‘Elon is gambling’ — How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale

I'm not reading that. I can safely assume it can be summarised as "it's shit"

A lack of transparency on the part of Tesla and Elon Musk is the #1 most important point as to why you can never trust any data about Tesla EVs, Robotaxis, FSD, SpaceX, Grok, Neurolink, and any other venture that Elon is involved with. All the significant data on every important subject has virtually no independent or third-party validation. On the contrary, Elon goes out of his way to be belligerent and angry whenever even an attempt is made to suggest this type of scrutiny.

👆

And Waymo is sooo transparent, directly linking to excel spreadsheets of every waymo incident, running you through the math of how often there's an incident, etc, directly from their website. Its crazy that the only 2 real competitors in this market so far are such polar opposites of each other and people can't see that one side is desperately clinging on to whatever they have.

Yeah it has rarely made any sense why the stock trades at this insanely inflated multiple. It has proven time and time again to be unshortable

Breaking news Elon just farted on the factory floor where he was sleeping that’s gonna be good for two or 3% Monday

>None of this comes as a surprise to Elias Martinez. One of the earliest Full Self-Driving beta testers, he says Tesla’s software has “come a long way” over the past four years. But he argues all available evidence points to the technology being nowhere near robust enough to support the 10,000 cars Musk claimed in May were possible in theory on day one. The issue with even this conclusion is that unsophisticated drivers cannot quantifiably differentiate between reliability and their own complacency and biases against a black box. And neither can Tesla. This is a particular issue in even well-managed safety-critical systems development programs. The test operators naturally gain a familiarity with the system and subconsciously begin to ignore primordial failures that are, in actuality, catastrophic downstream. That is why all test personnel are maintained under a strict and evolving Safety Management System (SMS) in legitimate, good faith safety-critical system development programs. Tesla obviously has zero interest in that. >The technology could prove a game changer, especially for marginalized communities like the handicapped. Jessie Wolinsky, a legally blind millennial who video blogs about her experience slowly losing her eyesight, told California regulators she was grateful for being part of Waymo’s trusted rider program. A bit of an aside, but there are serious downsides - especially in Black-majority cities like here in Detroit. Local politicians get married to a (oft-absurd) future vision of self-driving cars and habitually fail to invest in transit - thus depriving cities of major productivity boosts that the coastal cities enjoy. And, should a self-driving fleet ever be deployed to a city like Detroit, it is probable that the fares will increase substantially while the vehicle service areas will be restricted to white-concentrated areas. Density that brings services closer to home and accessible by mass transit is always the more equitable option. Maybe self-driving vehicles have a place to bridge some gaps in a city that already enjoys an extensive mass transit network - but, in my view, it is a nightmare in cities like Detroit that are struggling to break out of a productivity trap. >And even these figures, Martinez argues, should be vetted independently by regulators before being taken as credible: “If you leave it to a company, they will filter it to fit their narrative.” Honestly, by that point it would not make a difference. No one can establish safety (which is a ***continuous process***, not a "thing") from downstream data. Regulators, if one effectively existed in the automotive space, would have to be integral to the day-to-day of the development program - as it exists in commercial aircraft regulation (or should, anyway). Effectively regulation requires that independent, competent regulators are ensuring that the firm is properly quantifying failure and maintaining systems such that failure is being managed down to appropriate risk levels. Data is a part of that, but not a complete part. Data alone cannot capture the full extent of failure pathways. That was always the ***major*** absurdity in the "data-driven" approach of Tesla's FSD development program. But Tesla is not organizationally-competent in safety-critical systems, quite clearly.

> Its crazy that the only 2 real competitors huh? if by 2 you mean Waymo and Tesla they are not competitors at all. For one Tesla does not even have any taxis without drivers and there's not even a clear path to when something like that will even happen. Neither do they have any taxis with drivers, since the current program is invite-only and only marketing/pr people are allowed to participate. But in the driverless robotaxi space Waymo has some actual competitors of course. Like that Zoox thing, there are other contenders too.

And the stock gonna rally another 10% Monday! 🤷‍♂️

I mean, there's also the fact that every major car manufacturer in the world is working on autonomous driving, and none of them are following Tesla's "cameras are good enough lol". This is mainly because they have competent engineers making and justifying design choices, instead of a ketamine addled Nepo baby who thinks he's a lot smarter than he actually is.

I could understand if the problems were taxi related on. Say dropping someone off at the wrong location. I can even give some lattitude about stopping on an intersection. It is pusshing the boundry to argue that is a taxi thing but fixable? Mind you it sould not sit there for 8 minutes. But running a train is FSD. That is years of their idea of self driving. That has zero to do with taxi and suddenly suggesting those problems are fixable because it is a 'taxi' service is not a legitimate arguement. There is a reason Tesla hides their accidents while Waymo allows you to download it into an excell sheet no less.

> The very day Elon Musk expanded the boundaries of his three-week-old autonomous ride hailing service in Austin, Joe Tegtmeyer’s Tesla tried to illegally run a railroad crossing just as a locomotive approached. “The robotaxi did not see that, and the safety observer had to stop the vehicle until the train had passed. So there’s a little bit of work that still needs to be polished up with the software, but otherwise it’s been just an amazing opportunity to see how well the expanded service is working,” he said on Monday in a post on X. Is there video of this? Weird how it didn't get more attention.

I'd say 95% of the people who drive a Tesla EV don't realize how little independent oversite exists to ensure their safety. That same 95% has no idea how inexperienced Tesla's engineering and safety staff are. Nor do they realize the complete absence of third-party peer or independent review of design choices that exist with Tesla products. The other 5% are too stupid to know the importance of these things.

Maybe they shouldn’t have used episodes of “the dukes of hazard” as training material.

Musk also actively peddles ridiculous claims about the safety, efficacy and economics of his competitors too. He's literally spread equally baseless claims about LIDAR, HD maps, sensor fusion and the general scalability of services provided by competitors who are literally further ahead than him for years. Why build your own company up when you can simply tear everyone else down? This is also from a man who actively bemoaned any and all criticism of Tesla as baseless attempts at destroying the company too.

Tegtmeyer shared a video of his ride, included in the article, but he says this incident wasn't captured on camera, he just relays it near the end of the video.

NDAs probably include not showing that..

The way I see it is earnings will go negative, it'll be dropped from S&P, that'll trigger more selling than the cultists can 'buy the dip' absorb, so the price will crash. If I'm right, and you can predict when that'll happen, it'll've become shortable.

Grok probably gave them a higher weighting because it liked the confederate flag on the car.

This has never been about the Tesla software getting a little bit better. This is about a hardware design that doesn’t work. Elon wanted to avoid expensive sensors and expected some AI software magic to bail him out. He needs the FSD to work so he can convert the fleet of EVs no one wants anymore into profit. Waymo pays something like 250K per vehicle, but they actually work in most environments. Elon tried to cut all the regulations that would prevent him from deploying dangerous FSD. Tesla wouldn’t even exist without all the tax credits, which cost more than all the government jobs he cut. Now he and daddy Trump broke up and it isn’t getting any better from here.

TL;DR Tesla's "Robotaxi" won't scale because you need one human being per "Robotaxi" to drive the "Robotaxi". This is like saying Mechanical Turks "won't scale" because how will you find enough little people to cram into the Mechanical Turks. Tesla's challenge with "Robotaxis" is not scaling, it's making a Robotaxi. If you want a Robotaxi that scales you need to make a Robotaxi, and Tesla has not made any of those yet, they just took a car with an advanced driver-assistance cruise control and slapped a sticker that said "Robotaxi" on the side.

I can’t believe he had the gall to say he is cash poor too.

> Local politicians get married to a (oft-absurd) future vision of self-driving cars and habitually fail to invest in transit - thus depriving cities of major productivity boosts that the coastal cities enjoy. I am not a big believer in public transit in non-densely populated areas (like US is for the most part, including Detroit). But with that aside - as anybody that had to use public transit predominantly (including myself) - no matter how great it is, once you can afford it to - you just get a personal car. That does not mean you stop using the public transit, but you've got a choice the moment you got your personal car. So with this in mind and Detroit being in the USA - what's up with the whole underserving thing? Is it just elderly/sick and children you are worrying about? Because regular adults should have zero problems driving a car, right? And you don't need a robotaxi to transport them around, just give people personal cars (don't need to be fancy cars mind you)

Many people will go the route of getting their own car, but expanding public transit is about giving people more freedom of choice and being able to make a viable decision either way. In my city, public transit just isn’t there. If I needed to get to work and my car was broken, there isn’t a bus or train that will get me anywhere near there in a reasonable amount of time.  Factor in vehicle maintenance, gas, car loan, and paid parking everywhere, and being effectively forced to maintain a personal vehicle is quite expensive.

> but expanding public transit is about giving people more freedom of choice and being able to make a viable decision either way Sure, it's just another option. But you need to be mindful of costs too. You cannot have public transit at every house, even if you have highrises that thousands live in, there are going to be place where you'd have quite a bit of a walk until you reach a public transportation, and then it's not even a given it goes where you want to go or their schedule works for you. > If I needed to get to work and my car was broken, there isn’t a bus or train that will get me anywhere near there in a reasonable amount of time In the same woulda-shouda fashion, you work the night shift and public transport does not run after 2am and does not stop at your place of employment anyway because the places where it does serve are too expensive for the kind of job that would hire you (not a personal insult, but just as an example of somebody in a bad enough situation). In other words, people will always have problems no matter what. > Factor in vehicle maintenance, gas, car loan, and paid parking everywhere, and being effectively forced to maintain a personal vehicle is quite expensive. On the other hand: housing with convenient access to public transportation is (sometimes much more!) expensive, real estate near public transportation similarly so, so companies would try to have their factories away from such expensive places. How much experience do you have in a place where you (as an adult) had to only resort to public transit? There's a reason why all those car sharing, bicycle/scooter rentals and so on are popular, because the public transit does NOT solve the "last mile" all that much as people want you to believe. Do I have solutions? Nope. But I know that public transit is not one all by itself for sure based on my own personal experience.

> You cannot have public transit at every house. We can and we do. Every single day our children, even those living in rural locations, are picked up by buses *for free*. There are some exceptions, but for the vast majority of people public transit is already working. And when it works it's so invisible you forget about it.

Ride failing service

> We can and we do. Every single day our children, even those living in rural locations, are picked up by buses for free. that must be why every time I go by school at a particular time of day, there's a HUGE line of cars waiting for something, the conditions are so bad, they typically have special people present to curate this mass of cars. > And when it works it's so invisible you forget about it. Yeah, you forget about it and miss it by 5 minutes and then you are on your own, right ;)

Yeah, cars suck, it's no wonder that the parents who choose cars end up waiting in traffic.

Worse. It’s probably shit, but.

And Mercedes has a better self driving than Tesla, but you won’t know unless you go to a dealership. Tesla is attempting to be a luxury car, an affordable car, a truck dealer, and a cutting edge software company. They are none of those.

My mother is a very competent attorney. She’s also the type to buy a hype/meme car just to be cool/hip.

I am sure that's exactly why they chose to use the car, because it sucks so much compared to the school bus, right?

The fact is that Detroit, given its size (nearly 3 times the land area of Boston, which does have an extensive, rail-based transit system), simply cannot ever pencil out financially without increasing density (and productivity). The downtown core of Detroit, despite having made significant \*\*visual\*\* progress over the past decade, only has a population of about 6,000. That is far too puny. We would have to at least quadruple that. A big part of the productivity trap that Detroit is stuck in (and has been for decades) is due to a lack of transit (not to mention, the lack of transit creates some significant degree of political unproductiveness). Major transit trunk lines also establish lines of investment efficiency - and Detroit is massively under-invested. Car insurance is sky-high within the borders of the City of Detroit - some of the highest in the nation. The lack of productivity, high (exploitative so) car insurance and forced car ownership bleeds capital off of a population that is already grappling with 33% poverty - also amongst the highest in the nation. Beyond that, Metro Detroit has such a massive, over-built roadway system that we simply could never afford it. The Metro Detroit economy, due to its low-productivity and lack of any high-value industry, simply lacks the economic activity to afford such sprawl.

I’d like to se it de listed

So I don't see how increasing public transportation is going to make any of that better? It's going to suck the same or more resources from residents via taxes and fare costs while being less convenient than a car. Or does the plan also include forcefully relocating everybody into some newly built highrise apartment buildings in the downtown? Detroit being in the USA, the land of the free, would never succumb to the central planning the likes of what they have in Asia or what they had in Soviet Union, and besides it's much easier to combat the sprawl before it happens, once it's already there - no puttign that cat back into the bag I am afraid.

Scale? This shit just doesn’t work

Forcefully? No. But I think that it is hard to deny that efficient, reliable transit is a major boost to a city's productivity and investment attractiveness position. I have it on good authority that the lack of transit in Detroit is one of the top reasons that several companies have declined to locate here over the years - not to mention the fact that Michigan cannot retain any high-skilled labor nearly at all. The graduate retention rate from University of Michigan is beyond terrible - and a major reason cited for that is that younger people do not wish to own a car. They choose Chicago, New York and the West Coasts instead. I have seen this at the top of every public and private sector report on Michigan competitiveness. Michigan is one of the most rapidly-aging states in the union. Michigan is the worst performing state economically in the Midwest and amongst the poorest nationally (in terms of nominal GDP per capita). Neighborhoods in the City of Detroit are akin to separate fiefdoms, rather than a cohesive city - which only increases economic and political unproductiveness. Would-be housing developers do not have a North Star to invest around since major transit corridors are missing. Instead, we get parking lots. It all adds up. Sure. It would be great if we had sprung from a city-wide, rail-based transit system when it was first proposed in 1918. Or the last serious city/metro-wide, rail-based transit system proposal here during the Ford Administration. But the same structural issues persist today as they did back then. Self-driving cars can never come close to matching the productivity boost that will be needed to get us all of out this trap. They are a net capital export (to California, mostly). And we hardly need any more capital exports.

> But I think that it is hard to deny that efficient, reliable transit is a major boost to a city's productivity and investment attractiveness position. Transit? sure. Public transit? I doubt it. And most of the USA is the proof that you can thrive (as a city) without functional public transit. > and a major reason cited for that is that younger people do not wish to own a car. They choose Chicago, New York and the West Coasts instead. I wonder if there were repeat polls of whoever moved out a few years later to check car ownership rates. After all it's easy to look at public transit through the rose colored glasses if your only encounter was the school bus. Also I go to Chicago semi-regularly and not only all streets are lined with parked cars and if you want to have a semblance of a big lawn you have to go so far out of the city that no rail reaches there and once it's expanded, the prices of the real estates go up and existing inhabitants are forced out by increased taxes (yes,m I have a friend affected by it) > Self-driving cars can never come close to matching the productivity boost that will be needed to get us all of out this trap. This is probably true. I am sure there are bunch of other factors, like e.g. weather ;) It also probably does not help that a lot of manufacturing was exported out of the country so suddenly all those factories that needed lots of labor to man are not there anymore. And there's no easy fix to that either now that it happened. Viewing this through just availability of public transit prism seems very simplistic. Want to attract people - make the place desirable. Which typically means - make it pay a lot of money, if you cannot make it happen, people would find a reason not to come/stay there.

> But in the driverless robotaxi space Waymo has some actual competitors of course. Like that Zoox thing, there are other contenders too. And that's just in the US. China has its own ecosystem that will likely get there first.

I was born in Chicago (South Side) and lived there for 35 years. (Moved to the City of Detroit recently because my wife is from Detroit and she wanted to be closer to her aging parents.) True, there is still too much car dependency in Chicago - and it costs Chicago (and the region) handsomely. Chicago is short about a million people from its peak and is roughly 1/3 underproductive due, in part, by a transit system that does not extend into certain areas. The Loop and North Side simply cannot sustain the financial weight of the whole city. Whole areas of Chicago are excluded, by design. Whole stretches of valuable downtown core land is un-investable - including big stretches in the West Loop along the Kennedy. >Viewing this through just availability of public transit prism seems very simplistic. Want to attract people - make the place desirable. Which typically means - make it pay a lot of money, if you cannot make it happen, people would find a reason not to come/stay there. It comes from the best feedback that we have though. Asked and answered. Directly from the source. The "Growing Michigan Together" report that Whitmer's administration commissioned cited responses from 10,000 Michiganders. And indeed... it is unfortunately, a chicken-or-egg problem now. It is extremely difficult to convince, particularly external capital, to invest in Detroit when we are structurally unproductive. And income growth is based on productivity growth - providing would-be resources and political support to major infrastructure projects. Michigan does not sufficiently invest in ***itself***, so many others figure... "why should we?". It is a fair assessment. I do not blame grads for bouncing one bit. And that is apparent in the economic performance over the decades. >This is probably true. I am sure there are bunch of other factors, like e.g. weather ;) To maintain a sufficient safety lifecycle for thousands of individual vehicles at sufficient service levels (to achieve equivalent productivity as rail-based transit) - it is going to cost a hell of a lot more, even when figuring the upfront capital costs with rail. And self-driving car firms are not going to cover those costs. Detroiters will pay for those inefficiencies, inevitably. And all of that capital is exported to other states and regions. Even with imaginable future technology improvements, the structural inefficiency gaps are still there.

While there are certainly players outside the US, I don't think Waymo is present outside the US, so out of country players are not really competitors either I think

The main idea is to have sensor suite as in multiple type of sensor work in conjuction together to get better "picture" of the field and as fail-safe. Having only one type is risky endevour. Even mid-range BYD now implement at least one front facing LIDAR. Not to mention SONY saw the possible sensor need and have started to produce budget LIDAR and still continuously improving it.

"Expert" are uniquely often become easy target for mumbo jumbo like these. The idea being they are actually expert in one thing and think that they also knew better on other aspect of life where they have little experience on. There is name of this phenomena i forgot, something about nobel laurate often fell and promote snake oil.

Have there been any actual accidents yet? Or minor collisions? I’m assuming it would be all over the news

> This is also from a man who actively bemoaned any and all criticism of Tesla as baseless attempts at destroying the company too. Tesla fandom has all the hallmarks of a cult including the persecution / external threat element along with the charismatic unaccountable beyond criticism leader.

I'm not sure what your argument is. We both agree that every day school buses perform the "last mile" public transportation you said wasn't possible, and we both agree that every time you go by a school you see cars all jammed up in traffic trying to do the same thing.

> It comes from the best feedback that we have though. Asked and answered. Directly from the source. The "Growing Michigan Together" report that Whitmer's administration commissioned cited responses from 10,000 Michiganders. like I said, without follow on questions some time later of those that did move out - it's incomplete. May be what people REALLY need is education that public transportation is not as good as they imagine (since they don't have first hand experience). Though I won't be surprised if the reason for living would shift to something else. But the underlying root of "nobody wants to live there" + "high tax burden to support aging infrastructure and decades of bad policy decisions" + "bad weather" + "lack of decent high paying jobs" would probably stay an anchor for growth even if people don't see this directly and only choose some other proxy reason for the underlying cause. > Michigan does not sufficiently invest in itself, so many others figure... "why should we?". Not that I looked too much into it, but what sort of "invest in yourself" stuff did California do outside of the universities that the Michigan is not doing? > To maintain a sufficient safety lifecycle for thousands of individual vehicles at sufficient service levels (to achieve equivalent productivity as rail-based transit) - it is going to cost a hell of a lot more, even when figuring the upfront capital costs with rail. Do you have may be some pointers to such costs? Esp. considering that serving every subdivision with rail seems unrealistic for oh so many reasons. Sure rail as the "bulk goods transporter pipeline" might be ok (there are some frictions with loading/unloading for the first/last mile delivery), but that's about it. For personal transportation it's mightily inconvenient with very few exception if compared to true point to point transportation. All that time waiting for the train, longer times in transit thanks to connections and such - they also have costs to those that have to bear them. That's also why I think it's important to poll the people that moved out for "public transit" reasons to see how they like their public transit paradise once they actually get to live in it. > And self-driving car firms are not going to cover those costs. Of course not, but they'll use shared infrastructure that many others would use and help share the cost of maintaining. On the other hand it's much harder to pull off with rail.

Ok, I guess the way I worded it was incorrect and you can have public transportation that goes near your house twice a day and drops/picks you up at some relatively central location with thousands of others. That model comes with some mighty drawbacks, for one if you live far away from that destination (we don't get into that may be it's impractical for all people to work centrally like that) you'll spend hours on that bus eating in your personal time quite a bit (all those extra stops add up after all so using a personal car would be faster for some number of people). And so all those inconveniences add up to the point that (relatively many) people choose the "lesser evil" of doing a personal car trip vs the "super great free public transit". Because in the end it only looks like it's the "same thing". I was curious how much is a typical school bus trip and apparently it's 30 minutes, meaning there are those that are much shorter and those that are much longer, including hours on the bus (one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/z1do48/how_long_of_a_school_bus_ride_would_you_put_a_3rd/ )

>Not that I looked too much into it, but what sort of "invest in yourself" stuff did California do outside of the universities that the Michigan is not doing? Transit in major cities. A high-speed rail line. Political leadership and financial support for emerging clean technologies. Just to name a few. I am not *that* familiar with California, but it seems to be doing a few things right economically compared to us. >Do you have may be some pointers to such costs? Esp. considering that serving every subdivision with rail seems unrealistic for oh so many reasons. Rail is not designed to serve every subdivision directly. Indirectly, yes. What we should do, what we need to do, is to put realistic goals and outcomes on the table that would make us comparatively competitive (in terms of productivity growth potential) with other peer cities. Build a transit system to achieve outcomes. Not just plop down rail anywhere. Outcomes should be to be increasingly competitive to other regions and cities that we are losing human capital to massively. The City of Boston has nearly the same population as the City of Detroit, but is nearly three times smaller in land area than Detroit. Yet Boston has a highly-expansive metro network and regional rail system. We compete with Boston, effectively. It is simply an impossibility that bus service alone can be competitive, let alone, provide reliable service across even just the City of Detroit. The system maintenance alone would simply be too complex with diminishing ROI. If just the City of Detroit attempted to provide the same service level of Chicago with just buses, we would be paying significantly more per mile just due to the obvious efficiency gaps (and Detroit competes with Chicago even more). Rail, being the most cost-efficient mode possible, is supposed to form major transit trunk lines - with other secondary forms for the last miles that span out from the rail stations (which could include self-driving vehicles, in part). Also, what is trying to be achieved is that housing and other developers build denser around the rail lines under the premise that demand will be solid for those not wanting to own a car - thereby reducing stress on the secondary transit services. >Of course not, but they'll use shared infrastructure that many others would use and help share the cost of maintaining. On the other hand it's much harder to pull off with rail. We cannot even afford our roadway network right now. As we type. It has never had a dedicated funding source that was not costly bonds that burn an enormous amount of cash without any improvements in productivity. Detroit itself, clearly, cannot survive financially just by being a weekend and gameday city. ***Existing*** Michiganders, by and large, expect toll-free use of roadways. And we cannot retain any new would-be Michiganders or new political ideas to challenge that. So, yeah. Another serious chicken-or-egg problem. But that is a Michigan electorate problem. Not a structural issue with rail.

Dr. Mehmet Oz was a highly regarded surgeon. Have you seen what he's been saying for the past ten years? My wife was part of the team at Alcatel Lucent that worked on formulating LTE. I'm a systems engineer. My mother doesn't understand any of those things and just says "huh" whenever we talk about a topic that falls under something we can say we're qualified on. I do like to debate law with her, but always defer to her education, knowledge and experience.

> A high-speed rail line. They have never built it in California, so we cannot really list this as something they have done, can we? > Political leadership and financial support for emerging clean technologies I am not sure how this attracts talent to your state (outside of may be areas that are doing R&D of those technologies, of course) > I am not that familiar with California, but it seems to be doing a few things right economically compared to us. It's also possible some external factors played a role and what we see is not the result of some genius policy. > Rail is not designed to serve every subdivision directly. Absolutely. And here in lies the problem (that you can also observe eveerywhere else that has "great" public transit) - you have expensive properties next to convenient transportation options and cheaper stuff that's far away. The next thign that happens - the poor people that are supposed to be served by the proposed mass transit are priced out of the areas served by said transit and pushed to where it's not reaching and the claimed benefit does not happen. > The City of Boston has nearly the same population as the City of Detroit, but is nearly three times smaller in land area than Detroit. > Yet Boston has a highly-expansive metro network and regional rail system. You mean higher population density makes public transit somewhat more feasible? We already knew that. But short of shrinking Detroit to the size of Boston while retaining all the population, I am not sure what's teh viable action item to get the same transit options at the same cost. > Also, what is trying to be achieved is that housing and other developers build denser around the rail lines under the premise that demand will be solid for those not wanting to own a car - thereby reducing stress on the secondary transit services. the "not wanting to own the car" is a false premise on so many levels. "could not afford the car" - I could buy that, but car offers too much convenience in too many situations that foregoing ownership is only on financial grounds. The other problem here is the new development is not cheap, and to recoup their investments builders would go for mostly premium housing anyway. We can see it everywhere as is, and also the land near rail would cost more too again impacting the pricing of housing. Overall I see a lot of wishful thinking and concentrating on what I perceive as secondary problems, but I don't know of any solutions. Here's my perspective: I live in Knoxville TN and for the last decade or so people suddenly started to flock in here, the population growth is big, the housing skyrockets. It's not because some genius moves were made by local politicians to attract people, but it was a combination of external factors, I suspect. Do we have passenger rail? NO. do we have workable public transit? mostly no. Are we are sprawled place? yes, VERY. Is it getting any less sprawling? no. TBF I don't even know why all those people suddenly decided hey want to live here. I guess initially it was havign a decent infrastructure while being relatively cheap, but a lot of that (the cheapness) is gone now. It's not like we are some sort of an industrial powerhouse with lots of need for labor either. So... who knows.

You cannot trust a liar until they have proven their repentance. Good luck trying to get Elon to give up his wealth and power by doing good works.

100% this. Sensor fusion is the only way to do it for the foreseeable future. For something as simple as drive position, I never just rely on encoders (even outside of setting reference positions/rehoming) and always use PE's. And that is an order of magnitude less complex than a car moving fast on a road filled with other cars moving fast.

It's not really the average persons fault, though. The implicit assumption is that, if they're selling the car, it *must* be safe. Unfortunately, regulatory capture and the onward March of late stage capitalism means that "safe" is a highly variable and subjective term.

It should be regulated by the body built to do just that. Their regulatory capture and giving up to industry... I'm not trying to both sides this, I will say that while one is almost 100% for regulatory capture, we don't have a lot of friends on the other side. Politicians are, if you break them down, politicians. That includes people like AOC, Bernie, all of the people have to make hard decisions, weigh them and make hard choices. Not the fake Alaskan Senator, Tulsi, or all the people who have talked a good game but in the end voted for the people who made SCOTUS what it is. I hate to feel this way, that it's all a route, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't think the world is controlled by the Hapsburgs or whoever it is now, but it was at one point. WWI was a bunch of cousins getting into a pissing match, and millions of idiots died for these people who have spent the majority of their lives inside immaculate palaces. It goes back to the US Cival War, illiterate idiots who got talked into fighting for rich cotton and tabacco barons who didn't want to pay wages. The world is not fair. It never has been.

and it's only getting more unfair with respect to time. shits going to get wild before (if?) it gets better

Tesla does not have a robotaxi service.

But Tesla is in China so they are competitors there, and Chinese EVs are becoming popular everywhere outside of protectionist USA.

Yeah, I don't want to see civil war in the US in my lifetime, but I feel like it could pop off. Most southern red states have no real power, but if Florida and Texas decide to pop off I'm sure garbage states like Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas...

I have accepted now that I have to add the tesla stock to my list of things that I will never understand in my life.

[deleted]

I do indeed yet despite that they've already got pretty much 10% of the EV market share in the EU. And talks are ongoing about a revised arrangement that may drop the high tariff for minimum pricing or something else. Chinese EVs have essentially zero presence in the US, about the only country in the world where that is the case.

Mine tried to run a red light with oncoming traffic last week until I intervened. This will never work as long as musk is in control.

Dose Tesla even still have a cult at this point In any way that's meaningful, Elon fan boys have been largely quiet the last couple of months, and the spam seems to have largely disappeared in terms of frequency seen. He comes off now a just a clueless, self-absorbed billionair with a god complex.

The [Nobel disease](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease), specifically. Winning a Nobel Prize tends to give you a big ego boost, and so you start to think you're an omnidisciplinary genius even though your award was for work in one specific category. Lots of famous scientists in the past, after winning their prizes, went on to stain their reputations by endorsing quack ideas like spiritualism, mysticism, psychic phenomena, eugenics, racial pseudoscience, alternative medicine, astrology, creationism, and denial of global warming. Elon Musk is like that, except he's not actually a scientist or an engineer (or at least hasn't been one in decades), he just played one on TV and let it go to his head.

>> You cannot have public transit at every house. > We can and we do. Every single day our children, even those living in rural locations, are picked up by buses for free. I hate to tell you this, but that's not every house. There are millions of house with no children, house where the children walk to school, and houses where the parents drive them to school. On top of that, no where that I've lived, do those busses stop at houses. They stop at a few locations throughout a neighborhood. You're entire assertion is false. > There are some exceptions, but for the vast majority of people public transit is already working. That's not even close to true. You're delusional if you think the vast majority of people use public transit. Number show that usage rates are between 3.1%-11%, depending on how you slice the numbers and the years, and that 45%-55% of American have no access to public transportation at all. > And when it works it's so invisible you forget about it. That's not even close to true either. While I respect public transport, and vote for it when it comes up where I live, anyone that has ever used it understand that you're tied to the schedule of the transport. With something like subways, it's a pretty fast cycle, but with busses, depending on the area, you could be waiting a while. No one forgets about it.

Yes it ran straight into a parked car when it got confused in a parking lot. https://www.pcmag.com/news/tesla-robotaxi-hits-parked-car-in-first-recorded-accident

> I hate to tell you this, but that's not every house. There are millions of house with no children, house where the children walk to school, and houses where the parents drive them to school. The point is that we have a bus system already in service which drives by the majority of homes in America. I understand that not every home has a child to be picked up, or that some parents choose to drive their child, but the point is that making bus routes available to every home or even putting a bus stop within walking distance of every home is not only possible, but extremely realistic. > > There are some exceptions, but for the vast majority of people public transit is already working. >That's not even close to true. You're delusional if you think the vast majority of people use public transit. That's not what I said or what I meant. >> And when it works it's so invisible you forget about it. > That's not even close to true either [...] where I live, anyone that has ever used it understand that you're tied to the schedule of the transport Doesn't contradict what I said at all. I didn't say that all public transport has enough funding and is working today, I said that **when** it works it becomes invisible, such as in the case of school buses which everyone forgets about when talking about public transit. If you had a bus come by every 15 minutes your issue would vanish. Increasing bus schedules to that degree is much more affordable than adding infinite lanes to highways and building car-centric cities.

In the context of robotaxi, Tesla is not in China.

Only ones convinced it has legs are the Musk die hards that would buy his actual shit if he named it Tesla Droppings.

read that first bit as 'launched to great failure' and thought 'yeah that tracks'

Ok serious question: who in the normal real World Is hailing these teslas for rides? Like it’s painfully obvious it’s not safe.

They are. Every Tesla sub is attempting to jerk off Elon.

I'm eligible to be a Mensa member\*, but the awareness of the what I *don't* know is always growing no matter how much I pour myself into learning new things \*insufferable elitist jerks, there's a reason I said eligible and not \*actually\* a member lol

Did you see the dick pic of the service area? The guy must be laughing all the way to the bank(ruptcy)!

> Elon goes out of his way to be belligerent and angry whenever even an attempt is made to suggest this type of scrutiny …not even to mention directly decommissioning the programs and personnel that would have been overseeing him

Engineer here: it’s far worse than you can possibly imagine. It’s not even necessarily an elective lack of transparency, but a structural one. Let’s first explain how most AV companies operate: they have a series of models/modules that work together to process data. This means each step in their pipeline yields an “auditable” signal passing from one module to the next that an engineer can evaluate. For example: I detected an object associated with these points/images/etc. I classified those things as a train. I tracked the motion of the train for 2 seconds. I considered these possible actions an estimated a risk for each action, given the train I see. I picked this action. Here are the control signals for that action. Typically you would individually simulate / validate each one of those processes and use that to make general risk assessment. In an accident/failure, they also let you pinpoint which exact step went wrong so you can fix the problem or change your risk assessment.  Now Tesla: end to end NN. Data comes in and a trajectory comes out. How did it decide what to do? What exactly went wrong? Impossible to tell. There are some nuanced tricks around this that I’m not at liberty to discuss, but the general fact is that E2E means decisions happen in a black box. ALL you know definitely are the outcomes/stats. Can engineers learn much from them? Not really. Can you take steps to address a specific problem? Not directly. All you can really do is throw more data at the problem and hope it improves. This is an oversimplification, but it should give you a rough idea of how their problem differs from other AV players.  Their entire safety case HAS to be built exclusively upon operating stats, since they cannot subdivide it into smaller subproblems. So of course they have an incentive to suppress problems. They don’t even necessarily know what went wrong, and they are relying on the stats to support their safety case.

Nobody should ever wonder why Elon has lost all credibility among those of us who hold him to a normal level of skepticism. It's amazing that there are so many people and media organizations who still don't.

Baidu in China is on their 6th gen robotaxi and they are close to Waymo in miles driven. They launched the first robotaxi rental service two weeks ago.

But Baidu cannot (or at least does not) operate in US and Waymo cannot operate in China, so in this sense they are not real competitors, they just work towards somewhat same goal, but that's about it.