How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale

> The average people won't agree to spend money on public transportation when there are robotaxi available 24/7 on "already existing infrastructure".

90% of people hate public transportation. They want to be in a private cabin that takes you directly to where you’re going.

There’s nothing you can do about it other than to impoverish the population. I have lots of immigrant family that move to NYC because that’s where our ethnic enclave is. They uniformly strive to move somewhere suburban where everyone can have their own car. My cousin just moved her family with three kids to Arlington Texas from Queens and is thrilled.

Elon is trying to address the problem people actually have instead of the one some minority thinks we should be solving.

Literally the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Can you point to an article about the 1930s? This is interesting.

The scaling problem is the Robotaxi implementation details. Waymo is scalable in the way you describe. Tesla’s Robotaxi current restrictions make is what is holding back scalability.

Also, I realized a side effect of a hypothetical world where everybody rode in robotaxis/waymos/even ubers is we’d effectively get congestion pricing everywhere (due to “surge” pricing), and the use of roads would actually fit into regular supply and demand market forces!

Indeed, individuals optimise for latency not throughput. They may be willing to go for high-throughput low-latency options if the cost-savings are significant, but that is often not the case.

I live in northern Europe now. The only time I ever felt unsafe on a bus, was once when a raving junkie walked up and down the bus with a scissor in his hand, trying to "sniff out the snitch". Turns out the bus I took, was the bus that also went to a halfway home.

But that's about it. I've taken thousands of rides, and have felt safe.

Sure, there are some annoying aspects - like teens blasting music, drunk people going out on the weekends, but most of the time it is pretty good.

Then again, taking the bus isn't looked down on in Europe - and carries no shame , so to speak. That goes for the metro, too.

Sure but this is not a fundamental issue with public transport, it's an issue with the implementation of public transport in the US. There are plenty of places where it's done well, and it is felt deeply.

Living in major city in the Netherlands I have never felt any need to own a car. I've been quite open to it a few times and I can afford it no problem, but it was just not worth the hassle, it's just an inferior option.

How about just fix those problems in public transport. Weve put zero thought/resources into it

> I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride

It has very little to do with public transports and everything to do with our declining western societies. I've never witnessed any of these in any part of developed Asia I know of...

> Perhaps another solution is needed.

Reducing inequalities, funding education, local police, etc. all seem like a more sustainable way forward than shielding ourselves from the shit in a robotaxi...

That sounds like a self centered culture problem not a public transportation problem.

For what it's worth, I prefer drugged up people in a bus rather than behind the wheel. It's better to be annoyed by them than to be dead from a car crash with them.

Using public transport is, statistically, safer than a private vehicle.

It is often perceived as unsafe, but perception is not reality.

None of those things particularly contribute to the traffic problem.

If the problem you are trying to solve is "interacting with random humans" then sure Robotaxi is good. If you are interested in "moving a lot of people to where they need to go efficiently" then it's not.

Well then you will find out that these vehicles needs their own infrastructure, because they don't exist in a vacuum, but in a city where lot of other elements are using the roads, like people crossing streets on lights.

And when you will get your own infrastructure, well you are converging back to a subway or overhead light railway.

Most of the land consumed by vehicle operation is not consumed by the vehicle itself, but by the headway in front of the vehicle that’s necessary for safe operation at a given velocity.

For instance, at 0 mph, car might be 20 feet long and occupy a 10 foot wide lane, for a total land consumption of 200 ft². However, at 60 mph using the two second rule for safe following distance it needs an extra 240 feet of distance for a total land consumption of 2600 ft.².

By limiting your one seat golf carts to 30 mph, you’ll certainly need less headway then something people expect to operate at 60 or 70 mph, but it will still be much larger footprint than simply the vehicle itself.

Of course, this is true of other vehicles, including buses and trains, but they get to divide that land consumption by the number of people inside, making the comparison much more favourable.

IMO Better than arguing about what type of vehicles people should and shouldn’t use, we should simply stop giving away public land for vehicles as if it’s free. Require the public, as owners of the land, be reimbursed for land consumed by private vehicles, including headway. If you’re Elon Musk and you’re terrified of strangers on transit, that’s fine. You just have to reimburse the public for the extra land required to travel alone in your robot car.

Regardless, you'd need to get Americans out of their huge SUVs.

Whether it is into golf carts or trains, I bet you there will be resistence.

"this is ok because..."

you might want to think a bit longer on the inefficiencies here.

That's an appeal to authority. Either make an argument for why his reasoning is good or don't. But don't appeal to someone's reputation.

That being said, I do think what the parent commenter is missing is that those other modes require significant investment. With cars you get profit and can scale one by one. So less up front investment. Should do nicely in all sorts of cities.

The lies about FSD, the webcams instead of Lidars, the fake robot controlled by a human being, the obsession with shitcoins, firing useful people, the lies about his subway thingy, or being a literal Nazi in front of the cameras?

I'm wondering what track record you could talk about, because I believe this guy should be in jail forever but you will surely prove me wrong.

Please list some of the things he's "proved the doubters wrong" about.

> In the US it is officially 2 deaths involving Teslas with FSD engaged, with a couple more under investigation but not yet verified that FSD was engaged.

That is not a useful metric for Tesla. They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident.

Tesla’s disengage their self driving just before a crash. That’s how the company can say FSD hardly ever causes crashes.

As for 'Jia Lin Zheng'—it's a typical Chinese name. I can confirm that, as I am Chinese myself.

Zheng Jia Lin is a common name. And there are many Chinese/Taiwanese in Hawaii. Source: wife’s family is Taiwanese.

I remember this incident. It happened a couple of blocks away. Unreasonable that they let him go.

How many people saved by the tech?

This is tough for people to get right too. Near my house we’ve got 2 left turn lanes that merge into a 3 lane road without any lane markers, and I’ve got to maintain constant vigilance for people drifting into my lane.

It’s that Waymo is both more widespread and better. If there were no Waymo, then sure. But there is Waymo.

Human bicameral driven cars are unreliable too, but FSD is more reliable. And more reliable, with way more data than any competing technologies.

Using vision for driving is something that has worked for as long as cars have existed. Trying to push some "millimeter precision" solution with unproven feature set and prohibitive hardware accessibility is just asking for no real safety improvements and just more lives lost.

Cheers.

> edge-case failure modes grow exponential in time.

How so? Honestly asking.-

Waymo works in a remarkable range of situations. I took a waymo in LA and our route came through an awkward four-way intersection at the crest of a hill on a residential street. Another driver went through the stop when we had right of way, saw us and then just stopped, completely blocking our side of the road. The waymo just backed up a couple of yards and then slowly went round the wrong side and proceeded on its route. That is, in a weird situation it did exactly what a good, cautious human driver would do. Small sample, but it makes me think they are not doing what you say, they are just actually trying to approach the problem seriously rather than Tesla’s “full speed and damn the torpedoes” approach.

> if you put a waymo in a small town that no alphabet engineer has ever even heard of, then youll see it fail badly as well.

Which is why it is a non-goal for Waymo. It should be a non-goal for Tesla too, given the state of the art.

> i think if you put a waymo in a small town that no alphabet engineer has ever even heard of, then youll see it fail badly as well.

Waymo is not claiming to work in small towns.

Tesla is. Soon™.

San Francisco, Phoenix and LA represent a strong diversity of driving conditions. Certainly not all driving conditions, but no one is throwing a Waymo into a small town in the way you describe. Expanding slowly and cautious seems like the rational thing to do, I’m not clear what you are proposing as an alternative (or specifically what the alleged fraud is).

Remember that the robotaxi industry is currently doing everything they can to look good. They are being watched like hawks. Look at how everyone was horny for Uber rides, until Uber needed to actually make money so they jacked up fares, cut driver pay and let anyone with a piece of shit car join. Or how Google search has been enshittified.

In 10 years when robotaxi companies are short on cash and trying to IPO they will absolutely start speeding. They'll lock the doors and give you a paid presentation about Scientology during your ride. "Accidentally" drive you to a competing store that paid for sponsored traffic, instead of the .

Over the years, I’ve had four human driven taxis crash, and two taxi drivers rob me.

Tesla's never had LIDAR to remove. They had short distance ultrasonic parking sensors that they removed.

The part that I always found difficult to square was not that Elon Musk towed this “no need for LiDAR” line so hard, but that Andrej Karpathy, who I generally consider a very reliable voice in this space, was also in strong agreement that cameras were all that was needed. Does anyone know if he still believes cameras is all you need?

Edit: Here is a link to Karpathy discussing the trade-offs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0&t=5276s

Many LIDARs are blinded by direct Sunlight, and often see highly reflective surfaces like mirrors as black hole or distant ranged areas. These still need tertiary safety sensors like mm RADAR for safety in dust/rain/sunlight.

In cities, high-speed rail and e-bikes make more sense than a honking traffic jam at 4am. lol =3

Camera vision and LIDAR perfectly complement each other. Camera vision is no good detecting unknown/outlier obstacles quickly and accurately. LIDAR is great at detecting unknown obstacles quickly and accurately.

You can tune the camera obstacle detection to be hyper-sensitive, which results in phantom braking, causing Passengers to feel that the car is "unreliable" while it actually is safer. Humans are better at braking the appropriate amount when they see something strange, dynamically tuning their sensitivity in a new situation.

You can lax the sensitivity, which will reduce false alarms, but will actually cause more crashes, deaths, and injuries. You don't want your customers to feel unsafe, so from a business perspective you will inevitably reduce the sensitivity.

No, they don't. Look at what has happened when a tesla has mistaken a motorcycle with two small rear lights that is nearby for a car that is further away but with the same lighting configuration. Did not end well for the motorcyclists.

He's just wrong about this.

They are complementary sensors. It's a much easier engineering feat to combine two (cheap) sensors that are good at different things and fusing this information than creating one perfect sensor that does everything.

Private moon landers (the Japanese being most recent one) keep crashing because they rely on a single high-quality altimeter and expect it to work perfectly, all the time. If they had a complementary low-quality backup altimeter that operated independently, they would have had a less failure prone distance estimation system.

Can cameras do it eventually is a bit of a tangent.

All the information is there in a video feed, but the amount of work to get reliable perception from it is not small. With LIDAR and radar you get to the end goal with less uncertainty.

Ever heard of optical illusions? If a brain can be fooled by input from its two cameras like this, what hope does a dumb (or worse, artificially “intelligent”) computer have?

Sensor fusion is pretty straightforward. You can think of it like sorting algorithms in CS. There's a bunch of standard techniques simple enough to teach undergrads that work fine in production, and enough technical depth beyond them to last the rest of your career.

If you actually look back at the E2E tweet, musk only says that the NN replaced 300k lines of "control code". Control code usually doesn't encompass the entire AV software stack, but neither should it take 300k LOC. As far as I'm aware no one is 100% sure what they mean by E2E and if it's actually the standard meaning or something else that's been widely misinterpreted.

> and the software is and end-to-end neural net,

Well considering Musk record for adherence to reality, question is if you can really believe that or if Musk thinks that this is happening or it is not happening at all and Musk is just making it up.

You've got it exactly backwards.

When the software was hand-coded, having Lidar and a high-res map was vital.

But if you have a good enough AI, sensors that replicate the human senses are all what is needed.

The real question is: when will we get good enough AI that can be applied to all cars?

It's not "Musk's argument," it's Andrej Karpathy's.

Also, if you've ever done any ML you would note that more data isn't always better. Plus there's the piece about which thing to believe when you get conflicting data. It's a lot more to it than what random Hacker News people are saying in this thread.

Counterquestions

- What living creature is using wheels to move around?

- What kind of birds come strapped with a jet engine?

Sometimes non-natural solutions are easier and often better than attempt to replicate nature for every cost. Imagine your logic applied on a plane - birds flap their wings, thus this 737 should spread it wings and flap away like a goose. Now take military goose and flap fast enough to get supersonic...

There's no reason to think the best performing, or even adequately performing, technological solution to a problem would mirror how humans have solved it. Submarines don't swim like fish after all.

But more specifically to this case, human eyes are attached to brains with (generally) vastly better image recognition and reasoning abilities than any camera based self-driving car. Because of this, humans are better able to recognize visual input even in degraded or unusual conditions compared with a computer.

That's a bit like saying cars should use legs instead of wheels.

(Also, I don't know what star-system you grew up on by my lidar sensors are next to the tubular sheaths on my cephalothorax, right where Xoc'tlz'ik (the Creator) intended them to go.)

My head contains intelligence hardware that far outstrips anything in these cars. Plus my cameras are a lot better.

Despite all this, a lot of modern cars are adding lidar to make things easier for me.

Your head has a general intelligence, so it can do sensor fusion in a way a car can only dream of.

It's not that we lack lidar, but we what we have in addition to "cameras".

We possess a spatial intelligence (e.g. how your brain has an approximation of: It feels like I walked three blocks) that will never exist in this "photons-in" "controls-out" fantasy.

It's like a different dumb jackass assumed that role some time ago.

Why would they use what was a science role model that way?

Nazi salutes won't be forgotten.

On national TV.

In a presidential inauguration.

A permanent stain on US history.

Probably because major news outlets are reluctant to include pictures of penises, even stylized ones, in their articles.

He was definitely not always like that, at least loudly in public.

They are "the men in the arena" taking chances pushing humanity forward, we are on the sidelines, doing nothing but criticizing people greater than us. Death is necessary for humanity to progress. Eleven workers died building the golden gate bridge, etc.

Citation for the "clearly brilliant" part?

> Musk is a clearly brilliant man

proof left as an exercise for the reader.

Most of the time when a human does it is because they were either operating the car while they were tired or ill which interfered with their ability to pay attention or they were doing human stuff that distracted them such as dealing with kids, talking to others in the car or by phone, daydreaming, looking at something interesting on the side of the road, panicking because they just noticed a big spider on the ceiling above them, and so on.

A self-driving car should not get tired. It shouldn't be doing any robotic equivalent of those things that distract humans.

This is why almost hitting things is a bigger deal for self-driving cars. Humans are expected to almost hit things, because we do a lot more than drive cars and we are easily distracted.

A self-driving car is a specialized system designed for that one task. If it almost hits something it is either a sign that there is a flaw in how the system works, the real world testing was not good enough, or it has hit an extremely rare edge case

I wonder: when a human does it "we" have someone to blame. I think as a species we like that.

When a machine kills someone do we go after … the company? (Maybe we should all be shorting robo-taxi companies.)

In the 1000s of miles I have been a passenger in Ubers, taxis, etc.. I have never had one try to drive through a railroad crossing.