Two Tesla Robotaxis Use Center of Four-Lane Road for Pickup and Dropoff... With One Getting Stuck for 4 Minutes

I like how he keeps trash talking Waymo when it took him 14 minutes, an intervention and a mile or so to make a left turn because the other Tesla thought it should pick people up in the middle of the street. Clearly the Tesla is superior. /s

Shouldn’t this be a crime?

Waymos will actually drop you off in bad locations as well, but it will be safely in a neighborhood, which may be inconvenient but not unsafe like this.

The issue isn't that it stopped in traffic... the issue is that it was surely programmed NOT to stop in traffic and it did. Remember, for an unthinking car stopping in traffic or driving off a cliff are the same thing. They are both events where they aren't following the rules. If the car for some reason, sun glare for instance, thinks driving straight off a cliff makes sense, it will do it. That's why you have to "supervise" it. I would never in a million years drive in the backseat of a driverless Tesla. You get rid of the safety driver and you increase the rides to thousands, or millions, and t's basically a guarantee someone is going to die.

The more I learn about autonomous cabs, the more I want to avoid them.

Presumably, it is! But crimes punished by financial penalties are actually not crimes if you are rich, and so Elon Musk is exempt.

These things are such pieces of crap. They need to be off the roads

Thats just elon musk's adolescent humor at work

And given they’ve ripped out so much of the oversight, regulation and enforcement this will be allowed to happen all over the country

That was my thought as well, he keeps trash talking Waymo meanwhile this stupid vehicle caused way more problems

Why do all these driverless cars tend to do this?

I think there is comparatively a lot of data for how to drive a car (particularly the boring parts), every car ride has many minutes or hours of training data. Every car ride has exactly one example of parking, and many of those are not relevant to taxi service usage (IE, parking in a household garage or similar). So I think it's a lack of data, and then they generally are not serious about hard-coding solutions where machine learning does not present a ready solution. Waymo, far more serious than Tesla, but neither is great at it.

I thought it was the beginning of a joke, expecting “then one said to the other…” Turns out it IS a joke, but on all of us.

Tesla doesn’t use rules in their AI stack, they proudly stated some years ago that they now have a full learning model. There is a reason why rule engines are a very common component in almost any AI application.

If a Tesla self drives off a cliff and an influencer doesn’t film it, did it actually happen?

Can’t wait for the future when we have these things littering our streets glitching like the traffic in Grand Theft Auto V.

Because they’re a novelty, not really ready to be a viable consumer product.

"great experience, I was excited to se the Robotaxi, i seemed to know that I wanted out in the middle of the road without me saying. I am not sure why the safety guy kept praying" <Rider probably>

Only if Sawyer tweets about it afterwards

Sometimes riders make insane requests and there is no safe pickup spot. A human driver would refuse the pickup. Sounds like it needs more work.

The widely released supervised version, which I use everyday, is probably safer stopping to the side of a residential street. Because the only way you could cross the country with no interventions is if you never entered a parking lot. 12.3.9 sucks at parking lots. If I were to describe the behavior it would be to say it is looking for all the turns that are NOT an entry or an exit. In some communities, the center turning lane is the safest because the street is basically parking lot with diagonal parking on opposite sides. Otherwise you have to block traffic, which is super annoying to others but regarded as a frustration similar to how drivers see jaywalkers.

It's all because Elon musk wants a surveillance state with the cameras. Lidar doesn't use cameras therefore isn't used. These cars are all about data collection. From the passengers to the surrounding area. Now with Musk at the helm, he has an army of camera cars that can drive without drivers to wherever musk tells the cars to go. And they can't do that right because Musk doesn't want them to, he wants the surveillance.

Remember when fElon blocked Sawyer and Omar? That still makes me laugh.

A human driver could roll down the window, tell the rider to go to a corner, and that they'll circle the block and be back in two minutes.

Yup

Obviously needs fixing !

wild take. he isn't using lidar because of the cost. if he was able to get the software good enough, and if it drove just as good as waymos, then he would clearly win, simply on cost. look at spacex, as an example. people scoffed at the idea of rockets self-landing. but they did pull that off, and it gives the company a huge cost-savings advantage. but the reality is that the robotaxis are dangerous, and he is putting everyone else at risk just for his own advantage. maybe these cars could self-drive really well just using visual optics one day, but that seems pretty far out at this point.

Hang on… the influencer would even celebrate it as a feature because it pumps the stock!!

Yup. My fun little Peter Thiel/palantir connection conspiracy. Full on surveillance state conspiracy. It makes sense considering the drones over major cities that suddenly stopped. That was the US military, who peter thiel is in bed with.

That douche is insufferable

It’s better than human in percentage I guess.