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How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale
- diamondfist25 1y ago[flagged]
- kcb 1y agoThere's people that straight faced make the claim that FSD is worse than GM, Ford, Toyota etc. driver assistance systems. Meanwhile we can put an address in while in the driveway, go through the streets and highway, and arrive at a destination without ever touching the wheel. It's alternative facts at this point.
- guywithahat 1y agoNot too long ago Edmonds gave FSD the lowest rating for their self driving test because they had to occasionally touch the steering wheel to prove they’re still paying attention. It was the only system that drove on city streets and was by far the best system on the highway. Tesla went from the upstart everyone loved to the incumbent they love to hate, regardless of facts
- insane_dreamer 1y agoSide point but TIL aol still exists.
- EmilyJM 1y agoIdk if its just me but it seems the link to the article is not working, I believe this is the original https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-service-austin-scaling-earnings-car-sales/ https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-serv... . Honestly really excited in general for the expansion of driverless vehicle services like robotaxi/waymo, but I am a bit cautious on the robotaxi camera only approach (correct me if I’m wrong) compared to Waymo’s combination of LiDAR, radar and camera
- taneq 1y agoThanks! Yeah the AOL link gave me a menu bar and a blank page on Firefox.
- tsimionescu 1y agoRobotaxi is not a driverless taxi service, though, it's a regular taxi service with a human driver in every car. It's laughable to even compare it to Waymo.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoCan you post a photo of the said driver?
- dfedbeef 1y agoIt's actually more than one driver, there's a remote person who can intervene as well.
- dham 1y agoSounds like all the same things Waymo has when they launch in a new area? https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/waymo-cars-are-coming-to-new-york-with-a-driver-behind-the-wheel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/waymo-cars-are-coming-to-new...
- tsimionescu 1y agoWaymo has already proven that they can drive without any human in the car. Tesla have not, at all - and as this article points out, their cars continue to make major driving mistakes, like driving into an on-coming train, running red lights, driving on the wrong side of the road. These are not subtle issues. So I see no reason to assume that they'll ever work without the human driver. Remember also that FSD can't even be trusted to drive the 2 miles of one-way tunnel at the Las Vegas Loop - even those cars require a driver today.
- billy_bitchtits 1y ago[flagged]
- jfengel 1y agoYeah yeah.
- mattigames 1y agoNegative assertion by sarcasm implied by duplicated agreement, my favorite, also works for sure sure but not for true true.
- jfengel 1y agoI recall that Teslas have a mode where it shows its camera and labels what it sees. I would love to see what these failures look like in that mode. What did it think was there? Nothing at all? Something far away? Insect on the lens?
- Coeur 1y agoWhat that mode shows is that the Tesla thinks there is nothing there. AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized. What it should do is model the entire world around it in 3d and consider that. But it doesn't. Cow on the road - problably not recognized. A child in an uncommon halloween costume chilling / lying in the middle of the road - pretty damn sure not recognized and the Tesla would just kill that child. Yep. (I drove a Tesla Model 3 with the latest "self-driving" software for a bit a year back.)
- rogerrogerr 1y ago> AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized. This is not true; in modern FSD the visualization is disconnected from the actual driving model. The visualization runs a lightweight model that labels some stuff and shows it; the actual heavy lifting is now a single model that takes pixels as input and outputs control commands. My car very clearly reacts to stuff that doesn’t appear in the visualization.
- dylan604 1y agoThe sad thing is that based on your telling of it, if it detects a small child in a weird costume in the middle of the road but doesn't recognize it as a small child that it's not at least recognizing that something is in the road that should not be regardless of what it is. That should be the minimum in recognizing the road and then recognizing any object within the road.
- avalys 1y agoMore Musk absurdity that he describes this as having “launched” the Robotaxi service when for all intents and purposes they still have a human driver.
- samrus 1y agoi dont like musk but the driver it there during this initial phase to take over in emergencies right? they arent actually driving the whole time? i do agree he should say its in early access or something
- breadwinner 1y agoAlso, their remote control center staff have steering wheels on their desks, to take over when needed, see discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1li0swv/does_tesla_use_remote_teleoperator_steering/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1li0swv/do...
- porphyra 1y agoLiterally every self driving car service, including Waymo [1], Cruise, etc, initially launched as an invite-only program with a safety driver --- in the driver seat no less, rather than the passenger seat like for the Tesla robotaxi. I don't know why people point to the safety operator somehow like it's proof that Tesla is bad. It's just a normal thing for a very early phase of deployment. In the worst case Tesla is just a few years behind Waymo but that by no means is absolute proof that they cannot scale up and improve it just as Waymo has. > The service will initially be limited to "early riders" who've already been a part of Waymo's test programs. This first wave will also find human drivers ready to take over in the event of a problem. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-05-waymo-one-launches.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-05-waymo-one-launches.html
- queenkjuul 1y agoWell except that according to musk, Tesla has had a 10 year head start and it's still behind
- FireBeyond 1y ago
- 65 1y agoTesla self driving has always been doomed to fail without lidar.
- maxlin 1y ago[flagged]
- findthewords 1y agoAs a control engineer who knows something about sensor fusion - No LIDAR no ride. Musk can brute-force his unsafe robotaxis on the road but they won't be as safe as Waymo. Maybe people won't care if the price is slightly cheaper vs. competition, I don't know.
- dazc 1y agoThe non-technical answer is that people do not care so long as it's safer and less unpleasant than the current alternative. My last taxi ride involved jumping red lights and speeding through residential streets at 60mph because, I assume, it was early morning and the driver had learned from experience that he could get away with driving like this. The previous experience to this was a lecture about a certain religious ideology and how I should spend the next two weeks reading up about it.
- madaxe_again 1y agoOver the years, I’ve had four human driven taxis crash, and two taxi drivers rob me.
- scrollop 1y agoNever heard of those two occurrences happening for a taxi customer, ever. Perhaps you live in a location that lends itself to such events...
- brianwawok 1y agoChicago taxis were pretty bad. Had taxis driven by the guy not in the card. Broken seat belts. Mega speeding. It was terrible.
- igor47 1y agoI was in a Chicago taxi where the driver was basically passing out but (I think) chewing qat to keep awake
- breadwinner 1y agoHaving taken Waymo rides multiple times in San Francisco I can attest to how awesome Waymo is. I am worried Tesla will bring a bad name to the whole robotaxi industry. Waymo has never had an at-fault injury accident. Tesla FSD has killed many people.
- tsimionescu 1y agoThe good news so far is that Tesla doesn't have a robotaxi service at all, they have a plain taxi service. We'll see what happens if they ever release a self-driving car, but for now, as in the past 7-8 years, they are way behind Waymo in the self driving car arena.
- samrus 1y agothe thing about waymo is that i suspect they're running the same ML fraud that tesla itself is running in the silicon valley in general, which is to overfit on the 20% of situations that occur 80% of times. for waymo itself, you can overfit on 100% of the situations that will be encountered. 49 square miles isnt that large. its the real world outside that which im concerned about its efficacy in. i think if you put a waymo in a small town that no alphabet engineer has ever even heard of, then youll see it fail badly as well. FSD is a reinforcement learning problem, and we have no good way of training non-simulation algos for that. and a real dynamical driving environment cant be simulated accurately enough
- chronic0262 1y ago> i think if you put a waymo in a small town that no alphabet engineer has ever even heard of, then youll see it fail badly as well. Waymo is not claiming to work in small towns. Tesla is. Soon™.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoFSD works in small towns today. Source: small town FSD user.
- seanhunter 1y ago
- codechicago277 1y ago“On Monday, Musk thought it would be funny to expand the area covered by its three-week-old Austin robotaxi service to resemble a giant penis when seen on a map. “Harder, better, faster, stronger,” the $1 trillion company wrote on Monday, a double entendre referencing the synth pop track of the same name by Daft Punk, a duo appropriately known for performing as robots. Musk approvingly reposted the phallus-shaped service map, adding the fare would now be hiked to $6.90 per ride from $4.20 previously, both numbers the 54-year old often employs for comical effect.” It’s amazing that anyone still takes him seriously. One of the first riders almost hit a train, and this is what he’s spending his time on. It’s inexcusable, but his fans lap it up.
- samrus 1y agohes always been like this. from faking video games to pushing memecoins. his being cringe itself isnt the issue. its the lack of EQ that leads to someone being a slave to wanting to be liked. it doesnt inspire confidence in his ability to think rationally. like how hes perfectly fine grifting and contributing to the decrease of trust in society. its messed up
- Closi 1y agoTesla Robotaxi is a classic case of premature optimisation - with Waymo they decided to deploy whatever technology worked best and did not cost-optimise at the start. Each Waymo vehicle is much more expensive than a Tesla, and has much more expensive sensors and compute. Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle. There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)
- dchftcs 1y agoFSD itself is not a failed bet as a driver-assist system. When it started Tesla was cash poor and often on the verge of collapse, so cutting costs made sense. They will never do as well as a mature Lidar-based solution, but over the years FSD added some value to some people, and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars. I also think Tesla and their robotaxis are egregiously overhyped, but cutting Lidar was not a terrible business decision at the time. Though it's a terrible decision to have still stuck to vision-only (and using low-quality cameras apparently) when they could have at least got Radar and cheap Lidars.
- beeflet 1y ago>and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars. Not if openpilot is competitive
- persolb 1y agoI wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot. FSD is amazing and I use it door to door wherever I drive. I got a LOT better about a year ago. But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera) I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI'm actually kind of stunned at the report by the guy that almost got turned into chum by a train. The stan is strong, in that one...
- lvl155 1y agoOT, but we need smart roads before we get a reliable robotaxi. You need lidar + road sensors embedded into the road. You basically have multiple sensors covering a section of the road that constantly updates specific to that section. And you have robotaxis pinging these stations wirelessly. When disconnected, autonomous feature also disengages. You don’t need to install a ton of sensors on every cars.
- trainsarebetter 1y agoNonono. Externalizing the part of the compute is bad idea. increasing the cost and complexity of a socialized infrastructure is bad as now it relies on external reliability, we can barely maintain roads in there current form
- lvl155 1y agoBased on that view, maybe we shouldn’t have public roads at all. Go back to scavenging for food.
- maxlin 1y agoNo? Public roads are fine. They've been fine for as long as they've existed. So the right option is to just make tech that works with them, and works like cars and roads have always been interacted with. By turning vision in to wheel inputs. With what we can do with x amount of technology in given volume improving, increasing cost and making motoring just more unreliable (and to only work in cities) would be a strategy short sighted as running in a forest with your eyes closed. And sounds like Solar Roadways lol
- lvl155 1y agoDo you not see my point? How about traffic lights? Or street lights. It’s the same thing. You make it sound like things can’t improve from status quo. Let me guess you are a Java dev.
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- duxup 1y agoI recently ran across this weird world of the influencers who have been trotted out (invited) to post social media posts about their rides in the robotaxi. It is amazing how many are “other than the thing(s) that went wrong it was very safe and worked great”. Some of those things that went wrong were dropping people off in the middle of an intersection, not recognizing railroad track guard rails… and simply not being able to get them to their destination at all.
- general1726 1y agoOf course it can't scale. Putting 10000 cars with 1 human in them into a city is hard and just creates traffic. Putting 100 buses with 100 people in them is much easier. Also why don't you use something what has less degrees of freedom like a train and thus is much easier to automate and also much easier to scale by just connecting more cars. You got that Loop thing, expand onto it and turn it into a subway... Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state - buses, subways, trams. There is natural development behind it, it is not like somebody said that city people shall only sit next to a stranger - you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that. Unless you will use existing mass transportation solutions.
- Mountain_Skies 1y agoRarely have I been on a bus with 100 riders outside of a few cities like Vancouver. Even there, it's only during limited periods of time per day. Most buses in most cities run with only a small fraction of the bus's capacity. Transit systems can try to bump up utilization by making buses less frequent but then that lowers overall ridership. Simply creating more capacity doesn't itself create greater ridership. I'd argue for 500 buses with 20 people if you really want people to change their behaviors as reliability and frequency is far more important for attracting riders with options than larger buses that are less frequent.
- toxik 1y agoHow about smaller buses then? This is quite common in the Nordic region it seems.
- coffeecoders 1y agoI hear this argument often. Subways require billions in infrastructure and over 20 years of lead time. And they operate on fixed routes. Additionally, robotaxis and Waymo-style systems are trying to replace the private car and on-demand ride-hailing, not mass transit like subways or buses. Our country operates on 4-year political cycles, not 20+ years infrastructure visions. Hence long-term megaprojects are mostly pipe dreams.
- xyst 1y agoI have the misfortune of living in this city and godforsaken state where they let any company with enough money use it as a testing ground. Cruise was/is fucking awful. But these tesla taxis somehow 10x worse than Cruise. Going to end up live the governor of this state and without the ability to recover funds due to awful tort reform.
- jmyeet 1y agoTesla has to create new revenue sources. The Supercharger moat is evaporating. Elon is otherwise pretty successful in torching the brand loyalty. Regardless of one's personal opinion, Tesla owners as a whole are at odds with Elon politically. Tesla owners skewed educated, living in blue states and are environmentally conscious. I think this will go down as one of the biggest self-owns in history. The only thing preventing Tesla from going bankrupt is trade barriers on Chinese EVs. Elon has always been a snake oil salesman and I suspect this robotaxi venture will blow up in his face in a way that's potentially fatal for Tesla. All it will take is someone to be killed in or by a robotaxi. That'll bring in the authorities and likely reveal what a shitshow it is behind the scenes.
- fullshark 1y agoIt won't be fatal for Tesla, I'm not sure it will even be fatal for Musk as CEO. As long as the stock price goes up or even sideways Musk will be CEO of Tesla and they will sell cars and Musk will play whatever financial games / hype to keep the party going.
- jmyeet 1y agoTSLA has defied gravity for years. Fundamentally, it makes no sense. It's been valued at between $500,000 and $1 million per car sold in a year. That's utterly insane. But we know that stock prices are based on expectations for the future not fundamentals. So massive growth is built into the stock price but we have to start asking where this growth is coming from. That's why there's a robotaxi effort. EVs are becoming a commodity. So over time Tesla's price direction is towards the Big Three. But with more risks, namely the Chinese supply chain for batteries. You can view Tesla as an investment in Elon, which I think the market has. But that's on incredibly shaky ground. He's torched his relationship to the current administration going so far as to call the sitting president of the United States a pedophile [1]. Elon doesn't seem to appreciate that Trump could end Tesla with an executive order. My point is that Elon is volatile and can so easily become a liability to Tesla. They're paying him billions so firing him can immediately and massively improve the bottom line. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So I'm not predicting the imminent collapse of Tesla but I think it will come and it'll be sudden and dire. [1]: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-pedophile-dig-after-team-trumps-new-report-in-jeffrey-epstein-case-8836978 https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-pedophile-dig-aft...
- jqpabc123 1y ago“The fact that they’re hiding data should tell you everything you need to know. If you really want trust, you have to have full transparency.” Anything Musk says is simply not trustworthy. Not just my opinion but proven over and over again. Hiding safety data is just icing on a cake that he has been baking for years. The real problem here is that those who choose to trust him and his companies are putting others at risk. Those who own/drive a Tesla typically have insurance but what about those who hire robotaxis? Can they be held personally liable when their roboride hurts someone?
- csours 1y ago> Anything Musk says is simply not trustworthy. I have a boss who speaks in "future tense" - they say how they think things WILL work. In my boss' case it's not lying, it's how their brain works. If you ask carefully, you can tell that they understand what's going on, but it takes some work to get there. It's annoying, but not terrible in my case - it is good to have someone who can look towards the future. I think people in general, and some people specifically, have hard time telling the difference between what IS true and what SHOULD Be true - especially when they are speaking informally. I also think that billionaires are very hard to educate. Anyway, you are absolutely correct, I also do not trust Musk.
- DustinBrett 1y agoThese are like articles saying why Tesla won't make an electric car. Just more doubters to be proved wrong, again.
- itsoktocry 1y agoOr like the solar roof, battery, swap, Cybertruck best selling vehicle of all time...you know, things people said wouldn't work, and didn't. Elon has a good track record, but he has some duds in there too.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoIf Cybertruck is such a flop now is the time to snap a collectible deal.
- chung8123 1y agoDidn't Tesla start as an electric car maker?
- avidiax 1y agoHaving worked at Uber, I can tell you that most people vastly overestimate how many Uber drivers are working at any one time. A medium sized city like Seattle might have a few hundred at peak hours. There is a limited scale to any taxi service, at least until it becomes cheap enough that the company can afford to have lots of cars sitting parked and idle for much of the day. Otherwise, the rush hour peaks will be less convenient and affordable than having a private car.
- maxlin 1y agoPretty much. Has the air of the oil&gas funded "journalist" piece where he ran circles in a parking lot then wrote about it suddenly running out of battery, and was disproven by logs lol
- mrkeen 1y agoAny day now https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
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- ryandamm 1y agoGenuine questions for AI engineers, or self driving car people: is the Tesla approach of only using cameras inherently flawed? I've read that the AI is directly hooked up to the cameras, with no explicit intermediate 3D representation... everything is done in latent space. If true, this seems inherently hard to improve; throw more data at it, sure, but you can't necessarily understand how and why it fails when it does. That seems... non-optimal for safety-critical systems like self-driving cars.
- maxlin 1y agoThere's plenty of visualizations of their intermediary voxel representation. Hardly worse than any LIDAR for the task but without all the downsides of LIDAR.
- ryandamm 1y agoDo you know that there is an actual voxel representation that exists before the self-driving AI? I was under the impression (from conversations with engineers who might know, admittedly) that there was not an explicit 3D representation that went into the self-driving module, and the AI was operating directly on pixels. I would be relieved to hear that there's an explicit 3D solve before that step... if accurate. Obviously there are 3D views on the dash, but my understanding is that is not an input to the full self driving solve. But again, it's hearsay (hence my question).
- maxlin 1y agoThis article will age so badly lol. Tesla's architecture is the only one of the robotaxi providers which actually _can_ scale. Not being dependent on exact HD maps, having the same standard as humans do "if you can see enough to drive" means eventually there'll be scant roads Robotaxi can't serve. By this strength it'll serve in areas that would never work for LIDAR/pre-HD-mapping requiring solutions
- renewiltord 1y agoSaying Elon Musk won’t succeed at something that is a hard technological problem is foolish, yes. His companies have done what everyone said was impossible for ages. But I do wonder if rising nations will instead just build their infrastructure to line up with technology (e.g. HD mapping their streets as they build them, installing signed beacons to inform AVs). The cost of this tech is cratering. One possible future, though admittedly an unlikely one.
- maxlin 1y agoI do see that as much more likely for China than western, more ossified cities. But even then, it'd only be for cities. FSD functioning basically as a human driver would function, anywhere they would function is the real deal.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- biimugan 1y agoI've never understood this argument. When I drive, I'm relying on more than just vision. I'm relying on sound, tactile feedback, an understanding of traffic law, an understanding of human behavior on the road (some of which is specific to my locality, the time of day, etc.), an understanding of weather conditions and geography, past problems I've run into on the road and heuristics I've learned over time to improve safety, weighing the risks vs benefits of certain maneuvers (especially considering how specific cars around me are behaving), and so forth. Some of this a purely vision focused FSD could simulate. But much of it it cannot. That's why alternate sensing systems really are needed, whether it's LIDAR or something else.
- gre 1y agoIt's the LIDAR, stupid.
- Jcampuzano2 1y agoThe fact that at one point there were over 80% odds of a full rollout within this year shows how delusional some people are. I own a Tesla, I use FSD all the time. It is nowhere near viable enough yet to release it unsupervised to the masses with no driver at the wheel. I have also ridden in Waymos and felt way more comfortable with how it drives. It's in a different league.
- boringg 1y agoAOl is still alive? Wow.
- shcheklein 1y agoTo be fair. I live at Mission Bay (SF) that has Caltrain railway nearby (and you have to cross it if you take particular ways in/out). I drive (and like it a lot!) Waymo. Waymo avoids crossing it (it takes a longer way to drive a bridge). So, they probably realized the risk and still to this are not willing taking it.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoThe whole article is based on an incident a YouTuber talks about in one of their videos. The incident was not captured on video and was not even described as dangerous by the YouTuber himself. I would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.
- nerevarthelame 1y agoThe whole article is not based on that incident. For example: >The former U.S. Marine hosts the crowd-sourced FSD Community Tracker, the single most sophisticated and reliable form of empirical data collection and analysis on Tesla’s self-driving technology that is publicly available. Car executives like Volkswagen Autonomous Mobility CEO Christian Senger speak highly of it as a benchmark, and even Musk—who has his own internal data on disengagements that he refuses to share—singled it out as proof the company is making progress. >Currently, its data shows even the latest FSD version from Tesla results in a critical disengagement roughly every 340 miles between both city and highway at present. Called 13.2.9, it rolled out in May just weeks before the Austin service launched. “You sometimes hear Elon saying, ‘we’re having a hard time finding disengagements.’ That is such BS,” Martinez adds.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoThat does not prove that Tesla's robotaxi service cannot scale. A robotaxi service is geofenced. The community tracker is not. As soon as Tesla manages to nail Austin, they can expand aka scale. How close are they to operate safely in Austin and to rid of the safety people? I don't know. But sooner or later they will, that is for sure.
- iamgopal 1y agoQuite simply, standardising public transport across the globe, ( and in turn bringing economy of scale ) , can solve the transport problem , problem is that this is not economically viable for car companies
- guywithahat 1y agoWhy are people mad there’s more competition? Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has. I think there will be some inherent risk in getting in the first full self driving vehicles, but their success to date has been nothing short of incredible
- coolspot 1y ago> Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has. My research shows that you can arrive at these numbers only if you compare Tesla’s FSD incidents that are only reported if airbags are deployed, to all Waymo incidents, which are reported even when only a minor damage is occurred. https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_ae23a802-40b4-4545-a3a1-abb1c51840f8 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_ae23a802-40b4-4545-a3a1-abb1...
- homefree 1y ago[flagged]
- wnevets 1y ago[flagged]
- moogly 1y agoThe whole thing never made sense to me. Tesla, a supposedly forward-looking car maker, operating a taxi service, which is inherently low-margin? And the alternative scenario floated (the "appreciating asset" malarkey), that everyone would be adding their personal cars to the pool and would be making money while you sleep and/or work even more baffling. Sure, you might fool some people that they'll make money even though the wear and tear and depreciation will be much worse, and you'd need better insurance to take care of when your car seats will be knifed (a considerable risk, even before the wanton brand destruction), and someone or some thing is going to need to clean and charge the car, then charging and parking fees... And if it were that profitable on one or two cars, then why would Tesla even sell cars to you instead of operating their own fleet? So it doesn't hold up to scrutiny unless you own a fleet, and then you'd probably need employees. Which, again, you'd be competing with Tesla and every other likeminded fool? I guess somehow it's started to make a perverse kind of sense recently when Tesla sales are plummeting. Someone's going to have to use the cars they make I guess.
- kevlened 1y ago> And if it were that profitable on one or two cars, then why would Tesla even sell cars to you instead of operating their own fleet? It's a scaling strategy. The payback period is reduced to 0 if a customer pays for the vehicle. That capital can be fed back into manufacturing, lowering costs, and expanding market penetration.
- Gareth321 1y ago> and you'd need better insurance to take care of when your car seats will be knifed (a considerable risk, even before the wanton brand destruction), and someone or some thing is going to need to clean and charge the car, then charging and parking fees... Vehicle sharing companies have already solved this. The vehicle sharing company provides insurance built into their fee and vets customers. If the vehicle is vandalised (or someone makes a mess), the vehicle share company pays for everything. People wouldn't use these services if they were subject to that kind of risk. As for charging and parking, the use case here is people who already have parking space for their Tesla. So that's where the Tesla parks when and if it's not needed. In time, I imagine, charging hubs will appear where either attendants plug in the vehicle, or the plug mechanism is automated. Or the car just comes home when it hits the predefined minimum charge, and the owner plugs in later.
- labrador 1y agoI think we should require robotaxis to have the same abilities as professional drivers. I driven professionally in various jobs and consider it a skilled profession above what the average driver can do. Some of the scenarios I've encountered truely tested my limits, such as someone trying to commit suicide by pulling out in front of my bus in Las Vegas, or various insurance scam accidents attempted on the bus because the bus company had deep pockets. What you are casually asserting is that Tesla "eyeballs" and driving AI will duplicate the abilities of a professional driver real soon now. Count me skeptical. I wouldn't ride in a vision only Tesla without a safety driver and don't recommend anyone else do it either.
- maxlin 1y agoThe more you require of them, the less of them you'd have on roads with their 1x-10x safety rating compared to other members of the traffic. If you do the calculus, The Grim Reaper is cackling and cheering you on, agreeing that no Robotaxi should be allowed on the road unless it has achieved a 100x human safety rating.
- labrador 1y agoI'd ride in a Waymo because it is not vision only. Waymo with it's extra sensors has a better chance of reaching the level of a pro driver imho.
- maxlin 1y agoPro drivers don't shoot lazers out of their eyes. Better master one thing instead of introducing distractions. Both from targeting of effort and model quality, and use of compute.
- queenkjuul 1y agoRobotaxis, with no widespread release and human drivers, has proven to be 10x safer, after just ten cars in one city? Quite the extrapolation
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- jacobjjacob 1y agoThey only have ten cars on the road? What a farce, the stock is inflated with hopes and dreams and hot air. Only needs a little bit of work to not drive into trains.