It's even likely there will be legislation forcing LIDAR for self driving cars. Elon cannot flip the switch on self driving until they have millions of intervention free miles under their belt. Right now Tesla gets ~500 miles without intervention. One kid gets decked and the law will shutter his plan.
There is another layer too, where because of his polarizing personality, a lot of critical talent is inaccessible to him. Keep in mind Elon is doing -none- of the engineering besides the social engineering. He relies on talented people who want to work for him. I know many talented people who could make a difference for Tesla, but none who would ever give Elon a single minute of time.
If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.
What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake.
Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?
I agree that Waymo is generally safer for in city driving. It’s still not technically fully autonomous even though it appears that way; it has a lot of support people on the backend to resolve when the cars get stuck and whatnot. Waymo still can’t go on the highway or leave well-defined city limits whereas I can use my Tesla on every trip I’ve taken. I think comma.ai is a closer comparison point at this time as I can’t have a Waymo for my own personal use that I can take anywhere whenever.
This is actually very deadly.. at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on. An autonomous vehicle may behave in unpredictable ways and cause carnage. It only takes one incident to completely shutter it forever.
Your experience must be very different. I've been on the road long enough to know that humans will try all sorts of things to not avoid missing the turn & Tesla behaved very similarly.
FWIW, it was signalling all the right ways and no collision seemed imminent and I doubt it would have gotten into an accident. I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself.
"I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself."
So basically you had to intervene and it doesnt meet the standard of a fully autonomous vehicle. Do all the mental gymnastics all you want mate lmao.
Maybe, maybe not. It's quite remarkable how far he's been able to go with camera only. And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well. There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR. At worst, the camera tech has kept Tesla at the front of where the industry has actually been going the last 5 years.
Looking at the bigger picture, I'm not sure you can point to someone who has made as many good bets in different engineering fields as Elon. Elon is the opposite of the Gell Manning effect: you think he's wrong about areas you are educated about, and he proves you wrong. You can find my posts on HN mocking SpaceX for going with an oxygen/RP1 rocket as if we were back at the dawn of space travel. Boy was that wrong!
Today you would be embarrassed to mention you took at job at Tesla, especially when so many other big name prestigious companies will pay the same or more for those same skills Elon desperately needs.
Additionally, my observation is that reactions to Musk are heavily influenced by individual levels of empathy, and “people focused versus systems focused” thinking. In my experience aerospace engineers are pretty low empathy and low people focus. When I got my degree in aerospace engineering in the early aughts—before SpaceX and the reboot of commercial aerospace—the most exciting job to look forward to was designing missiles for Raytheon and stuff like that. When I worked for a military contractor, the hypothetical scenarios always involved stuff like “so we just overthrew Iraq’s government, and now we need radio uplinks to our UAVs so we can blow up terrorists.” Nobody caught feelings over that stuff. I doubt many of these folks care about Elon’s tweets.
Those all include radar.
> There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR.
There are several from Chinese car makers.
"if the human brain can do it purely on optics, then so should we. if we need extra sensors that the human doesn't have, that means the model is worse than the human brain."
i can totally see that going through elons 105iq head. and there is something to be said there. kind of, "no cheating allowed!", where "cheating" is defined as "a sensor the human wouldn't have had".
whether it has value... well... thats hard to say, but you have to make a bet i suppose. the waymos are very expensive with their sensor arrangements. maybe that can be made cheap?
The human brain doesn't do it purely on optics.
We still have tens of thousands of car-related deaths in the US.
Also, if doing it a different way than a human is cheating...are they sending data via organically grown neurons in the car? Didn't know that. Looks like "cheating" to me.
Maybe it makes sense in Musks' head.
Me - I want the car to be better than the human brain.
And if he didn't have competitors, it would not be a damaging stance.
But in the reality we're in...
Very ugly world we live in - the joker masquerades as someone who is doing stuff for the benefit of humanity and crossdresses to appeal to whomever to benefit himself.
Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward.
> Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car?
This has nothing to do with industry. Calculators were actually a PAID position and they went away, regardless of the number of people that enjoy mathalons.
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
This is incorrect, historically and practically.
Roads and highways, in an economic metaphor, are rivers of money. They provide capital velocity as well as smoothing labor and consumer availability.
Due to the economy of scale, mass transportation and self locomotion is the only practical transport for people, at a large enough scale. GOODS, on the other hand, require a powered engine to move in and out. Those stacks of soda can't be transported by subway. The sodas produce trash, that also can't travel by subway. Roads themselves and trucking, in general, have kept personal vehicles in service. Cars still exist in London and New York, over a century later for this very reason.
Motorized bikes dominate many cities in Asia. I can see that becoming a preferred mode in western cities, over time, then personal driving becoming regulated out of existence (ie huge fees to run a personal vehicle a hyper-urban area). Maybe, just maybe, grassroots political will could have pushed cars off the road (so to speak) when the climate crisis was a meager priority, but I have lost faith in that avenue.
But from my news bubble, and my perception of much of Europe... it seems to me that it is very likely a regulation like this would happen in Europe, probably through a well-meaning green initiative.
Funny how perceptions of others can be so drastically different!
If there's a button in people's cars that they can push and then play on their phone for the rest of the trip, 99% of people are going to push that button.
And after a few years of that, and insurance rates being higher for manual driving, we'll start seeing some areas be automated-driving only, which will then expand...
For some reason, Americans seem to be fine with regulations that come from companies and enforced via economics, but become extremely vocal when there regulations come from legislators.
It started innocuously with mandatory emergency signalling in the instance of a crash, then mandatory reversing cameras, then mandatory lane keeping assistance, auto emergency braking, speed limit indication. Coming soon in Europe is automatic speed limit adherence. Emissions regs have also led to a huge rise in automatic transmissions in Europe.
For very many people the only thing they do to control their car now is turn the wheel and push the accelerator.
One only has to watch that recent White House dinner of the Big Tech figures getting together (minus Scamath) and the forceful nature in which Mr Trump made Zuck and Cook issue statements of large investment amounts.
Nothing of that nature goes in Europe, at least not so blatantly.
In that case, there would be absolutely no way we could allow manual driving. The benefits are just too great. Obviously I'm talking about a best case scenario where things actually work as they should.
Where is the funding for all this coming from again? Remind me why councils for example in the UK, are broke and barely investing in this stuff?
Ah... yeah. Lets get real.
Just because you enjoy something doesn't make it the right thing to do or allow. This as a person who does not believe Tesla has the right formula to actually achieve FSD and that a pure vision approach would never work in the way they want it to (no interventions, all weather, etc).
There will come a time when technology advances enough that self driving with be an order of magnitude safer than human driving, and we will have to battle with the fact that allowing humans to do so will be objectively worse for society. That may not actually be anytime soon, but it may happen.
They can, and have been.
It would be even less straightforward in the US than in Europe. Many cities are 100% car-dependent.
Many people enjoy writing code 'manually' too. But overwhelmingly, people opt to have LLMs write most of it for them. There is no way in hell I'm ever reading api docs or writing python scripts by hand ever again with gemini, unless gemini craps the bed and i'm forced to do so.
listen man i'm a petrol head too... look, when FSD comes out as-standard, this turning-the-steering-wheel malarky is done-zo. its over. yes theres people who enjoy driving a car, but if you offerd people full self driving in every car with no price premium, 99% of the population would never touch a steering wheel again.
>but over here in Europe
bro, Europeans love daddy government to come and ** their ** up. all you have to do is tell the euro "FSD decreases traffic accidents by 5%!" and they will do the policing themselves.
I can already hear it: "erm excuse me, is your car not FSD? you know, you're endangering myself and others by driving that on the road, right? do you have a license for your manually-operated car?"
1. Not as many as you think, IMHO.
2. Those folks can perhaps not turn on the self-driving feature.
3. Even those that do may have times where it is a chore (stop-and-go traffic).
> Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will.
If self-driving can be shown to be statistically safer than hour human-driving then your insurance company may offer you discounts for always using it. No government regulation needed: those bearing the risks will incentivize you to do the less risk-y thing.
Are you talking about Waymo here? In any case, the timeline is not obvious.
We could be 2 years away from it or 200. Who knows? Elon doesn't, despite his best misinformation efforts.
Also, private busses? I don't see any movement towards them that can be described as rapid.
I don't think Zuck et al are avoiding criticism because of their wardrobe (I don't think they're avoiding criticism actually). But they haven't spent $44b to signal boost hatred of their core customer base and it's values or offered unconditional up front support for a presidential platform which spends taxpayer money ripping out EV chargers to own the libs, does many other things unhelpful to his businesses, but did let him have a play at destroying regulators for a bit. This has very little to do with PR departments and cost an awful lot more, so it might have been an objectively better bet for Elon not to have done this...
On Musk, he doesn't need PR so much as to keep his mouth shut for a while and try and deliver on some of his BS instead of spouting more.
Elon is not just a PR department away from being seen as an acceptable person. He did a Nazi salute for the world to see and most of the world finds him contemptible.
Also the only way manual driving diminishes is if the world invests more into public transportation.
Now there is none of that, not many people talking about him in a political light and I'm certain public sentiment about him has gone up given it is now already more publicly acceptable to talk about things adjacent to him and his companies.
There will be die hards who will never change, but its clearly apparent on social media he is no longer getting anywhere near the hate he used to, and even people who previously weren't are now publicly praising things like Grok and recent SpaceX missions.
If not for the uncertainty around the extremely inflated Tesla stock price due to the lies he has told he would have been ousted years ago. He has no tangible vision of the future and no expertise in anything.
They all shipped products that billions of people use and those old enough can remember a world without such products and how different it was.
People can remember what the world was before Musk and it's the same as it is now, the wide eye fans are those who look at the technical accomplishments such as the rockets landing on their butt, however when they are asked by skeptics "what does it mean for me?" the response is always a not well specified "handwaving about the future" as if Musk was a 21yr old out of college
I'm confused by this. Zuckerberg has persistently had image problems. Sometimes it has improved for a bit but saying it has been rehabilitated seems to be a major overstatement.
Cook, on the other hand, has generally always been positive with the public except for some skepticism early that he could succeed as successor to Jobs.
elon can see this direction. whoever invents self-driving cars first, will kill cars as we know it, completely. so it makes sense then, that if anyone should invent what kills tesla, it should be tesla.
alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.