I have no confidence that Tesla will fix this before the planned Robo-Taxi rollout in Austin in 2 weeks.
After all, they haven’t fixed it in the last 9 years that self-driving Teslas have been on the road.
I have no confidence that Tesla will fix this before the planned Robo-Taxi rollout in Austin in 2 weeks.
After all, they haven’t fixed it in the last 9 years that self-driving Teslas have been on the road.
The article doesn’t mention anything about where the cars will be driving in Austin, but I reluctantly took a Waymo from the airport in Phoenix to a hotel and it did really well. Even slowed down for a guy who was jaywalking.
It ended up taking longer than expected because apparently they’re either require or trained on different roads than you would normally take (e.g. no highways). It did such a good job, though, that I ended up taking a Waymo a second time while there.
All this to say that it may not be ready for all roads, but is ready for some. Definitely still scary though.
I believe Waymo has a better set of sensors (Lidar + Radar+ Cameras instead of just cameras), more processing power, and more research / time / resources spent on it compared to Tesla.
So it’s not that we aren’t ready for self driving taxis, but rather about which cars are ready to provide that service
I think Waymo is also trying to prioritize safety. I was in San Francisco recently and took one, just out of curiosity, from my hotel to a Giants game. It seemed to stop when pedestrian traffic got heavy instead of going all the way to the stadium. So, like three blocks from the stadium. No biggie. I might have told a human taxi driver I could walk from there.
I’m not sure if it’s a California regulation or Waymo trying to play it safe but I will never get in a self-driving car regulated by Texas and designed to the specifications of one of history’s biggest dumbasses.
Working with cities to regulate self-driving and plan out specific routes/infrastructure was always going to be the only path to widespread adoption but Elon was too busy grifting off bullshit claims like everyone’s Teslas moonlighting as self-driving taxis and paying for themselves.
Makes sense. There were sensors alll over that thing.
Waymo is really interesting - you probably wouldn’t guess it, I’m a cautiously optimistic autonomy person! Waymo is already 12x safer than human drivers, that’s brilliant, I love that.
Teslas will (allegedly) start on a small, low-complexity street grid in Austin. exact size TBA. Presumably, they’re mapping the shit out of it and throwing compute power at analyzing their existing data for that postage stamp.
The rub… that all points out the obvious danger of rolling out the wild-west FSD that Tesla drivers are currently employing everywhere else. If it’s safe enough to trust to drive your car for you, why does it need a ton of additional guard-rails to operate without a safety driver?
Yeah it’s scary to think about. There should be laws though that you’re still 100% at fault if you were not driving during an accident. I imagine another issue with FSD is government having a backdoor into your car to immobilize you or whatever they want. Part of me is in favor of that, but of course that a huuuge responsibility that can be abused.
I am optimistic about self driving, just not Teslas. Unlike other self driving cars, Tesla is exlusively reliant on cameras. Others, like Waymo, have cameras, lidarr sensors and radar.
It’s weird–Tesla at least projected some sort of ‘higher-end’ quality back when they first started coming around but as time has gone on it’s proven itself to be a very cheaply-made vehicle.
The fact they insist on using their proven-inferior tech for FSD tells you all you need to know: they aren’t looking to innovate or even bring themselves up to modern standards. They are determined to make their cars with the cheapest, shittiest tech and they’ll just grease the right palms in order to proceed as necessary.
Elon’s success as a businessman beyond being very good at self promotion is that he’s a brilliant cost cutter. SpaceX exists as it does today thanks to his exceptional ability to make people do great things with the least amount of resources and processes possible. The problem is at this point he has bought in too much into his own myth to the point he’s a caricature of his own self. Sensors are expensive and ugly, so he doesn’t want to use them and his argument is that humans don’t have sensors, only eyes. Which is a fine philosophy if you’re trying to create a system that is as dangerous as humans behind the wheel but I thought the idea was to make something better.