GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow out.
Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.
Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.
I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own
A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fancy new feature they can’t control
I doubt that. They just care less for the technical details.
As it turned out, the feature was still pretty janky and I only tried it a few times before reverting to just regular speakerphone. And when the battery died and the head unit lost all its config, I never bothered figuring out how to set it up a second time.
Salespeople are always trained on the latest features in the auto industry.
Even if they don't get in person training, all carmakers release 1 hour long videos showing the features of their cars for training purposes.
All of the sales people could tell me how many doors each car had and what color it was when we stood next to it, but that was about it. Many of them could look up if other near-by dealers had the exact combination of options I wanted.
If sales person training about the actual cars exists, my experience indicates very few new car sales people take advantage of it.
I would walk away if I saw that.
And that is probably why they go out of their way to not show you that.
Instead of transparently selling a product for fixed price, the dealer system appears based on information asymmetry, haggling, upcharges, finance bullshit, warranty bullshit, subscription bullshit, and many decades of entrenched psyops culture against customers.
On top of that, salespeople are often poorly trained on the products and dealerships seem to have an adversarial relationship with corporate, especially around the corporate website differing from the local story.
And then the dealerships steer you for whatever benefits them. In 2017 I tried to test drive a Chevy Bolt: Motortrend's car of that year. One dealer hadn't even heard of it. Another said he couldn't get one. Another tried to dissuade me from looking at it by dissing the product. Finally I found a knowledgeable dealer that knew the product, had some, and revealed they were easy for all dealers to get in our area: the others were just being obstreperous. Suck.
I don't like being ripped off but I'm not particularly price sensitive, so I'd love to just show up and pay a reasonable sticker price that was just The Price Everyone Paid and not have this vague haggling system expected, and not have to worry whether I was being ripped because I wanted a particular option. I hate having to think about decisions I don't particularly care about, so I would prefer to constrain my choices to "maker Y's automobiles", be it GM, Ford or Toyota for the rest of my life, so that once I have the capabilities I need out of an automobile there's only one or two choices. I would love the simplicity of the dealer being the default maintainer of my automobile and I just show up once a year or so and they take care of it in a pleasant experience.
It's irksome instead that it feels like they just want to trick you out of as much money as possible up front and that they don't want to have a maintenance department, but are legally required to.
My last purchase during the supply chain shortages was actually remarkably stress-free other than not being able to get the car sooner rather than later. I was paying cash. Knew there was almost certainly very little negotiating leverage on the list price. Did a bit of haggling on some "factory-installed" add-ons with a car that hadn't been built yet against my trade-in which I got IMO a good deal on.
The whole thing took me maybe an hour which is hard to complain about for a large purchase. One of the keys is being ready and able to sever the actual purchase from the financing and the trade-in. It's when people really are stretching their financial envelope (which is common) that conflating various aspects of the transaction starts causing a lot of stress.
Of course, it also helps if you've been around the block a few times. OK, if I MUST I'll watch the stupid video about some coating product but know that the answer is no. It's annoying but no more than lots of other things.
>Google/Waymo ... Amazon/Zoox ... Uber/Yandex ... GM Super Cruise ... Ford BluesClues
That's the one the press release is referring to, I guarantee it.
Other companies have neat AV demos (some that they even make people pay for), but fundamentally they can't and won't scale.
GM was majority stakeholder in Cruise, which was gearing up to a ride hailing service. Cruise's cars have instruments like LiDAR on the roof, unlike Super Cruise-equipped cars.
Ford wrote about an "initial launch of a commercial self-driving service in 2021" but I don't think it materialized. A photo of their robotaxi bears the logo of Argo AI, a startup that shut down in 2022.
Not sure how it's suddenly so controversial to realize that Detroit is terrible at software strategy. This has been the conventional wisdom (and with good reason) for quite some time.
"Creative destruction" is coming for them real soon.
LOL, no. Tesla has a gimmicky car that is supposed to be a taxi, with zero planning for the infrastructure (so far).
Yes. I think GM leadership has finally learned enough to realize how far behind they are.
I can safely and legally take a Waymo home after getting drunk at the bar, this is not true of a Tesla.
Btw that kinda thing is one of the few use cases that really does require 5g’s latency and bandwidth… which Tesla currently doesn’t ship. More hardware updates are going to come, despite musks promises)
I don't know how I will switch to another car brand after this.
On top of that, one offered free oil changes for 12 months, IIRC. They'd regularly try to sell unneeded services on top of it (alignment after <12 months of ownership without even checking it first, for example).
My experiences with Tesla have been imperfect, but vastly better by comparison. There are issues, but I'd take them over the dealer experiences 100% of the time.
A Subaru dealership tried to charge $200 to reset a passenger window like this (literally just pushing the button to roll down the window and back up):
https://www.subarubatterysettlement.com/
But they tried to just charge me for it even though I knew how to reset the window and didn’t ask them to. They were thinking I didn’t know how to do it myself, so wouldn’t know any better that they didn’t actually do anything.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/cars/china-baidu-apollo-go-ro...
That doesn't sound like it's nearly at par.
I'd love to see some direct safety comparison stats.
Today, I think they should do this. It is rare I need to touch the wheel or pedal these days and people should experience it.
> Chrysler was the first manufacturer to implement the device in 1958. They called it “Auto-Pilot” and it appeared in their luxury model as an upgraded option. Soon after, General Motors installed it in their Cadillac vehicles, naming it “Cruise Control” which has stuck to this day.
>>> it didn't read signs or lights yet. So if you're coming up on a signal it would just keep going!Self driving probably works great on Interstates with numbers like 5, 10, and the feeders. Based on my experiences with subaru self driving and watching videos and watching tesla drivers around here, a self driving car would give up after maybe 3 minutes. There were more teslas and other expensive "self-driving" style cars a couple years ago, but now i rarely see them. I wonder why?
I can consistently get my wife's subaru self driving to swerve into another lane without warning, without jerking the wheel, with very minor control inputs. Subaru keeps updating the firmware, but they haven't fixed the suicide merge!
405 in WA, OR, and CA are bypasses.
495 in DC is a beltway.
Minneapolis / St Paul has 394 - a spur (I guess?), 494/694 beltway, and 35E which really is a bypass but still carries a legacy name alongside 35W.
Though the roads you reference would probably not be called “feeders” in the same way. I take feeder specifically in the Houstonian meaning to refer to a frontage road that is used for local access that runs parallel to a limited access highway. Notably it must run parallel to the highway and exist for the primary purpose of providing local ingress and egress while preserving the limited access nature of the highway.
While SuperCruise is a highway only system, riding in a friend's car with it was pretty much a non-event.
Has there been a significant customer side advancement in Tesla autopilot in 10 years? From what I can tell, all Elon has accomplished is becoming the new Prius- a sprinkling of Teslas blocking the left lane of our highways (ask any Autopilot aficionado, that’s the safest place to use it) while the human inside watches TikTok.
It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product.
This argument is always so silly because it’s just an argument about the correct way to build a safe control system (i.e. with guaranteed performance characteristics in a defined operational domain) versus the incorrect way to do it (just kinda work over an ambiguously defined set of conditions and hope you don’t kill too many innocent people to cripple your business).
Yes,that's a suppressed fact, not an assumption. It just follows the car in front. Check my other comment.
MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain.
It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe.
You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).
What evidence do you have for your argument?
Restated: You are assuming that if Mercedes engineers had a similar appetite for putting millions of innocent people at risk by operating in unreliable contexts, that their system would perform far worse than FSD does. On what basis do you make that assumption?
The fact that their software is written only to just follow the car in front, and completely and immediately give up if there's no car in front or one cannot be seen due to it being dark or bad weather, on premapped roads.
Meanwhile FSD has repeatedly shown that's it's capable of driving without a car in front.
You can watch YouTube videos of FSD driving without a car in front for thousands of miles on non-premapped roads.
What makes you think Mercedes would be better at doing that?
MB also has a luxury brand reputation to maintain. When they ship a major feature like that, it absolutely has to work 100% as advertised.
Source? If someone gets killed when the system is driving, there is no legal framework for you as a driver to escape criminal penalties. Who at MB are they going to jail for it?
Can UPS indemnify their drivers from involuntary manslaughter charges?
So there will be a system happily running producing target driving paths, but some monitoring system disables in the case with no car in front.
I would guess that the mb system is in fact ok without a car in front, but didn't hit their appetite for risk yet.
I didn't say they are. You're the only one making assumptions here :)
Should we also assume that Mercedes cars can fly better than a plane, because we have not yet seen them fly?
What kind of logic is that?
In other news, OpenAI has solved AGI last year, but is keeping it a secret because it's too dangerous.
I have solved self driving, how can you say I didn't if you haven't seen it perform?
Here's a better example: let's say by law Mercedes has to restrict their cars from exceeding 80mph. They have a car that can reach 80mph in 2 seconds. Is it therefore credible to claim that the car is actually incapable of driving at 81mph?
Or is it more credible to say, "we don't know much about its performance beyond 80mph, but it can probably achieve something outside of that."
The fact that it shuts off immediately shows that they're just copying what the car ahead does.
The system is unable to function on a pre-mapped highway on a clear day with lane markings if there is no other traffic on the road. What does that tell you?
None of that is true, it just follows the car in front in slow moving traffic during daytime in good weather on premapped roads and cannot even change lanes. No car in front anymore? It completely fails to "self"-drive.
These limitations are taboo to talk about because the Mercedes system is used as an anti-Tesla talking point, you can get permanently banned from Reddit and BlueSky for bringing it up. Thats why so many people think its a great system.
Edit: Downvotes for bringing up inconvenient facts.
But within the range of cases where the Mercedes system is applicable (which recently went up to 59mph in Germany [1]) it's solidly better than the Tesla system because Mercedes did the engineering to make it reliable enough that you don't have to supervise the car's driving. If I had a highway commute in stop-and go traffic I'd be comfortable reading in a Mercedes, but not in a Tesla.
[1] https://media.mercedes-benz.com/article/4c04b46a-05e3-4a20-9...
It gets dark at 4:45PM in a good chunk of the western world in winter so it won't be useful then.
Absolutely untrue. It's not even close to perfect. I use it a few times a week and while it's seen some significant improvements over the last year, it still makes pretty dangerous mistakes, especially on left turns, right-turn slip lanes, intersections with flashing yellow lights, streets with very worn road lines or where the positioning of the road lines shift from one side of the intersection to the other. I can think of a dozen other similar situations so I'm very sure there are many others I've never even encountered.
It remains to be seen how much juice Tesla can squeeze out of a transformer approach to autonomous driving, but it's by no means a sure thing.
edit: I misunderstood the comment. I see now that "practically perfected" is a reference to the ideal conditions mentioned in your first sentence.
"Tesla FSD is practically perfected, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions"
> Who has the training data at this point?
Woven by Toyota has roof pods on rideshare (Lyft) cars collecting data: https://woven.toyota/en/our-latest/20220407/
They can't though. Mercedes-Benz can. To pretend that Tesla doesn't offer a better product because they don't want to is...
Disengaging 2 seconds before an accident leads to a perfect driving record
Technologically Tesla is far behind since one man's ego wants to trump physics and computing limitations and its failing. Still no Lidar.
I don't care about 90 youtube videos of long drives with no intervention. I care about a million out of a million (and maybe 10 on top). Either there is something I can trust with mine and my kids life with, or I am not interested with anything on top adaptive cruise control (since I don't spend my life in stop&go traffic).
Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is totally "autonomous," but the fact of the matter (to me, at least) is that they are putting in way more effort to solve the problem than legacy auto manufacturers are.
I can step into a Tesla today, press a destination, and go there without touching the wheel or pedals. Sure it won't be flawless but the fact is, I can. I can't do the same in any other consumer car, and the closest thing is a Waymo. The effort is there, I think its just a matter of time before we start seeing the legal stuff play out.
That's a lot simpler than what Cruise showed in their video. Dealing well with pedestrians, stopped cars, cross streets, etc are a significant challenge.
Can you give an example? I'm not aware of anything in 2016 that would consistently pass this test.
In 2016 Waymo reported their safety drivers intervening once for every 5,100 miles driven [1] - which implies to me that 99% of journeys nobody touched the wheel or pedals.
The problem is 99% isn't enough, as there are tremendous numbers of cars out there, and a busy bit of freeway would get a disengagement per minute.
[1] https://driverless.wonderhowto.com/news/2016-disengagement-r...
It might be missing a few logging roads, private driveways and carpark lanes - but it shows Google is entirely capable of mapping streets in detail all over the world.
This is complete bullshit. The systems in 2016 were restricted to pre-mapped areas with lots of training. (i.e. the waymo/cruise approach today) So if you weren’t in a tiny slice of San Francisco or a few other training areas, this didn’t work.
..and yet Tesla is quick to blame the drivers when accidents happen - and has disclaimers for supervision in its TOS. Mercedes on the other hand, takes all responsibility for eventualities that happen while self-driving is engaged (DrivePilot - not ADAS)
I travel hundred miles a day on average on a mix of local and highway, but all major roads in city and suburb.
Humans would fail a driving test designed for autonomous driving too. We don't have the reaction time comparable to computers to ..say.. avoid oncoming traffic or an object/animal on the road within a few milliseconds. Or identify dark objects easier to see in infrared. Or maintain an exact speed, to a few significant digits. Or manually do a good job with traction control.
You call lying about it endlessly, misleading marketing, beta-testing on public roads, and not even having L3 properly in production "taking it the most seriously"?
I can't point to a single Andrej Karpathy or Chris Lattner or Jim Keller working at Mercedes, BMW, GM, etc (not to mention the not so big named people who are still very very good). And I also don't see many people crossing over from legacy auto autonomous orgs to openai, anthropic, deepmind, etc.
Other manufacturers don't have custom in car inference chips either, or spend billions in R&D for custom training silicon. This is clearly not a side project for Tesla, whereas with other manufacturers, its an obvious afterthought.
My guess is other manufacturers will just license some AV product from whoever is most successful and try to sell products like they always have - through design language and brand feel, not through breakthrough technological innovation.
So yes, I don't think any other consumer car manufacturer is taking it seriously.
But that has been invested in X.ai not Tesla.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv9HtWUf27s
Arguably this is Waymo in its "home turf"
This is nowhere close to being true. The latest numbers I could find for 2022 are 17,060 miles per disengagement[1] for Waymo. And even then the definition is not quite clear, because these are safety disengagements from what I can tell, and not disengagements for things like getting stuck because the road is closed or something else.
[1] https://www.eetimes.com/waymo-cruise-dominate-av-testing/
Tesla doesn't reveal it's miles/disengagement stats, but according to crowdsourced data it's 690-828 miles between critical disengagement [1], which is 2 orders of magnitude worse than the Waymo number you posted, and far below their goal of besting human drivers' abilities.
1. https://electrek.co/2024/10/24/elon-musk-just-said-some-wild...
1. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8135....
It better be, because Level 1 is satisfied with just cruise control with automatic braking.
Tesla autopilot 1.0 has been around on tesla since 2015. It's actually pretty good on the freeway as traffic aware cruise control + autosteer. I think it's a pretty good balance of driver + assist.
That was a your-dealership issue, not a GM issue. GM doesn't run the dealerships (though they sure have plenty of influence).
I test drove the Silverado EV a month ago and got to try out super cruise.
The top-selling EV maker in the US doesn't have any dealerships, so clearly it's not an insurmountable problem. GM just hasn't prioritized surmounting it.
We are seeing this play out with VW’s attempt to direct-sell Scout vehicle's and immediately getting challenged/sued by dealerships over it. [1]
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-10-25/...
The document is rather one-sided and slanted, but I think it’s interesting to see how a dealership association explains their perspective:
https://www.nada.org/media/3267/download?inline
Of particular interest is warranty issues. Tesla has an extra-strong interest in hiding recall-worthy issues and preventing warranty service from occurring since their service department is owned by the manufacturer.
A car dealership has the opposite incentive: every dealer-performed warranty service is a payment from the manufacturer to the dealer.
Finally, even if GM is lobbying to do direct sales, dealerships employ more Americans than the carmakers and parts manufacturers. Their lobbying group is larger and more local.
2. This is technically a tangent to the issue at hand. If Tesla was a gasoline vehicle startup they would have the same incentives to avoid dealership franchises, perhaps an even stronger incentive.
3. The fact that vehicle service is the most profitable part of the business is a great argument for the dealership model. Tesla owning their own service centers means that they are directly incentivized not to fix reliability problems in their vehicles, while all the car companies who have to pay out dealerships to handle recalls and warranty claims have a direct incentive to produce a reliable vehicle. Lo and behold, Tesla is about halfway down the vehicle reliability list according to consumer reports. At least they're better than Chrysler?
Wouldn't this be served just as well by having independent repair shops certified by the manufacturer to do recall and warranty repairs, without prohibiting direct sales of vehicles?
Being forced to buy a vehicle from the manufacturer would be exactly like being forced to buy Indiana Jones and the Great Circle only from Microsoft. But it's a lot better to be able to buy it from multiple game stores, many of which compete on price.
https://www.cheapshark.com/search#q:Indiana%20Jones%20and%20...
Overall I think it's totally fine that Tesla wants to sell cars direct, and any manufacturer should be able to. But they should also be obligated to sell to dealerships at a fair price (they shouldn't be able to just pretend that their own selling process has no cost associated with it).
And, to be fair to the dealers, there is a long history of the makers trying to screw them over, and the public, too.
They aren't going to be any good as an off-road vehicle, the approach/departure angles are horrible. They will also be way too heavy, just as a function of being an EV. Plus, the styling is absolute garbage. I've owned a scout 80 for 18 years, it was my first vehicle. I owned an OH scout for longer than they have been collectible. This new scout doesn't have any styling cues to any prior vehicle, it just looks like if you asked an AI to generate an off-road truck. And they even had a better example, the new broncos absolutely hit it out of the park. Line I E if those up next to a mid 60s bronco and you can see the resemblance, which is why Ford did that in their marketing. These new VW scouts, if you park them next to either an 800 or a scout 2, don't even look like the same lineage. They are just an abomination, and the only car company I'd trust less with shepherding the scout brand would be stellantis2. We've seen how poor of a job they've done with the jeep.
And the stupid part is,most people don't and have never understood why the original scout was good. They were an overly heavy, underpowered, and expensive vehicle. But, they were a tremendously capable off-road vehicle, my stock scout 80 has gone places a modern Rubicon with lockers couldn't go. It's down to a very fortunate suspension design and stupidly low gearing.
I think you're not in a marketing mindset if you think that any significant amount of people are to buy a new Scout for off-roading. Premium-priced vehicles are more about image than the implied capabilities of that image.
Porsche sells more four door vehicles than two door sports cars. You might say that's not a real Porsche in the spirit of a Porsche, but it is what it is. It sells, and the average person doesn't need a two door car with no trunk or an off-road truck that is painful on the road. They usually need a family vehicle for mundane domestic life.
ahem Guess what Tesla has a ton of problems with?
Edit: there are a whole lot of people replying who seem unaware that I was referring to new car customers who have a vehicle which is broken under government-mandated warranties, but also that:
- The majority of manufacturers have long required proprietary diagnostic tools (the OBD-II functions in your car are only useful for the most basic diagnostic info, cannot adjust parameters, and cannot trigger diagnostic procedures such as cycling a valve or motor.) That is why some states and countries have right-to-repair laws. Automakers responded by shifting all that stuff to work only over telematics, and then claimed that online websites were not "tools."
- At one point car companies were doing bullshit like shipping parts with electronics in them "uncoded" (not uncommon, VAG does this) and not flashed with any firmware. Volvo did this. The firmware could only be flashed by a dealer, and it required them to plug the car into their internet-connected diagnostic tool through which servers in Sweden would encrypt the firmware for that specific VIN number and module, which could only be decrypted by the main control units in that specific car - and transmit it back to the technician's diagnostic tool.
- Teslas require software/online tools only provided to Tesla service centers and technicians
- You cannot buy parts for a Tesla without providing them with the VIN number of a car you own and which they still consider roadworthy. Tesla has a very arbitrary process for declaring vehicles to not be roadworthy, with relatively minor collisions triggering it, whereas vehicles nearly totally destroyed often are not declared unroadworthy and their VIN can be used to purchase parts
- Tesla does not distribute parts via third party distributors such as Worldpac, and prohibits its OEMs from selling parts, which is extremely unusual. You (and your independent mechanic) can only get parts directly from them - if they'll sell you the part at all.
The laws requiring dealerships and that they be independently owned were created because in the early days of the auto industry, people were getting endlessly screwed by automotive manufacturers producing cars that would break within weeks or months, did not have parts available for them at all, and the company would dissolve right after a production run so that customers had nobody to go after for damages.
The reason for requiring it be an independent business is simple; the state government wants to see that a local business has judged the manufacturer to have their shit together sufficiently enough to want to do business with them, and they won't be left holding the bag.
> ahem Guess what Tesla has a ton of problems with?
If the goal is to allow people to have vehicles repaired, then mandate right-to-repair laws, mandate that all auto manufacturers must fully document how to service the vehicle.
The problem with Tesla isn't the lack of dealerships, it's that even if you go to a normal auto repair store, Tesla won't sell repair parts nor provide detailed enough repair manuals. Tesla will void your warranty for having someone else fix it.
If the regulation is meant to allow consumers to repair their vehicles, then it should say that.
vehicles regularly catching on fire for no reason
vehicles driving into the back of emergency vehicles, slamming on the brakes in the middle of highways - both because the CEO decreed that RADAR/LIDAR isn't necessary
Issues with its "self driving" randomly swerving at objects, pedesrtians, cyclists, other vehicles...
Enormous service/parts/bodywork backlogs
vehicles blacklisted by insurance companies becaue of high crash rates and repair costs
windows that randomly shatter
drivetrains that fail because you drive them in too heavy a rainstorm
a truck that cannot be driven in the snow (snow reflects light off the DRL bar, blinding the driver, the headlights getting blocked by snow, and the vehicle is stymied by barely a few inches of snow):
https://www.tiktok.com/@molesrcool/video/7446853436198358303...
GM doesn't have any of these problems (except for a small number of Bolts which had defective cells made by LG - all replaced now, and given extended ten year warranties.)
Not even that, colleague's Model 3 died because it was parked out in rather normal european heavy rain over 1 night. It just completely died.
Tesla service center just took it and replaced it without any questions - clear sign this wasn't an exception and it was well known issue at that point.
This is just a car dealership tying its hands behind its back and not competing well. If it isn't widespread it isn't a GM problem.
The car dealership isn't going to "go under" since they have an exclusive franchise. Presumably, GM isn't incentivizing them to sell super cruise.
BlueCruise vehicles were updated with the most sophisticated driver attention system ive ever seen. It will complain in less time than it takes me to change a radio station.
Before that update, I was enjoying the automated driving a little bit too much, and using it to take liberties with my attention in the car. That was awesome as a user experience.
After the update, I am paying more attention to the road than I did when I was driving a manual. There is no benefit to being able to take my hands off the steering wheel. That’s a good thing for safety, but it means that “level 2.5” driving (or whatever) adds zero marginal utility.
> Starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, we will deduct points if an [active driving assistance] system doesn’t have adequate [direct driver monitoring systems]. Right now, only Ford and GM’s systems meet our criteria for earning additional points, but others could be available soon. ...
> Ford’s BlueCruise sets a high standard among [active driving assistance] systems, aided by an infrared camera that monitors the driver’s eyes to determine whether they are looking at the road. If the driver glances away from the road for more than about 5 second... the system will give the driver a visual warning and an audible chime.
Global-wise, there are also a few Chinese companies in the robotaxi market. Pony.ai and WeRide both recently went in public market.
Not yet with customers, but in the testing phase.
It does seem strange but when one considers that the CEO of one of these competitors spent ~$260M to help elect the next President and he will have his ear on matters of autonomous car regulation, maybe not so strange.
If future autonomous car regulations are influenced by Musk and end up being lax and favour the technological approach that Tesla has taken, then GM/Cruise may have made significant irrelevant investments to solve issues that are no longer relevant, and this puts them on poor footing in the new competitive landscape.
It's possible they're bowing out early on the assumption that this will no longer be a competition that they can win.
To be clear, the "no longer relevant issue" is safety regulations designed to protect citizens from getting killed.
"It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board."
No, because BlueCruise sounds like an asinine feature. To make me pay $2450 more for a car for some arbitrary selection roads for that feature to be available doesn't make sense to me.
Cruise really was on to something, well w/e GM's loss!
GM later had a PR release for UltraCruise which was supposedly developed in house and maybe that uses Cruise technology. However, AFAIK it was never released and is rumored to be shelved.
My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.
So it might be interesting to somehow plot total "self driving" investment against that kind of customer base projection over time.
That's still a huge market. And the baby boomers are the most affluent demographic in the western world.
I can’t imagine how someone would compare it to a multi-sensor setup - a single camera can’t match the level of prescience a Waymo or Cruise have. But also as the overall experience is just absurdly different. Waymo was the first tech thing I felt was truly magical in _decades_.
Meanwhile the best I can get out of Tesla FSD is straight highways. And even there, there’s random glitches (the forever annoying ghost braking being the one that makes me feel particularly unsafe with it)
The problem is that at the end of the day, enough people still have serious issues and Tesla wildly oversells the capability of their system.
I think they’ll “get there” in terms of functionality and reliability but it’s nowhere near what waymo is reporting
Tesla's equivalent system appears to be 100% vaporware. I don't understand the case for them not being far behind.
My gut tells me Waymo is ahead, probably by a good amount. But calling Telsa FSD "vaporware" is absurd, and leads me to the same conclusion that GP already called out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeNKYRWGgBc
Just because Elon was optimistic in 2017 doesn't make this any less impressive.
I have been following closely. 13.2 is a major leap forward. It is VERY impressive.
It's also five years late.
It's got some serious issues, such as intervention rates (which, despite being massively lower, are still too high).
It has trouble in California-style adverse weather conditions. This is largely due to it's vision based sensors.
And by the way, I'm not saying they're not going to "pull it off". I think they're one of the few that will succeed, to be honest. I'm saying that it is nowhere close to where it needs to be to match Tesla's promises.
> This is the most advanced AI driving system in the world.
That is a bold claim, and one that I don't think is true. Tied for first or just second most advanced, I would absolutely believe. And certainly one of the five major players.
It's also missing some key customer service and realtime service components, that took Waymo over 4 years to roll out and fine tune. And Waymo is still having edge case issues!
> Just because Elon was optimistic in 2017 doesn't make this any less impressive.
That understates his repeated broken and aggressive promises, often made during investor meetings. It makes it hard to believe his claims about the future.
As for the most advanced AI driving system, yes you could argue Waymo is more advanced, it's certainly more complex. By most advanced I mean that it's fully end to end, and this is a very new development in AI and robotics (which I work with). It's actually a much simpler architecture than other systems. But as we've seen repeatedly, what tends to win is simple models with a ton of compute and data.
As for V13.2, it won't be perfect, but it's also not the final version. It's approaching feature complete, and we've seen it handle snow covered roads at the very least. Rain hasn't really been a problem for recent versions. In my view, weather is mostly a matter of data collection at this point.
IMO, it's largely because BlueCruise (and all of the similar services) is not sufficiently better than the non-subscription driver assists.
I have the option of BlueCruise on my vehicle and it's just not a compelling offer.
* It only works on major highways. Beyond actual coverage, major highways are places where the standard driver assists already work extremely well.
* It does nothing about traffic around you. You have to be prepared to react. Not much different than driver assist.
* It's wickedly expensive.
Right now, radar assisted cruise and camera based lane centering eases 95% of my driving fatigue.
I drive (and have driven) a fair number of rental cars due to travel, and I have to say I feel that way about many new vehicles in their entirety. So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
> It's wickedly expensive
We own two cars, 6 and 10 years old respectively, yet I've never felt less motivated to look at new cars than I do now.
Guess our part towards saving the planet may well turn out to be 'driving that existing ICE vehicle for just a little bit longer'...
So if you drive an average amount with those cars you're not saving the planet by continuing to drive them.
In a well functioning system you'd be selling them on to people who drive very little and are old and set in their ways and replacing them with an EV.
(Genuine question, not whataboutism...) what about the environmental aspects of manufacturing and distributing a vehicle other than CO2 emissions?
> old and set in their ways
I fear I may be approaching this stage myself! :)
The greenest choice most of us can make is an old, used car with reasonable emissions and that’s fuel efficient. Like a 15 year old Civic or Corolla. Or do what a colleague of mine did - he revived a first generation Prius, flashed newer software onto it, and salvaged a battery pack from a newer, wrecked Prius.
There are also the caveats you mentioned that the analysis does assume that an EV is actually the greener choice, which is itself a function of a lot of other choices being made green also, such as whether it was constructed and powered with the most environmentally favorable choices of mining and manufacturing, most of which isn't really in the consumers direct control.
Relevant phrases are "well-to-tank" and "tank-to-wheel" which combine to give "well-to-wheel" numbers.
Is this with the battery tech of today, december 2024? So for EVs built in 2020 let's say, it was worse? I think there is some advancement in battery making, isn't there?
I assumed we're attempting to weigh up keeping an ICE vehicle that already exists - like my 10 year old diesel - vs building building a new EV vehicle and scrapping the old ICE.
Although maybe we're missing a trick. Not the dumping-it-in-the-lake bit(!), but the taking-an-old-ICE-out-of-circulation bit.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
It suggests that making an ICE car is roughly equal to the running in terms of carbon.
In reality manufacturing is about 10%, disposal 5% and the other 85% from running it e.g. fuel and maintenance.
It then suggests that keeping an old car is better because if you keep the car for twice as long then the emissions are half per mile, but you don't scrap functional cars you sell them onto someone else. This causes a cascade with the oldest and most polluting cars being scrapped.
I imagine this depends hugely on the kind of vehicle?
Our small [petrol] car cost the equivalent of $10k on the road, including all taxes. It has a tiny engine, four seats, and limited luggage space. It's fairly fuel-efficient (at least when I'm driving).
I've also recently driven a BMW 5 series (booked the cheapest "compact manual" as an airport rental vehicle, got that instead - win!) List price around 10x that of our little car. Nicer ride, of course. Bigger luggage space. Five seats.
Presumably in terms of carbon the BMW's manufacturing costs vastly exceed that of small cars, but is the carbon manufacturing cost linear with either its fuel efficiency or with its price?
https://www.carboncounter.com/#!/details?cars=34797;36030;34...
The tool also lets you set various assumptions like miles driven per year to see how they affect things.
In any practical sense, no, it's not. Its a dumb argument pushed by people trying to sandbag EVs.
Current recycling tech is pretty terrific (IIRC ~98% recovery of lithium, misc metals). Enabling the long fabled "circular" economy.
At some point we'll hit a (near) equilibrium. IIRC, ~20 years out. (Assuming Li-ion battery tech continues to improve at current rate. Thereby balancing out the lithium lost during recycling.) So we'll hit something like "peak lithium", greatly reducing mining (extraction) of new lithium.
Recycling is much cheaper than mining (both $ and CO2).
(I believe, but obliviously can't prove, that sodium (et al) batteries will enable new use cases and markets, complimenting lithium rather than replacing it.)
I think we're discussing the latter, where the upfront cost of the ice doesn't count because you already have it.
But generally we don't scrap old ones.
If you instead sell the old one to someone who drives an ICE car that gets worse mpg then that's a further benefit.
If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity, your break even is determined based on the higher efficiency of electric motors and of the (energy efficient but filthy) big stack coal generators compared to the relatively clean but inefficient gasoline ICE.
But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier - suddenly that distance shrinks rapidly (maybe half) even though for you as an end user nothing changed, because electricity is fungible so you charge a car from the solar farm just the same as from a coal power plant.
Which is almost everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
> But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier -
If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
I love solar, but don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
And if you ask the people who have done that "hey, was it cheap and easy to move your car's energy consumption to renewables?" and they reply "Yes!", please bring their story back here and share with the class.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/execut...
Let's say doing things one way uses 10 units of something, and doing something another way then uses 5 units of that same something. Didn't you then avoid using 5 units of that thing?
Yeah, no. If this was 1984 you'd be right on the money. In 2024 "We mostly burn coal to make electricity" either means you're subsidising coal or you have no infrastructure investment to move to a better generation.
> Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
Where are you still seeing 80%? Last I saw was closer to 60%. A lot of that isn't coal, and the gasoline is not electricity production†. Gasoline is what we're replacing in the discussion, so "Yeah, but what about gasoline?" is a total misfire. Which mostly leaves methane. And that's a very different comparison to coal. There are indeed new methane electricity plants in lots of places.
A methane power plant might emit half or even a third of the CO2 of the equivalent coal plant. It's still a fossil fuel, but in terms of the ratio we're talking about for break-even on an EV, that's a huge difference.
> If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
You're seeing huge investments because they're expensive and make money, that's what an investment is. They're not investing in coal plants because that's a money loser. Yes, it's often subsidised, in my country the renewable energy schemes are subsidised via "Contracts for Difference" which have the effect of insuring the price paid for energy, leaving the problem of delivering the energy very much in the hands of the bidders, the government is only the hook for the agreed price of energy when it's delivered, this has the effect of making investment less risky - if you can make 1000GWh of energy over the lifetime of the project and the subsidy says you're definitely getting £50 per MWh, that's £50M, without CfD you can't be sure if you get paid £80 per MWh (we're £30M richer) or £20 per MWh (we're bankrupt) until the power auctions years after you've constructed the plant.
† Yes there are a handful of power plants running on this fuel, but they're insignificant at a global scale.
Production of EVs and batteries generate more CO2 before the first wheel turns, however, the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving.
- It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle.
- If the EV draws electricity from a coal/fired grid, however, the catchup period stretches to more than five years.
- If the grid is powered by carbon/free hydroelectricity, the catchup period is about six months.
Shouldn't we be comparing an old ICE which was already built years ago but is still operating vs building a new EV to replace it?
The carbon footprint of building the ICE is almost irrelevant, it's just the ongoing damage it is doing. Compare that with footprint of building and operating the EV that could replace it.
Everyone replaces their car at some point. If you are comparing a new EV, its best to compare its impact compared to a new ICE. We all know its probably best in most cases to keep any vehicle, even one that is inefficient, on the road for its useful life.
I didn’t know this until this thread. And I feel like I’ve heard people say things like they are going to improve the environment by ditching their current car for an EV, not because they’re planning on getting rid of their car anyways.
Here's Top Gear explaining it, as my attempt to convey the same information seems to have bounced off most people replying:
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/mythbusting-world-...
> But what if your existing petrol or diesel car is perfectly satisfactory? Obviously if you cause one less vehicle – of any kind – to be manufactured, you’re saving CO2 in the short term. But if you drive a lot of miles or your car is thirsty, then sell it to someone who drives less. Getting an EV would after a very few years move you into credit. If it’s efficient and you drive little, probably hold on to it for a while.
> In most areas of life, the greenest thing is simply to buy less stuff and keep it for longer. But with ICE cars, because they emit so much CO2 in use, it’s not always so simple.
(Apologies for the snark but...) mythbusting articles without any experimental data or references to back up claims - or claims they say they've debunked - aren't really my thing. Hopefully not really a HN thing either :/
I agree that there are shades of gray though. My counterpoint is that I am not so sure the non-commercial vehicle market is that efficient that when you sell a vehicle that it is going to the best candidate best on the miles driven. Your vehicle is still in the fleet and being used. I think the simpler argument is that for any modern vehicle, there is not a significant enough gain and you are better holding on to the vehicle until it reaches your preferred EOL.
Ditching their current car isn't setting their old car on fire. It's still in the overall fleet of cars.
Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Vehicles should be reduced first (drive less), reused second (keep using existing one), repaired (keep using existing ones), and finally you can recycle as best as possible.
All of this should happen prior to replacement. If you replace an existing ICE with an EV, the EV not only has to catch up with a new ICE, it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction. That's much worse than 20k miles because the cost of building your existing car is sunk. It could take as many as 50,000 miles of driving to break even against your existing used car.
Consumerism and early replacement of working goods has always been the mortal enemy of environmentalism.
That is precisely the sunk cost fallacy though: the principle is that continuing an endeavor simply because it already has been a cost paid shouldn't be done, unless the total continuing cost (including the eventual replacement) is less than the cost of immediate replacement (plus all continuing costs after initial replacement, including the eventual replacements of those in turn). Otherwise the principle says it is a waste of resources.
The 4 R's assume that the replacement is no better than the original at the job, which is why I described that analysis as the sunk cost fallacy. We don't have to take this assumption (personally, I prefer to bike over driving my ICE, so this analysis doesn't apply), but if we take the assumption that the EV does less environmental damage over its lifetime, then this assumed "environmental damage" function is minimized by discarding the ICE immediately, as any further use simply increases the total "environmental damage" caused by the choice of which car to use.
This can be seen in computers too, as newer computers are sometimes so much more power efficient then their replacement that they can very quickly save on resources by throwing out a perfectly working computer to replace it with a newer one.
This is unlike most other consumer goods which tend to be scrapped much earlier. If you're scrapping a car before its ~10-15 years old, chances are there's either something quite wrong with it, or you just drove it way too much and its gonna fall apart (i.e., something wrong with it).
The importance of those is a tiny fraction of the importance of CO2 emissions.
A toxic pit full of battery waste the size of a small town will not end life on Earth. An atmosphere full of CO2 will.
In the specific case of electric vehicles (and many plug in hybrids) luckily they're such an immense improvement that my guess is that they still have a net benefit. But far from the simple efficiency math, and more likely the user will increase their consumption by some meaningful percent.
I wonder though if the more significant limitation for most people is the value placed on their time currently, so they seek to minimize travel and commute times (rather than minimizing for fuel costs). And if so, does will the rise of self-driving + EV paradoxically increase the number of miles someone is willing to sit behind the wheel in the coming decade?
Like what?
(In general, because of cratering manufacturing costs, improving tech, and a still low trust for battery health, being an EV early adopter is an expensive option at the moment because even if an early EV is still at 80% functionality compared to new, the resale value is terrible, and I think this plus the lack of charging infrastructure is a big impediment to adoption growing to become dominant in the mainstream)
I've thought about it over the years and if I was regularly away for long periods in the winter I'd probably have spent the money. As it is, I cross my fingers and generally try not to have long periods away from my house in the winter.
https://electrek.co/2022/11/08/electric-vehicles-provide-bac...
https://gmenergy.gm.com/for-home/products/vehicle-to-home-so...
Reliably getting 300-400 mile range (even in cold), getting 250 miles range in 10-15 minutes of fast charging, and seeing batteries comfortably make it to 150k miles with small degradation.
Unfortunately people seems to really care about edge cases (What if I have to unexpectedly drive 400 miles on a frozen January evening?), so until EVs can easily cover those bases, people are really trigger shy.
There are plenty of people who live in places where it's frozen every evening for getting on for half of every year.
"Unexpected long trips" aren't exactly an edge case in our household either, for a bunch of reasons.
I don't follow your take on the current EV gen either. A car at the end of the day derives most of its value from taking you one place to another. The current gen of EVs do this and do it well. "current EV gen is kind of doomed" that is just hyperbole, nothing is changing in the near future that would doom current EV vehicles on the road.
Yep, or selling it and buying a more efficient one, so the person buying yours upgrades their less efficient car as well.
> So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
So you are basically paying to take legal responsibility for the crashes of a not-quite-ready autopilot whilst still having to keep alert.
The moment there is a true self-driving capability, where you can sit back and let the car drive even if you're not sober etc, then it would be wildly popular.
It'd be the height of stupidity if it does just keep rolling forward, but who knows...
Honestly, I'm not surprised that new cars aren't breathtakingly awesome. It's been a really rough 5 years for everybody and we're not seeing much genuine light at the end of the tunnel. Everyone's just trying to survive. Hard to do your best work under those circumstances.
Several other carmakers beyond GM are still pursuing L4+ autonomous technology. So apparently they don't think Waymo is wrong, although they're way behind.
I’m trying to understand how this would be them determining autonomous driving is not viable, which appears to be your premise, rather than them and others just not having a path to compete.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/11/24318651/cruise-robotaxi... https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/03/22/why-ford-and-vw-shut-d...
It's not that they can't compete with the almighty google, it's that there's no business there.
I just spit up my drink. Thank you for that.
Seems like a) the salesperson might not know his vehicles and perhaps it just wasn't a Super Cruise enabled vehicle (meaning, it wasn't added-on to that specific vehicle). b) the actual Super-Cruise module was broken in that vehicle, and that was his excuse c) he didn't know how or wasn't comfortable with telling you how to enable it. (some people are still quite afraid of giving full control over to computers)
I have tested numerous vehicles with Super Cruise; I quite enjoyed it.
I could be wrong, but unless it's a new GM rule, afaik, and with my understanding of how dealerships work (as far as the ones I've visited), dealerships try to avoid messing with the vehicle programming as much as they can. It's rather sad, as aside from the manufactures, dealerships have the most tools and access to the vehicles programming, but rarely-if-ever stray from the service manual.
Custom programming kind of is a market for that reason.
Living in a state with a very large automotive industry, there are a lot of people who have the tools + knowledge that offer custom programming services like: Programming the key fob that if one was to hold the unlock-door button for 5 seconds, the driver side window opens. And if the lock button is pressed once, then held for 5 seconds, all the windows are rolled up. Enabling a bunch of different video codecs/formats and enabling video-playback while the car is in motion if the passenger seat detects something siting there, etc, etc...
They really don’t know how to develop a compelling product, even though they have an enormous amount of experience and engineering talent.
It’s very similar to the failure of Boeing but GM doesn’t make anything that can kill 200 people at once so we don’t notice.
"In the early 1980s AT&T asked McKinsey to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The consultancy noted all the problems with the new devices—the handsets were absurdly heavy, the batteries kept running out, the coverage was patchy and the cost per minute was exorbitant—and concluded that the total market would be about 900,000. At the time this persuaded AT&T to pull out of the market, although it changed its mind later. "
We know how big the taxi market is and it's growth rate. There is clearly room for a few businesses here alone. Then consider driverless will go beyond taxi to general transportation like trucking which is massive market. Also likely play a significant variable in what cars consumers choose.
I think the risk here is software tends to a winner (or small number of winners) gets all market.
That has to be a major risk/reward concern on the companies investing in this tech.
I wonder if this is a liability thing (driver would be responsible).
Or it could suck and the chances of buying the car go down.
I remember walking into an apple store and seeing the apple vision pro headset. I asked to try it, and they said "you can't. You have to make an appointment and blah blah". If someone adds friction to the buying process, there must be some reason - they must be hiding something (poor performance, complexity, price, etc)
Before the iPhone came out, some pretty decent/popular smartphones existed. I had clients in the industry. They sold a lot of n95s and such.
But... data plans sucked. Apple did an exclusive deal and forced them to include 2gb of data. They could not sell phones with data-less plans. Customers could not buy iphones on data-less plans.
At some point you have to nudge the paradigm.
Many others on forums report the same, and here's an example of a component being borked.
AEB, Automatic Emergency Braking, is on by default and always turns back on at vehicle start.
It's dangerous. An example? Even with a camera and a separate radar, it is borked. I've been behind another car, slowing for a light, and hit a downward slope of a large speedbump and SLAM the brakes come on.
Why?
The radar suddenly sees pavement, as the nose of the car is pointed down, but the camera sees car + brake light ahead.
This is at 30km/hr, and everyone is braking fine, the car ahead is not even close. And proof it's not me is the 5 times it happened in 2 weeks, it was always something like this.
I was almost hit 3 times.
It literally panic brakes. Horribly designed.
I finally had it and removed the radar sensor with forscan.
With behaviour like this in something as simple as AEB, by no means would I trust anytiong else. Forums show people complaining about:
* adaptive cruise slowing down, or speeding up because it sees speed limit signs on offramps, or even adjacent roads
* the lane assist pulling strongly because the car thinks an offramp is the main road.
* reports of swerving into other lanes when passing some vehicles, the car confused
It's just junk.
This beta testing on our roads needs to stop.
What cracks me up is this.
If you asked a skilled software dev, if they'd prefer to have software designed by a team, any team, responsible for tgeir life? They'd likely say no.
Because we've all seen the crappy code that gets produced. We know of bugs. We know of failures in testing, automated or not.
These cars ae all extremely buggy, just as any software project is. But beyond that, auto manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners.
I just can't imagine why anyone, this decade, would want to trust auto drive anything.
That said, when trying to BUY a supercruise vehicle, the sales guys were clueless, I had to review the stat sheets of each car to see which ones did or did not have it. GM is treating this technology as “surveys say 2% of the market wants a self driving vehicle” (incorrect question) compared to “install on every vehicle as an available subscription, let the sales team earn their way.” I’m sure the tech is expensive, but it can’t be that much more at the OEM level.
I also have a Tesla with FSD. FSD is truly amazing but still struggles with edge cases like, my office has two entrances, one is blocked by barrels, it tries to turn into the barrels every time.
I really don't want to buy a Tesla, but from what I can tell, nobody has anything close to what FSD offers.
From what I read about it, you're absolutely right. Down to the point of unwanted veering towards road dividers and other vehicles.
Our 2024 Kia does this every 10-20 miles on average. You don't even have to enable lane assist. It also randomly decides to weaken the regenerative braking, or switch out of single pedal mode.
If you disable enough of the safety features it stops doing these things, but, for instance, that means you can't have blind spot detection that works when you're going over 5mph and a working steering column at the same time.
The Tesla system isn't perfect, but it is far from unique in being imperfect.
FSD is a very hard problem, and the systems deployed are at best alpha level. These things should be "hyped responsibly".
SuperCruise does what it claims to do, keep it up the middle on listed corridors. Most highways and interstates are eligible. I love both systems.
FSD is truly almost there for unsupervised, point to point driving. People want to virtue signal and complain about Tesla but it is an amazing piece of hardware being mass produced today. My car is 3 years old.
You might "feel" it is almost there because it gets it right 99.9% of the time but that is still way too many accidents and injuries in the long run. And the work to go from 99.9% to 99.9999% is 1000x more complicated.
Also, fault tolerance error rates don’t work that way - difficulty increases exponentially as you increase fault. In other words, it’s much more difficult than three orders of magnitude to go from 3 9s to 6 9s - it’s easily 5-6 orders of magnitude.
When L5 becomes available then this becomes a different calculus. And it’s honestly questionable about how good the characterization actually is since Tesla’s L2 FSD seems to outperform Mercedes’s L3 and it’s more a matter of the liability the manufacturer is willing to take on vs objective measurements of quality.
The average crash rate for human is one every 500k miles.
You'd trust your partner or parent to do that for you ...
That said, based on my experience with FSD, I'd be tempted to take a nap if it let me, reinforcing my initial statement that it's very darn close.
Are you ready to have your tesla drive FSD with you sleeping in it for 500k? You are letting your feeling dictate that FSD is ready. The math is more complicated.
Going from 99.9% to 99.99999% is what makes a system truly driverless and where most of the work is. Waymo is way way ahead of FSD for this.
Your comment/question seems to assume that somehow accurate classification of performance is possible, which is demonstrably false assumption.
First, if somehow system-internal watchdog was able to detect erroneous outputs for training, it would also be able to stop those outputs propagating to control system live, leading to zero errors. Such a watchdog requires self driving to be quantified analytically, leaving implementation entirely testable and therefore control system not passing the testsuite (i.e. exhibiting erroneous behavior, i.e. still having "edge cases") not deployable in public. Many words to say that that in practice with driving being somewhat loosely defined you need humans in the training loop.
Second, vehicle operators are not only unqualified to accurately monitor behavior of these autonomous systems, in part due to not being formally trained on safety systems in general and the system they are monitoring in particular, but on top of that incentivized to underreport erroneous output.
My prediction has been that we are going to see increased number of accidents with ADAS deployments, not less, before the number can start dwindling.
I've had one Tesla for 6 years, another for 2: I've gotten to a point where I find Autopilot boring and turn it off just for something to do.
My older Tesla has enhanced Autopilot. As impressive as it is, it's very glitchy. I primarily use it so I don't speed.
Because enhanced autopilot was so glitchy, when we added a 2nd Tesla to the household, we didn't pay for FSD. (Enhanced autopilot was too expensive given how glitchy it was in my older car.) The free trials of FSD in the 2nd Tesla are impressive... And glitchy. I constantly need to take over on surface roads; but it is very nice on freeways.
The thing is, "self driving" as a feature just isn't worth the sticker price. If you're sitting in the driver's seat, and there's nothing to do, you can just save yourself a boatload of cash and drive the car yourself. Especially if you have to remain alert at all times, the best way to cut the boredom is to drive the car.
But if I have to maintain a hand on the steering wheel and monitor the car I may as well be driving.
The facts don't matter anymore.
Just perception.
Waymo isn't scalable.
I think you mean interest in level 3 autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679
Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor
This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.
The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.
The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.
This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
Fun fact - Cruise did actually have a source code leak a few years back, some engineer decided to embrace the 4 hour work week and outsource their role to a contractor, who uploaded their work to a public github repo (I assume this was accidental and they intended to make a private repo). But it was not core AV code.
Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.
Of course, if they're actually a more general kind of sensor but called a camera then it's fine.
It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothing and got crushed.
And Waymo has that whole time to bring down their costs of construction, learn how to solve problems of scale, and so on.
I agree that a CyberCab would have structural advantages if the service were at parity w/ Waymo, but that is a very big hypothetical!
I know which one I'd back.
Yeah, I could be wrong and they're just looking for the lowest risk profile. But, riders seem to be pleased and accident rate has been impressively low.
Is it easier to ramp to 1M vehicles a year and cut BOM costs by 80%, OR, install more GPUs and collect more data?
It's not a hardware problem for Tesla. They are a trillion dollar vertically integrated manufacturing powerhouse.
Thus it's a hardware problem.
If Tesla can solve FSD with only cameras, then yes, their ability to scale is much better than Waymo’s.
But that is a stupendously large “if”!
I’ve seen the Karpathy quote before, and I think it’s kind of hilarious to compare one company which does X0,000 robotaxi rides per day, to another company which has a robotaxi maybe entering production in two years, and say, “well look, they both have problems!”
Bit of a misleading simplification, no? Tesla boosters assume they will crack FSD, it’s just a matter of time. That seems like a big leap to me.
Andrejs point is that software problems are easier to scale your way out of. I think we can both agree there's plenty of precedent for this line of thinking.
A company cannot as easily scale their way out of lowering material costs by an order of magnitude or go from 1000 cars a year to 1M cars a year.
I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think.
But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by scaling / software, and Waymo is fundamentally screwed and has no way to innovate out of its own scale problems.
Companies lower material costs by an order of magnitude all the time! Look at battery/solar over the last 15 years — in many areas we see two OOMs of cost reduction. It’s a challenge; but one that seems on par with creating software to replicate the optical capabilities of the human brain.
We're surrounded by AI miracles, this website is full of examples, yet people can't conceive of Tesla reaching this finish line. It's pretty odd.
I've clocked 20k miles on FSD. In the brief period I've used it I've seen step improvements. I guess in my mind it's a foregone conclusion with no breakthroughs required. All I need to believe is on the Tesla earning reports, which is Tesla data center build progress (training) and vehicles sold (data)
If they do pull that off, or are able pivot to a fused sensor architecture then I do think their hardware potential will make them a good competitor.
https://electrek.co/2024/02/15/gm-nearly-doubles-map-super-c...
But would people take it?
I mean, if one service is 25% cheaper but there are a bunch of horror stories of their vehicles crashing into highway barriers (like this past October), I'm not sure people are going to get in.
Also, it's different when you crash a car yourself vs a robot doing it. If you are driving, there is clearer accountability than a robot, so the bar must be much higher for the robot.
Even supposing slanted regulatory rule making, Tesla’s autonomous capabilities are vastly inferior to Waymo. The rules can’t be that complicated, either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not.
FWIW I’m a Tesla owner who rides Waymos whenever they are available for a cab ride, and won’t turn on FSD despite a number of free trials
This doesn't seem obvious to me. My impression is that the rate of improvement on autonomous systems is at least somewhat gradual. You've seen this in Waymo's slow roll out, moving from offering the service in initially less complicated settings (suburbs of Phoenix) and progressing to more challenging terrain (San Francisco). If that's the case, then a competitor could provide a worse product but, due to the fact that accidents are somewhat rare in general, have this go undetected for a while. In the intervening time, the worse performing company would benefit from collecting additional training data that they couldn't have been able to collect under a more strict regulatory regime.
Definitely possible that Waymo would benefit even more though! They definitely seem well prepared (except for the unfortunate hiccup of working with a Chinese OEM right before a bunch of EV tariffs got put in place)
What does Waymo have, a few hundred cars in San Francisco and Phoenix? In a field where data matters more than anything else, Tesla has an insane advantage.
And it doesn't help with the main issue, which is Tesla uses cameras and cameras don't work reliably at night, in glare, when they're dirty, etc.
It's not like Waymo couldn't be rolling out faster, but it's obvious they're doing everything they can to maintain the public's trust in them because once that's lost it'll be incredibly hard to get it back again.
And ultimately the law is one thing, but if people legitimately see Cybercabs as dangerous to them personally they'll take things into their own hands. Someone assassinated a CEO in New York a few days ago, you think pissed off people won't molotov a cybertaxi?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
edit: removed talk of downvotes, just providing the tweet.
Beyond, idk, saving my relatives the task of driving me to the airport, I don't see my family using an autonomous taxi at all. I think I'm like many Americans in that I like my personal vehicle because it's mine. I'm comfy in it, it's filled with only my stank, and I have tailored it to my liking.
It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.
I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.
My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.
The report comes days after Trump named the automaker's CEO, Elon Musk, as a co-head of the incoming administration's government efficiency department. Trump's team is looking for policy leaders for the transport department to develop a federal regulatory framework, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Musk criticized the state-by-state approval process, required for self-driving vehicles, as "incredibly painful", weeks after unveiling a two-seat "Cybercab" robotaxi without a steering wheel and foot pedals, set to go into production in 2026.
That's a good thing, we shouldn't be lowering the bar for AVs.
There's a straightforward solution to this that doesn't compromise public safety:
Employ paid training drivers who monitor the AV while it is collecting training data in environments where it does not yet meet the safety bar. These drivers are paid to be observant and intervene to avoid accidents. Furthermore, in their interventions, these training drivers provide critical training data used to improve the system.
This is what Waymo does also.
Perhaps Uber should have been more careful whom they hire, or put stronger controls on what they are allowed to do in the car.
Nobody wants to let a minimum viable driver chauffeur them around every day. Accepting the reduced quality of performance and increased risk a short duration cab ride is another story.
If you simply search for things like "tesla direct sunlight", "tesla camera condensation", "tesla camera bad weather", you can see thousands of instances of vehicle cameras not working.
Meanwhile Waymo bets on jamming the car full of sensors to ensure it has superhuman 360 perception in all conditions with multiple sensor redundancy. Waymo takes safety insanely seriously. Tesla doesn’t care if 100s die in their car while on FSD. Waymo doesn’t want to make cars or manage fleets. They want to purely focus on automating the driver end to end.
Unless Tesla has a magical perception algorithm breakthrough, Waymo may expand all US states that allow it, while Tesla won’t even get an operational robotaxi with 100+ rides per year.
Elon has tremendous success in SpaceX with falcon & starlink, that’s a fact. But Tesla FSD is so much hype compared to substance.
Not exactly reliable sources of information.
a) Early technology adopters are more forgiving of minor problems and are your free word-of-mouth marketers. The company benefits from lowered GTM costs.
b) Fast, reliable service depends on density; there needs to be enough cars on the road that there's always one available within a few minutes when you open the app; users will develop a habit of choosing whichever provider is reliably faster and that habit will become ingrained, making market entry for later movers more costly. First movers also have the advantage of their early adopters helping pay for their fleet as it's built up; later movers have to flood new markets with subsidized capacity to get to equivalent density. That works (Uber did it for rideshare) but it's expensive. So again: lower GTM costs.
Regarding whether this will be a viable market - Lyft/Uber have already demonstrated there's tons of demand for on-demand transportation services, and Waymo in SF is already very popular. One can back-of-the-envelope whether the economics work but generally speaking any time you replace labor with automation in a large market, it does.
In the long run though you're right that there isn't a moat that can't be solved with massive capital investment. But you could say the same about many markets; turns out one can have a successful company within a competitive market the old fashioned way.. by just being really good. It's harder, but it works.
We're still not even close to anything remotely capable of being autonomous, even on sunny straight californian roads... Bring these to switzerland snowy mountain passes or serbian dirt roads lmao
> a bleeding edge industry.
The only thing that this industry is bleeding is money so far
Most taxi/rideshare rides occur in cities, not the snowy mountains of Switzerland. Maybe they never make it to those snowy mountains. Who cares?
And again that's exactly what waymo's ceo said, it won't work everywhere / in all conditions, and as it turns out: outside of deserts and the west coasts these conditions are far from edge cases, they're the norm in most of the world
Without even talking about edge cases like mountains, put one of these in Paris or Rome and I give it 15 minutes before it gets stuck/crashes, people underestimate how hard the last 20% will be. 100 000 cars go through that place every single day: https://youtu.be/JgWhagB4d_g?t=79
I've been very puzzled at people treating FSD as non-existent when it's very reliably good.
Wonder if they'd sell Cruise back to the founders for say a buck? Sure Cruise could then cut a deal with another auto maker. Maybe even get financing from one?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/10/gm-halts-funding-of-robotaxi...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/10/gm-halts-funding-of-robotaxi...
Dec 4th, 2024
GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war
SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses.
https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-bat...
Now they've gone back to what I think GM's original plan was for acquiring Cruise — using their tech for passenger cars. Selling cars is GM's bread and butter. This wasn't going to end any other way.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA
...maybe you are meaning something more specific?
This had the slope I remember.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/199974/us-car-sales-sinc...
But, buyers are moving from cars to SUV's.
You can see something similar happening with Waymo. If it were actually scalable & in sight of a promising ROI, why wouldn't Alphabet fund it themselves rather than bringing in outside investment?
Every car sold does about 100,000 to 250,000 passenger miles. Every taxi does about 200,000 to 500,000 miles. Due to deadheading, a taxi does almost 2 miles for every passenger mile.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/anthony-levandowski-donald-trump-fu...
I’m serious about this point too. Eg. Intel pays less than half of what tsmc in Taiwan pays for similar jobs on a ppp basis after 20years of wage freezes and cuts at intel. They can’t poach any talent and investors want more layoffs and wage freezes next quarter to fix the decline they see. GM is similar. It’s not going to turn around and start competing in the high end labor market reasonably. It can’t. The big shareholders would sack the ceo in seconds. Think GM could ever compete with Google (Waymo) in a market where ai engineers can earn ) 1m/yr? Ha! The MBAs wouldn’t allow it for a second.
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-titles/Inte...
They unsurprisingly rate ‘very easy interview’ on glassdoor since they’d hire no one without lowering the bar significantly. I would never begrudge anyone working at these broken companies either fwiw. You just have to be aware it’s a job you have while looking for a reasonably paying job. If anyone wants a lesson in the core place the rot starts consider maybe there’s a reason intel is struggling to achieve what it’s much higher paying competitors achieve.
A very similar story plays out for GM, Boeing and the other rotting companies. Short term focus leading to non-competitiveness in the labor market leading to poorer results in all aspects. GM is not going to win this. They can’t due to a focus on production lines using minimum wage staff and applying that to knowledge work.
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=reTensor
It was well-known and well-leaked that something was wrong with Cruise.
Then they didn't deliver.
Waymo hasn't left blood on the pavement. Cruise and Tesla have.
As long as we're clutching our pearls and being overdramatic, how much blood have the humans left on the pavement in the meantime?
Can you point to scientifically rigorous evidence, at least reaching the bare minimum of fit for publication, of the absolute level of safety of those systems and where they stand in comparison?
How many people am I allowed to kill or injure before I need to run scientific studies on unproven and empirically fatal technology?
That is not only insane, but empirically false in the USA as people cared very greatly about Cruise injuring people during the development process.
You have to be answering the question: “Assuming we already know for a fact that the technology is safer than a human driver, then, if scaled to all drives, how many can die annually and still be morally justifiable?”
My question is: “How many do I get to kill before I need to figure out if I am killing fewer people?” That is the basic question to be asked during the development process of any unproven dangerous technology to minimize sacrifices to technological dead ends.
[1] https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/mol/2016/03/11/70647585...
As soon as Cruise closed up shop, the complaints went way down.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/muni-bus-killed-san-franci...
I can't speak to their technology, but generally speaking Cruise seemed too cautious, both in the aggressiveness of the driving, and in how quickly the company capitulated. I've taken Waymo a few times and what stands out to me is how aggressive Waymo cars are. As a passenger this aggressiveness makes them feel more sophisticated, not to mention faster, but the cars also spook pedestrians to a greater extent as they nose their way into traffic or through turns. Nonetheless, Waymo has been more adept at moving past bad publicity than Cruise, including in the face of accidents.
Above and beyond whatever technological shortcomings there may have been[1], I think there was a management and business development mismatch between GM and Cruise. Cruise manifestly worked well enough. With better management--more honest, but also more aggressive--it could have been a contender; heck, it was (is?) the only proven competitor to Waymo for autonomous public taxi service, at least in the U.S.
[1] In 3 Waymo trips remote intervention was required once, which is a comparable ratio to my Cruise trips.
My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.
Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.
The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays.
Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
EDIT: and yes, it's a completely reasonable question to ask why invest in special new kinds of roads when more people would be better served by public transit.
Or maybe just issue license plates with a different color to avs. Like taxis/public transport having yellow license plates in some jurisdictions.
> The answer is that people want cars.
Actually in many cities in the world, only a minor % of people own a car. And even those that do own a car don't use if for that many trips.
> They want to drive.
Driving in cities is almost universally hated and is proven to cause lots of stress.
> and face unpredictable schedules and delays.
Because in cars its impossible to have unpredictable delays, roads are always completely open and there is never any concention?
In most cities in the world, public transport has less unpredictable delays compared to driving.
> Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
A sensible incredmental improvment are regular bus lanes with regular trolley buses.
Even if the claim (you need Europe density) wasn't trivially false, several parts of the US DO meet that level of density and could easily support good public infrastructure.
Or do you not know that in the early 1900s nearly every city had copious public transportation that was relied on by literally everyone in the city?
Seattle has a tiny amount of street car rail, but regularly pays out large damages to people injured by the rails.
For heavy rail, they don't often run in the road, parallel with the road, in the lane of travel. And when they do, it's usually in an industrial area that people aren't walking and cycling through.
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...
Seems pretty reasonable for difficult new tech.
So I must be missing a lot of cars and a lot of extra cities with service. Or you've confused ambitions (Cruise wanted to have thousands of vehicles and wanted to be in dozens of US cities by 2027) with reality (Neither of those things happened)
That being said it’s usual in US for CEOs to be rewarded in short time with stock raises when they cut costs.
Innovation is not a game for the light hearted.
Google is playing that game with Waymo and ploughing billions every year. GM doesn’t have the same risk bearing culture.
Where is the money? I don't mean to be as snarky as Cruise founder, but how can you burn that amount of money and not show results?
They operated a robo taxi fleet for a time (until they got involved in an accident and mislead the following investigation), what other results would you like to see?
QUOTE: Cruise and GM’s technical teams will be combined into a single effort focused on developing autonomous technology to offer in future models sold by GM, according to a statement Tuesday. GM said it will no longer fund robotaxi development work “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
It’s a big retrench for GM and Cruise, which survived a shakeout among autonomous-driving companies and restarted operations after one of its cars dragged a pedestrian last year. ...
The move has significant implications for GM. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra wanted to transform the automaker into a transportation technology company and double GM’s revenue by 2030 in part by generating $50 billion from Cruise. Without a robotaxi business to bring in fares, that goal looks remote. /QUOTE
The business of robotaxis has always been a bit suspect, given the unit economics of running 1000s of taxis, each with ~$100K of equipment (even as the COGS were coming down each generation).
My 2c: the only reason Waymo is succeeding (so far) is that its parent Alphabet has deeep pockets, it has a a 6th gen (?) technology of its AV driver, and they already exited the other AV trucking segment... implying they need to succeed in robotaxis, so it's all hands on deck. It also helps that they have, so far, NOT blundered their way (=> a significant pedestrian collision) the way Uber ATG did or Cruise did.
This is a loong game to win, far longer than anything the tech bros have promised their their investors... We are still in the initial innings
I wouldn't underestimate the advantage of not having to bootstrap a planet scale backend/ML platform. Look how much R&D Uber spends on software and they're not even doing the same level of ML. Waymo can just start using excess capacity across the google fleet whenever it wants for training and simulation. That's a huge advantage.
It felt like there was a lot of buzz around it a while back but then it only happened in a couple of cities which were just US cities with favorable climate. Did it ever move beyond that? You'd think that if the market is really competitive, then operators would bring it to cities where it doesn't exist, rather than just all competing in the same small handful of cities?
Their last great innovation was Saturn, and they killed that too.
Waymo has been a little less expensive than Uber/Lyft for me. I just saw a Zoox autonomous vehicle today. That weird looking box with no drivers seat.
It's not an event camera, so it's very much taking images, which are then being processed by computer vision algorithms.
Event cameras seem more viable than CMOS sensors for autonomous vehicle applications in the absence of LIDAR. CMOS dynamic range and response isn't as good as the human eye. LIDAR+CMOS is considerably better in many ways.
Well, that definitely changes my opinion on how feasible/competitive camera-only autonomous driving can be.
If Tesla can do level 5 in 2-3 years as you say (and that might be a pretty big “if”), that places them 5+ years behind Waymo.
What leads to the win here, then? Waymo constrained by the cost of LIDAR? Is it truly such a massive % of build cost that they can’t succeed? Is it that Tesla is vertically integrated?
https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
Cruise cars were way more numerous around SF, although the service was worse than Waymo's. That stupid October 2023 accident really snowballed, and it wasn't even their (primary) fault.
where is YC's top tech success now?
Shows that most yc companies are clownshoes who pale in comparison to the tech chops of actual tech companies
Why not just keep the meter running? Then it ceases to be a problem.
You bled all over the car because you were shot and then crawled out looking for help because the AI had no clue wtf to do? Ok good luck sir, you owe us 10 days of metered fairs. No there’s no human to get help from.
Lots of people are ignoring this because of politics.
The Elon hate is so ingrained here, people are ignoring what’s happening right in front of their eyes.
Because a Tweet from 2016 wasn't accurate?
These people probably have never even tried FSD. They have no idea
Maybe yours see something different.
It would, inevitably, lead to more cars in cities. Probably faster cars. Both are the opposite of what we need; it isn't just about safety.
I say "we" do - ie, if people want to buy autonomous cars, then that's what's going to happen.
Incidentally if there's a large number of autonomous cars available in a fluid and efficient market, that would probably mean fewer people need cars in total.
Baked in to this is the assumption that the operation of markets are democratic, but they are not. A very small number of people decide where investments go, what tech to design, and what to buy. The alternative - public transit focused infrastructure, is not available to buy in small quantities. Huge investments have to be made before anyone can “vote with their wallet” on public transit. And similarly, billions have to go in to AV development before anyone can buy in to it. And those with more money always have more “vote” in a “vote with your wallet” scenario. Fifty percent of the people in the US have so little money as to make their votes nearly meaningless in such a scenario. That’s not “us” making a decision that is very much certain people making that decision.
Baked into this is a certain kind of economic unrealism that you frequently see online. Rich people aren't endless fountains of capital. They fund things that work, ie, things that sell, ie, things the public likes. Rich people who have some other investment strategy than this go broke.
> Fifty percent of the people in the US have so little money as to make their votes nearly meaningless in such a scenario.
I think if you look up the median wealth and income of the US, and the purchasing power of the US middle class in aggregate, you'll be very surprised by how much sway these people have. Its true that the upper-middle class and the rich are even better customers, but many fortunes have been made catering to the whims of the median American. The US consumer rules the world.
And all this is just academic. Countless poor and middle class families buy cars every day because it's a way better option than living in an urban zone and taking a bus.
Rich people fund a certain kind of thing, but that is a subset of the class of all things which could be built. Free universal healthcare is very popular in the US, but rich people aren't building it. They have perverse incentives to build a healthcare system which becomes a good long term investment while using government protection to exclude all competition.
There are things that can be build by collectives of regular people, like libraries, which are conceptually overlapping but also distinct concepts from "things rich people build to sell to regular people." Not all good things are products which are sold to us.
> The US consumer rules the world.
Yes to the detriment and suffering of a sizable portion of the world's population.
> And all this is just academic. Countless poor and middle class families buy cars every day because it's a way better option than living in an urban zone and taking a bus.
Yes, in a world where we vote with our dollars, a car and a bus are going to be the only options for poor and middle class families. But in Japan, China, Spain, France, and countless other places countless poor and middle class families ride bullet trains. How come we didn't vote with our dollars in to bullet trains in the USA?
> > The US consumer rules the world. > Yes to the detriment and suffering of a sizable portion of the world's population.
Why is it then that real income & wealth (and with that, life outcomes) have shot up in all the "sweat-shop" countries that stock the shelves of Walmart?
> Yes, in a world where we vote with our dollars, a car and a bus are going to be the only options for poor and middle class families. But in Japan, China, Spain, France, and countless other places countless poor and middle class families ride bullet trains. How come we didn't vote with our dollars in to bullet trains in the USA?
Have you been to these kinds of places? I've lived in several, and spent significant time in many. Poor and middle class people aren't taking bullet trains to work anywhere in the world. Those things are hella expensive to build and run and ride. Even rich, dense London with its world class mass transit has a hard time delivering an acceptable experience compared to an F150 and a stretch of wide tarmac.
For most poor American families, living in a big house in a small town and owning one or more cars is the optimal solution, not some utopian pipe dream involving high-rises and buses.
We have very different views on the labor conditions of foreign workers.
> For most poor American families, living in a big house in a small town and owning one or more cars is the optimal solution, not some utopian pipe dream involving high-rises and buses.
I grew up in a big house in a small town and worked doing property maintenance in high school to buy my own car. I have been driving cars for 25 years. Two years ago I moved to a dense city with halfway decent public transit (by US standards). Finally I can walk or ride my bike to my friend's houses. I still have a car and I use it about once a week. But now I bike to work, even in the rain. I use public transit more than I ever have in my life, because the transit is more useful here than in any of the car-centric cities I have lived in before. I am happier leaving my car parked and walking or biking to see my friends and loved ones. And when I bike, I wish less space was devoted to cars - roads and parking divide up a beautiful place. Everything is compartmentalized, and high speed danger is always nearby.
Even cities with the best public transit still have room for cars. But I do not think that relying on cars as the predominant method of transit is "optimal". When cities are built to make life without a car hell, then yes people in those places will find a car the optimal choice as individuals. But I have been to New York, London, Paris, and Brussels. I saw how public transit can be used to reduce the need for car ownership and car infrastructure. We could do that in the USA too.
People consuming less energy to get to their destination [2] is good for society
[1] https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/subway-air-pollution-dispro...