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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

> Recent reports show the company is planning to hire a human team to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations.

> Tesla would not be the first robotaxi company to use this method. In fact, it’s an industry standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi company owned by General Motors, was employing remote human assistants to troubleshoot when its vehicles ran into trouble (the vehicles appear to have run into trouble every four to five miles). Google’s Waymo is also thought to employ the same practice, as does Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon.

Big pile of nothing. Fools only read titles exclusively. If Teslas offering is bad then that’s a story, but hiring human operators is the norm.

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> fools only read titles

The lady doth protest too much?

What matters is the frequency of interventions, remote or in person. Having taken Waymos and Teslas in FSD extensively, the interventiona rate in the latter is substantially higher, in part due to them being a Level II system trying to operate globally.

The article isn't anything damning. But it's also not a nothingburger.

This is about robotaxis like Waymo not FSD. Even if it were there are orders of magnitude more FSD cars available than Waymo cars.

> This is about robotaxis like Waymo not FSD

What "this" are you referring to? Tesla doesn't have a robotaxi. It does have FSD, which makes it a reasonable comparison for (a) existing and (b) sharing FSD's camera-only dogma.

The title leads the reader to believe that Tesla’s robotaxis will be piloted by humans rather than self-driving software. The combination of the word “control” with scare quotes on “self-driving” gives this impression.

The article may not be damning, but the title? It doth mislead.

> the vehicles appear to have run into trouble every four to five miles

This sounds like one cannot take a trip anywhere without a human driver.

Not what your quote says

> Big pile of nothing.

Not really. In the very least it proves that at best Tesla is way behind established robotaxi operations, and once again demonstrates that Elon Musk's recurrent promise that "full self driving cars is just around the corner" is just a blatant lie to fool investors. I mean, think about it: if Tesla's promise of full self driving was indeed around the corner, why would they suddenly feel the need to hire teams of drivers to drive there cars?

The leading company Waymo does the same thing - is Waymo not full self driving?

Is Tesla Waymo?

I mean it’s not nothing. Those companies have been honest about their practices and intentions while Elon Musk is known to have lied consistently and persistently and egregious about the “self driving” state and capabilities of Tesla and resently made the bogus claims that they had autonomous robots that were just remote controlled.

The subtext is that it’s likely Tesla will soon claim that have self driving cabs, which are just remote controlled.

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