The executives’ remarks are the latest illustration of how driverless taxis navigating public roads today are still far from being 100 percent autonomous. Tesla, in particular, has been playing it safe, quietly pausing its “unsupervised” robotaxi rides last week, meaning that there currently don’t appear to be any robotaxis with no human “safety monitor” in the driver’s seat.
It’s an especially glaring subject as lawmakers continue to ponder the risks of having autonomous vehicles coexist with human drivers on the road. And given the latest data, those risks remain substantial, with new National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data suggesting Tesla’s robotaxis are crashing three times as much as humans — even with human monitors.
Well, there are still posts from people getting unsupervised rides in Austin in Teslas, for instance:
The issue of Waymo’s use of overseas “remote operators,” is interesting, but I think some in Congress are not understanding what those remote operators can and can’t do.
I’ve not seen anything confirming or denying that Tesla employs remote operators in the same fashion. I doubt they’d be overseas if they do, though.
They are taking small steps of improvement but it’s not “50% of the population” or now “25% of the population” I believe.
It’s more like:
Whatever it is, it is small: few vehicles, few roads, few rides and few miles.
The hype is the sham.
They are under pressure to show progress because now there is real competition to compare against.
Waymo is now in 6 cities with true L4 autonomy and with more cities in their pipeline at various stages of progress and new cities announced all the time.
The Waymo Driver has traveled nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles
Tesla is in the march of 9s to safety, fighting the long tail of edge and corner cases, a tough slog of incremental improvement.
Business Insider
“UBS cuts Tesla Q1 delivery estimate and says concerns are growing that robotaxis might not wow investors”
Recent investor feedback has been that Robotaxi and Optimus updates are slower/more muted than expected," Spark stated. "In the wake of Nvidia’s Alpamayo and other AV announcements (including Waymo’s scaling), we also believe that there is growing sentiment that Tesla may not sustainably differentiate on robo-taxis.
Huh. Seems possible.
Not having robotaxis for some time is also possible.