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Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
- kreetx 1y agoNote that electrec.co only ever has negative takes on Tesla.
- kajecounterhack 1y agoOK but also note there's also not a "both sides" to everything. Some stuff can just suck.
- kreetx 1y agoI'm sure it might. It's just that any news item from this particular site has been negative. (Even the one from 2019 that the sibling links.)
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThe sibling link was the turning point -- articles about Tesla before the link were generally positive, articles after and including the link were negative.
- kreetx 1y agoYou are correct (and it even looks like 2019 wasn't much negative).
- Veserv 1y agoThat is entirely untrue. Fred Lambert was one of the most full-throated supporters of Tesla just a few years ago. He personally referred around 15 million dollars of sales [1] to Tesla. If even Tesla's most fervent supporters now call them liars and dangerous, you should probably listen. [1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-referral-program/ https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- turnsout 1y agoThinking of re-upping my put options on $TSLA. This launch is destined to be a fiasco. It's unbelievable to me that they doubled down on vision-only at the expense of lidar. Google/Waymo is going to eat their lunch on the self-driving side, and the Tesla brand is dying with consumers. This company is cooked.
- RajT88 1y agoSo - the cooked-ness of Tesla may depend on what you think Musk's goal was with Tesla. If you believe he was out to change the world - maybe he'll let Tesla die. It's unlikely they are going to accomplish much else at this point, better, smarter more experienced competitors are sweeping the board. If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can, he'll probably course correct at some point. Lidar it is clear will be the future of self-driving, and with all the adopters the economies of scale will kick in at some point.
- turnsout 1y agoI don't understand how you could look at Elon's actions and think he has any interest in making as much money as he can. He's already made his money. Now he's gone full Howard Hughes. "I would like to die on Mars" is a direct quote.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoI think he is on a power trip but the last 6 months have taught him that his opinions are not as valued as he thought.
- steveBK123 1y agoEasily accomplished with a 1 way rocket (it doesn't even need a lander).
- RajT88 1y agoActions like leveraging the relationship with Trump to get the government to buy a ton of StarLink and Cybertrucks? Him and his companies hold a few billion in crypto, and is possibly one of the major holders of the Trump shitcoin? It appears to be self-dealing for profit to me, the Trump relationship being his path to his next hundred billion dollars in net worth. What does it look like to you?
- blindriver 1y agoI have over $100k in Tesla puts. There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week. Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road. I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FSD as recently as last month for one month to try it out. It doesn't work as well as a Waymo, not even close. It still feels like a really good high school demo but not close to being in the same ballpark as Waymo. But Elon has killed his brand with his politics, and the robotaxi initiative is a desperate attempt to gain ground. But it's going to kill someone and it will be 100% on him because he's the one pushing this when there's no way it will ever be ready for real world situations the way Waymo is.
- WorkerBee28474 1y agoThe market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
- mosdl 1y agoA great quote and applies to a lot of things
- moralestapia 1y agoSure, tell that to Theranos' executives. Oh yeah, you can't, they're in jail.
- antisthenes 1y agoTheranos never went public, so the quote about markets doesn't apply. I do agree with the general sentiment, however. If FSD kills a person, many executives, including the top dog, need to go to jail.
- nickff 1y agoThat seems like an awfully low bar to imprisoning people. Shouldn't executives at every company which designs or manufactures vehicles go to jail by your standard? If not, why?
- stingrae 1y agoWe are potentially about to see a worse incident than Uber in Phoenix or Cruise in SF. 444 miles per Critical Disengagement is terrible. In 2023, Waymo reported 17,000 miles between Critical Disengagements and have made significant (as seen by a functioning robotaxi service) leaps since.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoCruise in SF was a bit of a freak accident. There were systematic issues that exacerbated the issue, but it wasn't an issue of bad disengagement numbers. In fact, Cruise 2023 actually highlights how misleading disengagement numbers can be, as they reported 0 critical disengagements the entire year over 583k miles. Waymo is extremely consistent about their numbers and they typically sandbag themselves relative to their competitors. Tesla of course doesn't officially report CA numbers, so people rely on crowdsourced data that the company and fans maintain are orders of magnitude lower than reality. It's entirely possible that the opaqueness and small scale of the Tesla rollout could lead to situations where long tail events like the Cruise collision simply don't occur, or aren't allowed to reach public media.
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Cruise in SF was a bit of a freak accident. The ensuing cover-up attempt wasn't, though.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoI think we can agree that people trying to cover-up a horrific accident by lying to regulators is a somewhat different issue though.
- const_cast 1y agoThe same hubris that powers faulty and half-baked implementations is responsible for lying to regulators. The problem here is that Musk isn't really a humble man, and he's the face of Tesla. That makes everyone a little on edge. Of course, there's a lot of other people in Tesla who, I'm sure, are fantastic engineers and designers. But still, the feeling of uneasiness ensues. If companies want to earn the trust of the public, they have to anticipate our questions and concerns and address them. It's a high bar in modern America, which is why so many industries (food, pharmaceuticals, automobiles) are plagued with low-trust.
- iw7tdb2kqo9 1y agoTesla had more chance to succeed than Waymo. It's impossible for Waymo to match Tesla in real world training and testing data. Somehow Waymo is winning.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoWaymo has ~40 million miles of test data. Tesla has ~4B miles. But for training both quantity and quality are important. Tesla only uploads excerpts and metadata for its 4B miles, and it's video only. Waymo can fully analyze all 40M miles, and it's much richer, with LIDAR and other sensors. My feeling is that Waymo has the data advantage.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoYou can also just buy camera data from other OEMs, not to mention the vast amounts available from public sources like YouTube or Google maps vehicles that are accessible to them if they really care. The vast, vast majority of that data is uninteresting though. It's not much better than simulation data, which Waymo has many tens of billions of miles worth.
- darth_avocado 1y agoI’ll trust Waymo’s 40 million over Tesla’s 4B any day. You can make something work most of the times with our vision. But when there is no one to man the car, most of the times isn’t good enough
- horsawlarway 1y agoWaymo chose an approach that seems geared towards actually doing the task. Tesla tried for the moonshot - They wanted a consumer car with cheap sensor hardware to perform the job. Trusting that computing "smarts" could solve the rest of the problem. I'm in Atlanta where Waymos have started popping up left and right - the sensor bank on these things is HUGE. You can spot 'em from way far off... Giant sensors on top. Big sensors on the front wheel wells back wheel wells, big sensors on both front and back. Big sensors basically all over them. I'm of the opinion now that Tesla was just way, WAY off base about what sort of requirements exist for sensing, and that they don't, in fact, have much more real world training data because their data is just garbage from the cameras. Waymo is winning because Waymo accepted the actual requirements early. Tesla is off in lala land with a dead end solution. Lots of great marketing from tesla... but very little progress now in years. They really seem stuck in a local optimum with the camera-only approach, and it's not close to delivering the promised experience.
- leesec 1y agoI personally think it'll be fine. FSD is perfect for all my driving. It's been 3000-4000 miles since my last takeover. I know an uber driver who's driven his 16k miles without a safety intervention. And this is without them superfinetuning and doing custom navigation/mapping on a specific town.
- tuckerman 1y agoI'm a huge proponent of e2e learning for robotics (worked at two places doing e2e before Tesla adopted it) and personally believe its the right approach long term. I also have FSD on my Model 3 and love it for L2+. That said, my experience with disengagements is very different than yours.. I have a few a week for things like road works, school zones, route map following. Perfectly fine for L2+, L4 it would be unacceptable. If these robotaxis end up looking more like my experience than yours then another layer of trouble will be root causing and fixing failure modes. Training models e2e makes both of these much more difficult.
- xnx 1y agoe2e is good, but why limit yourself to only cameras? e2e with cameras, radar, and lidar is going to perform better.
- tuckerman 1y agoYou could argue its not necessary to achieve performance for an L2+ product and so keeps BOM cost down while still achieving goals. I'm not personally opposed though, the systems I worked on did have other sensors we could use. That wouldn't resolve the concern around debugging/root-causing and remediating failures more quickly though. You still have a black box system that is difficult to simulate closed loop.
- jjcm 1y agoI own two Teslas, and drive between Portland and Seattle about once every 10 days, using FSD nearly the entire way. FSD has gotten amazingly better over the last year, it can and has taken me from driveway to driveway between two cities... when the weather is nice. As soon as there is any weather however, things start to fall apart. It's very clear to me that vision alone wont be the solution to FSD, and is the main reason why I believe Waymo's approach here is simply better. That's not to say vision wont work when the environment is good - FSD has gotten to the point where when things are optimal, it's a better driver than I am (ie it does better at merging into a lane of traffic better than I could, since it has 360 vision), but it simply isn't stable in the face of dynamic conditions.
- ilikeatari 1y agoI also use FSD HW4 daily, and it really just works well in regular conditions. It's unbelievable how we have a level of autonomy here and now, and not too many people know about it. Out of about 6k miles in the last 7 months, I probably drove 80 or so. I did not have many issues in the rain, but I do have issues in the snow. It's still somewhat unaware of how to drive well in snow. I usually disengage when it's snowy or very icy.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> unbelievable how we have a level of autonomy here and now, and not too many people know about it Would note that most premium cars sold in America currently have advanced self-driving capabilities. I've personally been more impressed by Mercedes' kit than Tesla's, mostly because the former seems to have done a great job of defining where you can almost trust the system to just work.
- misiti3780 1y agowow, that is quite a hot take!
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
- seydor 1y agoThe sales of helmets in Austin are going to spike
- username223 1y agoThis stood out to me: > the automaker posted a new job listing days ago for engineers to help build a low-latency teleoperation system to operate its “self-driving” cars and robots. It's June 17; they're supposedly launching in five days. Even if it's 95% off-the-shelf software, that timeframe for getting it up and debugged, then hiring enough humans to operate it, makes absolutely no sense. After nearly a decade of broken promises about FSD, has Elon finally trapped himself? Will there be a handful of "robotaxis" circling around a few blocks of Austin with Mexicans hiding in the frunk to drive them? I'm glad I don't live there.
- electrondood 1y agoCheck the source. Elektrek cranks out anti-Tesla articles. Hardly fair and objective.
- matt3210 1y agoIf I can’t nap while it drives me it’s not FSD
- JKCalhoun 1y agoAre taxis like the anti-public transportation? Maybe they're "public" transportation for the individual? But we don't want drivers because.... So strange to me.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Are taxis like the anti-public transportation? Taxis are a useful way to get around, including to and from public transit. That's all that should matter. Whether they fit into a particular urban vision is secondary to the fact that they're desirable to the people living there.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoTrue, Omaha is not very "urban" (in the Manhattan sense). I don't understand the singular focus on them. (Again, maybe because I don't live in Manhattan).
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Omaha is not very "urban" (in the Manhattan sense) I split time between Manhattan and Wyoming. I still take taxis from time to time in the latter, e.g. to and from the airport or to and from a bar on the weekend with friends.
- standardUser 1y agoMuch of the US was built in ways that make mass transit impractical and inefficient, but those same areas have comprehensive road systems already built out, sometimes excessively. That gives self-driving taxis an opportunity to fill in the transit gap in the huge expanses of this country ill-suited for trains and buses, but well-equipped with roads. I think the actual concern is around medium-to-large cities and metros, where self-driving cars will compete directly with mass transit, much like Uber does, but potentially much more competitively.
- xnx 1y agoCould this moment finally be the thing that finally sinks Tesla's ridiculous stock price? As long as the Robotaxi is just and idea, it can't fail. Once it's real, people can realize what a joke it is. Relevant Silicon Valley: "If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
- honeybadger1 1y agoA public display of seething hate aimed at someone adding to the world from someone only attempting to critique it. Fred, checks notes, tracks human beings that kill each other for sport for money, to make money. It must not be lucrative enough so he gets the rest of his green from writing half-truth hit pieces about companies that have more success. I'm surprised he's not writing for business insider.
- srj 1y agoAs an austinite I'm nervous about these things. My son and his classmates play along the street and I'm 90% sure I saw one of these driving by our house last week, presumably for testing. The street is legally at a higher speed than most people will drive because there's a lot of activity and no sidewalks which I'm about to argue for changing. Normal people will slow when they see kids around but autonomous cars still drive their normal speed.
- more_corn 1y agoThis will end in tragedy.
- tzs 1y agoI'm curious. Suppose I took a taxi to some specific address, which is a large building the occupies a whole block. There are two entrances to the building on that street, at opposite ends of the block. With a human driven taxi I'd be able to tell the driver which entrance I'd like to be dropped off near. Does Waymo provide a way to do this? Has Tesla said anything about if they will allow such a thing?