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Tesla launches robotaxi rides in Austin
- karlgkk 1y agoIn summary: > 10-or-so cars > human driver behind the wheel (except in this beta) > invitation based (apparently a very limited audience) > geofenced not only to a city, but to a small handful of neighborhoods > early reports suggest disengagement requires remote re-engagement I hope they get there, more competition in this space is good. But, this is pathetic. They're so far behind Waymo it isn't even funny.
- jamessinghal 1y agoThe beta today was without a driver behind the wheel. Granted, the geofence is much smaller than Waymo's in Austin.
- jen20 1y agoIf you can eventually guarantee you’ll get a robotaxi instead of a car with a driver when you call one (unlike Waymo in Austin, now, thanks to their dumb partnership with Uber), they’ll likely do ok in the longer term.
- jamessinghal 1y agoI'm rooting for Tesla being able to provide some driverless taxi competition to Waymo. Hopefully both can increase supply enough to allow for a guaranteed robotaxi booking, although anecdotally I haven't found it that hard to get a Waymo through the Uber app depending on the time.
- jen20 1y agoI’ve only tried twice (after using it ~30 times during the preview directly through the Waymo app) - neither time resulted in a robotaxi though, and one resulted in a driver that smelled so bad I’ve sworn off ride sharing until the end of summer. Hopefully the Tesla app forces Waymo to reconsider their deal with Uber altogether and just run it themselves like they do in San Francisco.
- darth_avocado 1y agoNo human behind the wheel but there are still people in the passenger seat
- blackjack_ 1y agoLet’s give it a little bit of time to see, but gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants is not the choice you make when you are confident with a product…
- karlgkk 1y agoEarly videos are showing results that are not great, to say the least.
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago> gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants Are they sycophants or are the other sites haters? Take a gander at every tech website's headlines regarding Tesla for the last few years and tell me they aren't following the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra. The people invited to preview Robotaxi were not only unedited, they were also allowed to live stream.
- trainsarebetter 1y agoSounds like there’s actually around 32ish, based on photos from the “war room” where all the engineers have live feed from all the cars and 112 rides ? https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/1936865682810946035 https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/1936865682810946035
- jfoster 1y agoThey had said 10 - 12 prior to launch. Are you looking at the feeds from the cars to reach 32? Each screen is from the cameras around a single car, so you're actually only seeing 5 cars from that.
- _ea1k 1y agoI understand the thinking here, but this is too early to be too negative, IMO. For the first day, I think this looks like a reasonable first step. If they are still doing this in 3 months, it'd be a bad sign, of course. Their plan is for rapid growth next year. We'll see if they are able to do that.
- __m 1y ago"next year" is Musk speak for "not going to happen anytime soon"
- smallmancontrov 1y ago"Tesla has self-driven 4B miles in every corner of the USA, Waymo has only self-driven 0.1B miles in select cities, how pathetic! They are so far behind Tesla it isn't even funny!" - Me, if I wanted to be equally ham-handed in throwing the comparison for Tesla. In reality, we are seeing two bets on two different approaches. Do you scale up supervised driving to maximize data collection/diversity and then go unsupervised? Or do you go unsupervised and then scale up problem solving as you go? The cool thing is that both of these approaches are being tried so we will find out. If you want to place a bet of your own, you can find the casino in your favorite brokerage app! In any case, the videos of what is possible with supervised FSD are quite amazing, certainly not "pathetic," and what remains to be seen is if they can successfully navigate the supervised->unsupervised jump, which is certainly not trivial. Arc de Triomphe: https://youtu.be/o2xKpbKZLVA?t=7 https://youtu.be/o2xKpbKZLVA?t=7 Busy China: https://youtu.be/ybBpRN4Hqbc?t=13 https://youtu.be/ybBpRN4Hqbc?t=13 Manhattan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qafr3RrJRfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qafr3RrJRfU
- jfoster 1y agoIt's only day 1.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoOne example from the first day, where the vehicle spends a bit of time driving into oncoming traffic: https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=0h7m15s https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=0h7m15s
- smallmancontrov 1y agoHere's a human doing the same thing in the same video for the same reason: https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=906 https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=906
- mahkeiro 1y agoAnd so it’s ok to break traffic rules? In my country, as a human this will get you easily a one month license suspension.
- smallmancontrov 1y agoNo, just a bit of perspective. I'm sure the video record of your car would be squeaky clean with no violations whatsoever.
- pixelpoet 1y agoIf I said I've never had a driver's licence, can we get back to the topic at hand? What's the thesis here, humans are imperfect drivers and therefore we should accept self driving cars driving into incoming traffic, and if anyone objects, focus on their faults instead?
- smallmancontrov 1y agoWe allow imperfect humans, we should allow similarly imperfect robots. The robots will get better. The humans, in aggregate, will not.
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- mmastrac 1y agoI honestly thought Tesla would beat everyone to the punch here but it seems like they just stalled out what - five or so years ago? Waymo seems to be the furthest ahead in my complete outsider opinion. I feel like everyone else is a way distant second.
- CamperBob2 1y agoIt's hard to attract and retain key talent when the CEO is going around acting all Nazi-curious. Good people who can leave are likely to do so.
- aetherson 1y agoThat may be true, but Tesla stalled out a long time before Musk's rightward turn.
- baq 1y agoNazi-curious is just a state of substance-curious in this case IMHO
- throwaway314155 1y agoOh well in that case it's totally excusable /s
- baq 1y agoOh no you misunderstood. He’s been insufferable for many years before this.
- rsynnott 1y agoI mean, lots of people are drug addicts without being complete arseholes. Not an excuse.
- tcoff91 1y agoTheir decision to entirely rely on computer vision seems unwise
- fracus 1y agoI really feel we are headed towards a future where humans driving cars will be illegal outside of few exceptions. There will be no traffic as all the robocars will coordinate unselfishly. Car ownership won't be a thing, rides will be a service. Parking spots won't be needed. It's just getting over a safety threshold we are comfortable with.
- blindriver 1y agoI have predicted this for years. I think they will make city cores self-driving cars only, with no other cars, or even bicycles because they are too chaotic. China should have done this with those ghost cities, so that they could have dominated with full self driving before other countries. Someone will own the platform that coordinate car movement, and then all cars will need to pay to get onto this coordination platform that will tell each car how to drive, which route to take, etc. Each car know what all the other cars in its area will be doing, so that mass coordination is possible. This is how you can get a completely full highway but all traveling at 65 mph 1 feet away from each other.
- fracus 1y agoImagine all the land being used for parking that wouldn't be needed anymore. Car accidents will be like plane accidents where a full investigation will be launched to improve the car and coordination software.
- Svip 1y agoI surely hope not. I'd rather have a city centre without cars than one filled with constantly self-driving cars. Pedestrians and animals are still "chaotic elements". At 105 km/h (still slow by European standards), what happens when a deer suddenly runs onto the motorway with a distance of ~30 cm between the vehicles? Talk about carnage. I suppose the solution is to seal in all roads then with high walls; what dystopian future.
- trainsarebetter 1y agoNo bicycles? That is ridicules. Many city’s are now trending towards people centric design. Bikes are a key part of that
- Flatcircle 1y agoOne accident and the knives are gonna be out. But if it works the world will change
- rcpt 1y agoDifference between this and Cruise or Uber is that Elon is in charge of regulation. A driverless Tesla could plow through a farmer's market and service wouldn't even stop for the afternoon.
- spikels 1y ago[flagged]
- throwaway314155 1y agoThat's not usually the argument. It's that LiDar has historically been working more reliably than tech that doesn't use it - and reliability is pretty important in that industry. In any case I'm curious what gives you such blind faith that Tesla's vision-only tech will work out. There's a lot of really practical and frankly obvious reasons why it hasn't been working for a very long time and similarly lot's of videos (which are aggressively taken down by Tesla or can't even be posted due to shady customer NDA's) of their self-driving equipment getting dangerously close to murdering people. And of course, there are the _actual_ cases of Tesla's self-driving tech just you know, straight up murdering people. You can shift blame to the humans not being attentive enough to take control when self-driving mistakes come up, but then you've lost the broader argument that self-driving Tesla's are "ready", even if you're right about the former. Edit because fuck-you-HN-comment-limit-soft-ban: (response to child comment below): > Obviously, only vision and hearing are required for driving Human vision is drastically better than even the most advanced computer vision systems we have or are likely to have any time soon - especially when there are realtime and hardware constraints. That's before you introduce the relatively (!) shoddy approximations that even SOTA vision models learn via SGD.
- jdminhbg 1y ago> I'm curious what gives you such blind faith that Tesla's vision-only tech will work out. Obviously, only vision and hearing are required for driving. The question isn't "can it work," the question is "which approach will be economically viable on what time scale, and is there a winner-takes-all dynamic that excludes the approach that comes second."
- brettp 1y agoI've never understood the argument "humans only use vision and hearing so self driving cars should too". We don't constrain what we do with machines to what humans do. Humans don't have wheels either. Is Tesla planning to replace wheels in their cars with legs, Flintstones style?
- djaychela 1y agoCalling this 'Robotaxi' rides seems somewhat disingenuous given that they are Model Ys with a full seating provision. People will be conflating this with the (IMO a very bad choice) 2-seat design seen on the demo months ago with 2 doors and no provision for more than two people (which wouldn't work too well if the drives are being chaperoned, reducing seating to one). This conflation and mixing of words is something which Tesla seems to do intentionally (Full Self Driving, Autonomy, etc), or am I being cynical about that?
- modeless 1y agoI agree that 'cybercab' and 'robotaxi' are similar names, but what ulterior motive would it serve to intentionally confuse people about the difference? Seems like it's just bad naming. Cybercab isn't late or anything, it was announced for 2026 at its unveiling. And Robotaxi is an accurate and descriptive name for a self-driving Model Y that you can hail.
- siliconc0w 1y agoWhat good is the safety driver doing in the passenger seat? Even the die hard Tesla FSD fans will admit that it isn't uncommon to have a serious disengagement. I give this less than a month before they pull the plug.
- jfoster 1y agoIn the first instance they're asking to see the passenger's app to verify identity. Seems like a necessary precaution considering what happened to the Waymo vehicles recently. Presumably if there were an incident they would be trying to remedy any situation.
- GuB-42 1y ago> What good is the safety driver doing in the passenger seat? The same as a driving instructor. He has a brake pedal, and he can pick up the steering wheel if necessary.
- spikels 1y agoThere's no second brake pedal on the passenger side.
- PicassoCTs 1y agoWayToLittle, wayToLate, wayMore already on the road in Cal!
- spikels 1y agoWayMore expensive