> The departures include leaders from Cruise’s legal, government affairs, commercial operations and safety and systems teams, according to the company-wide message, which GM and Cruise spokespeople confirmed was authentic.
I'm not so sure. Slow and steady in this case might just be a failure to fail fast.
The future isn't in cars or autonomous cars, it's in sidewalks, trains, bike lanes, and other forms of transit. The best ride in a car isn't one in which I'm driving or not driving, it's one in which I don't get in the car in the first place.
I hear a lot of people saying "the future isn't X" when they really mean "I wish the future wasn't X".
The future absent radical change of cultural heart clearly is personal EVs. You don't have to like it, but it's the direction 99% of countries are moving and clearly normal people do want it.
Most are, but a massive number of Americans live in sprawling suburbs and small-to-medium sized towns, not cities. Most of those places are ill-suited (to the extreme) for mass transit and other non-car options - yet they are perfectly designed to handle cars.
63% of Americans live in an urban area having a population density greater than 1,500 per square mile. There's no agreed-upon definition of "sprawl", but it's generally computed at being under 2,000 residents per square mile. None of the people collecting this particular data used that definition, they used 1,500.
Even so, some 2/3 of Americans live in areas that would benefit from pursuing alternatives.
As someone who has driven around a lot of this giant country, that 2/3rds number sounds hopelessly optimistic. Most places that fit that criteria are still remarkably ill-suited for mass transit solutions. Because they were deliberately designed that way.
Yeah, there's more to it than just population density. There also needs to be a sufficient density of walkable places for people to take transit to, and that's also missing in much of American suburbia. Bog standard suburban strip mall is way too spread out and buried in a sea of parking lots. They're simply not designed around pedestrian travel.
Suburbs are not that badly suited to mass transit. It costs more per person than in denser cities, but most suburbs are dense enough to support great mass transit, and it would be cheaper than the cost of cars.
However great is key. This means you need great operations: including worse case waiting time everyone should be 15 minutes or less from a place where they can find plenty things to do in the community (stores, parks, schools); and a transfer to express service to elsewhere. If you don't have great transit: people in the suburbs can afford a car, and traffic isn't a problem so they will just drive. Note that this is a higher level of service than many downtowns get.
The above is very very expensive. However cars are very very very expensive.
When I think of the hilly suburbs of California, I cannot imagine a system that could convince even a fraction of those people to give up cars, no matter how elaborate or well-designed. But the design of those streets and the terrain make them extremely well-suited for cars. So instead of devising some radical and expensive re-design of the thousands of suburbs in America, autonomous cars seem to solve the problem quite elegantly. And there's nothing stopping people from tacking their autonomous car or taxi to a train station for more urban-oriented travel.
It's probably going to be financials... The most common argument against suburbs is that they aren't self sustaining at paying for the services/infrastructure/utilities they consume.
That is the most common argument, but they have been successfully doing it for more than 100 years. It is time to kill the argument, when you dig in you discover they are using some really weird definitions of self sustaining. (they don't count money that comes in from other sources even though everyone gets it all the time)
Literally every country that moves from low to middle income, or middle income to wealthy, gets more personal vehicles because it's what people want.
Denying this or misunderstanding human nature will not get you closer to mass transit, you have to first understand what motivates people before trying to convince them of another path.
I'm widely doubtful about personnal EV. The renewable energy production chain growth this year is already slowing down, and we will probably be 20-30% under the net0 objectives in renewable production by 2030. Objectives that did not take into account metal availability either, so we could fall of behind really, really quick.
You’re not gonna retrofit Atlanta and Dallas to be commuter friendly anytime soon. Self driving cars are gonna be a thing given what Waymos been able to achieve in SF and Phoenix already.
I won't go as far as to say Atlanta is commuter friendly, but the past decade has seen lots of improvements in greenway construction, the expansion of the beltline, connecting different parts of the city. I hope it keeps going that directions because that is where I am looking to end up eventually.
I used to cycle down Peachtree Street from Buckhead to Piedmont Park...it was a harrowing experience.
I'm not sure we need to retrofit Atlanta or Dallas, or what you might envision here. You could for example maintain existing infrastructure without spending a lot of taxpayer money on new highways and instead allocate funding to improving density, adjusting zoning, eliminating surface parking lots, and literally just paving sidewalks and bike lanes.
Busses can run on existing highways and throughout cities. City streets can already accommodate trams and bike lanes.
I agree that self-driving cars are "going to be a thing" but their proliferation I doubt. They're not really a category change from Uber, it's just "more efficient" as an additive solution, but we need subtractive solutions. You can think of the car and self-driving cars in particular in the same way you can think of personal digital cameras, alarm clocks, and smiliar devices before the advent of the iPhone. The iPhone (and other smart phones) was a subtractive product and eliminated the need for those devices.
Similarly a sidewalk and building well (among other things) eliminate much of the need for a personal car and so Ford, GM, Toyota, Tesla, etc. can't effectively compete because they don't build sidewalks or have anything to do with this category of transit. If I can just walk over to the grocery store like I could in London or Osaka then no amount of self-driving will matter.
Self driving cars also imply you can have self driving buses. Imagine a couple small electric vans running from your cul-de-sac to a local transit center (with shopping). Since labor is the highest cost of a bus no sane transit system could do this, but a cheap self driving van means nobody on your street needs to own a car, and the local transit center lets you transfer to larger transit vehicles to other places. It might be slower than directly taking your car places, but it is a lot cheaper and better for the environment.
I think that the future of self driving is shuttles.
Small vehicles that use the road to take you on the short journeys, where mass transit is not an option.
The biggest issue with busses, for me is the timetable. Imagine having a truly 24/7 on time transit network? You'd only need a vehicle to haul something, which is not a daily operation.
Even if no one ever does that, sends an empty car anywhere, there will be an increase in "drivers" on the road as more people that would not be allowed to drive because they have no license (ie. the elderly and children) are now able to drive by themselves in a single car, whereas previously they would have transported themselves with other people or on public transit.
Autonomous cars will result in an explosion of cars on the road and a severe increase in traffic. It'll be a disaster.
Why would you have the car drive home? That means you have to give it heads up and make a plan to leave so it can drive back to you. If it just circles the block for 8 hours while you work, it will be there within minutes to drive you home whenever you feel like it.
> If it just circles the block for 8 hours while you work, it will be there within minutes to drive you home whenever you feel like it.
Alright so what we're going to do is extract limited resources from the earth, pump out a bunch of C02, have a lot of people or machines get together in a big factory and assemble a car, someone is going to take out a loan for $40,000 or something, pay interest on that loan, pay for insurance, pay for maintenance, pay for energy/fuel, we're going to build highways and roads, and then we're going to have the car drive itself and the passenger (of course just them because nobody is sharing their car) to their computer at work, the car is then going to circle the block for 8 hours while you work (i.e. sit on Zoom calls), and then once you are ready to head home the car will stop circling the block and come and get you.
Right. All to avoid walking, riding a bike, or god forbid being near other humans on a tram.
But seriously, privately owned cars are the problem here. If, instead, taxi service is normalized, then we don't have this problem, and my car doesn't need to circle the block because it isn't my car. As long as I can get home at the end of the day, a self driving taxi seems like the way for the system to be organized, to avoid precisely the stupidity you described.
Soon no, but you have to start sometime. The sooner you start building great transit, the sooner people can start switching their life and city to use that. But if you sit around in defeatism people cannot switch and things get worse. Both cities have a lot of low hanging fruit to improve transit, it just takes some vision and investment in building/running it. Once the transit is in place the city responds, and in a few years you have more places that are worth an investment to improve transit, and in turn the city responds.
Of course you need to avoid all the issues of NYC where they can't do anything, but both Atlanta and Dallas are not as corrupt (which isn't saying much) around transit.
That may be true but, by the sky high prices of houses in walkable neighborhoods it’s pretty clear that there’s unmet demand for a less car centric life. Smart cities are starting to figure this out, it’s just going to take time.
Something like 40% of trips in Amsterdam are still made by car. It’s a useful tool, just not the ultimate solution to every transportation issue.
Considering many cities were actually retrofitted to become car/sprawl centric, I'm going to say that's a political will/lobbying problem rather than a real one.
Although it may have become a problem with all this sunken cost.
Atlanta and Dallas are two poor examples compared to say Houston and LA. Atlanta and Dallas both have multiple forms of public transportation and extensive bike trails, you actually could extend the existing capabilities in both cities easier than others.
As much as I would love to believe in that future, it is a pipe dream in America at least. So little of the infrastructure I see going up is around any of those other forms of travel. Building sidewalks and bike lanes is not a sexy propositions for capital to come through...the money is in building 4 lane highways and spending billions on autonomous car research.
All that to say I hope I am wrong in the biggest way possible.
All the new suburbs around me are building sidewalks and bike paths. That is a big improvement. Now if we can just get people to use them for something other than a Saturday bar hopping bike ride.
Yeah, its kind of a chicken and the egg problem: more foot traffic can incentivize better infrastructure, and better infrastructure can incentivize more foot traffic. But which one should come first? Is the "build it and they will come" mindset right for all locales? (Questions are somewhat rhetorical). Plenty of ambitious projects get completed and fall on their face.
I was a huge proponent of urban planning and smart growth, loved trains.
But I feel the pandemic has upended any momentum for public transit for a generation. Less frequent commmutes make long drives more tolerable and parking more affordable and available, and transit now seems like a disease vector as well as rolling homeless shelter.
For me personally, I hate the smell of weed and it is EVERY where in many downtown areas and transit hubs.
Bikes? So weather dependent, little cargo space, hard to secure, and no way to carry a family readily.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Autonomous cars will be a travesty as everyone starts sending them on non stop errands or run double commutes to save on parking…
I hate driving down the highway and people speeding past me and weaving in and out of traffic without a license plate.
I can't stand cars driving into buildings and businesses in my downtown area.
Whenever it snows it seems like there's a huge multi-car pileup on the highway causing a complete stop and I can't get to where I was trying to go.
The highways and roads are really really loud.
Someone drove into my family in their truck and killed us all.
Etc.
It's not fair to point out the problems with bikes like you are, like the smell of weed (what about drunk drivers??) without also at least acknowledging the gigantic list of problems associated with car-only transit.
Admittedly some of the problems you mention like a rolling homeless shelter or the smell of weed share a solution which is more, and better policing and as a society us having higher standards for ourselves and others, but they are problems that can be solved much more easily in my opinion than the problems associated with car-only infrastructure.
Also I do want to point out that the disease vector comment seems really weird to me. Like the population density at Costco is a lot less than a train ride therefore you won't get sick as often? I don't get it.
I have a feeling that if people made one of those pros and cons sheets and did the crossing off equal things, these conversations would go easier
I can't imagine equating things like the smell of weed and having to share a train with a homeless person, with death, death, accident clean up, new barriers added, and then more death anyways
I've never died in a car, but I experienced awful negative externalities with public transportation all the time (back when I used it). You're comparing a 95% occurrence to a <1% occurrence.
> Admittedly some of the problems you mention like a rolling homeless shelter or the smell of weed share a solution which is more, and better policing and as a society us having higher standards for ourselves and others, but they are problems that can be solved much more easily in my opinion than the problems associated with car-only infrastructure.
They seem pretty equally hopeless to solve. How are we going to "change society's standards?" This isn't even a public transit problem--it's a "dealing with other human beings" problem.
Ever since the pandemic, going out in public and trying to do basically anything is like entering a probabilistic mental facility, where some non-trivial percentage of the time, some member of the public is going to enter your life as an obstacle, aggressor, or at least as an irritant. It's always been kind of the case, but the percentage chance just seems much larger today.
Road ragers are out in equal number to smokers on the train, sidewalk poopers while you're trying to walk, and coal rollers while you're trying to bicycle. It's not the mode of transportation, it's the growing belligerence of the general public.
My point is that most people don't consider externalities when deciding on their transit. Sitting in your car is far more comfortable than navigating smelly and dirty transit with unstable individuals roaming. Yes transit is safer, but people really don't do that calculus on the morning of their commute.
Weed smell is going to be a problem simply from the fact that users stink ALL THE TIME, even if they aren't smoking in the actual metro. It like an epidemic of BO.
What Costco do you shop where you are pressed up against people for half an hour? A loaded train is a sealed environment with poor ventilation and way more density than almost any other scenario in modern life. Regardless it's also people's perception, and a huge warehouse feels better ventilated than a subway car.
> But I feel the pandemic has upended any momentum for public transit for a generation. Less frequent commmutes make long drives more tolerable and parking more affordable and available, and transit now seems like a disease vector as well as rolling homeless shelter
Speak for yourself. More metros around the world are pushing for better mass transit. Even in the US, even mild expansion of light rail makes it possible for my kids to bike+rail to school and for me to use light rail to commute to work. US needs to handle its homeless problem - agreed - but that's a bigger societal issue.
Pandemic lockdowns are not going to happen again. People are finding out that lockdowns did not help all that much (even when implemented near-perfectly like in China).
Really, here on the east coast our downtowns are largely empty, with huge office garages always at the ready. Maybe less street parking because we still have some outdoor cafes using sidewalk space for dining now?
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.
I'm a car convert, and I'm someone who generally hates driving, and used only public transport for decades. It's just no match. PT is only more effective in theory.
Car infra takes next to nothing to plan and build. Trains, trams, metro, anything big at all really, takes decades, riddled with corruption, environment destruction, landscape change. State actors, maybe society, is just plain bad at organising this. Maintaining and switching cars is easy, maintaining public infra, keeping timetables (!!!), organising upgrades and extensions, keeping workforce happy and not striking is the same as above. And I live in a fat rich western country.
I get that cars don't scale, and ok, downtown of 1m+ cities should be park & ride. But maybe we should just spread out our living area more, and outside of megapolises just admit defeat and improve car infra.
> Car infra takes next to nothing to plan and build. Trains, trams, metro, anything big at all really, takes decades, riddled with corruption, environment destruction, landscape change.
As opposed to building highways, parking lots, massive car sized neighbourhoods etc...?
> Car infra takes next to nothing to plan and build. Trains, trams, metro, anything big at all really, takes decades, riddled with corruption, environment destruction, landscape change.
Car infrastructure is the same, you just haven’t seen it, and those are often related: most “pedestrian” or “bike” projects end up being about car management and almost all of the cost is usually spent there.
This has ripple effects: for example, Boston’s rail service is underfunded in large part because of the massive debt taken on to build the Big Dig. That was promised to reduce commuting times for suburbanites substantially but within a couple years of opening, they were worse than before due to the extra trips incentivized.
Why do you think that highways, roads, etc. aren't riddled with the same corruption, greater environmental destruction, landscape changes, etc. ?
Admittedly we can build highways quicker, but I wonder why? Certainly it has nothing to do with corrupt state transportation agencies whose jobs depend on big highway construction jobs, auto lobbies, or highway and road construction companies that rely on big government contracts for their livelihoods... right?
Wait wait wait. A single double-tracked rail line that's 50 feet wide carries more passengers an hour than a 10-lane wide highway that's pure asphalt. In what world is the train a greater destruction of our environment?
And in what world is that a greater destroyer of our natural landscapes?
I understand the convenience. I also went from taking public transit exclusively to driving a lot more - and I get the appeal. I also understand the appeal is not scalable, considerably less environmentally friendly, and contributes a ton of carbon output and environment destruction.
We don't need to bend over backwards to pretend that the things that are convenient and enjoyable for us must necessarily be virtuous. We should be fully capable of owning the dissonance that our desires do not necessarily align with public benefit.
Nowhere did I say it's greater, but still significant compared to how higways - which will still exist anyway - are much more useful and have more freedom of access (eg. for freight companies, emergency services). If most of society has this dissonance, maybe it'd be useful to overthink it. There are many ways to make personal travel greener, and that may be the more attainable goal.
> maybe we should just spread out our living area more
If we have any hopes of restricting climate change, reducing CO2 emissions, preventing mass extinction via habitat loss, we can't be doing this and going down this path.
It would only make any sense to create new green field cities if they were compact walkable cities built on a foundation of frequent and high speed rail access. Everything else is a regression of massive amounts of highway construction, habitat loss, CO2 emissions and strangulation by increased capture by the requirements of structurally inefficient automobile oriented infrastructure.
This is such a ridiculous thing to say. Cars are so immensely useful because I can go to exactly where I want to when I want to. I can transport people and things easily.
How do I take a train or a bike 80 miles away to go hiking, boating (imagine carrying a boat or a canoe onto a train!), golfing, etc? Or the other way to the beach? Or to drop kids off at different places with a variety of things they have with them?
I would seriously limit my freedom of movement and ability to do things.
There's a tendency here for a I assume young person who lives in a city and doesn't have a family or hobbies that require going to far away places with things, etc.
Can you elaborate on why if we build more infrastructure, create more bike lanes or sidewalks, create street cars in downtown areas and such, you wouldn't be able to drive your car 80 miles away to go hiking or boating or golfing or go to the beach?
> The best ride in a car isn't one in which I'm driving or not driving, it's one in which I don't get in the car in the first place.
As saying you don't see any need for cars at all. That the future is these other things. I'm just saying that cars are extremely useful and that if I had to choose between having a car or all the other things then I'd pick a car. I enjoy the other things too and am grateful to have a train nearby I can take into the city. But I can't imagine life without a car.
Oh ok. I also have a car, and a garage, and have no plans on not having those. It's convenient and allows for flexibility. I'm not advocating for banning cars or something. But we also do not have to make an either-or choice. The answer is we can have both! But today we need to do two things:
1. Not building car-only infrastructure. I.e. build sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, and trams/street cars. While I can afford a car, many can't or struggle to, or even if they can it is a poor financial choice. By giving people additional options we can increase entrepreneurship, reduce barriers to things like physically getting to a job, etc.
2. Reducing the need to use a car for things like buying a loaf of bread, short trips, going out to a restaurant, heading to a local sporting event, etc. There's no world in which you will forever be able to drive a large truck or SUV 15 miles to a grocery store to buy a few trivial items. We can do that now because we hit an energy jackpot with fossil fuels (which are necessary and useful), but economic physics dictate that this can't last. So instead of driving to do common tasks, you can instead just walk (exercise is good for you) and then walk back. If it's raining, umbrella. Etc. There are a lot of additional benefits here like obesity reduction which will save us money.
Today what we have is incredibly expensive infrastructure and transportation. We don't need to. We need more options.
I took the train from Rotterdam to go to the beach at Den Hague. It was great. I didn't have to plan ahead at all.
When I grew up in Buenos Aires Argentina we used to take the train to our small boat, that train ran every 15 minutes. The boat was kept at a "dry" marina stored on bunks in stacks of other boats. We would call them about 15 minutes ahead of time, and they would forklift the boat into the water. I used to ride the train myself to school so my parents didn't have to drop me off with my variety of things. On the way home I would get off the train at a beach for after school sailing lessons. They had Canoes, kayaks, windsurfers, small boats, etc. so you didn't have to own your own or bring it on a train.
When I lived in Seattle, and Vancouver, there were busses that regularly went to trailheads. They would add express routes on the weekends from downtown directly to trailheads in Seattle.
If I were a golfer, I can't imagine being willing to walk my clubs a few miles over 18 holes, but not be willing to walk them a block or two to the bus stop. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some people leave their clubs in a locker at the course so they don't have to load them into and out of their car.
All of the "problems" that you solve with your car have already been solved in other places without using cars. It seems like a distinct lack of imagination to think that everything you own has to be at your home, and that you have to use a car to use it.
Self-driving electric vehicles are the future of public transportation: safer, faster, cheaper, and less environmental impact than trains. Additionally, nothing is better for pedestrians and cyclists of the future than self-driving electric vehicles.
> Additionally, nothing is better for pedestrians and cyclists of the future than self-driving electric vehicles.
How about no cars at all (or significantly fewer cars)? Adoption of mass transportation like trams, trains and buses is better for pedestrians and cyclists.
> Adoption of mass transportation like trams, trains and buses is better for pedestrians and cyclists.
Buses are terrible to bike around: obstruct visibility, hard to pass, block traffic when they stop, and are louder and more polluting than electric cars.
Trains don't yield to pedestrians and only serve a very limited number of locations.
I mean, I certainly hope that the future is those things in places where they're practical.
There are many places where they just aren't practical—where sidewalks are useless, because the nearest thing to walk or bike to is miles away, the weather gets too inhospitable to walk or bike safely for much of the year, and the places people want to go are just too spread out for trains to be at all viable.
For those of us who choose not to live in dense urban areas, I would dearly love to see full self-driving cars someday...but given the challenges we've observed in the last few years, I'm now skeptical as to whether we'll realistically see them arrive.
Who else has put more eggs in self driving than Waymo/Google? They have a fully autonomous service running in two cities running 24/7, with two more announced. 700,000+ trips in 2023 so far. They’ve spent tens of billions over the years on R&D, custom sensors and vehicles. That doesn’t sound like a hobby to me.
Google is pretty damn good at hobbies then. What is everyone else doing for whom this isn't a hobby? Pretty sad that someone's side hustle is doing better than your "major eggs", no?
Waymo pioneered self driving and has been quietly in the lead since. Companies like Tesla and Cruise are all smoke, no fire riding on Waymo's coattails in public perception.
Autonomous driving is not a core business for Google at this point: almost all profits come from ads, some good chunk of revenues from GSuite and cloud, but autonomous driving is orthogonal to the rest of their business.
They have achieved great things, and kept a steady pace, but my point was there is no urgency to "deliver" -- it doesn't really reflect in any way on core business, is not necessary for their survival, but is a moonshot that could really pay off. For Tesla and Cruise, it is much more existential that they are not left behind in self driving.
Waymo is not under Google. It is an independent company under Alphabet, unlike something like Cloud or YouTube for example which are under Google. It has the same leadership but the company is very separate. For Waymo, it is an existential crisis to fail at self driving because Google ad money is not funding Waymo.
And Cruise went hard with their GM-backed power to lobby to bend rules for them harder and faster than Waymo could.
Remember the Firefly? Totally unacceptable to have a low-speed vehicle with no controls. But Cruise? Sure, fuck it, why not have a giant EV Bolt with no controls? Or a giant box-on-wheels?
Tesla has been kept alive only because they are scared to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel. They have very low confidence in the system to allow for driver inattention, let alone completely remove the driver. Numerous software “rewrites” over the years with many buzzwords attached, and they still haven’t clocked a single driverless mile.
They also have a huge fan base (investors) who are happy to babysit FSD in order to provide more “training data” and they’ve rationalized themselves whatever little benefit it offers is worthy of the product name.
Tesla cannot abandon FSD, if they did Musk, and by extension (and due to all kinds of financial connetctions and dependencies) all his other companies would be in very serious trouble.
Not at all, Tesla has enough cash on hand to pay everyone out a few billion if there was a judgement wrt FSD. They outran the liability with the brand and sales.
The comment you're replying to is not talking about court-enforced liabilities. If the pull out of FSD they're basically Mercedes with a 5 year lead on manufacturing. That is categorically not a trillion dollar company and the house of cards leveraged against Tesla stock crumbles.
Nah, there is still enough collective delusion in the brand to keep the stock somewhat propped up vs legacy auto’s slow death. BYD and Tesla are crushing it comparatively and have the supply chain to keep ramping. No one else is selling meaningful volume at this time. Mercedes is certainly not the future in any meaningful way.
5 year lead on manufacturing vs Mercedes? Are panel gaps and technicians swapping USDM headlights to EUDM on cargo ships transporting their cars to Europe a 5 year lead now?
Many are shorting Tesla and continue to lose money because of the markets idiocy. If I were a billionaire I would short it, but as it stands I cannot risk losing money just because of stupid prolonged hype.
I'm not betting against anything, my money is going to real estate me and my family will live in, not WSB gambles. Also, betting against hordes or Tesla fanboys does not seem rational at all, doesn't mean the product is any good or has a bright future still.
I don't understand what you mean. Mercedes-Benz is currently ahead of Tesla on autonomous driving. They have a working SAE Level 3 system already. It is currently very limited but will expand over time.
DRIVE PILOT is ready to chauffeur you under conditions that help ensure a secure ride. Conditions include:
Clear lane markings on approved freeways
Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH
Daytime lighting and clear weather
Driver visible by camera located above driver's display
There is no construction zone present.
and from the manual:
The distance [to the vehicle in front] is neither too small nor too large
How is this remotely comparable to FSD? Drive Pilot is less technologically ambitious than the 1995 CMU No Hands Across America vehicle, which happened 28 years ago. Polishing it enough to accept liability is cool, but there is no technology path from follow-the-leader to general purpose self-driving.
Mercedes Drive Pilot is aimed at a different use case than Tesla FSD so it's difficult to make a direct comparison, but independent reviews generally indicate the Mercedes system is superior. Tesla doesn't have a viable technology path to general purpose SAE Level 4+ autonomous driving either, so I don't see any difference there.
Why is everyone so overly dramatic about this stuff. I remember when FSD was announced on HN everyone knew it'd be way longer and he was just pumping it up cuz that's how he is. It wasn't some big surprise.
Now everyone is acting like it's do or die, as if everyone bought Tesla's just so they won't have to ever touch a steering wheel at some point in the future. Only 19% opted for it and plenty of those are probably wealthy people who can afford novelties and all that matters at the end of the day is if you're competitive with the alternative options on the market (holistically not just feature to feature). Ultimately it's still just a car people bought instead of a BMW or whatever. They're not making car purchasing decisions comparing it to some beta project only running via taxis in silicon valley and some random small cities.
HN is just generally awful on this topic and not worth commenting in imo.
Tesla is very well positioned even if they did zero on FSD (which they won't). The Model Y was the best selling car on earth across all categories (including ICE and EVs!) - not sure what more you could want for car company success.
HN has a lot of people that hate Elon Musk because they disagree with his politics. It's clear to anyone that is on here every day since his twitter became popular.
If you look back, 10 years ago HN loved him (see convo about first time 2 falcon 9s landed), but now that he is the richest man in the world the tides have turned.
You say that like there's something wrong with disagreeing with anti semitism. Of COURSE people disagree with his politics. You'd have to be fucked in the head not to. HN isn't Stormfront, you know. His behavior changed and new facts arrived since he used to be popular, so reasonable people changed their minds about him, and unreasonable racists are now his new biggest fans. The reason people hate him is not that he's the richest man in the world, it's that he's a bigot.
I'm stunned that I need to explain that to you. Is it actually news to you? If so, welcome out from under your rock. Or are you just pretending not to know, in order to troll?
There are uncountably many horrible things I don't need to insincerely issue a non-apology apology for at the insistence of my legal department, because I never did them in the first place.
You've got a lot of catching up to do from your 10 year absence from reality. I'm not going to lead you to water because you'll refuse to drink. Go google it for yourself, and stop trolling.
Exactly the response I was expecting from you too, since I just said you were pretending not to know in order to troll, and that confirms it.
I don't owe you any examples, because you know very well but are pretending not to know what I'm referring to, you're not a serious person, you're intellectually dishonest, and you're trolling, so your bad faith arguments don't matter, and you don't deserve a response, troll.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
This quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre's work "Anti-Semite and Jew" (originally "Réflexions sur la question juive"), written in 1946. In this passage, Sartre analyzes the behavior and motives of anti-Semites. He argues that anti-Semites are aware of the absurdity and frivolity of their arguments. According to Sartre, they engage in such discourse not to persuade through rational debate but to amuse themselves and to disconcert their opponents. They do this by undermining the seriousness of any conversation, thus avoiding genuine discussion. When pressed, they may cease the discussion, indicating that they are above argumentation. This approach, Sartre suggests, is a form of bad faith, a concept he discusses in his existentialist philosophy, referring to acts of self-deception or dishonesty in one's dealings with oneself and others.
He is guilty (as in they lost this lawsuit for millions in damages) of letting the Fremont, California factory run like this [1]:
Robert Hurtado, a supervisor at Tesla, called Diaz the N-word over 30 times, including by saying “[N-word], hurry up,” “[N-words] are lazy,” and “I wish I can get all you [N-words] fired.” Tr. 3:604:23-606:8. Ramon Martinez, another Tesla supervisor, called Diaz the N-word over thirty times, said “I hate you, [N-word],” and told him “to go back to Africa.” Tr. 3-603:11604:20. Diaz's supervisor, Tamotsu “Tom” Kawasaki, testified that Martinez often used the words “mayate” and “chongo,” both racial slurs in Spanish. Tr. 2-281:9-12. Wayne Jackson, a Black program manager at Tesla, confirmed that Martinez used the word “mayate.” Tr. 2-381:17382:7. Martinez denied all of this. Tr. 3-584:18-585:1.
Diaz also testified that he complained to Romero several times about being called the N-word. Tr. 3-613:5-14. Romero agreed that he learned Diaz had been complaining about racist conduct, see Tr. 3-542:22-24, 543:13-14, though Romero said Diaz did not complain directly to Romero at least until the Timbreza incident, Tr. 3:561:1-4. Romero testified that he did not personally investigate Diaz's complaints and was specifically told by Tesla to not personally investigate the Timbreza incident. Tr. 3-541:22-542:1, 544:21-545:2, 549:13-550:16. Diaz and Romero both testified that Tesla never fired anyone for using the N-word. Tr. 3-552:10-19, 615:13-15.
Jackson testified that the use of the N-word was “[r]ampant,” as in it was used “[e]very day,” “[m]ore than several times a day.” Tr. 2-381:3-15. He found the N-word “[e]xtremely” offensive and “very derogatory” when it was used, regardless of how it was said. Tr. 2-383:15384:2. He said that these words should not be used in a workplace, but that there was “nothing” he could do to stop their use “[b]ecause Tesla allowed it. They didn't stop it.” Tr. 2-384:12-22.
Yeah the irony is he used to get a lot of hate from the right (because of environmentalism and EVs being left-coded) while the left loved him, but it's flip-flopped. I think partly because the media is directly threatened by twitter - there's a conflict of interest, but also because the progressive left has gotten worse (though I think the 'hate the rich' bit is part of it).
The same types of people (inaccurately) labeling Musk an antisemite are often simultaneously pushing/defending DEI offices and ideology at universities that cause actual direct threats against Jewish students.
I know that to be the case. I've checked the numbers from reputable sources numerous times.
But my mind still fails to comprehend this. It's a $80k cad luxury idiosyncratic vehicle. How's this out-selling civic and corolla, kia and hyundai base models? Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide? I just don't understand that number if it's talking by units sold (and not revenue or profit). My entire world-view fails to make sense of that factoid.
I've sent it reported by several websites but I've never seen the primary source of that "fact". Lots of websites source Motor1 (some fly by night website I've never heard of) who source but do not link JATO Dynamics, another source I've never heard of, who has supposedly compiled "multiple sources" to find this figure.
Base Model Y starts at $43k USD. Then there's probably some electric incentives to bring the even lower depending on where you live, so presumably you can get one in the mid to upper $30's.
That's not bad for a new car, especially when the general buyer I think mostly considers it a luxury brand.
Also the floor for car prices has gone up. The days of the near $10k new car are over.
> Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide?
I'm far from a millionaire and a $40-50k car is not unreasonable, my wife's car is in the low $50s. But I have a Kia Forte that was like $25k. A small Kia for $25k! But it was the cheapest car I could find on shortish notice that had lance centering and whatnot.
USA and Canadian pricing is clearly different, fascinating! We just got a Kia Rio 5 for $20K CAD (starting price is $17K CAD). Which is less than 25% the price of Tesla Y starting at $68-70k (see my sibling comment a bit up for breakdown details). Absolutely different cars in size, features, capabilities, etc, yes! But for me, in Canada, Tesla Y is very much in the luxury category :-/
Yeah I wouldn't buy one, was just trying to make the point that it wasn't so expensive that it didn't have potential to sell well just based on price, given the parent millionaire remark.
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.
Tesla Model Y, according to website, starts at 70k CAD.
Toyota RAV4, according to website, starts at 36K CAD.
So that's plus or minus twice the price :-/
Other way of looking at it - even if it were "Only $15k USD difference" in USA, that is an entire car worth of difference (not only in pre-COVID times, when you could buy a new car for $10k! We just bought a $17k Kia Rio 5. Tesla Y is four time the price, and ~2.5 times the price of Corolla or Civic, which again I wouldn't think of as "marginally more expensive". (Edit: And this does not include the money one would presumably need to spend to install chargers etc at home).
Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's a somewhat Hacker-News specific perspective that Tesla isn't luxury, or that $15k USD difference isn't much. Acura RDX starts at $57K CAD, which is 12K CAD less than the Tesla Y, and I'd certainly consider that a luxury car.
Other people might not! But that underscores my point that for high earners, "luxury" and "rich" creeps up. (same for me too! I used to think $100k a year was "rich" until I got there and then I conveniently moved up my own personal definition. I don't consider our Honda Odyssey a luxury internally - I consider it a "necessity" or a "practical choice" until I have a "whoa" moment and remember that my parents took five people around in a little Citroen AX and Zastava 101, and that vast majority of people cannot afford a $55k CAD family car - and even we got it used from a 2 year lease because $55k CAD for a car is just a lot lot lot of money)
A lot of people are no longer buying new cars. Of my groups of friends, only the very wealthy and well paid ones have done so. Half of them very reluctantly because the used car market getting so crazy. In fact a lot of the craziness of the used car market is down to increasingly people can’t afford a new car.
It's cherry-picked statistics. It's just talking about a single model. Tesla has far fewer models than the larger automakers, so total sales are more concentrated in any one model.
Tesla has sold about 5 million vehicles in its entire history. The last time Toyota sold less that 5 million vehicles in a single year was 20 years ago (they do close to a million vehicles a month now [1]). VW Group is not far behind Toyota.
Because Teslas market gap is based on the assumption that it is a tech company. This assumption is, basically, only FSD and Musks image as a tech genious. And a lot relies on Teslas valuation, including for a time SpaceX funding.
Officially announcing that FSD is a dead end takes allnof that away, and Tesla might very well be valuated as car company (which it is). And that share price adjustment could, or will, be a very serious problem Musk and his enterprises.
There was a time VW sold more cars in a year then Tesla did in its entire history (they still do by the way, a lot more), had the best selling car in the world, the VW Golf, for years in a row, was profitable, on its way to surpase Toyota as the biggest car manufacturer by units sold and had nowhere near the multiples in the valuation that Tesla has.
So no, having the best selling car is by no means a reason Tesla share prices are where they are.
Toyota has four of the top ten selling cars and is worth $290B. Tesla has two and is worth $792B. Tesla the carmaker is a valuable company but not more than Toyota.
You could make the argument a few years ago that Tesla was only electric car maker and would capture the market as it grew. But now lots of companies make electric cars. Electric cars are booming, Tesla is growing fast, but they are losing market share.
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.
Because that's what Musk has promised many years going. It's snake oil sold to the gullible because it's highly unlikely that the processors and sensor array in the production cars sold (with this feature) will ever be able to actually do FSD - no matter how advanced the software becomes.
If a company consistently lies to its customers and the market as a whole, shouldn't there be consequences?
The biggest reason why I haven't traded in the Tesla for something else is FSD. No other system compares. With FSD, I can do 6-8 hour segments where I actually drive the car less than ten miles total.
The Supercharger Network is nice as well but Electrify America and evGo have been scaling hard as well and they work for the most part. Not like that matters because the Supercharger Network is being opened up.
Why would they want to abandon FSD? I look up videos whenever these threads come out and over the last few years it seems to have made astonishing progress.
2 million miles per day of FSD driving is impressive. The resulting training data from every corner of the USA is a bonkers advantage.
Their existing system is pretty strong evidence that it was in fact a model training problem -- do you mean to say that you think training will stall out before it gets to the point of being viable?
I'll admit that I am by no means an expert and might be completely wrong, but yes, I believe that model training cannot fully solve driverless vehicles.
All models that we train today have edge cases where the model produces wildly inaccurate output. As far as I'm aware, nobody yet has managed to squeeze this problem out.
ChatGPT is still an overall useful tool with the occasional hallucination. Those types of edge cases in software driving a car are unacceptable.
Right, said another way, is driving a completely deterministic activity or does it sometimes require general intelligence. If it's not completely deterministic, then you might need a human in the loop.
ChatGPT intentionally plows through low-confidence scenarios. It just tries to do its best because "I dunno" is reliably low-utility while a hallucination doesn't gamble lives. It errs on the side of hallucination by design: if you alter the RLHF feedback, you can alter the confidence level.
In FSD, as you point out, the stakes are higher. It makes a different design decision: it slows down in low-confidence situations. Just like a person. If you watch a FSD video, you'll see that most of the human interventions happen because FSD lost confidence in a tricky scenario and halted the car even though the pathing ultimately wound up being correct. This won't solve every edge case, but neither do humans -- the bar is (or should be) "better than human," not "perfect," otherwise we are sacrificing lives on principle.
I have no idea if training will stall out half way through the march of 9s. It might, but if it does, it won't be because there is no high level strategy to control hallucinations. That already exists.
Tesla sold their investors and customers on "full self driving", not "self driving where you must always have your hands on the wheel ready to take over".
Customers are willing to tolerate the latter right now because they believe the former is still in development.
I'm not here to argue that the overly enthusiastic timetables weren't cringe. They definitely were. I'm just here because there seems to be consensus that FSD is doomed and it doesn't remotely seem that way to me.
Maybe, but I think that feedback and training data from supervised driving will continue to propel Tesla along the march of 9s until FSD has genuine superhuman performance. Of course, there is only one way to find out. Time will tell.
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.
Should you remove the human and then expand scope (Waymo)? Or expand the scope and then remove the human (Tesla)?
I dunno. I personally think the Tesla approach is fundamentally better because it obtains more data, faster. Millions of miles per day rather than millions of miles per year, with better macrodiversity to boot. However, that's just a heuristic: we've got a Tortoise and Hare scenario and as the parable teaches us, it's not so difficult to imagine a scenario where slow and steady wins the race. Even though I favor the Tesla approach, I could see this going either way.
That said, I do think it's uncharitable to read failure into Tesla's high level decisions. They could have chosen the Waymo path and dumped all their effort into maximizing reliability on a small scenario subset. They chose not to. There are Andrej Karpathy interviews about it. They wanted to data-max. They data-maxed. Now they have 300x the data collection rate of Waymo. That's not failure, and it may even be a killer advantage. We'll see.
> They wanted to data-max. They data-maxed. Now they have 300x the data collection rate of Waymo.
Citation needed.
What Tesla lacks is quality data, which Waymo has due to their high fidelity sensors. Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for. They still have embarrassing failures so basic in nature [1], you know they're going nowhere. If all it took was data, they would have something meaningful by now.
Tesla's data isn't just more volumnious than Waymo's, it's also higher quality. Macrodiversity is important. LiDAR isn't. Scene reconstruction got good in the last few years, and that's what LiDAR was competing with. Meanwhile, there's no substitute for macrodiversity.
Anyway, you asked for citations. Here they are.
Waymo:
> Waymo was the clear leader in 2022 with 2.9 million miles with safety drivers
Waymo has millions of driverless miles at this point. Tesla has zero. I'm not sure how Waymo's safety driver miles is relevant here.
> Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
And what exactly have they got to show for it? All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco. You don't need nationwide data not to run stop signs or swerve onto oncoming traffic.
Safety-driver miles are more useful for training. Driverless miles are more useful for proving. Like I said, different paths: remove the human then expand scope vs expand scope and then remove the human. Waymo is undeniably further along path 1, Tesla is undeniably further along path 2. Which path is shorter? I'm pretty sure it's path 2, but time will tell.
> All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco
Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade. Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere. You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope. Time will tell.
> Safety-driver miles are more useful for training.
Waymo does most of its training in simulation. They do 20+ million miles of simulation every single day with 25,000 "virtual" vehicles. They don't even have to put out many cars for training.
> Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think driving in SF is easy or that Waymo is only doing it in the easiest situations. They cover the entire city 24/7, and in rain and fog.
> Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere.
And they won't because maps are clearly a big part of their tech stack and they've found a way to efficiently maintain them. That's what gives them the confidence a.k.a reliability to remove the driver.
> You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope.
So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today. Community trackers (absence of Tesla sharing data) show Tesla's intervention rate hasn't really improved much at all and they still seem to make extremely basic mistakes. So the formula clearly isn't working as of today.
Tesla has simulations too, of course. Thing is, the world has fractal complexity and synthetic data only captures the variation that you tell it about. Simulations for synthetic data generation are literally my job -- this is where my intuition is at its strongest.
> if you think driving in SF is easy
I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring. Google and Waymo are used to having a scale advantage, but Tesla's fleet utterly dwarfs them.
> Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today.
That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
> So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla.
FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time. They don't even use freeways, last I checked. Slow and steady is a fine strategy, I wish them luck in the marathon, but it's a bit early to call this one for Waymo.
I'm used to holding back the enthusiasm in Tesla circles where we are naturally predisposed to call the race early for Tesla, so this is a fun change of pace.
> I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring.
Then explain to me why it can’t stop for stop signs in SF or can’t drive in a straight line without swerving onto oncoming traffic. Surely, they have a lot of data from the city with their large fleet? Either the data is helping or it’s not.
> That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
Yes, with a driver. And still with poor intervention rates after years of development. What’s Tesla’s timetable for getting their reliability up and removing the driver? That’s really the ballgame in self driving.
> FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time.
“Works everywhere” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when you rely on a driver to prevent crashes. Literally does not pass the true test of self driving.
It took Waymo 10 years to completely remove the driver. Now they’re announcing new cities and capabilities constantly, with freeways coming soon. Let’s see how many “rewrites” it takes for Tesla to tell drivers not to pay attention, let alone completely removing them. I wish them luck (as a Model 3 owner), but they’re working with their hands tied behind their backs on this one.
As a vehicle user, and not a stock holder, there is only heuristic that will determine whether I get into either of their vehicles: Which one is more likely to kill me.
I'll take a ride in a self driving taxi through residential streets that might hit a dog.
I will not pay for a vehicle that will hard brake on a highway or drive under a tractor trailer.
Maybe after more deaths and data Tesla will pull ahead in that risk calculation but I will not pay to be part of that.
If they don't think it's achievable, the smart move at this point is to shrink the team down to just a few people and claim to still be working on it, while pushing incremental improvements every few months while telling customers and investors that 'its coming'.
Any other move causes a precipitous drop in stock price as investors see that they won't be taking over the entire transportation industry.
Correct, FSD is baked into the future success of Tesla. It is the hype engine that has helped keep the company alive all these years. However you notice they are starting to pull back from all there promises of robotaxi's and now Musk is calling it "supervised" FSD.
Because, despite the phony name, it's not actually self-driving. It's merely a driver assist. And when it's only a driver assist, there's always someone sitting in the driver's seat (who may or may not be paying attention) that you can pin any crash on.
This is a big dramatization of the Tesla situation. No consumer vehicle has a driverless system that tolerates inattention, they are merely driving aids. Nobody on the consumer market is claiming to be anywhere near level 5 fully autonomous driving.
Tesla’s full self driving system is the only one on the consumer market that will drive on city streets for you in the form of beta software. Yes, it’s going to make you touch the wheel and prove you are alert. Which competitor doesn’t? Yes, it’s a beta that isn’t done. Yes, it will disengage at some point. Are there any other car makers with software that is further along?
A Waymo driverless cab has a roof rack and all four corners of the vehicle covered with equipment that might cost up to five figures to produce and install. It isn’t a consumer product. The whole reason consumer automakers like Tesla don’t want to bother with that equipment is that it isn’t something that will ever make financial sense. Consumer personal vehicles are cost control exercises where every dollar and cent counts. When you buy a base model Tacoma and it has an 8” screen instead of a 12” screen, that’s a change that saved Toyota $5-10 at most, and that $5 or $10 matters.
Your comment makes it sound like Tesla is in some kind of financial or competitive danger because of its autopilot/FSD feature, but I think that just isn’t true from a dollars and cents standpoint. If anything Tesla’s strategy has much higher profit margin potential due to its reliance on consumer grade equipment.
That matters, but what almost surely matters more is providing a differentiation among the trim levels to justify the four-figure difference in prices.
It doesn't matter what other consumer vehicles or Waymo offers, or their financial state (which wasn't point of my comment). Tesla is the one who has continuously promised they'd be L5 and have robotaxis "by end of the year" for years now.
When questioned on their own promises, you can't turn around and say "It's a beta; no other car maker is further along".
Of course, it's a successful business already because many consumers believed Tesla's (false) promises. If that's your bar, then very well. But they still haven't met their original stated goal and it doesn't look like they're going to anytime soon.
> No consumer vehicle has a driverless system that tolerates inattention...
Mercedes's Drive Pilot (L3), which you can buy in a production car today, is explicitly advertised as allowing drivers to take their attention off the road and do other things in specific situations.
It's not L5, but it'll absolutely tolerate inattention and let you e.g. pull out your iPad to wage an HN comment battle while it drives you from Berlin to Potsdam.
Clear lane markings on approved freeways
Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH
Daytime lighting and clear weather
So if it's night or raining or foggy, you can't use it for that drive. If there's no or little traffic, you can't use it for that drive. In circumstances in which you can use it, you're gonna be doing 40MPH in the right lane.
It doesn't, but it can't go faster than 40 mph so it wouldn't be pleasant to go 40 mph while people are zooming past you at 70 mph on the empty autobahn.
> On suitable freeway sections and where there is high traffic density, DRIVE PILOT can offer to take over the dynamic driving task, up to the speed of 40 mph.
> Mercedes's Drive Pilot (L3), which you can buy in a production car today, is explicitly advertised as allowing drivers to take their attention off the road and do other things in specific situations.
So Mercedes is going to take 100% liability if their system causes a crash, right?
> A Waymo driverless cab has a roof rack full of equipment that might cost up to five figures to produce and install. It isn’t a consumer product. The whole reason consumer automakers like Tesla don’t want to bother with that equipment is that it isn’t something that will ever make financial sense.
Baloney. I, and many others (and as you point out, many Tesla owners already have) would pay considerably for true self driving that actually worked. That is, if I could get true self driving (meaning I could take a nap or read a book), I would easily pay for lidar and other advanced sensors.
The reason I'd never trust Tesla's FSD claims is that I believe (like many of their own engineers) that their (really Musk's) "camera only" approach is foolhardy and unsafe.
If Tesla gets their solution across the finish line, Waymo’s solution is instantly uncompetitive just from a hardware cost standpoint. The fact that they’re first to get higher level self driving working would become instantly irrelevant.
I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced.
Elon is an idiot but he wasn’t wrong about the general idea of having a very low hardware cost. There’s almost no point in getting something working with exotic equipment.
> I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced.
The stakes are a tad different. I can accept the slightly lower visual quality of VHS compared to Beta. For self driving, if the lower technological level results in a slightly higher chance of "you're dead", I'm not going to be cavalier about what I choose.
But that's not really the right analogy. A VHS tape didn't have an analogy to "you're dead." It worked fine, was just as reliable, but it happened to give you a longer recording time for the money. Any negative trade-off it had was basically negligible to the average person, which is why it won.
What I mean here is that if Tesla and other automakers are developing cheap-to-mass-produce autonomous driving that ends up being 5 years behind Waymo, their lack of first-mover status is moot. The moment that the cheaper technology it catches up in capability well enough to be reasonably safe and equivalent, Waymo is stuck with a more complex and costly solution.
Waymo will be making the hand-crafted mechanical watch while the automakers will be making cheap Quartz watches. Both tell time equally well.
I know it's not the right analogy, that's why I used it as an example of what you proposed, i.e. "I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced."
The point being, in normal "format wars", people are willing to take certain tradeoffs because the stakes are low - I'm willing to be cheap because the difference in video or audio quality or whatever is negligible to me.
That dynamic doesn't exist with self-driving cars. If one system is able to drive just .5% better, I'd pay a ton more for that because my life is on the line. And it's not at all like Waymo is building a "hand-crafted mechanical watch" - they're building a system with better sensors to provide a better experience. I sincerely doubt leaving out these sensors will ever lead to a safer experience.
> they still haven’t clocked a single driverless mile.
This seems maybe technically true but extremely misleading. There is of course always a driver in the car, but they have absolutely clocked many miles with a driver in the car not needing to intervene.
I think what's interesting is how many end-to-end trips, or at least meaningfully distinct segments (eg. the highway portion, the city portion, etc.) driven without any intervention. And how repeatable that is.
You could start me in goal for the Leafs and I bet I could clock many hours of scoreless game time in a season.
Eh, driving the 99.99% of miles where nothing happens is easy.
It's the 0.01% of miles where an empty carrier bag blows across the road, or a fire truck is stopped in your lane, or a kid crosses the road without looking, that makes self driving hard.
as it does for real people - especially those that are on their phones while they drive.
FSD doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be consistently better than the typical/average driver and cause or get into less accidents than real people do.
That day is coming - it may be TSLA, it might be someone else, but sooner or later you won't even be able to afford the insurance for a car that is powered by a human if FSD provably is safer in agrregate.
Yep, this is it. It's why it's such a shame about the Cruise incident in SF - people act like it's shocking that an autonomous vehicle didn't do the correct thing when a human driven vehicle launched a person into their windshield. Of course it's terrible that the car drove over the person (and unacceptable that Cruise tried to conceal that fact), but in terms of thinking about the safety of the vehicle you really have to ask yourself whether humans would be able to handle that situation well.
Would I definitely react in the optimal way if a person hit my windshield? I wouldn't bet on it, and I would say there is a nontrivial likelihood that I would accidentally step on the gas and run over the person. That's just the nature of dealing with a truly one in a million situation that I'm totally unprepared for (just as the autonomous car was totally unprepared for it).
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.
To be honest, I'm surprised quite how poorly teslas FSD performs. They have plenty of funding, plenty of smart minds, orders of magnitude more training data than anyone...
Sure, they have hobbled themselves with lack of LIDAR - but it seems that planning and decision making is the stumbling block for most systems, not object recognition.
But still, I think there must be some poor management or a lot of bad luck in that team not to see more success.
They have a relatively small team when compared to Waymo, at least at the research/state-of-the-art level. Don't quote me on this but just look at the the difference between autopilot team size vs Waymo employees size who have a PhD in a related area. It'd at least 10x more ay Waymo, probably even more.
Hardware and HD maps makes a lot of difference too. Planning and decision making always becomes easier when you have a perfect estimate of the environment and good predictions of other agents behaviors. Intent matters a lot more than just recognition/detection in this setting.
To be fair I'd say Autopilot team is doing pretty good for the team of their size. They are no where close to Waymo, that's super clear, but if they focused all of their stack on making driver assistive tech rather than trying to push towards FSD they'd probably be better off.
> They have a relatively small team when compared to Waymo, at least at the research/state-of-the-art level.
Sure, but in every independent test, Tesla's smart driving capabilities get completely trounced by Subaru EyeSight. Does Subaru also have vastly more PhD researchers than Tesla?
I'm not following the news on this, but what metrics do these independent tests use and what aspects do they cover? Are they driver assistance features?
Subaru EyeSight works very well in my experience, but it's much less ambitious. It basically just does lane keep assist, automatic braking, and dynamic cruise control. It can't be used at all in heavy precipitation and will automatically deactivate. The cruise control also has an annoying tendency to unnecessarily slow down on the freeway when you're in the slow lane and the vehicle in front takes an exit ramp.
I'm sorry but there's no way that Subaru EyeSight can "trounce" FSD. Maybe it is slightly better in some scenarios than legacy Autopilot which came out many years ago and hasn't been updated since. Tesla FSD is vastly more capable and can handle city driving with traffic controls whereas EyeSight merely just follows a lane.
1. the AEB may run on a different codepath than FSD
2. AEB needs to decide when it is appropriate to override the driver, e.g. if the driver is behaving as though they are paying attention, e.g. by repeatedly stepping on the accelerator, it is undesirable to override the driver's deliberate actions even if it appears that the driver is about to run into something. On the other hand, when the car is driving autonomously, it has full control to avoid running into anything at all.
Also, instead of trusting unscientific tabloid news with inconsistent methodologies, why not use the standard assisted driving scores from official government tests, such as the Euro NCAP? Teslas score by far the highest. https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-driving...
You have made a solid argument for why we should believe the Euro NCAP scores so I will accept their assessment that Tesla is by far the worst.
Your link shows Tesla scores 36/100 in assistance competence, the lowest score by far. The second lowest is 52/100 and the average over all models (excluding Tesla) being ~67/100.
Your original link was to the “Assisted Driving Gradings” which evaluates ADAS systems such as Tesla Autopilot.
What you just linked is the AEB (and other collision avoidance/warning) rating and “AEB has nothing to do with self driving or Autopilot” as you said, so is totally irrelevant.
So, I stand by your position that we should trust Euro NCAP which means concluding Tesla Autopilot is by far the worst system.
In that "worst system" result it actually scored full marks on Adaptive Cruise Control Performance and got dinged points on subjective points such as "Driving Collaboration". The conclusion states that it excels at driving but the design may cause over-reliance. Since the 2020 test, Tesla has added a lot of new features such as driver monitoring via in-cabin camera which is extremely good at detecting whether I am focused on the road or looking at my phone.
For what it's worth, I have lots of experience with both Autopilot (both legacy and FSD) and various cruise control implementations. Tesla is honestly just vastly better.
So, we should “use the standard assisted driving scores from official government tests, such as the Euro NCAP” when you thought “Teslas score by far the highest”, but now you say the test sucks and has lots of methodology problems.
It looks like of the features both systems have, Subaru EyeSight performs better... But Tesla FSD has vastly more abilities (some of which it performs well at, some middling, and some poor).
I also see questionable engineering decisions. For example, some reverse engineering showed that there was an overlay map of problematic stop signs and road signals that was downloaded per-road on all navigation routes. Surprise surprise, as that data got out of date, the car would randomly slam the brakes on as the overlay data told it there must be a stop sign, when in fact it was a temporary sign from construction months ago.
If you're aiming for end-to-end neural networks, you shouldn't have hard overlay facts like this. Ideally you get all the behaviour you need from curating training data, but if you can't do that the most you should have location specific info-vectors that nudge the network into making the right decision if needed. Such info-vectors can be used for all kinds of things, like "this city has aggressive drivers", "this street has a blind corner", "there's a dog at this house who loves to run under wheels", "this country drives on the other side of the road", etc.
If the list is of objects they can't yet reliably detect, then how would they implement your suggestion to detect those objects? I'm sure they have a lower tolerance for false negatives, so of course the known problems must be hard-coded.
Lets imagine there is a stop sign that is half hidden by a bush and pretty faded, so the stop sign detection logic says "only 5% chance it's a stop sign". That in turn isn't enough to make the car stop.
The hardcoding approach says "This is a sign. 100% sure.".
The vector approach says "There's a hard to see stop sign around here, boost up the probability of anything stop-sign-ish a bunch".
The difference functionally is that nothing in the real world is ever 100% certain. So you should never tell any bayesian machine (which a neural network effectively is) that anything is 100% true.
The vector approach I outlined is far more general than the above though - it allows any behaviour of the car to be tweaked automatically or manually. location-specific vectors can be learned from data, and/or put in by operatives. The way the neural net trains, the meaning of a vector could 'evolve' too - for example, whenever a human puts in that there is a hidden stop sign, the neural net might learn that that means other human drivers might occasionally fail to see the sign and stop in those locations. Even though it had never witnessed a human failing to stop in this specific location, it has learnt that is part of the meaning of this vector.
I'm saying it's very likely that the business has exactly zero tolerance for the detector missing those signs while there are known, unresolved issues. They can't have something happen when they "knew it could happen".
After "resolving" the issue, then they can resume tolerating the normal probabilities.
In the US, it might be more of a precaution. In Europe, it could be more of a legal obligation. Either way, I doubt engineering has a say in the matter.
On the contrary I'm quite surprised how well FSD performs. Of course, it's not fully autonomous like Waymo, but here in the Bay Area it works remarkably well on the suburban stroads outside of San Francisco. I basically never have to intervene at all. Moreover, when you read news like how Cruise actually has a manual intervention every 5 miles [1], it seems that actually Tesla is not really as behind as some naysayers claim.
> Tesla has been kept alive only because they are scared to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel. They have very low confidence in the system to allow for driver inattention, let alone completely remove the driver. Numerous software “rewrites” over the years with many buzzwords attached, and they still haven’t clocked a single driverless mile.
That is quite backwards.
When they first launched, the steering wheel checks were every fifteen minutes. They reduced it to five minutes, and slowly had to be dragged kicking and screaming due to threats from the NHTSA to get to where it is now. Even now, most of their attitude to it has been very nudge nudge wink wink, "yeah, they make us tell you to pay attention but you don't have to" (until you do get in a collision, and they throw you under the bus, of course).
> until you do get in a collision, and they throw you under the bus, of course
You made my point for me. It's less about steering wheel checks and more about taking liability. They can remove the driver and take liability only if they are confident in their system. They are not.
Not really. They don't care about the liability until they have to. That's why they didn't care about steering wheel checks either. Tesla were not scared to "even let drivers take their hands off the wheel". It was the NHTSA who said "No, actually, you need to be", and started forcing their hand to actually implementing the checks (or rather with a reasonable interval).
Yes, but its not really clear to me how to interpret these layoffs.
1. I could understand firing a few top executives, but is laying off a quarter of the staff likely to make the cars safer? Shouldn't they be adding people focused on safety if they intend to continue to pursue it?
2. Far more people each day die in GM's not-self-driving vehicles. Why are they not firing people over that?
I guess the generous perspective is that maybe they are trying to change an internal culture? Or maybe reduce their cost base so they have a longer runway in which to emphasize safety?
But a concerning perspective, for me, is that they are irrationally prioritizing the negative publicity associated with a single rare/newsworthy incident over the unpublicized/not-newsworthy daily drumbeat of human-caused auto deaths. And that doesn't seem to be good for safety in the long term.
Large majority of layoffs were non-engineering and specifically targeted in such a way that we can refocus on standardization and benchmarking profiles for a single city re-launch while cutting and revisiting programs wholesale such as commercial operations (which is on hold for some time). We don't have infinite money and need to build standards that can benefit the whole community/industry/regulations. Despite what many are saying - this is being done calculated and methodical.
How does Cruise focus on standardization by laying off the people who were writing them? Surely you've interacted with the sensors teams, or the kernel teams, or the silicon teams, or the hardware teams, or syseng, or any of the other engineering teams that saw significant cuts?
My visibility is somewhat reduced given that I was one of them, but from what I've heard from the people remaining, 10-15% losses on those teams, including a lot of the staff+ people. It included engineers who were on the critical path for MY28, some of the people replacing the MCTM, etc.
This is not an attempt to make cars safer. It is a cost-saving measure as they slowly fold the company or attempt to pivot strategy. Remember they lost their operating license in San Francisco? How many people were employed to run that?
(2) is an age-old question. Why are people upset over Fukishima but not air pollution deaths from oil & gas?
> 2. Far more people each day die in GM's not-self-driving vehicles. Why are they not firing people over that?
First, you need to consider accidents per mile driven.
Second, you need to consider accidents attributable to the manufacturer as opposed to user error. In driverless, every accident is manufacturer error to some degree. Recalls are a decent proxy for manufacturer error in non-driverless. I'm sure that heads do roll at GM when a recall occurs.
That's funny since people used to say that cruise AND waymo were taking it slow and steady. The only difference is that waymo hasn't had a major incident.
Though as bad as it is (or isn't, I'm not super informed on the very latest version of FSD), it seems like Tesla has improved a lot recently. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's good at all, just that it was pretty bad when they started the beta. So I'm not sure which approach will end up winning. As weird as it sounds, going about it so slowly just makes you a lot more vulnerable when stuff goes wrong like with the Cruise car accident. Tesla on the other hand is a car manufacturer, so they won't really ever "quit" unless they shut down.
> 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.
Of course Tesla has killed the most people they have literally millions of cars with this functionality on the road, comparing that is kind of silly. That said I have not actually hear of any major or fatal accidents on FSD. They have also saved a lot of people by adding advanced detection that most cars on the road simply don't have. So a comparison like that really just doesn't make much sense.
Comparing Tesla Autopilot to other quasi-Autopilots makes more sense.
The real difference is that Tesla sells cars, makes money and can use this as a feature in their cars. For basic autopilot of course, but also for other things. So its worth doing for them even if they don't reach Level 5. They have not stacked their financial viability on that. Arguably they have stacked part of their credibility on that, but they have lost most of that.
Waymo and Cruise basically don't have a relevant product and wont have one for quite a while.
I also worked in AV for a time. It was like uber bro culture personofied and I didn't even work at uber. for some reason AV just draws out the worst kind of assholes. most of my co workers were from cruise and waymo. their arrogance and awfulness towards other humans was terrible.
Our CTO is leading very well through one of the roughest times in our company's history. Despite what many are saying about Cruise right now - it's not down for the count.
What would down for the count look like to you? It seems pretty shaken up from an outsider's perspective. Losing a quarter of the workforce, most of the executive suite, and getting banned from the streets of California seem like difficult challenges to overcome.
If we saw a wholesale exit of our MLI platform teams I would be concerned. But many here are waiting to see where our CTO is going to lead. Eng was spread very thin attempting to commercialize. CTO's approach appears to be much more methodical so it's sort of a - let's give him a chance
> [CTO] Elshenawy reiterated the company would be narrowing and refocusing its efforts, information shared last month following the resignation of co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt and some executive shuffling that included appointing Craig Glidden, GM’s EVP of legal and policy and a Cruise board member, as chief administrative officer at Cruise. Jon McNeill, a member of GM’s board, was also named vice chairman of the Cruise board. McNeill, who joined the Cruise board recently and was previously chief operating officer at Lyft and president of Tesla, now serves alongside GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra.
So who exactly is in charge at Cruise right now? I'm lost.
How does it work in the US? Here it's a mandatory insurance you pay on your salary, but then if you're laid off without cause, you get 80% of your salary for X amount of time (sometime the company give the missing 20% for like 2 months, but i'm not sure if it's standard).
Companies pay an unemployment insurance payroll tax that goes into a big fund managed by the state and benefits are paid out of that fund. The exact amounts and timing vary a lot from state to state. These state funds are backstopped by the federal government who will lend the states money against future unemployment insurance tax revenue.
Hm, this would probably be me today if I had been offered a position there. Weeks before Christmas! Those guys were pretty cool but from the very beginning I always felt Cruise was built to be acquired. That seemed to be the whole plan: build a dream team, redo what we did in the DARPA challenges except more impressive, get bought by some big company… profit. It all worked out but there was never a plan after that it seems, because the darpa approach was never going to solve autonomous driving, even with a mega corp backing R&D.
Since the CEO / founders have already "resigned", this feels like GM is moving towards winding down the company or at the very least strongly re-thinking their commitment to backing this long term.
Getting to FSD is probably moving a lot slower than they hoped and it's looking more and more like it will be another decade (or multiple) until a self driving company can turn a dime of profit. GM doesn't strike me as a particularly innovative company so the idea of a decades long moonshot probably isn't very appealing to them.
The dragging / lying to regulators incident was bad but axing the founders / CEO seems like it would have been enough if GM were excited about the company long term.
I disagree. The cuts are focused on commercial operations roles, not engineering. I see this as a sign that the adults have entered the room, and realized more work is needed to get the technology ready for commercial use rather than trying to prematurely skip to the end to keep up appearances with Waymo.
The press release says the cuts were focused on operations, but that doesn't mean engineering was unaffected. Even the functional safety related teams were affected.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] thread> The departures include leaders from Cruise’s legal, government affairs, commercial operations and safety and systems teams, according to the company-wide message, which GM and Cruise spokespeople confirmed was authentic.
Uber and Cruise both tried to cut corners and mistakes caused their operations massive set backs.
Tesla's efforts have killed the most people, but seem relatively resilient.
The future isn't in cars or autonomous cars, it's in sidewalks, trains, bike lanes, and other forms of transit. The best ride in a car isn't one in which I'm driving or not driving, it's one in which I don't get in the car in the first place.
The future absent radical change of cultural heart clearly is personal EVs. You don't have to like it, but it's the direction 99% of countries are moving and clearly normal people do want it.
A large percentage of the world's population commutes on mopeds/scooters.
That is due to lack of money not lack of desire.
If you asked the moped/scooter riders if they would rather have a car, they would choose a car.
As countries become more developed and wealthier, more people will be able to afford cars and car use will increase.
cities should be pushing for alternatives because they're better in literally every possible way, except convenience.
better for our safety, for our health, for the environment, for less noise, for the cost, for a sense of community, for the saved space, and so on.
Most are, but a massive number of Americans live in sprawling suburbs and small-to-medium sized towns, not cities. Most of those places are ill-suited (to the extreme) for mass transit and other non-car options - yet they are perfectly designed to handle cars.
Even so, some 2/3 of Americans live in areas that would benefit from pursuing alternatives.
However great is key. This means you need great operations: including worse case waiting time everyone should be 15 minutes or less from a place where they can find plenty things to do in the community (stores, parks, schools); and a transfer to express service to elsewhere. If you don't have great transit: people in the suburbs can afford a car, and traffic isn't a problem so they will just drive. Note that this is a higher level of service than many downtowns get.
The above is very very expensive. However cars are very very very expensive.
Denying this or misunderstanding human nature will not get you closer to mass transit, you have to first understand what motivates people before trying to convince them of another path.
Building cities and infrastructure that precludes anything other than personal vehicles - that what forces people to use them primarily.
Human nature wants convenience. A personal vehicle is not always the most convenient transport method.
I used to cycle down Peachtree Street from Buckhead to Piedmont Park...it was a harrowing experience.
Busses can run on existing highways and throughout cities. City streets can already accommodate trams and bike lanes.
I agree that self-driving cars are "going to be a thing" but their proliferation I doubt. They're not really a category change from Uber, it's just "more efficient" as an additive solution, but we need subtractive solutions. You can think of the car and self-driving cars in particular in the same way you can think of personal digital cameras, alarm clocks, and smiliar devices before the advent of the iPhone. The iPhone (and other smart phones) was a subtractive product and eliminated the need for those devices.
Similarly a sidewalk and building well (among other things) eliminate much of the need for a personal car and so Ford, GM, Toyota, Tesla, etc. can't effectively compete because they don't build sidewalks or have anything to do with this category of transit. If I can just walk over to the grocery store like I could in London or Osaka then no amount of self-driving will matter.
Small vehicles that use the road to take you on the short journeys, where mass transit is not an option.
The biggest issue with busses, for me is the timetable. Imagine having a truly 24/7 on time transit network? You'd only need a vehicle to haul something, which is not a daily operation.
Autonomous cars will result in an explosion of cars on the road and a severe increase in traffic. It'll be a disaster.
Alright so what we're going to do is extract limited resources from the earth, pump out a bunch of C02, have a lot of people or machines get together in a big factory and assemble a car, someone is going to take out a loan for $40,000 or something, pay interest on that loan, pay for insurance, pay for maintenance, pay for energy/fuel, we're going to build highways and roads, and then we're going to have the car drive itself and the passenger (of course just them because nobody is sharing their car) to their computer at work, the car is then going to circle the block for 8 hours while you work (i.e. sit on Zoom calls), and then once you are ready to head home the car will stop circling the block and come and get you.
Right. All to avoid walking, riding a bike, or god forbid being near other humans on a tram.
But seriously, privately owned cars are the problem here. If, instead, taxi service is normalized, then we don't have this problem, and my car doesn't need to circle the block because it isn't my car. As long as I can get home at the end of the day, a self driving taxi seems like the way for the system to be organized, to avoid precisely the stupidity you described.
Of course you need to avoid all the issues of NYC where they can't do anything, but both Atlanta and Dallas are not as corrupt (which isn't saying much) around transit.
Something like 40% of trips in Amsterdam are still made by car. It’s a useful tool, just not the ultimate solution to every transportation issue.
Although it may have become a problem with all this sunken cost.
All that to say I hope I am wrong in the biggest way possible.
But I feel the pandemic has upended any momentum for public transit for a generation. Less frequent commmutes make long drives more tolerable and parking more affordable and available, and transit now seems like a disease vector as well as rolling homeless shelter.
For me personally, I hate the smell of weed and it is EVERY where in many downtown areas and transit hubs.
Bikes? So weather dependent, little cargo space, hard to secure, and no way to carry a family readily.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Autonomous cars will be a travesty as everyone starts sending them on non stop errands or run double commutes to save on parking…
I can't stand cars driving into buildings and businesses in my downtown area.
Whenever it snows it seems like there's a huge multi-car pileup on the highway causing a complete stop and I can't get to where I was trying to go.
The highways and roads are really really loud.
Someone drove into my family in their truck and killed us all.
Etc.
It's not fair to point out the problems with bikes like you are, like the smell of weed (what about drunk drivers??) without also at least acknowledging the gigantic list of problems associated with car-only transit.
Admittedly some of the problems you mention like a rolling homeless shelter or the smell of weed share a solution which is more, and better policing and as a society us having higher standards for ourselves and others, but they are problems that can be solved much more easily in my opinion than the problems associated with car-only infrastructure.
Also I do want to point out that the disease vector comment seems really weird to me. Like the population density at Costco is a lot less than a train ride therefore you won't get sick as often? I don't get it.
I can't imagine equating things like the smell of weed and having to share a train with a homeless person, with death, death, accident clean up, new barriers added, and then more death anyways
They seem pretty equally hopeless to solve. How are we going to "change society's standards?" This isn't even a public transit problem--it's a "dealing with other human beings" problem.
Ever since the pandemic, going out in public and trying to do basically anything is like entering a probabilistic mental facility, where some non-trivial percentage of the time, some member of the public is going to enter your life as an obstacle, aggressor, or at least as an irritant. It's always been kind of the case, but the percentage chance just seems much larger today.
Road ragers are out in equal number to smokers on the train, sidewalk poopers while you're trying to walk, and coal rollers while you're trying to bicycle. It's not the mode of transportation, it's the growing belligerence of the general public.
Weed smell is going to be a problem simply from the fact that users stink ALL THE TIME, even if they aren't smoking in the actual metro. It like an epidemic of BO.
What Costco do you shop where you are pressed up against people for half an hour? A loaded train is a sealed environment with poor ventilation and way more density than almost any other scenario in modern life. Regardless it's also people's perception, and a huge warehouse feels better ventilated than a subway car.
Speak for yourself. More metros around the world are pushing for better mass transit. Even in the US, even mild expansion of light rail makes it possible for my kids to bike+rail to school and for me to use light rail to commute to work. US needs to handle its homeless problem - agreed - but that's a bigger societal issue.
Pandemic lockdowns are not going to happen again. People are finding out that lockdowns did not help all that much (even when implemented near-perfectly like in China).
Have you seen the sidewalks and trains in American cities? Lol
Maybe if our streets and subways looked like Tokyo I’d agree with you, but getting to that point is a coup-complete problem
Take a look at Amsterdam in the 1970s. https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-...
Car infra takes next to nothing to plan and build. Trains, trams, metro, anything big at all really, takes decades, riddled with corruption, environment destruction, landscape change. State actors, maybe society, is just plain bad at organising this. Maintaining and switching cars is easy, maintaining public infra, keeping timetables (!!!), organising upgrades and extensions, keeping workforce happy and not striking is the same as above. And I live in a fat rich western country.
I get that cars don't scale, and ok, downtown of 1m+ cities should be park & ride. But maybe we should just spread out our living area more, and outside of megapolises just admit defeat and improve car infra.
As opposed to building highways, parking lots, massive car sized neighbourhoods etc...?
Car infrastructure is the same, you just haven’t seen it, and those are often related: most “pedestrian” or “bike” projects end up being about car management and almost all of the cost is usually spent there.
This has ripple effects: for example, Boston’s rail service is underfunded in large part because of the massive debt taken on to build the Big Dig. That was promised to reduce commuting times for suburbanites substantially but within a couple years of opening, they were worse than before due to the extra trips incentivized.
Admittedly we can build highways quicker, but I wonder why? Certainly it has nothing to do with corrupt state transportation agencies whose jobs depend on big highway construction jobs, auto lobbies, or highway and road construction companies that rely on big government contracts for their livelihoods... right?
Only if you pay up for that. Suburban areas are notoriously underfunding themselves.
Wait wait wait. A single double-tracked rail line that's 50 feet wide carries more passengers an hour than a 10-lane wide highway that's pure asphalt. In what world is the train a greater destruction of our environment?
And in what world is that a greater destroyer of our natural landscapes?
I understand the convenience. I also went from taking public transit exclusively to driving a lot more - and I get the appeal. I also understand the appeal is not scalable, considerably less environmentally friendly, and contributes a ton of carbon output and environment destruction.
We don't need to bend over backwards to pretend that the things that are convenient and enjoyable for us must necessarily be virtuous. We should be fully capable of owning the dissonance that our desires do not necessarily align with public benefit.
If we have any hopes of restricting climate change, reducing CO2 emissions, preventing mass extinction via habitat loss, we can't be doing this and going down this path.
It would only make any sense to create new green field cities if they were compact walkable cities built on a foundation of frequent and high speed rail access. Everything else is a regression of massive amounts of highway construction, habitat loss, CO2 emissions and strangulation by increased capture by the requirements of structurally inefficient automobile oriented infrastructure.
I have no interest living in a city and the older I get the more and more I want to move away from things.
How do I take a train or a bike 80 miles away to go hiking, boating (imagine carrying a boat or a canoe onto a train!), golfing, etc? Or the other way to the beach? Or to drop kids off at different places with a variety of things they have with them?
I would seriously limit my freedom of movement and ability to do things.
There's a tendency here for a I assume young person who lives in a city and doesn't have a family or hobbies that require going to far away places with things, etc.
> The best ride in a car isn't one in which I'm driving or not driving, it's one in which I don't get in the car in the first place.
As saying you don't see any need for cars at all. That the future is these other things. I'm just saying that cars are extremely useful and that if I had to choose between having a car or all the other things then I'd pick a car. I enjoy the other things too and am grateful to have a train nearby I can take into the city. But I can't imagine life without a car.
1. Not building car-only infrastructure. I.e. build sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, and trams/street cars. While I can afford a car, many can't or struggle to, or even if they can it is a poor financial choice. By giving people additional options we can increase entrepreneurship, reduce barriers to things like physically getting to a job, etc.
2. Reducing the need to use a car for things like buying a loaf of bread, short trips, going out to a restaurant, heading to a local sporting event, etc. There's no world in which you will forever be able to drive a large truck or SUV 15 miles to a grocery store to buy a few trivial items. We can do that now because we hit an energy jackpot with fossil fuels (which are necessary and useful), but economic physics dictate that this can't last. So instead of driving to do common tasks, you can instead just walk (exercise is good for you) and then walk back. If it's raining, umbrella. Etc. There are a lot of additional benefits here like obesity reduction which will save us money.
Today what we have is incredibly expensive infrastructure and transportation. We don't need to. We need more options.
When I grew up in Buenos Aires Argentina we used to take the train to our small boat, that train ran every 15 minutes. The boat was kept at a "dry" marina stored on bunks in stacks of other boats. We would call them about 15 minutes ahead of time, and they would forklift the boat into the water. I used to ride the train myself to school so my parents didn't have to drop me off with my variety of things. On the way home I would get off the train at a beach for after school sailing lessons. They had Canoes, kayaks, windsurfers, small boats, etc. so you didn't have to own your own or bring it on a train.
When I lived in Seattle, and Vancouver, there were busses that regularly went to trailheads. They would add express routes on the weekends from downtown directly to trailheads in Seattle.
If I were a golfer, I can't imagine being willing to walk my clubs a few miles over 18 holes, but not be willing to walk them a block or two to the bus stop. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some people leave their clubs in a locker at the course so they don't have to load them into and out of their car.
All of the "problems" that you solve with your car have already been solved in other places without using cars. It seems like a distinct lack of imagination to think that everything you own has to be at your home, and that you have to use a car to use it.
How about no cars at all (or significantly fewer cars)? Adoption of mass transportation like trams, trains and buses is better for pedestrians and cyclists.
Buses are terrible to bike around: obstruct visibility, hard to pass, block traffic when they stop, and are louder and more polluting than electric cars.
Trains don't yield to pedestrians and only serve a very limited number of locations.
There are many places where they just aren't practical—where sidewalks are useless, because the nearest thing to walk or bike to is miles away, the weather gets too inhospitable to walk or bike safely for much of the year, and the places people want to go are just too spread out for trains to be at all viable.
For those of us who choose not to live in dense urban areas, I would dearly love to see full self-driving cars someday...but given the challenges we've observed in the last few years, I'm now skeptical as to whether we'll realistically see them arrive.
Waymo pioneered self driving and has been quietly in the lead since. Companies like Tesla and Cruise are all smoke, no fire riding on Waymo's coattails in public perception.
They have achieved great things, and kept a steady pace, but my point was there is no urgency to "deliver" -- it doesn't really reflect in any way on core business, is not necessary for their survival, but is a moonshot that could really pay off. For Tesla and Cruise, it is much more existential that they are not left behind in self driving.
Remember the Firefly? Totally unacceptable to have a low-speed vehicle with no controls. But Cruise? Sure, fuck it, why not have a giant EV Bolt with no controls? Or a giant box-on-wheels?
They also have a huge fan base (investors) who are happy to babysit FSD in order to provide more “training data” and they’ve rationalized themselves whatever little benefit it offers is worthy of the product name.
If you're right it'll be a relatively great payday for you.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a45326503/mercedes-benz...
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
Now everyone is acting like it's do or die, as if everyone bought Tesla's just so they won't have to ever touch a steering wheel at some point in the future. Only 19% opted for it and plenty of those are probably wealthy people who can afford novelties and all that matters at the end of the day is if you're competitive with the alternative options on the market (holistically not just feature to feature). Ultimately it's still just a car people bought instead of a BMW or whatever. They're not making car purchasing decisions comparing it to some beta project only running via taxis in silicon valley and some random small cities.
Tesla is very well positioned even if they did zero on FSD (which they won't). The Model Y was the best selling car on earth across all categories (including ICE and EVs!) - not sure what more you could want for car company success.
If you look back, 10 years ago HN loved him (see convo about first time 2 falcon 9s landed), but now that he is the richest man in the world the tides have turned.
I'm stunned that I need to explain that to you. Is it actually news to you? If so, welcome out from under your rock. Or are you just pretending not to know, in order to troll?
I don't care that he called someone a pedophile. He apologized for that: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/elon-musk-apologizes-for-....
You've got a lot of catching up to do from your 10 year absence from reality. I'm not going to lead you to water because you'll refuse to drink. Go google it for yourself, and stop trolling.
Have a nice day.
I don't owe you any examples, because you know very well but are pretending not to know what I'm referring to, you're not a serious person, you're intellectually dishonest, and you're trolling, so your bad faith arguments don't matter, and you don't deserve a response, troll.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
Let me ChatGPT that for you:
This quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre's work "Anti-Semite and Jew" (originally "Réflexions sur la question juive"), written in 1946. In this passage, Sartre analyzes the behavior and motives of anti-Semites. He argues that anti-Semites are aware of the absurdity and frivolity of their arguments. According to Sartre, they engage in such discourse not to persuade through rational debate but to amuse themselves and to disconcert their opponents. They do this by undermining the seriousness of any conversation, thus avoiding genuine discussion. When pressed, they may cease the discussion, indicating that they are above argumentation. This approach, Sartre suggests, is a form of bad faith, a concept he discusses in his existentialist philosophy, referring to acts of self-deception or dishonesty in one's dealings with oneself and others.
Robert Hurtado, a supervisor at Tesla, called Diaz the N-word over 30 times, including by saying “[N-word], hurry up,” “[N-words] are lazy,” and “I wish I can get all you [N-words] fired.” Tr. 3:604:23-606:8. Ramon Martinez, another Tesla supervisor, called Diaz the N-word over thirty times, said “I hate you, [N-word],” and told him “to go back to Africa.” Tr. 3-603:11604:20. Diaz's supervisor, Tamotsu “Tom” Kawasaki, testified that Martinez often used the words “mayate” and “chongo,” both racial slurs in Spanish. Tr. 2-281:9-12. Wayne Jackson, a Black program manager at Tesla, confirmed that Martinez used the word “mayate.” Tr. 2-381:17382:7. Martinez denied all of this. Tr. 3-584:18-585:1.
Diaz also testified that he complained to Romero several times about being called the N-word. Tr. 3-613:5-14. Romero agreed that he learned Diaz had been complaining about racist conduct, see Tr. 3-542:22-24, 543:13-14, though Romero said Diaz did not complain directly to Romero at least until the Timbreza incident, Tr. 3:561:1-4. Romero testified that he did not personally investigate Diaz's complaints and was specifically told by Tesla to not personally investigate the Timbreza incident. Tr. 3-541:22-542:1, 544:21-545:2, 549:13-550:16. Diaz and Romero both testified that Tesla never fired anyone for using the N-word. Tr. 3-552:10-19, 615:13-15.
Jackson testified that the use of the N-word was “[r]ampant,” as in it was used “[e]very day,” “[m]ore than several times a day.” Tr. 2-381:3-15. He found the N-word “[e]xtremely” offensive and “very derogatory” when it was used, regardless of how it was said. Tr. 2-383:15384:2. He said that these words should not be used in a workplace, but that there was “nothing” he could do to stop their use “[b]ecause Tesla allowed it. They didn't stop it.” Tr. 2-384:12-22.
[1] https://casetext.com/case/diaz-v-tesla-inc-7
and don't forget all of the anti-union causes he donates to
The same types of people (inaccurately) labeling Musk an antisemite are often simultaneously pushing/defending DEI offices and ideology at universities that cause actual direct threats against Jewish students.
But my mind still fails to comprehend this. It's a $80k cad luxury idiosyncratic vehicle. How's this out-selling civic and corolla, kia and hyundai base models? Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide? I just don't understand that number if it's talking by units sold (and not revenue or profit). My entire world-view fails to make sense of that factoid.
I share your scepticism.
That's not bad for a new car, especially when the general buyer I think mostly considers it a luxury brand.
Also the floor for car prices has gone up. The days of the near $10k new car are over.
> Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide?
I'm far from a millionaire and a $40-50k car is not unreasonable, my wife's car is in the low $50s. But I have a Kia Forte that was like $25k. A small Kia for $25k! But it was the cheapest car I could find on shortish notice that had lance centering and whatnot.
the media salary in the US is like 55k is a lot, esp. given the prices of everything going up, and given the alternatives.
Toyota RAV4, according to website, starts at 36K CAD.
So that's plus or minus twice the price :-/
Other way of looking at it - even if it were "Only $15k USD difference" in USA, that is an entire car worth of difference (not only in pre-COVID times, when you could buy a new car for $10k! We just bought a $17k Kia Rio 5. Tesla Y is four time the price, and ~2.5 times the price of Corolla or Civic, which again I wouldn't think of as "marginally more expensive". (Edit: And this does not include the money one would presumably need to spend to install chargers etc at home).
Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's a somewhat Hacker-News specific perspective that Tesla isn't luxury, or that $15k USD difference isn't much. Acura RDX starts at $57K CAD, which is 12K CAD less than the Tesla Y, and I'd certainly consider that a luxury car. Other people might not! But that underscores my point that for high earners, "luxury" and "rich" creeps up. (same for me too! I used to think $100k a year was "rich" until I got there and then I conveniently moved up my own personal definition. I don't consider our Honda Odyssey a luxury internally - I consider it a "necessity" or a "practical choice" until I have a "whoa" moment and remember that my parents took five people around in a little Citroen AX and Zastava 101, and that vast majority of people cannot afford a $55k CAD family car - and even we got it used from a 2 year lease because $55k CAD for a car is just a lot lot lot of money)
The price is comparable, the costs of ownership are way lower, and the product is at least twice as good.
There's basically no downside which is why they're selling so well.
Tesla has sold about 5 million vehicles in its entire history. The last time Toyota sold less that 5 million vehicles in a single year was 20 years ago (they do close to a million vehicles a month now [1]). VW Group is not far behind Toyota.
----
1 - https://www.investopedia.com/toyota-global-output-hits-recor...
Officially announcing that FSD is a dead end takes allnof that away, and Tesla might very well be valuated as car company (which it is). And that share price adjustment could, or will, be a very serious problem Musk and his enterprises.
Energy. Batteries. Charging network. Top selling vehicles (Model Y is best selling car worldwide)…
So no, having the best selling car is by no means a reason Tesla share prices are where they are.
You could make the argument a few years ago that Tesla was only electric car maker and would capture the market as it grew. But now lots of companies make electric cars. Electric cars are booming, Tesla is growing fast, but they are losing market share.
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.
If a company consistently lies to its customers and the market as a whole, shouldn't there be consequences?
The Supercharger Network is nice as well but Electrify America and evGo have been scaling hard as well and they work for the most part. Not like that matters because the Supercharger Network is being opened up.
2 million miles per day of FSD driving is impressive. The resulting training data from every corner of the USA is a bonkers advantage.
All models that we train today have edge cases where the model produces wildly inaccurate output. As far as I'm aware, nobody yet has managed to squeeze this problem out.
ChatGPT is still an overall useful tool with the occasional hallucination. Those types of edge cases in software driving a car are unacceptable.
In FSD, as you point out, the stakes are higher. It makes a different design decision: it slows down in low-confidence situations. Just like a person. If you watch a FSD video, you'll see that most of the human interventions happen because FSD lost confidence in a tricky scenario and halted the car even though the pathing ultimately wound up being correct. This won't solve every edge case, but neither do humans -- the bar is (or should be) "better than human," not "perfect," otherwise we are sacrificing lives on principle.
I have no idea if training will stall out half way through the march of 9s. It might, but if it does, it won't be because there is no high level strategy to control hallucinations. That already exists.
Customers are willing to tolerate the latter right now because they believe the former is still in development.
I'm not here to argue that the overly enthusiastic timetables weren't cringe. They definitely were. I'm just here because there seems to be consensus that FSD is doomed and it doesn't remotely seem that way to me.
My point is that in the long run, Tesla cannot solve the ML edge cases by having a human available to take over at a split second notice.
I dunno. I personally think the Tesla approach is fundamentally better because it obtains more data, faster. Millions of miles per day rather than millions of miles per year, with better macrodiversity to boot. However, that's just a heuristic: we've got a Tortoise and Hare scenario and as the parable teaches us, it's not so difficult to imagine a scenario where slow and steady wins the race. Even though I favor the Tesla approach, I could see this going either way.
That said, I do think it's uncharitable to read failure into Tesla's high level decisions. They could have chosen the Waymo path and dumped all their effort into maximizing reliability on a small scenario subset. They chose not to. There are Andrej Karpathy interviews about it. They wanted to data-max. They data-maxed. Now they have 300x the data collection rate of Waymo. That's not failure, and it may even be a killer advantage. We'll see.
Citation needed.
What Tesla lacks is quality data, which Waymo has due to their high fidelity sensors. Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for. They still have embarrassing failures so basic in nature [1], you know they're going nowhere. If all it took was data, they would have something meaningful by now.
[1] https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1727889381309239731
Anyway, you asked for citations. Here they are.
Waymo:
> Waymo was the clear leader in 2022 with 2.9 million miles with safety drivers
https://www.eetimes.com/waymo-cruise-dominate-av-testing/#:~....
Tesla:
> FSD Now Drives 1 Million Miles Per Day
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1327/tesla-fsd-milestone-1....
> Graph showing 2M miles per day
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
> Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for.
Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
> Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
And what exactly have they got to show for it? All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco. You don't need nationwide data not to run stop signs or swerve onto oncoming traffic.
> All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco
Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade. Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere. You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope. Time will tell.
Waymo does most of its training in simulation. They do 20+ million miles of simulation every single day with 25,000 "virtual" vehicles. They don't even have to put out many cars for training.
> Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think driving in SF is easy or that Waymo is only doing it in the easiest situations. They cover the entire city 24/7, and in rain and fog.
> Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere.
And they won't because maps are clearly a big part of their tech stack and they've found a way to efficiently maintain them. That's what gives them the confidence a.k.a reliability to remove the driver.
> You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope.
So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today. Community trackers (absence of Tesla sharing data) show Tesla's intervention rate hasn't really improved much at all and they still seem to make extremely basic mistakes. So the formula clearly isn't working as of today.
> if you think driving in SF is easy
I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring. Google and Waymo are used to having a scale advantage, but Tesla's fleet utterly dwarfs them.
> Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today.
That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
> So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla.
FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time. They don't even use freeways, last I checked. Slow and steady is a fine strategy, I wish them luck in the marathon, but it's a bit early to call this one for Waymo.
I'm used to holding back the enthusiasm in Tesla circles where we are naturally predisposed to call the race early for Tesla, so this is a fun change of pace.
Then explain to me why it can’t stop for stop signs in SF or can’t drive in a straight line without swerving onto oncoming traffic. Surely, they have a lot of data from the city with their large fleet? Either the data is helping or it’s not.
> That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
Yes, with a driver. And still with poor intervention rates after years of development. What’s Tesla’s timetable for getting their reliability up and removing the driver? That’s really the ballgame in self driving.
> FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time.
“Works everywhere” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when you rely on a driver to prevent crashes. Literally does not pass the true test of self driving.
It took Waymo 10 years to completely remove the driver. Now they’re announcing new cities and capabilities constantly, with freeways coming soon. Let’s see how many “rewrites” it takes for Tesla to tell drivers not to pay attention, let alone completely removing them. I wish them luck (as a Model 3 owner), but they’re working with their hands tied behind their backs on this one.
I'll take a ride in a self driving taxi through residential streets that might hit a dog.
I will not pay for a vehicle that will hard brake on a highway or drive under a tractor trailer.
Maybe after more deaths and data Tesla will pull ahead in that risk calculation but I will not pay to be part of that.
Any other move causes a precipitous drop in stock price as investors see that they won't be taking over the entire transportation industry.
Oh wait, thats exactly what we see.
Tesla’s full self driving system is the only one on the consumer market that will drive on city streets for you in the form of beta software. Yes, it’s going to make you touch the wheel and prove you are alert. Which competitor doesn’t? Yes, it’s a beta that isn’t done. Yes, it will disengage at some point. Are there any other car makers with software that is further along?
A Waymo driverless cab has a roof rack and all four corners of the vehicle covered with equipment that might cost up to five figures to produce and install. It isn’t a consumer product. The whole reason consumer automakers like Tesla don’t want to bother with that equipment is that it isn’t something that will ever make financial sense. Consumer personal vehicles are cost control exercises where every dollar and cent counts. When you buy a base model Tacoma and it has an 8” screen instead of a 12” screen, that’s a change that saved Toyota $5-10 at most, and that $5 or $10 matters.
Your comment makes it sound like Tesla is in some kind of financial or competitive danger because of its autopilot/FSD feature, but I think that just isn’t true from a dollars and cents standpoint. If anything Tesla’s strategy has much higher profit margin potential due to its reliance on consumer grade equipment.
That matters, but what almost surely matters more is providing a differentiation among the trim levels to justify the four-figure difference in prices.
When questioned on their own promises, you can't turn around and say "It's a beta; no other car maker is further along".
Of course, it's a successful business already because many consumers believed Tesla's (false) promises. If that's your bar, then very well. But they still haven't met their original stated goal and it doesn't look like they're going to anytime soon.
Mercedes's Drive Pilot (L3), which you can buy in a production car today, is explicitly advertised as allowing drivers to take their attention off the road and do other things in specific situations.
It's not L5, but it'll absolutely tolerate inattention and let you e.g. pull out your iPad to wage an HN comment battle while it drives you from Berlin to Potsdam.
This is maybe technically true but in practice not really correct. Some conditions to use it are (per https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot):
Clear lane markings on approved freeways Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH Daytime lighting and clear weather
So if it's night or raining or foggy, you can't use it for that drive. If there's no or little traffic, you can't use it for that drive. In circumstances in which you can use it, you're gonna be doing 40MPH in the right lane.
So it needs other vehicles to orient itself?
Can we stop pretending that other manufacturers have better self-driving capabilities when they have such SEVERE restrictions?
I can use Autopilot at night with light rain at 80 mph. It's actually amazing how well it can read lines.
https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovation/product-innovatio...
Very specific situations.
So Mercedes is going to take 100% liability if their system causes a crash, right?
Baloney. I, and many others (and as you point out, many Tesla owners already have) would pay considerably for true self driving that actually worked. That is, if I could get true self driving (meaning I could take a nap or read a book), I would easily pay for lidar and other advanced sensors.
The reason I'd never trust Tesla's FSD claims is that I believe (like many of their own engineers) that their (really Musk's) "camera only" approach is foolhardy and unsafe.
If Tesla gets their solution across the finish line, Waymo’s solution is instantly uncompetitive just from a hardware cost standpoint. The fact that they’re first to get higher level self driving working would become instantly irrelevant.
I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced.
Elon is an idiot but he wasn’t wrong about the general idea of having a very low hardware cost. There’s almost no point in getting something working with exotic equipment.
The stakes are a tad different. I can accept the slightly lower visual quality of VHS compared to Beta. For self driving, if the lower technological level results in a slightly higher chance of "you're dead", I'm not going to be cavalier about what I choose.
What I mean here is that if Tesla and other automakers are developing cheap-to-mass-produce autonomous driving that ends up being 5 years behind Waymo, their lack of first-mover status is moot. The moment that the cheaper technology it catches up in capability well enough to be reasonably safe and equivalent, Waymo is stuck with a more complex and costly solution.
Waymo will be making the hand-crafted mechanical watch while the automakers will be making cheap Quartz watches. Both tell time equally well.
I know it's not the right analogy, that's why I used it as an example of what you proposed, i.e. "I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced."
The point being, in normal "format wars", people are willing to take certain tradeoffs because the stakes are low - I'm willing to be cheap because the difference in video or audio quality or whatever is negligible to me.
That dynamic doesn't exist with self-driving cars. If one system is able to drive just .5% better, I'd pay a ton more for that because my life is on the line. And it's not at all like Waymo is building a "hand-crafted mechanical watch" - they're building a system with better sensors to provide a better experience. I sincerely doubt leaving out these sensors will ever lead to a safer experience.
"Full Self-Driving Capability: $12,000"
Source: tesla.com
Why do people ignore comma.ai? They call it ADAS instead of FSD? Their marketing is confusing because they just provide hardware for MIT license OSS?
This seems maybe technically true but extremely misleading. There is of course always a driver in the car, but they have absolutely clocked many miles with a driver in the car not needing to intervene.
You could start me in goal for the Leafs and I bet I could clock many hours of scoreless game time in a season.
I would describe it as a system for rapid reaction and lane assist. It's very... very poor at self driving, outside of an empty interstate.
"Always a driver in the car" != driverless
You often see waymos cruising around sans driver. That's real driverless.
Very cool. Where? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it anywhere in LA.
https://waymo.com/tour/#schedule
Join the waitlist asap so you can get access when they launch in socal.
It's the 0.01% of miles where an empty carrier bag blows across the road, or a fire truck is stopped in your lane, or a kid crosses the road without looking, that makes self driving hard.
FSD doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be consistently better than the typical/average driver and cause or get into less accidents than real people do.
That day is coming - it may be TSLA, it might be someone else, but sooner or later you won't even be able to afford the insurance for a car that is powered by a human if FSD provably is safer in agrregate.
Would I definitely react in the optimal way if a person hit my windshield? I wouldn't bet on it, and I would say there is a nontrivial likelihood that I would accidentally step on the gas and run over the person. That's just the nature of dealing with a truly one in a million situation that I'm totally unprepared for (just as the autonomous car was totally unprepared for it).
Sure, they have hobbled themselves with lack of LIDAR - but it seems that planning and decision making is the stumbling block for most systems, not object recognition.
But still, I think there must be some poor management or a lot of bad luck in that team not to see more success.
Hardware and HD maps makes a lot of difference too. Planning and decision making always becomes easier when you have a perfect estimate of the environment and good predictions of other agents behaviors. Intent matters a lot more than just recognition/detection in this setting.
To be fair I'd say Autopilot team is doing pretty good for the team of their size. They are no where close to Waymo, that's super clear, but if they focused all of their stack on making driver assistive tech rather than trying to push towards FSD they'd probably be better off.
Sure, but in every independent test, Tesla's smart driving capabilities get completely trounced by Subaru EyeSight. Does Subaru also have vastly more PhD researchers than Tesla?
I mean that's what literally all of the data shows, e.g.:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
1. the AEB may run on a different codepath than FSD
2. AEB needs to decide when it is appropriate to override the driver, e.g. if the driver is behaving as though they are paying attention, e.g. by repeatedly stepping on the accelerator, it is undesirable to override the driver's deliberate actions even if it appears that the driver is about to run into something. On the other hand, when the car is driving autonomously, it has full control to avoid running into anything at all.
Also, instead of trusting unscientific tabloid news with inconsistent methodologies, why not use the standard assisted driving scores from official government tests, such as the Euro NCAP? Teslas score by far the highest. https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-driving...
Your link shows Tesla scores 36/100 in assistance competence, the lowest score by far. The second lowest is 52/100 and the average over all models (excluding Tesla) being ~67/100.
* https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model+y/46618
* https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model+s/47760
which is by far the highest out of all models tested.
What you just linked is the AEB (and other collision avoidance/warning) rating and “AEB has nothing to do with self driving or Autopilot” as you said, so is totally irrelevant.
So, I stand by your position that we should trust Euro NCAP which means concluding Tesla Autopilot is by far the worst system.
For what it's worth, I have lots of experience with both Autopilot (both legacy and FSD) and various cruise control implementations. Tesla is honestly just vastly better.
If you're aiming for end-to-end neural networks, you shouldn't have hard overlay facts like this. Ideally you get all the behaviour you need from curating training data, but if you can't do that the most you should have location specific info-vectors that nudge the network into making the right decision if needed. Such info-vectors can be used for all kinds of things, like "this city has aggressive drivers", "this street has a blind corner", "there's a dog at this house who loves to run under wheels", "this country drives on the other side of the road", etc.
The hardcoding approach says "This is a sign. 100% sure.".
The vector approach says "There's a hard to see stop sign around here, boost up the probability of anything stop-sign-ish a bunch".
The difference functionally is that nothing in the real world is ever 100% certain. So you should never tell any bayesian machine (which a neural network effectively is) that anything is 100% true.
The vector approach I outlined is far more general than the above though - it allows any behaviour of the car to be tweaked automatically or manually. location-specific vectors can be learned from data, and/or put in by operatives. The way the neural net trains, the meaning of a vector could 'evolve' too - for example, whenever a human puts in that there is a hidden stop sign, the neural net might learn that that means other human drivers might occasionally fail to see the sign and stop in those locations. Even though it had never witnessed a human failing to stop in this specific location, it has learnt that is part of the meaning of this vector.
After "resolving" the issue, then they can resume tolerating the normal probabilities.
In the US, it might be more of a precaution. In Europe, it could be more of a legal obligation. Either way, I doubt engineering has a say in the matter.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
That is quite backwards.
When they first launched, the steering wheel checks were every fifteen minutes. They reduced it to five minutes, and slowly had to be dragged kicking and screaming due to threats from the NHTSA to get to where it is now. Even now, most of their attitude to it has been very nudge nudge wink wink, "yeah, they make us tell you to pay attention but you don't have to" (until you do get in a collision, and they throw you under the bus, of course).
You made my point for me. It's less about steering wheel checks and more about taking liability. They can remove the driver and take liability only if they are confident in their system. They are not.
1. I could understand firing a few top executives, but is laying off a quarter of the staff likely to make the cars safer? Shouldn't they be adding people focused on safety if they intend to continue to pursue it?
2. Far more people each day die in GM's not-self-driving vehicles. Why are they not firing people over that?
I guess the generous perspective is that maybe they are trying to change an internal culture? Or maybe reduce their cost base so they have a longer runway in which to emphasize safety?
But a concerning perspective, for me, is that they are irrationally prioritizing the negative publicity associated with a single rare/newsworthy incident over the unpublicized/not-newsworthy daily drumbeat of human-caused auto deaths. And that doesn't seem to be good for safety in the long term.
Should there be a comma after 'standardisation'. Maybe after 'launch', too?
(2) is an age-old question. Why are people upset over Fukishima but not air pollution deaths from oil & gas?
It reflects the fact that they can no longer legally operate in their main market.
First, you need to consider accidents per mile driven.
Second, you need to consider accidents attributable to the manufacturer as opposed to user error. In driverless, every accident is manufacturer error to some degree. Recalls are a decent proxy for manufacturer error in non-driverless. I'm sure that heads do roll at GM when a recall occurs.
Though as bad as it is (or isn't, I'm not super informed on the very latest version of FSD), it seems like Tesla has improved a lot recently. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's good at all, just that it was pretty bad when they started the beta. So I'm not sure which approach will end up winning. As weird as it sounds, going about it so slowly just makes you a lot more vulnerable when stuff goes wrong like with the Cruise car accident. Tesla on the other hand is a car manufacturer, so they won't really ever "quit" unless they shut down.
That's the only heuristic that matters for the public and lawmakers. Like it or not.
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.
Comparing Tesla Autopilot to other quasi-Autopilots makes more sense.
The real difference is that Tesla sells cars, makes money and can use this as a feature in their cars. For basic autopilot of course, but also for other things. So its worth doing for them even if they don't reach Level 5. They have not stacked their financial viability on that. Arguably they have stacked part of their credibility on that, but they have lost most of that.
Waymo and Cruise basically don't have a relevant product and wont have one for quite a while.
Waymo is looking more and more reliable.
by far the most toxic place I have ever worked, I look forward to dancing on its grave
So who exactly is in charge at Cruise right now? I'm lost.
Getting to FSD is probably moving a lot slower than they hoped and it's looking more and more like it will be another decade (or multiple) until a self driving company can turn a dime of profit. GM doesn't strike me as a particularly innovative company so the idea of a decades long moonshot probably isn't very appealing to them.
The dragging / lying to regulators incident was bad but axing the founders / CEO seems like it would have been enough if GM were excited about the company long term.
Most of the layoffs are within the operations side that assumed broader immediate rollout, and engineering is "largely not impacted."