I hope it doesn't get anywhere beyond being a research project.
However Musk has much stronger persistence and likability. He can keep promise things and collect money for much longer and be forgiven when delivers much less of what he promised.
I bet Theranos could have still be a thing today if Musk was the CEO instead of Holmes. Instead of failing, they would have delivered slightly smaller machines that work with about the same amount of blood but with better UI and integrated fart jokes.
That said, I don't think that Musk is a fraud. I think that he is amazing in building financial hype machines, thus capable of concentrating wealth that can be used to work on far fetched ideas. Even if he fails to deliver on the high promises, he menages to change the landscape. After all, electric cars and commercial space flight are a thing now, aren't they?
Holmes should have delivered iOT blood testing machines of regular type when being funny on Twitter and could have been fine. When asked when the 300 test from 1 drop of blood is coming, she should have always answered "I'm confident that we will have it in 2 years". Even maybe she could have sold a more expensive machine that "has the hardware to do 1 drop blood test but will be enabled with a software update later".
Musk claimed that reusable rockets and electric cars were the future and people said those things wouldn't happen for 50 years. Now where are we? Saying that FSD is 50 years away seems like a risky bet given what musk has accomplished already.
What I am saying, she should have delivered what she could and promise to devliver better in the feature instead of failing to deliver on the promises.
She could have bought a small manufacturer with all that funding, slap a nice UI and iOT functions on top of it and deliver that. Continue to work on the original 1 drop of blood tests, maybe integrate it into the more expensive version of the machines of the manufacturer she bought, call it beta and use on own risk and the accurate version will be enabled through software update in the future.
Also, being funny on twitter could have been better strategy than imitating Steve Jobs.
Theranos was fraud from beginning to end. They literally tested samples on Siemens machines and pretended that their own machines did the analysis.
They were taking small amounts of blood, too small for the siemens machines and then diluting it down to increase the volume.
So not only were they passing it off as if it was their own machines, but they were providing inaccurate test results leading to incorrect diagnosis.
And I can't believe they got as far as they did with the scam because lots of experts were saying what she was claiming was not possible. Because a drop of blood is simply not large enough to get a statistical result for most things tested. It doesn't matter how amazing or sensitive your machinery is, you can't give a correct result if you simply don't have a large enough sample.
Also, Tesla too failed on cost and quality control issues until they stopped failing.
Yes, she apparently faked the tests but faking till making is nothing new in SV. With all that money, she could have bought a manufacturer or lease buy and rebrand from Siemens by adding something on the top of it. Many big names start by acquiring their parts from OEMs. She could have build on top of some less known European company that sucks at the software UX, for example and keep kicking the can down for the one one drop blood tests. When asked what is going on, give a presentation about the challanges and about the work you did and say that it's going to be ready in 2 years.
You can't know what a research will bring, maybe it will be discovered that you can do all these tests through some proxy measurement etc. In biology they don't deal with "laws of nature" in the same sense with the physicist, therefore everything is engineering problem since you always have the option to go above or below the biological processes.
You can't transplant a heart until you find a way to do it, you can't change genes until you find a way to do it.
There's no natural law prohibiting measuring something something from the finger that can be measured from somewhere else, it simply cannot be done with the current methods due to some process going on in the human body. The task would be to find a way around the mechanism that is preventing you doing it.
"single finger prick drop of blood at levels that consistently correlate with venous levels" is definitely not one of the fundamental laws of nature. They may not correlate but maybe it's possible to acquire the information about the body through some other channels. It's not like there's a single way of surveying the body, right? A specific test can be impossible but another method can be develop for obtaining the same information.
If a doctor needs the patient's current platelet count for treatment they're not going to be able to get it through a nasal swab or urine test or whatever. This is restrained by fundamental physical laws. If you're still not getting it then all I can suggest is taking a remedial biology course.
Blood test nerds can be disappointed, of course. I doubt that the core audience are the blood test aficionado, but you can always make them happy by saying "We are confident that the test can be done through single drop of blood in 2 years".
How so? The very basis of what Holmes promised with Theranos is impossible based on current knowledge. Musk promised something that at least had a basis in reality, and could be worked on refined (not the autonomous driving, but an electric car).
Holmes just promised something arbitrary and then hoped for a scientific breakthrough.
What he does is nothing new, electric cars or vertically landing rockets, reusable space vehicles are not new but he is the only one who could manage to collect the funding necessary to work on these things again and be the one who is doing it with the current technology(which could end up financially sound this time).
For example, hyperloop is proving to be total BS, no roots in reality. Just look what he promised and what he delivered. The trick to keep party going on, if the party is not over you don't fail. "Hyperloop delivered nothing" is a failure, "Hyperloop delivered something that is nothing that was promised but a car in a concrete tunnel, nice CGI and a model of what it could be" is work in progress.
If you can keep the party going on for long enough, ether the technology will catch up or people will forget the original promise and accept the current delivery. Musk could end up being Tube magnate if he can keep up the funding despite not delivering on the vacuum tube hypersonic travel stuff.
Yes, a lot of what he says is nonsense, like Holmes. But the difference is he also delivered big time on some of what he said. I assume many people are aware of his pie in the sky hopes for the future, but that is different from Holmes claiming she already had a technological breakthrough and succeeded in something all the other scientists with decades more experience knew wasn’t possible, and yet not providing any evidence.
Musk's biggest achievement is changing the Conventional Wisdom[1] of government policymakers in the west from "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but a toy for rich people" to "right, we're phasing out fossil fuel powered cars" in the space of a decade.
That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
You will quibble that lots of other people did the technical work. But Musk had the public visibility.
Especially considering that a ton of these policies are about as old as the Tesla roadster. Must be a hell of a achievement to change policy retroactively.
The reason why we have an electronic car revolution now is because batteries have finally become cheap and dense enough. Maybe the largest manufacturer of EVs deserves some credit, but that's of course never been Tesla.
Then why did newspapers only report them in the last 18 months?
There were government subsidies for EV cars more than 18 years ago, and they were almost everywhere 18 months ago. Anyway, what newspapers report and what's the "conventional wisdom of policymakers in the west" is unrelated, if we even accept that "the west" and "conventional wisdom of policymakers" aren't nebulous constructs.
I was talking about announcements of government policies in various European countries to prohibit or tightly limit sales of new fossil fueled vehicles by 2030 or 2035 or similar year, not about current annual sales of vehicles.
As I said, the conventional wisdom changed from "electric vehicles are not practical" to " we must have only electric vehicles" in the space of a decade in which Tesla showed that EVs could be as practical as fossil fuel vehicles.[1] Other manufacturers (VW, Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, etc., are now scrambling to catch up.
1. Yes, the Nissan Leaf was there too, and a few others, but it/they suffered from short range and/or other compromises, so the "impractical" label remained in the minds of policymakers. And it/they suffered from undermarketing, because the makers didn't want to cannibalise their ICE vehicle sales.
And as for Space X, space travel is also nothing new. We have been traveling to space since 60 years and vertical landing and reusable space vehicles had been done before.
All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially. As I said, Musk is brilliant in building commercial systems. This time we have better cheaper technology and these things can actually be feasible.
> All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially.
That was my point. At least some of Musks’s claims were based in reality and so he was able to deliver something. The entirety of Holmes’ claims were fictional. That’s the difference.
As a financial delivery, sure. It turned out to be a good stock investment. So may others like AMD, Apple or GameStop. I don't argue that Musk can't make brands and money, he surely can.
Sure there were a few other electric cars out there before Tesla but nothing with 500km range that was compelling and affordable to the middle classes. There were other rockets too but SpaceX significantly reduced cost and launch frequency. Nobody had recovered an orbital rocket before SpaceX, let alone reusing it another 7 times.
The world will not accept it when a self driving truck does this. Computers are supposed to be perfect, as far as the public is concerned. If a computer killed a bunch of people, there must be a flaw. The fleet must be grounded until the flaw is found and fixed.
How much better than a human driver does a self-driving truck need to be before people will accept and trust it? 3x? 10x? Infinitely better?
I tend to think the scale trends towards 'infinitely better'.
I believe that for self driving vehicles (at least commercial ones) to truly find adoption there's going to have to be the perception that there's still a human supervisor, even if this is a 'polite lie'. Perhaps it will take the form of lower paid and less skilled human 'co-pilots' who are simple there in the truck or taxi cab as 'sin eater' to take the blame when something goes wrong. Or perhaps one individual can monitor several vehicles remotely (in a totally ineffectual manner). At the end of the day though, I think that for the public to accept truly self driving cars in the near-ish future, there's still going to have to be a human they can blame if something goes wrong.
He needs the money to try and as such needs to present it as something that will happen soon to get that money. I don't think there's any other way to go about it. Who would spend on "we don't know if and don't know when"?
I think there's a lot more trial and error in human tech advancement then we want to admit. Especially for developments that take more than a few years. Failure is always an option, recent popular optimism "anything is possible" is wishful thinking. To answer if it is possible you can only try and see. And to really try you need to believe.
But let's focus on the salary package, it is a optimized for growth not for success, those are 2 very different things.
I am kinda conflicted about this, but when I am calm and analyze the situation from a neutral standpoint I always come up to the conclusion that it takes 2 parties to come up with an agreement . Musk managed to sell his way during the negotiation and arrive to that advantageous salary compensation which is basically crafted for him to achieve by basically keep doing what he's doing (growth and nonstop promotion), can't say anything other than "well played mr. Musk", good for him, he managed to get what he wanted out of the negotiation.
However, the lane keeping assist does not seem like a good idea to me. It sort of works, but I never know if it will lose track of the lane suddenly. When there is an exit or something that breaks the lines, I think of the Tesla crash I read about. When there is a curve in the road, it seems like there is a threshold beyond which it doesn't try to follow. So it amounts to an unpredictable resistance of the power steering, and doesn't reduce the driver's workload at all, in my opinion. Maybe it's supposed to be used on straight highways, but if it worked without attention for a while, that seems even more hazardous.
I wonder if that could be a direction to go in - future cars could let the driver steer, but mostly figure out going and stopping on their own.
However, rather than tried to crash, I think of it as an awareness aid. Blindly following it a bad idea.
I hate blind spot assist. It just makes me concerned that I'm missing something. I adjust my mirrors in accordance with SAE guidelines from 1995 that eliminates blind spots.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...
Still won't trust it though
The ACC was great, and very useful in both high-speed traffic and stop-and-go traffic.
But the lane-center tech was useless, regardless of the road conditions. Even with full sunlight and freshly-painted lines, it didn't work reliably.
When I was test driving a RAV4, the dealer told me not to use the lane-centering when in the slow lane, allegedly because people are coming and going a lot. But it was clear that the real problem was that it would keep you centered even as the line on the right veered off for an exit, which would drive you right into an overpass.
So sad that we live in an era of tech where basically everything is expected to severely degrade after 2 years and be essentially unusable after 5.
But the updates do other things too, like help it understand new kinds of signs or to improve handling of weird situations.
I'd be much more likely to buy a car that has pretty good driver assist tech if it were regularly updated. I don't want to have a car for 10 years if half the driver assist tech is useless when the car is brand new, and it will never be updated.
The first one by mobileye is actually pretty decent at automating the boring stuff. "traffic aware cruise control + autosteer". It was actually better than the next one for a little while until features caught up.
Some folks with the pre-autopilot tesla cars were able to retrofit a mobileye device on the dash somehow. I don't know if it still works to do that.
Relatedly, have you ever looked at the urban planning of Brasilia? Concepts similar to yours have been tried under the high modernism of the mid 20th century.
Obviously no. Most modern conveniences - electricity, planes, abundant food etc came partly from some form of big tech.
Self driving tech has a chance to fix the 1m+ annual road deaths. Not there yet but give it a while.
Sure some CEOs can the rent seeking etc but that's what competition and regulation are for.
Isn't the USA still waiting for that low price insulin shot?
Horse and buggy enthusiasts hate semis but people who shop at Amazon love them.
The same goes for people who want self driving cars and the infrastructure they will be supported by. If the world goes that way, it's because the people want it.
So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Let's not. If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
Most of America has no public transit, and cars are mandatory to transit any appreciable distance (Texas, Florida, most of California, for example). That is unlikely to change, and therefore it is reasonable to discuss efforts and resources into improving environment attributes for self driving vehicles of all manufacturers. Roads are already governed by safety and regulatory standards, there is no reason those standards setting bodies should not take input from developers of self driving vehicles.
> If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
Sure, that stop sign (or rather, the roadway segment attributes necessary for the vehicle to infer that a stop is required) should be in OpenStreetMap anyway, which should be used as canonical digital ground truth for roadway intents by automakers, regulators, and roadway O&M alike.
That is pretty weak motivation, can you offer something stronger then "there is no reason" for taking requests from financial interests?
Why don't we invest that money in making current technology economical before we go asking single mothers driving clapped out Ford Taurus's to pay for it.
You conflate scaling Tesla up with scaling the technology up. You want everyone to invest in Tesla so that Tesla can fulfill the promises Tesla made to Tesla owners.
You misunderstand. All Tesla vehicles can use Superchargers. S and X owners paid for the network build out for the 3 and Y buyers (and future S and X owners, which there are less of naturally due to the 3 and Y cannibalizing higher end sales [Musk's statement from an earnings call indicates they continue to sell the S and X as "art pieces" and for "sentimental reasons", backed up by their most recent quarterly report]). Tesla has offered the network to other automakers in a cost sharing agreement, and publicly no one has agreed to that (privately, an automaker is testing interoperability). The point is that someone has to make the investment, those funds have to come from someone's pocket. The US government didn't cough up significant EV charger funds until this year as part of COVID relief [1] (and the goal is for 500k chargers by 2030 ಠ_ಠ). As of February 18, 2021, Tesla operates over 23,277 Superchargers in over 2,564 stations worldwide (an average of 9 chargers per station). Tesla's Supercharger network build was started in 2012 [2].
> You conflate scaling Tesla up with scaling the technology up. You want everyone to invest in Tesla so that Tesla can fulfill the promises Tesla made to Tesla owners.
No. I don't care if you invest in Tesla. I'm not invested in Tesla. It won't even matter if you invest in Tesla (institutional money and index funds are driving the show there, retail is just along for the ride). You're arguing that someone should come along and invest in self driving for everyone's mutual benefit, and that entity doesn't exist. Tesla likely won't even be held accountable for false marketing if they can't deliver on FSD other than a class action (for those who were savvy enough to opt out of arbitration) where purchasers receive a trivial payout, attorneys walk away with a chunk of change, but it's a slap on the wrist compared to revenue and enterprise value (which was able to grow faster than the potential penalty cost of Musk's tenuous promises). Not saying it's fair, nor right, just how it's always played out.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... (Control-F "EV chargers")
[2] https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-motors-launches-rev... ("Tesla Motors Launches Revolutionary Supercharger Enabling Convenient Long Distance Driving", September 24th, 2012)
Almost exactly a year ago, the article below was published talking about this exact thing. Since companies tried restricting class action lawsuits, there are now instances of death by 1,000 arbitrations.
Judge William Alsup, who also handled Oracle vs. Google, is quoted:
"Your law firm and all the defense law firms have tried for 30 years to keep plaintiffs out of court, and so finally someone says, ‘OK, we’ll take you to arbitration,’ and suddenly it’s not in your interest anymore. Now you’re wiggling around, trying to find some way to squirm out of your agreement. There is a lot of poetic justice here."
The companies made this bed, and they don't seem to like laying in it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/business/arbitration-over...
The chargers should be open to all makes and models of EV. Single brand plugs and chargers is wasteful infrastructure.
Tesla switched to CCS in Europe. They should switch to CCS in the US as well. The next step is to open the chargers to all EVs like the other charging networks do.
You can fuel an ICE car at any fuel station so you should be able to charge an EV at any charging station. Not being able to do so makes EVs less practical than internal combustion vehicles.
Like we did for regular cars when they first became a thing?
This is a fundamental thing. Robot cars that can't interact with humans without killing them at a greater rate than humans do are not self driving.
Humans use road signs and lights and... We created separate, additional infrastructure for ourselves as drivers. Why wouldn't we add infra to "help" autonomous cars? Can't a car that senses RFIDs at every corner be considered autonomous, full self-driving? How is that different from sensing road markings via camera?
If the issue is just a terminology one, to distinguish "full self driving" versus "full self driving with fully self-contained reasoning" or whatever I must object - that's not how these terms get defined.
Tesla is arguably misusing the term "full" because it doesn't operate to the level we'd expect; not because of whatever resources it uses to function
If this is too long -
tl;dr: I think the absolute majority of people won't mind calling a car that requires _any_ additional infrastructure (including communication with other cars) a "full self-driving" car. As long as it drives itself 100% of the time without a human driver, it's full self driving.
If a robot can't deal with a human cyclist or someone crossing the street the that is not remotely self driving.
That is not the bar to pass here, as robot drivers have already surpassed it. L5 is way beyond that.
So, when you said that "Tesla cars" kill humans at a lower rate than "human drivers", could you provide a source for that? Or did you mean the regular claim by Musk about teslas being safer by 100% than an average driver, which means that an average tesla car while running autopilot in almost always highway conditions in almost always sunny conditions has lower fatalities than the average human driver, who will skew older and more accident prone, driving on average roads, in average conditions, with the average 10 year old car with less safety features.
Never in any of these statements have i seen any discussion of pedestrians deaths, but it makes sense right? How many pedestrians are on highways where autopilot is mostly used.
Trains can't pass each other, so you will need multiple lines with lots of trains, and they don't serve all transport needs unless you manage to get rail outside all shops for instance.
Roads outside of shops is a small minority of all roads, and we are currently undergoing a change in how city planning is handling commercial districts, with movements towards the edges or online.
There are however major problems with train networks, one being that lack of redundancy. With road maintenance you can shutdown a major highway and redirect traffic temporary to smaller roads with significant reduction in speed. With trains you either have the option to go around the maintenance, or you replace the train temporarily with road based travel.
A second big problem with train infrastructure is the lack of an obvious upgrade path. With roads you build a new highway when security, air pollution and noise become too severe for smaller towns around the old road, and the better road also adds higher capacity and faster allowed speeds for transportation. There are so many incentives to upgrade old roads, and with an increasing population it makes traffic heavier for old roads, speeding up demand for better and bigger roads that runs outside the towns.
For rails, there is mostly just an economic argument in favor of building more. The reduction in car travel is not significant enough compared to building a new road outside the limits of the smaller towns.
At least in the US, my major concern would not really be building it right the first time (though there are plenty of places where we don't even do that), but maintaining it over time.
Many jurisdictions can barely keep the paint legible on the roads, so autonomous cars are just going to have to deal with poor or deferred maintenance.
If an autonomous bus costs twice as much I think it still wins out. Maybe you still need a conductor to make sure people pay and don't act antisocially but such a person can probably be much cheaper/less skilled.
Why do you need to specify the "unionized" drivers? Do they cost more? Why? because they are paid fair(like paid extra if they have to work on Christmas or extra hours)? Or maybe they union negotiated to keep the salary in sync with inflation?
Las Vegas had autonomous buses for a while, but they're gone. Too slow and the routes were very limited for some reason.
I guess if you purchased say, 40 honda civics?
There’s a lot of other considerations to consider here as well.
Cars and vans would both take up more space for the same amount of people which means more traffic which leads to slower speeds and more noise and air pollution.
Cleaning all these cars and vans would require more workers than cleaning the equivalent number of busses either by capitol or by riders.
Cars and vans require more space to park.
There’d be far more maintenance for cars and vans than busses.
Busses are equipped with handicap ramps, bike racks, and seats to accomodate the differently abled, as well as payment processors. These features all drive up costs. Tech only solutions can prevent access to transportation for indigent and differently abled populations.
More cars and vans means more road wear.
And of course the lifetimes of the vehicles may differ adding in other costs.
In reality, they compromise. I live in a not-very large city. I used to rent an apartment in a suburb to the southeast just a few miles out, and the bus only made one trip in the morning to the city and one trip in the afternoon back, and if you didn't work the exact hours that you could catch the bus, like my job was 9-6 or 2-11, etc., you were out of luck.
Now, I live within city limits, in the southwest, but there is no bus route going north-south to where I work (or did before covid), because most of the traffic goes east to downtown and back, so that's how all the routes go. There aren't many routes or stops to the north and west.
When I was living in an apartment in a slightly different suburb, there were more frequent buses, but they were almost empty when I rode them. You can't assume that they're saving resources in any circumstance.
I'm saying that there's a tradeoff between investment and cost effectiveness relative to individual transportation.
A bus gets like 6 mpg. You have to have a certain average number of people on it per time or distance for it to be more efficient than a person in a car.
A network is more valuable the larger it is. But the more routes you have, the less traffic each one will have.
Being willing to invest is irrelevant, unless you think investing in something that makes people worse off is a no-brainer.
American governments tend to prioritize investment and spending for individual transportation over public transportation. The numbers get really crazy when you actually factor in the costs associated with 'free parking' - including requirements that new developments include a minimum amount of parking spots for each housing unit - and all the other subsidies car transportation enjoys.
[edit] > Being willing to invest is irrelevant, unless you think investing in something that makes people worse off is a no-brainer.
The thing is, public transportation isn't meant to be necessarily cost effective or even in all cases fuel efficient at the point of service, it levels the playing field. Poor folks currently have to buy a car to get to work. That's a huge investment in a depreciating asset at usurious interest rates. Public transportation reduces inequality and bolsters the economy indirectly, too.
[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2014/09/ff-transpor...
It's offensive and insulting to go off on an anti-American tangent that signals a complete lack of engagement with the comment supposedly being replied to.
You're compounding it. Whether what you write is true or not, has nothing to do with it being an obnoxious political digression.
I made a comment on tradeoffs. Whether anybody is willing to spend money on things that have a positive return for society is changing the subject. The assumption was that we all are.
Am I wrong? Do Americans actually love public transit, and is the government in fact willing to invest as much as it takes to make the system work right? All the data I've dug up suggests otherwise but if you have some I'm happy to read it.
> Whether anybody is willing to spend money on things that have a positive return for society is changing the subject. The assumption was that we all are.
Well, not really, narratives and entrenched interests do a good job of convincing people to vote against their own interests.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/transit-center-census-americans-...
The average number of people you need for simply the fuel is like, 5. But as far as all other factors, a lot are fixed costs, so number of trips is more important that average people.
Not to forget, again, electric buses exist and work well.
I was not promoting specific numbers; the point is there's a tradeoff and a tipping point where more trips make things worse, whatever the numbers are.
Averages have a way of being a lot lower than peak numbers, too.
The ranking as I understand it is Waymo, Cruise, then everyone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuU5L2MEII
Note: He regularly runs a Twitch livestream coding stuff in the space, recordings are on YouTube, very high signal low noise stuff there.
If you're interested in the state of fsd listen to this andrej karpathy podcast. Not Ford's PR department
https://twitter.com/pabbeel/status/1374450544475992064?lang=...
Waymo can scale as fast as they want to via partnerships like the one they have with Chrysler already. Other companies will build the vehicles and add the hardware, Waymo will handle the software. Not everyone has to do everything in-house like Tesla does.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632588 -- comment a year ago on the end of Starsky Robotics (good blog post)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633543 -- further down in the thread quoting Chris Urmson from March 2016, and also Bill Gurley from 2018
Sure things could have changed, but by all accounts they haven't, given the lack of deployment. They took 5 years to get to 90%, another 5 to get to 99%, and will take roughly the same amount of time to get to 99.9%, etc. And that doesn't mean they're done.
(I have been following this for at least 10 years, and I also worked on a college project in autonomous vehicles 21 years ago. It was not good, but the deployment and philosophical issues are identical to the ones back then IMO.)
You're absolutely correct, but there are far more people who want to make the argument that Tesla's ahead because they're "beta" on roads and "don't need LIDAR".
There's optimism, and there's reality-distortion field. I think a lot of people bought into the latter.
Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.
The fixed costs of owning a car are expensive, but typical city/suburban usage ignoring work commute easily makes the costs worth it. The time expense of using public transit or the dollar expense of relying on lyft/uber are simply too high.
Self driving cars have some advantages:
They reduce the cost of sporadic non-peak usage. For some this will make the work commute on public transit a dollars+time net savings. This pressure will be especially high on 2+ car households, where the economics of a second car will be abysmal.
Self driving cars can act as a much more efficient feeder to public transit. At any given time, especially during peak usage, there are a bunch of people going from approximately where you are to approximately where you're going.
We aren't taking advantage of this today because of two problems: Coordination is hard and requires a critical mass. Any time stopped just kills average speed, greatly increasing time to get to a destination (this is why busses are soooo sloooow.)
Self driving cars can take people from their houses in suburban neighborhoods to coordination locations. Hop in a small bus/shuttle with a few others. Wait no more than a minute or two as cars arrive. Then the shuttle takes everyone to their destination (if it's a high density city where the destination is within a block), or the reverse of a feeder, where single person taxis are already there waiting to take you, with a pause as long as it takes to get out of a vehicle, walk a few feed, and get in another.
Public transport and bikes are not feasible in Houston or Los Angeles, due to low density and hostile roads.
Going back to your argument, I believe all of this would also be possible with cabs, from a user's perspective the only difference between an autonomous car and an Uber might be price (over the long term)
High speed rail between large agglomerations like SF/LA seem like obvious improvements,but seem impossible to build in the USA.
For many people a robot taxi is a viable alternative to car ownership, but for plenty of people owning a car is always going to be a better option.
> Why does the US need car ownership?
Cause freedom. You're talking about the U.S. Why does the US need gun ownership? Cause.
> wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
I hear this again and again and I wonder how detached from reality people are. There are many reasons this won't happen. People have different standards of cleanliness. People have different standards of how much scratches they tolerate on a car. People view cars as status symbols. The list goes on.
People buy condos even though a rental would financially make more sense. But they want to own something they can call theirs and do with it whatever they want or keep it pristine to their liking.
Is it other people detached from reality? It seems unrealistic to assume 100% of people will not want to use such a service.
> There are many reasons this won't happen.
The very fact taxis and Uber exist means there is a demand for such a service.
When I lived ~10 miles outside of a town, I would have been fine not having a car if I could reliably summon cheap transport. In a small town, all the same. The amount of waiting matters, but not that much.
While I own a Tesla model 3 with FSD I am more impressed by what is shown on youtube by beta testers than by anything my car can do. Simply put, Telsa only recently changed their entire FSD suite to include maintaining an active awareness of all labeled objects which in itself is greatly improved as my car clearly does not see everything.
Think of it this way, current versions work on a very short moment of time so and don't have labels for everything it can see which leads to missing parked vehicles (as in how did that survive this long) and more. My favorite example is my car rendering cones around a parked cable/phone truck but not the damn truck! It also had fun with a garbage truck doing a great job rendering the guy and cans and with the truck not always there but immediately real once it moved.
As for buying FSD, don't. Regular autopilot provides the driver assistance people can actually use on long trips. Which is, keeps you safe if you get distracted or worse. Plus there is still an issue with trade ins to Tesla, pretty much they were assigning ZERO dollars for FSD. So until Tesla provides a transfer fee or puts FSD at the account level I am never buying another one.
FSD needs to be at the account level. It would actually make Tesla more money as they could then sell a subscription for those who only need it for trips.
Autonomous cars are coming. They just will come first to specific areas where the cars are more experienced, like waymo does in Phoenix, and the cars themselves will be purpose built. As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.
It’s crazy irresponsible that Tesla switched on what they did and marketed it as FSD, and it’ll set back self driving cars years when people start getting into collisions.