not good at all. doesn’t mention the mini-bus which is large enough to stand in. said fsd was “recalled” but what really happened was the driver monitoring software was updated.
As I understand it, a car "recall" is a regulated action in the US, and that manufacturers must issue recalls in certain circumstances and that they bring with them various requirements. How that recall actually takes place, and whether it's just an OTA update, is an implementation detail that doesn't matter as much. I realise that does go against the customer perception of what a product recall entails in general. The Verge therefore is technically correct in stating that it was a recall.
You can argue semantics, but it’s not an implementation detail that doesn’t matter, it’s fundamentally misrepresenting the truth.
A “recall” that does actually involve bringing the car in for service, a.k.a. recalling the car, is not accurately described as a “recall”. Words mean something.
The NHTSA is being idiotic (unsurprisingly) in not distinguishing between a software update and a recall, because legacy auto doesn’t have the software chops to successfully replicate Tesla’s approach.
News agencies that lean into that idiocy in a slanted attempt to denigrate Tesla are only denigrating themselves. It is not good coverage, and it is willfully misleading their own readers.
Call it a mandatory update if you want. But nothing was recalled, so insisting on calling it a recall is like insisting on calling cars “horseless carriages”.
I'm not arguing semantics, I'm arguing that the law is (as far as my understanding goes), that a recall is not about where the car goes to get fixed, it's about the process of issuing it, defining the set of cars affected, etc. Because it's a legal or regulated term in that way it's not misrepresenting the truth, the point of regulation is to be very precise about things like this. I'm also not defending this definition, I'm only explaining what I understand it to be – I think the fact it doesn't match what consumers understand is silly.
The NHTSA define a recall as something that manufacturers are required to issue when the NHTSA determines the minimum safety requirements aren't being met, but they only define that the manufacturer must fix it (or replace or something), not that the fix must be a physical change performed at a garage.
Are the press wrong for using the term "recall" when the car wasn't taken into a garage? I don't think so because it's the industry term for this, although I accept that they could perhaps be clearer by saying that the recall was addressed with a software fix.
e.g. "Toyota is recalling over 42,000 Corolla Cross Hybrid SUVs from the 2023 and 2024 model years to fix a software error that may cause drivers to lose power braking assistance if they brake while turning a corner."
I don't know that it makes sense for the distinction between "recall" and "not a recall" to be whether the software update can happen OTA or not.
Nah, the whole thing with Musk fanboys getting all up in arms about, "iT's NoT aCkShuAlLy a 'ReCaLl'" thing is dumb and glosses over the overall point.
If a vehicle has a safety issue that needs to be fixed, regardless of hardware or software, it doesn't matter if you call it a recall or not. At the end of the day, it's still a fuckup on the part of the manufacturer that put their customers/drivers at risk, and the manufacturer needed to fix it.
Call it a "recall", call it a "patch", call it "The Sunshine and Rainbows Happy Time Update #12" - at the end of the day, Tesla made an oopsie that they need to resolve, and depending on what it is, could risk the lives of customers. The term you choose to describe it won't change the fact that they're fixing their mistake.
They did post about the Robovan. While I agree regarding the tendency of media to use the word "recall" in a misleading fashion, I ctrl-f'ed and couldn't find it in the Verge live blog page that was linked to.
This kind of pouting does no favors. I had a recall on my Lincoln which was "place this sticker with a sentence of text on it at the bottom of page 254 of your owner's manual", about the ability of objects to move through space from the 'trunk' to the passenger area if the passthrough area is open in the event of a collision.
Nothing touched the vehicle at all, even electronically, so you could argue it was even less of a recall than some of the Tesla recalls, but there you have it.
You'll survive. Tesla will survive. It's a recall.
Looks very similar to the Volkswagen XL1, including the butterfly doors, the lack of a rear window, the color, the front and rear lightbars, and the overall shape and two seater layout. But I love it.
It's a slick design, but unless it's expected to be used in very limited scenarios, the lack of a control surface (or even how Tesla expects to build an OC) for edge cases is worrying.
I expect that the general handling of edge cases for any control-free robotaxi is that you call for emergency services, or an Uber, depending on severity.
The control-free stuff they're rolling out is generally being trialed or used on very narrow routes - roads where they've even built mild infrastructure to make it easier for AVs.
An emergency joystick would be pretty cool. Actually, a joystick to give the driving AI input would be great too. "Maybe squeeze a little farther left here". "Slow it up, the road is sketchy here". "It's safe, drive faster".
It’s amazing the shared delusion that my entire family participates in. My kids somehow get driven by a vaporware FSD to school every day in a car that I was told will never exist let alone be allowed on streets.
A new car look without steering wheel and pedals. A working robovan. I don't think people understand the complexity of creating a hardware prototype of anything. This can't be ChatGPTed
The demo is open to the eventgoers and lets you choose your destination. It's quite polished and a lot more advanced than "hardcoding to drive in a loop".
That's a pretty generous way to describe a ~20-acre geofenced, low-speed ride using a pre-mapped area in which they likely tested this out quite a bit prior to the event.
I saw a video from people in the car. The screen allowed them to pick between 2 different destinations. It’s not like they could just punch in any old address.
They've shown working shells of cars at every single reveal of their past cars without the interior filled in. We know they can do that. What's in question is whether they can make a driverless taxi.
What if there are humans acting as these Tesla Robots in this product demo or the Tesla Robots are just remotely operated by humans to fake this demo?.
Very skeptical of this whole presentation, even if Elon and Tesla are overpromising on timelines.
Nothing that was shown is beyond the capabilities of robots from over a decade ago like Asimo (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am1csALyEzE). It was a cool demo and beyond hobbyist capabilities, but realistically achievable by a commercial lab without having to fake it.
I frequently drive in the SF Bay Area in a non-Tesla and it's incredible how many Teslas I've seen nearly hit us, randomly swerve or brake hard for literally no reason.
I always encounter a lot of Teslas while walking my dog and it's clear they're no safer than many people who shouldn't be driving regular cars.
It's wild, most Teslas I encounter drive fine, but every once in a while I see one driving completely erratically. Stopping 20 feet too soon at a stop sign, very weird positioning in lane, sudden acceleration or deceleration. I think I can pretty much tell if a Tesla has FSD enabled if I follow it for a minute or so.
I disagree completely. Letting it drive is the exact same as teaching my 16 year old kid to drive. It’s nice to let them take the wheel, but you never know when there going to make a mistake and almost crash into traffic.
Human drivers use the bike lane, shoulder or oncoming traffic lane to drive around cars turning left and to avoid hazards all the time. It’s not unsafe if you check to make sure no one is there and my Tesla detects people around me basically as well as a human can.
On the other hand, FSD won’t try to pass me on winding mountain roads with a double yellow line.
A single person's evidence isn't helpful. People doing testing at scale of Tesla's solution (even the latest version), have found a few interventions happen an hour (or at least per day), especially on busy streets or in situations where weather isn't complimentary.
It cannot be truly an autonomous robotaxi without VERY HIGH reliability. One intervention per hour is one too many.
Cruise had driverless robotaxis on the streets while they had 2.5 to 5 miles per intervention. [1]
I think FSD 12.5 is way beyond that --- I drove over 20 miles yesterday with zero interventions. Also, having ridden Waymo in San Francisco many times, I find that the FSD is actually slightly smoother and handles stuff like going around obstacles and blockages more naturally, although, as you are no doubt aware, there are still some rough edges in rare cases.
Once Tesla has reasonable remote human assistance infrastructure in place to help out with the extreme edge cases, and the software improves at the current rate, I don't see why they couldn't roll out a robotaxi service.
As a Tesla owner I can promise you there will never be reasonable human assistance infrastructure.
Have to ever tried to get in touch with a human at Tesla short of driving to a service center. Almost impossible. It would be easier for me to get the president on the line.
Having just purchased a new Tesla, I tried for 2 weeks to communicate with Tesla prior to purchase. The closest I even got was a phone tree, which after 7 levels sent me to a voicemail box that was full. Am I’m talking every day for 14 days. Had my wife not wanted it so bad I would have cancelled my deposit on the spot.
I requested service on it last week. The earliest service date is Nov. 12. I have yet to hear from an advisor on the app.
Tesla does a lot of things right, but supporting their products with actual humans is not one of them..
Dang, that's not been my experience at all. I've had them come out 3x for tire repair (construction site alongside our commute), and they've always come out to to my house to fix the tire in my garage, same day, after a couple of back and forths via text. I've never had a better car maintenance experience.
That said, I don't think they want to talk with you pre-purchase outside of one of their showrooms, and the showroom isn't even a large part of their sales model. I imagine that if you're trying to go against the flow, it'd be hard.
Not to defend Cruise too much, but the 2.5 to 5 miles stat is misleading in that they aren't real time disengagements. They are instances where the vehicle proactively identified a situation where it wasn't confident enough to proceed and then safely stopped while awaiting a response. This is obviously way too often in terms being a courteous and legal road user but its completely different from a driver taking over as the vehicle attempts an unsafe maneuver.
I don't have any clue if it assumes that, I was just illustrating the difference in failure modes. In either case differently unsafe is not mutually exclusive with being orders of magnitude safer overall which Cruise is compared to current FSD when unsupervised.
> Cruise had driverless robotaxis on the streets while they had 2.5 to 5 miles per intervention. [1]
And they got (rightfully) pulled off the roads.
> there are still some rough edges in rare cases
Waymo has substantially lower interventions.
And, they have a huge fleet of humans running around the city attending to the cars. A few weeks ago I saw one stuck - whoever had last used it, managed to trap a seatbelt in the door. It was sitting for about 5 minutes when a guy pulled up and fixed it and sent it on its way. I'm not saying Tesla can't build that, but they're going to have to.
That is a very important question, to be honest. And it definitely seems like it's getting more and more difficult for all of the self driving companies to reach "that next step".
> What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?
That is a MASSIVE "what if".
What's if it's 2036? What if it's 2056? Hell, if it's 2030 then Tesla is in _serious_ trouble.
It's an SAE Level 2 system, they haven't indicated that's ever changing on current cars. They're even calling it "Full Self-Driving (Supervised) (also referred to as Autosteer on City Streets)" now [1]
A lot of companies have Level 2 systems. That's still a far cry from full automation.
Back in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stunned the automotive world by announcing that, henceforth, all of his company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary for “full self-driving.” You will be able to nap in your car while it drives you to work, he promised. It will even be able to drive cross-country with no one inside the vehicle.
They have one of the best Level 2 self-driving implementations on the market. It’s so good that I don’t even question the FSD tag. That said, I would never let my family ride in a Tesla robotaxi running on the existing suite of sensors and FSD. Does anyone know what needs to happen for Tesla to reach Level 5 autonomy? I get nervous letting the current FSD handle complicated intersections.
It doesn't matter because it's a meaningless statistic. But sure, I'll entertain it. Last figure I heard was 1 disengagement per 200 miles. The distance between SF and LA is 380 miles. If my car can drive me from SF to LA and I only have to intervene once, that's already incredible and leagues ahead of what Waymo can offer. And since you asked, FSD 12.6 will reduce disengagements per mile by 5x.
Waymo doesn't require a driver to supervise the car, they're supposedly running Level 4 cars. FSD requires continual supervision, you must be responsible and attentive at all times. How is this a reasonable comparison?
There's a big difference between "someone at central command can take over when the car signals" and "someone must watch the car constantly and take over when they see it do anything bad".
The disengagement events on recent videos of FSD are still the likes of "oops it almost turned into oncoming traffic" or "oops it almost ran into a pole", that's the sort of thing you have to catch before it happens, not after.
Waymo was doing .64 disengagements per 1000 miles in 2015 and wasn't comfortable launching a taxi service on that. Even after 12.6, Tesla will be behind. The point is Tesla can't launch a driverless taxi service on its current system, not from SF to LA, not within SF, not anywhere.
No, he's telling you that Waymo could do the same thing (and better) in 2015, yet it took them 8 more years to launch a robotaxi service. So, Tesla robotaxi in 2032 maybe?
For the record, you no longer have to keep your hands on the wheel at all times.
I think it’s a mistake to conflate the actual capabilities of the system with the user instructions for how the system is being used. SAE levels are primarily about the latter and about who takes liability for the operation of the vehicle. Conflating the two punishes car manufacturers who are cautious about the current state of their self-driving system.
No, remote operators are never in control of the vehicles. They give the computer hints about how to handle situations it's unable to resolve for itself, but the computer is ultimately still responsible for driving and maintaining the safety invariants.
This is fundamentally different from FSD, where the human is always responsible for driving and maintaining the safety invariants.
It entails a completely different division of responsibilities and safety profile. Specifically, it's one of the critical differences between SAE levels 2/3 and level 4:
To give an analogy, let's say you use a credit card. A machine processes the payment most of the time, but occasionally something looks suspicious, so it denies the payment and sends a message to a human (you) asking whether the next payment should be allowed. Do you consider yourself to be a "driver" in this system?
If so, imagine a system where all payments flash by onscreen for a human that's tasked with stopping erroneous approvals in realtime. Are humans doing the essentially the same job in this system such that both roles are "drivers"?
You do realize you cannot buy a Waymo for your own use?
You do realize Waymo will only operate in geofenced areas in select cities that have been premapped down to the millimeter?
Waymo is not even remotely close, nor attempting to solve the same problem. This is coming from someone who lives in SF and takes Waymo regularly. Waymo is a cool tech demo and that's about it; FSD is a real tool that people everywhere can actually use to take them where they want to go.
I don't know what to say man, Waymo takes me where I want to go several times a week (why would anyone be a repeat customer if it was just a demo?). My Tesla with FSD can't take me anywhere without me monitoring it.
Everywhere they want to go? In an electric car? These taxis would probably only drive in big cities where there are enough charging stations and service centers.
I also have a 2024 Tesla with FSD, but stopped trusting it. Here’s the thing, it works great for 30-40 minutes, until it doesn’t and makes a completely wrong move almost causing an accident without user intervention. And yes, I’m talking about v12.5.1
In the last month, it’s driven onto grass where there used to be an off ramp that was redone last year, cut across 3 lanes of highway traffic within 200 feet of an off ramp, and almost ran a semi truck off the road (yes, we had the right of way, but he weighs 20,000 lbs and was in no way going to be able to stop in time).
It a cool toy to show off when you’re being hyper vigilant about keeping an eye on it, but there is no way it should be allowed on the public roads yet.
I 1000% would advise against purchasing it unless you have the extra cash and want to try it out. It’s not even close to production ready.
> Here’s the thing, it works great for 30-40 minutes, until it doesn’t and makes a completely wrong move almost causing an accident without user intervention
interesting. this wasn’t my experience. i did SF <> Lake Tahoe (which can stretch to 5hrs) a number of times when i was in SF and didn’t encounter any major issues. small issues sure, but it was definitely better than my driving.
I suspect this is the same hyper-vigilance a spouse gets when the other is driving. Somehow I can go 20 years without an accident but everytime the spouse is in the car it's not the same as 'their' driving so they constantly feel the need to backseat drive and press the imaginary break. Not saying Tesla driving is perfect but it's better than a lot of drivers I know.
Mine still makes a lot of grave mistakes on local roads, stops for overly long at stop signs (long enough to confuse other drivers), and has very poor merging behavior, especially when there are trucks around. It works fine 99% of the time.
Aside from supply issues due tot he pandemic and demand, I there’s a strong incentive to be conservative in how you roll out self-driving: Cruise and Uber both ran into serious issues because they rolled out self-driving cars too aggressively. It won’t take that many publicized incidents to cause significant financial, legal and reputational issues for Tesla. So, selling FSD as a level 2 system while they are training their networks and gathering performance data makes a lot of sense.
Sure, but saying every earnings call 'it will definitely fully work this year' and then not delivering every year is rather. wrong. He knows it won't work this year, or next. It needs more training and testing as you say; needs either that or a significant AI breakthrough.
Would you trust it without a break pedal and steering wheel you can take control over? How confident you are Tesla can deliver this within one or two years? If your answer is not a resounding yes for both this product its as good as nothing at this stage. Considering Tesla track record of delivering on timelines and expectations for this kind of tech.
Anybody know why the autonomous taxi isn't just a model 3?
I don't see the point in a purpose built two seater with no steering wheel or pedals and I don't know why regulators would approve an autonomous car with no way to manually override it.
Barring all the issues, if you did build a huge fleet of autonomous taxis - smaller, lighter cars with less moving pieces would save you a lot of money.
2 seater - smaller car
No wheels or stuff - saves money on the build and parts.
They are probably planning to reuse lots of parts from model 3 to save money
And people are creatures of habit and highly social so version 1 of robotaxis will 100% look like normal cars. Regardless of whatever benefits you can come up with on paper. Once it's normalized then you experiment.
This is the company that released the CyberTruck. V1 will probably look mostly like what was presented. Every single prototype they have ever unveiled eventually ended up looking very similar to the production model.
Mark my words: the "final form" of robotaxis will seat 4 (up to 6 in a pinch) people on facing seats, will be able to drive in both directions and have all 4 wheels fully steerable for more flexibility.
Imagine if you could have one human operator able to go anywhere in the city for every 50 active cars ! Of course you can scale the number up and down based on actual needs. Kinda like Tesla AAA. Overhead will be less than having a driver per car and could be reasonable.
How long would it take for the single operator to reach a stuck car, worst case and average? I don’t know how it’s in the US but I’m pretty sure you could never get this certified in the EU, you can’t have your cars stuck and blocking traffic for 20 minutes before someone comes to get it unstuck. I think remote control would be much better for this.
Imagine a hurricane knocks out mobile internet and every car in the fleet is offline, x% of all cars on road stop operating, or maybe they have some independence, but if they get stuck, are stuck immobile until comms are restored. I guess at least if they're small other vehicles can shove them out of the way.
I assume robo taxi will be significantly cheaper to manufacture. You can get away with much less range and creature comforts being quite a bit less. People care much less about comfortable for something they sit in for twenty minutes versus buy for $50k
Yeah I would be interested in seeing how the costs shake out.
There is logic in this design being cheaper to manufacture but I would think that it would be a long while before you "broke even", so to speak, compared to using a design that you already know exactly how to make.
Creature comforts, fine, they can go, but a shorter range? I thought the idea was for me to be able to have my car galavanting around the city all day being a taxi for people to help me make money. Forgive my ignorance, but how is a shorter range going to help with that?
Their cars currently produce an audible request to close the doors. In practice it doesn't happen often, I've never seen it happen in person. They also have support just minutes away usually.
The Zeekr vehicle they're testing now, and presumably the Hyundai they're starting to develop, will have self-closing doors.
I've heard in the past that the OEMs don't want to be relegated to being just some whitebox manufacturer so many of them have been very cold (in receptiveness) to working with Waymo. Probably explains the terrible selection of vehicles they have used, Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Jaguar i-Pace, the ionic 5 was surprising since I suspected the others were just OEMs offloading their turds onto Waymo and telling them to take a hike. Maybe Hyundai is getting something good in exchange.
Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.
Tesla sold a bunch of cars to Hertz which turned out to be terrible for Hertz, but great for Tesla.
>Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.
They very much care if they are selling their cars to an entity that is striving to make them irrelevant.
Think about it: If the world moves to a car sharing system where any type of car is available on demand and no one actually owns a car, do you think anyone will actually give one hoot about the badge on the front of the car? That puts manufacturers into the worst possible business model. Competing solely on price...ie a commodity.
So the manufacturers will either not want to work with them, give them whatever junk they can't sell and then tell them to go away...or they expect to get something big in return maybe like some technology sharing or a exclusive partnership.
Why else has Waymo partnered with the bottom of the barrel OEMs up to this point? Why not a Toyota or a Mercedes or hell even get the good cars from the OEMs they have partnered with?
Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.
They’re one of the few companies mass-manufacturing affordable EVs in the US.
Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
>Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.
What does one have to do with the other? The I-Pace was built in Austria. They dont seem to care about where it was built.
>Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
The Chrysler Pacifica was a gas powered vehicle, The I-Pace had a starting MSRP of ~70k. They didn't seem to care about propulsion method or cost of vehicle either.
What they do have in common is that they were both poorly selling cars made by manufacturers that were desperate to sell.
>Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
Any evidence to prove this assertion?
Going back to my previous comment I mentioned that an OEM could want to partner with them if they got something meaningful out of the deal. Seems like thats what Hyundai is getting: Waymo Tech transfer/possibly an exclusivity agreement.
>I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
You ignored the rest of my response which is again driving the point: What does Hyundai really get out of this?
Circling back to my point, this does not really explain why they are partnering with Waymo. Waymo is a rounding error in sales for Hyundai.
If Waymo was solely focused on cost, then they should have stuck with the pacifica which is cheaper or gotten something even cheaper like a Toyota. It makes no sense to go with Hyundai which is not even the cheapest for the features that it offers(compared to id 4, Niro EV, Hell even Kona EV). It is a smaller car compared to the Pacifica and the i-Pace and is far less equipped in terms of comfort and space.
We dont even know if they specifically wanted to go with an EV. Thats just something you just asserted without evidence.
It sure seems like their self-imposed constraint is EVs. Their goal beyond that is cost reduction. It seems like the actual key right now might be volume:
“The team at our new manufacturing facility is ready to allocate a significant number of vehicles for the Waymo One fleet as it continues to expand. Importantly, this is the first step in the partnership between the two companies and we are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration.”
but to your point, Hyundai may see this as an opportunity for “future collaboration” to get autonomous driving tech into their vehicles. But selling a “significant number of vehicles” is also very much in Hyundai’s interest.
If Hyundai was making the Niro or Kona EV in the US, then they may have been an option, but they’re not. They are not eligible for the tax credit. Toyota won’t make EVs here until 2025 or 2026.
The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
Uh that article is clearly a PR puff piece timed to coincide with the retirement of the Pacifica fleet which is nearing 5-6 years of service at that point.
Again given their strange choices in the past and their backpedaling on previous initiatives (having Chrysler produce special Pacificas and then going back to retrofitting them by hand themselves, going from commiting to purchasing 65k pacificas to NOT purchasing 65K Pacificas, getting Magna to go a custom design of the iPace for them to not having them do a custom design) I dont see this as a deal that Hyundai got into without major concessions.
>The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
If my theory is correct I suspect they are not getting a warm reception from many manufacturers and they have to pick whatever they can get. I'd imagine their ideal company is Toyota. They have experience with those cars from the early days, they make cars that can help minimize downtime due to their reliability and costs can be reduced. There is a reason so many taxis are prisues. Why not apply that common sense cost savings to Waymo's fleet?
I have no first hand knowledge here, but thinking from first principles. From Robotaxi fleet perspective you want autonomous maintenance, cleaning, charging, and lowest cost. From Robotaxi user perspective you want climate / music / entertaiment / safety. So the idea for robot taxi is that it should be better than model 3 in some or all of those dimensions.
Now speculating for the moment, from Elon perspective you probably want things to be more cyberpunky as that is how future looked in his childhood and he is trying to build it. Also, engineers / designers were likely mandated to handle all of the maintenance and possibly production by Tesla Bots.
Like any robot on a vehicle assembly line, it’s going to be trivial to get it to follow a pre programmed path. All the cars it has to clean are identical…. So actually it will be simple.
Yes, I think you're spot on. They showed a video of a robot arm cleaning the car's inside, and it appears the vertical opening doors make that kind of access easier. The car will also have wireless charging, which makes that easier to automate as well.
Because all the work of allegedly building a new vehicle platform is a better excuse for making no profit on the robotaxi initiative for the next ten years.
What's the deal with cynical, low effort comments like this that add nothing to the discussion? There's obviously more to the story than what you're saying. HackerNews is supposed to be for discussion, not Reddit-tier snark. Comments like yours are just visual pollution.
>What's the deal with cynical, low effort comments like this that add nothing to the discussion?
People are starting to wake up to the (shitty) new reality that Big Tech created for us. The cynical nature is just the natural reaction to a serial grifter becoming the world's richest man.
I don't think anyone but the most naive actually believes anything in this PR piece will come to market.
Oh yeah, look at all the terrible things Tesla has done, sell more EVs than everyone else, and make them for less cost, and include a good infotainment system in a car, what a terrible reality
Yes. Sadly, it's always been this way. Look up the response posts to Dropbox, Ethereum, .. Every few years I'm like "I think it's gotten worse" and then I'm like "I'm going to spin up some sentiment analysis to prove it's gotten worse" and then I read some old posts and I'm like "I miss jacquesm, but nah it's pretty much the same." And then I think "this is still the best forum on the internet."
The future I was promised was utopian, and instead my appliances all play ads and spy on me, and the robber barons at the top of the heap will use their billions that they got selling my personal data to advertising scum to leave legacy trusts that will continue to erode the fabric of society and increase wealth disparity long after said billionaires are dead and buried.
But sure, your Tesla has a good infotainment system so that's cool.
Which CEO is leaning into far-right conspiracy theories and using Twitter to boost the electoral chances of the most dangerous US presidential candidate in history?
I mean, you've got to look at the context. This isn't happening in a vacuum; they've been promising this any minute now for the last eight years. At a certain point, the benefit of the doubt becomes strained, and every ostensible delay starts to look like a delaying tactic.
Because that isn’t different or new enough to get investors excited.
The point of this presentation was not to spell out technically how they are going to accomplish this. Agreed, a fleet of model 3s would work great.
The point of this presentation was to look like a cool visionary tech company that is going to change the world, to justify that your Market cap is now larger than EVERY OTHER MAJOR AUTOMAKER COMBINED!
Same reason the prototypes need to look like they were lifted from Blade Runner.
Many reasons. Model 3 is to big. The Model 3 is missing many features needed, like inductive charging, automatic doors. And has lots of things not needed, like a steering wheel column. Model 3 is build on a much older architecture, even the upgraded versions. Model 3 still uses traditional car wiring.
With all the changes you would have to do to M3, its basically a new car.
This Robotaxi will have all the drive-by-wire architecture of the Cybertruck. The new electronics architecture and Ethernet bus. And things like wireless charging.
Do you not see those driverless Cybercabs driving around without a steering wheel? At least that's a development that we haven't seen in the past 10 years.
If I have to explain it, the whole point is lost. I've marked this conversation as a loss and so did the investors wrt to the Tesla stock. I recommend you do the same.
The RoboTaxi looks neat, but I don't get why it only seats 2 rather than just updating the Model 3? What's the utility of an entirely new production line for a car that is less flexible than the existing model that's built at scale?
It's much easier to explain to shareholders why these things have endless delays even though "the tech is already there!" if they are a new chassis rather than an existing one. That way, when they haven't released anything in the next 5-10 years, they can still keep the music going.
The entire plan hinges on low cost high volume. That means reducing parts and complexity. Stainless steel body so no paint shop or variations to worry about, or paint maintenance, etc. removing steering wheel, removing glass roof, removing doors, and more.
Vehicles are dominated by the production costs of producing anything. You save surprisingly little producing smaller vehicles because the expensive bits are all the things you don't majorly save on like the production lines, the battery, the mechanicals, the wiring, the electronics, etc. Nicer interiors, paint options, and other consumer upgrades have extremely low marginal costs. They're pure profit for the manufacturer.
It's strictly more expensive if you're limited to say, the typical NHTSA autonomous vehicle production limit of 2,500 vehicles per year.
Just look at traditional USA automakers and why they are scaling up their vehicles. Bigger vehicles can justify bigger prices thus bigger margins. Even if the manufacturing price is not that much different.
If you go down to basic physical material costs, Surface area of car, Metal cost, Glass cost etc, are the things which will determine car price in long run, So car which is weighting let's say 25% percent less can be be built cheaper compared to car weighting more. Less doors, less glass use, less paint, less material, less battery needed for same amount of distance, which brings down to cost.
Ok, lets think of it other way, all things equal, if you are tasked with cutting costs of vehicle without cutting back things which makes your brand unique, and without reducing margin or running on loss how will you do it?
You make vehicle simpler, with less expensive parts. That's how hardware design works.
Cutting back on quality or software expense is not a option for Tesla as that will make Tesla equal to any other Chinese EV brand.
Raw material is less than half of the price of a vehicle, right? Assuming it’s 50%, a 25% smaller car would save 12.5%.
I would be surprised if raw material is even 50% of the cost.
They are doing both; one doesn't exclude the other. Unsupervised FSD is also coming to the model y and model 3. They actually had a few model y's cruising around unsupervised at the event even. And they also have the 20 people robovan thing.
If you look at regular taxis, the only part that is used by passengers is typically the back seat. Which fits two, maybe three people at best. So, it's not such a crazy form factor for a taxi because most taxis are also two passenger vehicles right now.
The point of this car is that it's smaller and cheaper (less parts, battery, etc.) and optimized for being an autonomous taxi. And the reason for that is productizing unsupervised FSD. The car is just a means to that end. If you are going to build a self driving taxi, a two seater is the logical choice. IMHO it's actually too big. They could make it a lot shorter.
Here's an idea - take the Robocab car design, strip out all the FSD/autopilot stuff, put in a steering wheel and dash and sell it starting at the end of the year for ~$25k.
Tesla market cap is based on AI/robotaxi/FSD. Without that, they’re just playing catchup to BYD (who quietly, yet aggressively, executes at scale; they offer EVs today between $10k-$20k and already employ more workers than Toyota [for scale]).
Not at all. Global light vehicle sales are ~90M units/year. US ~17M/year. EU ~13M/year. China remains a factory to the world (and itself is the leading market). BYD can build in Mexico (NAFTA) and the EU to avoid tariffs, if desired.
Tariffs aren’t going to keep the EV printer at bay. They only delay the inevitable.
I disagree this would be effective or a path to success. The evidence does not show policy moves faster than capital, and auto tariff policy gymnastics only work until foreign corporations open factories in country (as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Stellantis, and Hyundai all have done [US example]).
US EV demand is simply not at the point where this is economically rational (imho), yet. And so, you’re stuck with a legacy auto EV, a Tesla, or a BYD with 100% tariff markup for now. Even with the tariff, the BYD is still cheaper than a Tesla.
It's not rational, but the current tariffs are explicitly aimed at Chinese EVs and were created faster than they could hit the US market in any sizable quantity even using China's existing manufacturing infrastructure.
Policy in support of existing capital that is a heavy hitter politically can absolutely move faster than capital of new entrants.
And with both political parties explicitly being anti-chinese capital currently, it's not clear that a chinese factory would even be allowed to open domestically.
China can easily get around that the same way they made western manufacturers get around its own tariffs. Only the Americans aren’t going to require 49/51 JVs, even though they should.
You are ignoring the fact that the world doesn't end with the USA (and EU)... Even in LatAm (which is "west") there is abundance of Chinese cars... In Africa it's probably even more visible...
BYD are literally handmade. I expect QA issues worse that Tesla’s Production Hell and in long term support. Plus, they’re doped up with subsidies like an Eastern Block Olympic Athlete; China needs to prop up its books after the Real Estate bubble turned to rubble
They seem to have significant quality issues - I have multiple friends with them in Thailand, and every second social post from them is bitching about whatever randomly stopped working or fell off this time - although I have a feeling they build their Thai market models elsewhere.
This is a bit of an aside, but why does everyone assume, if not for the sanctions, BYD would eat Western manufacturers alive? I for one, don't like to engage in anti-China hysteria, but having had experience with Chinese products, their quality and reliablity is a hit and miss. How would you know, that they didn't cheap out on caps in inverters, and they won't break down after a decade/200k km?
Also their cars are build like modern consumer electronics, welded/glued together at every opportunity.
Take a look at this video where a guy tries to pry apart a BYD battery pack:
I guess BYD's strategy of world domination involves a high degree of automation, so they can make their cars in countries without a large pool of free workers/high wages, that's why they're made like this.
And here in Europe, they're not even that much cheaper, before tariffs. A Seal costs almost as much as a Model 3.
Has he like ever met his promised price? If we go by almost every single other car he has released, The 30k robotaxi will be available for like 1 week on a stripped down tier (maybe like 25kwH battery?) or available off menu for like 6 months until it disappears and no one dares speak of it again.
https://skills.ai/tesla-car-prices-analysis/ 37k model 3 for a good chunk of time, especially given the inflation since initial announcement, and given the amount of features in the base version which you'd have to pay out the ass with other OEMs, is actually very good.
Ehh I disagree, the main competition like the Mazda 3 has still been very competitive price wise in that they also kept prices either low or lowered them further post COVID inflation and if you are comparing to the luxury brands then consider the fact that the car launched with a very stripped down interior compared to their competition and still remains that way while their competition have clearly continued to excel in this regard indicates that Tesla have hidden the inflation there.
But the problem with comparing "features" is that tesla fanboys/haters get to assign arbitrary values to the features the cars have. It would be so much easier to just meet your promised price point. In that regard my point still stands.
The interior is minimalist, and ever since the model 3’s release, all other brands have been slowly trending in its direction. The 2024 model 3 interior is beautiful to the point that all the pointless plastic widgets present on other OEMs are kinda hilarious to look at.
what makes you think the mazda 3 is the main competition?
>and ever since the model 3’s release, all other brands have been slowly trending in its direction.
This is probably the most untrue statement you've made all evening and you have made plenty.
>The 2024 model 3 interior is beautiful to the point that all the pointless plastic widgets present on other OEMs are kinda hilarious to look at.
The market seems to disagree given that the gasoline competition is still the overwhelming majority of new sales. There are many reason for that but if this interior was so good they should have swept the market after 7 years of this cost cutti I mean minimalism?
>what makes you think the mazda 3 is the main competition?
The mazda 3 is a non luxury sedan that competes in that segment. You can substitute the corolla the civic or any of those cars on the non luxury side. If you instead consider the Tesla to be a competitor to luxury cars (which is difficult to argue again because you cannot compare feature to feature) then you'd obviously go with the german/japanese luxury brands(as I also mentioned but you ignored).
Again going back to my point, Tesla has a history of never meeting their promised price point when they release their car. Not one model has ever hit their primosed price point. Not even the 12 year old Model S with its sub 50k price point. After 12 years of lies and false promises, there is no credibility that they will get to this magical 30k price point so it becomes moot when the market (which cannot afford their damn cars today gien their sales slump) will not be buying this contraption when it comes out years past its announced release window.
yup it’s only the world’s best selling vehicle :) they have swept the market.
indeed interiors of most other brands have morphed into a large screen instead of the 2010 circus of buttons. Model 3/Y is very competitive with premium german/japanese brands like bmw/audi etc.
I don’t disagree their pricing goals are usually not really met unless given the discount of inflation.
fyi EVs are 25% of the global car market and growing.
One reason is, and bear with me, that this robotaxi does not exist !
There is a good reason why it was all presented in a Hollywood studio, without any specifics. The car we've seen yesterday is a prototype at best, a prototype that's crucially missing a small but important part for a robotaxi - the ability to drive autonomously...
Cybetruck was supposed to cost 40k (1/3 of the initial price) and have twice the range or something like that.
It has no rear window and wacky doors and only two seats. It would not sell. It's purpose built as an autonomous taxi, where those choices make perfect sense.
They are also doing a $25k car, they just aren't revealing it today.
This is why I want a pragmatic operational industry expert CEO[0] for Tesla, in the same way Shotwell is for SpaceX.
Announce and do the far stuff, but at the same time ship the near things that people want.
A pragmatic auto CEO would have had that $25k car moving already. A pragmatic industry CEO also wouldn't have such a large event without a call-to-action.
If they had a "reserve now for Feb 2025 delivery" button under todays announcement it would have gone offff
[0] edit: ok Gwynne is COO - let Elon keep the title, but we know what matters.
I agree that Tesla's biggest mistake was doing Cybertruck before the $25k car. But if they solve autonomy and/or succeed with Optimus then everything else becomes irrelevant.
I agree, but these are moonshot announcements that should sit isolated from the core business.
The same thing that Google (ironically) did with X - which led to Waymo, which now already has autonomous taxis[0]
You can't keep perpetually hyping tomorrow when the next Q is due.
I have an affinity for Tesla since it's named after someone from a village my mums family is from (and who I'm named after), and I like environmentalist, decarbonise, and electrify Elon.. but sometimes he makes it hard.
[0] on that note - not only have I seen better taxi demos than today, also seen better robot demos from Boston Dynamics.
Yeah Boston Dynamics is way better at locomotion, but their advantage in manipulation is smaller. You also won't see 50 at the same time like Optimus today. Tesla's advantage will be manufacturing.
Optimus has improved quickly. Gen 3 should be better. They showed Gen 3 hands today that looked pretty good.
I don't think Tesla have an advantage in manufacturing. China today is what Japan was in the 70s and their processes are so fucking good.
You can't win on manufacturing - this is, after all, a nation that is now building Volvo's better than the Swedes did.
Tesla fell into the China partnership trap, where the gov subsidises you and you open a "partnership" there, meanwhile they take your IP and knowledge for the benefit of the state (I was in that situation in '07 with Tencent and turned it down).
Hence now $10k Chinese cars - and Biden introducing tariffs to protect local industry (including Tesla - which Elon doesn't seem to appreciate)
On AI at Elon's recent recruitment event he put X.ai in Tier 1 with OpenAI and Anthropic and didn't even mention Meta. To me, as someone who applies these models across industries every day X.ai has never even come up.
That tells me he isn't informed on what Meta are doing (and that is - undercutting the commercial AI industry).
I'm hesitant to think it but there's a ton of hand waving and investor pumping happening here. Which is a shame, because a company with that market cap can do _a lot_ better.
I wasn't impressed by a single thing I saw today. I've seen the same autonomous car demo in a closed environment at my own uni 25+ years ago. I've seen better robots from Boston. I've also seen much better presentations than someone who looked like they are reading the text for the first time.
They have the capital, the mindshare, and the means and they're wasting it.
Tesla's advantage over Boston Dynamics will be manufacturing. Over China, it will have to be innovation and software. China is going to be much harder to beat than Boston Dynamics for sure. But remember that Tesla is no stranger to competing with Chinese companies and they are doing OK vs BYD today and not just in the US, with the bestselling car model in the world and in China. I think the "partnership trap" was more relevant years ago; today China has a lot less need to steal tech, at least in the domain of car manufacturing (note that Tesla is not manufacturing Optimus in China).
It's hardly new news that Elon is an awkward presenter and it isn't relevant to future performance of Tesla. You have to look at the pace of improvement of what Tesla is doing. Among humanoid companies that started in 2021 or later Tesla is the furthest along and improving much faster than the likes of Boston Dynamics. While they are still far behind, they have the time and the funding to catch up.
The Cybercab demo was an amusement park ride (and Elon explicitly billed it as such), however Tesla's FSD is released to the public and can be directly evaluated. While it is not yet near Waymo it is impressively good as of this month and the rate of improvement is very fast now. It just drove me across town for 20 minutes and I didn't have to touch the steering wheel a single time. It was incapable of that on that specific drive just two months ago. And I have the less powerful older variant of the Autopilot computer.
The question is how much does a Boston Dynamics robot full of complex hydrolics cost vs a Tesla bot that full of electric actuators. Boston Dynamics robots aren't really design to be produced in numbers and are designed for a different use-case.
Boston Dynamics' humanoid robots thus far have been R&D platforms so the cost isn't all that important. That said, they released a quick teaser for the next gen of Atlas which seems to be all electric.
> I agree that Tesla's biggest mistake was doing Cybertruck before the $25k car.
While a $25k EV seems to be what we all want and is almost guaranteed to be a massive hit, there is no evidence such a thing can be done yet without losing money on every sale.
Why isn’t any other car company doing it?
Rivian are losing money on every car sold at 4 times the price.
People really have gone off the deep end with Shotwell, yes she is awesome. But you know what makes it a huge amount easier to be awesome, having a reusable rocket to sell in the first place.
Musk makes the primary choices at SpaceX, he decides the company strategy, he decides where the money goes, he decides what future projects to take on.
If its so clear what a 'pragmatic auto CEO' would do, why do other car companies not have those cheap cars?
And the data shows pretty clearly that 2 person cars, even cheap ones don't sell very well.
Reuters said that, and Elon directly denied it. I think it is likely that the $25k car was delayed somewhat from whatever its initial plan was, but not canceled.
The 25k will be on the same chasis and drivetrain as the robo taxi. He couldn't get all the execs to move to mexico to build it, so he agreed to do the robo taxi first in texas, then when they build the mexico giga factory they will build the 25k there. So, one year for cybertaxi line, and a year and a half for mexico factory. Will probably start rolling off the mexico factory in late 2027
The Robovan—as an actual van one could buy today—would sell. Especially in Asia, versus Toyota Alphards. Alas, seems it's more likely to get used as point-to-point transit inside closed spaces (parks and convention centers and ... perhaps the Vegas Loop).
> The Robovan — as an actual van one could buy today—would sell.
One would think so. But slow self-driving mini-buses seem to be a niche item. San Francisco's Treasure Island had one from Beep for part of 2023 and early 2024.
Las Vegas had one back in 2017, from Nayva. Local Motors had some, but is defunct. There are a few from WeRide on an island in Guangzhou. EasyMile has a few installations.
This kind of self driving, at 7 to 9 MPH, has been around since 2009. It works, but it's not that useful.
Fair. I was actually imagining a Robovan crossed with a Model Y, with a legit steering wheel (and, sure, standard FSD), to compete with premium mini-vans.
But to your point, the value for the Robovan is minuscular unless it's as far-ranging as any other vehicle. And even if the FSD tech and regulations are there for it, the actual vehicle—at least the wheelbase and body covering said wheels—will need to be rethought for real-world conditions.
There's only so many times you can have genuine curious conversation for the same promise. Musk has been holding this presentation, with very small variations, for 6-10 years now. The first 5 times, sure, plenty of curious conversation. But after some time you have to start calling a fraud a fraud.
The big promise of the Robotaxi was that every Tesla would be one, that your Tesla would earn you money while you weren't using it. This was obviously unlikely to ever happen, but has been the promise right up to this event, and something Musk has been very vocal about.
Despite having very few details in this presentation, the one detail that is clear is that existing Teslas won't be taxiing anyone, and Tesla will be the operator reaping the benefits. That's a significant under-delivery, especially for the average Tesla retail investor who believes in the mission and is driving their stock price.
The promise was that you'd buy a Model 3 to use as your personal car, and then run it as a robotaxi while you're at work, and the taxi money would pay you back for the car within a year. FSD is nowhere near up to that task, neither technically nor legally. And the new info from this presentation is that it is, of course, never going to be: this was an indirect admission that the Model 3 was sold with fraudulent advertising by the then-CEO himself.
> one detail that is clear is that existing Teslas won't be taxiing anyone, and Tesla will be the operator reaping the benefits
Elon said you will be able to buy a Cybercab for under $30,000 and individual owners will be able to "tend to [your robotaxi fleet] like a flock of sheep".
Edit:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1005577738332172289
SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …
"Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package will definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …"
I didn't want to spend the time to find the video where the flying bit was said more explicitly.
I didn't make it up. In the above quotes he definitely implied it would be capable of flying, and more recently, stated it outright.
The car doesn't exist in the first place, doesn't exist with thrusters, and doesn't exist with thrusters that make it capable of flying, and so I think it's a little early to call victory on flying Tesla roadsters.
Discussing the thrusters in 2018:
"Using the config you describe, plus an electric pump to replenish air in COPV, when car power draw drops below max pack power output, makes sense. But we are going to go a lot further."
Musk said a lot of things which turned out to be bullshit. For someone who's been following Musk since forever, 'next year'™ or 'one year away'™ are some of the markings of incoming USDA prime bullshit designed to fool investors.
On a tangent, I find it hilarious that all the Musk related streams are always hijacked by crypto scammers. It's some circumstantial evidence that the circles in a venn diagram of the types of people falling for crypto scams and the people falling for Musk snake oil has a lot of overlap.
I don't know what presentation you were watching, but in this one it was clearly stated that all Tesla models will be autonomous, not just the Cybercab, and also that you will be able to buy and own the Cybercab just like their other cars and it will earn money for you. It's fine if you don't believe it, but that's what was said.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] thread[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267132/tesla-robotaxi-...
A “recall” that does actually involve bringing the car in for service, a.k.a. recalling the car, is not accurately described as a “recall”. Words mean something.
The NHTSA is being idiotic (unsurprisingly) in not distinguishing between a software update and a recall, because legacy auto doesn’t have the software chops to successfully replicate Tesla’s approach.
News agencies that lean into that idiocy in a slanted attempt to denigrate Tesla are only denigrating themselves. It is not good coverage, and it is willfully misleading their own readers.
Call it a mandatory update if you want. But nothing was recalled, so insisting on calling it a recall is like insisting on calling cars “horseless carriages”.
The NHTSA define a recall as something that manufacturers are required to issue when the NHTSA determines the minimum safety requirements aren't being met, but they only define that the manufacturer must fix it (or replace or something), not that the fix must be a physical change performed at a garage.
Are the press wrong for using the term "recall" when the car wasn't taken into a garage? I don't think so because it's the industry term for this, although I accept that they could perhaps be clearer by saying that the recall was addressed with a software fix.
e.g. "Toyota is recalling over 42,000 Corolla Cross Hybrid SUVs from the 2023 and 2024 model years to fix a software error that may cause drivers to lose power braking assistance if they brake while turning a corner."
I don't know that it makes sense for the distinction between "recall" and "not a recall" to be whether the software update can happen OTA or not.
Funny you'd say that while arguing the opposite.
The word "recall" with respect to cars has a legal meaning with specific before and after procedures. It's not any random update.
If a vehicle has a safety issue that needs to be fixed, regardless of hardware or software, it doesn't matter if you call it a recall or not. At the end of the day, it's still a fuckup on the part of the manufacturer that put their customers/drivers at risk, and the manufacturer needed to fix it.
Call it a "recall", call it a "patch", call it "The Sunshine and Rainbows Happy Time Update #12" - at the end of the day, Tesla made an oopsie that they need to resolve, and depending on what it is, could risk the lives of customers. The term you choose to describe it won't change the fact that they're fixing their mistake.
Nothing touched the vehicle at all, even electronically, so you could argue it was even less of a recall than some of the Tesla recalls, but there you have it.
You'll survive. Tesla will survive. It's a recall.
Tesla will apparently be selling it for $30k before the end of 2016.
I’m super curious about the induction charging rate! The robot they showed cleaning it was also pretty interesting.
Very skeptical of this whole presentation, even if Elon and Tesla are overpromising on timelines.
I always encounter a lot of Teslas while walking my dog and it's clear they're no safer than many people who shouldn't be driving regular cars.
Driver probably felt safe and that everything was in order. The cyclists not so much.
Point is it's a matter of perspective. How many around you have to accommodate?
On the other hand, FSD won’t try to pass me on winding mountain roads with a double yellow line.
It cannot be truly an autonomous robotaxi without VERY HIGH reliability. One intervention per hour is one too many.
I think FSD 12.5 is way beyond that --- I drove over 20 miles yesterday with zero interventions. Also, having ridden Waymo in San Francisco many times, I find that the FSD is actually slightly smoother and handles stuff like going around obstacles and blockages more naturally, although, as you are no doubt aware, there are still some rough edges in rare cases.
Once Tesla has reasonable remote human assistance infrastructure in place to help out with the extreme edge cases, and the software improves at the current rate, I don't see why they couldn't roll out a robotaxi service.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general...
Have to ever tried to get in touch with a human at Tesla short of driving to a service center. Almost impossible. It would be easier for me to get the president on the line.
Having just purchased a new Tesla, I tried for 2 weeks to communicate with Tesla prior to purchase. The closest I even got was a phone tree, which after 7 levels sent me to a voicemail box that was full. Am I’m talking every day for 14 days. Had my wife not wanted it so bad I would have cancelled my deposit on the spot.
I requested service on it last week. The earliest service date is Nov. 12. I have yet to hear from an advisor on the app.
Tesla does a lot of things right, but supporting their products with actual humans is not one of them..
That said, I don't think they want to talk with you pre-purchase outside of one of their showrooms, and the showroom isn't even a large part of their sales model. I imagine that if you're trying to go against the flow, it'd be hard.
As a Waymo user I can promise you that there is, and they have it.
And they got (rightfully) pulled off the roads.
> there are still some rough edges in rare cases
Waymo has substantially lower interventions.
And, they have a huge fleet of humans running around the city attending to the cars. A few weeks ago I saw one stuck - whoever had last used it, managed to trap a seatbelt in the door. It was sitting for about 5 minutes when a guy pulled up and fixed it and sent it on its way. I'm not saying Tesla can't build that, but they're going to have to.
What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?
> What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?
That is a MASSIVE "what if".
What's if it's 2036? What if it's 2056? Hell, if it's 2030 then Tesla is in _serious_ trouble.
That right now is THE multi-billion dollar Tesla question.
A lot of companies have Level 2 systems. That's still a far cry from full automation.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...
It was also announced today that unsupervised FSD is coming to Texas and California in 2025.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
The disengagement events on recent videos of FSD are still the likes of "oops it almost turned into oncoming traffic" or "oops it almost ran into a pole", that's the sort of thing you have to catch before it happens, not after.
I think it’s a mistake to conflate the actual capabilities of the system with the user instructions for how the system is being used. SAE levels are primarily about the latter and about who takes liability for the operation of the vehicle. Conflating the two punishes car manufacturers who are cautious about the current state of their self-driving system.
This is fundamentally different from FSD, where the human is always responsible for driving and maintaining the safety invariants.
That's a cute euphemism for remote operators.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/j3016/J3016_table.jpg
To give an analogy, let's say you use a credit card. A machine processes the payment most of the time, but occasionally something looks suspicious, so it denies the payment and sends a message to a human (you) asking whether the next payment should be allowed. Do you consider yourself to be a "driver" in this system?
If so, imagine a system where all payments flash by onscreen for a human that's tasked with stopping erroneous approvals in realtime. Are humans doing the essentially the same job in this system such that both roles are "drivers"?
You do realize Waymo will only operate in geofenced areas in select cities that have been premapped down to the millimeter?
Waymo is not even remotely close, nor attempting to solve the same problem. This is coming from someone who lives in SF and takes Waymo regularly. Waymo is a cool tech demo and that's about it; FSD is a real tool that people everywhere can actually use to take them where they want to go.
In the last month, it’s driven onto grass where there used to be an off ramp that was redone last year, cut across 3 lanes of highway traffic within 200 feet of an off ramp, and almost ran a semi truck off the road (yes, we had the right of way, but he weighs 20,000 lbs and was in no way going to be able to stop in time).
It a cool toy to show off when you’re being hyper vigilant about keeping an eye on it, but there is no way it should be allowed on the public roads yet.
I 1000% would advise against purchasing it unless you have the extra cash and want to try it out. It’s not even close to production ready.
Edit: spelling
interesting. this wasn’t my experience. i did SF <> Lake Tahoe (which can stretch to 5hrs) a number of times when i was in SF and didn’t encounter any major issues. small issues sure, but it was definitely better than my driving.
I don't see the point in a purpose built two seater with no steering wheel or pedals and I don't know why regulators would approve an autonomous car with no way to manually override it.
2 seater - smaller car
No wheels or stuff - saves money on the build and parts.
And people are creatures of habit and highly social so version 1 of robotaxis will 100% look like normal cars. Regardless of whatever benefits you can come up with on paper. Once it's normalized then you experiment.
He can't even to FSD in a 2.4 mile TUNNEL after years
It seems certain they’ll correct that with their massive expansion coming
For human drivers were a little overkill with no real advange besides parking in small spaces) but they would be probably more usefull.
But the fact that they are a little too complex remains, maybe making them semi standardized and modular would help
There is logic in this design being cheaper to manufacture but I would think that it would be a long while before you "broke even", so to speak, compared to using a design that you already know exactly how to make.
He said in the video it's cheaper through the economics of reuse, not through it being cheap itself
If people are willing to pay extra for comfort and style already, why would they stop?
I feel like so much of this discourse is dominated by people who hate cars. Most people like their cars! That's why they bought them.
Maybe easier to clean, or wash out vomit, or even warn of forgotten items.
The Zeekr vehicle they're testing now, and presumably the Hyundai they're starting to develop, will have self-closing doors.
https://x.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1712009158210519474?s=19
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...
Tesla sold a bunch of cars to Hertz which turned out to be terrible for Hertz, but great for Tesla.
They very much care if they are selling their cars to an entity that is striving to make them irrelevant.
Think about it: If the world moves to a car sharing system where any type of car is available on demand and no one actually owns a car, do you think anyone will actually give one hoot about the badge on the front of the car? That puts manufacturers into the worst possible business model. Competing solely on price...ie a commodity.
So the manufacturers will either not want to work with them, give them whatever junk they can't sell and then tell them to go away...or they expect to get something big in return maybe like some technology sharing or a exclusive partnership.
Why else has Waymo partnered with the bottom of the barrel OEMs up to this point? Why not a Toyota or a Mercedes or hell even get the good cars from the OEMs they have partnered with?
They’re one of the few companies mass-manufacturing affordable EVs in the US.
Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
What does one have to do with the other? The I-Pace was built in Austria. They dont seem to care about where it was built.
>Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
The Chrysler Pacifica was a gas powered vehicle, The I-Pace had a starting MSRP of ~70k. They didn't seem to care about propulsion method or cost of vehicle either.
What they do have in common is that they were both poorly selling cars made by manufacturers that were desperate to sell.
>Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
Any evidence to prove this assertion?
Going back to my previous comment I mentioned that an OEM could want to partner with them if they got something meaningful out of the deal. Seems like thats what Hyundai is getting: Waymo Tech transfer/possibly an exclusivity agreement.
>I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
I never said or implied that they would.
Waymo optimizing for cost: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...
Circling back to my point, this does not really explain why they are partnering with Waymo. Waymo is a rounding error in sales for Hyundai.
If Waymo was solely focused on cost, then they should have stuck with the pacifica which is cheaper or gotten something even cheaper like a Toyota. It makes no sense to go with Hyundai which is not even the cheapest for the features that it offers(compared to id 4, Niro EV, Hell even Kona EV). It is a smaller car compared to the Pacifica and the i-Pace and is far less equipped in terms of comfort and space.
We dont even know if they specifically wanted to go with an EV. Thats just something you just asserted without evidence.
It sure seems like their self-imposed constraint is EVs. Their goal beyond that is cost reduction. It seems like the actual key right now might be volume:
“The team at our new manufacturing facility is ready to allocate a significant number of vehicles for the Waymo One fleet as it continues to expand. Importantly, this is the first step in the partnership between the two companies and we are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration.”
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...
but to your point, Hyundai may see this as an opportunity for “future collaboration” to get autonomous driving tech into their vehicles. But selling a “significant number of vehicles” is also very much in Hyundai’s interest.
If Hyundai was making the Niro or Kona EV in the US, then they may have been an option, but they’re not. They are not eligible for the tax credit. Toyota won’t make EVs here until 2025 or 2026.
The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
Again given their strange choices in the past and their backpedaling on previous initiatives (having Chrysler produce special Pacificas and then going back to retrofitting them by hand themselves, going from commiting to purchasing 65k pacificas to NOT purchasing 65K Pacificas, getting Magna to go a custom design of the iPace for them to not having them do a custom design) I dont see this as a deal that Hyundai got into without major concessions.
>The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
If my theory is correct I suspect they are not getting a warm reception from many manufacturers and they have to pick whatever they can get. I'd imagine their ideal company is Toyota. They have experience with those cars from the early days, they make cars that can help minimize downtime due to their reliability and costs can be reduced. There is a reason so many taxis are prisues. Why not apply that common sense cost savings to Waymo's fleet?
The upward opening doors will also be able to open anywhere, and for anyone, even with canes or bags/luggage.
Now speculating for the moment, from Elon perspective you probably want things to be more cyberpunky as that is how future looked in his childhood and he is trying to build it. Also, engineers / designers were likely mandated to handle all of the maintenance and possibly production by Tesla Bots.
sort of Kentucky Fried Movie style :)
Groovy ;)
1. What is important for a vehicle optimized for large scale robotaxi fleet from manufacturing and operational perspectives.
2. What is important for me if I get an into autonomous vehicle.
People are starting to wake up to the (shitty) new reality that Big Tech created for us. The cynical nature is just the natural reaction to a serial grifter becoming the world's richest man.
I don't think anyone but the most naive actually believes anything in this PR piece will come to market.
But sure, your Tesla has a good infotainment system so that's cool.
Surely they should be using facebook, that's already proven to be great at helping with genocides
The simple fact is that Musk is a bad actor, an asshole with a huge ego, with a history of over promising and under delivering.
Is it so surprising to you that the supremely-unlikeable boy who cried wolf is being met with cynical skepticism?
BYD sold 131k in 2020, 321k in 2021, 911k in 2022, 1.6million in 2023, and in 2024 q1: 300k q2: 444k q3: 443k, total: 4.15 million
The point of this presentation was not to spell out technically how they are going to accomplish this. Agreed, a fleet of model 3s would work great.
The point of this presentation was to look like a cool visionary tech company that is going to change the world, to justify that your Market cap is now larger than EVERY OTHER MAJOR AUTOMAKER COMBINED!
Same reason the prototypes need to look like they were lifted from Blade Runner.
It's so Enron Musk can say it's still 2 years away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCezICQNgJU
With all the changes you would have to do to M3, its basically a new car.
This Robotaxi will have all the drive-by-wire architecture of the Cybertruck. The new electronics architecture and Ethernet bus. And things like wireless charging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2aNJCsfrP0 - 10 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mITK3qaaHQ8 - 4 years ago
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-tesla-self-driving-cars-anniv... [1]
For high density you have the robovan.
It's strictly more expensive if you're limited to say, the typical NHTSA autonomous vehicle production limit of 2,500 vehicles per year.
Also using old and already amortized tech is another option. Dacia mastered this art in the recent past.
If you look at regular taxis, the only part that is used by passengers is typically the back seat. Which fits two, maybe three people at best. So, it's not such a crazy form factor for a taxi because most taxis are also two passenger vehicles right now.
The point of this car is that it's smaller and cheaper (less parts, battery, etc.) and optimized for being an autonomous taxi. And the reason for that is productizing unsupervised FSD. The car is just a means to that end. If you are going to build a self driving taxi, a two seater is the logical choice. IMHO it's actually too big. They could make it a lot shorter.
Oh, that's right, it was a stunt to boost the stock price, not a real product you intended to sell. Just like this.
Seriously, though, this is the standard Elon Musk tactic...
It would sell +++
Filled it back up as much as I could with the included inflator kit, took it a big box store, they patched it up and was on my way.
Took maybe an hour total out of my day? No $ cost to me (under tire warranty)
(and if you get one + slime stuff, you will kill the TPMS and have to buy a new one)
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/cars/china-tesla-byd-competit...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/03/chinas-byd-is-set-to-beat-te...
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/bev-sales-10-m...
Tariffs aren’t going to keep the EV printer at bay. They only delay the inevitable.
https://electrek.co/2024/10/09/byd-to-sell-100000-evs-north-...
https://electrek.co/2024/08/16/byd-plots-another-ev-plant-wh...
https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/byd-triple-ev-market-share-eu...
https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-ev-driving-seat-us-a...
US EV demand is simply not at the point where this is economically rational (imho), yet. And so, you’re stuck with a legacy auto EV, a Tesla, or a BYD with 100% tariff markup for now. Even with the tariff, the BYD is still cheaper than a Tesla.
Policy in support of existing capital that is a heavy hitter politically can absolutely move faster than capital of new entrants.
And with both political parties explicitly being anti-chinese capital currently, it's not clear that a chinese factory would even be allowed to open domestically.
Not if Trump wins and I mean that without cynicism.
EU is imposing tariffs depending on the manufacturer's co-operation with cost investigations.
Also their cars are build like modern consumer electronics, welded/glued together at every opportunity.
Take a look at this video where a guy tries to pry apart a BYD battery pack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPTefsqNGI4
I guess BYD's strategy of world domination involves a high degree of automation, so they can make their cars in countries without a large pool of free workers/high wages, that's why they're made like this.
And here in Europe, they're not even that much cheaper, before tariffs. A Seal costs almost as much as a Model 3.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841960 ("HN: VW, BMW and Mercedes Are Getting Left in the Dust by China's EVs")
But the problem with comparing "features" is that tesla fanboys/haters get to assign arbitrary values to the features the cars have. It would be so much easier to just meet your promised price point. In that regard my point still stands.
what makes you think the mazda 3 is the main competition?
This is probably the most untrue statement you've made all evening and you have made plenty.
>The 2024 model 3 interior is beautiful to the point that all the pointless plastic widgets present on other OEMs are kinda hilarious to look at.
The market seems to disagree given that the gasoline competition is still the overwhelming majority of new sales. There are many reason for that but if this interior was so good they should have swept the market after 7 years of this cost cutti I mean minimalism?
>what makes you think the mazda 3 is the main competition?
The mazda 3 is a non luxury sedan that competes in that segment. You can substitute the corolla the civic or any of those cars on the non luxury side. If you instead consider the Tesla to be a competitor to luxury cars (which is difficult to argue again because you cannot compare feature to feature) then you'd obviously go with the german/japanese luxury brands(as I also mentioned but you ignored).
Again going back to my point, Tesla has a history of never meeting their promised price point when they release their car. Not one model has ever hit their primosed price point. Not even the 12 year old Model S with its sub 50k price point. After 12 years of lies and false promises, there is no credibility that they will get to this magical 30k price point so it becomes moot when the market (which cannot afford their damn cars today gien their sales slump) will not be buying this contraption when it comes out years past its announced release window.
indeed interiors of most other brands have morphed into a large screen instead of the 2010 circus of buttons. Model 3/Y is very competitive with premium german/japanese brands like bmw/audi etc.
I don’t disagree their pricing goals are usually not really met unless given the discount of inflation.
fyi EVs are 25% of the global car market and growing.
There is a good reason why it was all presented in a Hollywood studio, without any specifics. The car we've seen yesterday is a prototype at best, a prototype that's crucially missing a small but important part for a robotaxi - the ability to drive autonomously...
Cybetruck was supposed to cost 40k (1/3 of the initial price) and have twice the range or something like that.
They are also doing a $25k car, they just aren't revealing it today.
Announce and do the far stuff, but at the same time ship the near things that people want.
A pragmatic auto CEO would have had that $25k car moving already. A pragmatic industry CEO also wouldn't have such a large event without a call-to-action.
If they had a "reserve now for Feb 2025 delivery" button under todays announcement it would have gone offff
[0] edit: ok Gwynne is COO - let Elon keep the title, but we know what matters.
The same thing that Google (ironically) did with X - which led to Waymo, which now already has autonomous taxis[0]
You can't keep perpetually hyping tomorrow when the next Q is due.
I have an affinity for Tesla since it's named after someone from a village my mums family is from (and who I'm named after), and I like environmentalist, decarbonise, and electrify Elon.. but sometimes he makes it hard.
[0] on that note - not only have I seen better taxi demos than today, also seen better robot demos from Boston Dynamics.
Optimus has improved quickly. Gen 3 should be better. They showed Gen 3 hands today that looked pretty good.
You can't win on manufacturing - this is, after all, a nation that is now building Volvo's better than the Swedes did.
Tesla fell into the China partnership trap, where the gov subsidises you and you open a "partnership" there, meanwhile they take your IP and knowledge for the benefit of the state (I was in that situation in '07 with Tencent and turned it down).
Hence now $10k Chinese cars - and Biden introducing tariffs to protect local industry (including Tesla - which Elon doesn't seem to appreciate)
On AI at Elon's recent recruitment event he put X.ai in Tier 1 with OpenAI and Anthropic and didn't even mention Meta. To me, as someone who applies these models across industries every day X.ai has never even come up.
That tells me he isn't informed on what Meta are doing (and that is - undercutting the commercial AI industry).
I'm hesitant to think it but there's a ton of hand waving and investor pumping happening here. Which is a shame, because a company with that market cap can do _a lot_ better.
I wasn't impressed by a single thing I saw today. I've seen the same autonomous car demo in a closed environment at my own uni 25+ years ago. I've seen better robots from Boston. I've also seen much better presentations than someone who looked like they are reading the text for the first time.
They have the capital, the mindshare, and the means and they're wasting it.
It's hardly new news that Elon is an awkward presenter and it isn't relevant to future performance of Tesla. You have to look at the pace of improvement of what Tesla is doing. Among humanoid companies that started in 2021 or later Tesla is the furthest along and improving much faster than the likes of Boston Dynamics. While they are still far behind, they have the time and the funding to catch up.
The Cybercab demo was an amusement park ride (and Elon explicitly billed it as such), however Tesla's FSD is released to the public and can be directly evaluated. While it is not yet near Waymo it is impressively good as of this month and the rate of improvement is very fast now. It just drove me across town for 20 minutes and I didn't have to touch the steering wheel a single time. It was incapable of that on that specific drive just two months ago. And I have the less powerful older variant of the Autopilot computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
While a $25k EV seems to be what we all want and is almost guaranteed to be a massive hit, there is no evidence such a thing can be done yet without losing money on every sale.
Why isn’t any other car company doing it?
Rivian are losing money on every car sold at 4 times the price.
No other car company offers it, or promises it's coming next year, or ...
Similarly, who actually believes a $39,000 CyberTruck will EVER appear?
Crickets?
> who actually believes a $39,000 CyberTruck will EVER appear?
That was the estimated pricing announced before COVID and the associated inflation wasn't it?
Since then the released prices are significantly different.
> Why isn’t any other car company doing it?
You mean except all the chinese companys doing it right now?
Or all the european carmakers releasing theirs as we speak?
Do those meet US vehicle regulations? How can I buy one for $25k
> Or all the european carmakers releasing theirs as we speak
I have not seen mention of those, can you share links please?
Cheap car for when interest rates hit would’ve been perfect too.
Musk makes the primary choices at SpaceX, he decides the company strategy, he decides where the money goes, he decides what future projects to take on.
If its so clear what a 'pragmatic auto CEO' would do, why do other car companies not have those cheap cars?
And the data shows pretty clearly that 2 person cars, even cheap ones don't sell very well.
They do! The chinese for a while (hence tariffs), the europeans are releasing theirs right now.
I believe the reason was it adds strength that let's you have higher wider glass roof above passengers heads.
And the rear view mirror replacement uses cameras.
One would think so. But slow self-driving mini-buses seem to be a niche item. San Francisco's Treasure Island had one from Beep for part of 2023 and early 2024. Las Vegas had one back in 2017, from Nayva. Local Motors had some, but is defunct. There are a few from WeRide on an island in Guangzhou. EasyMile has a few installations.
This kind of self driving, at 7 to 9 MPH, has been around since 2009. It works, but it's not that useful.
But to your point, the value for the Robovan is minuscular unless it's as far-ranging as any other vehicle. And even if the FSD tech and regulations are there for it, the actual vehicle—at least the wheelbase and body covering said wheels—will need to be rethought for real-world conditions.
Despite having very few details in this presentation, the one detail that is clear is that existing Teslas won't be taxiing anyone, and Tesla will be the operator reaping the benefits. That's a significant under-delivery, especially for the average Tesla retail investor who believes in the mission and is driving their stock price.
Elon said you will be able to buy a Cybercab for under $30,000 and individual owners will be able to "tend to [your robotaxi fleet] like a flock of sheep".
Yeah, not sure how this is supposed to be a positive reply.
That’s untrue. He said Model 3s and Ys will be starting taxiing next year in California and Texas.
he says a lot of things. Where's my Roadster?
He was talking about compressed air thrusters to increase acceleration. It's a cool idea. Who knows, they might implement it.
Edit: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1005577738332172289 SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …
"Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package will definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …"
I didn't want to spend the time to find the video where the flying bit was said more explicitly.
He said, from your own link, "Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …".
https://electrek.co/2024/06/15/elon-musk-tesla-always-coming...
The car doesn't exist in the first place, doesn't exist with thrusters, and doesn't exist with thrusters that make it capable of flying, and so I think it's a little early to call victory on flying Tesla roadsters.
Discussing the thrusters in 2018: "Using the config you describe, plus an electric pump to replenish air in COPV, when car power draw drops below max pack power output, makes sense. But we are going to go a lot further."
And more recently, it was very explicit: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1801980372823187707 "The new Tesla Roadster can fly"
On a tangent, I find it hilarious that all the Musk related streams are always hijacked by crypto scammers. It's some circumstantial evidence that the circles in a venn diagram of the types of people falling for crypto scams and the people falling for Musk snake oil has a lot of overlap.