Sundar is just a poor fit for a top leadership role in an innovative and growing company. He comes across as a timid people pleaser, not a commander. It always felt like someone else was really in charge, like the company was actually being run by his reports managing up.
No, they have talked about it in interviews. They've repeatedly said they don't have remote drivers. They have "remote assistance" that the car can call to ask questions if it's confused. You can tell when this is happening in the car, because it plays a message like "our team is working to get you moving". It's rare, maybe once every few rides. There is no way there's one overseer per car.
I mean a year or two ago plenty of people said the tech was a dead end because it didn't handle rain and fog. They will add snow and ice capability as they expand.
You're describing driving from a human perspective. The delta from no cyclists or pedestrians to 100 cyclists or pedestrians is a lot easier for a computer than a human because it can pay attention to all of them simultaneously and plan a trajectory accordingly. Waymo handles this kind of complexity in SF all the time.
In fact, it could likely be that we end up with the opposite of your adversarial selection case. Studies have shown that dense cities with good public transit (or walkability) have lower DUI arrest rates. That could potentially extend to everywhere that Waymo is widely available and convenient.
The whole point of self-driving, and why it's hard, is to handle that 1%. Nobody is saying you shouldn't be thrilled at the product or that it's not worth $200/mo to you. But it's not autonomous driving. It's not a robotaxi. You're paying for something else. The vaporware comment is in reference to Elon Musk's robotaxi claims -- he sold the product as something it isn't.
Waymo drives better in San Francisco than I do, and I live here. And it drives an order of magnitude better than I did during my first few months in the city. I have friends who live in the South Bay who are still reluctant to drive when they visit SF.
I feel like I read this exact comment in 2018. And I am certain I'll read it again in 2028, even as Waymo is operating in dozens of cities and serving millions of trips per week. Because with the Tesla religion, the magical AI rapture is always just around the corner.
I think this must happen all the time. As they say, ideas are cheap. It's likely that ALL of them had the seq-to-seq idea cross their mind at some point before it was acted on, so if credit is assigned to whoever said it out loud first, there's going to be disagreement, since most people don't remember the full details of every conversation. It's also possible for someone to be skeptical of their own idea, so that argument isn't compelling to me either. Ultimately credit usually goes to the people who do the hard work to prove out the idea, so it seems like the system worked as intended in this case.
I wouldn't call SoFi a failed company (yet). They're still at roughly 10B valuation, same as what they IPOed at. That's actually pretty remarkable in this economy for a company that's still in pre-profit growth mode.
OpenDoor isn't that bad either, they're down 60% from IPO, but a real estate company being able to retain that much value with the massive hike in interest rates also seems pretty good (competitors have done much worse, e.g. Compass and Redfin).
> The only difference is that waymo hasn't had a major incident.
That and they do higher speed roads, offer service during the daytime, service the airport (in Phoenix), use more direct routes, handle more complex maneuvers, have driven a lot more miles and served more trips, and so forth and so on.
There's a massive difference between needing a driver every x miles and never. Waymo has served more than 700,000 rides this year. FSD cannot drive intervention free 700,000+ times in a row (on many different routes), I doubt it can even get close.
They still haven't removed the driver, which Waymo did in 2018 when AI was much less advanced than today. Therefore it's pretty clear there's some fundamental limitation that probably has to do with hardware and/or inability to build proper guardrails for their AI, as opposed to the capability of the models. In other words: building AI models that can drive impressively in the common case is likely the EASY part of the problem, and they haven't made much progress on the hard part, which is likely dealing with the long tail.
Model Y is definitely not a luxury vehicle in the US. I'm not sure about in Canada, but in the US the Model Y AWD only costs about $15k more than a mid-tier AWD Honda CR-V or Toyota RAV 4 trim (I just recently priced out options for our next vehicle). You'll make up that difference over the first 5-10 years in gas and maintenance savings, and then tax incentives shave off another $7.5k or more depending on the state at low/mid income levels. In other words, it's at most marginally more expensive than a Civic or Corolla, and on par with compact SUVs. The same is more or less true in China. See tons of Teslas there.
That's just rubbish speculation on your part. All evidence points to FSD having a very marginal effect on Tesla's market cap. The market has already discounted it as nothing more than a driver assist system.
Most of Tesla's valuation is easily attributable to the fact they sell a ton of cars, with very high profit margins, and are on track to sell even more in the future.
You're just dreaming. I hate cars, but they aren't going anywhere. Even cities in China that have some of the most convenient and modern public transit in the world are still full of cars. Even if the world cuts car and truck usage in half, which will take multiple generations, autonomous vehicles will still be enormously impactful.
My theory is the Cruise leadership created an expectation that they were ahead of Waymo, based on focusing on SF rather than Phoenix suburbs. Then Waymo rolled into SF with their 5th gen platform and progressed faster than expected, and the heat was on.
Dig deeper, dude. I'm not sure if you're serious or being disingenuous, but the fallout over that incident has been in tech news including several HN threads for the past 6+ weeks.
This is completely false. The Cruise vehicle stopped, then started again and dragged the woman under it. The majority of her injuries resulted from the dragging, which is entirely Cruise's fault.
If public transit can't be solved in SF, the second densest city in the US, there's no hope for the rest of America outside NYC.
On average it takes close to twice as long to get from point A to B in SF using public transit than with Waymo. And for the walking portions you're likely dealing with either hills or sketchy areas.
Greater density in cities too because fewer car owners means less need for parking. And probably fewer people will want to live in suburbs, today owning a car makes the suburbs a little more appealing because you don't have to deal with city driving and parking.
They're deployed in Austin and there have been a lot of complaints there too, although no serious injury accidents as far as I know.
Wide fast streets come with their own set of problems. For instance, stopping in the middle of an intersection is much riskier, the car needs to see objects farther away, etc.