I can’t post an article because TMF doesn’t like the borders of the service area.
Tesla Robotaxi seems to be expanding without the disasters that were predicted. It’s now available to the 52,000 students at the University of Texas, Austin.
intercst
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Well. The article does say the “critics” are angry.
Tesla is moving forward with FSD, in spite of the “critics”.
And faster than “predicted”.
Democratizing access to public transport will have significant macroeconomic effects.
ralph is certainly a “fan” of Tesla achieving these milestones.
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A few factual comments (ex bullet 2):
- seems is an important qualifier, Tesla still only has about 10 human-supervised taxis
- expanding the area of the geofence for 10 existing taxis is certainly more artistic achievement than technical advance, although one might wonder about the artistic appeal of the new geofence to about 1/2 of the population (but what do I know about branding compared to some others?)
- the service is not generally available to the public, so those 52k students are only riders if they are accepted by Tesla’s invitation process
- 10s of millions of unsupervised miles are needed to estimate safety metrics
- Tesla has revealed exactly 0 such miles
- Waymo has over 55 million through 2024 and accumulates more than 2 million per week and now has 100 million driver-only miles
- Tesla will need to drive a lot more miles, a lot faster, to approach L4 autonomy in the US
Where is Tesla’s long-advertised data advantage?
How exactly will Tesla’s data advantage manifest itself, if not now, after years of collecting data?
No one can answer these questions and Tesla is certainly not providing any transparency.
Waymo’s leadership:
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Naughty bits! Naughty bits are funny!
In all seriousness, this does raise some interesting questions for Tesla - because it really undermines their prior assertions that their service area was chosen for specific substantive reasons to ensure customer safety. Since the current service area quite obviously was chosen for LULZ, Tesla’s demonstrated pretty clearly that they’re not tailoring the service area to any particular roadway characteristics. That’s a sign of confidence - but I wouldn’t want to be their defense counsel if there’s an accident and an injury claim. Hard to have your company representatives and engineers arguing that the system was designed to prioritize passenger safety with the…um…twig and berries up on the video screen as Exhibit “A.”
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Does the expansion of one particular geofence for 10-ish supervised taxis available by invite give you any additional confidence in Tesla’s AI driving ability?
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Not a ton - after all, their confidence may be entirely misplaced. But it certainly shows that they are feeling a bit more confident than their previous public statements indicated.
They had said that the geofence was chosen to make sure that the cars were staying in areas and going through roadways that were the most suitable for their system. By expanding to an obviously arbitrary (and of course juvenile) new geofence area, they are clearly acting as though that’s no longer the case - they’re ostensibly willing to send the cars into new areas without necessarily having done a lot of homework on how they will fare there.
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I very much doubt not a lot of pre-work was done.
I’m pretty sure they Lidar- and camera-patrol any new geography pretty hard. Not 100% certain, but think I read that somewhere.
Well, I think you are reaching there in your cause-effect inference and it looks like they do a ton of pre-patrol for any new geography.
But, let’s just disagree, lol.
By the way, you need to enter your predictions about the future here:
It’s no additional charge!
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They are poised to go global in next 6 months.
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That looks like a prediction.
Will they go global
- with true AI driving, with no safety drivers (onboard or remote)
- to the general public (vs selected people only)
?
Need the fine print.
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I bet this is a flex by Elon. He maintains that a geofence isn’t required, and thatTesla FSD can operate in the wild.
What’s a $10 million wrongful death suit to a $1 Trillion corporation? And to date, the robotaxis are avoiding interstate highways and operating only on surface streets at 40 mph or less. The probability of a death in a crash for a seat-belted paying customer is small. Don’t forget that when they did the crash tests on the original Model S years ago, the frame of the vehicle was so robust that it broke Consumer Reports testing methodology. The Model Y has a similarly stellar crash rating
https://fox4kc.com/news/teslas-model-s-p85d-just-broke-consumer-reports-ratings-system/
intercst
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Global rollout will be slow and expansion will be similar to the pattern in Austin.
Data from the ground will inform decision making with each step.
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I’d be more worried they kill a pedestrian…
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By which you mean, “and China,” right? I mean, you can only get FSD (supervised) in four countries (the U.S., China, Mexico, and Canada). So those are the only feasible markets for robotaxi. They’re not going to get regulatory approval to have autonomous vehicles in Canada, and probably not in Mexico either. So that just leaves China.
Granted, China’s huge. But “global” would generally be understood to mean more than just two countries.
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Europe has many countries both in EU and outside.
Middle East is another area with many countries.
Australia is a continent with many cities.
China and US have hundreds of cities.
FSD saves lives and regulations will have no choice but approve.
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This has been the promise for 7-8 years, if not more. But it’s still just a promise, it is not a reality yet. No guarantee the technology lives up to the promise.
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But Tesla doesn’t even offer FSD in any of those countries yet. How are they going start offering robotaxi service in a country within six months when they haven’t even reached the point where they can launch FSD?
Which country do you think is the third country (after China) that Tesla will launch a robotaxi in?
So? There’s a big gap between FSD and robotaxi. How on earth can Tesla’s robotaxi “go global” over the next six months when there’s only four countries that even FSD is available in, and two of them (Canada and Mexico) are unlikely to allow that service to launch?
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As usual, the conversation shifts from:
EVs are a joke → EVs cannot be profitable → What about charging stations → Robotaxi will never happen → FSD will never happen
Meanwhile TSLA in last 5 years has gone from a $50B market cap to > $1+ Trillion.
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No, it doesn’t.
The conversation started as a discussion of Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin, and has largely remained there. You suggested that Tesla’s robotaxi service was going to go “global” within six months. I pointed out that this didn’t seem possible, since even FSD is only offered in only four countries, and two of them were pretty unlikely to authorize a robotaxi service.
You’re the one trying to shift to a different conversation about whether Tesla can be profitable making EV’s. But that’s not what we were discussing. That doesn’t support your specific claim that robotaxis will have a “global” rollout within the next six months.
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Just a few weeks ago, most naysayers were pounding on the table that Robotaxi will not happen for many years.
Here we are.