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Comment by decafninja | Hacker News Reader

Hanging out in a Tesla online community, I've noticed there are two types of Tesla fans (and investors even).

The first are those that believe that EVs are the future and love the cars Tesla is producing.

The other are robotaxi/FSD evangelists and believe Tesla will usher in the age of autonomous cars sooner rather than later. These people genuinely believe we'll have fully road legal autonomous cars (as in, requiring zero human input) by 2025 and that human driven cars will be outright banned in many developed countries by 2035 or even 2030. Some of them actually want Tesla to stop selling cars to the public in favor of stocking them for the robotaxi fleet which they are absolutely sure will be widely deployed in a matter of a few years.

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Regarding the latter group, this video[1] that was archived by an HN user[2] is pretty telling.

[1] https://troll.tv/videos/watch/54bc7bd0-8691-4359-aa7d-dc5148...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810351

It's really not that telling. Tesla short-sellers really will stop at nothing to try to recoup their bet.

Someone on HN has put together a fairly detailed timeline of Elon's comments on FSD:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26519357

There are two types of people: those who divide people into groups and those that don't.

Seriously though: there are many more Tesla fans, there are also those that hope the company succeeds but that wished that that self driving feature had been postponed until it actually worked because in the longer term this is bad for the brand and bad for electrics as a whole.

Don't get me wrong - I too am a Tesla fan, and my next car will most likely be one too. And disclaimer: I also own stock.

But yeah, I wish both Elon and the rabid FSD evangelists would quiet down and stop hyping FSD and robotaxi. I agree that hyping it right here and now today is going to hurt the brand more than help.

The bad attention is already happening. You hear about any other company making incremental advances in autonomous vehicle tech, and it's generally met positively. News about greater, more significant, advances from Tesla, are met with second guessing, doubts, and worries about how many people will get hurt.

> These people genuinely believe we'll have fully road legal autonomous cars (as in, requiring zero human input) by 2025 and that human driven cars will be outright banned by 2035 or even 2030.

I'm not a Tesla fan, but I think that's going to happen eventually. Probably much closer to 2100 though.

By 2100 people will realize how dumb people in the 2020 were and have efficient public transportation for that "autonomous" travelling.

Unless we've discovered how to teleport from place to place, I think people in 2100 will prefer private cars to public transport, as they have done ever since the car was invented.

Do they, for all types of trips? Personally, I much prefer trains for every trip over two hours.

Being able to stretch my legs, get coffee and food, and comfortably work are worth it.

Cars are very nice for when there is no (direct) train connection available to where I want to go, as well as for shorter trips, but they don‘t scale well at all in terms of density of traffic as well as efficiency.

Distance is definitely a factor, as is frequency. I'd prefer public transportation systems (trains, buses, planes, etc.) if it's a longer and occasional trip.

For short, regular, frequent travel, i.e. a commute? Give me a personal car anyday.

But my opinion is jaded from the awful urban public transportation systems we have in the US. Give me something like what Tokyo, Seoul, etc. have, and I might prefer public transit for commuting too.

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