Basically they took the steering wheel off the Model 2, came up with a demo, and had a bunch of dudes wearing Oculus headsets remote controlling a bunch of robots.
The problem is that the fundamentals aren’t amazing. Tesla is getting its butt kicked in China (world’s biggest auto market) and tariffs are the only thing stopping BYD and Nio from taking a huge bite out of Tesla. Tesla has essentially saturated the “has a place to charge and $35k+ for a new car” market in the US. The sub $20k market is up for grabs. And US protectionism won’t save Tesla in other countries’ markets.
Where do those cars go to charge outside peak demand?
Clean, effective, prompt, affordable, quickly constructed mass transit however, does seem to work.
I'm not anti-robo-taxi or pro-mass-transit. Instead, if the value is fewer cars and less carparks, mass transit with the aforementioned properties has been shown to work.
Sadly the United States has been unable to hit those notes with their projects (LA's metro, for example, is still constructing approximately the Prop A system approved by voters, in 1980, 44 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Lo...) so in that specific case, it's murkier.
Small vehicles will never solve traffic, and will never be cheap, no matter the level of automation they implement. Labour cost is just one part of the equation.
I'm a huge fan of SpaceX but Tesla is another matter.
> I'm a huge fan of SpaceX but Tesla is another matter.
The competency and skill of Gwynne Shotwell cannot be overstated.
I don't want to be that cynical. I want to drive a car that is all torque and no fumes.
I mean, the "Cybercabs", THEY DON'T HAVE CONTROLS. Where is that going to be legal in 2-3 years?
Elon will be appointed to a new cabinet position - the Fabricator General and will be given license to lobotomize people into servitors - AKA Optimus. This will also allow for true FS(ervitor)D.
I’m joking of course. I think.
Waymo can give direct control of their vehicles to police or others when appropriate. This mitigates the cost of potential edge cases.
Their list of cities include Zürich Switzerland. If you launch a rocket of that size on Zürich lake you will blow out every window in the city...
starting at 16:37:
CA: So you really believe this is going to be deployed at some point in our amazing future. When?
GS: Within a decade, for sure.
CA: And this is Gwynne time or Elon time?
GS: That's Gwynne time. I'm sure Elon will want us to go faster.
Then there is the whole: any tesla can be a part of the fleet, then only extra paid FSD teslas can be part of the fleet, and now no-wheel nobody-wants-this-mobiles bait and switch. Investors ought to be upset. This was a shot from the hip instead of proper innovation.
Maybe they should put together a “demo” of faster-than-light travel next. This was closer to ideation.
edit: sorry I just checked, it does appear to have see through windows at this timestamp https://youtu.be/-JOas3fcXU0?t=896
It's absolutely not a tram; it's a large passenger van (not big enough to be called a bus). Trams run on rails.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/business/china-driverless...
Not a separate car model.
Like are there people who actually believe that if they buy a Model 3 this year, that it will be able to run completely autonomously next year?
Do people really believe that Musk, who said in 2016 that Summon would work across country by 2018, is being at all on the level with any of this? If so, why?
And it is.
Except that the result is that instead of switching to bikes or PT, people still use their cars but drive around in circles much longer which cannot be in anybody's interest. Or, if folks are sick of being nannied, they just drive to another big city that's not too far away, and do their shopping there.
Do you have sources for that claim? Most cities in western Europe have been doing that, and it seems to pay off. The whole of the Netherlands or Copenhaguen are very good examples of policies like these having worked to the perfection, but it takes time for people to change their habits.
We have purposefully made cars a central part of cities and the populations of those cities have suffered a decrease in their quality of life as a direct effect. Between pollution, constant noise, collisions and deaths and congestion, and the taking up of vast amounts of space for something that sits around most of the time doing nothing, cities have become far less livable as cars have been prioritized over people.
To call it 'nannying' to backpedal a bit from this design decision is missing the fact that cities are not a natural environment -- they are purposefully designed from the sub-surface pipes and tunnels to the spires on top of the buildings. Nothing evolved naturally -- someone, sometime, decided to design cars into them, and they can be designed out.