Tesla launches robotaxi rides in Austin | Hacker News Reader

Tesla launches robotaxi rides in Austin

techcrunch.com

57 pointscodexy131 comments

One example from the first day, where the vehicle spends a bit of time driving into oncoming traffic:

Anyone who owns a Tesla with “full self driving” knows how this is going to go. Teslas using only camera vision just don’t have the sensor package and programming to actually perform self driving. I just don’t see this going well for Tesla as it’s more likely to reveal the weaknesses in their technology than be a showcase.

Given that and given that they know the data better than anyone, what's your hypothesis as to why they would deploy if the data isn't in their favor?

Musk needs to keep hyping the next big thing to justify the insane valuation. So it was going to launch regardless of how ready or safe it was.

Still seems nuts to me, they're pretending Waymo doesn't already regularly drive without supervision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

But if you're correct, then won't it be a massive harm to the valuation once they are at fault in many accidents over the coming weeks? They have the Q2 earnings call coming up next month.

It seems like it would be a really bad idea to put this out there if they know from the data that it will cause lots of accidents.

It depends on how much autonomous driving they actually do. My guess is that they will only drive a miniscule amount in favorable conditions for the foreseeable future. That would maximize the hype:risk ratio.

It's also possible they quietly rely on remote operators to a large extent. The fake robot PR stunt wasn't even that long ago, the company might try the same thing here.

Yeah, well, companies like Enron show that covering up mistakes with other mistakes ends badly. Fake it til you make it works if you make it, blows up otherwise.

So you're saying they developed it up until this level where it can mostly drive itself, but now they've pivoted toward collapsing the company?

I just don't see how this train of thought makes sense.

Let's see, the future is yet to manifest.

Same phenomenon as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-5s4JlBesc

Nobody's gonna be the one to tell Elon that the stuff isn't ready.

So you think Elon is not interested in numbers? Or you think Tesla employees are presenting fabricated data to him?

The phenomenon in that video is only possible when management is heavily disconnected from ground truths & data, but that seems the opposite to how Musk's companies are run.

One can only delay the much-hyped thing so many times before the markets get irritated, and Musk isn't great at acknowledging that he screwed up.

So you think they chose to launch it yesterday despite the data telling them that they will be at fault in lots of accidents over the coming weeks, and will presumably be forced to roll it back? You think they decided that's somehow better than delaying?

I mean, if that were to happen, they wouldn't exactly be the first. It's not particularly rational, but "launch very late thing in an unacceptable state and then pull it a few weeks after" is not an uncommon industry pattern. Admittedly, it's unusual for _hardware_ (though not totally unknown; see the Humane AI thing, say).

Pulling something a few weeks later isn't uncommon when it's unknown how a service will go, but in this case they actually have data that pretty much tells them how this is likely to go.

Honestly, I have been hearing this since years now. I was suspicious about it for a long time. But they have been allowing vision based FSD for a long time now and the data shows it's getting better, fast. I am ready to park my skepticism (sometimes cynicism) for some time and give them a benefit of doubt out of optimism. Tesla knows that if things go wrong with Robotaxi launch, they are screwed. They wont' take that risk unnecessarily.

> They wont' take that risk unnecessarily.

Tesla: a company that doesn't take risks unnecessarily.

exactly!

Waymo has had many such incidents like this, but they're still (correctly) considered much safer than human drivers.

Whilst a wheel wobble & veering somewhere it's not supposed to go looks bad, it's very difficult to do worse than the average human driver in terms of safety.

It's actually the opposite. Humans, for all their faults, are amazingly safe drivers. Depending on exactly how you choose to measure things, we achieve anywhere from 5-8 9s of reliability or more.

It's statistically unlikely that we'd see an issue like this on the first day of a limited deployment if FSD was hitting those numbers.

That's true. As part of this deployment they haven't driven enough miles to prove safety, but from their FSD data overall they should have a pretty good understanding of where they stand.

> from their FSD data overall they should have a pretty good understanding of where they stand

They know where they stand when there is a safety driver behind the wheel. I'd expect if that data were really good, they'd be less secretive about it. But still, it says very little about where they stand without that driver.

How many accidents have you been in?

Including being not the driver? Four.

How is it relevant though?

If I was in a car with a human driving that badly, I'd leave ASAP! No-one beyond a learner would traverse in such an uncertain, jerky way. And this is on a day with perfect visibility and no adverse conditions that are visible in the video.

But there was no traffic. It changed its mind, but it handled it pretty perfectly otherwise.

People have some sort of beef with Elon and thus FSD, but Waymo has made WAY WAY worse mistakes

here are some examples.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302724

Here's a human doing the same thing in the same video for the same reason: https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=906

They shouldn't be on the road either. That's not a positive argument for the Tesla experience, it's a negative one for whoever was driving that car.

I don't like what that person did, but I don't think their license should be taken away for it.

I believe that driving is a privilege, not a right.

However, I'm not saying that their licence should be taken away (we've all made mistakes - I should have made that clear), but if that is representative, it is dangerous. I rode motorbikes for many years, and you can spot people who are dangerous very quickly from their 'car body language'. And an error like that in another circumstance could kill someone.

I knew people whose driving had deteriorated like this (my late mother and her friends spring to mind). They refused to accept they were not capable any more, and she used to do things that terrified me. I had discussions (kindly!) about her driving standards and errors and she refused to accept that she was making the errors she was. And they were not as bad as what I saw in the video.

And so it’s ok to break traffic rules? In my country, as a human this will get you easily a one month license suspension.

No, just a bit of perspective. I'm sure the video record of your car would be squeaky clean with no violations whatsoever.

If I said I've never had a driver's licence, can we get back to the topic at hand?

What's the thesis here, humans are imperfect drivers and therefore we should accept self driving cars driving into incoming traffic, and if anyone objects, focus on their faults instead?

We allow imperfect humans, we should allow similarly imperfect robots. The robots will get better. The humans, in aggregate, will not.

Humans on the aggregate can definitely get better, that's why Norway has 2.14 / 100k traffic-related deaths per year and the United States has 12.84 / 100k.

Norwegians drive half as much. Even if we ignore the other components of the gap, closing that 50% will require rebuilding 300000 square km of urban sprawl into dense urban centers with good public transit. It's a nice thought, but my money is on the robots.

Robots are not going to fix other problems with sprawl. People there are focusing on wrong solutions.

The "human drivers are shit" problem kills a million people every year. Solving it is good. If we let the great be the enemy of the good we will never fix anything.

It's not a binary. That particular case is pretty egregious since the car signals to turn, gets into the turn lane, actually starts turning, and then swerves back (across the oncoming traffic lanes in the middle of an intersection!) and tries to get back into the correct lane to drive straight, but only manages to achieve that after driving for a bit in the lane for oncoming traffic. That is a major fuckup. And this all happens on a road with fresh clear marking, on a sunny day with perfect visibility.

License should be just revoked instantly for the sake of Tesla. At least with not fully autonomous I can override it. They need to get a feedback that they are not ready.

Texas just passed a law to license autonomous driving, but does not take effect until this fall.

What good is the safety driver doing in the passenger seat? Even the die hard Tesla FSD fans will admit that it isn't uncommon to have a serious disengagement. I give this less than a month before they pull the plug.

> What good is the safety driver doing in the passenger seat?

The same as a driving instructor. He has a brake pedal, and he can pick up the steering wheel if necessary.

There's no second brake pedal on the passenger side.

In the first instance they're asking to see the passenger's app to verify identity. Seems like a necessary precaution considering what happened to the Waymo vehicles recently.

Presumably if there were an incident they would be trying to remedy any situation.

I really feel we are headed towards a future where humans driving cars will be illegal outside of few exceptions. There will be no traffic as all the robocars will coordinate unselfishly. Car ownership won't be a thing, rides will be a service. Parking spots won't be needed. It's just getting over a safety threshold we are comfortable with.

I think you're partially right... it'll start with insurance companies, they'll charge people that insist on driving it themselves more for the right (due to safer standards (not that I'm saying this is the case, just that THEY will say it is)).

Then local Gov will charge more to allow non robot cars on the road ( less wear and tear on the roads, fewer roads needed due to more reliably predictable drivers and fewer accidents).

Then lastly manufactures will get to a point that they need to simplify their production range and will pretty much only produce self driving.

lastly, culturally the demand will change. the ipad generation dont want to have learn to drive or have to spend their screen time driving. the damand from them alone will push for self driving cars.

We're so many years from that point that it's impossible to make reliable predictions. I was hearing these claims over a decade ago and we're only marginally closer. The vast majority of miles driven still happen in locations and/or conditions that self driving isn't reliable at.

There is a massive long tail of unusual cases that happen outside of major cities that nobody is even really trying to solve at the moment because there isn't much of a profit motive compared to dense cities.

> Car ownership won't be a thing

Car ownership definitely isn’t going away. Sharing a vehicle with the general public gets old fast if you have the means to avoid it.

There are also many reasons people use cars for more than going from point A to point B on a purely transactional basis. Many professions need to leave things in the car or truck like tools or even your laptop. Having to take everything you own into every building in case the self-driving car gets called back home for service or whatever isn’t going to work.

Google is exploring bringing the Waymo driver to privately owned cars as well.

That's probably a thought experiment in business models. Like a franchise. Waymo is experimenting with Uber as it's retailer, essentially. Personally, I'd prefer to do business with Waymo, directly.

If the cost of the Waymo Driver hardware falls to the point where it's not prohibitive for the low duty cycle of a private vehicle, I could see that eventually happening.

A lot of people really like driving and are pretty into cars. Maybe in 100+ years but I think this is sci-fi in the near term.

Yeah, will probably be the same as with horses. Quiet a few of them standing around at the outskirts of the my town. Maybe we'll get an equivalent to horse girls

In US, I find it doubtful regardless of how well the tech works, for purely political reasons.

On the right, car ownership is deeply culturally ingrained as a signifier of personal freedom, and the notion of the government requiring that a robot drive you instead would be unpalatable, never mind the notion of no car ownership at all.

On the left, you have a generally hostile attitude towards cars in general as undesirable and to be replaced with public transport. Then there's a growing current of FSD being associated with "big tech" in general and Musk in particular that makes it an even stronger knee-jerk reaction.

The shoddy past 10-15 years of self driving improvements has led me to believe that this "inevitable future" is at least 20-30 years away, if not longer given that a huge portion of existing cars would need to be effectively outlawed for that that to happen, people and businesses will basically always have legitimate reasons for wanting a human in the loop (and not remotely), and the tech has been worked on actively for decades and still doesn't work well enough to avoid loss of life (which, similar to a terrorist attack, might not be as devastating in numbers as the current state of affairs with humans driving - but will absolutely cause a deeper psychological impact on the general public as there is something seemingly more cruel and dystopian about a company killing people via "error" or cost-savings than a person killing someone by accident).

The psychological distinction is definitely something that was perhaps overlooked. we need to put the blame on some one, for closer. Loosing to some rounding error definitely is haunting

I have predicted this for years. I think they will make city cores self-driving cars only, with no other cars, or even bicycles because they are too chaotic. China should have done this with those ghost cities, so that they could have dominated with full self driving before other countries.

Someone will own the platform that coordinate car movement, and then all cars will need to pay to get onto this coordination platform that will tell each car how to drive, which route to take, etc. Each car know what all the other cars in its area will be doing, so that mass coordination is possible. This is how you can get a completely full highway but all traveling at 65 mph 1 feet away from each other.

No bicycles? That is ridicules. Many city’s are now trending towards people centric design. Bikes are a key part of that

I surely hope not. I'd rather have a city centre without cars than one filled with constantly self-driving cars. Pedestrians and animals are still "chaotic elements". At 105 km/h (still slow by European standards), what happens when a deer suddenly runs onto the motorway with a distance of ~30 cm between the vehicles? Talk about carnage.

I suppose the solution is to seal in all roads then with high walls; what dystopian future.

Imagine all the land being used for parking that wouldn't be needed anymore. Car accidents will be like plane accidents where a full investigation will be launched to improve the car and coordination software.

Ghost cities are really just ghost districts, and they simply aren’t economically viable which is why they are deserted, traffic won’t make something economically viable, and it’s quite the opposite, economic viability brings traffic. Self driving isn’t going to make Kangbashi or Tianjin’s new financial district popular.

China is demoing a lot of self driving cars in their suburbs however, so not core Beijing, but out in Daxing or Changping, for example. China could and will mandate self driving cars in dense city cores when they become viable to optimize traffic flow in cities that can’t really fit many more new roads. And Chinese companies are working hard to make mass produced Lidar economical, while America will probably just put high tariffs on that.

It's already a reality in many places around the world. Most of people don't own a car, just participate in the ride sharing economy. In many places they still have a safety driver like Tesla but there are plenty of places with %100 autonomous driving.

Also authorities are getting giddy when a human tries to drive on railways, so it's effectively illegal to drive in certain places where the ride sharing is the default mode of transportation. It's also very privacy focused, even though there are cameras everywhere you can just buy an anonymous travel pass that you top-up every once in a while. It also allows you to hop between rides for free or at discount.

In the larger cities they often use hyperloop, so you never get stuck in the traffic.

In summary:

> 10-or-so cars

> human driver behind the wheel (except in this beta)

> invitation based (apparently a very limited audience)

> geofenced not only to a city, but to a small handful of neighborhoods

> early reports suggest disengagement requires remote re-engagement

I hope they get there, more competition in this space is good. But, this is pathetic. They're so far behind Waymo it isn't even funny.

Let’s give it a little bit of time to see, but gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants is not the choice you make when you are confident with a product…

> gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants

Are they sycophants or are the other sites haters? Take a gander at every tech website's headlines regarding Tesla for the last few years and tell me they aren't following the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra.

The people invited to preview Robotaxi were not only unedited, they were also allowed to live stream.

Early videos are showing results that are not great, to say the least.

I understand the thinking here, but this is too early to be too negative, IMO. For the first day, I think this looks like a reasonable first step.

If they are still doing this in 3 months, it'd be a bad sign, of course. Their plan is for rapid growth next year.

We'll see if they are able to do that.

"next year" is Musk speak for "not going to happen anytime soon"

Sounds like there’s actually around 32ish, based on photos from the “war room” where all the engineers have live feed from all the cars and 112 rides ? https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/1936865682810946035

They had said 10 - 12 prior to launch.

Are you looking at the feeds from the cars to reach 32? Each screen is from the cameras around a single car, so you're actually only seeing 5 cars from that.

No human behind the wheel but there are still people in the passenger seat

The beta today was without a driver behind the wheel. Granted, the geofence is much smaller than Waymo's in Austin.

If you can eventually guarantee you’ll get a robotaxi instead of a car with a driver when you call one (unlike Waymo in Austin, now, thanks to their dumb partnership with Uber), they’ll likely do ok in the longer term.

I'm rooting for Tesla being able to provide some driverless taxi competition to Waymo. Hopefully both can increase supply enough to allow for a guaranteed robotaxi booking, although anecdotally I haven't found it that hard to get a Waymo through the Uber app depending on the time.

I’ve only tried twice (after using it ~30 times during the preview directly through the Waymo app) - neither time resulted in a robotaxi though, and one resulted in a driver that smelled so bad I’ve sworn off ride sharing until the end of summer.

Hopefully the Tesla app forces Waymo to reconsider their deal with Uber altogether and just run it themselves like they do in San Francisco.

It's only day 1.

Day 1 or year 10. Depends on perspective.

Development and releases are two different things.

"Tesla has self-driven 4B miles in every corner of the USA, Waymo has only self-driven 0.1B miles in select cities, how pathetic! They are so far behind Tesla it isn't even funny!"

- Me, if I wanted to be equally ham-handed in throwing the comparison for Tesla.

In reality, we are seeing two bets on two different approaches. Do you scale up supervised driving to maximize data collection/diversity and then go unsupervised? Or do you go unsupervised and then scale up problem solving as you go? The cool thing is that both of these approaches are being tried so we will find out. If you want to place a bet of your own, you can find the casino in your favorite brokerage app!

In any case, the videos of what is possible with supervised FSD are quite amazing, certainly not "pathetic," and what remains to be seen is if they can successfully navigate the supervised->unsupervised jump, which is certainly not trivial.

Arc de Triomphe: https://youtu.be/o2xKpbKZLVA?t=7

Busy China: https://youtu.be/ybBpRN4Hqbc?t=13

Manhattan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qafr3RrJRfU

I honestly thought Tesla would beat everyone to the punch here but it seems like they just stalled out what - five or so years ago?

Waymo seems to be the furthest ahead in my complete outsider opinion. I feel like everyone else is a way distant second.

You might not have heard of the biggest one. Apollo Go in China is actually slightly ahead of Waymo in terms of vehicles and miles.

Assuming the Austin robotaxi service continues to go smoothly, I expect Tesla will leapfrog both of them in the next 12 months. Tesla's cost-effective approach (cameras) combined with the fact that they have already scaled vehicle production positions them really well.

Media (and therefore people who trust it too much) will point out places where each of the services goes wrong, but the reality is that likely all of them are already much safer than human drivers if you define "safety" in terms of severe accidents per million miles.

More than a million people die each year from automobile accidents with humans behind the wheel.

> the reality is that likely all of them are already much safer than human drivers if you define "safety" in terms of severe accidents per million miles.

There's no chance this includes Tesla with their disengagements (equivalent to the driver passing out) and even then it's only true under the restricted set of conditions these systems actually operate at compared to human drivers.

It wouldn't make sense for the robotaxis to ever disengage in the same way that you might've seen in FSD videos.

I'm guessing that they just stop if they ever encounter a situation where they don't know what to do.

Yes but what I was getting at is if the autonomous system is allowed to disengage every time it encounters a "difficult" situation (as Tesla "FSD" does) then its safety record can't be compared to human drivers even in otherwise comparable road conditions.

Human drivers don't get the luxury of disengaging and having a more skilled driver take over when they're struggling. If Tesla FSD drives for 100km before overwhelming glare causes the system to disengage, that'll go on record as "100km driven without accident", but when the human driver is blinded by the same glare and ends up in an accident 5km later, that'll go on record as 1 accident per 5km driven for the human driver.

OK, but if the system avoids an accident by not driving in glare whereas the human doesn't, that is still one accident avoided, isn't it?

> they just stop if they ever encounter a situation where they don’t know what to do.

Oh my god that’s terrifying if true. I can think of many situations when driving when slamming on the breaks is the absolute wrong choice. Tesla is pushing this out way before it’s safe enough to operate in public.

Not justifying it, but there is a reason the person behind is almost always responsible in accidents. You are responsible for maintaining a safe distance in case the person in front of you (for whatever reason) stops or acts erratically.

What would be a better option if the system doesn't understand the environment? Can happen in any system, right? There's really only two options:

1. Keep driving in some way

2. Stop

Which one do you think Waymo (or any other system) does when it doesn't understand a situation?

Apollo Go doesn’t seem to be very safe yet, see https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1hy72y9/ch..., it seems like they still need safety drivers? Watching the video, I don’t know how much if the ride is just being China (chinese taxi drivers on Chinese roads can make you car sick also), but the tech is obviously not where Waymo is regardless.

The video seems biased. What's with calling the car to a location where they weren't happy to access it from, and then acting as though it was a fault of the service? Pretty sure I also spotted a gap in the hedges where a fire hydrant was, so it really felt like an act.

Besides whether the video is biased or not, are we conflating comfort & safety? When a robotaxi jiggles the wheel and makes the car shake, that's clearly terrible for comfort and perhaps brings to mind an inexperienced driver, but that is a personification. Programmers who have ever dealt with debouncing might recognize that it's likely something that could use smoothing to aid with comfort, but not necessarily unsafe.

In any case, Apollo Go is ahead in number of vehicles, cities, rides, and probably also miles. Not that it really matters. Demand is going to lead supply in autonomy for many years to come. These services are not actually going to be in real competition with each other for quite some time.

The video seems pretty honest about their attempts to even get a car in the deep suburbs of Shenzhen, let alone Shenzhen central. And the ride making them sick seems legit, but it does contrast with the many Chinese social media posts saying the service didn't need safety drivers and was comfortable (although, if you watch those videos, they are obviously in the deep suburbs also, so I guess they agree on service area limitations at least).

I was in China (Beijing) a couple of months ago yet didn't have a chance to ride a driverless car there because they were only running them in the deep suburbs (Changping near Lenovo I think?). This is quite different from my experience taking Waymo, where it served the central city just fine (although I'm not sure how Waymo would handle a narrow Hutong alley way like one of the taxi's I took did).

The video seems honest in what way? What part of it makes you think that? The only evidence of ride discomfort that I saw was some steering wheel shuddering.

Once I saw the part where the car was being blamed for the pickup location chosen by the user, I really struggle to believe anything that's being said. Felt like they wanted to say it's not good right from the start.

They constantly mentioned that their phone camera stabilization was pretty good, and that they really wanted to like this from the start (otherwise they could have just taken a normal taxi without waiting around in an outer suburb for a few hours to finally get one). I don't know what to tell you, you seem to believe that self driving cars are running around the core of these cities without safety drivers, while all I've seen so far, even from the most enthusiastic Chinese v-bloggers, are cars running in the deep suburbs and aren't really very deployed yet like Waymo is in downtown SF.

You're conflating things a lot.

This started with me pointing out that the scale of Apollo Go is greater than Waymo, but then you made it about safety, which is quite a different (but still interesting) topic. Then there's this video that has been brought up in the context of safety, but seems more related to ride comfort. Ride comfort is also interesting, but different than safety.

I'm not sure we can actually have a reasonable conversation without objectively separating such topics.

I haven't looked at what the service area is, but I wouldn't assume that a downtown service area is somehow better or worse than a suburban service area, especially not without defining "better". A suburban-focused service seems like it might actually be a lot more useful than a downtown-focused service.

Back to the original point, you easily see the data yourself. The scale of Apollo Go is slightly larger than Waymo on most metrics that would seem to matter; vehicles, rides, miles, etc.

Yeah, but Tesla is headed by a ketamine-addicted imbecile.

Will sound engineering prevail over brain rot in the C-suite? I am skeptical.

I hope he gets shut down so hard he winds up living in a box in an alley. He's a billionaire Neo-Nazi.

Their decision to entirely rely on computer vision seems unwise

Their decision to rely on vision got them billions of miles of training data from every corner of the USA. It did not get them point clouds, but monocular depth estimation works extremely well these days, so would it really have been that valuable? It looks to me like they made a shrewd bet and won big.

They didn’t count on LIDAR falling in price so rapidly with their bet.

The cameras that collected those billions of miles of data were installed up to 10 years ago. You can't teleport today's LIDAR prices into the past.

Yes, but it’s pretty easy to drive a car around with a LiDAR unit, you can couple it with Google maps data collection.

They didn't drive around a collection car, they had their customers drive millions of collection cars for billions of miles.

"LiDAR is gay"

- Elon, probably

Next up from Musk: "Cameras are unreliable, and radar is woke. The Force is all you need."

“acoustic environment sensing”

Short term, perhaps, long term they might end up with a more generalized robot operating system. It’s definitely more flexible

Seems like a mistake not to be a sensor maximalist. Why not try and get as many data streams onboard as possible. Seems like the generalized robot OS would be better if it was a data fusion platform.

That’s a good point. I coming from the perspective that waymo is more of a “dead reckoning” approach compared to Tesla long(and maybe never ending) road.

> Waymo seems to be the furthest ahead in my complete outsider opinion.

There's a high floor to Waymo's costs though, and therefore a lower ceiling to their profits. Tesla's aim was always to make it (way) more scalable. If they can match Waymo's performance at Tesla's costs, Waymo goes the way of the dodo pretty quick.

It's hard to attract and retain key talent when the CEO is going around acting all Nazi-curious. Good people who can leave are likely to do so.

That may be true, but Tesla stalled out a long time before Musk's rightward turn.

Nazi-curious is just a state of substance-curious in this case IMHO

I mean, lots of people are drug addicts without being complete arseholes. Not an excuse.

Oh well in that case it's totally excusable /s

Oh no you misunderstood. He’s been insufferable for many years before this.

One accident and the knives are gonna be out. But if it works the world will change

Difference between this and Cruise or Uber is that Elon is in charge of regulation. A driverless Tesla could plow through a farmer's market and service wouldn't even stop for the afternoon.

Calling this 'Robotaxi' rides seems somewhat disingenuous given that they are Model Ys with a full seating provision. People will be conflating this with the (IMO a very bad choice) 2-seat design seen on the demo months ago with 2 doors and no provision for more than two people (which wouldn't work too well if the drives are being chaperoned, reducing seating to one).

This conflation and mixing of words is something which Tesla seems to do intentionally (Full Self Driving, Autonomy, etc), or am I being cynical about that?

I agree that 'cybercab' and 'robotaxi' are similar names, but what ulterior motive would it serve to intentionally confuse people about the difference? Seems like it's just bad naming. Cybercab isn't late or anything, it was announced for 2026 at its unveiling. And Robotaxi is an accurate and descriptive name for a self-driving Model Y that you can hail.

WayToLittle, wayToLate, wayMore already on the road in Cal!

WayMore expensive

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