Tesla Robotaxi | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Robotaxi

tesla.com

265 pointsiamwil740 comments

It's amusing that this was at the Warner back lot, which is out in Burbank. Not Paramount or Universal, which are both in Hollywood. It would have been embarrassing to do this at Paramount or Universal, because those are in Waymo's service area. People would have arrived at the event in real self driving taxis.

Waymos however need thousands of dollars of hardware to achieve this and only work in limited areas. Tesla's bet is a lot more risky but also with a lot more potential.

Potential lawsuits

I strongly believe that once you have everything working it's much easier to start working on the costs.

This is definitely the big bet Tesla is making. However, the hardware Waymo uses will also become cheaper over time and with scale, so either bet has advantages and disadvantages.

Waymos exist. This intro of nothing doesn't.

It's much much easier to make an existing thing cheaper and better over time.

Waymos drive in limited geofenced zones. FSD exists but needs driver supervision. Both are incomplete and it is unknown who will be the winner.

The people living in the "geofenced" areas don't care about how "incomplete" it is. The point of a self driving taxi is that you don't have to own the vehicle.

And this is a vast difference. You can expand a self-driving taxi service by running an Uber-like service and dispatching w/safety-drivers for journeys taking you out of the area, and its functionally equivalent - people are buying the mobility, not the self-driving. You get to start rolling out without solving the whole problem.

The geofence can extend. Drivers are harder to replace.

Have been seeing both the LA and SF Waymo operating zones increase steadily. Also seen Waymo's being driven manually outside of those ranges presumably for further development.

FSD is also geofenced, just a bigger fence. When/if the robotaxi actually debuts it too will be heavily geofenced and have usage restrictions but it will also be several years behind Waymo in terms of development, testing, technology and regulation.

Whilst it is unknown who will be the winner, or even valid competitors, we can predict with high confidence that Tesla has a massive challenge to reach where Waymo is today.

But isn't it the case that Waymos are actually usable (for this purpose), while FSD/RoboTaxi isn't?

Geofencing sounds like a good idea to me. It's a mean to roll things out carefully, while minimizing risk of death. If actual FSD/Robotaxi is ever released, I suspect that they'll need to geofence, too, for a while.

The idea that Tesla would win the robotaxi race by not needing LiDAR died sometime between when LiDAR cost $100k and when it cost $1k. Now it’s just Elon being intransigent.

Humans don’t use lidar, which clearly shows that a vision-only robotaxi is very much feasible.

Birds have to flap wings while our planes don't have to. There is absolutely no reason to limit self-driving cars in the same way our bodies are limited.

When it comes to AI though, humans are using biological neural net much more capable than any today's AI you can cram into a car. So, even if one accepts your premise of targeting human performance as a design guideline, more sensors is still logical at this point as way to compensate for the weaker AI.

Also, if you read how Tesla does vision it is very different from, and i think inferior to, how your eyes and brain build the 3d map of the surroundings. If one is limiting oneself to only vision, the first thing would be to try to get as good as possible that 3d mapping, and the vision seems to be among the simplest and most researched brain functions, ie. easiest to reproduce. As Tesla doesn't seem to be doing it - only may be couple years ago they only started to elicit the 3d model - i think they aren't on the shortest path to success when it comes to FSD.

Planes do ”flap their wings”, just not the ones protruding from the fuselage.

I think you're mistaking rotating for flapping. Rotation is one of those fundamental things differentiating our technological civilization from Nature.

Bacterial flagellum rotate. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_... .

> Rotation is one of those fundamental things differentiating our technological civilization from Nature.

Rotation is very common in nature.

Planetary rotation, inner-core rotation, spinning galaxies, dung beetle rolling, Keratinocyte migration, Rotifers, spirals, rotational symmetry, etc.

What isn’t common (but not non-existent) is using rotation for locomotion in biology.

Many plants and trees spread rotating ”helicopter seeds”. Many vines roto-grow themselves around vertical supports. Day flowers rotate to follow the sun.

Apples and oranges fall on the ground and can roll far and wide. Walnuts too.

Partial rotation is still rotation, of course: see animal joints in walk, trot and gallop.

And then there’s the belly-up pig drunk on brewery grain rolling down the hill. That mash packs a wallop!

Yes! Which is why the idea that “ Rotation is one of those fundamental things differentiating our technological civilization from Nature” is not all that useful a statement.

Huge swaths of microbes use electrostatic rotary motors driving screw type propellers, so if not say it’s that uncommon.

Those rotating things still produce their thrust by pushing a wing-shaped structure through air, producing a high-pressure zone on one side, and a low-pressure zone on another. That is what I was getting at. It is the same principle.

No, it is different. A prop or fan blade is inmovably attached to the shaft and pushed through the air the same way like the plane's wing, and the blade isn't flapped like the bird's wing.

I can't tell if this is satire, or if replicating 6 million years of evolution has legitimately become handwave material for Elon's supporters...

Mammalian vision and vision itself have been around a lot longer than 6 million years by at least one, likely two, orders of magnitude.

I don't know if you've tried this recently, but take a photo of something on your phone and put it into an AI.

There may even be an AI built into your photo library app.

The fact I work on self-driving cars makes me a tiny bit more of a realist than someone who thinks CLIP is proof of what AI can and can't do...

So your job is to, in your own words, be "replicating 6 million years of evolution"?

You know how big your own team is, and that your team is itself an abstraction from the outside world. You know you get the shortcuts of being able to look at what nature does and engineer it rather than simply copy without understanding. You know your own evolutionary algorithms, assuming you're using them at all, run as fast as you can evaluate the fitness function, and that that is much faster than the same cycle with human, or even mammalian, generational gaps.

> CLIP is proof of what AI can and can't do

CLIP says nothing about what AI can't do, but it definitely says what AI can do. It's a minimum, not a maximum.

Not to be rude but you're arguing with somebody that works in what I would assume is a highly mathematical space and asserting your opinion on how quickly that highly mathematical space can advance while your own profile admits that you were unable to understand "advanced calculus or group theory" and your own github indicates that you are stuck on "the hard stuff — abelian groups, curls, wedge products, Hessians and Laplacians" because you "don't understand the notation." Your opinion on the speed of advancement just doesn't seem informed?

Maybe this is an old post and your understanding has dramatically improved to the point where you're able to offer useful insight on ML/AI/self-driving?

https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/11-12.00.16.html

1. Note time stamp: https://github.com/BenWheatley/char-rnn

2. Most ML is basic calculus and basic linear algebra — to the extent that people who don't follow it, use that fact itself as a shallow argument.

3. I'm not asserting how fast it can advance, I'm asserting that the comparison with "6 million years of evolution" is a as much a shallow hand-wave as saying it's trivial, as evidenced by what we've done so far.

I'm curious. Can you elaborate on what CLIP proves about what AI can and can't do?

My point is that it doesn't.

The fact your phone can identify an object doesn't inform you on the capabilities of self-driving car's vision stack. It's complete non-sequitur.

They are afraid, times of crisis - especially planetary one, have the weaker minded and scared ones always rally around figureheads. Some guy in operetta uniforms, exclaiming "Im the captain, give me all your cash" brandishing a detached steering wheel is what the passengers want to see. Reality be a lovecraftian horror to much to bear.

s/feasible/possible/

Humans don’t have radar, or thermal cameras, or ultrasonic sensors, doesn’t mean planes and boats shouldn’t use those

Think of pile-ups. No matter how good a driver you are there are situations where you cannot prevent crashing. But lidar can.

Pray tell how a Lidar prevents crashing in this situation?

Accurately determine distance to objects in almost no time. While a human has 1 second reaction time. There will be situations a fast reaction time alone can save.

Pile ups happen because people drive:

- Over the speed limit (it's called a limit for a reason)

- Too fast for the conditions (speed limit != speed target)

- Too close to the vehicle in front of them

There are very few situations that can't be prevented by driving properly in the first place.

That same argument can be used for all companies to fire all their employees. They are all human after all. Just implement all the needed features in hardware and software, done.

feasible? I want the thing to drive better than me, especially in the rain, fog, and the dark!

You mean "very much theoretically possible".

Humans don't act based on visual patterns alone though. We act based on our understanding of the world as a whole, including the intentions of other humans.

For instance, when we see a ball rolling onto the street, we know that there is probably a young person nearby who wants that ball back. We don't have to be trained on the visual patterns of what might happen next.

Of course AI can be trained on the visuals of high probability events like this. But the number of things that can potentially happen is far greater than the number of training examples we could ever produce.

> the number of things that can potentially happen is far greater than the number of training examples we could ever produce

Models don't need to have been trained on every single possibility - it's possible for them to generalize and interpolate/extrapolate.

But, even knowing that it's theoretically possible to drive at human-level with only the senses humans have, it does seem like it makes it unnecessarily difficult to limit the vehicle to just that. Forces solving hard tasks at/near 100% human-level, opposed to reaching 70% then making up for the shortcoming with extra information that humans don't have.

>Models don't need to have been trained on every single possibility - it's possible for them to generalize and interpolate/extrapolate.

They do have some in-distribution generalisation capabilities, but human intentions are not a generalisation of visual information.

"human intentions are not a generalisation of visual information" is a bit confusing category-wise. Question would be to what extent you can predict someone's next action, like running out to retrieve a ball, given just what a human driver can sense.

Clearly that's possible to some extent, and in theory it should be possible for some system receiving the same inputs to reach human-level performance on the task, but it seems very challenging given the imposed constraints.

Also, for clarity, note that the limitations don't require the model be trained only on driver-view data. It may be that reasoning capability is better learned through text pretraining for instance.

Humans continuously move their heads in three dimensions to infer depth.

Cars can't do this.

And not surprisingly the biggest problem with FSD is the accuracy of its bounding boxes.

Citation? Humans are not constantly moving their heads to the degree that chickens do, and I find it doubtful that the micro movements from our head (which our eyes have to adjust for with the vestibulo-ocular reflex so things aren't blurry, similar to image stabilization in cameras) are large enough to infer depth.

I never said people are moving their heads like chickens.

But we do move our heads around pretty frequently. Enough to build mental records of what the bounding boxes are going to be for a range of objects.

We're not doing that while driving, though.

If we're talking purely about going off memory, there's no reason why machines couldn't build up a similar catalog (which could be used by every self driving AI once learned). And human ability to judge distances varies significantly between drivers.

Humans eyes are an order of magnitude better than the cameras in a Tesla. Humans also have a database in their head and remembers how to behave in certain situations. FSD doesn't have any database of any kind.

Humans use our brains to drive. Unless you're planning on popping an actual human brain or something that can perform equivalently into the car, you'd do well to consider more superior sensor suites.

can I get a lidar for 1k like the cars use?

You're going to have to be more specific with your necessary specs, there are $100 360° hobbyist LIDAR sensors on Amazon.

No there aren't. Those use triangulation. LIDAR is time-of-flight. They also only scan a single rotating point which is only sufficient for simple robots like vacuum cleaners.

Intel's L515 lidar from 2020 was <$300, uses MEMS ToF instead of rotating for very high speed scanning. 730p@30.

Good indoor range but not really useful outdoors at any range. Scaling to higher power is indeed a challenge, but that Intel delivered so so much in 2020 for such a small price is awesome, shows potential.

Damn that looks amazing! Such a shame they abandoned RealSense.

Still, $300 is not $100 and presumably they were selling at big loss, otherwise they wouldn't have shuttered RealSense.

Apple has ToF lidar for face recognition for years now. It's a matter of spec.

Similar style single chip lidar for automotive is in engineering sampling phase now [1]. Price remains to be seen but anything sub 1k would be a no-brainer to add to a robo-taxi.

Oh, everyone in the industry thinks Tesla is .. how to put it nicely .. is irrelevant for the future because of their CEOs stance on sensors. Camera will never be enough.

https://scantinel.com/2023/07/03/scantinel-photonics-launche...

There is no reliable FSD implementation on any car right now so it's kind of an irrelevant question.

The more relevant one is what will happen first. Tesla figuring out how to make vision only work on their existing hardware. Or the price of LiDAR coming down.

On-chip lidars are coming to automotive sector currently

I’ve ridden Waymo in SF and it has gone great. The cost was cheaper than the cheapest Lyft/Uber, but in a much nicer vehicle. I felt 100% safe the whole time, which is better than I can say about humans who get paid more if they drive faster. My only complaint is cases like where it “wasted” a few minutes because it didn’t want to do an illegal U-turn during the pickup (any human driver would have done it).

The word “reliable” without any units attached isn’t well-defined, so I can’t say whether Waymo meets that bar, but it’s a good customer experience.

FYI Waymo is typically ~30% more expensive than Lyft/Uber in SF.

If you buy en masse maybe. We buy such devices on or few at a time for industrial use cases, and those will cost you 10k€ for the big ones, and maybe less for the smaller ones. lots of development happening in the space tho.

How does it have more potential? I don't know how much taxi drivers earn in the US but let's pick a random number like 50k USD per year. If Waymo hardware costs $10k but Tesla costs $2k, then the savings are $40k for Waymo in the first year and $48k for Tesla. That is a 20% increase in the worst case for Waymo and the longer the vehicle lasts or the higher the taxi driver salary, the worse it gets for Tesla. Their potential is heavily bounded and gets worse over time.

Not to mention, Tesla might not be able to do it at all. Plus a driver that makes magnitudes less mistakes, is punctual, doesn't sue, doesn't rest, or is a liability is worth much more than $50k. The human component though we could argue whether humans are meant to be driving cars full time putting themselves and others at human error risk

I wouldn’t step into a Tesla robotaxi in bad weather, period. They’d absolutely need a human remotely operating it. Without a steering wheel, passengers can’t take control even if they wanted to. Even in good weather, I’d be genuinely surprised if Teslas, in their current form, could drive around autonomously. I was really hoping Musk would mention new sensors being added for extra safety, maybe spinning it as: “Your Model 3 doesn’t need additional sensors, but just to be safe, we’re adding new ones.”

can multiple operators from India operate the robotaxis or does it need one on one operation? I mean consider the savings!

The latency will kill you.

Both figuratively and literally.

Maybe something like Mexico would be better.

Latency? That's when Starlink comes into play!

>The latency will kill you.

I mean - I wasn't thinking I would risk it!!

Just ranting here - The psychological disconnect between a remote operator and passengers in a robotaxi needs more research though. Remote operator might have less empathy and responsibility towards passengers possibly causing moral disengagement. The remote driver might never face the real-world aftermath of their actions, which can reduce their sense of remorse or responsibility. There could be complex legal dilemmas too (especially if operator is from a different country)

But this has definitely been researched a lot in the field of military drone operators who can make life altering decisions from thousands of miles away.

I think “thousands of dollars” in hardware is fine

My Tesla still beeps at me because it thinks I'm about to drive into pedestrians or parked cars because there's a bend in the road.

I honestly think at this point Tesla's FSD AI is way, way overfitting on a few US cities.

Well my 10 year old BMW F11 does it too sometimes, it really is a stupid primitive technology with tons of badly handled corner cases. Luckily its not obnoxious and I got used to it quickly so ignoring it. But in critical situations it can take away a bit of focus which is pretty bad. Of course can't be turned off.

Nobody expected 15 year old design from BMW to perform better I guess. From modern up-to-date teslas who don't even have steering wheel but lidar is a no-no because his ego? I can't imagine it getting approved in Europe, ever. Which is fine, there will be tons of competition for this in few years.

It's way overfitting on the routes that the CEO and a few YouTubers drive. https://electrek.co/2024/07/09/tesla-insiders-say-elon-optim...

Isn't any Tesla costing thousands of dollars anyway?

Tesla's autobots are free?

Waymo & Hyundai announced a partnership. IIRC Waymo has always intended to work with OEMs, vs make their own vehicles.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4156375-hyundai-motor-joins-fo...

Having no opinions about the IONIQ 5, I've gleaned that it's well regarded. Maybe not a Model Y, but close enough.

Of all the legacy OEMs, Hyundai has a fair chance of surviving the Tesla (& BYD) juggernaut. So I think Waymo chose wisely.

But Teslas vehicles can’t operate ANYWHERE autonomously — not even with supervision inside the closed loop tunnels in Las Vegas [0] — 6+ years after Musk said autopilot/FSD was capable of driving itself coast to coast.

Whenever Teslas manage to offer autonomous driving, what makes you think LIDAR etc will still cost what it does now?

[0] https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/news-columns/road-warrior...

All of Warner is "out in Burbank" as is most of what is normally considered Hollywood.

Yes, Disney is also in Burbank.

They claim that unsupervised autonomy in existing cars will arrive in California and Texas next year (with an easy bogieman that it will depend on regulatory approval), but no details as to what exactly this would mean.

It’s possible that they might be able to get an Level 3 product out similar to offerings by the likes of Daimler, Cadillac, and Ford - where on certain highways under certain conditions you don’t have to pay much attention but still must be available to take over relatively quickly if the conditions change. That seems the most likely route, although all other systems I believe rely on vision+radar or vision+lidar fusion. Those approaches have a lot more broad industry experience and quantifiable benefits in safety, but it’s possible Tesla has compelling data on the performance of its vision system, especially during daylight hours.

I’m honestly not sure how they could ship what they are implying - basically FSD as it is today but without anyone in the driver’s seat. That would imply they are (nearly) comfortable with it driving 10’s to 100’s of millions of miles between fatal accidents without any intervention. Either that or they are willing to ship and know it’s less safe than an average driver. That’s ignoring non-fatal accident rates.

There are some middle ground options where UFSD would have a larger set of conditions it can operate “unsupervised”, say in good weather and possibly daytime, and maybe only on some types of roads. But the edge cases where it transitions out of those conditions can be brutal and not easy to address. It’s relatively easy to say “just pull over and make the driver take over”, but especially on highways or heavy traffic that can take a while.

Ford and Cadillac have Level 2 systems, not Level 3. Tesla also has Level 2, but it is significantly more capable. (I don't think any of the others work on city streets at all, or even change lanes automatically based on navigation.)

Mercedes is so limited to just technically qualify for Level 3 that it could be likely be trivially outmatched by some limited FSD conditions if that's the route Tesla wanted to go.

But yeah I assume you start with some limited Level 3 subset, probably highway, then extend it to city streets. Then just start working your way through validating new conditions.

Fair call out that bluecruise and supercruise are not actually L3

https://www.arenaev.com/mercedesbenz_drive_pilot_now_works_a...

? this demonstrates the limitations of drive pilot. and its describe a feature that is not out until 2025. current limitations are 40mph on a straight line highway, no lane changes, navigation, etc

Mercedes, unlike every other automaker, including Tesla, *takes over legal liability* in those circumstances.

They're putting their money where Musk's mouth is.

And next year it will go up to 85kmph, close to highway speeds.

No they aren't.

If you look at their wording, they are saying they are ready to defend themselves and their software, not that they will protect anyone from a lawsuit.

The owners manual even explicitly states you are always the operator under drive pilot.

> The owners manual even explicitly states you are always the operator under drive pilot.

Just a straight up lie. The manual states:

> The person in the driver's seat when DRIVE PILOT is activated is designated as the fallback-ready user and should be ready to take over control of the vehicle.

> As soon as the driver steers, accelerates or brakes, the responsibility for driving and safe operation of the vehicle, including compliance with traffic regulations, will be returned to the driver.

On other words, the product can just return control to the user at the moment when there is a problem, so they don‘t take responsibility.

IDK how you got that from what I quoted other than just wishcasting it to be the case. There is a 10 second handover window after which the car goes into an emergency stop procedure if the user hasn't taken control.

They’re taking legal liability when you are driving a straight line on selected freeways going less than 40mph and with a car in front of you to follow during the day. This doesn’t demonstrate advanced capability, just limited scope.

Tesla’s system is purportedly far more advanced — do you believe that they could offer the same safety promises and legal protection for that limited scope if they wanted to?

(leaving aside for the moment, why they wouldn’t want to)

I’m not sure, I think it’s technically feasable given the current state, I expect that scope has pretty good safety numbers on current software, since it’s such a narrow scope.

But they would probably want to do all kinds of extra training and validation and fine tuning on it first rather than just blast out the current version.

Does no one read the article? They're going to bump up the speed limit to 85kmph (52mph for the metric-impaired).

And I actually believe Mercedes Benz, you know, the inventors of the automobile, to deliver.

> (with an easy boogieman that it will depend on regulatory approval)

Right. Tesla has avoided getting the California DMV's autonomous driving licenses. They have a "learner's permit" for testing with a safety driver. California DMV's regulations for self-driving vehicles mirror those for drivers. There's the "learner's permit", (with safety driver), which has much the same restrictions as a human learner's permit. There's the autonomous testing permit, which is comparable to a regular (class C) driver's license - you can drive yourself and your employees, but not for hire and not large trucks. Then there's the deployment license, which allows charging money and is hard to get. Mercedes, Nuro, and Waymo have one. Cruise used to have one, but DMV revoked it after a fatal crash.

Tesla reported zero autonomous miles driven on California roads in 2023.[1] They're not even trying. Tesla has long been scared of the reporting requirements. All disconnects have to be logged, miles driven have to be logged, and all accidents, however minor, have to be reported. Everybody else in the real self driving industry, from Apple to Zoox, does this. The ones with bad numbers grumble about it sometimes. Waymo doesn't.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

I would bet that it would not arrive in SF (at least the parts governed by Karl the Fog). Vision based sensors cannot slice through fog and rain and they would need constant take over by a driver.

> basically FSD as it is today but without anyone in the driver’s seat.

I thought Elon said it would be L4 FSD with only vision, but it'll be available later. If he can deliver it, then a $25K L4 robotaxi certainly will have an advantage over Waymo's $200K mod. Well, I guess the stock market believes it's more of a vaporware than reality.

The most interesting thing to me by far was the lack of a steering wheel on the Robocab.

Without manual controls, vague promises ("puffery"?) about autonomy won't drive vehicle sales as they do today across all Tesla's models. The Robocab as shown literally cannot function (or make a dime of revenue) until they've fully solved autonomy and have convinced regulators of the same.

It's not going to be in mass production until 2027 at the earliest, realistically. Will they have unsupervised FSD "next year" as claimed? I doubt it. But by 2027? I think there's a strong possibility. I've been testing FSD since it was released and lately the pace of improvement has gotten a lot faster. And the Cybercab is going to have a much faster onboard computer, and probably more/better cameras.

I got to try fsd (supervised) recently, and although it wasn't perfect, it was pretty good.

I also had to learn to to enable adaptive driving (or whatever it is called) to let the car go slightly over the speed limit and go with the flow of traffic, otherwise it would only go the speed limit and people would rage-pass.

I suspect if it works well 99% of the time, which is pretty good, they're about half way to their goals. Making it work well 99.9999% is probably a lot harder.

If they were that close, why did Karpathy leave 2 years ago?

You'd have to ask him. He worked there for 5 years, maybe he just wanted a change instead of a second 5 years of sprinting to the goal? In interviews he says he is still bullish on Tesla.

There is no reason for him to burn bridges so being bullish doesn't really mean much imo. It sounds like what any socially capable person would say.

To me it feels like the traditional auto manufacturers are catching up to Tesla and now they need the next hype to stay ahead of the game. It keeps the stock price high. I am aware this is not a new goal though. I very much doubt it's within reach by 2027. I'm happy to be proven wrong though, driving a car is a bit tedious imo.

Check the video here. https://youtu.be/hM_h0UA7upI?si=Tt9HqQoxceXKHmiI&t=140 He's not just politely saying he likes Tesla, he's talking for 5 minutes in detail about exactly why he believes Tesla is ahead of Waymo and will beat them to scale.

He's forced into supporting vison-only sensors as superior for political reasons but humans can't see in the dark. I don't want a self driving car that's as good as me at night, I want one that's better.

Of course he is bullish on Tesla, probably still has some stocks or stock options. Otherwise saying that he is bullish costs nothing to him.

And "wanted a change" my *ss. If you believe the hype that autonomous driving is really just around the corner (has been since 2015) AND you are leading the R&D of the company that does this, would you want to jump ship before the product is shipped? Do you think Jobs would have left Apple in 2006, just before the Iphone announcement because "he wanted change"? If you do, I have a bridge to sell you.

Could also be a non-disparagement clause in a contract he signed.

No idea.

But, as always, I consider how hard working at Tesla is, and what percent of the total economic value of working at Tesla Karpathy had acquired at the time he left. You don't need to imagine anything other than "cool, I'm good, see you guys around" for such a decision to make sense.

We saw a bunch of execs leave shortly after Tesla presold 500k Model 3s. Super sensible -- they were vested most likely, and other industry execs could be retained for the herculean lift that getting scaled up for the M3 was going to be. Why kill yourself? And from Tesla's point of view, why overpay in the market for those guys? You can hire someone from Audi (which they did) for much less on the back of the successful pre-order.

It is interesting that you are confident in that matter. But you have been playing with it for a long time. Someone like myself with zero experience with it am very skeptical about how much I can trust it. We have seen several accidents over the years in the news. How do we convince the masses that this car is safe and this car will not suddenly drive off the road? I do think self driving cars are as a whole a lot safer but I also consider myself a good driver so it would be hard to give up that control. When I would be sold on the tech is when it is so good I am legally allowed to sit back and sleep between destinations. Wake up in a new city each day.

There are more than enough on the road already to know exactly how safe they are. FSD has already driven a billion miles. Once it is good enough they will have the statistics to prove it.

It's interesting, because FSD has probably driven a billion miles, but I couldn't find any useful statistics yet.

So... I think it's a bit early to start believing the hype :)

It is far from good enough today, no doubt. But the rate of improvement is what matters, and from personal experience I believe it is quite high. I do wish Tesla would release some better statistics.

Closest we have is this: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/tesla-full-self-driving...

Sadly, it's not the real statistics. Also, it's not really good.

Tesla has, as far as I can tell looking through the reports, done not a single mile or kilometer under the Californian DMV Autonomous Vehicle Tester (AVT) Program[0]. Nor have they partaken in any other program of this kind that would enforce public reporting or any measure of transparency. There is no public data to gauge safety or reliability as of yet.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

You are right, there is no public data, they've kept it all private. FSD is not anywhere near good enough to be unsupervised right now so there's no real point to doing autonomous testing.

I'm simply saying that when it improves to the point where it can be unsupervised, they will definitely have the data to prove it.

I've had FSD (as branded by Tesla) for probably five years; it's gone from "actively trying to kill you constantly" to "very, very, good" to "probably safer than my teenager (who is a good driver)". I banned my current youngest driver from using the old version, but encourage use of the latest version for night driving -- it's really excellent. In most circumstances, it's probably a better driver than me.

That said, my kid told me last night in the rain with some cars slowing, it tried to pull left into oncoming traffic, and needed a quick recovery. We seem to be at stuff like that every thousand or so miles, down from every mile five years ago. it is WAY WAY WAY ahead of any other car I've driven or ridden in that can be bought. I understand Waymo in SF is significantly better. But, compared to Rivian, Ford, Volvo, Mercedes, it's years ahead.

> and needed a quick recovery. We seem to be at stuff like that every thousand or so miles, down from every mile five years ago. it is WAY WAY WAY ahead of any other car I've driven or ridden in that can be bought.

That's orders of magnitudes better than other FSD users.

Independent testing of over 1,000 miles through Southern California required 77 interventions, at an average of once every 13 miles.

I suspect your "one intervention every one thousand miles" might be a little optimistic.

Maybe. But on what version of FSD? Recent ones are radically better than older ones. And of course roads and situations vary.

12.5.3, so :(

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/tesla-full-self-driving...

I just took it on the way home, (1 mile), and I disengaged it. But I'm not sure if I needed to; I was in a roundabout and somebody tried to wedge in from another direction; the car braked, but I decided it was safer to accelerate through. So, now I'm down to at least 1 in 500 :p

That's not entirely true. Waymo have remote control operators, these would have the same - you don't need 100% foolproof autonomy to operate a fleet of cars like this.

I am also highly sceptical of everything about Tesla's program though

You're going to buy a personal car that can be remoted into at any time?

These are robotaxis, not personal cars.

No, the idea is that these are personal vehicles that are not operated by Tesla, but owned by regular people who gets to keep most of the profit they make driving strangers around.

Tesla has zero intentions of operating a fleet of autonomous vehicles on their own.

To the public, sure, but I'm sure their employees need a way to get around.

He stated that they would be for sale to individuals.

Not to mention the gigantic nightmare of liability in case of accidents.

With my permission? Sure!

Waymo support staff is more akin to conductors, they can choose actions for the vehicle to take, but can not control steering/acceleration/brake. In car controls are still used by field support staff if the car is really stuck or for emergency services.

I'm guessing it will show up first on a lot of private roads. This thing would be perfect on airports, big events, etc. It will be interesting to see what kind of companies will buy this thing. I don't think they'll be selling these to consumers any time soon.

The regulator thing is going to be a game of who will give in first and where. Once a few do, it might flip around quickly to regulators being more eager to not miss out. You see a little of that with Waymo where some cities would maybe like to get Waymo in their city sooner rather than later now that they are up and running in more glamorous places like LA and San Francisco. Unfortunately, waymo isn't able to rapidly roll out everywhere rapidly because they have to do a lot of work with mapping and testing in every place they roll out. Tesla might be able to move faster here once they get going and actually give some of these cities an alternative to waiting for Waymo to eventually show up.

Of course the whole thing is getting a bit political as well with Elon Musk's backing of Trump. My guess would be that Texas is going to be first. Probably Austin, where Tesla and SpaceX are of course very present. I'm guessing Tesla has pretty warm relationships with the local politicians there.

On the other hand, LA needs to look good during the next Olympics and Tesla did just host their Robotaxi event there. Some of those Robovans would probably be helpful in addressing some of the traffic headaches and sustainability goals with the Olympics. Paris just put a huge stake in the ground on that front so there is a fair bit of pressure. There's an opportunity there for Tesla.

Autonomy is solved. It will have hiccups/mistakes, but fewer than a human driver makes. The lack of steering wheel is solved by having support drivers who can work it remotely when the passenger presses a 'help' button or similar.

Solved, just not by Tesla who have been promising it every year since.. 2016?

Here's an idea - take the Robocab car design, strip out all the FSD/autopilot stuff, put in a steering wheel and dash and sell it starting at the end of the year for ~$25k.

It would sell +++

It would need a NACS port. Otherwise it would be a rather expensive brick.

and a steering wheel i guess

Toss in a spare tire, too. I care to do without! It's several thousand dollars. Signed, annoyed owner of a car with a fix-it-kit and a pat on the ass

without a spare tire, every flat I've gotten is a giant unplanned waste of time (min was 4 hours)

Last flat I had, there was a giant Allen wrench stuck in the tire and it was rapidly leaking.

Filled it back up as much as I could with the included inflator kit, took it a big box store, they patched it up and was on my way.

Took maybe an hour total out of my day? No $ cost to me (under tire warranty)

Teslas don't come with an inflator. sigh.

(and if you get one + slime stuff, you will kill the TPMS and have to buy a new one)

Weird, I have TPMS and it still works fine. I don’t have a Tesla though. Didn’t use slime though.

It must already have one.

I think it has one but techcrunch/verge bloggers heard inductive charging and leapt into assuming thats the only way to charge

"The robotaxi has no plug" — Elon Musk

This. If you have a robotaxi for under 30k, why not just sell the car for that much?

Tesla market cap is based on AI/robotaxi/FSD. Without that, they’re just playing catchup to BYD (who quietly, yet aggressively, executes at scale; they offer EVs today between $10k-$20k and already employ more workers than Toyota [for scale]).

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/cars/china-tesla-byd-competit...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/03/chinas-byd-is-set-to-beat-te...

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/bev-sales-10-m...

I think you're ignoring the fact that Chinese manufacturers are heavily tariffed in the west

Not at all. Global light vehicle sales are ~90M units/year. US ~17M/year. EU ~13M/year. China remains a factory to the world (and itself is the leading market). BYD can build in Mexico (NAFTA) and the EU to avoid tariffs, if desired.

Tariffs aren’t going to keep the EV printer at bay. They only delay the inevitable.

https://electrek.co/2024/10/09/byd-to-sell-100000-evs-north-...

https://electrek.co/2024/08/16/byd-plots-another-ev-plant-wh...

https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/byd-triple-ev-market-share-eu...

https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-ev-driving-seat-us-a...

The tariffs would most likely morph to disallow that.

I disagree this would be effective or a path to success. The evidence does not show policy moves faster than capital, and auto tariff policy gymnastics only work until foreign corporations open factories in country (as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Stellantis, and Hyundai all have done [US example]).

US EV demand is simply not at the point where this is economically rational (imho), yet. And so, you’re stuck with a legacy auto EV, a Tesla, or a BYD with 100% tariff markup for now. Even with the tariff, the BYD is still cheaper than a Tesla.

It's not rational, but the current tariffs are explicitly aimed at Chinese EVs and were created faster than they could hit the US market in any sizable quantity even using China's existing manufacturing infrastructure.

Policy in support of existing capital that is a heavy hitter politically can absolutely move faster than capital of new entrants.

And with both political parties explicitly being anti-chinese capital currently, it's not clear that a chinese factory would even be allowed to open domestically.

>BYD can build in Mexico (NAFTA) and the EU to avoid tariffs, if desired.

Not if Trump wins and I mean that without cynicism.

China can easily get around that the same way they made western manufacturers get around its own tariffs. Only the Americans aren’t going to require 49/51 JVs, even though they should.

Heavily tariffed in the US, no tariffs in AU/NZ/Asia.

EU is imposing tariffs depending on the manufacturer's co-operation with cost investigations.

No special tariffs in the UK also.

You are ignoring the fact that the world doesn't end with the USA (and EU)... Even in LatAm (which is "west") there is abundance of Chinese cars... In Africa it's probably even more visible...

BYD are literally handmade. I expect QA issues worse that Tesla’s Production Hell and in long term support. Plus, they’re doped up with subsidies like an Eastern Block Olympic Athlete; China needs to prop up its books after the Real Estate bubble turned to rubble

They seem to have significant quality issues - I have multiple friends with them in Thailand, and every second social post from them is bitching about whatever randomly stopped working or fell off this time - although I have a feeling they build their Thai market models elsewhere.

This is a bit of an aside, but why does everyone assume, if not for the sanctions, BYD would eat Western manufacturers alive? I for one, don't like to engage in anti-China hysteria, but having had experience with Chinese products, their quality and reliablity is a hit and miss. How would you know, that they didn't cheap out on caps in inverters, and they won't break down after a decade/200k km?

Also their cars are build like modern consumer electronics, welded/glued together at every opportunity.

Take a look at this video where a guy tries to pry apart a BYD battery pack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPTefsqNGI4

I guess BYD's strategy of world domination involves a high degree of automation, so they can make their cars in countries without a large pool of free workers/high wages, that's why they're made like this.

And here in Europe, they're not even that much cheaper, before tariffs. A Seal costs almost as much as a Model 3.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41842394 ("HN: China's Top Carmaker BYD Dominates Foreign Rivals with $14k Plug-In Hybrid")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841960 ("HN: VW, BMW and Mercedes Are Getting Left in the Dust by China's EVs")

Has he like ever met his promised price? If we go by almost every single other car he has released, The 30k robotaxi will be available for like 1 week on a stripped down tier (maybe like 25kwH battery?) or available off menu for like 6 months until it disappears and no one dares speak of it again.

https://skills.ai/tesla-car-prices-analysis/ 37k model 3 for a good chunk of time, especially given the inflation since initial announcement, and given the amount of features in the base version which you'd have to pay out the ass with other OEMs, is actually very good.

Ehh I disagree, the main competition like the Mazda 3 has still been very competitive price wise in that they also kept prices either low or lowered them further post COVID inflation and if you are comparing to the luxury brands then consider the fact that the car launched with a very stripped down interior compared to their competition and still remains that way while their competition have clearly continued to excel in this regard indicates that Tesla have hidden the inflation there.

But the problem with comparing "features" is that tesla fanboys/haters get to assign arbitrary values to the features the cars have. It would be so much easier to just meet your promised price point. In that regard my point still stands.

The interior is minimalist, and ever since the model 3’s release, all other brands have been slowly trending in its direction. The 2024 model 3 interior is beautiful to the point that all the pointless plastic widgets present on other OEMs are kinda hilarious to look at.

what makes you think the mazda 3 is the main competition?

>and ever since the model 3’s release, all other brands have been slowly trending in its direction.

This is probably the most untrue statement you've made all evening and you have made plenty.

>The 2024 model 3 interior is beautiful to the point that all the pointless plastic widgets present on other OEMs are kinda hilarious to look at.

The market seems to disagree given that the gasoline competition is still the overwhelming majority of new sales. There are many reason for that but if this interior was so good they should have swept the market after 7 years of this cost cutti I mean minimalism?

>what makes you think the mazda 3 is the main competition?

The mazda 3 is a non luxury sedan that competes in that segment. You can substitute the corolla the civic or any of those cars on the non luxury side. If you instead consider the Tesla to be a competitor to luxury cars (which is difficult to argue again because you cannot compare feature to feature) then you'd obviously go with the german/japanese luxury brands(as I also mentioned but you ignored).

Again going back to my point, Tesla has a history of never meeting their promised price point when they release their car. Not one model has ever hit their primosed price point. Not even the 12 year old Model S with its sub 50k price point. After 12 years of lies and false promises, there is no credibility that they will get to this magical 30k price point so it becomes moot when the market (which cannot afford their damn cars today gien their sales slump) will not be buying this contraption when it comes out years past its announced release window.

yup it’s only the world’s best selling vehicle :) they have swept the market.

indeed interiors of most other brands have morphed into a large screen instead of the 2010 circus of buttons. Model 3/Y is very competitive with premium german/japanese brands like bmw/audi etc.

I don’t disagree their pricing goals are usually not really met unless given the discount of inflation.

fyi EVs are 25% of the global car market and growing.

I’m sure the 30k is below cost assuming Tesla makes some revenue on the taxi service over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Because people lie.

One reason is, and bear with me, that this robotaxi does not exist !

There is a good reason why it was all presented in a Hollywood studio, without any specifics. The car we've seen yesterday is a prototype at best, a prototype that's crucially missing a small but important part for a robotaxi - the ability to drive autonomously...

Cybetruck was supposed to cost 40k (1/3 of the initial price) and have twice the range or something like that.

Make it a convertible.

a ROUND steering wheel and add turn signal stalks!!

The squircle actually works pretty well in the CT! Agree about the turn signal stalks though.

It has no rear window and wacky doors and only two seats. It would not sell. It's purpose built as an autonomous taxi, where those choices make perfect sense.

They are also doing a $25k car, they just aren't revealing it today.

This is why I want a pragmatic operational industry expert CEO[0] for Tesla, in the same way Shotwell is for SpaceX.

Announce and do the far stuff, but at the same time ship the near things that people want.

A pragmatic auto CEO would have had that $25k car moving already. A pragmatic industry CEO also wouldn't have such a large event without a call-to-action.

If they had a "reserve now for Feb 2025 delivery" button under todays announcement it would have gone offff

[0] edit: ok Gwynne is COO - let Elon keep the title, but we know what matters.

I agree that Tesla's biggest mistake was doing Cybertruck before the $25k car. But if they solve autonomy and/or succeed with Optimus then everything else becomes irrelevant.

I agree, but these are moonshot announcements that should sit isolated from the core business.

The same thing that Google (ironically) did with X - which led to Waymo, which now already has autonomous taxis[0]

You can't keep perpetually hyping tomorrow when the next Q is due.

I have an affinity for Tesla since it's named after someone from a village my mums family is from (and who I'm named after), and I like environmentalist, decarbonise, and electrify Elon.. but sometimes he makes it hard.

[0] on that note - not only have I seen better taxi demos than today, also seen better robot demos from Boston Dynamics.

Yeah Boston Dynamics is way better at locomotion, but their advantage in manipulation is smaller. You also won't see 50 at the same time like Optimus today. Tesla's advantage will be manufacturing.

Optimus has improved quickly. Gen 3 should be better. They showed Gen 3 hands today that looked pretty good.

I don't think Tesla have an advantage in manufacturing. China today is what Japan was in the 70s and their processes are so fucking good.

You can't win on manufacturing - this is, after all, a nation that is now building Volvo's better than the Swedes did.

Tesla fell into the China partnership trap, where the gov subsidises you and you open a "partnership" there, meanwhile they take your IP and knowledge for the benefit of the state (I was in that situation in '07 with Tencent and turned it down).

Hence now $10k Chinese cars - and Biden introducing tariffs to protect local industry (including Tesla - which Elon doesn't seem to appreciate)

On AI at Elon's recent recruitment event he put X.ai in Tier 1 with OpenAI and Anthropic and didn't even mention Meta. To me, as someone who applies these models across industries every day X.ai has never even come up.

That tells me he isn't informed on what Meta are doing (and that is - undercutting the commercial AI industry).

I'm hesitant to think it but there's a ton of hand waving and investor pumping happening here. Which is a shame, because a company with that market cap can do _a lot_ better.

I wasn't impressed by a single thing I saw today. I've seen the same autonomous car demo in a closed environment at my own uni 25+ years ago. I've seen better robots from Boston. I've also seen much better presentations than someone who looked like they are reading the text for the first time.

They have the capital, the mindshare, and the means and they're wasting it.

Tesla's advantage over Boston Dynamics will be manufacturing. Over China, it will have to be innovation and software. China is going to be much harder to beat than Boston Dynamics for sure. But remember that Tesla is no stranger to competing with Chinese companies and they are doing OK vs BYD today and not just in the US, with the bestselling car model in the world and in China. I think the "partnership trap" was more relevant years ago; today China has a lot less need to steal tech, at least in the domain of car manufacturing (note that Tesla is not manufacturing Optimus in China).

It's hardly new news that Elon is an awkward presenter and it isn't relevant to future performance of Tesla. You have to look at the pace of improvement of what Tesla is doing. Among humanoid companies that started in 2021 or later Tesla is the furthest along and improving much faster than the likes of Boston Dynamics. While they are still far behind, they have the time and the funding to catch up.

The Cybercab demo was an amusement park ride (and Elon explicitly billed it as such), however Tesla's FSD is released to the public and can be directly evaluated. While it is not yet near Waymo it is impressively good as of this month and the rate of improvement is very fast now. It just drove me across town for 20 minutes and I didn't have to touch the steering wheel a single time. It was incapable of that on that specific drive just two months ago. And I have the less powerful older variant of the Autopilot computer.

NZ has cheap BYDs, etc and Tesla still vastly outsells them.

The Model Y was the top selling car model in China last year. BYD has more models and sold more units overall but Tesla is clearly competitive.

The question is how much does a Boston Dynamics robot full of complex hydrolics cost vs a Tesla bot that full of electric actuators. Boston Dynamics robots aren't really design to be produced in numbers and are designed for a different use-case.

Boston Dynamics' humanoid robots thus far have been R&D platforms so the cost isn't all that important. That said, they released a quick teaser for the next gen of Atlas which seems to be all electric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M

> I agree that Tesla's biggest mistake was doing Cybertruck before the $25k car.

While a $25k EV seems to be what we all want and is almost guaranteed to be a massive hit, there is no evidence such a thing can be done yet without losing money on every sale.

Why isn’t any other car company doing it?

Rivian are losing money on every car sold at 4 times the price.

> Why isn’t any other car company doing it?

No other car company offers it, or promises it's coming next year, or ...

Similarly, who actually believes a $39,000 CyberTruck will EVER appear?

Crickets?

so, you're just agreeing that it makes no sense to have made a $25k car before Cybertruck... which is exactly what I was saying.

> who actually believes a $39,000 CyberTruck will EVER appear?

That was the estimated pricing announced before COVID and the associated inflation wasn't it?

Since then the released prices are significantly different.

> there is no evidence such a thing can be done yet without losing money on every sale.

> Why isn’t any other car company doing it?

You mean except all the chinese companys doing it right now?

Or all the european carmakers releasing theirs as we speak?

> You mean except all the chinese companys doing it right now?

Do those meet US vehicle regulations? How can I buy one for $25k

> Or all the european carmakers releasing theirs as we speak

I have not seen mention of those, can you share links please?

Biggest mistake was not releasing it soon enough. 2020 would’ve been perfect for it.

Cheap car for when interest rates hit would’ve been perfect too.

People really have gone off the deep end with Shotwell, yes she is awesome. But you know what makes it a huge amount easier to be awesome, having a reusable rocket to sell in the first place.

Musk makes the primary choices at SpaceX, he decides the company strategy, he decides where the money goes, he decides what future projects to take on.

If its so clear what a 'pragmatic auto CEO' would do, why do other car companies not have those cheap cars?

And the data shows pretty clearly that 2 person cars, even cheap ones don't sell very well.

> why do other car companies not have those cheap cars?

They do! The chinese for a while (hence tariffs), the europeans are releasing theirs right now.

I thought they said they were scrapping the $25k car?

Reuters said that, and Elon directly denied it. I think it is likely that the $25k car was delayed somewhat from whatever its initial plan was, but not canceled.

When is it going to be released if it has just been delayed?

The 25k will be on the same chasis and drivetrain as the robo taxi. He couldn't get all the execs to move to mexico to build it, so he agreed to do the robo taxi first in texas, then when they build the mexico giga factory they will build the 25k there. So, one year for cybertaxi line, and a year and a half for mexico factory. Will probably start rolling off the mexico factory in late 2027

The rear window thing is also done by Polestar in one of their latest cars.

I believe the reason was it adds strength that let's you have higher wider glass roof above passengers heads.

And the rear view mirror replacement uses cameras.

Who wants a 2-seater taxi? That seems ridiculous for a sizable segment of riders.

Anybody know why the autonomous taxi isn't just a model 3?

I don't see the point in a purpose built two seater with no steering wheel or pedals and I don't know why regulators would approve an autonomous car with no way to manually override it.

Barring all the issues, if you did build a huge fleet of autonomous taxis - smaller, lighter cars with less moving pieces would save you a lot of money.

2 seater - smaller car

No wheels or stuff - saves money on the build and parts.

They are probably planning to reuse lots of parts from model 3 to save money

And people are creatures of habit and highly social so version 1 of robotaxis will 100% look like normal cars. Regardless of whatever benefits you can come up with on paper. Once it's normalized then you experiment.

This is the company that released the CyberTruck. V1 will probably look mostly like what was presented. Every single prototype they have ever unveiled eventually ended up looking very similar to the production model.

Yikes, I had assumed it was the usual concept car BS until you mentioned the cybertruck

Or god forbid you'd build a proper electric public transport network that can transport dozens, sometimes hundreds of people way more efficiently.

You can see Musk's vision of that in Las Vegas: in tunnels (so it doesn't disturb "regular" motorists), but still using cars (what else?).

Cars driven by a human driver.

He can't even to FSD in a 2.4 mile TUNNEL after years

I don't understand how they can't get autonomous working in a tunnel. It sounds like the perfect controlled environment.

A driver in the Vegas tunnel told me they self drive perfectly fine, it’s a regulation thing holding them back.

It seems certain they’ll correct that with their massive expansion coming

Mark my words: the "final form" of robotaxis will seat 4 (up to 6 in a pinch) people on facing seats, will be able to drive in both directions and have all 4 wheels fully steerable for more flexibility.

The 4 fully steerable wheels on robottaxis is an interesting ones.

For human drivers were a little overkill with no real advange besides parking in small spaces) but they would be probably more usefull.

But the fact that they are a little too complex remains, maybe making them semi standardized and modular would help

Especially because every autonomous taxi fleet to date seems to have runs where they end up blocking roads and emergency vehicles.

Imagine if you could have one human operator able to go anywhere in the city for every 50 active cars ! Of course you can scale the number up and down based on actual needs. Kinda like Tesla AAA. Overhead will be less than having a driver per car and could be reasonable.

How long would it take for the single operator to reach a stuck car, worst case and average? I don’t know how it’s in the US but I’m pretty sure you could never get this certified in the EU, you can’t have your cars stuck and blocking traffic for 20 minutes before someone comes to get it unstuck. I think remote control would be much better for this.

"You're trip is important to us, please hold and the next available operator will assist you as soon as possible."

Imagine a hurricane knocks out mobile internet and every car in the fleet is offline, x% of all cars on road stop operating, or maybe they have some independence, but if they get stuck, are stuck immobile until comms are restored. I guess at least if they're small other vehicles can shove them out of the way.

I assume robo taxi will be significantly cheaper to manufacture. You can get away with much less range and creature comforts being quite a bit less. People care much less about comfortable for something they sit in for twenty minutes versus buy for $50k

Yeah I would be interested in seeing how the costs shake out.

There is logic in this design being cheaper to manufacture but I would think that it would be a long while before you "broke even", so to speak, compared to using a design that you already know exactly how to make.

Creature comforts, fine, they can go, but a shorter range? I thought the idea was for me to be able to have my car galavanting around the city all day being a taxi for people to help me make money. Forgive my ignorance, but how is a shorter range going to help with that?

I guess it depends on the initial regulatory environment. But most likely it's not any cheaper.

He said in the video it's cheaper through the economics of reuse, not through it being cheap itself

You don’t need 350 mile range for city errands and if for some reason you did, they can just coordinate vehicle swap that takes 30 seconds

Huh? You will spend exactly as much time in the Robotaxi as you do in a vehicle you buy for yourself.

If people are willing to pay extra for comfort and style already, why would they stop?

I feel like so much of this discourse is dominated by people who hate cars. Most people like their cars! That's why they bought them.

I would imagine the interior would be more "passenger proof".

Maybe easier to clean, or wash out vomit, or even warn of forgotten items.

First reason - doors won’t close themselves.

That is true, although they could add that to a model 3. I wonder how Waymo deals with it.

You close the door yourself, and open it yourself. I was horrified to discover this.

What?? What if you don’t close it and just leave? I mean this will happen.

In San Francisco? You're probably liable for all the property damage that happens next. I wasn't brave enough to find out.

Their cars currently produce an audible request to close the doors. In practice it doesn't happen often, I've never seen it happen in person. They also have support just minutes away usually.

The Zeekr vehicle they're testing now, and presumably the Hyundai they're starting to develop, will have self-closing doors.

Well they know who booked the ride, so they will probably charge you for it or block you from riding again.

They'd also have multi-camera high definition video and a LIDAR point cloud of the rider not closing the door and walking away.

It just sits there asking for help:

https://x.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1712009158210519474?s=19

You just close the door when you exit the Waymo lol.

The next generation of Waymo vehicles, based on the Hyundai Ioniq 5, will have powered doors.[1]

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...

I've heard in the past that the OEMs don't want to be relegated to being just some whitebox manufacturer so many of them have been very cold (in receptiveness) to working with Waymo. Probably explains the terrible selection of vehicles they have used, Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Jaguar i-Pace, the ionic 5 was surprising since I suspected the others were just OEMs offloading their turds onto Waymo and telling them to take a hike. Maybe Hyundai is getting something good in exchange.

Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.

Tesla sold a bunch of cars to Hertz which turned out to be terrible for Hertz, but great for Tesla.

>Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.

They very much care if they are selling their cars to an entity that is striving to make them irrelevant.

Think about it: If the world moves to a car sharing system where any type of car is available on demand and no one actually owns a car, do you think anyone will actually give one hoot about the badge on the front of the car? That puts manufacturers into the worst possible business model. Competing solely on price...ie a commodity.

So the manufacturers will either not want to work with them, give them whatever junk they can't sell and then tell them to go away...or they expect to get something big in return maybe like some technology sharing or a exclusive partnership.

Why else has Waymo partnered with the bottom of the barrel OEMs up to this point? Why not a Toyota or a Mercedes or hell even get the good cars from the OEMs they have partnered with?

Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.

They’re one of the few companies mass-manufacturing affordable EVs in the US.

Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?

Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.

I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?

>Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.

What does one have to do with the other? The I-Pace was built in Austria. They dont seem to care about where it was built.

>Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?

The Chrysler Pacifica was a gas powered vehicle, The I-Pace had a starting MSRP of ~70k. They didn't seem to care about propulsion method or cost of vehicle either.

What they do have in common is that they were both poorly selling cars made by manufacturers that were desperate to sell.

>Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.

Any evidence to prove this assertion?

Going back to my previous comment I mentioned that an OEM could want to partner with them if they got something meaningful out of the deal. Seems like thats what Hyundai is getting: Waymo Tech transfer/possibly an exclusivity agreement.

>I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?

I never said or implied that they would.

Hyundai #2 to Tesla: https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=...

Waymo optimizing for cost: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...

You ignored the rest of my response which is again driving the point: What does Hyundai really get out of this?

Circling back to my point, this does not really explain why they are partnering with Waymo. Waymo is a rounding error in sales for Hyundai.

If Waymo was solely focused on cost, then they should have stuck with the pacifica which is cheaper or gotten something even cheaper like a Toyota. It makes no sense to go with Hyundai which is not even the cheapest for the features that it offers(compared to id 4, Niro EV, Hell even Kona EV). It is a smaller car compared to the Pacifica and the i-Pace and is far less equipped in terms of comfort and space.

We dont even know if they specifically wanted to go with an EV. Thats just something you just asserted without evidence.

Waymo has touted that their entire fleet is now electric: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/03/paving-way-toward-fully-elect...

It sure seems like their self-imposed constraint is EVs. Their goal beyond that is cost reduction. It seems like the actual key right now might be volume:

“The team at our new manufacturing facility is ready to allocate a significant number of vehicles for the Waymo One fleet as it continues to expand. Importantly, this is the first step in the partnership between the two companies and we are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration.”

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...

but to your point, Hyundai may see this as an opportunity for “future collaboration” to get autonomous driving tech into their vehicles. But selling a “significant number of vehicles” is also very much in Hyundai’s interest.

If Hyundai was making the Niro or Kona EV in the US, then they may have been an option, but they’re not. They are not eligible for the tax credit. Toyota won’t make EVs here until 2025 or 2026.

The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.

Uh that article is clearly a PR puff piece timed to coincide with the retirement of the Pacifica fleet which is nearing 5-6 years of service at that point.

Again given their strange choices in the past and their backpedaling on previous initiatives (having Chrysler produce special Pacificas and then going back to retrofitting them by hand themselves, going from commiting to purchasing 65k pacificas to NOT purchasing 65K Pacificas, getting Magna to go a custom design of the iPace for them to not having them do a custom design) I dont see this as a deal that Hyundai got into without major concessions.

>The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.

If my theory is correct I suspect they are not getting a warm reception from many manufacturers and they have to pick whatever they can get. I'd imagine their ideal company is Toyota. They have experience with those cars from the early days, they make cars that can help minimize downtime due to their reliability and costs can be reduced. There is a reason so many taxis are prisues. Why not apply that common sense cost savings to Waymo's fleet?

The Waymo car has a speaker that tells you to close the door lol.

If Tesla pivots to this later, fans will be like „The best part is no part, that’s so genius!“

Why is this a requirement?

Good thought.

The upward opening doors will also be able to open anywhere, and for anyone, even with canes or bags/luggage.

I have no first hand knowledge here, but thinking from first principles. From Robotaxi fleet perspective you want autonomous maintenance, cleaning, charging, and lowest cost. From Robotaxi user perspective you want climate / music / entertaiment / safety. So the idea for robot taxi is that it should be better than model 3 in some or all of those dimensions.

Now speculating for the moment, from Elon perspective you probably want things to be more cyberpunky as that is how future looked in his childhood and he is trying to build it. Also, engineers / designers were likely mandated to handle all of the maintenance and possibly production by Tesla Bots.

Autonomous cleaning? Good luck vacuuming all the nooks and crannies in a car.

They literally showed a clip of a robot cleaning the car in the announcement. Also perfect task for Optimus.

I straight up do not believe that Optimus is capable of vacuuming a car unassisted without damaging itself, the car or the hoover.

what if the robot can exchange it's arm for a vacuum?

sort of Kentucky Fried Movie style :)

Chainsaw arm ala Evil Dead and I'm back on board.

Groovy ;)

Like any robot on a vehicle assembly line, it’s going to be trivial to get it to follow a pre programmed path. All the cars it has to clean are identical…. So actually it will be simple.

Yes, I think you're spot on. They showed a video of a robot arm cleaning the car's inside, and it appears the vertical opening doors make that kind of access easier. The car will also have wireless charging, which makes that easier to automate as well.

From what “first principles” are you thinking?

As a rough draft I went with:

1. What is important for a vehicle optimized for large scale robotaxi fleet from manufacturing and operational perspectives.

2. What is important for me if I get an into autonomous vehicle.

Because all the work of allegedly building a new vehicle platform is a better excuse for making no profit on the robotaxi initiative for the next ten years.

What's the deal with cynical, low effort comments like this that add nothing to the discussion? There's obviously more to the story than what you're saying. HackerNews is supposed to be for discussion, not Reddit-tier snark. Comments like yours are just visual pollution.

>What's the deal with cynical, low effort comments like this that add nothing to the discussion?

People are starting to wake up to the (shitty) new reality that Big Tech created for us. The cynical nature is just the natural reaction to a serial grifter becoming the world's richest man.

I don't think anyone but the most naive actually believes anything in this PR piece will come to market.

Oh yeah, look at all the terrible things Tesla has done, sell more EVs than everyone else, and make them for less cost, and include a good infotainment system in a car, what a terrible reality

Yeah this place feels like Reddit right now. Hivemind takes left and right.

Yes. Sadly, it's always been this way. Look up the response posts to Dropbox, Ethereum, .. Every few years I'm like "I think it's gotten worse" and then I'm like "I'm going to spin up some sentiment analysis to prove it's gotten worse" and then I read some old posts and I'm like "I miss jacquesm, but nah it's pretty much the same." And then I think "this is still the best forum on the internet."

Look at your post. Hivemind is an easy way to handwave common sentiment, perhaps even perception. This meta-commentary can be insightful. Yet.

The future I was promised was utopian, and instead my appliances all play ads and spy on me, and the robber barons at the top of the heap will use their billions that they got selling my personal data to advertising scum to leave legacy trusts that will continue to erode the fabric of society and increase wealth disparity long after said billionaires are dead and buried.

But sure, your Tesla has a good infotainment system so that's cool.

Which Tesla car plays ads?

Which CEO is leaning into far-right conspiracy theories and using Twitter to boost the electoral chances of the most dangerous US presidential candidate in history?

The Twitter that's barely used by anyone and thus isn't important?

Surely they should be using facebook, that's already proven to be great at helping with genocides

Move the goalposts any further and they'll be beyond the horizon from where I stand.

The simple fact is that Musk is a bad actor, an asshole with a huge ego, with a history of over promising and under delivering.

Is it so surprising to you that the supremely-unlikeable boy who cried wolf is being met with cynical skepticism?

Tesla doesn't sell more EVs than everyone else, BYD does.

Tesla has sold about 6.5 million cars at least.

BYD sold 131k in 2020, 321k in 2021, 911k in 2022, 1.6million in 2023, and in 2024 q1: 300k q2: 444k q3: 443k, total: 4.15 million

I mean, you've got to look at the context. This isn't happening in a vacuum; they've been promising this any minute now for the last eight years. At a certain point, the benefit of the doubt becomes strained, and every ostensible delay starts to look like a delaying tactic.

They're going for lowest cost per mile. Most rides have 2 or less people, this will address that huge market in a very efficient way.

Why is that market not served by a 4 person self driving car?

Or by a Waymo you can already use in a visit to SF?

Because roads exist outside of SF and Waymo should have competition.

The mentionned the show that they will have autonomous versions of 3 and Y first.

Because that isn’t different or new enough to get investors excited.

The point of this presentation was not to spell out technically how they are going to accomplish this. Agreed, a fleet of model 3s would work great.

The point of this presentation was to look like a cool visionary tech company that is going to change the world, to justify that your Market cap is now larger than EVERY OTHER MAJOR AUTOMAKER COMBINED!

Same reason the prototypes need to look like they were lifted from Blade Runner.

So a pump and dump?

They said in the event that they will first deliver 3s and Ys. They just add a 2 seater and 20 seater van later to fill other use cases.

> Anybody know why the autonomous taxi isn't just a model 3?

It's so Enron Musk can say it's still 2 years away.

BTW, Google tried this too (building a small 2-seater w/o controls). What happened to that project?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCezICQNgJU

Retired. Explained here: https://medium.com/waymo/from-post-it-note-to-prototype-the-...

Many reasons. Model 3 is to big. The Model 3 is missing many features needed, like inductive charging, automatic doors. And has lots of things not needed, like a steering wheel column. Model 3 is build on a much older architecture, even the upgraded versions. Model 3 still uses traditional car wiring.

With all the changes you would have to do to M3, its basically a new car.

This Robotaxi will have all the drive-by-wire architecture of the Cybertruck. The new electronics architecture and Ethernet bus. And things like wireless charging.

Because most Uber rides are 1-2 person and a car designed to be smaller is cheaper.

I'm guessing mostly for show. I they had a driving system that actually worked they could fit it on a car and try it in real life like Waymo.

Given current Tesla FSD drives like a drunk teenager even in good conditions, I don't see how this is anything but a scam. It's the perpetual "Teslas will be able to fully self-drive in 2 years".

Not my experience driving FSD in silicon valley. I was floored

I obviously don't know your personal experience, but with the amount of videos from Tesla owners showcasing FSD turning into oncoming traffic, trying to clip parked cars, blazing through stop signs without even slowing down and taking roundabouts the wrong way around in 30 minutes and then finishing the video by concluding that FSD did well is insane.

Just the amount of scary FSD footage from Cybertrucks alone that only got FSD a few weeks ago is massive.

Algorithm sometimes pushes those videos to me as well, and it seems that common narrative is 'great new update to FSD, I only had three interventions that could have killed me this morning'.

Think about it this way: when it actually works, that's not a video you're watching or that's getting amplified on the feed.. social media is a distortion field

I must say the show seemed a bit lame and the market seems to agree - TSLA down 8% at present.

The robotaxis did 5 mph on cleared streets and so seemed much less impressive than Waymos which can deal with real pedestrians and do 30 mph+

They only had two seats which is not how you'd make a commercial robotaxi and so probably just made for show to try to impress investors.

The robots serving drinks etc seem to have been remotely controlled by humans.

It's not that impressive when Waymo are driving people around in real life and also various robotaxis in China eg. https://youtu.be/izLfWY4c0Ko

I've always defended Musk saying robotaxis will be here in a year or two over the last decade because new tech is hard but they now look a bit in danger of being left behind by the competition.

The RoboTaxi looks neat, but I don't get why it only seats 2 rather than just updating the Model 3? What's the utility of an entirely new production line for a car that is less flexible than the existing model that's built at scale?

It's much easier to explain to shareholders why these things have endless delays even though "the tech is already there!" if they are a new chassis rather than an existing one. That way, when they haven't released anything in the next 5-10 years, they can still keep the music going.

Why wasn’t the Model X not just a Model S chassis with higher ground clearance and an SUV body?

Because it was a halo vehicle, and it worked out very well. The Model Y is literally a lifted and heightened model 3 because it's not a halo vehicle.

Graphic on Twitter says that ~90% of car trips consist of 1-2 people.

That's a huge amount of capex to spend for a low marginal cost though.

One could make the point this is better for the environment that hauling a multi-ton SUV around. /European perspective

The entire plan hinges on low cost high volume. That means reducing parts and complexity. Stainless steel body so no paint shop or variations to worry about, or paint maintenance, etc. removing steering wheel, removing glass roof, removing doors, and more.

For high density you have the robovan.

Vehicles are dominated by the production costs of producing anything. You save surprisingly little producing smaller vehicles because the expensive bits are all the things you don't majorly save on like the production lines, the battery, the mechanicals, the wiring, the electronics, etc. Nicer interiors, paint options, and other consumer upgrades have extremely low marginal costs. They're pure profit for the manufacturer.

It's strictly more expensive if you're limited to say, the typical NHTSA autonomous vehicle production limit of 2,500 vehicles per year.

Just look at traditional USA automakers and why they are scaling up their vehicles. Bigger vehicles can justify bigger prices thus bigger margins. Even if the manufacturing price is not that much different.

If you go down to basic physical material costs, Surface area of car, Metal cost, Glass cost etc, are the things which will determine car price in long run, So car which is weighting let's say 25% percent less can be be built cheaper compared to car weighting more. Less doors, less glass use, less paint, less material, less battery needed for same amount of distance, which brings down to cost.

I can assure you that you don't save 25%. Yes, there are small savings, but they're dominated by the fixed costs of producing a vehicle at all.

Ok, lets think of it other way, all things equal, if you are tasked with cutting costs of vehicle without cutting back things which makes your brand unique, and without reducing margin or running on loss how will you do it? You make vehicle simpler, with less expensive parts. That's how hardware design works. Cutting back on quality or software expense is not a option for Tesla as that will make Tesla equal to any other Chinese EV brand.

Look upthread. I would reuse an existing vehicle platform because it's cheaper at any realistic volume.

yeah, share as much as possible. anything new comes with an extra cost which needs to justify itself woth returns.

Also using old and already amortized tech is another option. Dacia mastered this art in the recent past.

Raw material is less than half of the price of a vehicle, right? Assuming it’s 50%, a 25% smaller car would save 12.5%. I would be surprised if raw material is even 50% of the cost.

Paint shop is the most expensive line by far. Maybe 20% higher than stamping capex.

Don't worry. This thing will never come out.

They are doing both; one doesn't exclude the other. Unsupervised FSD is also coming to the model y and model 3. They actually had a few model y's cruising around unsupervised at the event even. And they also have the 20 people robovan thing.

If you look at regular taxis, the only part that is used by passengers is typically the back seat. Which fits two, maybe three people at best. So, it's not such a crazy form factor for a taxi because most taxis are also two passenger vehicles right now.

The point of this car is that it's smaller and cheaper (less parts, battery, etc.) and optimized for being an autonomous taxi. And the reason for that is productizing unsupervised FSD. The car is just a means to that end. If you are going to build a self driving taxi, a two seater is the logical choice. IMHO it's actually too big. They could make it a lot shorter.

Classic bait and switch setup. Selling people the future in 2 years time with little to nothing to show for today. Timelines will slip, plans will change, software won‘t be ready, prices will change. And that doesn’t even account for where Waymo is in two years from now, or what the Chinese EV industry is able to pull off until then.

Even this underwhelming event was originally announced on short notice to prop up perception when sales looked bad in April [1], delayed by two‘ish months, and then didn‘t even start on time. Oh, and implementing the robo taxi was a two-months project back then [1]. It‘s a ruse, folks.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-dela...

Also:

> “The autonomous vehicles, we’re going to stop from operating on American roads, remember this,” Trump said.

Well, apart from tax cuts for the rich he never followed through with anything he said and his voters will never hold him accountable for anything, ever, so you can safely ignore every thing he says.

“Can’t trust anything” is not the same as “can safely ignore everything”. There’s nothing safe about it.

Abortion is now illegal in dozens of states.

13 states

https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/abortion-access-tool...

Wasn't that due to the supreme court deciding it wasn't up to the federal government?

Who nominates the justices to the US Supreme Court?

De jure or de facto?

One of the judges died in Obama's term, and senators explicitly declared they would not consider any nomination he made:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-stolen-suprem...

What a legacy. He achieved so much.

Just days after Musk appeared and spoke strongly in favour of him at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania [1]. These are interesting times and people make very strange bed follows.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/style/elon-musk-donald-tr...

Then again, can we trust a word the man is saying? It all feels like shallow pandering. Plus, it may be worth going through the entire event at the Detroit Economic Club [2] to check the quote more clearly as at least one source quotes him as referencing PRC car automation with that statement, while expressing some general personal scepticism of autonomous driving [3].

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km-gQhP5fnw

[3]: https://qz.com/donald-trump-self-driving-cars-avs-musk-tesla...

He is going to say exact opposite in a month and flip again and again until he does whatever random thing will ensure him random thing he wants in the moment.

Good. They don't work, and they wont work. We are a decade into the hype cycle on 'cars that have self' and the proponents are stuck pretending that their best case demo, which is always going to crash into stupid stuff that a human would easily understand (in it's highly tested and constrained route) has 'self' to preserve.

This is a reductive and far-too-pessimistic take when Waymo is completing more than 14,000 driverless trips per DAY and has completed over 15 million miles of driverless trips.

That's not a "best case demo": it's a real system, working in real world environments, and even if they're "constrained" (and go ahead and look at the Phoenix service area and tell me how constrained it really is), they are functioning, now, today. There's one driving by my house as I type this. It's not mowing down children. It's not causing fatal accidents. Its incident rate is dramatically lower than human drivers, and its severe injury rate is lower still. We're a decade into the hype cycle because of how hard a problem this is to solve, and we're finally catching up with the right confluence of technologies at the right time (mostly around machine learning, machine vision, sensor fusion, LIDAR, reinforcement training, and computer power) to make it actually work.

I can understand if you live outside a Waymo market that you might still believe this is still fairy tale "won't work" stuff, but when you live in a market where you see dozens of them every single day, doing their thing _unremarkably_, it's... well, it feels quite a bit like the future.

Note that I'm speaking explicitly of Waymo here. Tesla FSD still terrifies me, vision-only seems like a horrible oversight, pun intended, and while it's meant to be non-constrained, it still has a very, very far way to go to close the gap with Waymo.

It wouldnt work even if you asserted a perfect record. The result is taking a robust fault (emergency) tolerant system and converting it into a fragile one without so much as a steering wheel.

Your Waymo will stop when you dont want to.

Tesla Cybertruck was announced as vapourware in 2019 and got limited production only in 2023. It was also delayed. Wonder whether it would have been also considered "bait and switch setup" according to your stance.

Wasn't it also released at a significantly higher price than announced?

"""In 2019, Musk claimed that the Cybertruck would be available in late 2021, starting at $39,900. The date was later pushed to 2022, and eventually it was pushed to late 2023, with a starting price of $60,990.""" - according to the Wikipedia page.

I'd definitely count that as bait and switch from the price change alone.

Ah right, the price should have remained the same despite the highest worldwide monetary inflation rates in the last 40 years.

I can't imagine why would a company want to sell a product at a profit.

Could you give some numbers to back it up? Considering the loss due to inflation from 2019 [1] I would have expected the truck to get to around $49,200.

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2019?amount=1

What numbers am I backing up?

Should the price have remained the same? Or was 2022 not the highest year for USD inflation in 40 years (see: your own source.)

Is a company only allowed to increase their prices at a rate pegged to monetary inflation?

Whats your point here? We said they broke their promise (bait and switch, because they knew it was not assured expectation for price and delivery).

You say they have the right to brake promises, which is true.

So we agree they made a promise, broke it and raised the price beyond inflation, likely due to screwing up the production cost targets. All of that after they took reservations.

So we agree but you don't like that we're judging them badly for it?

> Is a company only allowed to increase their prices at a rate pegged to monetary inflation?

If they want to avoid a reputation for dishonesty, yes.

50% increase in price point, 3 years delay. Inflation is only a small part of this. The delay is more telling than the price increase.

The cybertruck was promissed as a cheaper way to make cars, its more expensive tha n the others that suffered the same inflationary forces. Save that its a new product, if they trusted that scale was going to cheap it down more than they current methods they would take a loss at the start to make a larger profit later.

Gee, if only there was a comparable item to measure inflation against…

Tesla Model Y:

$39,000 in 2019, the same year the Cybertruck was announced - https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/tesla-unveils-mod...

$31,490 today - https://www.tesla.com/compare

So, a price cut then. From the same company, on the same time horizon.

Even on longer timelines, inflation isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Tesla Model S:

$57,400 in 2009 - https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-motors-sets-new-pri...

$68,490 today - https://www.tesla.com/compare

Thats a 19.32% price increase in one of Tesla's other cars over 15 years, compared to a 52.857% price increase of the Cybetruck in the 5 years between it being announced and today.

The cheapest Model Y right now is $44,990. You have to remove the "gas savings" and other subsidies that individuals may or may not qualify for to see this cash price.

So the announced price for the ~300mi, dual-motor version in 2019 was $49k.

Today that price is $79k. ($99k if you want the first-edition Foundation series which has been the only one delivered to customers so far).

CPI inflation calculation puts $49k in 2019 as $60k today. So inflation means the price should have gone up ~$10k, but it has actually gone up ~$30k.

Also in 2019, $69k was supposed to get you 500 miles of range. The highest range configuration of the truck they shipped is 340 miles, with potentially up to 470 miles if you fill half the bed with an additional $16k battery pack that is only installable/removable by a Tesla Service Center. Nobody has seen this pack demonstrated yet or how it will handle things like Supercharging. Having half the bed taken up to achieve the max range was definitely not part of the 2019 sales pitch.

The starting price of 60K is still just a promise at this point. What you can actually buy costs 100K.

In the case of the Cybertruck, it was never a question whether it is even possible to do such a thing, because they had all the technology, the only question was if they were stupid enough to build it.

Just as in the case of the "Hyperloop": in theory, it is perfectly possible, but anyone who got as far to build a few meters of it (or something resembling it) quickly realized the practicality problems, and what would happen if you scaled those problems to a few hundred kilometers...

On the other hand, autonomous driving is not a solved problem, not even in theory. One could argue that it would require some sort of a generic AI, which we don't have, and nobody knows if we will in the future. So selling anything based on that is simply fraud, in my opinion.

What do you mean by "stupid enough to build it?" It's the best-selling electric truck in terms of shipped units, by a large margin (approximately equal to every other EV truck manufacturer combined, including Ford's electric F-150).

Could you please cite sources on this? Just looking at Rivian [1] they delivered 37,396 units this year alone. Tesla doesn't officially publish numbers, but the Cybertruck recall from few weeks ago tells us around 27,185 total [2]. I know that the July sales were high, over 5172 units [3], but that's a single month. And just to put everything in perspective here: over 13 million trucks were sold in the States in July alone [4].

[1] https://electrek.co/2024/10/08/why-rivian-rivn-cutting-ev-pr... [2] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2024/RCLRPT-24V718-2751.PDF [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2024/09/22/cyber... [4] https://press.spglobal.com/2024-07-24-S-P-Global-Mobility-Ju...

Here is one source from the Verge:

Tesla sold more Cybertrucks than almost all other EV trucks combined

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/18/24247985/tesla-cybertruck...

The Cybertruck was the best-selling $100,000+ vehicle in July

https://qz.com/tesla-cybertruck-is-selling-better-than-any-o...

"Tesla sold more Cybertrucks than almost all other EV trucks combined" - in July, you forgot to add

"The Cybertruck was the best-selling $100,000+ vehicle in July" - there you go

Rivian's delivery numbers include the R1T pickup, the R1S SUV, and their EDV delivery van for Amazon and other fleet customers. The R1T pickup is likely half or less of their total production number.

We don't know how profitable it is. They're already running out of folks willing to pay $100k and have begun offering the $80k version. Will that version be profitable to build? It takes more than unit sales to make a good business decision.

Even if it is profitable, it still needs to be weighed against the opportunity costs of using those resources to pursue a different strategy. Would the same resources in terms of designer, engineers, hours, and capital outlay on factory production lines have been more profitable if they were applied to a different vehicle?

It's very possible. The Cybertruck is always going to be a limited demand vehicle. It may do well versus other EV pickups in the US market, but Tesla is a global company and the Cybertruck is not a global vehicle.

Yes, indeed that’s a bait and switch. There were changes in price, features, availability dates and so on.

Look at the announced price and all the claimed features then. We were promised a bulletproof amphibious truck for (IIRC) $40k, and we got a truck whose warranty is void if you drive in the rain, costing $80k for the base model. Also it won't even stop .22LR bullets.

We were also promised micron panel gaps. the panel gaps on the cybertruck are both visible and visibly uneven.

It's really weird to see anyone even imply that the Cybertruck has vindicated Tesla.

> Also it won't even stop .22LR bullets.

Seriously? Is there proof of this?

The body panels are pretty thick, and they're made of an austenitic nitrogen steel -- a modified form of 316LN -- which should perform nearly as well as any "armor grade" steel alloy. (Against steel fragments, it likely performs poorly, but against lead handgun rounds it is likely even superior to the average high-hardness armor steel.) Just on the face of it, I'd expect the Cybertruck's body to stop any threat up to .44 Magnum.

There are videos of people shooting holes in it with 9mm at least.

I've seen a few where it stopped 9mm.

e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5EyKMqGGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOteg0J5teg

Do you have links to those videos where it fails?

Besides, 9mm and .22lr are very different things. .22lr is one of the very weakest ballistic threats. 9mm has much more mass, usually more velocity, and a much higher (~3x higher) average KE load.

Yeah of course I can't find it now, there was some lame Youtuber memelord that let his buddy shoot at it with a handgun and at least one bullet went through. But I also see that it can resist it, so IDK and retract my statement.

I do know the difference between the calibers though, having shot a few different weapons in different calibers (as a hobby & in the military)

Can someone explain the thought process here.

People sit in a Cybertruck. With their head visible through the glass. Non bullet-proof glass.

Tesla previously announced that all of their cars had the hardware for Level 5 Self-Driving in 2016 and would be capable of driving fully autonomously within 2-3 years.

This isn't just a bait and switch, it's a new bait and switch to redirect from the existing one.

If Tesla wants to make a new announcement about autonomous vehicles now, 8 years after originally announcing that they were already shipping them, it should be that they are actually operating autonomous vehicles in the wild somewhere.

Not showing off a new car design that isn't needed for such a demonstration and that is coming 2-3 years from now.

Elon has almost no credibility left for what he says.

It's basically just a website at the moment with bunch of 3D renders which you too could get done from a web shop.

Tesla has nothing new to offer and competition is catching up, EV adoption slowing down and such.

If I had, I would gradually drop Tesla stock because it's going to go downhill if not rock bottom from here.

> It's basically just a website at the moment with bunch of 3D renders which you too could get done from a web shop.

They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue. The bar was staffed by Optimus robots. “Basically a website”?

> They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue.

To quote a participant[0]:

> After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, @Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians.

[0] https://x.com/realdanodowd/status/1844605093368512799

There are countless videos on youtube of people recording their experience with FSD's open beta. It is probably 90% of the way there, if not more. Anyone who thinks Tesla won't get there first is peak delusional. Hate on Elon as much as you want, but Tesla are top-tier engineering.

Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao

> Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao

It's not "talk shit about Tesla's engineers", it's just a very hard problem to solve. It's easy to get it "most of the time" but extremely difficult to finish it. It's obvious it will take decades, not years to get us there. Whereas Musk insists he will solve it "this year", every year from 2014.

Even if you'd be right about the 90%, I highly doubt they'll be first.

How long did it take to get to that 90% ? AFAIK they first mentioned FSD ~2016(Self-driving itself even earlier).

As the last 20% of work are often 80% of the effort we can estimate that those remaining 10 % take ~ 40% of the time. They've been at it for ~8 years , which gives an expected release of ~ 2029.

We'll see what Waymo and other competition has until then.

There are 90% and then there are 90% more.

A.K.A the Rule of Credibility: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule

Followed by Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law

That 90% is about as good as a teenager taking his first practice drive with a parent (meaning an extreme road hazard).

> about as good as a teenager

a suicidal teenager

I feel like there’s some software adage about the last 10% being the hardest. It certainly holds true from my experience - even if they are 90% of the way there, it’s not a linear path to 100%.

90% done, 90% left to go.

so the 90% is really meaningless in that case.. it's what we judge to be 90% which is erroneous.

I live in Los Angeles, and Tesla will not get here first because Waymo has already arrived.

I saw pedestrians walking in front of the cars in the live stream. The rest is true though. It reminded me of taking the classic car ride around an amusement park where the cars all follow each other on a track.

Tesla at a forward P/E of 80 is massively overvalued as a car company. You can get Mercedes or BMW at a P/E of 6, with a 9% yield. Sure, the EV market is still growing, but Tesla is not the only player. All brands now have EVs, there are both cheaper and more luxurious Chinese EVs, that's some massive competition.

The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics, which Musk and Tesla-friendly analysts are heavily pushing. Since Musk has made massive loans against his Tesla stake you can expect that he will keep highlighting those narratives as well. A revaluation of the stock to sane levels would certainly cause him some financial difficulties.

>The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics

Maybe a bit of that but investors are more buying into Musk's past track record with Tesla and SpaceX which has been pretty good really.

- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.

- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public

- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible

- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day

You’re a fool tricked by another fool who shouts loudly that they support free speech while they ban speech left and right.

For goodness sake, ElonJet was banned and you can’t even say the word “cisgender” on the platform. How delusional are you?

Also Musk has banned mentions of his own transgender daughter, who now posts on Meta’s Threads app instead.

X is like a textbook case of why total autocracy isn’t actually good management practice. Musk has become the Henry VIII of social media.

ElonJet was a live geotracking site for private jets. You can post cisgender, it just comes with a warning.

Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.

So your response is “it was worse in the past”?

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Either you’re a “free speech absolutist” or you’re just a lying charlatan. Elon is clearly the latter, the evidence is right in front of your eyes and you choose to make excuses.

ElonJet is posting publicly available information and isn’t banned on other platforms. Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.

> Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.

Placing a warning is generally not considered a restriction on free speech but rather a tool to inform or protect audiences.

In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright. Warnings are typically seen as a way to balance free expression with the responsibility to inform audiences.

> In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright.

You mean like suing people for saying true things, and encouraging the government to criminally investigate for people for saying the same? Because that is exactly what Musk has done in the past year.

I’m not saying anything about Musk.

I’m simply saying that it is false to claim that attaching a warning to something is restricting free speech.

Two good examples are the government warning on tobacco product or cancer-causing warnings in public spaces.

These are warnings and do not constitute restriction of free speech.

The warnings undoubtedly come with a derank in the Twitter algorithm, so it's very much not the same.

But if you want to get really technical then this isn't even about "free speech". A platform restricting speech has nothing to do with "free speech" as it is defined in the US constitution. That's all about governments creating laws that punish people for certain speech.

But hey, we're in a world where Elon spouts nonsense about being all about "free speech" so the world has lost that meaning anyway.

Free Speech means more than Free Speech under the law. It also refers to the permissiveness of private platforms.

So this is just yet more nonsense.

Yes, it was much worse in the past.

People are only being banned for impersonation and live geotracking. In the previous Twitter, you were banned, shadow-banned, de-amplified, etc, if you expressed views that the political left disagreed with.

You want to justify and downplay the latter my presenting Musk as equally villainous. It's disingenuous mental gymnastics to advance your censorious and authoritarian agenda. Getting Twitter back to being censored is what motivates the incessant attacks on Musk.

Let’s say you’re right. There is only one side claiming they are “free speech absolutists”. There is only one side demonstrably lying to you. It’s Elon Musk. You’re being duped by a billionaire and you’re too blind to see it.

I'd much rather X under Musk while he doesn't live up to his free speech absolutist claims than X under the establishment, where you must use left-wing gender pronoun conventions or be banned.

You're okay with the previous authoritarianism that was imposed that's why you'd prefer a return to the previous setup. If you believed in political neutrality and Free Speech, you would be hardly annoyed by Musk not being as committee to Free Speech as he claims, while he reverses what had been an overwhelming censorship program.

I prefer that to the CIA having a direct line to the top of the platform and free reign to use it for propaganda, yes.

Mostly I agree, modulo "he knows how to make teams to do XYZ", which I'm happy to count for the same reason I'm happy to blame him personally when those teams he's ordering around do something I don't like:

> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

I strongly disagree with this.

Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…

There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions

Yes and:

I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.

Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.

For bonus credit:

- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)

- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally

- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation

- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"

I really wonder if he is not focused enough

Ya, 3.5 out of 5 ain't bad.

US competition with Tesla isn’t even close and the only way anyone has able to get a functional charging network up and running was to piggyback off of Tesla. I know the Trump stuff is annoying, but there’s way too much criticism of Tesla out there that is our political emotion.

Trump is Tesla's only hope.

Elon knows Trump is a transactional person and as long as he supports Trump, he can get the necessary governmental treatment his companies need to survive (tax credits, Chinese EV tariffs, some sort of asinine Mars mission).

EV tariffs are going to happen throughout the entire west with or without Trump.

Western governments have discovered the Chinese plan to decimate western manufacturing by subsidizing it at over 10 X the rate required and seen in the west.

Vehicles matter because they are a means for war machine production.

He needs more than that. Both Mercedes and BMW are eating into high end Tesla sales.

Those companies are faltering without software talent.

Tesla has the world's best autonomous vehicle offering by some way of measuring things. There are many ways to measure things, but at least in some "category" they are indeed leading: Level 2 systems for the US which you can privately buy.

Mercedes already has a level 3 available for purchase in California: https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot

Yes which can not do a bunch of things that FSD can.

> with little to nothing to show for today

Although they didn't "show" it on the event, Tesla self-driving is steadily improving each month. It is now also available on the Cybertruck, and the miles per intervention metric is steadily improving. You can find many videos on YouTube. Note that this are real cars on the real road.

Maybe in the US. It still does nothing in Europe, which is disappointing because the company happily took my money in February 2019 on the promise that this feature is imminent.

I paid 7,500 euros for something that still doesn’t exist in any usable form. (I thought it would be good for my elderly parents who were the primary users of this car for a time.) It’s actively dangerous because it doesn’t even see speed limits correctly. The car will probably be at the end of its life before this feature ever ships.

Sure, it’s a lesson for me. But don’t underestimate how much goodwill Musk has burned with his customers. I’m never buying another vehicle from this company, no matter the price or features. His political activism is just the cherry on the top of his poop-cake of lies.

> I paid 7,500 euros for something that still doesn’t exist in any usable form.

And I thought people preordering games for 70€ were taking unnecessary risks. You guys took it to the whole new level.

For sure. It wasn’t my usual type of purchase, but more emotionally driven.

My dad, who is in his seventies and an early-adopter type, was really into Musk and FSD. I thought it would improve their quality of life to have access to this car, and I had recently found myself with the means to give back to my parents.

For a period, FSD was up to $15,000 USD... For heretofore still unshipped vaporware. And I say this as someone paying the $100/month for the current very very beta, sometimes absolutely terrifying form of it.

Where are the numbers?

The problem is Tesla and Musk have been lying about full self-driving for years: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

In 2016 Tesla said that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...

Tesla even lies about things as dumb as Cybertruck quarter mile times:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE

https://insideevs.com/news/699260/tesla-cybertruck-porsche-r...

Tesla never ran that quarter mile. And the worst thing about it was the Cybertruck's lead engineer trying to rationalize the lie:

https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1746266437088645551

When your engineers lack commitment to basic honesty then you've got a sick company culture.

Lying is just too much a part of the culture at Tesla. Musk clearly doesn't value honesty or credibility.

I donno. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes in your examples they were not completely honest. That’s true. But they have been innovating and shipping real products too which really work in the real world. If I have to choose between a company that does not innovate and never lies, and one that innovates but sometimes lies, then I think I rather have the lying innovator. At least as long as the lies come from a certain optimism and ambition. If the lies come from fear mongering then I’m not so interested.

Having said that, I agree fully that taking the full self driving money in the order of thousands of dollars and not delivering is highly problematic.

> Yes in your examples they were not completely honest.

They weren't honest. End of. No qualification or equivocation.

> At least as long as the lies come from a certain optimism and ambition

It amazes me the amount of mental gymnastics people will perform to defend fraud.

A propos Chinese EV.

US is raising import tax on Chinese EV (from 10% up to 38.1%) in EU to help us combat the climat change better. /s

Like someone said before, he's lost all credibility. As someone who picked up FSD some years back, I'll prob never get a Tesla again based on some future promise.

The Tesla Robotaxi seems similar to the prototype car without steering wheel or brake pedals that Google announced (or demoed?) in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/technology/googles-next-p.... It seems likely that Waymo is 10 years ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving, and not 2 years.

Are they faking this? The robots seem way too human like, maybe they are remotely controlled?

The ones that are walking around live move much worse than the ones seen in the videos of robots in a home. I suspect the latter were teleoperated.

Seems like the bar tender one was teleoperated

That head movement.

Without a doubt speculators will flood this comment either way.

Watch the latest FSD videos. It drives exactly like that.

Having built teleoperated robots, I can guarantee that the non-dancing ones are teleoperated.

Yep, they were just teleoperated - movements, voice everything. I guess they forgot to mention that.

Robotaxi & Optumus robot still looks to be years and years away. However, I'm pretty fond of the idea of having distributed compute nodes that performs computations when idle, the idea of reclaiming parking lots, the induction charging and vacuum bots looks pretty sleek as well.

> distributed compute nodes that performs computations when idle

I can't imagine that working well for latency-sensitive applications... like self-driving cars.

He just bought a massive data center with thousands of Nvidia boards. Why would the car be an efficient place to do the same work?

I don't believe it would be efficient, or do I know what compute load he intends these to be. But it's some use for idling hardware.

Because getting GWs of power into one building and the cooling it is expensive. Why not let other people buy the computer, provide the power, and it won't need expensive cooling.

Question is: are there enough high latency distributed workloads to sell?

High latency distributed with low security requirements. Until homomophic encryption works.

And resilient enough to handle nodes having an accident, catching fire in a flood, parking underground with no signal for days, pausing to be used as a car...

This is an unreliable spot instance at best, with none of the features one can normally attach to an instance (like storage, managed databases, ...). How fast can its Internet be? Will owners need to pay for Starlink too? (What about when parked indoors?)

It would have to be cheaper than all regular hosting options by a long shot for anyone to consider this. A very niche, low-paying market, in other words.

Doesn't distributed computing generally cope with nodes going offline?

The point is it's just a way to use free compute that's sitting around, if you want to sign up to use it you'd obviously make sure it was in wifi range

Running compute nodes in cars is honestly an even dumber idea than renting out your own car as a taxi.

> dumber idea than renting out your own car as a taxi.

your car is doing nothing for most of it’s lifetime. renting it out via turo or as a taxi makes sense.

> your car is doing nothing for most of it’s lifetime. renting it out via turo or as a taxi makes sense.

A lifetime that will be massively shortened by it running as a taxi 20 hours a day.

Or maybe you can just use a taxi if you need it, instead of buying a car to be used as a taxi?

It would be worth running the numbers on this, it is more viable to just take taxi rides for a year, compared to how much would payments and potential income net from a scheme like this. Of course if it ever sees the light of the day.

It's important to remember when this event was announced. It was announced in April, when stock was plunging following a Reuters report that a cheap Model 2 was cancelled.

Musk called them liars and announced on the spot the event that we witnessed today (which was postponed from the initial 8/8 date...).

That's what fraud looks like folks.

Was there an event, too? Any videos?

There are plenty yes. Here is a Reuters article:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/teslas-musk-unveil-robota...

Really wish they had shared more details. It was so high-level that we didn't really learn anything substantive.

They had a working car. Unlike most other reveals

But we already know they can make a car.

The whole point was to please future shareholders.

Maybe the product isn't the car but the stock.

They have a pretty decent robot thing going on.

It's 2024 and the Optimus can almost do some of the things Asimo could in 2000.

A new car look without steering wheel and pedals. A working robovan. I don't think people understand the complexity of creating a hardware prototype of anything. This can't be ChatGPTed

Yeah and making 50 new cars that drive around is a lot harder than making a one-off prototype.

Wow, great! They put motors and wheels on a chassis with a screen and hardcoded them to drive in a loop. So impressive.

The demo is open to the eventgoers and lets you choose your destination. It's quite polished and a lot more advanced than "hardcoding to drive in a loop".

Why not demo it for the livestream then?

That's a pretty generous way to describe a ~20-acre geofenced, low-speed ride using a pre-mapped area in which they likely tested this out quite a bit prior to the event.

I saw a video from people in the car. The screen allowed them to pick between 2 different destinations. It’s not like they could just punch in any old address.

They've shown working shells of cars at every single reveal of their past cars without the interior filled in. We know they can do that. What's in question is whether they can make a driverless taxi.

Hmm it's almost like there might not be anything of substance to share...

One thing confuses me... Why invest so much into automony on streets/roads when most (all?) US trains/trams/busses still have operators?

Elon said himself that busses have 5x the operating cost of robo-taxis (1$ vs 20¢ per hour), but failed to mention that a typical bus carries 25x people. Presumably the cost delta is due to payroll for a human operators & janitors, so if busses already have 5x max throughout per $ in a worst-case comparison, why not put more energy into driving down costs on the more efficient modality?

I imagine it would be an easier problem to solve too, as you could could define constraints on your operating environment. Dedicated travel lanes, rail, and preprogrammed routes seem like they'd massively reduce the complexity of the problem.

I could also envision a decent financial argument for moving from a customer base of general-consumers to one of cities & local govt. If a 5x operating cost reduction is feasible, I could see "public transit automation" making for a pretty compelling capital project.

Who is the customer for this? Sub $30k appeals to regular people. But why would regular people want to own a robotaxi? I want robotaxis to exist so I don't have to own a car. I want someone else to own it, and I pay to use it once in a while.

If this works, wouldn't just Tesla operate as a taxi company?

I don‘t want a car, I want mobility

For sure but the best thing about owning a vehicle is object permanence - for both the vehicle and whatever is inside it. At a certain point it’s just easier and more efficient to own something than rent/subscribe etc. Of course taxis/rentals all serve a purpose but usually not for daily use.

What you need is a horse. Full self-driving, all terrain, net zero, ubiquitous fuelling infrastructure, built in alarm and self-defence capabilities, and fully reusable and recyclable.

I jest but I’m actually considering a horse to take my daughter to school, as it would shorten the journey considerably, as we live in tortured terrain in the middle of nowhere, and would allow her to go alone in a few years - again, mobility and utility are the goals for us here, not a car.

My father grew up in a somewhat rural Irish village and there was one farmer who would take his horse and cart to the pub (fairly anachronistic even in his day) in the knowledge that no matter how passed-out drunk he got the other patrons would load him into the cart and the horse would take him home. Take that, self-driving cars!

Wait, why wouldn't I want my own robotaxi if it's cheap enough? Unless taking taxiw is much cheaper it seems much better to own one, especially for electric cars which have less maintenance requirements.

A lot of people I know like their cars and don't want to take taxis everywhere. Maybe I'm missing how it wouldn't be appealing to regular people.

I mean if the cost is the same then yeah you might as well own it, but that seems unlikely, unless you're in the car for most of the day. Owning means you'll need your own insurance and do your own maintenance (yes, EVs require this). What's the actual advantage to owning the car? So you can leave your stuff in it? Not owning it will force you to take your stuff out, which you should be doing anyway!

> if the cost is the same then yeah you might as well own it

The cost per mile will be the same for whomever owns the vehicles, thus i think many will likely be in the position where they would pay at minimum equal, and likely more by adding in a middleman. For a parallel look into the critical point of usage when renting a vehicle is cheaper per year than owning one today.

> What's the actual advantage to owning the car?

Minimal latency to go. No dependancy on availability of vehicles so you can be fully in control to meet your commitments.

The primary place this is an issue is competition at rush hours or holidays, where a large percentage of the population are all in commute simultaneously all delocalized from each other. An operator would need nearly 1 specific car for each of all of them in order to guarantee each could make their commitment… so, if cost is similar, and one vehicle needs to be guaranteed for you anyways, the questions becomes why wouldn’t people ensure that themselves by owning it?

I'm not say no one would want this. I'm saying that it's odd play. Most people that own their own cars do not want the limits of 2-seaters. 29k is a price point that appeals most to private buyers. If robotaxis exist, a lot of people would opt to not own a car at all.

Hypothetical here, but my mum's 88 and various relatives have had to give up driving around age 90 due to becoming dangerous, so I've been kind of looking out for something like this that could get her around in that event.

Another thing re the price point, in other news "Apollo launched its sixth-generation robotaxi at Apollo Day 2024 in Wuhan, Hubei province today, costing 200,000 yuan ($27,670), a 60 percent drop compared to its predecessor." https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/15/baidu-apollo-launches-6th-ge...

So maybe they are trying to keep up with the Apolloses. Which are actually out there taking rides - they are similar to Waymo.

The big promise of the Robotaxi was that every Tesla would be one, that your Tesla would earn you money while you weren't using it. This was obviously unlikely to ever happen, but has been the promise right up to this event, and something Musk has been very vocal about.

Despite having very few details in this presentation, the one detail that is clear is that existing Teslas won't be taxiing anyone, and Tesla will be the operator reaping the benefits. That's a significant under-delivery, especially for the average Tesla retail investor who believes in the mission and is driving their stock price.

Uber drivers already drive Teslas with FSD. Today.

The promise was that you'd buy a Model 3 to use as your personal car, and then run it as a robotaxi while you're at work, and the taxi money would pay you back for the car within a year. FSD is nowhere near up to that task, neither technically nor legally. And the new info from this presentation is that it is, of course, never going to be: this was an indirect admission that the Model 3 was sold with fraudulent advertising by the then-CEO himself.

On the event they announced they will start Unsupervised FSD in California and Texas with Models 3 and Y in 2025

Thanks for the laugh, wonderful passive income and price point

Show me proof they are doing it without being in the cars.

> one detail that is clear is that existing Teslas won't be taxiing anyone, and Tesla will be the operator reaping the benefits

Elon said you will be able to buy a Cybercab for under $30,000 and individual owners will be able to "tend to [your robotaxi fleet] like a flock of sheep".

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the quality of stuff coming out of that man’s mouth has stopped being quality and is now just quantity.

And Elon is a guy that knows how to tend to flocks of sheep(le)

If you are still believing a word from that man you're delusional

So it is 100% true that the promise for your current Tesla was broken. But don't worry, an additional $30k will fix it.

Yeah, not sure how this is supposed to be a positive reply.

He also said at the event that all Teslas would have the same robotaxi features.

> Despite having very few details in this presentation, the one detail that is clear is that existing Teslas won't be taxiing anyone

That’s untrue. He said Model 3s and Ys will be starting taxiing next year in California and Texas.

[flagged]

He also said the Roadster would fly with SpaceX thrusters. I think that was peak Musk.

Well there was the one on the falcon heavy test flight

"SpaceX package", not "SpaceX thrusters".

He was talking about compressed air thrusters to increase acceleration. It's a cool idea. Who knows, they might implement it.

No, he said it would fly, he really did.

Edit: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1005577738332172289 SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …

"Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package will definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …"

I didn't want to spend the time to find the video where the flying bit was said more explicitly.

He didn't say "it would fly".

He said, from your own link, "Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …".

"The new Tesla Roadster can fly"

https://electrek.co/2024/06/15/elon-musk-tesla-always-coming...

I didn't make it up. In the above quotes he definitely implied it would be capable of flying, and more recently, stated it outright.

The car doesn't exist in the first place, doesn't exist with thrusters, and doesn't exist with thrusters that make it capable of flying, and so I think it's a little early to call victory on flying Tesla roadsters.

Discussing the thrusters in 2018: "Using the config you describe, plus an electric pump to replenish air in COPV, when car power draw drops below max pack power output, makes sense. But we are going to go a lot further."

And more recently, it was very explicit: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1801980372823187707 "The new Tesla Roadster can fly"

Tesla running the service would good for the investor though

I don't know what presentation you were watching, but in this one it was clearly stated that all Tesla models will be autonomous, not just the Cybercab, and also that you will be able to buy and own the Cybercab just like their other cars and it will earn money for you. It's fine if you don't believe it, but that's what was said.

I find these half measure autopilots way more stressful than actually just driving.

Level 2-3 FSD is worse experience in my opinion.

1) driving as human — if I see brake lights, I apply brakes: see my turn, turn the wheel.

2) Tesla “driving” - if I see brake lights, I have to evaluate “did FSD See those lights, is it applying brakes” EVERY TIME. Because I need to pay attention. THEN I may apply the brakes and turn wheel (and if you use FSD a LOT, those skills will atrophy). it needs human intervention about once a day. But you never know when that will be.

We either need FSD or humans driving. Shared dynamically adhoc responsibility for the car is way way worse.

The CyberCab at least improves on that by removing the steering wheel, so when it makes mistakes you just along for the ride.

I am a curmudgeon though; I don’t even use cruise control, and the radar following cruise control gives me the same hereby jeebies “is it braking??” Problem

What if there are humans acting as these Tesla Robots in this product demo or the Tesla Robots are just remotely operated by humans to fake this demo?.

Very skeptical of this whole presentation, even if Elon and Tesla are overpromising on timelines.

Nothing that was shown is beyond the capabilities of robots from over a decade ago like Asimo (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am1csALyEzE). It was a cool demo and beyond hobbyist capabilities, but realistically achievable by a commercial lab without having to fake it.

What if everything you know is a lie, what if we never went to the moon, what if all our leaders are lizard people?

It's definitely teleoperated. The hardware is there, but the software isn't.

The Robovan—as an actual van one could buy today—would sell. Especially in Asia, versus Toyota Alphards. Alas, seems it's more likely to get used as point-to-point transit inside closed spaces (parks and convention centers and ... perhaps the Vegas Loop).

> The Robovan — as an actual van one could buy today—would sell.

One would think so. But slow self-driving mini-buses seem to be a niche item. San Francisco's Treasure Island had one from Beep for part of 2023 and early 2024. Las Vegas had one back in 2017, from Nayva. Local Motors had some, but is defunct. There are a few from WeRide on an island in Guangzhou. EasyMile has a few installations.

This kind of self driving, at 7 to 9 MPH, has been around since 2009. It works, but it's not that useful.

Fair. I was actually imagining a Robovan crossed with a Model Y, with a legit steering wheel (and, sure, standard FSD), to compete with premium mini-vans.

But to your point, the value for the Robovan is minuscular unless it's as far-ranging as any other vehicle. And even if the FSD tech and regulations are there for it, the actual vehicle—at least the wheelbase and body covering said wheels—will need to be rethought for real-world conditions.

It's ironic that the example he gives for driving across LA already has a fast train connection:

> People that live in LA, I mean try to get from Pasadena to El Segundo during rush hour. You can fly to another city faster than you get to crosstown LA. And you have to drive the whole way.

You can take the Metro A line from Pasadena, then transfer to the C line to get to El Segundo. No driving necessary. Musk sells cars, so of course he has a massive incentive to say more cars are the solution to peoples' transit woes. But it seems like throwing more cars at the problem will simply make traffic worse, and from my experience living in Chicago, the best solution to avoid traffic (and parking!) is to take an alternative mode of transit that can bypass it (e.g. train, bike, electric scooter).

The meme version of this would be:

Musk: Mom, can I have national infrastructure on which I can safely and reliably operate my semi autonomous vehicles?

Mom: We have infrastructure at home.

The Infrastructure: a rail network with communal seating, infrequent service, and a minimal set of fixed route options.

If, through the accidents of human history, we spend the next century repurposing highways as railroads for rubber tired carriages then I suppose that’s a good enough outcome. In the century after that maybe we’ll start to reclaim the highway land back, a la Dr Beeching’s shuttering of post war British railway infrastructure.

Maybe reflect on how you got to congested 10-lane highways in the first place if the opportunity permits.

Trains are great

Unless you think LA should go London/NYC style and build a load of stations, there is still the problem of what to do if you're not near a station at the start or end. If it involves a bus connection, people will just drive

> Unless you think LA should go London/NYC style and build a load of stations

Why shouldn’t one think that? Wouldn’t this be a good solution?

Absolutely it’s a great solution. It will cost a few hundred billion and be done in the 2050s at best.

When do we start? Call our local representative?

There are other alternatives. Short commute by bicycle to main stations a la french/dutch style. Requires less investment for safe bike lanes but it pisses off car people.

Trams are also much cheaper than metro or train lines and serve metropolitan areas pretty well but they anger house owners and nobody wants to take public transit, thats poor people stuff.

It will take a lot of disillusion from cars before any decent alternative gets traction. Took long in Europe and is still ongoing for most of it, it will take even longer in the US.

People might be stubborn enough to only turn away from cars when the big traffic jams are all made of self driving electric cars with one or two people inside going all to the same places.

LA is already doing quite a lot in its transportation system. But just spending a bunch of money on a bunch of project isn't enough. They need to evolve into a higher level thinking about transportation. Currently its just 'money here for project X', 'money here for project Y'. And then they need to evolve again and think about the whole city in a new way. Transportation and land use planning a 100% linked, to have good transportation you need good land use planning. That requires reforms in zoning codes, building codes, parking regulation, road regulation and a number of other things.

In some sense US cities are actually well prepared, they have tons of space on their gigantic roads to have priority bus lanes, bike lanes and many other things like that. Road safety and transportation could be improved by a gigantic amount with simply changes in road design and investment patterns.

How to achieve that politically, well, I don't know.

there’s a DTLA 2040 plan, so talking to them about their 2050 plans might be a place to start.

https://planning.lacity.gov/odocument/d2143d14-572d-4dc2-911...

Of course LA should do that.

LA is literally filled to the fucking brim with parking lots, so many fucking parking lots. You have enough space for more stations then Paris.

And yet somehow in most large cities people use trams and bus in large numbers and don't 'just drive'. Crazy to consider that some people don't even have to own a car in such a city. If you have proper transportation infrastructure, those buses/trams can be faster then private car traffic.

Its called a 'transportation system' for a reason, walking, biking, buses, trams, trains all work together to provide something that practically moves millions of people a day even in the largest cities in the world.

Love the design of the robocab. Assuming production looks something like this, can’t wait to see it IRL.

Looks very similar to the Volkswagen XL1, including the butterfly doors, the lack of a rear window, the color, the front and rear lightbars, and the overall shape and two seater layout. But I love it.

Looks like VW sold 250 of them (ever) for $125k a piece.

Tesla will apparently be selling it for $30k before the end of 2016.

I’m super curious about the induction charging rate! The robot they showed cleaning it was also pretty interesting.

Love the fastback look. The curves in stainless look way nicer than the angular cybertruck. (viewing online, not in person)

You can if you attend one of the next 10 annual Tesla robotaxi announcements.

It's a slick design, but unless it's expected to be used in very limited scenarios, the lack of a control surface (or even how Tesla expects to build an OC) for edge cases is worrying.

I expect that the general handling of edge cases for any control-free robotaxi is that you call for emergency services, or an Uber, depending on severity.

The control-free stuff they're rolling out is generally being trialed or used on very narrow routes - roads where they've even built mild infrastructure to make it easier for AVs.

An emergency joystick would be pretty cool. Actually, a joystick to give the driving AI input would be great too. "Maybe squeeze a little farther left here". "Slow it up, the road is sketchy here". "It's safe, drive faster".

Bold to assume it will go into production.

Just like the cybertruck, this is a concept car that will never be sold in real life

It’s amazing the shared delusion that my entire family participates in. My kids somehow get driven by a vaporware FSD to school every day in a car that I was told will never exist let alone be allowed on streets.

Where does my luggage go?

The back opens up to reveal a huge trunk that can store lots of luggage. They showed it during the livestream. Pic here https://x.com/sawyermerritt/status/1844583051449467202?s=46

With regards to "can this ever actually be done?" I think it can*, but also it's got all the problems of both a software project and fundamental research: the difficulty is unknown, the timeline is a wild guess.

That said, no steering wheel? Finally, he's met my long-standing requirement for what counts as "genuinely self driving".

* humans don't need lidar — we clearly benefit from all the extra sensors or we wouldn't even have rear view mirrors let alone parking sensors, but technically it's believable.

After predicting that, in the long term, humanoid robots will cost less than a car, Mr. Musk added: "It'll take up a minute to get to the long term".

Please stop trolling, Elon.

Because of the word taxi in the name it gives off the initial impression that this is a product for fleet use and not something you own personally. But I don’t think that impression is going to explain the larger reality. if it’s inexpensive and possible to exist in this form, this is what you’d expect people to buy as a personally owned vehicle specifically for commuting.

They haven’t even gotten self driving working with driver still at the wheel, how are they supposed to convince us that they can do fully autonomous?

I mean, people have been gullible for this long already...

I use it every day, but HN says it doesn’t work

Exactly. I wish people actually used it instead of reading biased news about it. Driving is so much stress free with it now.

I used it. It was novel, but it made a lot of mistakes. I didn't subscribe.

I frequently drive in the SF Bay Area in a non-Tesla and it's incredible how many Teslas I've seen nearly hit us, randomly swerve or brake hard for literally no reason.

I always encounter a lot of Teslas while walking my dog and it's clear they're no safer than many people who shouldn't be driving regular cars.

It's wild, most Teslas I encounter drive fine, but every once in a while I see one driving completely erratically. Stopping 20 feet too soon at a stop sign, very weird positioning in lane, sudden acceleration or deceleration. I think I can pretty much tell if a Tesla has FSD enabled if I follow it for a minute or so.

I disagree completely. Letting it drive is the exact same as teaching my 16 year old kid to drive. It’s nice to let them take the wheel, but you never know when there going to make a mistake and almost crash into traffic.

Driving is stress free until you end up under a truck or taking a life.

Saw a Tesla swerve into the bike lane yesterday while driver was on the phone.

Driver probably felt safe and that everything was in order. The cyclists not so much.

Point is it's a matter of perspective. How many around you have to accommodate?

I own a Tesla and a motorcycle. I'll often ride while my wife is driving the car, and FSD is far more respectful of me than most cars.

Human drivers use the bike lane, shoulder or oncoming traffic lane to drive around cars turning left and to avoid hazards all the time. It’s not unsafe if you check to make sure no one is there and my Tesla detects people around me basically as well as a human can.

On the other hand, FSD won’t try to pass me on winding mountain roads with a double yellow line.

A single person's evidence isn't helpful. People doing testing at scale of Tesla's solution (even the latest version), have found a few interventions happen an hour (or at least per day), especially on busy streets or in situations where weather isn't complimentary.

It cannot be truly an autonomous robotaxi without VERY HIGH reliability. One intervention per hour is one too many.

Cruise had driverless robotaxis on the streets while they had 2.5 to 5 miles per intervention. [1]

I think FSD 12.5 is way beyond that --- I drove over 20 miles yesterday with zero interventions. Also, having ridden Waymo in San Francisco many times, I find that the FSD is actually slightly smoother and handles stuff like going around obstacles and blockages more naturally, although, as you are no doubt aware, there are still some rough edges in rare cases.

Once Tesla has reasonable remote human assistance infrastructure in place to help out with the extreme edge cases, and the software improves at the current rate, I don't see why they couldn't roll out a robotaxi service.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general...

As a Tesla owner I can promise you there will never be reasonable human assistance infrastructure.

Have to ever tried to get in touch with a human at Tesla short of driving to a service center. Almost impossible. It would be easier for me to get the president on the line.

Having just purchased a new Tesla, I tried for 2 weeks to communicate with Tesla prior to purchase. The closest I even got was a phone tree, which after 7 levels sent me to a voicemail box that was full. Am I’m talking every day for 14 days. Had my wife not wanted it so bad I would have cancelled my deposit on the spot.

I requested service on it last week. The earliest service date is Nov. 12. I have yet to hear from an advisor on the app.

Tesla does a lot of things right, but supporting their products with actual humans is not one of them..

Dang, that's not been my experience at all. I've had them come out 3x for tire repair (construction site alongside our commute), and they've always come out to to my house to fix the tire in my garage, same day, after a couple of back and forths via text. I've never had a better car maintenance experience.

That said, I don't think they want to talk with you pre-purchase outside of one of their showrooms, and the showroom isn't even a large part of their sales model. I imagine that if you're trying to go against the flow, it'd be hard.

When did you last have them come out? They used to be awesome, but cut the mobile fleet in my area as part of the cost saving measures this past July.

Ah yeah, it was all before July, so if they made big changes then, then maybe my experience isn’t representative.

> As a Tesla owner I can promise you there will never be reasonable human assistance infrastructure.

As a Waymo user I can promise you that there is, and they have it.

Not to defend Cruise too much, but the 2.5 to 5 miles stat is misleading in that they aren't real time disengagements. They are instances where the vehicle proactively identified a situation where it wasn't confident enough to proceed and then safely stopped while awaiting a response. This is obviously way too often in terms being a courteous and legal road user but its completely different from a driver taking over as the vehicle attempts an unsafe maneuver.

It’s just differently unsafe because it assumes that “safely stopping” is possible which may not be true in every situation.

Didn't the unfortunate incident where it dragged a pedestrian happen because it tried to "safely pull over" while dragging her?

I don't have any clue if it assumes that, I was just illustrating the difference in failure modes. In either case differently unsafe is not mutually exclusive with being orders of magnitude safer overall which Cruise is compared to current FSD when unsupervised.

> Cruise had driverless robotaxis on the streets while they had 2.5 to 5 miles per intervention. [1]

And they got (rightfully) pulled off the roads.

> there are still some rough edges in rare cases

Waymo has substantially lower interventions.

And, they have a huge fleet of humans running around the city attending to the cars. A few weeks ago I saw one stuck - whoever had last used it, managed to trap a seatbelt in the door. It was sitting for about 5 minutes when a guy pulled up and fixed it and sent it on its way. I'm not saying Tesla can't build that, but they're going to have to.

I agree. And the very important question is how quickly is it improving?

What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?

That is a very important question, to be honest. And it definitely seems like it's getting more and more difficult for all of the self driving companies to reach "that next step".

> What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?

That is a MASSIVE "what if".

What's if it's 2036? What if it's 2056? Hell, if it's 2030 then Tesla is in _serious_ trouble.

Absolutely.

That right now is THE multi-billion dollar Tesla question.

It's an SAE Level 2 system, they haven't indicated that's ever changing on current cars. They're even calling it "Full Self-Driving (Supervised) (also referred to as Autosteer on City Streets)" now [1]

A lot of companies have Level 2 systems. That's still a far cry from full automation.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...

  Back in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stunned the automotive world by announcing that, henceforth, all of his company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary for “full self-driving.” You will be able to nap in your car while it drives you to work, he promised. It will even be able to drive cross-country with no one inside the vehicle.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-...

They have one of the best Level 2 self-driving implementations on the market. It’s so good that I don’t even question the FSD tag. That said, I would never let my family ride in a Tesla robotaxi running on the existing suite of sensors and FSD. Does anyone know what needs to happen for Tesla to reach Level 5 autonomy? I get nervous letting the current FSD handle complicated intersections.

There is a grand canyon sized gulf between "best level 2 system" and "adequate level 5 system".

How many disengagements per thousand miles? By all accounts, it's still far behind where Waymo was 10 years ago.

It doesn't matter because it's a meaningless statistic. But sure, I'll entertain it. Last figure I heard was 1 disengagement per 200 miles. The distance between SF and LA is 380 miles. If my car can drive me from SF to LA and I only have to intervene once, that's already incredible and leagues ahead of what Waymo can offer. And since you asked, FSD 12.6 will reduce disengagements per mile by 5x.

Waymo doesn't require a driver to supervise the car, they're supposedly running Level 4 cars. FSD requires continual supervision, you must be responsible and attentive at all times. How is this a reasonable comparison?

You say this as if there isn't an army of teleoperators behind the scenes ready to remotely take over a Waymo at a moment's notice...

It was also announced today that unsupervised FSD is coming to Texas and California in 2025.

It was also announced that there would be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road in 2020:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

There's a big difference between "someone at central command can take over when the car signals" and "someone must watch the car constantly and take over when they see it do anything bad".

The disengagement events on recent videos of FSD are still the likes of "oops it almost turned into oncoming traffic" or "oops it almost ran into a pole", that's the sort of thing you have to catch before it happens, not after.

Waymo was doing .64 disengagements per 1000 miles in 2015 and wasn't comfortable launching a taxi service on that. Even after 12.6, Tesla will be behind. The point is Tesla can't launch a driverless taxi service on its current system, not from SF to LA, not within SF, not anywhere.

My Tesla drives me around SF every day yet you're telling me it doesn't

No, he's telling you that Waymo could do the same thing (and better) in 2015, yet it took them 8 more years to launch a robotaxi service. So, Tesla robotaxi in 2032 maybe?

And yet you have to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention at all times. Why is that?

For the record, you no longer have to keep your hands on the wheel at all times.

I think it’s a mistake to conflate the actual capabilities of the system with the user instructions for how the system is being used. SAE levels are primarily about the latter and about who takes liability for the operation of the vehicle. Conflating the two punishes car manufacturers who are cautious about the current state of their self-driving system.

You do realize that Waymos don't have drivers behind the wheel, right?

I thought they had remote drivers to take over when shit goes south?

No, remote operators are never in control of the vehicles. They give the computer hints about how to handle situations it's unable to resolve for itself, but the computer is ultimately still responsible for driving and maintaining the safety invariants.

This is fundamentally different from FSD, where the human is always responsible for driving and maintaining the safety invariants.

"They give the computer hints about how to handle situations"

That's a cute euphemism for remote operators.

It entails a completely different division of responsibilities and safety profile. Specifically, it's one of the critical differences between SAE levels 2/3 and level 4:

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/j3016/J3016_table.jpg

To give an analogy, let's say you use a credit card. A machine processes the payment most of the time, but occasionally something looks suspicious, so it denies the payment and sends a message to a human (you) asking whether the next payment should be allowed. Do you consider yourself to be a "driver" in this system?

If so, imagine a system where all payments flash by onscreen for a human that's tasked with stopping erroneous approvals in realtime. Are humans doing the essentially the same job in this system such that both roles are "drivers"?

You do realize you cannot buy a Waymo for your own use?

You do realize Waymo will only operate in geofenced areas in select cities that have been premapped down to the millimeter?

Waymo is not even remotely close, nor attempting to solve the same problem. This is coming from someone who lives in SF and takes Waymo regularly. Waymo is a cool tech demo and that's about it; FSD is a real tool that people everywhere can actually use to take them where they want to go.

I don't know what to say man, Waymo takes me where I want to go several times a week (why would anyone be a repeat customer if it was just a demo?). My Tesla with FSD can't take me anywhere without me monitoring it.

Everywhere they want to go? In an electric car? These taxis would probably only drive in big cities where there are enough charging stations and service centers.

Since there is nobody in the driver seat of a Waymo to intervene, how does that work?

They stall out blocking traffic (the most recent example was blocking the VPs motorcade).

I also have a 2024 Tesla with FSD, but stopped trusting it. Here’s the thing, it works great for 30-40 minutes, until it doesn’t and makes a completely wrong move almost causing an accident without user intervention. And yes, I’m talking about v12.5.1

In the last month, it’s driven onto grass where there used to be an off ramp that was redone last year, cut across 3 lanes of highway traffic within 200 feet of an off ramp, and almost ran a semi truck off the road (yes, we had the right of way, but he weighs 20,000 lbs and was in no way going to be able to stop in time).

It a cool toy to show off when you’re being hyper vigilant about keeping an eye on it, but there is no way it should be allowed on the public roads yet.

I 1000% would advise against purchasing it unless you have the extra cash and want to try it out. It’s not even close to production ready.

Edit: spelling

> Here’s the thing, it works great for 30-40 minutes, until it doesn’t and makes a completely wrong move almost causing an accident without user intervention

interesting. this wasn’t my experience. i did SF <> Lake Tahoe (which can stretch to 5hrs) a number of times when i was in SF and didn’t encounter any major issues. small issues sure, but it was definitely better than my driving.

I suspect this is the same hyper-vigilance a spouse gets when the other is driving. Somehow I can go 20 years without an accident but everytime the spouse is in the car it's not the same as 'their' driving so they constantly feel the need to backseat drive and press the imaginary break. Not saying Tesla driving is perfect but it's better than a lot of drivers I know.

Mine still makes a lot of grave mistakes on local roads, stops for overly long at stop signs (long enough to confuse other drivers), and has very poor merging behavior, especially when there are trucks around. It works fine 99% of the time.

If it worked, why postpone all of this? Again? It works 'well enough' when there is a human on board, without one, it's just not safe enough yet.

Aside from supply issues due tot he pandemic and demand, I there’s a strong incentive to be conservative in how you roll out self-driving: Cruise and Uber both ran into serious issues because they rolled out self-driving cars too aggressively. It won’t take that many publicized incidents to cause significant financial, legal and reputational issues for Tesla. So, selling FSD as a level 2 system while they are training their networks and gathering performance data makes a lot of sense.

Sure, but saying every earnings call 'it will definitely fully work this year' and then not delivering every year is rather. wrong. He knows it won't work this year, or next. It needs more training and testing as you say; needs either that or a significant AI breakthrough.

Then you must be one of the lucky ones!

Would you trust it without a break pedal and steering wheel you can take control over? How confident you are Tesla can deliver this within one or two years? If your answer is not a resounding yes for both this product its as good as nothing at this stage. Considering Tesla track record of delivering on timelines and expectations for this kind of tech.

I'm confused, cause all these comments seem to just be plain lies? Have anyone actually driven in a tesla using FSD? It's freaking awesome. I literally drive to and from work everyday and pretty much never have to put my hands on the wheel unless i want to go faster.

They showcase this robot that is manipulated by someone behind the scenes. Is this really possible? It seems like a scam.

They are going face major regulatory hurdles. Safety concerns are huge—both real and perceived—and governments, especially in places like the US and Europe, are still far from trusting fully autonomous vehicles. Add in fragmented regulations across different states and countries, plus potential public skepticism, and it's clear this won't be in place any time soon.

Labor opposition is also going to be a nightmare. Just as Uber faced resistance from taxi unions and legislators sympathetic to workers who saw their jobs threatened, Tesla will likely face significant opposition from drivers in the gig economy, who rely on ride-hailing platforms like Uber and Lyft. Governments may be pressured to protect those jobs, especially in regions where automation is seen as a threat to employment.

I already get a driverless taxi a few times a week

The Verge has good coverage.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267132/tesla-robotaxi-...

not good at all. doesn’t mention the mini-bus which is large enough to stand in. said fsd was “recalled” but what really happened was the driver monitoring software was updated.

As I understand it, a car "recall" is a regulated action in the US, and that manufacturers must issue recalls in certain circumstances and that they bring with them various requirements. How that recall actually takes place, and whether it's just an OTA update, is an implementation detail that doesn't matter as much. I realise that does go against the customer perception of what a product recall entails in general. The Verge therefore is technically correct in stating that it was a recall.

The best kind of correct.

You can argue semantics, but it’s not an implementation detail that doesn’t matter, it’s fundamentally misrepresenting the truth.

A “recall” that does actually involve bringing the car in for service, a.k.a. recalling the car, is not accurately described as a “recall”. Words mean something.

The NHTSA is being idiotic (unsurprisingly) in not distinguishing between a software update and a recall, because legacy auto doesn’t have the software chops to successfully replicate Tesla’s approach.

News agencies that lean into that idiocy in a slanted attempt to denigrate Tesla are only denigrating themselves. It is not good coverage, and it is willfully misleading their own readers.

Call it a mandatory update if you want. But nothing was recalled, so insisting on calling it a recall is like insisting on calling cars “horseless carriages”.

I'm not arguing semantics, I'm arguing that the law is (as far as my understanding goes), that a recall is not about where the car goes to get fixed, it's about the process of issuing it, defining the set of cars affected, etc. Because it's a legal or regulated term in that way it's not misrepresenting the truth, the point of regulation is to be very precise about things like this. I'm also not defending this definition, I'm only explaining what I understand it to be – I think the fact it doesn't match what consumers understand is silly.

The NHTSA define a recall as something that manufacturers are required to issue when the NHTSA determines the minimum safety requirements aren't being met, but they only define that the manufacturer must fix it (or replace or something), not that the fix must be a physical change performed at a garage.

Are the press wrong for using the term "recall" when the car wasn't taken into a garage? I don't think so because it's the industry term for this, although I accept that they could perhaps be clearer by saying that the recall was addressed with a software fix.

Aren't most recalls software updates now?

e.g. "Toyota is recalling over 42,000 Corolla Cross Hybrid SUVs from the 2023 and 2024 model years to fix a software error that may cause drivers to lose power braking assistance if they brake while turning a corner."

I don't know that it makes sense for the distinction between "recall" and "not a recall" to be whether the software update can happen OTA or not.

> Words mean something.

Funny you'd say that while arguing the opposite.

The word "recall" with respect to cars has a legal meaning with specific before and after procedures. It's not any random update.

Nah, the whole thing with Musk fanboys getting all up in arms about, "iT's NoT aCkShuAlLy a 'ReCaLl'" thing is dumb and glosses over the overall point.

If a vehicle has a safety issue that needs to be fixed, regardless of hardware or software, it doesn't matter if you call it a recall or not. At the end of the day, it's still a fuckup on the part of the manufacturer that put their customers/drivers at risk, and the manufacturer needed to fix it.

Call it a "recall", call it a "patch", call it "The Sunshine and Rainbows Happy Time Update #12" - at the end of the day, Tesla made an oopsie that they need to resolve, and depending on what it is, could risk the lives of customers. The term you choose to describe it won't change the fact that they're fixing their mistake.

They did post about the Robovan. While I agree regarding the tendency of media to use the word "recall" in a misleading fashion, I ctrl-f'ed and couldn't find it in the Verge live blog page that was linked to.

This kind of pouting does no favors. I had a recall on my Lincoln which was "place this sticker with a sentence of text on it at the bottom of page 254 of your owner's manual", about the ability of objects to move through space from the 'trunk' to the passenger area if the passthrough area is open in the event of a collision.

Nothing touched the vehicle at all, even electronically, so you could argue it was even less of a recall than some of the Tesla recalls, but there you have it.

You'll survive. Tesla will survive. It's a recall.

The race to full self driving is not going to be close. Tesla has no competition.

The anti-Tesla sentiment here is hilarious to watch though. All because this place is largely leftist, and their CEO is on the right.

This story seems to have been buried.

as far as I've seen a high number of comments in a HN post will impact it's ranking.

to my understanding that is a feature designed to limit flamewars, of course I might be mistaken.

2 years away from being 2 years away

concept of a plan

Nobody talking about those gimmicky butterfly doors? I would bet some money that they will not make it into mass production. Not for a car priced unter $100.000

Why? Tesla likes cool doors, and the model X starts at $80k already.

This tech will obviously happen eventually, my buddy with the new Y has driven less than 1% on over 1500 miles. Will be great when it happens.

This is not a serious proposal. It's a cool little sports car looking design. It looks very future-y. It's the kind of thing someone would step out of in a sci-fi movie. That's how you know it's not an actual well-thought-out design. This isn't a taxi, it's the torment nexus in car form.

Taxis are not sexy, taxis are utility vehicles. Taxis carry people and goods. Taxis carry more than one person. Taxis carry disabled people. Taxis carry the elderly. If you want to know what a purpose-built taxi looks like, look at the London cabs, the JPN Taxi, or the NV200s. If you're going to build a fully custom platform for a taxi, make a goddamn taxi. Actually put in the effort to design something built for the purpose, not just something that you think looks cool.

(And if the design didn't give it away - inductive charging? Really?)

1) did u miss the robovan

2) these are supposed to be purchasable and they're very fucking cool

3) the model x with its gull wing doors is as cool as first shown.

> the model x with its gull wing doors is as cool as first shown.

This could be a literal textbook example of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I literally laugh out loud when i see a Model X open its doors.

ok. I think you missed the point so to be clear: it’s exactly as first shown, and the doors are a big selling point.

It’s a late april fools joke. Tesla Bot? They’ve gone full ASIMO in a Cartman suit.

They should have put a massive trunk in the back to carry goods, and more than 1 seat, and not banned old people from taking trips, those bastards

And if you wanted to use inductive charging why didn't you acquire a company that does that a few years ago, you can't just announce things with no experience in the area, that would be madness

This is all well and good, but it's not possible to deploy these kinds of technologies at scale in American cities (well, most American cities). They'll get torn to bits. The ability to actually move to an autonomous transportation future is downstream from citizens actually behaving in a way that allows this. Harsh, but true. Maybe in Singapore.

Waymo is doing 100k paid trips a week in 4 cities.

They also use remote drivers though.

Not in the way you’re implying. Once in a blue moon, when car is stuck on a tricky parking lot, a customer service agent can give hints to the car on how to get out.

Oh hey I get to copy paste a list of times elon said FSD would come out next year![1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

[1]https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview/

[2]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920

[3]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/02/self-driv...

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...

[5]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768

[6]https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_buildin...

[7]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/866482406160609280

[8]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1063123659290595328

[9]https://web.archive.org/web/20190220051410/https://www.ark-i...

[10]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI

[11]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE

[12]https://web.archive.org/web/20200709130939/https://www.youtu...

[13]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF2HXId2Xhg

[14]https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-interview-axel-spr...

[15]https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/elon-musk-full-self-drivi...

[16]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwq_PhtvLwo

(Or simply, https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/)

So this should be available next year … like the full self driving cars since 2012.

This is just another to have something in the pipeline to keep shareholders at least interested. It seems Musk tries really hard to keep the stock price from collapsing.

If FSD and robo-autonomy isn't fully cracked (level 5) in 1000 days, all of this is vaporware.

They demonstrate this robot that is manipulated by someone behind the scenes. Is this really possible?

And the collective "Scam Artist par Excellence and Conman of the Century" award goes to...

So are we taking bets on what the real price and launch date will be?

That’s it? Yawn…

what the world really needs is a robobicycle and according to this video we are nearly there :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F1H1V5MxtY

The event was objectively smoke in the eyes:

- days ago I was reading an article stating that Tesla didn't apply yet for the license to operate autonomous vehicles in the streets. Competitor had their licenses in 8 months or more. I think this is a critical factor to respect the deadline of December 2025;

- Just another risible demo in a controlled environment, a movie set: no real life scenario able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the robotaxi technology. This for something should be in exercise before 2025 ends is and indicator that the tech is not ready. "Only cameras" approach IMHO just won't work.

- the presentation images suggested that robotaxis should substitute public transport. This not only is bullshit for a number of reasons, it also can influence public transport politics like with the other bullshit technology called Hyperloop that was accepted as the future of transportation by short sighted administrators;

- Wireless recharge : oh please ! Apart technical consideration could raise doubt on the smartness of that approach, they really are saying they can create a network of wireless recharge points before the robotaxi go in exercise next year ?

- Robobus : wow ! What about electric tram ? I see a pattern here , step by step, they are demonstrating that the real electric revolution is electric public transport, not that electric robot limousine that are a viable and cost effective public transport alternative only in the mind of a megalomaniac billionaire !

- Men, you don't believe this is bullshit ? let's take appointment here December 31st , 2025, to discuss the status of the robotaxi.

Why is this a two-seater? A sedan with no driver can easier fit 5 people. Building one for only two is.. why? There are also no steering controls, this this vehicle can't ever be dual-purpose. Even something where steering/gas could be removable attachments, would be better. Allowing a possibility of being driven by a driver should the need arise.

But really? A two-seater?

I'm not a Musk hater but this vision of the future just doesn't seem that interesting. I'm from Switzerland, I much rather have trains and well timed buses.

Buses already exists and paying drivers isn't actually that big a problem. Society can easily pay for that, if you take into account the reduction in investment and cost you have from other road use.

Musk promise of 'less parking lots' can already be easily achieved with technology from 1960. Its not an engineering problem, its social problem.

Trains, trams, buses, bikes and walking is far cheaper and more efficient in every measurable way then fancy robotaxis even if they worked, witch they don't really.

Can you imagine the horror of a large city where most people each use an individual vehicle? That just dystopia.

An small autonomous bus has some uses but at best its a small part of a much larger transport system.

The US being so obsessed with robotaxis is just a consequence of 70 years of horrible road design and land usage and city planning.

> Can you imagine the horror of a large city where most people each use an individual vehicle? That just dystopia.

Yes

- every American

> Mr Musk's prediction that production would begin some time "before 2027"

So, no big reveal after all? Just another press conference where he once again says "it's coming soon"?

I didn't think he was going to unveil anything actually new, but I did honestly think he'd sing a new song about it all. I guess I overestimated him.

I feel like I’ve been looking at the same marketing slide deck for 10 years from these people. Wake me when they ship something.

Do you not see those driverless Cybercabs driving around without a steering wheel? At least that's a development that we haven't seen in the past 10 years.

Cars that drive in a circle around a fixed course? Yeah, I've seen that before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRitZlhL3OQ - 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2aNJCsfrP0 - 10 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mITK3qaaHQ8 - 4 years ago

And none of those shows a Cybercab. What's your point?

If I have to explain it, the whole point is lost. I've marked this conversation as a loss and so did the investors wrt to the Tesla stock. I recommend you do the same.

About the Robotaxi: I really, really wanted to impressed by what they will demo. However, I thought it was more marketing, with the product being "just two years away" as always. The demo was in a controlled environment so I doubt its real-life capability. I guess I will believe it when I see it on roads. Disappointed.

You now what makes transportation more affordable, sustainable and energy efficient? Building trains, trams and subways.

I see Lucy has brought a new football to the yard.

Year 2026 in Elon time = year 2030 in real time

I think the products all look great. The timeline, who knows. They probably will manage to get at least the Robotaxi out as a buzzer beater December 2026 release of a handful, at a minimum.

Unsupervised FSD timeline? Elon says 2025. I suspect they can do that, if you define it as Level 3, where you just need to take over within, say, 10-30 seconds. Probably starting on highway. Beyond that, hard to say. Recent FSD versions are impressive, but there is still a lot to do to reduce disengagement rates. But their strategy seems like it can be made to work.

How soon will it take to get it good enough for Robotaxi/Robovan? Well, they can basically have said no sooner than two years (for the late 2026 Robotaxi release). I doubt unsupervised FSD will work in a fully autonomous taxi mode on existing vehicles until the very end of that window.

Will the Tesla AI3 computers support Unsupervised FSD, sounds like possibly not, based on Elon's suspiciously noncommittal response to a guy yelling in the crowd. They can probably squeeze out of past promises on this in a couple ways if it won't work on AI3 cars. Presumably they'll want to minimize cost impact of making good. I think they'll first try to get as many FSD users to upgrade to a new AI4 (or later) vehicle by incentivizing them with free FSD transfer. For the rest, they could offer even bigger discounts on upgrading to a new car, and then finally bite the bullet and do some kind of FSD retrofit or simply refund. Or just piss everyone off and wait for the class action. But I suspect they'll resolve it sort of amicably while wanting to sweep it under the rug.

They could also never be able to make autonomy work, but I think that's doubtful at this point. Waymo demonstrates you can do it with geographical, time, and other constraints, limited release, and a different hardware stack. I think Tesla's vision-only approach has been fairly well validated on the existing hardware. The remaining issues do not seem like they require significantly improved sensors to operate in at least 90% or so of conditions, which is more than sufficient to run a taxi service.

Existing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805515

This is coming in 2 years at the earliest?

Tesla Full self driving has been coming by the end of the year since at least 2018. Expect this to follow a similar timeline.

I actually think we’ll get break even fusion energy before mass adoption of robotaxis in a variety of locales.

Great, just what we need. More TSLA “full self driving” cars on the road. Hope this is delayed by a decade. Tired of car centric transportation.

Pity they didn't also announce a self driving bus

For me the surprising thing is that the stock fell "just" 8% after this event. No sane investor should believe anything CEO says, given he is running multiple companies, is busy with upcoming election, as well as propagating conspiracy theories and hate speech on his platform.

After a decade of lies, this is another nail in the coffin and I honestly can't believe the marketcap of this company hasn't been significantly affected by something that was supposed to be a big reveal of those promises.

I'm disappointed that it wasn't a single occupant, three-wheeled, ultra-basic microcar limited to 50 km/h to gather and scatter people from public transport stops, solving the last-mile problem.

Overpromised and underdelivered, but Elon did make a strong case for a very positive autonomous-driving future. Unfortunately for Tesla, Waymo is at least 5 years closer to delivering that future.

This is honestly quite painful to see. Makes me all the happier to live in Switzerland and be able to use great trains and public transport everyday. (It's definitely not cheap though but the comfort is amazing)

You know what screams "democratizate transportation"?

99% single occupancy vehicles (well, that's democratic, I'll grant them that) controlled by a corporation known for a million abuses and basically no oversight, everything managed by faceless software.

Let me tell you an Uber story.

I've been an Uber customer across multiple countries for many years, and one day, I had a layover in London. So I tried to book an Uber in London, but it failed a few times for technical reasons (so their problem).

After a bunch of attempts, I received a notification my account was banned.

I contacted support, they gave me the runaround for 30 minutes or more, in the end their response was the standard BigCorp canned answer for fraud: "we can't tell you why your actions are suspicious" (with the subtext: if you're an innocent victim of our scans, tough luck, but we can't tell you because statistically if we tell you what you did wrong, real fraudsters will learn and defraud us even more).

So now I can't use Uber in the UK (I imagine if I try to circumvent the ban with another account, I risk that getting banned, too, and who knows what else, as I have to put my credit card in their app).

Now imagine if you want to plan your life around stuff like Tesla Robotaxi and they ban you. What's your recourse?

With your own motorbike/car, you need to commit serious crimes to lose your license forever. With public transportation, as long as you pay the ticket, nobody can ban you for life. And I don't think anyone can take away your bike/ebike/scooter/escooter :-)

Are normal taxis any different? Most of them only have one or two passengers. Typically in the backseat which gets kind of crowded with more people. You can get bigger taxis of course. But I'm talking about the common sedan model with the driver in the front. An unused front seat on the right. And the one or two passengers in the back. Exactly the same thing. Except there's no need for the driver.

I don't get the moral outrage here. It's taxi with one person less (the driver). Also available as a model 3 and y. And the robovan thing. So they do actually cover a range of vehicles with different amounts of passengers.

> Are normal taxis any different? Most of them only have one or two passengers. Typically in the backseat which gets kind of crowded with more people. You can get bigger taxis of course. But I'm talking about the common sedan model with the driver in the front. An unused front seat on the right. And the one or two passengers in the back. Exactly the same thing. Except there's no need for the driver.

We need to invest in walkable, bikeable cities and public transportation, not help these companies that lobby for making less liveable cities and towns. That was my main point for that angle. I know Americans hate each other and public transportation, but everything has a trade off and Robotaxis won't make our lives better.

> I don't get the moral outrage here. It's taxi with one person less (the driver). Also available as a model 3 and y. And the robovan thing. So they do actually cover a range of vehicles with different amounts of passengers.

How often to riders get banned from taxi companies? The Robotaxi looks like a service, ride hailing. Are these vehicles actually sold?

I don't think what you outline here, which I agree would be a good thing, and what Tesla announced are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think Tesla's announcement is just about the most concrete thing from any car manufacturer that gets us closer to that.

Getting rid of drivers means less space for parking is needed. It also means better utilization of the vehicles. So, less cars on the road. And they'll be electric so a lot more quiet and less smelly. And they also have a bus form factor; perfect for public transport.

Elon Musk actually showed some visuals of cities being greened this way. Complete with a cheesy joke about taking the 'ing' out of parking.

So, you are outraged because Elon Musk is doing exactly as you demand but just not in a way that you like?

Cars are inherently space inefficient. Self driving won't save them. We're talking about 10-15 sqm directly occupied on the road plus probably 100 more sqm for safe braking, etc.

This new tool should be at best a niche one, but convenience, as usual, kills.

Americans talking about 2.5T / 5m length cars to "save space" is tragically comic. The bus form factor is a good think but it can’t realistically compete with the one already in fonction in hundred of thousand cities. Sure it will have a market share from airports to luxury resorts and may replace some Dubai lines but that’s not a "democratic" transport.

Elon’s green city is a marketing pitch, nothing more or less. A marketing pitch is far from being "exactly" a "walkable, bikeable city with public transportation".

On the public transportation side, GP skepticism come from that tech giga corps are know for their kafkaïan (at best) or hostile (at worst) customer services.

Oh, and on the overreaction part, do you know that Las Vegas, one of the best places in the US to put high quality public transportation towards its "central business district", is instead going to build a "tunnel for single occupant Teslas".

Surely nobody lobbied for that instead of a proper subway system or bus rapid transit? (I'm being sarcastic here)

"Well taxi's only have four seats, and four is basically three, which when you really think about it is only two"

IDK it just seems weird to me how completely unimaginative the Cybertaxi is. Its ostensibly a revolution in transportation but everything about the form and function is essentially identical to an unpainted 2011 Honda CR-Z. It makes zero effort to imagine how a driverless car could be different or better in fundamental ways, which makes the Cybertaxi just another small incremental step in the decade long procession of broken self driving promises from Elon.

Many taxis shield off the driver; so the front right seat is not available for passengers. That's why I said two. In any case. The vast majority of rides is just one passenger, regardless of the size of the vehicle.

Ignoring for a moment that three is still more than two, drivers in the US don't love it but its usually fine if you are respectful and have a reason, especially in an Uber or Lyft. Elsewhere its more common to sit up front or even considered rude not to. Regardless, I think your argument speaks to my point. Even if the cybertaxi compares similarly in capability to a traditional taxi, Tesla isn't positioning it as one, they are positioning it as the vehicle of the future but the design betrays a complete lack of imagination for what that future will look like beyond playing Cyberpunk on your commute. Why should we be comparing it solely against the 2% niche of vehicle miles in ridehailing instead of the other 98% that its promising to make obsolete?

It's literally named "Robotaxi", plus what makes you think people want to give ownership so easily?

Ahh, well if taxi is in the name then we are obligated to ignore everything else he said about democratizing transport, eliminating the concept of parking, etc.

I'm not saying people won't want to own their own robocar, I'm saying this robocar is not particularly suited to ownership or to dedicated ridehailing or to really anything other than looking like a car Mr. Bladerunner from the hit movie Bladerunner would drive.

Musk has said many a things that bump his share price. I wish someone did one of those fact checkers for his Tesla statements, I doubt he's at 50% hit rate.

From https://www.asomo.co/p/the-luddites-guide-to-defending-physi...:

> As a thought experiment, imagine if all forms of transport except Uber were removed from our society, resulting in total ‘Uberfication’. What would happen in this ‘convenient’ society?

> For a start, you’d notice that your entire ability to move depended on an institution. While the first few weeks of trips might not bug you, over time it would begin to feel deeply stifling, even oppressive. The mass dependence on a intermediary would not only transfer mass power to Uber, but would in turn unlock a host of other problems:

He goes on to explain these very well.

Yes and:

That essay is a good start. Agree with all.

However, it uses the frames (starting assumptions) of neoliberalism (markets solve everything) and public choice theory (solve politics with just so stories). Versus say humanism, dignity, sovereignty, and right to self-determination.

What about fair and impartial adjudication of disputes, determining tort, and dispensing justice? These Big Bad vs Consumer framings don't (adequately) say what to do about inherit power imbalances.

Who are the referees?

When our government's "monopoly over violence" is usurped by corporations, acting as police-judge-jury-executioner, disenfranchising actual people, we're all just wage slaves, paid with company scrip, struggling to get our basic needs met.

Road to Serfdom indeed.

> Who are the referees?

Bought and paid for. Uber broke and ignored so many laws it was obvious the referees were on their side all along.

I find the timing of this release interesting to say the least.

How so?

I think their "robotaxi" is kinda pathetic. But goddamn... That bus is one of the single most beautiful vehicles they have ever designed. I absolutely love it. (Fan of Art Deco and streamliner locomotive design)

I for one cannot wait to run my cloud infrastructure on Tesla Web Services

Running Dojo D1 chips?

Elon Musk Has Been Promising Self-Driving Cars For 10 Years [Update - We Are Now On Year 11] [1]

https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-tesla-self-driving-cars-anniv... [1]

Lmao … I don’t have anything else to say, but feel it had to be said

HN is packed now with Elon Musk haters after the mass firings at Twitter. Anything related to him or his companies has long lists of negative comments. Bitter grapes?

Even if Elon cured cancer, there would be haters for his politics and business approach.

I don’t understand why people hate him. But this just shows the wokeness and naiveness of this industry — socially inept people who can only strike keyboards and habe 0 critical thinking on their own

O wait I just described the entire SF and tech industry

Hey Tesla, where's the Roadster 2 you announced in 2017 and took $50,000 deposits for?

Oh, that's right, it was a stunt to boost the stock price, not a real product you intended to sell. Just like this.

You mean the interest free loan they asked for? They are just waiting for it to double, so give it another 5 years. /s

Seriously, though, this is the standard Elon Musk tactic...

I wonder how many people did/didn't ask for their money back on that one.

Is there a way I can filter out all the ad hominem comments?

@dang

It’s unfortunate comment sections for stuff like this can’t be genuine curious conversation

There's only so many times you can have genuine curious conversation for the same promise. Musk has been holding this presentation, with very small variations, for 6-10 years now. The first 5 times, sure, plenty of curious conversation. But after some time you have to start calling a fraud a fraud.

Maybe because the event was all smoke and mirrors, and no actual numbers and plans were revealed ?

Why are the comments on this topic so consistently low quality? It's not even cynicism. It's just snark. It seems like most commenters aren't addressing the topic but rather are venting about their feelings.

This dude has lied about robotaxis for a full 11 years. Think about where you were in life 11 years ago. Each time he's done this, it's been brought up in here with steadily decreasing enthusiasm. What reason would anybody have to engage seriously with this until an actual product has shipped?

And that warrants low-effort snark and jokes polluting these threads? There are still good discussions here, but they get muddled by all this nonsense.

What did you see that you feel is being under-discussed?

It's not that something is under-discussed. The problem is the noise. Apparently, I'm in the minority for disliking shallow Reddit-style snark, since it's getting upvoted while people complaining about it are getting downvoted and flagged.

Technology will be ready when it's ready. There's a strong sense of entitlement and resentment in some when it's not ready when expected. "Lie" is a stretch and frankly it's not necessary to stoop down to that level. It's enough to say he's been overoptimistic and mistaken, like any human.

Lie is not a stretch at this point. It very clearly hasn't been 'nearly ready' this entire 11 years.

This isn't just a HN commenter who got carried away with starry eyed hype in a comment. This is a corporate salesman, and he's trying to sell a product that simply cannot do what he claims it can do.

It's not human error at this point, he's just knowingly selling magic beans.

Man I really have to stop reading hackernews comments, its a total bummer.

His companies are making rockets, autonomous humanoid robots and autonomous cars, I will cut my left pinky finger to work on any of those, and this is my capslock finger, so I will have to switch away from emacs..

With the worldlabs[1] work maybe they unlock models that do have even better spatial world model and can be used label data even better and faster, or create even better synthetic data so it can unlock FSD even sooner.

The fact that LLMs work means there is structure in language that is beyond our understanding, and yet the transformer can discover it and program itself to solve for it. I think that the stupendous amount of compute that is going to be released in 2025 will make it possible to train labelers that can do temporal labeling much better than humans and than the current models, and synthesize and perturb data to train really really good transformers that will outperform 90th percentile humans.

Why do you guys think that it can not happen? Maybe its not Tesla that does it, but I certainly think amazing tech is coming.

Hopefully it will not be just autonomous humanoid robots with guns paid by the military and patrolling the borders :astonished face:

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIXfYFB7aBI (Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson)

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