** But there’s a huge, embarrassing catch. As Electrek reports, the self-driving cabs will have a human “safety monitor” plunked in the front passenger seat — a far cry from Elon Musk’s bold promise that his automaker would be hosting unsupervised rides this summer.**
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Yep, looks familiar.
Looks like Waymo’s rollout:
Geofenced, safety driver
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Which is EXACTLY the way it should be done by any RESPONSIBLE company.
ralph
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It might be noted that a safety monitor on 22 June and driverless this summer are not mutually exclusive statements.
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It’s pretty funny to read:
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When Tesla rolls something advanced out, people complain they’re being reckless.
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When Tesla is conservative in rolling something out, it’s “embarassing” for the company.
Yes, I get that Elon over-promises. But, so has every company in the autonomy space, including Mobileye, Cruise, et al.
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By this point, “over-promising” might be considered charitable by some.
Some others might call it being “repeatedly, very publicly wrong.”
I prefer to let the record speak for itself.
And I support EVs that improve energy efficiency and AV tech that improves driving safety. I also support Tesla as a US-based innovative EV and energy designer and manufacturer.
I look forward to seeing apple-to-apples (as much as is feasible) data on relative safety of various AI drivers and human drivers.
I also look forward to seeing how AI drivers scale with less human involvement and less geographic restrictions.
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It’s always interesting to see that when Elon is wrong about timelines, he’s lying. But, when other CEOs do it, people forget and excuse.
Is this a lie?:
In 2016, Lyft co-founder John Zimmer predicted most of the company’s rides would be self-driving within five years…Today, the ride-hailing company is still nowhere near that milestone
What about this:
Have those autonomous shuttles been in operation since 2023? Are they even on any public roads?
What about this:
Was a Level 4 Zeekr on the road in China last year?
What about this:
And with today’s announcement of our commercial partnership with Udelv, Mobileye Drive is slated to enable fully autonomous delivery services in the United States starting in 2023.
Did that happen two years ago?
What about this 2022 deck, that promises L4 Robotaxi in 2023 and “Building the Best-in-Class FMCW LiDAR” - a project that was recently completely canceled. Is that not a “lie?”
What about this 2021 CES presentation by Shashua:
Amnon’s last word: “We would like 2025 to be the year in which we can start giving the experience of people buying a car and sitting in the back seat whenever they want and have the car drive everywhere — not just in one particular location.”
Is that happening this year, or is that also a “lie?”
What about GM Cruise building their own vehicle in 2023? :
That didn’t happen, and won’t now that the company is shutdown. And
The automaker has said it expects Cruise to bring in $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.
Aren’t those all “lies?”
And there’s these
Google CEO Sergey Brin once predicted that “ordinary people” would be using fully autonomous vehicles by 2017.
and
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick promised in 2016 that his company would get rid of human drivers by 2020.
The “lies” just keep on comin’!
Aptiv shut down its autonomy development, too:
It’s pretty clear that EVERYONE in the autonomy business has been overly optimistic about the rate of progress.
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Quick QA check.
I wrote “wrong” above, not lying.
And I don’t think I have written lying anywhere (and that was not my intent above, otherwise I would have simply used the word lying).
Or are you just referencing other commentary, not my specific post?
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I copied and pasted from a post I made on the paid side of TMF and didn’t bother doing any clean-up.
My point remains that criticizing only Elon/Tesla for missing autonomy dates shows a bias not borne out by the actual situation, which is that it’s difficult for everyone in the industry to predict the future.
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That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be held responsible for his predictions. Just because everyone else is just as bad doesn’t make his better. After awhile it is like the boy who cried wolf, everything he says starts to be doubted.
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It’s true. We’ve all read countless statements and articles about AV “coming soon” from almost all manufacturers.
Here’s a Ford example - Ford wants to launch a fleet of thousands of self-driving cars in 2021 | MIT Technology Review
“Half the price of Uber” - Ford launching a huge robo-taxi service in 2021 at half the price of UBER | NextBigFuture.com
And both GM and Ford decided to kill their AV enterprises (Ford killed Argo, and GM killed Cruise) because they didn’t want to fund them anymore. So far, only Google (Waymo) and Tesla (Robotaxi) have remained in the game in any meaningful way.
Yes, and I understand why Elon is the boy who cried wolf (especially since he acts like a petulant 13 year old). But, since Amnon Shashua of Mobileye has literally as bad a track record, why do so many Fools continue to believe him?
Here’s a website looking at autonomy:
He’s got a framework for evaluating autonomous efforts. Worth a read, although I disagree with some of what he says.
Musk gets (and courts) the publicity. That’s good when it’s good, but when it’s bad it’s not good enough to say “Well the other guy was wrong, too.”
The other guy barely has a mouthpiece. Musk has had a bullhorn for more than a decade. Praise - and blame - go with the territory.
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Yep.
Hence the adjectives below.
I’m going to answer this statement about bias:
with this:
Who is Amnon Shashua?
(written only half in jest)
That’s not what I’m saying as much as being intelligent investors, shouldn’t we be looking beyond the public perceptions to actual business opportunities? If the whole autonomy space is difficult for those in it to predict, we should either ignore the whole space (easy way out), or look deeper into what we can tell about current and predicted technology advancements (hard).
The CEO of Mobileye is all over CES every year, btw. Maybe people don’t follow that, though.
Only if one fails to notice that no one is good at these predictions … which would be not paying attention.
Anyone that isn’t paying attention to the CEO of the company isn’t an investor. At that point they should probably just be invested in Index funds.
Absolutely. We have had seemingly endless discussions about Tesla on these boards for years now. And the Tesla bulls (many of them anyway) have a pattern of taking Elon’s predictions as if they were written in Ecclesiastes, regardless if they make sense or not and not limited AVs either. This seems to be moderating a bit lately as some skepticism seems to be creeping in. But that’s been the pattern. We had a thread that went on for a couple years about Elon’s prediction of 20 million vehicles per year by 2030. One side was pointing out that prediction required implausible rates of growth and the other side saying “But Elon said so!”
There is no comparable cohort of posters giving full throated endorsement of whatever Mobileye’s CEO said, so it doesn’t get discussed.
Since we’re talking about the investment case, Tesla is priced like a tech company. Part of the argument supporting that valuation is that/has been Tesla has 70 million miles or data or something and years more experience in this area than anyone else. Hence, they have an AV moat, which helps justify the stratospheric stock price. Tesla will crack the code first, make bazillions in software subscriptions, and Teslas will fly off the shelves because everyone will want this new technology. And I agree, if Tesla cracks the code first, that is likely what would happen.
However, Tesla has just now achieved what Waymo did four years ago. And there are a number of other competitors that are hot on Tesla’s heels.
Cruise control is a driver’s assist tech that is has been around for a long time. Originally, it was an expensive option that only available on high end vehicles. Now, AFAIK, you can’t buy a car without it and it is getting to where adaptive cruise control is standard on many models.
That’s the way driver’s assist features are heading in general. At some point, everybody will offer Level 5 assist. But I think it will be gradual and whatever moat Tesla has is shrinking by the week.
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