Hacker News Reader

Comment by karlgkk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com