Idk, some team could have been told theyre not focusing on it, while somewhere else its still alive and well. Could also be the robotaxi and model 2 are one in the same and theyre using absolute language to prioritize the hard tasks on the critical path… or it could just be musk posturing to fuck with the market as usual.. only time will tell
People keep talking about robotaxis as if the important part is the vehicle (wheels, motor, seats, etc.) the vehicle is almost totally interchangeable if you have a capable software driving system.
Tesla is very far from having a reliable and safe driving system. 15 minutes of good driving footage is a neat tech demo, but for a deployable product you need 1,000,000 minutes of safe driving.
The others are much further along than Tesla because they aren't making hardware decisions to sell profitable cars. Waymo and Cruise both use radars, lidars, and more cameras than Tesla.
Tesla is far far closer to realizing a fully self driving car. Since Tesla made FSD (supervised) available for everyone in the US, a couple of weeks ago, there have been mountains of videos posted on X of people driving in all kinds of wild real world conditions, including big city driving, long road trips, in construction zones, crazy weather etc etc. [1]
Tesla announced a couple of days ago that they had passed 1 billion(!) miles on FSD, and growing exponentially [2]. In Elon's master plan from 8 years ago, he wrote they expected 6 billion miles before more global regulatory approval [3].
It's not there yet, but it's far far closer than most people realize. Me, personally, I think end of 2024, Tesla can demonstrate 2-3 billion miles driven on FSD and that a self-driving car is at least 10-20x safer than human drivers.
Some of the phrasing is ambiguous, since "halt" can mean different things.
That said, I wonder if it matters. It took 4 years to deliver the Cybertruck, something they were working on. I imagine a "paused" Model 2 is several years away.
I hope this is false. Tesla should be trying to beat BYD, not Waymo. I mean, the latter is interesting, but the former is the whole reason Tesla exists: Deliver a capable electric car for the masses.
(At the same time, pushback against vehicles in general is worthwhile -- let's prioritize pedestrians and mass transit -- but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
It would take me an hour and a half to get to work via mass transit vs the half hour it takes me now in a major city. It’s 9 miles. Mass transit just isn’t compatible with most American cities.
Just because your mass transit sucks doesn't mean some form of mass transit wouldn't work. Imagine a train doing that route every 5 minutes, for example. That's the reality in many cities around the world.
I think you totally missed the point of GP. Like, yes, that's exactly why we need to invest in better transit， because that experience you shared shouldn't happen.
That's a good distance for an ebike if you feel like it. Maybe you're unlucky with route but otherwise might work! May even be faster because traffic free.
I’m pretty sure I’d die on an e-bike in LA, there aren’t really any protected bike lanes on the route and everyone is on their phone. I do want to get an e-bike for our many trails and coastal bike paths. Any recommendations for something sub-$1000?
Even in one of the better cities for mass transit (Seattle) when I tried to ignore the worse P50 travel time, I experienced so many negatives that I'm probably never going to do transit again here. P90 travel time is much worse when buses don't show up (usually staffing issues or maintenance issues) or are full. Standing outside in the rain or cold when the buses are nowhere to be seen sucks. Standing for an hour in a crowded bus sucks. The occasional biohazard or violent incident on the bus or at the bus stop sucks.
Point being, it's both the infrastructure and a small number of problematic people that make this untenable for most of us.
Exactly. LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately it just isn’t now and un-informed Europeans who haven’t even visited just can’t or won’t understand how ridiculous they sound when they say we should just put in mass transit. Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people Europeans, I’ll wait.
It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media.
Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center.
But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion).
It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto"
Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.
Nope. Harker tends to skews new money and Asian American because it has an entrance exam (SSAT and ISEE), has merit based admissions, and gives scholarships if you have good grades and do well in the exam.
Old Money Palo goes to Woodlands, Woodside Priory, and Menlo School, or Palo Alto High
Lots of parents would buy houses or rent in crappy parts of East SJ to save enough money to sends both kids to Harker
The reason that new money (like me) tries to buy a house in Palo is so we can send our kids to PAUSD.
A lot of the born and raised crowd who were kids of hippies are fairly racist to the newer generation of Asian, Pacific Islander, Israeli+Eastern European, and Latino Americans on the Peninsula.
At this point I might as well buy a semi-rural house in San Benito County and spend the same amount donating a couple department libraries and Named Lecturer positions to my Alma mater for legacy benefits tbh.
It took a few decades to get this bad, it'll probably take a few decades to get good again. But if you never start, it'll never be good again. And people were displaced to build highways, why would you rule that out for mass transit?
This is still how highways (and other public infrastructure) are built now, both in the US and EU. Unfortunately, affluent communities are frequently able to unduly influence these procedures to get them moved elsewhere. That's the real fucked up part.
I guess its population density also was quite a bit higher, making it harder to serve the population well with public transport using vehicles that can transport many people at a time.
> Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people
Having said that, mass transit includes buses. There are zillions of roads in LA. On the main roads dedicate one lane in each direction to buses or, better, light rail.
Main problem will be how people would get to stations. You could change one lane on minor roads to a bidirectional bike lane, but such bike lanes would not only be unattractive to ride on, but also dangerous because they’d frequently cross huge roads. So, I don’t think that would solve this problem well enough.
Even in cities that currently have underground rail systems, I think public transport within cities is inefficient. So much time is wasted stopped at stations, and not going directly from your origin to your destination. If the tunnels were paved and road ramps to the surface added so that robotaxis could go down there to avoid the disruptions of the surface, so much time would be saved. Yes, autonomous driving is not good enough yet, but Waymo and the latest Tesla FSD version are undeniably not that far away, so I think cities should start planning for it now since it will likely be a reality within 15 years. It frustrates me that no one in my city's management seems to be thinking about it at all and are instead planning to restrict car access and invest billions in new rail systems that won't be ready until around the time they will be obsolete. They talk about the space used by cars compared to buses/trains without considering that most robotaxis will probably be tiny single occupant vehicles that aren't comparable to today's cars.
Adding more lanes rarely, if ever, solves traffic jams for long. Why would adding those lanes underground be different?
If the answer is “robotaxis”, why build expensive tunnels? Dedicating existing road lanes on the surface to robotaxis then should work, too, at much lower cost.
Yes, let us plan cities based on a speculative technology which may or may not ever exist. Similarly, we shouldn’t bother building electricity infrastructure now because we are reliability informed that practical fusion is 20 years away, just like it has been since 1950.
Well... If Musk says something we should definitely trust him. It's not like his previous statements haven't come to fruition.
OTOH: I do hope that car (especially EV) makers would finally stop making oversized monstrosities that are utterly useless in like 95% of cases (and close to 100% if you live in the city)... I dearly miss segment A/B… but yeah... now we get abominations like Toyota AygoX (pseudo-suv, that's bigger on the inside, and smaller on the inside... but it "LOOKS")
Elon probably said on both occurrences that robotaxis and the 25k$ cars were priority #1.
Anyway it doesn't hurt -even if this is a lie- to say the cheap cars are coming. It sucks financial derisking off of competitors. To competition, Tesla doing a cheap car means no margin for a decade, if ever. Sometimes a little lie can go a long way for moat building.
I have heard that “everything is securities fraud”.
On the other hand, what stops one from actually starting some low-key exploratory steps towards a new car, which you then mention as “we have something in the works” for a few years and then you cancel it that some point, after scaring most would be competitors? More effort than just running one’s mouth, sure..
True, there's a lot of wiggle room between outright lies and strategic narrative crafting. That said, I think it's absolute hyperbole that they are "scaring most would be competitors". If anything, competitors can use the public's response to Tesla announcements as free market research. They also can look to Tesla's track record at delivering on time and at promised price points to make their decisions.
I made a month's salary buying the dip after the Reuter's story broke then selling the rip back up when Elon refuted it. They can play that game every single day for all I care.
There’s no way there will be any robotaxis from Tesla this year or next or the one after that. FSD is not a level 5 system, and by the looks of it seems increasingly dubious it’ll even reach level 4. Source: I own a Tesla and get FSD subscription for a month every year. I like the car, but I do wish they’d stop their FSD scam and focus on plain ADAS instead
Tesla is stuck with him and that will be the end. I do wonder why anyone with talent would work for Tesla at this point. Such a polarizing thing to have on your cv.
Whatever you think of the cars, the work culture, or of Elon, Tesla is the most prestigious EV brand in the world right now. They are the "reference" for the industry.
Tesla on your resume (versus, say, GM) is far more likely to get you an interview at another company than get you auto-rejected.
How’s that prejudice? If you went and worked for Tesla after 2020 when all of their flaws were out in the open, then you opted into that environment. Are you saying you don’t make hiring decisions based on resume and where people worked? Hiring is always a subjective process. “Cultural fit” is a thing.
Maybe if you're applying to work for Cathie Wood. I'd consider Tesla a yellow flag if you started there the last few years.
I don't think it's really considered that strong of a place for engineers and they don't pay as well and work people harder so I assume these people couldn't get in to better companies. not so much for SpaceX where there's less choice in that sector.
"I assume these people couldn't get in to better companies". That's a pretty ignorant statement as Space X and Tesla are harder to get into than Harvard.
Well yeah, if you have an axe to grind and don't like Musk, then for you it's a red flag, but not for most people. Most people don't hate him enough to discriminate against a candidate for working there.
There are no more desirable companies than Space X because literally no other company is doing anything remotely like what they are. You have Boeing which is a disaster and Nasa which also isn't close.
As of 2022 Space X and Tesla were the #1 and #2 most desired companies to work for.
The Chinese EV makers will deliver it, as they already have vehicles at that price point. Their barriers here are buildout of repair/service infrastructure, and tariffs/US auto lobbyists.
Why would you buy it because you hate Musk? I would buy one based on price (assuming that BYD is a battery company at heart and probably will take better care of their battery packs than Nissan)
Robotaxis could work with preplanned routes, but a generalized solution seems too far away. Freight like interstate trucking or easy transit lines should work.
It sucks that it seems Tesla, or musk rather, is using their original promise as purely PR.
The overwhelming majority of times that's happened we never returned to the previous top priority project even when they didn't want to admit it was cancelled.
It's like Richard Nixon cursing the newspapers. Except these days we have immediate "feedback", a string of silly, supportive comments, which some say could be computer-generated.1
1. Before taking over, Musk claimed Twitter was dominated by "bots".
70 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadTesla's higher up(s?) need to get off Twitter.
Tesla is very far from having a reliable and safe driving system. 15 minutes of good driving footage is a neat tech demo, but for a deployable product you need 1,000,000 minutes of safe driving.
It's already interesting if he does it in a big city he knows we'll.
Nonetheless the YT videos of the self driving stuff looks quite good.
You need to start somewhere and others are already doing it.
Tesla announced a couple of days ago that they had passed 1 billion(!) miles on FSD, and growing exponentially [2]. In Elon's master plan from 8 years ago, he wrote they expected 6 billion miles before more global regulatory approval [3].
It's not there yet, but it's far far closer than most people realize. Me, personally, I think end of 2024, Tesla can demonstrate 2-3 billion miles driven on FSD and that a self-driving car is at least 10-20x safer than human drivers.
[1] https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1775238945506210004 [2] https://twitter.com/Tesla_AI/status/1776381278071267807 [3] https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
That said, I wonder if it matters. It took 4 years to deliver the Cybertruck, something they were working on. I imagine a "paused" Model 2 is several years away.
(At the same time, pushback against vehicles in general is worthwhile -- let's prioritize pedestrians and mass transit -- but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
“…but investing in it now will yield dividends in the future”
LA is so much better suited to it weather and topology wise but the roadways are dangerous. I feel you!
Point being, it's both the infrastructure and a small number of problematic people that make this untenable for most of us.
It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media.
Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center.
But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion).
It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto"
Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.
Old Money Palo goes to Woodlands, Woodside Priory, and Menlo School, or Palo Alto High
Lots of parents would buy houses or rent in crappy parts of East SJ to save enough money to sends both kids to Harker
The reason that new money (like me) tries to buy a house in Palo is so we can send our kids to PAUSD.
A lot of the born and raised crowd who were kids of hippies are fairly racist to the newer generation of Asian, Pacific Islander, Israeli+Eastern European, and Latino Americans on the Peninsula.
At this point I might as well buy a semi-rural house in San Benito County and spend the same amount donating a couple department libraries and Named Lecturer positions to my Alma mater for legacy benefits tbh.
In 1920, the population of LA was less than 600,000 (https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.php), and the built up area was a lot smaller (https://lamag.com/lahistory/citydig-this-1929-map-tracks-l-a...)
I guess its population density also was quite a bit higher, making it harder to serve the population well with public transport using vehicles that can transport many people at a time.
> Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people
Having said that, mass transit includes buses. There are zillions of roads in LA. On the main roads dedicate one lane in each direction to buses or, better, light rail.
Main problem will be how people would get to stations. You could change one lane on minor roads to a bidirectional bike lane, but such bike lanes would not only be unattractive to ride on, but also dangerous because they’d frequently cross huge roads. So, I don’t think that would solve this problem well enough.
If the answer is “robotaxis”, why build expensive tunnels? Dedicating existing road lanes on the surface to robotaxis then should work, too, at much lower cost.
They are just not in competition.
OTOH: I do hope that car (especially EV) makers would finally stop making oversized monstrosities that are utterly useless in like 95% of cases (and close to 100% if you live in the city)... I dearly miss segment A/B… but yeah... now we get abominations like Toyota AygoX (pseudo-suv, that's bigger on the inside, and smaller on the inside... but it "LOOKS")
Anyway it doesn't hurt -even if this is a lie- to say the cheap cars are coming. It sucks financial derisking off of competitors. To competition, Tesla doing a cheap car means no margin for a decade, if ever. Sometimes a little lie can go a long way for moat building.
On the other hand, what stops one from actually starting some low-key exploratory steps towards a new car, which you then mention as “we have something in the works” for a few years and then you cancel it that some point, after scaring most would be competitors? More effort than just running one’s mouth, sure..
Have you heard of Boring company before?
Tesla on your resume (versus, say, GM) is far more likely to get you an interview at another company than get you auto-rejected.
Plus ... imagine the stories!
Doing better manufacturing and selling EVs outside China than the rest of the entire auto industry?
OK.
I can respect the latter, but wrt the former, I can't see why Tesla is worse than any other conglomerate.
They would be dodging a bullet.
Where else are you going to go to work on incredible stuff that actually gets to market?
https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/much-more....
Well yeah, if you have an axe to grind and don't like Musk, then for you it's a red flag, but not for most people. Most people don't hate him enough to discriminate against a candidate for working there.
There are no more desirable companies than Space X because literally no other company is doing anything remotely like what they are. You have Boeing which is a disaster and Nasa which also isn't close.
As of 2022 Space X and Tesla were the #1 and #2 most desired companies to work for.
https://observer.com/list/power-employers-the-companies-us-s...
Already the case with people buying Kia or Hyundai or even Polestar when better Teslas are available for less.
It sucks that it seems Tesla, or musk rather, is using their original promise as purely PR.
It's like Richard Nixon cursing the newspapers. Except these days we have immediate "feedback", a string of silly, supportive comments, which some say could be computer-generated.1
1. Before taking over, Musk claimed Twitter was dominated by "bots".
Completely in line with Tesla's master plan: https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
In fact, they could keep the sensors and offer it as an integrated platform to other companies working on Driver Assist.