> Then again, perhaps as boss of DOGE, Musk will just use his "special government employee" status to bring the USPTO to heel, purging it of the experts needed to regulate his business, just as he did at NHTSA.
I clicked on the link thinking about this issue and found it at the bottom of the article.
Because lying about having "full self driving" is easy if you have no shame. Making a product that works and can pass regulatory muster to create a no-driver robotaxi is hard.
Tesla's FSD has different approach / tradeoffs compared to dedicated robotaxi services. FSD has to be cheap and energy efficient, run completely on-board, and it must work everywhere. They're trying to do more with less, which has so far been impossible. Their cybercab and robotaxi service will probably work more like Waymo, with a slightly relaxed set of limitations.
Some differences compared to Waymo:
- Waymo has / can use more on-board compute, from [0] "It has also been revealed that Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements."
- Waymo uses remote operators. This includes humans but can also have remote compute.
- Waymo's neural network model can be trained / overfit on specific route or area. FSD uses the same model everywhere.
- Waymo's on-board hardware can use more energy, because it's possible to charge the battery between trips.
- Robotaxi services charge customers per mile, so it makes sense to run longer routes which are also easier to drive, i.e. the routing algorithm can be tuned to avoid challenging routes. This would be possible to implement on FSD too, but it seems that FSD drives fastest route.
You'd think the biggest win would be in the middle:
We have an interstate highway system that's fairly well-maintained and understood, and is a finite space to map. Hypertrain on that, and you can offer an experience of 10 minutes hands-on-wheel at the start and end of the journey, and 3 hours of doomscrolling in the driver's seat. The highway miles are the most boring, both from a surprise-hazard standpoint and from a driver's-attention standpoint (there's nothing cool or interesting to see except the trunk lid of the car in front of you)
It offers a nationwide level of service that Waymo's city-by-city rollout lacks, and the chance for route-specific hueristics that Tesla's cameras-and-local-compute might miss.
Waymo specifically claims they never do remote human piloting. The car will present a remote human operator a choice of routes to get out of a situation, and the human will pick one. Remote piloting is way too risky.
Yes, definitely. "remote operator" is a human or an LLM which is able to make high-level decisions (i.e. what to do in a novel weird situation), but doesn't directly pilot the vehicle. Generally speaking, on-board compute is fast and stupid, and remote compute or a human is slow and smart.
I don't think that cars will have SOTA level LLMs running locally for a long time, and it seems that they actually need that kind of intelligence for full autonomy. However, it might also be totally fine if the passenger makes the difficult high-level decisions through a voice interface.
All decisions are made by the Waymo vehicle itself.
The vehicle can ask human remote operators for recommendations or clarification, but the vehicle itself decides whether to use them. Most of the time, the vehicle doesn't end up needing it.
The system though provides a way to let humans create training data for edge cases.
Well, I'd understand why it's difficult to extend to nationwide or even statewide just because of all the variations in road/driving conditions. So I can get how FSD never got certified at either scale. However, given their experience and plethora of data collected, I would have expected they'd be among the first get robotaxis in select cities. Idk, just struck me as odd is all. I figured I'd tee off this comment because someone might have an more informed insight into the why of it.
Tesla has been working on improving a level 2 system that works everywhere while Waynlmo has been working on expanding the capabilities and coverage of their level 4 system that works in limited areas and requires detailed mapping.
Tesla has yet to get good enough to achieve level 4 so they can't actually run a robotaxi yet. Tesla's bet is that if they can reach level 4 with their approach, they'll be able to roll out robotaxis much more widely than Waymo can.
So far, the bet has not paid off and Tesla needs it to pay off before Waymo's slower rollout gets too far ahead.
There's a word in GP's post that you elided. "Full" means a human doesn't need to be supervising, and it works outside of the heavily mapped and stable conditions of LA.
You left out the key word in that phrase, “full”. Tesla cars have autonomous driving features that require a human in the driver seat to take over in case the autonomous features shut off. That’s not “full self driving”.
Four lanes, left to right: straight+left, right turn only, concrete divider, right turn only, right turn only. Note that there are only two lanes when you turn right, so you can turn into the rightmost lane from lane 2, the leftmost lane from lane 3, rightmost from lane 4.
Traffic lights (four signals) on the far end of the intersection work thus:
1. Left two lane lights turn green (Right two lanes are red). You can have traffic going straight, left or right. Traffic in lane 2 can turn right, but lanes 3 and 4 cannot.
2. Right two lane lights turn green, left red. Lane 2 cannot turn right but lanes 3 and 4 can.
All the lights are circles, no arrows. The only indication of weirdness is that there's a "No turn on red".
Tesla is also the leader in terms of crashes, injuries, and fatalities. On a per-mile basis, they're the most dangerous advanced driving system in the world and it's not even close.
And they all do it better than Tesla. 0 fatalities. 0 injuries. 0 crashes where the self-driving was at fault (but a few where the car behind them crashed into them).
Glorified cruise control does not equal self driving. I know everyone has to hate on Tesla, but FSD in its current form is a decade ahead of these. It doesn't take long looking at videos of actual people using these systems to understand the massive capability gap between Teslas FSD and everyone elses driver assistance system.
> FSD in its current form is a decade ahead of these.
FSD is still only level 2.
Honda and Mercedes are the only two companies to sell level 3 capable cars, but these are only level 3 under certain limited conditions.
You may be correct that the level 2 performance of FSD is ahead of the level 2 performance of any other car, but I don’t think we can call Tesla king until they also match the level 3 performance of these other cars under those conditions.
Maybe but yes those level 3 systems need the stars to align to actually be active from what I understand. It's just as far as I know, there's no other system that allows someone to just enter an address, navigate through both city and highway, then arrive at a destination.
Because calling a feature “Full Self Driving” is a lot easier than making a car that is capable of fully driving itself without a human at the wheel to immediately take over in situations that regularly occur.
There are advertised features of Teslas that are vaporware, but it’s a stretch to call them vaporware. xAI is also very real. Others have mentioned SpaceX. He bought Twitter/X but that’s not vaporware either. Neuralink is also real. The Boring Company has only dug 2 short tunnels so far, so the case can be made for calling that vaporware.
He owned a company that merged with Confinity, which had already built a prototype of PayPal, registered trademarks, etc. at the time of merger.
He was made CEO. For four months. Which he spent trying to throw out the prototype written in Java because he only knew ASP.
Then the board fired him in absentia, the morning he left for his honeymoon. Not asked him to resign, not "focus on his family", but the moment he's gone, fired his ass.
Musk's contribution to the non-vaporware PayPal is "cashing the dividend checks".
I certainly hope they won't be the last. For a healthy market, we need at least 3 viable competitors. Waymo is viable, Cruise has pulled out, and Tesla is questionable.
Idk, every competitors system at this point is basically glorified lane keep adaptive cruise control. Similar to the standard Tesla Autopilot but far from Tesla's FSD.
It's first to file now. Imagine front running patents! Or granting every application and preventing the throwing out of bad ones. Bend the knee and pay your tithe or be buried in lawsuits.
First to file really doesn't change anything relevant here. It just makes it so that if two or more independent inventors invented the same thing and both are applying for a patent the patent goes to whoever filed first instead of trying to figure out who invented it first.
Trying to figure out who invented first could be hard because your priority date was not necessarily when you actually thought of the invention. It was the latest date where you started working diligently to reduce your invention to practice and continued so working until you succeeded.
So if you came up with the idea and started right away working diligently on it and keep doing so until you succeeded then your priority date would be when you came up with the idea.
But if you took breaks you might lose that priority date, and your new priority date would be when you resumed work.
So then we have to decide when a break will reset your priority date. Is it just the length? Does the reason for the break matter?
And what counts as working diligently? Does it need to be full time or is it OK if you are working on your invention every evening after your job?
I'm surprised they want to associate with the word "taxi" in the first place. Doesn't that cut through the hype bullshit supporting their stock price by admitting that they're gunning for the taxi industry, which is fundamentally low margins, geographically limited and overall niche? Even if they capture the entire global taxi market, that couldn't justify their present market cap (which as far as I can tell is supported by delusional investors who think these robotaxis will replace individual car ownership completely in a way that taxis obviously never will.)
Yeah, one of the problems with eliminating individual car ownership (which I think is a good idea) is the fact that cars are more than point A to point B transportation options. They also serve as temporary storage units (the case that springs to mind is keeping my guitar and amp in the trunk of my car while I’m at work to get to an afterwork rehearsal, but a less niche case is a shopping trip to multiple stores where the goods purchased along the way are kept in the car at each subsequent stop).
And then there’s the case of special configurations, e.g., car seats for those with young children, wheelchair access, etc. Even once FSD gets solved (if it ever does), these use cases also need to be accounted for as well.
> Even once FSD gets solved (if it ever does), these use cases also need to be accounted for as well.
But these are such easy issues to solve. Look at a society where public transport use is much much higher:
> All major train stations in Japan, and most minor stations, have coin lockers available to use. Coin lockers are a part of daily life in Japan, and they can be found also on bus terminals, shopping centers or department stores, some convenience stores and tourist attractions, and even on city streets.
Note that even in Tokyo, which is often held up as having some of the best public transit in the world, around 30% of households own a car. Around 12% of trips there are taken by private car. That suggests that there are still a significant number of cases that are not covered well by public transit.
For example I don't see how lockers solve the issue of multi-store shopping trips that was mentioned in the comment above. The locker would give you some place to accumulate the purchases from each store, but unless you could carry them all simultaneously you'd still need to make multiple trips between the locker and home to get everything home.
I suppose you could use public transit when going store to store accumulating things in the locker, then use your car to move everything from the locker to home in one trip. That's probably optimal. While going store to store you don't have to deal with finding parking at each store because you are taking public transit so might save time and money there, and you save time and money by getting your stuff home in one car trip instead of multiple transit trips.
Don't conflate "taxi" as a mode of transit with "taxi" (aka hackney carriage) as a particular industry. The name is meant to tell consumers what to expect, not investors. Combined with "robo", I know exactly what to expect: a licensed driverless car that attempts to charge you more by using circuitous routes, is poorly maintained, doesn't listen to directions, and drives somewhat dangerously.
The thing about bullshit artists is they can always generate more bullshit. Tesla stock marketing hype is not some fixed quantity that needs to be conserved. Rather, creating more is squarely in Muskov's wheelhouse.
'robotics at scale' what do you mean? Deployment of fully automated factories lanes at scale? Because unless they did that in the early 2010s, they are a bit late, no?
Do you have a good example of someone doing that with an e2e model? (not that I think most factory robots should be using e2e models, a more traditional sense-plan-act system usually makes more sense in that domain)
We were working on e2e models for manipulation and motion for a long time at Google X and I was at Wayve working on e2e models for driving. From a science perspective, Tesla's FSD is very impressive accomplishment.
Edit: Sorry I think I now understand your comment. I mean FSD, not their factory robots. I don't know anything about Tesla's factories.
No, not clear at all actually. Every day I see Teslas swerving dangerously while their "drivers" are using their phones instead of driving the car. When I used to commute past the SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, I'd see at least one Tesla accident a day.
I'm speaking from a research/capabilities perspective but you can also review https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport which seems to refute your anecdote to some extent.
It really doesn't. A few things you need to know about that report:
1. It compares "all drivers in all vehicles on all road conditions in all weather conditions" versus "the subset of miles driven in FSD conditions, where neither weather nor road conditions turn FSD off because it can't be sufficiently functional".
2. If your airbags don't deploy, Tesla doesn't consider it an accident for the purposes of that report (modern safety systems don't blindly deploy airbags, they evaluate g-forces, speeds, angles of impact, etc., so you can hit something at 25mph and the vehicle decides your seatbelts are sufficient. Tesla decides "that's not a reportable collision"). Know when else your airbags might not deploy? Very serious accidents, when hardware or controllers are damaged.
3. Speaking of which, fatalities are not included in that report. "It was a collision where someone died, but doesn't merit inclusion in a safety report" is a weird position to take.
I'm not saying FSD is a paragon of safety or even a good product. I just think, based on the numbers shared, that an anecdote of Teslas dangerously careening around might just be an anecdote.
No, as the parent points out: Tesla's "safety report" deliberately excludes most accidents, including fatalities, and thus is about as trustworthy as a charlatan.
So they can just call it a "Tesla™ Robotaxi", they already have a trademark. The Robotaxi part does indeed seem merely descriptive.
> Then again, perhaps as boss of DOGE, Musk will just use his "special government employee" status to bring the USPTO to heel, purging it of the experts needed to regulate his business, just as he did at NHTSA.
I clicked on the link thinking about this issue and found it at the bottom of the article.
There's a Tesla FSD Community Tracker here: https://teslafsdtracker.com/home
Currently it's showing one critical disengagement every 206 city miles.
Maybe they could call it Tesla Robocrash?
Or ASD (Assisted Suicide Driving) ?
Wouldn't it be murder-suicide if you hit other people?
I've always found it odd that the leader for personal "full self driving" cars, is essentially last to the robo taxi market.
Because lying about having "full self driving" is easy if you have no shame. Making a product that works and can pass regulatory muster to create a no-driver robotaxi is hard.
Seems its gonna be easier to edit the muster than to have functional product.
they dont really need to worry about regulators. Now it's just about media and press, and you know, _actual_ capabilities.
Tesla's FSD has different approach / tradeoffs compared to dedicated robotaxi services. FSD has to be cheap and energy efficient, run completely on-board, and it must work everywhere. They're trying to do more with less, which has so far been impossible. Their cybercab and robotaxi service will probably work more like Waymo, with a slightly relaxed set of limitations.
Some differences compared to Waymo:
- Waymo has / can use more on-board compute, from [0] "It has also been revealed that Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements."
- Waymo uses remote operators. This includes humans but can also have remote compute.
- Waymo's neural network model can be trained / overfit on specific route or area. FSD uses the same model everywhere.
- Waymo's on-board hardware can use more energy, because it's possible to charge the battery between trips.
- Robotaxi services charge customers per mile, so it makes sense to run longer routes which are also easier to drive, i.e. the routing algorithm can be tuned to avoid challenging routes. This would be possible to implement on FSD too, but it seems that FSD drives fastest route.
[0] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
You'd think the biggest win would be in the middle:
We have an interstate highway system that's fairly well-maintained and understood, and is a finite space to map. Hypertrain on that, and you can offer an experience of 10 minutes hands-on-wheel at the start and end of the journey, and 3 hours of doomscrolling in the driver's seat. The highway miles are the most boring, both from a surprise-hazard standpoint and from a driver's-attention standpoint (there's nothing cool or interesting to see except the trunk lid of the car in front of you)
It offers a nationwide level of service that Waymo's city-by-city rollout lacks, and the chance for route-specific hueristics that Tesla's cameras-and-local-compute might miss.
Waymo specifically claims they never do remote human piloting. The car will present a remote human operator a choice of routes to get out of a situation, and the human will pick one. Remote piloting is way too risky.
Yes, definitely. "remote operator" is a human or an LLM which is able to make high-level decisions (i.e. what to do in a novel weird situation), but doesn't directly pilot the vehicle. Generally speaking, on-board compute is fast and stupid, and remote compute or a human is slow and smart.
I don't think that cars will have SOTA level LLMs running locally for a long time, and it seems that they actually need that kind of intelligence for full autonomy. However, it might also be totally fine if the passenger makes the difficult high-level decisions through a voice interface.
All decisions are made by the Waymo vehicle itself.
The vehicle can ask human remote operators for recommendations or clarification, but the vehicle itself decides whether to use them. Most of the time, the vehicle doesn't end up needing it.
The system though provides a way to let humans create training data for edge cases.
Because they don't have full self driving cars yet?
Well, I'd understand why it's difficult to extend to nationwide or even statewide just because of all the variations in road/driving conditions. So I can get how FSD never got certified at either scale. However, given their experience and plethora of data collected, I would have expected they'd be among the first get robotaxis in select cities. Idk, just struck me as odd is all. I figured I'd tee off this comment because someone might have an more informed insight into the why of it.
Tesla has been working on improving a level 2 system that works everywhere while Waynlmo has been working on expanding the capabilities and coverage of their level 4 system that works in limited areas and requires detailed mapping.
Tesla has yet to get good enough to achieve level 4 so they can't actually run a robotaxi yet. Tesla's bet is that if they can reach level 4 with their approach, they'll be able to roll out robotaxis much more widely than Waymo can.
So far, the bet has not paid off and Tesla needs it to pay off before Waymo's slower rollout gets too far ahead.
Maybe they need a non-software upgrade that adds a bit more GPU power for robotaxi duties.
What do you call what this tesla is doing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQir90MktRc
Just because it's supervised doesn't mean its not self driving
There's a word in GP's post that you elided. "Full" means a human doesn't need to be supervising, and it works outside of the heavily mapped and stable conditions of LA.
You left out the key word in that phrase, “full”. Tesla cars have autonomous driving features that require a human in the driver seat to take over in case the autonomous features shut off. That’s not “full self driving”.
Let me know when "FSD" can navigate this intersection in my state capital:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q3VPJvJ6WwXe3gdZ7
Four lanes, left to right: straight+left, right turn only, concrete divider, right turn only, right turn only. Note that there are only two lanes when you turn right, so you can turn into the rightmost lane from lane 2, the leftmost lane from lane 3, rightmost from lane 4.
Traffic lights (four signals) on the far end of the intersection work thus:
1. Left two lane lights turn green (Right two lanes are red). You can have traffic going straight, left or right. Traffic in lane 2 can turn right, but lanes 3 and 4 cannot. 2. Right two lane lights turn green, left red. Lane 2 cannot turn right but lanes 3 and 4 can.
All the lights are circles, no arrows. The only indication of weirdness is that there's a "No turn on red".
I do not see FSD behaving appropriately.
they're not the leader for FSD cars. he just claims to be, through a little-known trick called "lying"
They are the leader in miles traveled.
Miles travelled at what? Level 2? Level 3?
Tesla is also the leader in terms of crashes, injuries, and fatalities. On a per-mile basis, they're the most dangerous advanced driving system in the world and it's not even close.
Are there even any other systems deployed with equivalent functionality?
BMW, GM, Ford, and Waymo.
And they all do it better than Tesla. 0 fatalities. 0 injuries. 0 crashes where the self-driving was at fault (but a few where the car behind them crashed into them).
> BMW, GM, Ford,
Glorified cruise control does not equal self driving. I know everyone has to hate on Tesla, but FSD in its current form is a decade ahead of these. It doesn't take long looking at videos of actual people using these systems to understand the massive capability gap between Teslas FSD and everyone elses driver assistance system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oWDVJ4FjfU
> FSD in its current form is a decade ahead of these.
FSD is still only level 2.
Honda and Mercedes are the only two companies to sell level 3 capable cars, but these are only level 3 under certain limited conditions.
You may be correct that the level 2 performance of FSD is ahead of the level 2 performance of any other car, but I don’t think we can call Tesla king until they also match the level 3 performance of these other cars under those conditions.
Maybe but yes those level 3 systems need the stars to align to actually be active from what I understand. It's just as far as I know, there's no other system that allows someone to just enter an address, navigate through both city and highway, then arrive at a destination.
Pretty sure they were referring to Cruise (the robotaxi company) not GM's existing supercruise feature.
Of course, with GM bringing Cruise in-house and abandoning the taxi service, there's no telling how much of their technology will be used.
Yes they are...
Because calling a feature “Full Self Driving” is a lot easier than making a car that is capable of fully driving itself without a human at the wheel to immediately take over in situations that regularly occur.
We can call them last to the market once they are actually in the market. Robotaxi is at the moment vaporware.
All of his enterprises are vaporware, if not to call a scam. Literally a vaporwave salesman.
SpaceX is not vaporware, but that's more because of Gwynne Shotwell than Musk.
So the astronauts were brought back from the ISS by vaporware?
There are advertised features of Teslas that are vaporware, but it’s a stretch to call them vaporware. xAI is also very real. Others have mentioned SpaceX. He bought Twitter/X but that’s not vaporware either. Neuralink is also real. The Boring Company has only dug 2 short tunnels so far, so the case can be made for calling that vaporware.
Wow, I didn't know that Starlink was vaporware.
I need to stop paying for things with PayPal if it's just vaporware.
PayPal isn't his. Never was.
He owned a company that merged with Confinity, which had already built a prototype of PayPal, registered trademarks, etc. at the time of merger.
He was made CEO. For four months. Which he spent trying to throw out the prototype written in Java because he only knew ASP.
Then the board fired him in absentia, the morning he left for his honeymoon. Not asked him to resign, not "focus on his family", but the moment he's gone, fired his ass.
Musk's contribution to the non-vaporware PayPal is "cashing the dividend checks".
Wasn’t X and Confinity a 50-50 merger?
Thiel and Levchin fired Musk, but they made up. Thiel bet on SpaceX later when it needed cash to reach its first successful launch.
I certainly hope they won't be the last. For a healthy market, we need at least 3 viable competitors. Waymo is viable, Cruise has pulled out, and Tesla is questionable.
Autopilot isn't even the best adaptive cruise control anymore. In my experience that goes to Toyota Safety Sense 3.0.
Idk, every competitors system at this point is basically glorified lane keep adaptive cruise control. Similar to the standard Tesla Autopilot but far from Tesla's FSD.
Musk's insistence on camera only probably doesn't help.
That is great. Always nice to see sane IP decisions.
Should have gone with the "Johnny Cab".
How did a Schwarzenegger movie from 1990 do a better job of naming a robot taxi than Tesla?
Those were professionals.
The movie was an adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick story, the name comes from the story IIRC.
There is a robot taxi in the story, but it doesn't have a name.
Especially considering it's been descriptive for decades in science fiction
Oh don't worry he just needs to make a phone call.
I give a week before the USPTO has been gutted from the inside.
If we lose patent trolls at the same time, I'd consider it's a fair trade.
It's first to file now. Imagine front running patents! Or granting every application and preventing the throwing out of bad ones. Bend the knee and pay your tithe or be buried in lawsuits.
First to file really doesn't change anything relevant here. It just makes it so that if two or more independent inventors invented the same thing and both are applying for a patent the patent goes to whoever filed first instead of trying to figure out who invented it first.
Trying to figure out who invented first could be hard because your priority date was not necessarily when you actually thought of the invention. It was the latest date where you started working diligently to reduce your invention to practice and continued so working until you succeeded.
So if you came up with the idea and started right away working diligently on it and keep doing so until you succeeded then your priority date would be when you came up with the idea.
But if you took breaks you might lose that priority date, and your new priority date would be when you resumed work.
So then we have to decide when a break will reset your priority date. Is it just the length? Does the reason for the break matter?
And what counts as working diligently? Does it need to be full time or is it OK if you are working on your invention every evening after your job?
It was quite messy.
That's one way it could go. Another is that no new patents are granted. No lawsuits. Full Shenzhen.
Think of all the winning if they just direct examiners to approve every application.
So now this elongated doggy turd will try to shutdown USPTO.
I'm surprised they want to associate with the word "taxi" in the first place. Doesn't that cut through the hype bullshit supporting their stock price by admitting that they're gunning for the taxi industry, which is fundamentally low margins, geographically limited and overall niche? Even if they capture the entire global taxi market, that couldn't justify their present market cap (which as far as I can tell is supported by delusional investors who think these robotaxis will replace individual car ownership completely in a way that taxis obviously never will.)
Yeah, one of the problems with eliminating individual car ownership (which I think is a good idea) is the fact that cars are more than point A to point B transportation options. They also serve as temporary storage units (the case that springs to mind is keeping my guitar and amp in the trunk of my car while I’m at work to get to an afterwork rehearsal, but a less niche case is a shopping trip to multiple stores where the goods purchased along the way are kept in the car at each subsequent stop).
And then there’s the case of special configurations, e.g., car seats for those with young children, wheelchair access, etc. Even once FSD gets solved (if it ever does), these use cases also need to be accounted for as well.
> Even once FSD gets solved (if it ever does), these use cases also need to be accounted for as well.
But these are such easy issues to solve. Look at a society where public transport use is much much higher:
> All major train stations in Japan, and most minor stations, have coin lockers available to use. Coin lockers are a part of daily life in Japan, and they can be found also on bus terminals, shopping centers or department stores, some convenience stores and tourist attractions, and even on city streets.
https://japanhorizon.com/train-stations-have-lockers/
Note that even in Tokyo, which is often held up as having some of the best public transit in the world, around 30% of households own a car. Around 12% of trips there are taken by private car. That suggests that there are still a significant number of cases that are not covered well by public transit.
For example I don't see how lockers solve the issue of multi-store shopping trips that was mentioned in the comment above. The locker would give you some place to accumulate the purchases from each store, but unless you could carry them all simultaneously you'd still need to make multiple trips between the locker and home to get everything home.
I suppose you could use public transit when going store to store accumulating things in the locker, then use your car to move everything from the locker to home in one trip. That's probably optimal. While going store to store you don't have to deal with finding parking at each store because you are taking public transit so might save time and money there, and you save time and money by getting your stuff home in one car trip instead of multiple transit trips.
Don't conflate "taxi" as a mode of transit with "taxi" (aka hackney carriage) as a particular industry. The name is meant to tell consumers what to expect, not investors. Combined with "robo", I know exactly what to expect: a licensed driverless car that attempts to charge you more by using circuitous routes, is poorly maintained, doesn't listen to directions, and drives somewhat dangerously.
The thing about bullshit artists is they can always generate more bullshit. Tesla stock marketing hype is not some fixed quantity that needs to be conserved. Rather, creating more is squarely in Muskov's wheelhouse.
[dead]
[flagged]
I’m rabidly pro Tesla but this seems fair.
> rabidly pro Tesla
Honest question: Why? They seem to be dragging up the rear in everything but unfulfilled promises.
They are clearly the front runner in L2+ ADAS (at least outside of China) and are one of the first teams to deploy an e2e model for robotics at scale.
'robotics at scale' what do you mean? Deployment of fully automated factories lanes at scale? Because unless they did that in the early 2010s, they are a bit late, no?
Do you have a good example of someone doing that with an e2e model? (not that I think most factory robots should be using e2e models, a more traditional sense-plan-act system usually makes more sense in that domain)
We were working on e2e models for manipulation and motion for a long time at Google X and I was at Wayve working on e2e models for driving. From a science perspective, Tesla's FSD is very impressive accomplishment.
Edit: Sorry I think I now understand your comment. I mean FSD, not their factory robots. I don't know anything about Tesla's factories.
They are clearly the front runner in L2+ ADAS
No, not clear at all actually. Every day I see Teslas swerving dangerously while their "drivers" are using their phones instead of driving the car. When I used to commute past the SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, I'd see at least one Tesla accident a day.
I'm speaking from a research/capabilities perspective but you can also review https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport which seems to refute your anecdote to some extent.
It really doesn't. A few things you need to know about that report:
1. It compares "all drivers in all vehicles on all road conditions in all weather conditions" versus "the subset of miles driven in FSD conditions, where neither weather nor road conditions turn FSD off because it can't be sufficiently functional".
2. If your airbags don't deploy, Tesla doesn't consider it an accident for the purposes of that report (modern safety systems don't blindly deploy airbags, they evaluate g-forces, speeds, angles of impact, etc., so you can hit something at 25mph and the vehicle decides your seatbelts are sufficient. Tesla decides "that's not a reportable collision"). Know when else your airbags might not deploy? Very serious accidents, when hardware or controllers are damaged.
3. Speaking of which, fatalities are not included in that report. "It was a collision where someone died, but doesn't merit inclusion in a safety report" is a weird position to take.
I'm not saying FSD is a paragon of safety or even a good product. I just think, based on the numbers shared, that an anecdote of Teslas dangerously careening around might just be an anecdote.
No, as the parent points out: Tesla's "safety report" deliberately excludes most accidents, including fatalities, and thus is about as trustworthy as a charlatan.