Wow, looks like, after starting a whole thread and not getting much notice, you decided to quote your entire thread starter here. Well, it’s still wrong, both in how the pay package works as well as from where the money comes. I advise reading up before you post, especially before posting the same nonsense twice.
Yes, and regulators don’t ask for that information, or at least Waymo and others have interpreted the rules they operate under to not require that information on remote assistance.
And to add to that, it’s important to understand how this human help is involved. For instance, the term “remote driver” isn’t at all accurate. Waymo doesn’t have humans looking at monitors ready to hit panic buttons if vehicles do something wrong. What they have is reliance on the vehicle to mostly do the right thing, but just as importantly, ask for help when it’s not sure.
And when the vehicle asks for help, the humans still don’t “drive” the vehicle in the sense that they remotely operate the pedals or steering. What happens is that the human will do things like draw a path for the vehicle to take or tell it to pull over or tell it to wait for a thing to clear itself. In the past, Waymo would dispatch human drivers to the vehicles to sit in the driver’s seat and pilot the vehicle out of the situation, but to my knowledge Waymo hasn’t had to do that in a couple years at least.
The edge case thing is interesting, and the quotes of miles needed are not what many are interpreting them to be. Long ago, Tesla realized that they had a Dickensonion problem: both too much data and not enough. Far too much of just driving in a lane on a highway, not enough of weird things like a truck towing a truck towing a truck, or a truck carrying highway signs:
So, Tesla started, and still performs, culling/curation of the data they gather, as well as create synthetic scenarios of variations of what they’ve seen, or can envision. Tesla doesn’t need to train on 10Billion miles - they need to see 10 Billion miles to know they seen what needs to be seen. And this is Elon’s current guess, which as we’ve seen in the past, could be quite wrong.
Another note is that another advantage of a camera-only system is that when you want to generate synthetic data, you only have to generate images. And thanks to all the gaming engines that have been developed, there is a wealth of efficient code for doing that from 3D models. If your autonomy also depends on radar, USS, and/or LiDAR, then you also have to generate those signals as well, and they all need to be co-ordinated. Do-able, but harder.
What’s probably happening now with Tesla is:
• CyberCab design probably satisfies any regulators concern about acheiving a Minimal Risk Condition (eg DDT Fallback).
• CyberCab production line is being completed. We’ll see how quickly that ramps once completed, but Tesla has a good track record here.
• Tesla has registered 1,655 vehicles for the service with the California PUC. We don’t know how many are actually in service for the 400 square miles they cover in the SF Bay Area, and don’t what, if any, mods were made to those vehicles. I also don’t know Austin numbers.
• Tesla is using these safety driver/monitor rides in SF Bayt Area and Austin to gather the information requested by the regulators - interventions, accidents, etc. In addition to the rides, Tesla gathers data on the deadheading those vehicles take without riders, and probably doing rides just to gather data.
• We’ve seen some CyberCabs with manual controls being manually driven. We don’t know if that’s for vehicle testing and/or for FSD training and/or for FSD certification.
California has a 3-step process for robotaxi approval:
- AV Testing Permit with Driver (no paid fares)
- Driverless AV Testing Permit (no paid fares)
- Driverless AV Deployment Permit (paid fares allowed)
Tesla got approval for 1) back in Sept last year. They are gathering data so they can get approval to move on to 2) when ready.
The currnt paid safety-monitored Robotaxi service is permitted under a separate Transportation Charter Party permit that Tesla has.
