5 ms·
Tesla is looking to hire a team to remotely control its 'self-driving' robotaxis
- Temporary_31337 2y agoImagine if we put these remote operators inside the car, the latency would be unrivalled.
- peutetre 2y agoWhat's the plan to do right by people who were duped into buying HW3 cars: https://electrek.co/2024/10/23/elon-musk-finally-admits-teslas-hw3-might-not-support-full-self-driving/ https://electrek.co/2024/10/23/elon-musk-finally-admits-tesl... Those buyers were made specific promises which Tesla has never delivered on: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-stating-all-cars-have-self-driving-hardware/ https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...
- FollowingTheDao 2y agoSince when do Tech Companies have to actually have deliverables? I thought they were only supoosed to break things?
- geon 2y agoNo wonder Musk wants to dismantle consumer protection. https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/28/elon-musk-cfpb-trump https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/28/elon-musk...
- wepple 2y ago“duped” isn’t the right word here. People optimistically paid money for a thing that didn’t exist, in the hopes that it would. People bought into a kickstarter and are entering the “find out” stage
- chipdart 2y ago> “duped” isn’t the right word here. "Duped" is an accurate description of how Elon Musk has been treating customers who bought a Tesla car with a HW3. He's been repeatedly promising those buyers that full self driving is just a software update away. Now apparently FSD is an impossibility and the company is rushing to hire drivers? In the very least it's bait-and-switch scam.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoAren't the drivers being hired for their recently announced Robo-Taxi fleet and not private, personal cars like your comment suggests?
- chipdart 2y ago> Aren't the drivers being hired for their recently announced Robo-Taxi fleet (...) The robo-taxi fleet is scheduled to be launched by 2026. This means Tesla, in spite of Elon Musk's wild claims, is not counting on providing anything remotely similar to FSD until at least 2026.
- fzeroracer 2y agoKickstarter is a very different thing. You are paying for a product that does not exist yet in the hopes that it will. For Tesla, you paid for a product that exists and outright does not have what the manufacturer claims. That's false advertising.
- mgiannopoulos 2y agoThe label on the Tesla site in the past has always been “FSD capable”. For years the FSD software was only available to a very small set of beta testers even if you had paid for it. People still have their money knowing they were not getting something at that monent. Not sure why we pretend they were fooled somehow.
- 2y ago
- olddustytrail 2y agoI've never heard of this and don't know what HW3 is, yet I will still speculate that the plan is "If that turns out to be the case, we will upgrade those who bought HW3 FSD for free. And we have designed the system to be upgradable." which is what it says in the link you provided.
- croes 2y agoNo the first time for Tesla. Fool me once … If people don’t learn it’s on them. Same with Trump.
- sshine 2y ago> Same with Trump. With buying cars you get to choose between more than two candidates, you can choose "wait", and the other candidate isn't worse.
- croes 2y agoActually there are more than two candidates
- sshine 2y agoNot effectively. The consequence of voting for a 3rd minority candidate is that your vote will effectively be wasted. Or, perhaps in a less pessimistic view, a protest vote, a flavored way of blank voting. In several European voting systems, parties form coalitions, so your vote will only go to waste if the party you vote for fails to cross some minimum boundary, e.g. 2%. As for buying electric cars, you still have at least 10 models to choose from that won't have a really bad, unfixable experience, or a high risk of the car brand going bankrupt. So comparing buying Tesla and voting Trump seems a little simple.
- croes 2y agoIt’s not about choice, it’s about getting fooled. Both Trump and Musk fooled their supporters. If that doesn’t disqualify them, it’s not their fault. If you still believe these liars, you’re to blame.
- sshine 2y agoI'm not sure what to say. I drive a Tesla, and I never believed it would drive by itself. When it comes to the election, it's a big circus and everyone who believes the primary candidates are fools. Blame is making someone responsible for your misery, you don't have to do that.
- sixQuarks 2y agoMusk has said HW3 owners will get free upgrades. It’s easy to replace the hardware and cameras.
- peutetre 2y agoIf it's easy, why hasn't it happened? HW4 doesn't have the same form factor as HW3. They'll have to make a HW3.5. They won't replace the cameras. So like I say, what's the plan? More empty words from Musk count for nothing.
- IshKebab 2y agoIf you believe that I have a FSD deposit to sell you...
- grecy 2y agoThose cars will get free upgrades, if required.
- John23832 2y agoThe cars don't have the inbuilt technology. I also HIGHLY doubt that Tesla would upgrade all cars at their own expense.
- hatenberg 2y agoThe plan was regulatory capture and defanging. It worked.
- John23832 2y agoI can't speak for Tesla, but Elon's plan is to get rid of the Bureau of Consumer Protection which is the institution that you would appeal to in such cases. Edit: Open and honest edit, Elon wants to get rid of the CFPB, not the FTC's BCP.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nunez 2y agoRegardless of the agency under question, wouldn't "deleting" them require an act of Congress and significant analysis?
- John23832 2y agoIn the US bureaucracy, if you control the executive branch you can stop enforcement which is effectively the same thing. That is an act solely delegated to the executive/president. The House can also just not fund the particular agency. Both of those options are more expedient than official removal.
- nunez 2y ago1. HW3 is capable of running the latest iteration of FSD, which is very very good. In fact, the FSD stack still targets HW3, despite HW4 having significantly better hardware. 2. Tesla stated that they would upgrade HW3 cars if they run too far behind HW4...not that this means much. 3. Tesla has also been consistent about HW3 lagging behind HW4 while still being at least 3x safer than human drivers...not that this means much either.
- peutetre 2y ago> HW3 is capable of running the latest iteration of FSD No. It isn't: https://electrek.co/2024/11/14/tesla-pushes-end-to-end-neural-networks-for-highway-driving-but-only-for-newer-vehicles/ https://electrek.co/2024/11/14/tesla-pushes-end-to-end-neura... https://electrek.co/2024/10/31/tesla-gives-update-on-self-driving-roadmap-v13-slips-more-promises/ https://electrek.co/2024/10/31/tesla-gives-update-on-self-dr... It's funny. The bigger the lie the more people will believe it and ardently defend it.
- october8140 2y agoNow your taxi driver doesn’t have to put their life on the line while they drive you around town.
- stuaxo 2y agoAnd they can be employed on the other side of the world for considerably less money and with less qualifications.
- nolok 2y agoYou want to be driven by a guy who has an added 200ms latency at best ? I don't
- miah_ 2y agoToo bad! You don't own the company or make the decisions. The value of your life has already been determined and paying a low wage to someone far away makes the most financial sense for these companies. We exist in a terrible, and great time.
- exe34 2y agothe only time Elon supports remote working is when he can break some laws doing it.
- raverbashing 2y agoSome SNL cast members in the 80s would have been glad for that (not sure it was Richard Pryor)
- zelphirkalt 2y agoSmells ripe for disaster. Not self-driving and will be ridiculed all over the place. I guess the lies are starting to catch up with them. But not only PR-wise. Imagine any kind of security issues. Or what if the signal is blocked out somehow, unintentionally or intentionally by some bad actor. Basically this looks like remote taxi drivers. Maybe they will be able to work from home or something. But probably badly paid. And then driver quality might go down. Oh and imagine the PR disaster, if any of them ever gets a customer into a car crash...
- nolok 2y agoI mean his "IA android" was the same thing. I really dislike Altman but if Musk was in charge of decision over there ChatGPT would be a pipe into Amazon Mechanical Turks or something like that ...
- sixQuarks 2y agoThere’s a lot of ignorance in these comments. do people not realize that Waymo and the other full self driving companies have tele operators as well? It’s a back up system in case The vehicle gets stuck. Simple as that.
- orwin 2y agoI'd really like if Tesla had the same system as Waymo, i.e. a disambiguation and no direct control. If it is direct control, i won't trust it.
- jvanderbot 2y agoTele-operate conjures images of RoboTaxi simulator on Steam, or something. What's really going on is it's more like Air Traffic Control for a taxi fleet - a welcome and very necessary step. "Oh 47 is stuck behind a fruit truck, requesting illegal go-around. Authorize it"
- mrweasel 2y ago> It’s a back up system in case The vehicle gets stuck People seems to be thinking emergency control, but that would make no sense. Imagine being dropped into a completely unknown setting, milliseconds away from a crash and being expected to take over the wheel. That's pretty obviously not what this is about, it can't be much beyond a car that hasn't moved in a few minutes because it's stuck.
- nolok 2y agoI assume they mean take emergency corrective action when an issue arise like google with Waymo, and the general thing will still be sorta kinda self driving like tesla does (which is not like waymo, but still better than nothing) ? Because being a network latency event away from a car crash doesn't inspire me much confidence, and I don't have to sit in one of those to be affected, just to be on the same road.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> assume they mean take emergency corrective action when an issue arise like google with Waymo, and the general thing will still be sorta kinda self driving like tesla does Having taken Waymos and put my parents' Tesla in FSD, I wouldn't assume as much. Tesla's FSD makes mistakes more frequently, and they're bad ones, in part due to its willingness to aggressively accelerate when it thinks the road is clear.
- simonjgreen 2y agoI would describe the difference as: Waymo drives like a limo driver, carefully and smoothly, and tries to disappear for the passengers in the back seat. Tesla FSD drives like a car owner might, and tries to make the person in the front seat feel like the behaviour of their car is the same as they would do it.
- ticklemyelmo 2y agoI rode in a Waymo for the first time last week. The highest praise I can give it is that it's boring. It drives like a careful human with zero surprises.
- llamaimperative 2y agoYeah it’s hilarious (frightening) when Tesla cultists say that the surprise in FSD’s behavior makes it exciting. That attitude is why people who share the roads are tired of Tesla’s and their loyalists’ constant excuses for this stuff.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoEveryone hates Elon Musk and you are all laughing, but clear your head and think straight: This is genius. Cars meant to be without a driver as much as possible, mixing AI and AI (Artificial Intelligence and All Indians). This allows minimising human costs with the future option of further reducing it. There are plenty of situations and roads where Artificial Intelligence is enough: waiting for a red light, a straight, simple street, a highway… Human operators will quickly cycle between different cars taking over in any situation that is too complicated for the computer. What this will do to safety is a different issue.
- beAbU 2y agoNot genius, not by a long shot. It's not surprising they're doing this. Even Waymo has human operators for emergency situations.
- chipdart 2y ago> This is genius. This is a peak Elon Musk stan quote: playing catch-up to what is described in the article as the industry standard, and something that established players were doing over a decade ago, is... "Genius"? Is that it? What does the word "genius" mean to you at this point?
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoI consider Elon Musk a clown. But this move is economically very clever. It is the beginning of the next disruption of the personal transportation business.
- amazingamazing 2y ago> Recent reports show the company is planning to hire a human team to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations. > Tesla would not be the first robotaxi company to use this method. In fact, it’s an industry standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi company owned by General Motors, was employing remote human assistants to troubleshoot when its vehicles ran into trouble (the vehicles appear to have run into trouble every four to five miles). Google’s Waymo is also thought to employ the same practice, as does Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon. Big pile of nothing. Fools only read titles exclusively. If Teslas offering is bad then that’s a story, but hiring human operators is the norm.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> fools only read titles The lady doth protest too much? What matters is the frequency of interventions, remote or in person. Having taken Waymos and Teslas in FSD extensively, the interventiona rate in the latter is substantially higher, in part due to them being a Level II system trying to operate globally. The article isn't anything damning. But it's also not a nothingburger.
- jagged-chisel 2y agoThe title leads the reader to believe that Tesla’s robotaxis will be piloted by humans rather than self-driving software. The combination of the word “control” with scare quotes on “self-driving” gives this impression. The article may not be damning, but the title? It doth mislead.
- amazingamazing 2y agoThis is about robotaxis like Waymo not FSD. Even if it were there are orders of magnitude more FSD cars available than Waymo cars.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> This is about robotaxis like Waymo not FSD What "this" are you referring to? Tesla doesn't have a robotaxi. It does have FSD, which makes it a reasonable comparison for (a) existing and (b) sharing FSD's camera-only dogma.
- hathym 2y ago@elon, Just put it on Steam as 'GTA: Tesla Edition' and let gamers pay Tesla to drive :D
- andix 2y agoRemote human intervention to some degree is not unexpected at all. The question is only how often it’s going to be needed.
- devonsolomon 2y agoAgreed. Reads as a bit of a gotcha. But wouldn’t we expect and want humans to be in the loop here?
- LightBug1 2y agoStop fooling yourself ffs ... call a spade a spade and think clearly. This is abosolute horseshit compared to the dream and vision and what was promised for some people who have actually paid hard cash for FSD.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoWaymo does the same thing: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing-chess-while-tesla-plays-checkers/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...
- nip 2y agoReally surprised by some of the comments here: a mix of hatred, ignorance and lack of foresight This is a great way to: - Have a fail-safe / fallback in case the software does not work as intended - Allow them to continue training the already immense dataset using real data (as opposed to synthetic data)
- manmal 2y agoI don’t want to sit in a taxi that’s remote controlled by someone who has low stakes (their body not in the way of harm). There will be a number of accidents attached to the self driving mechanism, so I can make an informed decision, but there won’t be such a number for the person taking over remotely.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LightBug1 2y agoReally? You're surprised that I don't want to get in a vehicle driven by Greg in Florida while he's scratching his nuts? ... Or Javinder in India while he's got a side eye on how his cricket bet is going? Count me out. This is a laughable version of the promised vision.
- hgomersall 2y agoYou'd think that if they can't get a reliable self driving car given how much training data they must currently have, perhaps they need to try a different strategy.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoMore compute.
- huijzer 2y agoYes I learned that too a while ago. If you say anything slightly positive about Tesla, you'll be downvoted into oblivion. I can't wait for the day for this US/Western tribalism to cool down and we can have substantive discussions again.
- gqlkebkelme 2y agoThe aggressive push to cover LEO with Starlink satellites is starting to make a lot of sense. This worldwide communication and telekinetic infrastructure has the potential to change the global economy in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Your imagination and experience can fill in the blanks here. Brilliant foresight and execution ostensibly by Elon.
- hatenberg 2y agoGotta love a new age of slavery where human drones in the colonies are serving us without us having to look into their faces. Now the anti immigrant push makes perfect sense, it’s priming demand for the slave labor matrix
- phtrivier 2y agoAs much as I would enjoy some Elon-bashing, this is a bit unsurprising. I used to write remote dashboards for autonomous vehicles, and if we had been able to fully support remote operation (latency was just unbearable at the time), we would have gladly done so, if only to unstuck vehicles from tricky situations. Also, it seems like it's already done in other robotaxi setups. It makes sense for the company, as long as the remote operator only drives a fraction of the miles ran by the vehicles (and if you can keep the wage low enough, while still ensuring driver engagement.) It makes sense for the user as long as the vehicle reach its destination, and they don't have to car about driving. I would still heavily fine Tesla for calling it "Full Self Driving" or "Autopilot", because it's a plain lie. But Elon retired from science & engineering to focus on running an ad-funded political campaigning platform, so "truth / lies" is a bit of moot point.
- llamaimperative 2y agoMoot point for sure but can and should be criticized and made fun of repeatedly.
- chipdart 2y ago> Also, it seems like it's already done in other robotaxi setups. I think you're missing the whole point. The whole point is that Tesla has been promising full self-driving cars for years, and going as far as to talk shit about specific computer vision strategies used by competitors with actual real-world autonomous car services being provided to the public. Elon Musk has been promising the public that full self driving was just a software update away for those who spent money on a Tesla car with a specific onboard computer. And now, after years of making promises about full self driving cars and shitting on companies who already provide autonomous car services, they silently decide that after all they "need the ability to access and control [Tesla cars] remotely” ? I mean, using teleoperators is a widely known industry standard. Tesla was promising way more than that and shitting on those who were using them. And now apparently they are scrambling to catch up with what Waymo was doing over a decade ago? If I was a shareholder or a customer, I'd be pissed.
- phtrivier 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hnburnsy 2y agoHere is the police interacting with Waymo support staff to clear in the vehicle... https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/6/24193094/phoenix-waymo-car-pulled-over-traffic-stop-oncoming-lane-police https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/6/24193094/phoenix-waymo-car...
- beardyw 2y agohttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241128-i-taught-rats-to-drive-a-car-and-it-may-help-us-lead-happier-lives https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241128-i-taught-rats-to... Problem solved!
- karakanb 2y agoGenuine question: instead of self-driving cars, why don't we have remote controlled cars all around? With cameras all around the visibility would not be as terrible, together with the current self-driving capabilities which can get through basic situation I would have imagined we'd see more of them around.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoI'm not sure what the news is here. Of course they are going to have a team of people to take over when the self-driving software reaches its limits. It would be stupid not to, and every autonomy company does.
- desert_rue 2y agoI believe the sticking point is that they are only now doing this industry standard practice- years after selling cars with FSD
- Animats 2y agoTesla is apparently talking about full teleoperation, with someone using a remote steering wheel while wearing a VR headset. Phantom Automotive tried that.[1] Baidu does that.[2] Apparently Tesla is hiring people to do that. Waymo doesn't do that. The support center can only give hints to the vehicle software. If the situation is so bad that won't work, they dispatch someone to go to the car and drive it manually. The sensor suite, with all those LIDARs and RADARs, isn't well matched to VR-type driving by a human. Tesla is trying to get away with Fake Self Driving, which they've been trying to do since 2016. Now we see why Musk wants federal pre-emption of state regulation.[3] California's "restrictive rules"[4] require SAE 4 or SAE 5 autonomy for autonomous vehicles. Worse, DMV can (and did, with Cruise) revoke a company's license to drive autonomously. They apply about the same standards they do for human drivers. Musk probably wants Federal rules where Tesla can cover up, litigate, and stall after accidents, since that's what Tesla has done in the past after major accidents. DMV can suspend a license immediately. [1] https://www.statesman.com/story/money/2024/11/18/tesla-federal-self-driving-regulations-trump/76417424007/ https://www.statesman.com/story/money/2024/11/18/tesla-feder... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/simracing/comments/1f0avac/baidus_selfdriving_taxis_use_g29s_in_a_remote/ https://www.reddit.com/r/simracing/comments/1f0avac/baidus_s... [3] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/heres-where-federal-automated-driving-law-stands-near-the-end-of-the-biden-administration/ https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/heres-where-federal-automated-... [4] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/av_second15day_notice_express_terms/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/av_second15day_notice_exp...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deadbabe 2y agoI don’t understand why this is a bad thing for so many people here. This kind of tech will eventually allow more people to have their own “private driver” who works remotely and on demand. Fully reliable self driving via AI isn’t coming for a very long time.
- hgomersall 2y agoSo a taxi? Just with even lower pay and less skin in the game?
- deadbabe 2y agoYes? What else do you think this tech is for? Increasingly we should just move toward reducing all work just to the purest form, eliminating things like commutes or geographic locations from the requirements.
- hgomersall 2y agoI'm not sure if your post is ironic or if you're being serious. Perhaps you could clarify.
- pixxel 2y ago> I don’t understand
- breeskee 2y agoProblem is, after listening to or observing most Tesla owners for a few minutes, I’d steer the car directly into the nearest guardrail or garbage truck.
- mehmetemirsen 2y ago[flagged]