Tesla has started rolling out initial round of Robotaxi invites

I'm a big Tesla fan having owned three of them, but I don't see the purpose at all in these Robo taxis. Maybe somebody can explain their value.

Build your own car in house with affordable self driving technology and in house phone app. Deploy robo taxis at lower break even cost and variable cost than competitors. Massively undercut price and seize market share, while profiting because cost structure is far superior. That’s the robotaxi idea. The other is selling unsupervised FSD subscriptions. Also use FSD technology as a base for training humanoid robots. Whether any of this will ever actually work on a technical and business level remains to be seen.

Umm you don't have to pay the driver so taxi rides are super cheap?

Say a ride is $10, driver gets $7, Uber gets $3. With robotaxi, you get the whole $10, and can work 24/7.

I think the idea is that someone can own a Tesla and, while they’re not using it, it can pick up passengers and take them places. Extra income for the owner. Like an Uber or Lyft, but driverless. Also, it gives the owner the ability to use it for their own transportation needs, especially if they don’t particularly like driving. I do wonder how successful they’ll actually be. Though Turo is a thing, I would never want a bunch of strangers riding around in my car without me being there. But may have a very different level of attachment to my car than a lot of younger people of today might. In any case, it’ll be really interesting to see from a legal standpoint how lawsuits happen and where responsibilities fall when things go wrong!

Price per mile low, ride prices are lower than competitors and you can operate nearly 24/7 making money.

Who takes liability? How do you get insurance if Tesla doesn't take liability? And most importantly, who is going to clean your car after random people who don't care about your car have trashed it?

The whole idea is moot since there is a lot of controversy surrounding Tesla and their approach to robotaxis (with just cameras).  People would need to feel comfortable getting in the car and letting it drive, which I can tell you as someone who is subbed to FSD right now, I certainly would not.

Tesla will take liability. Ultimately Optimus robots will clean the car Remember people have to use a credit card to get a ride. You can secure a deposit and they'll have a score like Uber. Trash a car once you'll never ride again

I would imagine Tesla will sell insurance for these vehicles. They at least planned for this by creating and building out their insurance business. In regards to vandalism, no idea.

I have less interest in using Robotaxi as an Uber-like service (as I don’t use Uber very often), but the ability to send out Tesla to go pick up our kids after sports practice or take our family to the airport and go back home and park would be quite a paradigm shift.

You don't understand the purpose of a taxi and the value of Tesla making profit off of it?

Tesla is absolutely going to take a cut. They will likely have to accept liability, and they aren’t licensing the software for free.

This is BIG. If you don’t like this announcement then you don’t like technology. PERIOD. This is huge in the race for self driving cars. Hate Elon and hate Tesla all you want, but you have to admit this is a PROGRESS. It’s important to have different ways to tackle the same problem. It happens in almost every iteration of technology and different hypotheses lead to better outcomes. So radar vs LiDAR vs vision only vs a combo of both, who cares. You know who wins? WE THE CUSTOMERS.

Watching in real-time as /r/selfdrivingcars and /r/electricvehicles lose their shit over this would be entertaining, were it otherwise not so sad and pathetic… Every single “see! It can’t do it!!” is completely devoid of any historical knowledge of how Waymo did its very first few drives.

But you don’t get 10 dollars anymore. Because now, you don’t need the driver, and you are competing with yourself.

They will? I have tried searching a bit and can't really find anything anywhere that states that. Do you have a source?

That's not how it works. Tesla will charge you for operation fees + liability fees. You will end up with something closer to $5.

holy crap… i never thought of this.

The long term strategy is transportation as a service. The ability to deploy them just about anywhere and have them available basically 24/7 will open up the possibility of a commuter model where people just don't own vehicles anymore. Sure, some can do this in dense urban centers with mass transit today, but the robotaxi can expand this to cover more suburban and rural communities. Tesla as a larger enterprise can maintain and service a fleet of vehicles in a more cost effective manner than individuals. Also the operating cost of a vehicle intrinsically goes down per mile when the vehicle is heavily utilized. The robotaxi that goes half a million miles in its life will be cheaper overall than an individually owned vehicle that goes only a fraction of that in its life. With people being pressured by expenses in many areas, being able to opt out of vehicle ownship will be a welcomed option to the frugle commuter. Tesla will be able to squeeze out a margin from their low cost operations of the vehicle while still offering a cost/mi less than what the individual would pay if they bought and maintained the vehicle themself.

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Tired of people claiming FSD doesn't work when I use on the daily to get me places even 2 hours away, city driving included, door to door. They've never used FSD and probably are astroturfing which is an annoying part of Reddit. Wish people understood what's possible when you have an AI company that happens to make cars and has a cycle-time that's a fraction of the traditional car companies.

Car sharing within the family will be so convenient.

Ew, those places are dis-gus-ting! Especially the latter...

Isn’t that about the same thing?

It's like your personal chauffer available 24/7

At the very least, in my case we can go from a 3-4 car family potentially down to 1 car. The car drops me off at work, heads home and takes the kids to school then heads back home for whatever errands my wife might need then make the reverse order of trips to pick up the kids then me. Yes it’s a lot of extra miles on the car but I’m also saving 2-3 car payments which means I can afford to replace cars quicker.

Slowly at first, then suddenly it will be everywhere. I think people underestimate the value proposition of a private ride, never mind the fact that Tesla will be able to offer it at cheaper prices than a regular cab or Uber. I think the hardest part will be convincing people to try it initially, but it will be hard ignore if they can price the rides at half of what Uber costs. Getting into a robotaxi with all your preferences already loaded before you even get in - Spotify / Netflix account logged in, AC set, not going to drop you randomly, options to wait for you after drop-off, etc. There's so much to be improved with a ride hailing experience and Tesla has the platform to actually make it real.

I use FSD 99% of my drive and it works amazingly good. Except on very rare occasions when I may have to intervene just because my brain thinks the other way and I want to impose it in FSD, but I have found zero issues with FSD otherwise. There were countless times when I would have made a mistake as I am looking ahead only while FSD is looking 360 degrees, I may have missed someone who is in my blind spot or behind A pillers unless I move my head and FSD is always looking for it. Just waiting desperately for FSD Unsupervised which is likely come after Robotaxi is going to work well.

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it's about sending your own Tesla to pickup your kids. Your car will be there waiting for kids to hop in and let you control its destination. Its trunk will have whatever your kids will need... snack, baseball gloves, violin, etc. Your kids/family can put bags (say shopping bags) in there until they do their next activities and they will be safe. Versus You call Robotaxi when your kids are about to finish.. Either Robotaxi will have to be patient for kids to hop in or your kids have to wait 10-20 minutes for one to arrive. You can't bring anything you don't plan to take out after the ride is done. You have to bring everything when you leave your house. Traveling without own (or rental) car is inconvenient because everything has to be carried at everywhere when you leave hotel.

I’ve been in so many weird Uber drivers vehicles that I cannot wait for this. I hope it scales and expands quickly.

That won’t happen anytime soon. Best one can hope for coming soon is something like drop you at airport then drive home then pick you up next day.

My sister is disabled and unable to drive. Part of my hope when buying my Model Y, is that someday I'll be able to have it drive me to work (already does that mostly) and then send it to my sister so she can have it help her run errands, instead of having to wait for her husband to get home, or asking her kids to drive her around.

Those 2 things will literally happen at the same time.

Truck and taxi drivers watching their livelihood disappear.

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No, picking up kids involves substantially more risk/uncertainty.

If I could send this around to pick up my 80yo Mom, shuttle her to a doctor appointment, wait for her, then take her back home afterward … that would be such a game changer in my life. I realize that best case scenario that’s probably still a few years away. But amazing to see that it might be possible.

>a 2 seater requiring 1 tesla employee to be inside the vehicle My understanding is that Tesla is using Model Ys right now for the service, not the dedicated Robotaxi announced earlier. So, it would be a 5 seater, but only with 3 available seats for passengers (2nd row).

What point of testing do you not understand? Waymo did the exact same thing for months before they fully released the product. What do you think is happening here? Testing with an employee in the passenger seat to oversee any issues. And months down the line if things are safe, they remove the employee and work towards the final launch. At this point I think people like you are just looking for something to be upset about and that makes me feel really bad for you.

Such as? Finding a parking spot? That’s really all I can think of once Tesla is actually a certified Lv4 or Lv5 autonomous car and doesn’t legally require a driver (which is faaaaaaar away in the future of course).

You should really go to that appointment with her...

Who takes liability when you let a friend borrow your car and they crash it? Your insurance company. I don't see any reason it would be any different if you let an AI drive your car. I imagine most insurers will offer supplemental insurance plans for commercial and/or non-commercial use of unsupervised FSD. If statistics stay similar to supervised FSD, they'll likely offer a discount. FSD doesn't ever drive drunk. FSD doesn't look away from the road to check a text. FSD doesn't fall asleep at the wheel. FSD doesn't get angry when people cut it off. FSD doesn't intentionally crash into people because "it had the right-of-way". FSD doesn't obey school zone speed limits or stop for emergency vehicles / school buses (oops, well maybe some day that will get better)

I’m interested on the price. We need to compare Waymo, Uber and Lyft

absorbed run serious desert support knee attempt unpack punch toothbrush *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev/home)*

Let's go

Yea that was always my idea for ideal usecase back when I bought it in 2018….. or going to sleep in the back while the car drives to the beach overnight…

One is private use the other is commercial use. You you lend out your car to a friend and he drives uber in it 24/7 your insurance isn't going to cover it. Now lets say we live in a world where they would cover commercial use on your private insurance. Dependending on the incident rates of any tesla that is cabable of using the robo taxi feature the rates would skyrocket, since now every tesla is now also a commercial vehicle running 24/7 using a lot more miles/kilometers and that also increase incident risk rates.

Even for it to self park a few blocks away from expensive downtown parking and then come back to pick me up after an event would be super cool

Is it picking up your kids, just for one.

Bruh

/s ?

The reason Tesla gets so much hate is how they have presented the product for years. Its obvious that they need to do testing, and a slow roll out as they work out the kinks. Waymo did that as well. What Waymo didn't do is talk trash about geofencing, then geofence. They didnt speak poorly about other players in the space, and then follow their lead (although 6 years later) to a T. Tesla's entier MO was to say they were going to work on FSD until it was complete, then push a software update and suddenly everyone would have a roboTaxi. That is not what they are doing, and they are getting criticized for it. I really hope Tesla's self driving does well, and grows quickly. But claiming that people are "just looking for something to be upset about" when they are just pointing out the years of, at best, disingenuous advertising is childish.

Robochauffeur

10 cars for only “friendly” promoters… that’s not a roll-out, it’s something different… 🚽

I like this idea but I think that will be a ways out. It’s my understanding that the RT service with have some oversight/monitoring that someone can remotely get the vehicle out of a trouble issue. I imagine part of the RT fees are paying for this and you’d be missing that if you sent your car out to run errands while not part of the RT network.

I don't think I have a source but they do basically everything in house and have an insurance division. They wouldn't pay anyone else to do something they could do themselves and they have $30B in the bank. They'll self insure

It’s annoying they haven’t turned it on yet, my Tesla drives me everywhere anyway! Almost no difference having me behind the wheel or not. This is how it will be in the future, it’s too convenient to not use it

Should be trivial to add the kids’ phones as “drivers” to the Tesla app.

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This is why I think ultimately the revenue model will be to pay to put your car on the robotaxi network, not for FSD per se. I have from the beginning expected FSD would become an included feature for personal use. It will ultimately come to be seen as an essential safety feature like seatbelts.

Amen brother!

You could always pay a small amount per mile to have this kind of service available

Uber drivers are required to get a rideshare endorsement on their personal coverage, which adds maybe $100/month. Uber also provides liability insurance during rides. It would likely be similar for robotaxi service. Very few people will have their personal cars operating as robotaxis 24/7.

> This system was touted as being able to operate anywhere, at any time, from day one on millions of vehicles. The design of the system accomodates this. That does not mean is should be turned on for every road in every place day #1. That would be wildly negligent with safety considerations. However, if the Austin trial goes well, and the LA trial goes well ... yes, Tesla would have the option to just "turn it on ... everywhere" whereas Waymo *as a business model* does not have that option and will never have that option as they currently operate. I know, it's easy ragey clickbait commentary to intentionally try to conflate the two. But please do not. Day #1 saftey is not the same as the foundational differences between the two models (and now we'll get to see how well Tesla's bet will pay off).

Yeah, no chance I let the general public use my Tesla, especially with the current sentiment. However, i personally would use the shit out of it and let close friends and family use the service too. Not having to find parking sounds amazing

Yes this will be amazing! But this will lag uber like services by atleast a decade

Like you most people have really thought about. But once you do it Is eye opening. No more door dash. And other things but picking up the kids is a big one

Or, food delivery. From a restaurant directly to you, no 3rd party person involved.

I’m almost 20k miles in 6months 80% of it FSD. I’ve done long distance and ton of city driving. Yes, it has flaws but you kinda know when it’s gonna make a mistake and it’s nothing major.

Or go home or not even park just go out and work then come pick you up

It will be cheaper for Tesla, not for you.

Yes, but when Tesla can drop you off somewhere and drive itself home, what is stopping you from picking up and dropping your kids off at home without you in the car?

> A joke of a service, with a "safety monitor" in the front seat? Front passenger seat, not in the driver's seat and not driving. > This system was touted as being able to operate anywhere, at any time, from day one on millions of vehicles. They never once promised that from day one.

The issue is that it can't make any mistakes when there is no supervision.

I won’t have kids alone in a car with a steering wheel and pedals. But being able to send the car back to the wife will make us able to only have one car

It would be absolutely incredible if I could send my car out to run tasks or pick up friends/family/customers. FSD would actually be an investment then. Agreed on the paradigm shift.

Or go find a charging station and charge. Would be super useful for hotel or Airbnb stays

No one in their right mind is sending a car to pick up their family, I don’t care if you trust the car enough, you aren’t living with yourself if something terrible happens.

Of course these people exist, but I’ve been with FSD since initial beta right after YouTubers got it. I’ve seen the evolution and the years of discussions. One thing has always been the same: everyone has vastly different experiences. Some will always claim it’s amazing and some with always claim it almost wrecked them. Where I’m at I mostly have great drives but it still gets in wrong lanes and misses turns, still makes dumb lane changes confusing other drivers, literally ran a red light last week for me and is far from anything I’d say is robotaxi. I’m amazed at what it can do but I’ll criticize it where it deserves it.

You can do that with Uber already.

what happens in these taxi when a kid grabs the wheel --how does waymo handle people screwing around with controls. has Tesla FSD got better in parking lots?

wow, so tesla robotaxis are only ~6 years behind waymo? (waymos did have safety drivers, in 2017, but launched without in 2019). maybe it’s not ignorance as much as bafflement that tesla is so far behind.

Nothing, except they are kids. Did they remember their backpacks, water bottles, etc.

At this point owning a personal vehicle makes no economic sense

Just what I was looking for, I well thought out explanation as to the value of a Robo taxi. Most of the responses I've seen so far have to do with making money off of a Robo taxi. That never occurred to me because I am retired and I have no interest in making any more money. I certainly hope that this Robo taxi meets the expectations of those who do wish to make money.

So far behind... On a general solution, not on something that only works in designated areas that require constant remapping, no? I guess (haven't checked) robotaxis are also going to be geofenced, but looks to me that the reasons would be different.

my understanding is that the robotaxis are very geofenced and that they only travel on mapped (or “confirmed ok”?) intersections. meanwhile waymo is doubling its coverage areas every few months as they develop confidence. we’ll see how broad an area zoox covers at launch but i would be surprised if it’s less than waymo. and both of those are “general solutions” but they use lidar (which is now 100x less expensive than when the tesla ceo whined about it)

Nobody is arguing they're 2nd (or 3rd? R.I.P. Cruise) to market. And no one would even argue with you on the ridiculous forecasting Elon has been wildly inaccurate about for years. But that's *not* the nature of the discussions over in those two subreddits, and you know it. No one is in either of those two subreddits saying "well, it took them a while, but it's good to have a second competitor in the market and more options for riders!" Nope.

Day 1 isn't this Sunday. It was years ago

> doubling its coverage every few months Are you kidding me right now? It's still just SF, LA, Phoenix, Austin and Miami - right? And they've had how many years to get what, a 10x10 sqmi patch in 5 US cities? You do know there are 300+ metropolitan statistical areas in the US, right? There is so much market opportunity that their model will struggle to get - even just the simple case of people in the suburbs who want to get a taxi to the airport is going to be a long-term struggle for them.

i am. i just did. i ride waymo every week and trust it, and i would not trust my model y’s FSD through any of the (very routine!) situations i see waymo navigate flawlessly. FSD, very obviously, has years to go before it’s truly ready, and it’s also very obvious the millions of hw3 and below will not be robotaxis, and it’s not obvious that even hw4 is capable. that they are so late to market with such a bad product is again, baffling.

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Turn it on everywhere for HW4 vehicles*** Turn it on everywhere that has a 0% chance of inclement weather in the forecast for the duration of the drive*** I know Mark Rober's YouTube channel is entertainment (although, he is a former NASA engineer), but there is a reason that many qualified people have been saying for years that limiting the sensor/hardware system to the few hundred nanometer band of the EM spectrum (that encompasses the human visual spectrum) significantly handicaps it's capabilities. No amount of software wizardry can fix a hardware limit. When LiDAR was prohibitively expensive, the approach of vision (+ radar) made sense as it allowed for outfitting millions of vehicles to collect data for, effectively, free. There was a critical juncture a few years ago where the economics was making a pivot worthwhile, but Elon didn't want to start from scratch again while ALSO rendering every previous vehicle incapable of being a future Robotaxi. It was a difficult decision and a major crossroads. I don't want to give Elon too much flak because that was a very, very difficult decision either way - and we don't live in an alternate universe where he did a major pivot and did a clean slate with a sensor suite with a broader range of electromagnetic wave spectrum. For all we know, that universe would have collapsed the stock (and thus the companies ability to raise money cheaply) and started a slow rolling negative feedback loop. That would be made more possible by inevitable FSD related lawsuits that were avoided by maintaining the current path. TL;DR Hindsight is 20/20, and it was a difficult decision to not pivot to a sensor suite with a wider band of EM wave detection (and, in fact, double down by eliminating the radar sensors they DID have to maximize the economical route they'd originally chosen). However, we do live far enough in the future now to say with confidence that the "vision only, no pivot" road did not deliver the desired results and that is precisely because fairly prevalent molecules like H2O interact with those wavelengths limiting visual distance. My house has opaque walls... because I see in "vision only". If I could ALSO see in other EM wavelengths, like, say, radio, my walls would be windows, which is beneficial for SEEING things.

I'm sorry, you'll have to clarify that then. When was day #1 for no-driver-in-driver-seat operation of a Tesla fleet?

> such a bad product It's amazing, you're able to see into the future and you already know - *with absolute certainty* - that the Robotaxi pilot in Austin is going to be a massive failure. That's incredible. Can I borrow that crystal ball of yours? Can you tell me who is going to win the next World Series and the Super Bowl?

that’s correct because each waymo vehicle currently is effectively a handmade bespoke platform for their technology. they only have a few thousand cars nationally. they’ve validated the software works and can scale, in some of the hardest to navigate metro areas of the country. now they are finishing their factories that can build tens of thousands of them. meanwhile tesla has yet to ship a single version that works even 10x as worse.

i never said that the austin pilot would be a failure - you may want to work on your reading comprehension? having safety drivers is the correct and reasonable thing to do and ensures some baseline level of safety and success. but it also means that they are far, far behind waymo and zoox and we’ll see who can scale up further, quicker.

Wait, so you say *manufacturing capability* is the key to success in this market? Hmm, if only we knew some company that had the capital investments to turn out millions of vehicles per year ... hmmm ...

> they are far, far behind waymo I don't think anyone, anywhere has ever argued against that point? Maybe stop constructing strawman arguments?

Probably sometime around 2018 when the CEO reiterated it was capable of fully autonomous coast-to-coast drives.

Having a person or not in the driver’s seat is irrelevant. Tesla has the data for the number of interventions required, they don’t need to move the guy one seat to the right to determine if the car can drive itself or not. Judging by their progression, it doesn’t seem like they’re anywhere near close to having an operational self driving system of any use. As an L2 system? Absolutely great.

I have a 2019 model 3 FSD. How do I know if I will be able to get this technology ?

So many possibilities

> Judging by their progression, it doesn’t seem like they’re anywhere near close to having an operational self driving system of any use. And yet ... they clearly have had driverless Model Y's roaming the streets of Austin for a few weeks now. I mean, we've literally seen video clips of them caught by random Austinites. I guess the local news media must just be in on the scam and is suppressing all the video of all the catastrophic collisions that clearly must have been happening if - as you say - their system is not "anywhere near close to having an operational self driving system" ... right? Can't believe Elon has paid off even the local news networks... wow. Thanks so much for enlightening me!

Exactly. Automated logistical car management would fundamentally change how the vast majority of people use cars and could also fundamentally change how cities are designed. No need for as much parking spaces anymore since your vehicle can just park back at home or park much further away in a designated "parking district". Also the use of valet would go away of the dodo.

It's no different than entrusting a human driver to go pick up your family. Unless you really never entrust any human driver to do that too and only entrust in yourself.

Your own little taxi service. Drop dad off at work early, come home. Pick mom and kids up, drop kids off, mom goes to work. Car comes home to wirelessly charge a few hours. Goes out to pick up dad, on and on in reverse. One car family becomes possible again, when the vehicle isn't sitting unused for 8 or 9 hours a day at once person's work.

Yes, yes, if you use it for a commercial purpose, you would definitely need to have commercial insurance. But again, just like somebody who uses their own car as an Uber, has to use their own insurance company, I don't think robo taxi service would be any different. You get the commercial use endorsement on your insurance, and you're good to go. I think it's ridiculous you think insurance companies would be forced to charge commercial insurance rates on any vehicle capable of being used as a robo taxi. Aren't all cars capable of being used as an Uber? Do insurance companies force every single driver of every single vehicle capable of being an Uber into a commercial policy just because it could potentially be used that way? No, that would be just as ridiculous as your comment. I'm also curious why you assume, regardless of personal or commercial use, insurance companies would charge more for somebody using a system that is already statistically provable to be safer than your average driver? You can look on the nhtsa website and see very clearly that both full self-driving, and waymo, have significantly fewer incidents, and significantly fewer deaths per 100 million miles than the national average in the US. Usually insurance companies reward being safer with lower rates, do they not?

To and from work, getting groceries, picking up kids with equipment, trips, beach gear in trunk, camera gear, instruments, the no personal car movement makes no sense. Renting from a company for $30+ per ride, multiple times per day makes no sense.

If it worked, yes that would be amazing.

WTF are you doing in this forum then? lol

The supporting infrastructure for autonomous vehicles will be much more complex than we currently imagine, but designed to solve the very problems people associate with not owning a car. For instance, if you need to transport gear, you could load it into a robotaxi, which would drop you off and then autonomously take your belongings to a secure storage point. After work, it would retrieve your items before picking you up. This model is also far more efficient. A personal car sits idle for the vast majority of the time. With a shared fleet, the nearest vehicle can pick up your kids, rather than summoning your specific car from across town. For this to work, the cost has to be low - a $30 ride is not a sustainable model. Ultimately, the cost of a robotaxi ride will be significantly cheaper than personal car ownership, even while allowing the operating companies to remain profitable.

They better be a lot cheaper than Uber. I drive 17,000 miles a year. At Uber prices, that would buy me a new Tesla with FSD every 3 years.

I suspect they will be cheaper by a lot

Isn’t this called Banish?

There is no way that would work without the passengers being able to communicate with the car so each knows where the other is. At that point it's no different from a robotaxi not owned by you.

This is what I'm looking forward to the most. If I can drive or FSD drive to densely populated areas with no parking and send the car somewhere off and call it back at some point, would be massively game changing imo.

I would not trust my kids in it...

I didn't even think about that. That's an excellent use case. I went on a road trip with friends to a more country like town, I had to drive half hour away to supercharge. That's over an hour out of my day and free time with everyone. Would be awesome if the car could just do it at night or in the morning when I'm getting ready. wait, that would also mean people without a driveway or garage can use Tesla's more normally too. It would still cost a good bit but for apartment people, if their car is parked on the road, they can send it to charge somewhere and have it come back and park where ever.

But we’d need induction charging. Who’s going to plug it in?

You could maximize supercharger usage this way too. Say at 2 am the charger talks to your car and it goes to the charger at the Target nearby and fills up and goes back to your apartment. This way your car is always charged even if you don’t own a charger.

The snake https://youtu.be/uMM0lRfX6YI

It's called a pump for the stock price

100% this. I’d also love something like I want to walk into town and have it pick me up. Or I want to talk to the gym, but not necessarily home (or the other way around). This would be next level.

Road infrastructure became more complex when the car was invented. And it has continued to evolve ever since.

That's only fun for the first hundred appointments, each with the same specialist's commentary. Once your parent cannot manage the interaction then yes it is better to go along every time.

I agree with you up to an extent. Except there's an issue with the logic imo, I'd assume that likely the kids are accompanied by a responsible adult. In this case, the responsible adult may not need to be a driver, In this case it would be no different than calling an uber. If the kids are young and don't have any supervision, I'd question if they have responsible parents. If the kids are old enough to be out on their own, then anything can happen with or without a self driving car. It's a risk you live with because you want to give space to your loved ones to grow. Otherwise get a babysitter or family member you trust to keep them company. If there's an issue in the car, the responsible adult will handle it. Even with another driver/baby sitter in the mix, this would still be a leap because the car wouldn't need to be parked at someone's workplace the entire day, the rest of the family can use it, I think is what the post you replied to is implying in general.

Mine too but on rare occasions it still makes mistakes. Not "last mile" improbable stuff, but uncommon. The car doesn't need to be able to handle every single situation possible but it needs to be able to avoid roads that it can't handle perfectly and when an error happens , it needs to be able to correct itself.

Why are you making a big deal about the safety monitor? You don't think people's lives or safety is worth a little negative PR?

I would buy a Tesla right now if this were a feature

Oh, those large vans carrying battery packs which drive around the city offering to charge your EV for a fee... might lose quite a bit of Tesla customers

Well, it's simple math. There is a cost of personal ownership. If the ride hail cost is higher, people will just buy a personal FSD car. Maybe owning one shared car will replace owning two or three cars across family members, causing the cost of ownership to be much lower. They might even rent their car to the Robotaxi network, lowering their costs further. Ride hail cost has to become way lower than ownership cost of that one single car. Probably Tesla will have to own the car at that time. I can see it happening, but each different location across the globe will experience this at different time scales.

super stoked! /s

Cue a thousand Teslas after a game in a weird driverless traffic jam doing all sorts of weird shit... Until someone tapes over the cameras for fun.

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I am gonna laugh so hard when the reviews come out as "this just feels like the current FSD stack but scarier because you are in less control". I hope they rack up enough miles for this to work with a proper wide scale rollout. I want to see these get tested in LA.

I cant say I’m in a position to send drivers on errands, maybe then I’d understand.

There would be laws that forbid you from just having the car circle around for a couple of hours while you finish dinner.

Tesla robotaxi thing does have induction charging.

I'm convinced everyone in those subs are well regarded. I'm glad I stumbled on this thread where people actually have good ideas, and there is productive discussion.

I love when this sub dreams about stuff that they are positive is coming “next year”

To clarify, Robotaxi is the overall service that will be running on multiple Tesla models. Cybercab is the specific 2-door vehicle that is meant to exclusively operate in a Robotaxi mode (and has built-in inductive wireless charging 🛜).

In my experience, I’ve only ever seen mistakes that annoy other drivers. Never anything unsafe.

But I believe you can also own a cybercab and use it for your own personal journeys and then switch it to the robotaxi network when you want it to make you money, am I right?

During the Robotaxi presentation, it sounded like consumers will be able to purchase Cybercabs as well, but pricing/availability is yet to be announced.

Wrong company.

For a lot of college football games you can park at a state fairground’s large parking lot and then take a bus into the game 20 minutes away. This would just flip that and drop you off at the game, park at the excess parking, then pick you up when it is done. Plenty of excess unused parking normally away from popular spots —- schools, office buildings at night, churches, etc

Nice

What % of an uber ride is driver cost + fuel + ICE car maintenance? How much cheaper could a Uber be if you subtract most of the above?

Why don’t people just get a 3/Y and have more seats?

Maybe, but more likely it will just be the cost of electricity, and wear and tear on the vehicle that will limit the circle around. You have a long lunch and it would cost you an extra 1000km of wear on your car and $50 in electricity because you have to supercharge to get home, and its looking a bit convenient, but pretty expensive.

But this is what cybercab is for. Would you really still own a car if each of those trips was only $1. No need to schedule who can use your car when, no need to be careful with charge, and no large upfront cost or care of maintenance.

That would require a significant redesign of the car or the charger, as is now it would be far to finicky to make it work, unless we're talking robot staffed chargers maybe... Could work.

This is more for downtown in a big city where parking is extremely limited and very expensive. Like downtown NYC where it's like $50 for 2 hours. Cheaper to pay for electricity and wear+tear on the car.

Totally true - always bullish even if all factories are burning or the toilets are clogged!

No way the car will drive 1,000km in 2 hours. Let's say 2 hours in NYC downtown parking cost like $40-50... Even driving at an average of 20MPH for 2 hours is just 40 miles. A Model 3/Y at <300Wh/mile is going to use no more than 10-13 kWh. Even expensive supercharging would cost about $5-6. Add in margin for wear+tear. Still coming out way ahead. And if everyone is doing it, traffic will be even slower so even fewer miles on the car.

Would be pretty trivial for the car to go on a larger non obvious loop. How would they know it is doing a 30 block loop vs traveling 30 blocks for a pickup?

Plenty of laws with various levels of difficulty in both detection and enforcement. Although if there is a will, there is a way... This could be done by regulation of the autonomous vehicles's themselves to make use of certain features detectable.

On the other hand. Self driving has been touted by Tesla for over 10 years now and Tesla is the underdog now in the driverless race. FSD working 95% of the time without interaction is more than enough when someome is behind the wheel, but not nearly enough when someone isn't.

That’s called the “cybercab”.

That’s called the “cybercab”

I live in Austin and have never heard of this, what cities do you know that has these? Sounds interesting

In waymos it alerts support and they give you a warning, if you do it again they end the ride

When pedestrians (and others) die, who gets legally annihilated? The Tesla owner or Tesla?

https://youtu.be/JXqBr4MxIp8 https://youtu.be/NcZtvz46-ss https://youtu.be/HBOc48whzI0

AIDRIVER acting like a petulant child because he didn’t get an invite.

Ask Waymo. What happened to them

Can’t wait till I can have my model y just go pick up my mom who lives 30 min away. Then take her home etc. Would be so great!

The amount of traffic this would add... people just don't get it. Having cars just driving around aimlessly until their owners summoned them? Just completely absurd the traffic impact that would have in dense urban areas.

And we thought traffic congestion was bad now.... Have every vehicle doing double driving and it'll be atrocious.

What he said is accurate. > I think the hardest part will be convincing people to try it initially, but it will be hard ignore if they can price the rides at half of what Uber costs. This is exactly what they've done - rides are $4.20. People are hesitant, except for that cheap of a price when Uber is going to be $15-$45 (making up numbers here....) people will try it.

Ya, I just paid 13 bucks for parking downtown Toronto. Robbery.

You won’t unless a HW4 upgrade somehow gets released.

What if it isn't dead-heading? Uber/Lyft, you can request to go somewhere as a driver, and it can find you rides along the way. Mom needs the car in 2 hours, it does drive to her empty, it drives to the nearest passenger needing to go towards her. Drops off near, then sits in the driveway.

Sure, if you're going to have it functioning as a taxi service as well - but that's not going to be everyone (I honestly can't guess as what percent of people I'd expect to enroll their car in the service - really low? high?). But having a car drive to work and then home and then to work and home again is doubling the traffic compared to the car that drives to work in the morning and home in the evening - that's what I was getting at. Now I'm not advocating for more vehicle ownership as a solution for traffic congestion. I'm just saying that if a lot of people do send their cars back home for the day, it's going to have ramifications on traffic congestion.

Some we never thought of. It will need some business model and gig jobs. Like insta cart and Uber eats and delivery driver You send your car to the store to pick it .

A new job.

But the traffic wouldn't be bad probably since they will take to each other just like how fsd handle traffic

Do you have a Tesla if it's in calendar . They would have their profile just work setting now they would be school. It would know where who goes where . On the day my son when I get in it on the screen

I wish this were the case for me. It's mostly great, but it has made a couple legitimately dangerous mistakes in the year that I've had it. That's enough for me to not trust it to drive without supervision. I hope Tesla gets there, but with the current publicly available version of FSD, I would absolutely not trust it to drive me somewhere unsupervised. In my experience it's probably a 98% chance that it will be fine, but I'm not risking my life on that remaining 2% when I've seen it do dangerous things first hand. Perhaps the robotaxi version of FSD is significantly improved though.

I just bought a model Y for my wife for the same reason. It's getting harder for her to get around, her only complaint so far is how finicky the damn dash buttons are.

Does anyone have any invites by any chance? I need one if possible...