Tesla offers ‘Full Self-Driving’ option, prompting criticism from regulators
washingtonpost.com
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Yes, yes - there will always be room for personal vehicles. But this conundrum is the epitome of excessive and terrible infrastructure design, to the N-th layer.
Look at how much fuss this causes when it's better replaced by competent public transit.
Mark it as another useless invention to paper over a huge crack just so we can continue to sell everyone a car.
It all depends on your local context, but where I live there is great and cheap transport and if I have a need for a car I can get one from stations across the city for 2-5€/hour + 1-3c/km, significantly cheaper than even a fully paid off car would be for the same trip, if you count insurance, maintenance, and petrol.
in dense urban areas it's a serious contender (free health, free workout, free meditation, near zero cost for the non-e bike, faster in traffic jams)
The US ironically has a much more efficient and sustainable train network, it's just that the thing trains are really efficient at is cargo, not personal transportation.
Much like with healthcare, European countries (generally) tend to think that it's decent idea to spend government resources to provide value to their citizen. Having regularly commuted using trains in Europe for a decade and a half, I would argue they are a pretty great, comfortable mode of transportation – and I can feel slightly more at ease knowing I'm not contributing as much to our carbon emissions.
Profitability has absolutely nothing to do with it. High speed rail in France is hugely profitable, but the state subsides many lines because it's the right thing to do. Railways have a higher capacity, are much cleaner and faster, and are provided as a common service. You don't expect the fire department or forest service to be profitable, do you?
Rail (& other public transport) has many other benefits, e.g. you'll need less policing and maintenance of roads if they are less used; air pollution from fossil fuels and tire wear are reduced, stress and accidents are reduced thereby decreasing healthcare costs, etc.
It all is a matter of building up the proper network, rather than to give more subsidies to big oil and the car industries (see the eternally repeating bailouts).
> Nearly as much of the cost of building and maintaining highways now comes from general taxes such as income and sales taxes (plus additional federal debt) as comes from gasoline taxes or other “user fees” on drivers. General taxes accounted for $69 billion of highway spending in 2012.
[pdf] https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...
(Musk has a bit of a train phobia)
A railway has a much higher and faster capacity, even if it does indeed cost that much ( it doesn't, it varies highly based on terrain, conditions, regulatory framework, etc.).
Personal automobiles have a huge cost to society. Self-driving doesn't really change a lot of that.
In a way, consistency here is good. If it only sometimes tries to crash itself, it's harder to fix and it may indicate a bigger recognition problem.
Of course, that doesn't mean the product is any good, or that selling it is reasonable.
Their current strategy does get people hyped. I wonder how many people you can program a machine to run over before it becomes an unprofitable activity.
I have a random comment I'll interject but it's totally off topic. My impression from watching people show off their Teslas is that they are constantly in awe of being able to get to work without controlling their car. But many of us have been commuting to work hands free for decades -- it's called public transportation. One person uses the power of electricity to take hundreds of people around the city, every 1.5 minutes during rush hour. It is pretty nice. But we didn't need self-driving cars to get there, we just needed to design our living and working spaces for hands-free commuting. Shrug.
Tesla should be penalized for reckless behavior in the promotion and development of their FSD. However, reality is any product performing a sufficiently risky action for sufficiently many people will have a very small number of catastrophic failures. I could make a similar argument to yours for cars, planes, much of modern medicine, most electric products, alcoholic drinks, etc, etc.
But as for the very specific emergency case while you are drunk, it could be overridden with some visible sign turning on notifying other drivers - but it would need some law background, so eg. a cop can escort you in that case, etc. But tesla’s fake self-driving doesn’t help anyone.
Last 1/3 is simple car size, aka congestion. Ironically, this will probably be solved by the Boring Company and teslas.
I'm a huge proponent of bike lanes + e-vehicles. But let's be serious, Teslas really are changing the game. Well, or will, once the price goes down in 10 years.
sure? if that exists, why not just wire that up to the DMV?
People pay for software that's supposed to drive the car. Why does it matter how the passanger drives? Well, because the software is a student driver. It fucks up in weird ways. It needs close supervision by an expert driver.
Tesla could have called it "supervised self-driving", and that would be fine with me. But "full self-driving" sounded like more value when they wanted to sell the feature. So they went with that.
It’s just goes to show you how utterly false all alleged progressive politicians are. Tesla is singlehandedly solving climate change with sustainable energy but because it’s workers vote not to unionize, they must be stopped.
or cause trends causing greater harm.