Of course it can't scale. Putting 10000 cars with 1 human in them into a city is hard and just creates traffic. Putting 100 buses with 100 people in them is much easier.
Also why don't you use something what has less degrees of freedom like a train and thus is much easier to automate and also much easier to scale by just connecting more cars. You got that Loop thing, expand onto it and turn it into a subway...
Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state - buses, subways, trams. There is natural development behind it, it is not like somebody said that city people shall only sit next to a stranger - you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that. Unless you will use existing mass transportation solutions.
I agree with your take on public transport, but I don't understand your point.
Tesla's robotaxis are not trying to replace public transport, they are trying to replace taxis, and eventually private cars. Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty, perhaps Tesla can do the same thing, in principle, with another degree of accessibility and cost-effectiveness. If anything, they may reduce the number of cars on the streets if more of them are shared.
I haven't yet formed a strong opinion on the viability of their vision, but that's beside the point.
Public transport is the last thing they will replace, and it is to a large degree complementary just like it has been for the last century. Public transport is of course far more efficient if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of immediacy and, well, interacting with the public. For the rest there's the private transport option, with various degrees of who drives and how much you own the car, that's where Tesla is aiming.
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!
Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.
You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow?
Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that?
While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.
It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand.
And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees.
Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.
Streets with parked cars are residential and don’t need better throughput. They need safety rails so little kids can exist without being run over. They need to be exempt from gps routing so people can quietly live their lives.
In some places throughput isn’t needed… safety is.
Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option.
Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.
I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.
It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive)
There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse.
I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.
If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)
Robo-taxis can pack significantly more densely into a dedicated parking space than regular cars. Snout to butt and no room side to side, as there's no need for maneuvering. A robo-taxi parking lot just becomes a dense FIFO queue.
Taxis just aren't that highly demanded of a service. It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.
One car owned per adult is very inconvenient to deviate from in a car friendly urban environment, even if robotaxis can be made to have overall cost parity to car ownership.
The net result, I think, is that robotaxis can only ever increase the total number of cars and concurrent drivers.
Would you disagree? Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Or, similarly, for single people to switch from 1 car or no car, just transit, to robotaxis?
Robotaxis seem to me to have potential well solve the niches human taxis are bad at: late night safe driving, very long point to point going out of an urban core into a rural area, perhaps even personal cargo shipping, if a robo van could enable you to do furniture shopping without renting a truck. But these are edge cases that compete with private cars pretty intensely. I'd only prefer a late night taxi if I'm drunk. I'd only want a robotaxi to a rural area if I'm an urban living rock climber or hiker, and I don't care to own a car. The total available market is just wildly incompatible with the current and speculated valuation, as far as I see it.
> It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.
That’s because you live with scarce and expensive taxi service. I know plenty of people in Dubai who use taxi or uber/Careem for their daily commute and I have done so in periods too.
Some parts of the world, like the countryside of many European countries, if you don't own a car, or are unable to drive for for whatever reason, taxi is the only available transport.
People help to drive the cost down by sharing taxis on common routes.
We have great public transport network, but only if one is lucky enough to live close by to well known cities.
Otherwise, you might have a few bus connections through the day if at all, and they might require walking down the village down to the closest stop a few km away.
Really? That appears to be one of the primary applications, and it's discussed in many investor calls re Waymo and Tesla. The driver component in the total cost of taxi service is 60-70%. EVs also have a lower total cost of ownership, and this scales with the number of miles driven because electricity is cheaper than gas. Even if the price of EVs stayed exactly as they are, autonomous taxis would cost 70-80% less than convention taxis. That's a market disrupting drop.
It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas.
I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2]
> it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation
Anecdote: I wouldn’t be able to take public transit to the airport in San Francisco or New York without the last (EDIT: first) mile being done in a rideshare. The alternative would be calling a private car for the whole journey.
I don’t know what you mean by this, unless there’s a personal reason.
LGA has a free shuttle bus from the subway, JFK and EWR have AirTrains connected to the subway, and SFO has a direct BART connection.
I use public transit exclusively to get to all of those airports.
I have a place on 26th & Broadway. If I have a heavy case or a pet or it’s raining, I need a way to get to Penn Station. And I’m incredibly close to multiple subway stations.
> Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty,
Maybe in US, turns out most of the rest of the world didn't had the same problem, nor the lack of regulations US suffers from.
Across African countries we were already calling into taxi like systems via WhatsApp, some European countries had taxi apps, and the US gig economy doesn't work here, so not only is Ûber regulated after a few court cases, it is also integrated with the taxi network.
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.
Why take a plane to Europe with 300 pax when you can take an oceanliner with 7000 pax , fewer degrees of freedom, more energy efficient and use ports and harbors that have existed for 1000s of years rather than building new runways and introduce noise pollution?
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.
To be fair, I absolutely would take ocean liners for this purpose if such a thing existed.
The closest that you can get on this front is basically seasonal route switches for cruise liners. The thing is, cruise lines price gouge on WiFi, so I'm not really able to work while taking the slow route, and I'm also having to pay food, lodging, etc.
The latency itself / limited freedom for a week or two, I don't mind. But it's the other expenditures and tradeoffs that are rather hard to stomach.
Have you used busses or the metro recently? My girlfriend refuses to ride them because they are dirty, uncomfortable, and most crucially, unsafe. And although I am an ardent supporter of public transportation, I tend to understand her side quite well when I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride.
I use public transportation frequently. But I feel that 50 years of work on public transportation has created a system that fails a large percentage of the population. Perhaps another solution is needed.
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.
I don't think you can compare public transport outcomes in the Netherlands with those of the US and use it as an indictment of the US implementation. The US has 50% more crime (including 5x more homicides) and ~$12k extra income (ie Americans can afford a little more comfort); the Netherlands has 5x the population density. Comparing the results of transporting a very different population through very different places doesn't reflect on either implementation on its own.
Population density is similar in the us and the netherlands, when you only count places that matter for transit. Farmers rarely get transit. Look only at the cities and not the rocky mountains and the us is plenty dense
Not that simple. Take Amtrak Northeast Regional. Service from NYC to Washington D.C is a very busy business travel route that goes down the densest population corridor in the country, but it still crosses areas (especially in northeast Maryland) that could be properly described as rural farmland.
That area is still very dense compared to what trains pass through elsewhere in the world. Of course as a tiny country the Netherlands has nothing to compare with. However France has plenty of not dense farmland their trains pass through. Spain has even worse terrin that their trains pass through and again a great system.
Nobody lives in the all the empty land in the US. The majority of people in the US live in urban areas. The density argument never makes any sense. We're talking about public transit within a single city, not between Chicago and Denver.
The Netherlands as a whole is less dense than NYC. If density were the issue, why does public transportation in NYC have problems that the Netherlands does not?
The population density of a whole massive country like the USA doesn't matter for public transportation that reaches its largest cities, you have pockets of very high density and an immense flyover space where few people live.
With the density of the Northeast Corridor you could have the exact same setup as the Netherlands has, the Northeast is only 20% less dense than the Netherlands while housing 50m people, there's almost a whole France in there but nowhere close to the infrastructure the Netherlands nor France have to move people around.
The USA is massive so there's a lot more space for localised solutions that work for different parts of the country, the West and East coasts could have similar solutions to interconnect the whole N -> S, there's enough density for it. If Sweden with 10m people and a frigid climate can run trains, public transportation, etc. in all major population areas along an area equivalent to the whole West Coast then I don't see any reason, except cultural-political ones, the USA couldn't.
My point is that we've had 50+ years of "trying to do it well" in the US. For all the claims that "it has been done better in other countries", how come not a single city in the US has been able to extract the je ne sai quoi of what makes it work over there when it doesn't work here? What exactly is the time horizon for fixing all our issues? 50 years wasn't long enough to make a dent - if anything, things have gotten worse in that time.
> how come not a single city in the US has been able to extract the je ne sai quoi of what makes it work over there when it doesn't work here?
Manhattan sort of nails it. Between the subway, Metro-North, LIRR and taxi system you don’t need to own a car and it massively increases life expectancy.
Life just seems longer. When I lived in small cities and walked mainly, all of my health numbers went in the wrong direction. Higher blood pressure, poorer quality sleep, worse glucose control. It took me quite a while, but I eventually determined the problems were connected to noise, nighttime lighting, and too many people.
Living outside of cities and better controlling my sleep environment has significantly improved my quality of life.
As the sibling comments suggest, I don't think the US has really been trying to very hard get it right. Leaving alone European countries, I've experienced and commuted using better public transportation in poorer countries of varying sizes 2+ decades ago.
No, sorry, the US has had 50 years of "trying not to do it at all if we can get away with it"
Absolutely not been trying to do it well.
Despite this, Washington Metro is pretty solid, i take CTA or my bike everywhere in Chicago, and i was able to navigate Philly and NYC reliably without a car without issue.
US transit agencies have been deliberately and systematically underfunded and poorly maintained. Public transit works great all over the world when governments actually care about doing it well.
But public transport in the Netherlands works because society as a whole isn’t broken. There aren’t even any noticeable homeless populations, for godsakes.
Which is why I’m happy to pay taxes there. It’s really worth it in quality of life.
This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.
For example, on the NY subway you have a 100x greater chance of dying by driving instead of taking the subway. 100x.
If you look at the risk of injury it's not any better.
The thing is that feeling unsafe and actually being unsafe are two different things. Cars feel safe because you're isolated, you have walls between you and everyone else. Public transit feels unsafe because you can directly see other people and there's nothing stopping them from just walking up to you.
Like, for your point on drugs, on a subway you can literally see the people on drugs, which makes you feel unsafe. In a car, you don't know who is on drugs, so you feel more safe. But, you're not. People are still on drugs, but now, they're also operating a deadly weapon.
> on the NY subway you have a 100x greater chance of dying by driving instead of taking the subway
Is this comparisons solely based upon deaths by (car passenger * distance traveled in NY streets) to deaths by (passenger * distance traveled in the NY subway)? The total amount of car passengers victims of accidents happening on highways, for example, seems not pertinent to me.
> This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.
Sure, you can make that argument. I can even agree with you. But you're not going to convince my girlfriend, or most women for that matter, that they're "actually more safe" in a car than BART. Especially if she has to dodge people yelling or cat-calling her to get on the station. You or I can be totally fine with that. But I can't find it within me to fault her for not being OK with that, and wanting to call an Uber instead.
I already included this in my post - feeling unsafe is a different thing. I don't know how to solve people feeling unsafe, because it's a combination of human's irrational risk management and real-world limitations.
If you remove walls and sound barriers, i.e. you go public for transportation, I'm not sure there's any way around the "feeling unsafe" problem.
> This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.
I think GP was referring to lack of safety due to crime, not accidents.
My (European) understanding of US public transport is that you get stabbed or shot at every station. (Full disclosure, everything I know about US public transport comes from "Death Wish" (1974).)
It's still safer than driving when you account for crime on public transit, which is itself a largely overblown problem.
I understand women feeling uncomfortable (am woman, have been harassed on trains) but I've had one time I've ever felt truly unsafe on public transit in many years of riding, I'm not going to let that stop me.
I realize i should add: it's basically impossible to drive on an expressway in Chicago without some jackass putting your life in danger cutting you off at the last second or weaving in and out of traffic with inches of clearance. It is genuinely far more dangerous, and far more scary, than riding a CTA bus alone at night.
> 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...
Just enforcing basic laws and rules on buses would go a far way. Also fare enforcement is talked about in Seattle not as a way to raise more revenue for the system (indeed, fare enforcement costs more than it brings in), but to make it safer (no one wants to ride Link and get stabbed at Capitol Hill station).
I strongly agree. Laws are a reflection of our values. If our values are that people should be free to blast loud music in public, spit on the sidewalk, and harass and intimidate others, our laws will permit that behaviour. Many Asian societies ensure their laws prevent people acting that way, often with harsh penalties. As long as we have such a strong movement to "defund the police," and "abolish prisons," our societies will never be as safe as theirs.
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.
I'd rather see drunks on my bus/in the metro than on the road.
I know it's dismissive of real fears and anxiety caused by that kind of behaviour, I understand where it comes from. But intellectually, I know I'm infinitely more safe having effective public transportation than not, even if emotionally I might not always feel the same.
I agree, but at that point I'm in favor of just having a bus that carts drunks and druggies around the city and normal people have no expectation of using it. In my experience in a big city this is already how public transit is used.
Vast majority of public transit riders in big US cities are perfectly normal people. Majority of my office takes transit (or other non-car method) to work here in Chicago. It's similar in NYC and Washington. And yes we all can afford to drive (i even own a car) it just doesn't make sense to take a car downtown, ever.
I've taken the bus all over the city too. Overwhelming majority of people are not drunk or high or anything, and it's not considered weird for normal people to ride the bus.
In fact, i haven't touched my car since i last visited friends in Wisconsin back in May. Most of my friends don't own cars, several can't even drive
Yes, in the US. Public transit does work well here, doing its part to commute the above categories of people around. Anyone who can afford to opts out because point-to-point travel is literally always better no matter where you are in the world.
My experience in the US is that it's not always worse than a car. I tried multiple times going from the San Francisco airport to Oakland. The BART was systematically faster than a taxi stuck in the traffic. I feel a lot safer going to the airport with the BART than with a taxi, because with the taxi I may miss my flight.
Similar experience driving in Los Angeles. So much traffic, whenever there is a train it's better.
Even with the slow ass 2025 CTA and a transfer in the loop, it's faster for me to take the train to get home at rush hour than to drive. Getting to Midway i could technically save 25 minutes driving, but at 10x or more cost.
I think these are just different measurements of safety. I do trust a subway to get to its destination on a reasonable schedule to a greater degree than an Uber, but to me that's a very different question than physical safety. The NYC subway is a great example of this actually, since it does seem to run very well but in the last year has had multiple horrifying incidents.
Again I think these are different concerns. On a plane I am with a section of the public that can hold their life together enough to buy a plane ticket, and I do not feel overtly physically threatened by them. On a subway I am with a section of the public so prolifically jumping over turnstiles that it's a systemic concern for for the subway itself. Concerns about the engineering mettle at Boeing or whoever provides the subway cars for NYC are separate.
I understand that there are uncomfortable experiences in the subway in big cities. But statistically, what percentage of the people get physically hurt as compared to the total number of travellers?
Same applies to planes: the quality of Boeing seems to have gone down in the last few years to the point where I choose airlines flying Airbus. That's my feeling, it is valid as a feeling. But statistically, the likelihood of my flight with Boeing ending up in a crash is very small.
For me it comes down to a very binary decision. Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause over taking a taxi or Uber. It doesn't happen on planes, and taxis and uber have better audit trails, and the bad stuff mostly happens outside the US, where I live. In both of these situations I'm also at the mercy of a bunch of lazy engineers and a Jira board. It's valid to try to pick the better engineers. But my immediate concern is my physical safety, and the safety of the people I bring with me, and a private situation is always going to be the safer option when the primary threat is the strangers around me.
> a private situation is always going to be the safer option when the primary threat is the strangers around me.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that maybe you over-estimate the threat.
> Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause
I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights: Boeing planes have crashed because of technical issues. The fact that they haven't crashed on the US soil doesn't say it's safer to fly them in the US.
So there is a measurable number of deadly incidents that happened with Boeing planes. I find it interesting that it doesn't give you pause at all, but the subway incidents do.
Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus. The granularities of the stats don't affect my decision much.
> I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights
Because again technical and social issues merit different weighting. If I'm flying on a 787-MAX I am at the mercy of all the good and bad design decisions that went into producing it. Those will be relatively consistent between flights for better or worse. The population of people traveling on a bus or subway routinely changes and is much less predictable. That predictability matters a lot here (to me). And given the option between weighting the threat of strangers around me vs. the threat of technical issues with a particular manufacturer, it seems to me that Boeing would have to crash a lot of planes on US soil before it would outweigh the number of people threatened or made uncomfortable on other forms of public transit.
> Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus.
Pretty sure it's not. But it definitely feels safer.
I think that you make your decision based on your feeling. Don't get me wrong, it's fine. But it's irrational. You don't avoid the NYC subway because it's dangerous, you avoid it because it feels dangerous to you. That's a valid concern, but you should be aware of the difference. Because I'm pretty sure that the actual statistics will tell you that it is not as dangerous as you feel.
If you said "I take the car because I don't feel safe in the subway", I'd say "it's unfortunate, I wish they could improve the experience in the subway". If you say "I take the car because taking the subway is a bigger risk on my physical integrity", I'll say you're probably wrong.
> Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause over taking a taxi or Uber.
But any measurable number of car-on-car incidents in the NYC is not enough to give you pause? Uber drivers aren't exactly known for their safe driving you know...
If literally everyone who can avoids it, I'm not sure it works that well
I avoid having a car because I live in a place where I can get by with busses, public carpools and the occasional uber, having a car would mean having to deal with finding parking for it, finding a mechanic I trust, driving in traffic and having to still ocasionally use any the former if I want to have a beer
It's not a matter of quality, it's a matter of preference. I don't own a car. I live three blocks from a bus stop and I Uber everywhere instead, because it's cheap and predictable. The buses are clean, they run on time, but the population is well-off enough that there's almost no reason to take them, and that filters to buses being full of people who for one reason or another (often significant problems integrating with society) cannot pay for an alternative.
If one takes public transit it's because of convenience, cost, or virtue, and convenience is often the leg lacking, because it doesn't come to your house. I have walked blocks to and stood at many bus stops in my life surrounded by unwell people and telling myself that I'm being socially efficient does not smooth that over particularly well.
It's the association with unwell people that I don't get, and I do agree that it feels particularly US Centric
Coming from a place where it's a lot more normalized, I've taken the bus, twice a day for the last say 7 Years, the worst I've seen has been the ocassional drunk person (I've also slept 90% of my commute plenty of times, that's how safe I feel)
Mostly it's working people and high school students (But also, old people running errands or going to church)
I assume most of those druggies/thiefs/etc, know that there's a lot to lose if they get caught messing with people on the bus (And I have seen a couple times a driver refusing service to specific people)
All the drivers know each other, and people on the same route are more often than not in you community and will tell people around
On the same note, a common thief usually avoids "working" places near his own house, because that's one quick way of destroying your life even if police never gets involved
That's reasonable, and as I noted in another comment I've only lived in the US and can only provide that perspective. Though I see a lot of discourse around this dismissed as "US-centric" while avoiding the fact that the US, the melting-pot of the world, is potentially one of the best test-cases for whether public transit works.
All of the situations you describe are just carpooling with extra steps.
Public transit as described in the US is a bunch of strangers with different goals and different jobs getting together in the same car at approximately the same time to go to roughly the same block. As a system it needs to be able to handle those, and when you scale it past the carpooling step, it doesn't.
Perhaps that's the problem to be solved, but if the US isn't handling it, I'm not sure you could point to a country solving the same problem and doing it better.
> Though I see a lot of discourse around this dismissed as "US-centric" while avoiding the fact that the US, the melting-pot of the world, is potentially one of the best test-cases for whether public transit works.
This is extremely US-centric :-). It's the exact cliché of how Americans see the world: "if it doesn't work for us, then it doesn't work at all", suggesting "because we are the best".
Go pretty much anywhere in the world: the US are perceived as the least capable in terms of public transit. I am not saying "it's the worse because there are conditions in the US that make it impossible to work" (which is what you suggest with "the US is the melting-pot of the world"). I am saying that public transit doesn't work in the US because the US doesn't understand how to make public transit work (and because the urban planning was often a complete failure in that sense).
There are many things that the US do really well. And there are many things that the US do really badly. The cliché, which honestly you kind of confirm here, is that the US people can't apprehend the thought that maybe they could learn something from other countries. "If it doesn't work for us, it means that it is impossible". And I'll end by quoting you saying pretty much exactly this:
> if the US isn't handling it, I'm not sure you could point to a country solving the same problem and doing it better.
I don't think I follow, all of those people in my example are taking the same route / the same bus, How is that different?
Or what difference would there be on a carpool / not a carpool?
On the same idea, walking a few blocks is the expectation here, being left on the same block on public transport would be enough to increase real state value
The bus I take everyday usually has:
- A random assortment of (Usually european) backpackers
- Some hospital workers
- A few factory workers
- Some office monkeys like me
- Random people dressed normally that I can't categorize
We just go along roughly the same route at the same hour
This is also mostly true in the US but replace the backpackers with people who often have little or no reason to be on the bus at all; panhandlers or people whose specific motive during the day is to harass people on the bus for money or fun. There are people who spend all day on the bus following its route back-and-forth to harass passengers. It's a not-insignificant amount of people; I have no doubt they exist in some form in other countries and maybe the generalized social solution lies outside the transit system, but I do think it's a product of having truly public transit in a place where the public is a sample of everybody everywhere.
EDIT: The distinction I make with a carpool is that you all know each other - you know the passengers, you know the drivers, everyone knows each other, the social contract enforces that nobody does anything too off-putting. Truly public transit has to assume that every passenger is a stranger to the other, and that's harder.
Not saying that you're wrong at all, but that feels pretty specific to the US. Which to me confirms that it is an urban planning failure.
In many places in the world, it's not remotely like that. I understand that "public transportation sucks in the US", but I feel like US people conclude from it that "public transportation sucks". And this is wrong. It's really a failure in the US.
That's fine, I've only lived in the US and can only provide that perspective. However I cannot imagine a version of public transit that would be so good that I would actually use it - and this includes looking at the options available in other countries, because as far as I know we're still operating with buses, trains, subways, carpools, etc. Until ya'll have free taxis that come to your house and take you directly to your destination, it's just not a comparable sell.
To that extent I think it comes back to preference and maybe culture, and doesn't indicate any kind of failure. In the US we can afford not to take public transit and exercise that preference, in many places, it's not an option.
> In the US we can afford not to take public transit and exercise that preference, in many places, it's not an option.
Public transit is objectively a better solution than individual cars. It's not that other countries have public transit because they don't have a choice. They do: they just choose the better option.
> To that extent I think it comes back to preference and maybe culture, and doesn't indicate any kind of failure.
Sure, it was built like this in the US because of the culture. But retrospectively it was a mistake. Driving an individual car emits more CO2 than taking a bus or a train, period. The US is probably the only place in the world where a swasticar is considered "ecological": it's using a lot of energy, just because it's heavy.
There have been plenty of people that have got into an Uber or taxi only to find out the driver is unlicensed or has bad intentions. One such incident would be more than enough for me to never get in a car alone with a stranger again.
An Uber i was in pulled straight out into traffic and if not for oncoming cars slamming their brakes we'd have been t boned. Like 4 Ubers I've been in featured a driver watching YouTube.
Sometimes you don't really have a choice. But I basically always choose the bus instead of i can help it.
See my other comment here but this is exactly my point. On a bus with dozens of strangers I have 0 recourse. In a car with someone who at least had to provide some kind of ID, I have more power. Consider that strangers just being present is not likely to protect you.
EDIT: I don't think your original comment included the licensing bit (apologies if I just read it poorly), but it doesn't change my point. If you have to provide some paperwork, however illegal, however incorrect, it is a barrier to crime that public transit does not have, and is a paper trail.
Be grateful you've not been assaulted by a taxi/Uber driver then. On the topic of self driving cars, I'd much rather put a woman in a Waymo at 2am after the bars close than an Uber.
I am grateful and this is exactly my point. On a bus I am at risk of being assaulted by dozens of people who did not need to provide any ID to be there. In an uber or taxi I am likely to have recourse.
I don't disagree, but I still have more recourse as a dead man who hired an Uber with a license plate and never made it to his destination vs. stabbed to death on a subway with 100 people, CCTV and no witnesses.
The drunk people you find on a bus are just driving themselves home in the US. Not sure which option is safer. As a European it's mind boggling that you would find a big parking lot next to a bar
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.
No one is saying that people who use drugs (or alcohol, which you refer to) don't ever drive cars. My point was that the ones on the bus probably don't. People who ride the bus are disproportionately poor, and unable to afford a car.
As for your point about drunk driving, I would guess most people who drive drunk would be more likely to take an uber/cab than ride the bus, which is not point-to-point, and which often takes much longer.
You’re making a guess. Who can say? There are many people who have a car and don’t want to pay Uber prices when they don’t want to drive, and there are many cities where public transportation is convenient.
People die or are grievously injured all the time in car accidents. The subway has a very particular kind of unsafeness concern (visible poverty). Cars as an insulated bubble for people to avoid ever being in the same physical space as a poor person is a mess.
Off the top of my head, we spent 90M[1] over the last few years adding new gates to prevent fare-hoppers. That's a far cry from "zero thought/resources".
Still though, compare 90M to the amount of money that goes into car infrastructure, including the ~$500+ (on average, 20% of peoples income) people pay monthly for their automobiles.
> I tend to understand her side quite well when I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride.
That seems to describe city streets. I had a relative that until recently refused to visit major cities because of this, using basically those same words (unsafe, uncomfortable, dirty).
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.
Now I'm curious whether or not this is true. I'm much more likely to be killed or assaulted by friends or family than by a random person, and if I'm being killed by someone, the most likely killer by far is also the person they killed, even in the US. Further, while I know people who were shot in their car, I know nobody who was shot on a bus (I don't know anyone involved in knife violence in any capacity).
Do you have any reason to only care about being stabbed in particular? Is another car running a red light and smashing into yours, leaving you to bleed to death within the hour preferable to being stabbed somehow?
In America or elsewhere? In America, they are dirty and unsafe because they are drastically underfunded, because of people like Elon Musk. This is the history of public transportation in America. America also has a despicable homelessness problem because of all the libertarian nonsense.
How will the robotaxis become unsafe? The reason public transit is unsafe is because of the other passengers on board with you, but you have the robotaxi to yourself.
Pricing - the point of the airline industry example is to highlight the level of nickel and diming that happens.
I’ve been on the best ranked airline, and had dirty toilets - before take off.
I’m not alluding to enshittification here - just that if your commuters don’t have the money to pay for better quality taxis, they are going to get dirtier cabs, and less safer cars.
Being private isn’t a magic bullet- it’s a matching of incentives and markets that produces outcomes.
This doesn’t mean that public goods and services can’t be equivalently good.
But when people complain public transit is unsafe, they don't mean that it's dirty (even though that's usually also true). They specifically mean they're worried about being the victim of a crime committed by someone else on it with them, and robotaxis solve that regardless of price.
By letting people report messes in the taxi that arrives and passing on the vehicle if it’s soiled, then you can quickly determine and evict the messy people from the system.
Airplanes usually have crews cleaning them after every flight + crew keeping order during the flight. Have you ever seen an airplane which just landed after 12 hours flight? What a mess huh?
> Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation
If done well, this should fix the most critical gap in public transit. You can move massive amounts of people via trains and buses -- but that doesn't get them from transit to home (unless you're lucky enough to live near an access point).
The robotaxis should be solely used for that 'last mile' -- reduce the need for transit parking (which is insane for commuter lots).
About the only place I’ve ever been to where this complaint really rings true in suburban areas is the US, and I’d be inclined to put that more down to poor funding and planning than anything else. If anything I kinda have the opposite complaint; there are bus routes in Dublin with literally a stop every hundred metres, in weird winding routes, and you can’t get rid of them because people will write to their TD (MP).
Bus routes and other expansions are constantly fought against in the suburbs, not because they don't want to conveniently get to the city, but because they don't want certain people conveniently coming from the city to the suburbs. There's a history of exactly why the suburbs exist in the US.
> you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that
There's no space for 4-seater sedans each carrying a single person. How about tiny 1-seater self-driving golf carts going no more than 30mph? They take up as much space as 2 bus seats. This is ok because you're saving the space from the bus's aisle and driver compartment, and because buses rarely run completely full so they already waste some space.
These vehicles don't exist today. But I bet you could design and build them much cheaper than subway systems in most North American cities. These cities tend to be less dense than European or Asian cities, where trams and subways are more economical.
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.
No you don't have to converge to that. Railways and trams tend to be defined by track switching. In-car switching creates a different class of system as the track is dumb, headways can be much tighter, and with a network of rails you don't have to go to a central hub, to go to another central hub, to then go to where you actually want to go.
Stations can be frequent and offline, individual transports can be smaller to transport a family / sleeper car / pallette-load of goods, land use under the track becomes available ie. new routes over farmland become viable, tracks can cross easily in 3D, and can as they are prefabbed, a line can be constructed and repaired quickly.
You are just creating an expensive infrastructure for few individuals. If you want to justify the cost, you need to push as many people through it as possible. And most efficient way to do that is train. Thus every pod nonsense will get converged into a train or train like setup.
Couple of things here, you're discounting completely the effect of distributing the passenger load across a network, secondly there's no reason why small minicars can't run on the network on high-traffic routes in addition to the smaller ones.
The important points are:
Point-to-point unlike trains (hub-hub) and busses (every stop).
As a result, load is distributed across the network.
Small offline stops like busses.
Complements other systems (tube, freight trains etc.) - if you can separate freight from passenger rail that's a massive win (eg. capacity, schedules).
In-car switching lowers headway, does not require centralised coordination.
Cars do not need to park - recycled on the network.
Sleeper cars.
Cars can go direct from warehouse to local shop, as the small cars can berth inside the warehouse/shop for loading/unloading.
Power supplied in-track, possibly with backup batteries, but not neccessary depending on implementation.
Separate track from pedestrians etc.
Prefabbed track for quick build-out and maintenance. Rail and road require preparing the surface rather than driving poles into the ground.
Separated steering, load, drive systems, unlike rail which has to compromise with a single conical wheelset.
No derailment.
Tighter turning than busses and trains, so you can fit it where they cannot go, note we don't always need to run at high speeds in cities, only intercity.
Suspended systems can easily tilt - better ride comfort and tighter turning at high speed.
Weatherproof, more so than bus or rail.
More tolerant of natural disasters if above grade (flooding, earthquakes etc).
Better land use if pole-mounted, lighter cars (say 20 people max) than light rail allows lighter-weight structures, and hence lower wear and noise. Heavy vehicles wear roads and rail much faster.
Dumb cheap rails, only power, no switching or coordination. This is a big cost for trains which need to rely on slots and schedules.
Coordination is done via protocols to allow for decentralised on-demand use.
3D track allows say transport to halfway up a building.
If you have dual-size compatibility (big and small) this allows individual parcel delivery, recycling collection, use in factories etc. with the small system.
Conventional trains cannot do any of these things (tilt is not as good). Yes they are THE most efficient at transporting large numbers of people / freight from eg. the Superbowl, but history has shown they are far from a complete solution.
The features I'm talking about here are not gadgetbahn ideas, they are real advantages for what is a new system, not a car, a bus or a train. This can complement existing systems. Cost is a misnomer when you factor in switching and coordination for busses and rail. Last mile becomes much less of a problem.
Pitching a more personalised transport is easier. If you standardise the track and protocols you can have many companies building it. You can run fibre, power, solar panels (if suspended) in the same track for infra buildout in 3rd world countries.
For comparison, the numbers for an example system:
At full occupancy (which seems to be what everyone quotes for rail, discounting economies of running routes off-peak etc.) 20 people with 10sec headway = 7200 people /hour on one rail. If we say we can fit 2 rails per train rail width-wise and another 2 heightwise, that's 28800 people down the same railtrack profile, which is comparable.
This is also leaving out platooning eg. Virtually coupling 2 cars together, so slightly longer platform which doubles your throughput to 57600. This is different to a train as platooning is a temporary arrangement.
Given a 2min loading time, you would need say 12 platforms to support this from a single station, but that's normally aggregated from multiple stations funneling into the same track, so you'd only require that at terminuses for instance.
This edge case always comes up as counter argument to better public transports and cycling infrastructure. The few who can't combine walking or a bike with some form of public transport will simply rely on less efficient modes of transport on the now much less busy roads... be it a (small) car, a shuttle, a taxi, or whatever makes sense.
It'd be silly to suggest we don't need escalators because the elderly only use the elevator anyway.
Outside of dense metros, getting to the nearest bus stop or train station (note: nearest, and not necessarily the one you need for that trip) entails a minimum 10 minute walk. Most people don't live in NYC where you climb down from your apartment and board the bus/subway. Add on a 10 minute walk at the other end of the ride as well, and some waiting for the bus or train, and your trip is already 30 minutes long without going anywhere.
So then you resort to biking to save time. Even assuming 100% of the population can bike (not true because elders, small children, people with disabilities etc.) buses only have 2 bike racks. Trains are somewhat better but even they don't have space for everyone's bike.
Train-heavy solutions work best in dense urban environments. Most of North America is not like that. You need complementary modes of transportation. They aren't for "edge cases". They are a holistic solution that makes the entire system accessible. A train is useless if people can't get to it easily. If there are frequent, fast bus routes to get people around then train ridership goes up too. It's not a competition.
Even in a place as dense as manhattan (where I live), it’s very common to spend 30 minutes on your commute still between walking to/from the subway and waiting for the train. Without sounding too harsh, a 20-minute walk really shouldn’t be a major hurdle for the vast majority of working adults.
Whenever I visit other parts of the US I’m struck by how resistant people are to walking even half a mile in the best of circumstances: wide, well-lit sidewalks etc. It’s remarkable how often we default to driving for trips that clearly don’t require it, and it’s like I’m speaking heresy for even suggesting it when visiting somewhere that has pedestrian paths.
At the heart of the public transit debate, it seems, is a simple reality: Much of the country simply doesn’t want to move at all, even short distances. Suggesting someone walks half a mile sometimes feels like suggesting they run a marathon. All the pedestrian infrastructure in the world won’t change that.
If you are not a bed ridden, you can walk from a stop to your home. Solution does not need to be perfect, it just needs to be acceptable (price and capacity) for most of people and pods aren't either cheap nor have enough capacity.
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.
> 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.
Isn't the money from things like vehicle registration fees and gas taxes already doing that?
Gas taxes and registration fees don't cover the whole cost. Federal subsidy is mostly essential for the US road network, and most states use other tax sources on road costs as well. A person who's never purchased a car nor gasoline has still paid into the road system one way or another.
Not really. Those types of things don't even cover operation of the land as vehicle transport, since the highway trust fund has to keep getting bailed out. But I'm not really talking about the operational costs, I'm talking about land rents.
There are surely places in the USA where there are no competing uses for land, and having ppl drive on it is not depriving the public at large of anything. But this stops being true in any town or city above a modest size.
For non-transport land uses, we ask those uses to compete amongst themselves for the land. But for some reason, we don't apply this same logic to vehicle transport. It's considered the govt's job to expand the supply of land for vehicles in an unlimited fashion. If anyone suggested it should be govt job to provide unlimited free land for any other use - housing is the most obvious example - they'd get laughed out of the room. But put 4 wheels on it and suddenly they will bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to find the land for it.
So my modest proposal is that if people want to drive on some publicly owned land, the govt should put the use of the land for a fixed period, say 50-100 years and auction the rights. Let the prospective drivers compete with other uses - say apartment buildings - for the land and see what the public is missing out on by setting the price at $0.
I'm not opposed to congestion pricing. I think it is inevitable as self-driving technology becomes widespread. Robodrivers remove the pain of being stuck in traffic. So you need something else to prevent forever traffic jams.
> buses and trains, but they get to divide that land consumption by the number of people inside, making the comparison much more favourable
Buses and trains rarely run completely full. A one-seater golf cart is a "bus" that runs at 100% occupancy.
A 60' bus going 60mph might need 5400 sqft of land vs the 2600 sqft of the car. It would only need 2 passengers to beat it.
re: "completely full" - the vehicle is irrelevant. Neither the full one seater golf cart, or the full 50 passenger bus make the road way completely full, but they have very different land costs per person and as owners of the land, we should be asking why we've set the price for using 2600 sqft of land the same as the price for using 26 sqft of land - $0.
I see half-empty city buses running all the time and no one says boo about "inefficiencies" then. And even then city buses outside of dense metros run no more frequently than every 15 minutes, but only during rush hour, and only on popular routes. That's no way to get everyone loving public transport.
I want to take public transport. I don't want to spend hours waiting for the bus. I don't want to wait 20 years for a subway to be built either. What do I do?
The only answer is more frequent, smaller buses. But drivers are expensive. So then self-driving buses. And if the buses drive themselves, you really want to them to be completely full, all the time. What kind of "bus" is always completely full? A single-seater golf cart.
The buses used here (double decker) take 80-100 people depending on model and are 12-14 meters long (about three smallish cars nose to tail. Half full they are massively more space efficient than cars. Even mostly empty, really.
The story is a _bit_ worse for single decker buses, but honestly not much.
The problem here, the great limiting factor, is volume. We have finite volume to occupy things with and these carts would be way less efficient than a bus. Bus drivers may be "expensive" but are entierly affordable in a public transport system. Hard to profit from though so america is fucked on that front. You're unlikely to see it without cultural revolution. Doesnt make proposed solution any less bad, or prone to simply perpetuating the ecact same issue plaguing the system now.
as for fsd busses, much more feasible with public infrastructure as you can give the bus eyes via cameras mounted at any difficult points in the city, things hard to make privately accessible due to abuse but fairly reasonable for a well made and maintained publically managed privacy focused system.
I hope at some point, ride hailing companies will start offering something like a bus service. The trick will be normalizing prescheduling trips. Like, if I schedule a vehicle to pick me up at 8:15am to drive me to the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and a return trip at 5:30, you'd be able to better optimize picking up more people on the way who are going to a similar location and to do so in an appropriately sized vehicle. That would bring down prices a whole lot, while mitigating congestion.
I'd be willing to pay a bit more vs a bus if it means I can have a reliable pickup time, a guaranteed seat, and I feel safe.
> 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.
Americans might hate American public transport, but it doesn't have to suck like the stuff I saw there on my visits.
I live in Berlin since 2018 and use public transport for almost every commute (almost, because a few times I just walked), and even used public transport when buying stuff from a building supply store. Don't get me wrong, it's slower than a car would be, but it's a really low-stress experience.
> I live in Berlin since 2018 and use public transport for almost every commute
How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?
In Germany overall, 68% of people regularly drive, versus just 14% who use public transit: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germans-commute-car-ins.... And Germany is about as dense overall as the state of Maryland, and well over twice as dense as California.
When I grew up (in America) there was a “school bus” that came to everyone’s house and took us all to school. I don’t know what happened where parents now all have to take a huge amount of time out of their day to do a second and third commute dropping off and picking up kids from school. Whatever is going on there, it seems like a huge regression.
> How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?
This is a very American question to ask. Why you should drop them off? Just give them public transportation pass, drill the route with them few times and off they go. Kids are not stupid.
Crazy idea, but why do kids need dropping them off to school?
If school is not further than 1 km, kid can just walk there. And in most German (and other European) cities schools are nearby.
And for locations that are remote, there are school buses, and public buses too...
Kid transportation is important, but it doesn't have to be cars. (I won't even go into kids who bycicle to their schools.) Of course, I understand that for kindergarten it's a different topic, but if we are taking about schools a person is already of age where they know where their home is and where they are going to.
> You’re going to let your first grader (6yo) use public transit in America solo? In Copenhagen maybe but sounds like lunacy here.
I mean, that's the exact point being made. The problem isn't public transport, it's American public transport. The USA could just copy what works from the rest of the world, if only it didn't already suffer the misapprehension of being the best at absolutely everything and having nothing to learn.
The rest of the world doesn't understand the US's problems. There are portions of the problem that are as easy as cutting and pasting transit systems from elsewhere, but unfortunately those are the easy parts.
Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.
> Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.
These are also places where the USA could do better if it didn't think it was already the best.
Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence", while the UK is apparently a crime-free haven in comparison because the British *Police* are not armed by default and overwhelmingly don't want to be.
Sprawl is harder to fix once the cities are built. But even dense cores I've seen in the USA don't have great public transit networks.
I have absolutely no idea why, or even if, America has more untreated mental health issues than Europe in general. But your governments at each level ought to.
They're all interrelated problems with multidecade response times to policy and dispute about the best path to fixing them. And the solutions to each aren't the same as in Europe, and the US has a hard time with consistent policy when there's no immediate payoff.
> Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence"
Without a hint of the self-awareness that the most likely person to be shot by your gun is yourself, either in the obvious case of suicide or where the gun has been taken from you either by family or theft.
> How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?
Sadly none, but if I did the nearest school is two stops along the bus route that passes almost by my front door.
Also, I can say from experience, that a lot of kids do use normal public transport here.
Furthermore, school hours don't line up with work days. Back when I was a kid myself, living in the UK, I was driven to and from infant (K-3) school, walked to middle school (4-6), and was given a bus pass and just expected to be able to figure it out for myself for secondary school (7-11). But even the primary school trip was never driven by my working dad. Different school hours here in Germany than back in the UK, but neither lines up with office hours.
> In Germany overall, 68% of people regularly drive, versus just 14% who use public transit: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germans-commute-car-ins.... And Germany is about as dense overall as the state of Maryland, and well over twice as dense as California.
The correct metric for commuting isn't the overall density, as vanishingly few people are attempting to cross farms (or in CA's case, winding mountain roads surrounded by flammable trees) on any given day. Look at each municipal commuter area separately for that, e.g. Berlin's commuter zone population is somewhat less than either the Bay Area or Los Angeles commuter zones, and all three are loosely-coherent commuter regions.
So many posters I this thread are obviously child free. The idea of carting kids to soccer practice on the bus, or shopping for a family of 4 and taking the bus with 100 pounds of groceries is absurd.
I guarantee half the people posting here will change their tune as soon as they have any responsibility beyond themselves.
I rode the bus for 15 years...when I only had to take care of myself.
In a whole lot of the world, children from 6-10 have a lot of responsibility and navigate public transit, etc, themselves. Of course, those countries are dramatically safer than the US.
It wasn't so long ago that kids even did this in the US, though the US was even more dangerous then.
The fact that kids have such a tiny range and have their basic needs ministered to such an extent by adults is not good for the kids and isn't good for the adults.
If i had kids, they could walk to the school and soccer field in the neighborhood in under 10 minutes. There's a playground at the end of the block. There's a high school a 15 minute walk away, and i would trust a teenager to take the bus to baseball practice or whatever.
I see families on the train and bus all the time. It's actually very easy to take a stroller on the train.
Why do people insist on buying 100lbs of groceries at a time, either?
My coworkers had kids, and a longer commute, and still took public transit to get to work.
> The idea of carting kids to soccer practice on the bus,
10 minute walk, not that I was interested in soccer as a kid (or as an adult).
> or shopping for a family of 4 and taking the bus with 100 pounds of groceries is absurd.
We have this fantastic new invention in Europe, called "deliveries". It's like Amazon, but it's your own supermarket.
Also, see previous point about building supplies. 25 kg may be ~55 lb not 100, but I have hauled both a 25 kg bag of cement and on a separate occasion a 25 kg bag of decorative rocks, in my rucksack, on a bus. I have *literally* seen someone take an actual kitchen sink with cabinet on the tram around here, something like this: https://www.amazon.de/Küchenschrank-Küchenspüle-Unterschrank...
Even on the one time I wanted more than I could carry (four 25kg bags of cement at once, and it seems these stores don't deliver specifically cement despite delivering everything else I've ever wanted), is was a case of "ask a friendly neighbour" not "buy your own car just for this"; but even if the neighbours had not been available, the building supplier does have rental vans specifically for people buying lots of stuff, so still no need to buy a car for this very occasional scenario that the thing you want is something they sell but don't deliver and it's too big or heavy to take on the bus.
Also, lunch breaks are generally long enough, and stores numerous enough and convenient enough, to do whatever top-up shopping is needed every day (except Sunday) rather than putting the whole thing into a single massive shop — and even if I forget shopping during lunch, my previous commute took me past at least 7 supermarkets and other decent-sized stores, plus two entire shopping malls at exactly where I changed lines — and additional options on two more shopping malls if I took a marginally longer route than my default.
Other things you may find ridiculous "what about a hospital visit!": it is between "very cheap" and "free" to call an ambulance here, and not "unaffordable even if you need it" like I keep hearing it is in the USA; and also the nearest hospital is a 16 minute public transport route, of which 14 is "bus" and there's a total of 100m walking (in total between both ends) going between the bus stops and the building doors.
Strollers/push chairs/wheelchairs: there's dedicated space on the bus, and more than enough space on the trains even on the ones without designated zones for them (and many do have dedicated zones for them and bikes).
(One thing I don't know and don't claim to know is how good in practice wheelchair access is in Berlin stations: I do know that the London network wasn't as good as it needed to be when I left the UK, but that's all).
I live accross from an elementary school and most of the children either walk (/bus + walk), take their scooter or their bike to arrive. Not to say the street isn't filled with cars before school starts, but considering how many children the school teaches it most certainly isn't the majority.
== How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?==
This is the definition of moving goalposts. What about this work-from-home that everybody on HN is always hyping? People in cities can often just walk their kids to school. Plenty of students in Chicago take the bus.
> 90% of people hate public transportation. They want to be in a private cabin that takes you directly to where you’re going.
Where do you get this number from? I used public transportation as a kid, and now as an adult and I always loved it. I like the feeling of people around me, that’s why I, for example, live in a big city.
I also can’t imagine my life without walking, and this makes me hate cars oriented cities.
I also won’t be able to read on my phone while driving, and when taking uber I get sick (Waymo is better in this regard though).
But overall point it’s very clear pros/cons in my mind, partly because of the experience, partly because I understand it’s a lot of people around and we need to live together more efficiently. A lot of people advocating for public transportation on these threads are showing there are def more than 10% of people liking it.
People can hate as much as they want, but if getting from one part of the city to another takes 2 hours in a car and 20 minutes in a subway, people will take subway in 90% of cases.
> if getting from one part of the city to another takes 2 hours in a car and 20 minutes in a subway
But that's not the case anywhere, and there are no proposals that would even come close, unless you count ones that artificially slow down cars instead of making subways faster.
> How about the World Trade Center to Yankee Stadium. Driving is 32 min with a $9 toll, or 38 min with no toll. Subway is 31 min with $3 fare.
When I checked that route just now, I saw 31 minutes driving with a toll, 35 minutes driving without a toll, and 42 minutes on the subway. And even with your numbers, that's very, very far from the 2 hours vs. 20 minutes that was originally claimed.
> And this is a Sunday afternoon, I’m sure the drive gets dramatically worse on a weekday.
When I set a departure time of tomorrow at 5pm, it says 41 minutes on the subway and a range of 30-60 minutes for driving. (Still not even close to 2 hours vs. 20 minutes.)
It says 42 minutes via subway because you have to walk to the station and wait a few minutes for the next subway.
Plus if you were driving, you’d of course need to park at the destination (either expensive or time-consuming, possibly both).
> It says 42 minutes via subway because you have to walk to the station and wait a few minutes for the next subway.
Google doesn't seem to count the time of waiting for the next subway train. It looks like they give you a departure time a few minutes in the future, such that if you leave then, you'll arrive just in time for the train. Since most people probably won't cut it that close, doesn't that mean it will probably take even longer than Google suggests? In particular, longer enough to counteract the time spent parking if you drive?
> Google doesn't seem to count the time of waiting for the next subway train.
Pretty sure it does. My understanding is that it computes the time simply as (estimated_end_time - start_time), and it determines the estimated_end_time as whenever you would reach your destination, which accounts for train schedules and walking time.
> Since most people probably won't cut it that close...
At least in NYC, IME people did cut it that close because during regular hours (that actually extend pretty late into the evening) the frequency is high enough that if you miss a train you only need to wait a few minutes for the next one.
The other thing that has not been mentioned so far in this sub-thread (but maybe elsewhere) is that public transport is very relaxing. Even if it's crowded and you have to stand, you can use your smartphone because there is wireless reception on the subway.
And if you consider the madness that is driving in NYC traffic, there is no comparison. It's maddening even just sitting in a rideshare. I'm surprised you're seeing driving times being comparable. I'm actually doubting the Google Maps estimates, which are usually rock solid.
> The other thing that has not been mentioned so far in this sub-thread (but maybe elsewhere) is that public transport is very relaxing.
No it’s not. In NYC it’s crowded, loud, and full of weirdos. You often have to stand and can’t get a seat. You have to really get good at tuning everything out. Meanwhile, driving (especially with supervised self driving or even modern adaptive cruise control and lane keeping) is quieter, has better climate control, and you can listen to a podcast or music without headphones.
> My understanding is that it computes the time simply as (estimated_end_time - start_time), and it determines the estimated_end_time as whenever you would reach your destination, which accounts for train schedules and walking time.
It does do that. But it moves start_time into the future, and that's what makes it not count the time of waiting for the train.
46 minutes is a lot more than 20 minutes, and "up to 2hr" is doing a lot of work since Google says "typically 1-2 hr". And isn't London the city that instituted the ridiculous 20mph speed limit? So even if the 2 hours vs. 20 minutes were true there, I'd put London in the "artificially slow down cars" category.
The average speed on the Kennedy in Chicago at rush hour very well might be less than 20mph. It's taken me a full 75min to go 7 miles, the bulk of which was "expressway"
The train gets me home in an hour, every time. I could bike and save even more time.
Individuals don't make that choice, though. Individuals consider the transit modes available to them, and don't consider the externality of slightly delaying everyone else if they take a car.
Driving from the north shore of Chicago (Evanston/Wilmette/Winnetka) to downtown takes anywhere from 45mins - 90mins depending on traffic. Taking the Metra (commuter rail) is a guaranteed 30mins. There's no contest.
I picked a random address in Evanston and a random one downtown and we're looking at 35m by car or 1h 7m by train, assuming that I catch the first train (comes every 20m)
edit: the metra wasn't considered because it takes longer but what's worse, the station near Evanston trains run every 60 minutes! If you're timing is perfect its still far worse than a car, and if your timing is bad, sheesh.
At rush hour trains run every 20 minutes or better. A rush hour train does indeed take 30 minutes between Davis and OTC (tomorrow's 7:11 is scheduled for 29min)
You are absolutely not, without question, making that drive in under 75 minutes at rush hour.
Obviously the equation changes at different times of day, but the vast majority of trips between downtown Evanston and downtown Chicago are office workers.
People not actually reading comments is indeed a common and frustrating thing on the internet (HN is better but still has it's share of issues), but in this case I don't think your comment said what you think it said, or you didn't read his comment
We’re making two different points. His argument though makes no sense when evaluating public transit since “I can jump in my car whenever I want” has never been a cogent argument against the efficiency of public transit.
Whoops, it turns out Google was showing me the L and not the Metra, because the Metra's headways are so far apart today that you'd get there sooner by taking the much-slower L than you would by waiting for the next Metra. But even when I do pick the Metra, it's still showing a 50 minute journey.
Tokyo might not be the best example. Shanghai, Peking, Moscow, as per my experience, there is a risk of getting stuck for 2+ hours with car. Even if it was faster sometimes by car, there is a risk of getting completely stuck.
A good public transport system can be faster than driving, tho. Really take any city with a large metro system. And driving in such a city only works as well as it does because most people use the metro system. Move everyone to cars, and it grinds to a halt.
> A good public transport system can be faster than driving, tho. Really take any city with a large metro system.
Does DC count as having a large metro system? Because in DC, driving at the slowest, most congested time of day usually seems to be faster than the metro.
Which city? It’s not true in New York City or Chicago. For the most part it’s not true even in Tokyo unless you’re talking about going between two tourist locations that are both right next to subway stations.
It's definitely true for New York City. (Statistically speaking, of course. Late night hours things change because traffic drops to negligible levels and train frequencies drop as well. But most people care about regular work hours on weekdays.)
It’s not true even in New York City. I used to live at 86th and amsterdam and commute to 45th and lex. Google shows Monday at 8:30 am that’s a 27 minute drive or subway ride. That’s pretty much best case scenario for transit. Same address to our current NYC office at 55th and Park is a 15 minute drive versus a 30 minute train ride.
And of course, living at 89th and Amsterdam is insanely expensive. In practice, the folks at my company that work in New York City live in Queens or Brooklyn. Their train commutes are an hour+, similar to how long it takes me to commute 36 miles from Annapolis to the west side of DC.
This actually happened in 2002 and 2013 in Prague where subway temporarily ceased operations after flooding. Getting anywhere in the city was such a hell on earth, that walking or cycling was only kind-of reliable way to get around.
It's not just speed. Public transportation entails being closed in a small space with a completely uncontrolled group of the general public. When normal people think public transportation they aren't considering how well driving scales, they think cell phones blasting music out loud, homeless people, conversations on speaker phone, and random acts of violence.
Until that is fixed, people are going to prefer private transportation.
SLC residents are perfectly capable of, and very happy to be rude to you and treat you with disdain for a multitude of reasons (and SLC is the most "tolerant" city in Utah. Anywhere out of downtown and you find that rapidly disappearing). My former employer was in SLC so I spent a lot of time there.
NYC people are superficially rude, sure, as a stereotype. But when I've had a genuine issue or question, I've found most people there willing to help. SLC people are just as superficially "really nice", for that comparison.
== There’s nothing you can do about it other than to impoverish the population.==
So dramatic. I know plenty of economically successful people who take public transportation. Visit Chicago, New York, London, Shanghai, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco and I bet you will see plenty of well-off people on public transit. Some of the richest places in the world, now that I think of it.
Come to a place with working public transport, then try and argue that.
I just want to get where I'm going cheaply, quickly and with the minimum of effort. In america, you need cars, outside of a few mega cities, because there is no public transport, and the stuff thats there is shite.
People want to move out of NYC because its fucking expensive, and the space you want to raise a family is very expensive. You would move to queens, because it had good train links to nyc. But as they've not extended the lines in any meaningful way for ~40 years, queens is now too expensive. (in practice nothing really since the 50s.)
> Come to a place with working public transport, then try and argue that.
I travel to Tokyo twice a year. When I came with my wife and three kids, we took an Uber everywhere because we could. I’ve also lived in Chicago, NYC, and DC.
In all of those places, even if you’re rich enough to live right next to a subway station, driving is usually faster, you don’t have to walk at either end during hot weather or rain, and you don’t have to share a cabin with the general public.
> People want to move out of NYC because its fucking expensive
If that were really true, demand for an NYC apartment would go down, and then prices would go down until people didn't want to move of NYC "because it's fucking expensive". Some people do actually want to live there!
Get out into the rest of the world and you'll see public transportation isn't some status simple that means your poor if you use it. Americans are just status conscious showoffs at the demise of their own surroundings.
>No, Elon wants to cancel public transportation. Just like in the 1930's when car companies bought public transportation to shut them down.
Except that's not what happened. Streetcars were already on the decline when car companies bought them. Claiming "car companies bought public transportation to shut them down" makes as much sense as "hospice doctors gave cancer patients painkillers to kill them".
From wikipedia:
>Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries' difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, consumerism, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.[
I guess we should make some comparisons between marketing budget for cars presented as "freedom" and public transit as outdated VS public transit discrediting cars.
Why were there tax incentives to own cars? Because cars were manufactured locally and required a lot of labor so we can say that it was a relatively positive thing for the economy.
But how come that some countries have both a strong public transit and huge car industries like France or Germany?
> ... consists of approximately 1,700 tram stops across 24 routes. It is the largest operational urban tram network in the world and one of the most used, with more than 500 trams and 250 kilometres (160 miles) of double tram track. It carried 154.8 million passengers over the year 2023-24. Trams are the second most utilised form of public transport in Melbourne after the city's metropolitan commuter railway network.
It’s actually not that much easier. Putting cars on the road with digital dispatch means that the cost to route is near zero. But getting efficient allocation for buses is very hard.
You need high frequency for urban transit to work. A single line at once per fifteen minutes is 48 bus visits at each stop in a 12 hr day.
Just try it. Put 100 buses in Austin in some sim. You won’t get 100 people in them. SF is 49 sq mi with 800k people. Second densest city in America. 1200 buses.
Billionaires obsession with transporting people in tiny little private pods and calling it the future continually perplexes me.
I've seen billionaire-backed projects that are literally just 6 passenger pods that use existing rail infrastructure. Sounded neat, until you realize that just a handful of 6 person pods would clog up a small rail system just as much as a handful of small trains capable of carrying 60 passengers each.
It's like they're completely detatched from the needs of everyday people. All they can think of when they see public transit is "gross, I have to sit next to poor people!" and they try to solve only that problem and nothing else.
You clearly have a pet issue. Why do you think that it's in any way relevant to the conversation at hand though?
Do you seriously think that the main challenge Tesla is going to face when trying to scale Robotaxi up is that there isn't enough room on the roads for all the Teslas? In a world where there's currently a dozen Robotaxi Teslas per city?
If you consider that "the world" is "the US". But in countries that did not completely fail their urban planning, public transportation works. Now admittedly the US probably has to compromise because of how it was built.
No way the robotaxi works e.g. in Europe. And that's without considering the fact that robotaxis belong to a guy who makes nazi salutes.
The US is a modern country and was built in grids, incredibly easy to build any kind of transportation network on top of.
In Europe, large portions of cities and road networks were built before any kind of engine was even invented, and so it is incredibly difficult to retrofit onto winding lanes and tiny cobbled city streets.
The US was built for the individual car. That's what I consider a failure. Maybe it was not obvious back then, but retrospectively I think we can say it is a failure.
In cities in Europe, you can actually walk. Many times you're faster by bike than by car. And public transportation works well (plus you can put your bike in the bus/tram/train if necessary).
> it is incredibly difficult to retrofit onto winding lanes and tiny cobbled city streets.
Agreed. But on top of making them more beautiful, the fact that it's harder to have 6 lanes full of cars is desirable to me.
Yes, and I used to live within walking distance to several, and this has been the case everywhere I've lived in the US. However I don't even really think of walkability to grocery stores as a good metric for urban planning - I've since moved and get groceries delivered instead. I don't need to own a car, there are fewer cars on the road doing specific tasks. Good urban planning is flexible around the reality that the physical world is hard to plan and change for.
Rarely have I been on a bus with 100 riders outside of a few cities like Vancouver. Even there, it's only during limited periods of time per day. Most buses in most cities run with only a small fraction of the bus's capacity. Transit systems can try to bump up utilization by making buses less frequent but then that lowers overall ridership. Simply creating more capacity doesn't itself create greater ridership. I'd argue for 500 buses with 20 people if you really want people to change their behaviors as reliability and frequency is far more important for attracting riders with options than larger buses that are less frequent.
Your argument defeats itself. Robotaxi users won't be some sudden additional people in to the existing system, they'll instead replace that exact crowd who doesn't want to use public transit but live private rides with more freedom. Elon obviously knows more of this than your arrogant ass does.
And for the cities being filled? What cities are filled with are cars that are used 5-20% of the time. Tireless robotaxis instead, will multiply that number and thereby require a fraction of cars for the same ability, enabling greener, less contested cities, with _higher_ traffic throughput!
You hit a nail here:
Some weeks ago, there was a story that people paid a premium of whatever double-digit-USD to get a PERSONFREE robo-taxi.
This clearly shows that people will accept robo taxis, because this shows most are more comfortable in a "private room" than in public transport (esp. when i think about public-toilets like Berlin or Frankfurt)
And by today, peoplre are already paying a premium, so i see a clear opportunity here.
Are you familiar with the concept of induced demand? It's often used in the context of road expansion, in which adding another lane increases the number of trips taken, and hence cars on the road. Often, traffic is often very similar to before the upgrade, if not worse (because the connecting infrastructure was not upgraded).
Demand for trips is elastic, and depends on many factors.
Similarly, if the Tesla robotaxi system is better than driving for anyone, it will necessarily increase the number of trips taken. Whether that's people who prefer to let the machine drive than drive themselves, or people who can't drive themselves (no car or no license), there will be more trips. Additionally, some number of people will take them instead of public transit, which will increase traffic without increasing trips served.
I know in Europe so I do know of walkable cities and how things do find a way with some limitations. We even reduced the amount of roads accessible to personal cars, literally 2 blocks from where I live.
With Robotaxi? Especially with the unavoidable fact (that I kind of don't like) of human driving eventually becoming curtailed with regulations, we can just use all of the existing capability that isn't used by transit, for Robotaxis that don't ever need to park even close to high traffic areas.
Induced demand won't ever overload the much more fluid system, especially as in peak times the prices can just go up a bit, and centers will become "gentrified" in favor of the more controllable Robotaxis way before driving your own car becomes literally illegal. Hell, driving your own car in Finnish cities is already ass.
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.
So your argument is basically that he is just very smart and good at being a disruptor therefore any questioning of his ventures is doubtful because he is successful at previous disruptions?
You really think that's a valid argument? Or is this just being an Elon fan wrapped in additional language.
No, that is indeed what you argued. I suppose I’ll repeat the same question you’ve been asked several times now, do you have an actual argument against the valid skepticism of Elon’s robotaxi business?
When you list it like that, it's incredibly impressive. He's clearly autistic, and says and does very socially awkward things, but this is the kind of person which moves society ahead by decades. SpaceX alone has reduced space transport by 10 *times.* Starlink provides internet to everyone, anywhere in the world. [This](https://youtu.be/sX1Y2JMK6g8?si=rV5_BKsbPc2GPg3n&t=195) is like something out of a really cool sci-fi, but it's real life. It's going to be in the history books forever.
Does that mean you are invested in Tesla or do you have private stakes in his other companies? Because all the other companies are separate and I feel like some people are investing in Tesla thinking they get part of SpaceX or something
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.
He demonstrated that electric cars are viable. Or that rockets can be reused.
But he also started the tunnel company that went nowhere, claimed we'd have fully autonomous self-driving by now, and for some reason lied about being good at video games.
I wish we'd see some nuance in this figure, and realize he's more self-serving than benevolent.
Possibly you omitted an (in America) from your original post? The first practical lithium ion battery car was either the Nissan Leaf or a weird Renault, depending on how you define practical (the Renault Zoe was built on the same platform as the weird Renault whose name I can’t remember , but came out about a year later). Both came out before the model S (though I think not in the US).
Really, the electric car revolution, such as it is, was largely driven by battery tech; lithium ion batteries crossed a threshold from not good enough (there were electric cars based on such batteries, notably some weird VW Golfs, but they did not sell well) to good enough.
The rocket thing was more business case than tech; both the US and Soviet Union studied reusable rockets from at least the 70s, but the economics wasn’t compelling.
> What could be more compelling than reducing launch costs by 90%?
You, ah, might be overselling that a bit. An Ariane 5 (20 tonnes to LEO) launch cost about 150 million at the time it was discontinued (launch costs for the new ones are murky as they've only launched a couple of payloads so far). A Proton launch (similar size) costs $65m. Atlas V Heavy (18 tonnes) costs $110-$190m. A Falcon 9 reusable launch (17 tonnes) costs $70m.
Like, it's _cheaper_, but nowhere even remotely close to 90%.
> Regenerative braking was a crucial enabling technology.
Indeed! Given that it was invented in 1886, tho, I'm not sure what it has to do with Tesla. Apparently the first electric car with automatic regenerative braking was in 1967. The first really successful mass-market example would probably be the Toyota Prius (at least for cars; it's shown up in trams for a long, long time). The Leaf, of course, also had regenerative braking.
> Too bad they didn't take the world by storm like Tesla did.
Again, you're _really_ mostly talking about America. They're a little under 10% of the BEV market in Europe, about 5% in China. They were the best selling manufacturer in Europe for a couple of years, but were never enormously dominant.
The SLS is not a commercial launch vehicle, and does not in any way serve the same role as the Falcon 9. If you need to launch payloads that big, it is essentially the only game in town for now. In any case the launch cost estimates for SLS are pretty handwavey and incorporate a lot of r&d.
The Falcon 9 is clearly not 90% cheaper than launch vehicles of a similar role, ie ~20 tonne commercial launchers.
I mean yeah I agree with you. What he did doesn't justify the idealized view of him that people have. It's just that he's in the news 24/7 so the perception of his importance and greatness gets imprinted on you regardless of whether you want it or not.
The Space Shuttle had reusable rockets. Sorry, Musk didn't invent the idea or even prove it could be done first - that was NASA in the 1970's.
He also didn't "demonstrate" the first "viable" electric car, either. There were other electric cars before Tesla that were "viable" (and I don't really care where your goalposts are for that word). He bought his way into Tesla, so it wasn't even his idea - Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
I'm not gonna die defending Elon, so you should assume a less combative tone. I absolutely don't love that he has the power that he does and what he does with it.
But electric cars are mainstream, he lands reusable rockets, and has a private space company that reaches orbit. People doubted that it will succeed, and he proved them wrong, I guess.
It doesn't mean that everything he does will be successful, or that whatever he does is worth doing, or the right thing to do, but he did achieve these things (using his wealth and power).
You should stop assuming someone's tone from a single internet comment, especially when you're making up the tone in your own head. It completely derails the comment thread, because now we have to talk about how you're misreading things and trying to scold someone based on your own assumptions. But maybe your whole intention with your comment was to troll me?
Nothing in your comment is really changing any minds.
> He bought his way into Tesla, so it wasn't even his idea
When Musk bought Tesla, Tesla was an office with no design and no car and no money. Technically, Musk did not found Tesla. In any practical sense, he did found it.
I hear this argument often. Subways require billions in infrastructure and over 20 years of lead time. And they operate on fixed routes.
Additionally, robotaxis and Waymo-style systems are trying to replace the private car and on-demand ride-hailing, not mass transit like subways or buses.
Our country operates on 4-year political cycles, not 20+ years infrastructure visions. Hence long-term megaprojects are mostly pipe dreams.
> Subways require billions in infrastructure and over 20 years of lead time
Of course they does, because purpose of subways is to transport hundred of millions to billions of people a year. You just can't fit that on a road with a unscalable thing like a robotaxi.
Actually it's mass public transit that can't scale. Despite $1.3T in cumulative subsides US public transit usage is tiny: ~1.5% of trips and ~1% of passenger-miles.
Getting 100 people in a bus is not "easy" because very rarely do 100 people all want to from/to the same place at the same time. We end up bunching people in both time and space and making multiple stops and/or connections - which all make the journey longer and less competitive with alternatives.
And even then buses are only near capacity in our very biggest cities (top 10-15) for a hundful of hours during weekday rush hours. For example, in SF while buses/railcars may occasionally get crowded they are usually empty: Muni averages only 6 passengers per vehicle, BART only 8 per traincar. On a passenger-mile basis this makes the service very expensive (Muni ~$4 and BART ~$2 including capital) and very energy inefficient (Muni(LRV) ~400Wh and BART ~600Wh). Explaining why both systems are struggling financially and require massive ongoing subsides keep operating.
Because busses/subways/trains (i.e. mass transit) require lots of passengers to make financial - or even environmental - sense they will always be a niche, if very important, part of transportation. Robotaxis are competing in the much, much larger car/light truck market (80-85% of trips and passenger-miles). Uber/Lyft (plus traditional taxis) is already much bigger than public transit (~2% vs ~1-1.5%) and still growing and with what should eventually be a much lower cost structure robotaxis should greatly expand this. In other words robotaxis like Tesla will likely be much more scalable than public transit.
Not as familiar with EU statistics but for shorter trips (under 300km) public transit is well under 10% of trips while cars are over 50%. For all intra-EU travel in passenger-miles cars are around 75% while busses/trains of all types is well under 15%. Viable sure, more scalable probably not.
Having taken Waymo rides multiple times in San Francisco I can attest to how awesome Waymo is. I am worried Tesla will bring a bad name to the whole robotaxi industry. Waymo has never had an at-fault injury accident. Tesla FSD has killed many people.
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.
Still way more (no pun intended!) than Waymo, which has had 1 Waymo involved in a 6 car crash that killed someone in one of the other cars. Besides the human fatality a dog was also killed, and 5 other people were injured, some seriously. The Waymo was empty at the time.
Ironically this crash was due to a Tesla.
The Waymo and the other cars were all waiting at a red light when the Tesla rear ended them at 98 mph.
The driver of the Tesla was not impaired at the time of the crash. He says he tried to stop but the brakes were not responding.
The driver was from Hawaii, and it was later discovered that there is someone in Hawaii with the same full name, Jia Lin Zheng, with a record of around 20 traffic crimes over the last 20 years, including excessive speeding and running red lights.
I don't know if it had been determined if the Jia Lin Zheng visiting from Hawaii who caused the San Francisco crash is the same Jia Lin Zheng as the Hawaiian Jia Lin Zheng who has the long record of unsafe driving.
I'm not familiar with the naming conventions of whatever country/culture that name comes from. Is Jia Lin Zheng the kind of name that probably many people have in Hawaii or is it one that is likely rare?
> 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.
> They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident.
Even if that were true, any accident where FSD was disengaged up to 30 seconds prior is counted as being engaged. And 30 seconds is long enough in driving that if FSD disengaged that long ago, there's no possible way any accident at that point was related to it.
Bullshit. And I am tired of having to call people out on it.
Autopilot shuts down when it can't handle the situation it's in. This doesn't help it "avoid blame" at all. Because Tesla considers Autopilot implicated in any crash that happened within 5 seconds from Autopilot being disengaged.
> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.
NHSTA's reporting requirements are even more conservative:
> Level 2 ADAS: Entities named in the General Order must report a crash if Level 2 ADAS was in use at any time within 30 seconds of the crash and the crash involved a vulnerable road user being struck or resulted in a fatality, an air bag deployment, or any individual being transported to a hospital for medical treatment.
It’s still counted as FSD enabled. Would you prefer FSD to remain active and potentially cause further collateral damage after an accident causing who knows what kind of damage to the vehicle? Safer to shut it down when systems are working and brace for impact. Seriously use your brain.
Is it "counted" if FSD was engaged within a certain time frame prior to a crash? If so, do you know what time frame?
Or only if it was disabled automatically due to detecting a potential crash?
The latter would still be problematic, as a human driver noticing a problem just prior to the FSD disabling itself would potentially be missed (right?).
Do you know who does the counting and who makes the rules in this regard?
Asking as you seem to have more knowledge here than me.
Your argument is ridiculous. Might as well attribute all accidents with any Tesla close in vicinity to FSD then?
The data is collected in all of these incidents, and most people have seen the clips of FSD avoiding otherwise potentially lethal accidents, so "They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident" is also just patently untrue.
They don't do that, but even if they did, it wouldn't skew the statistics, since the NHTSA still counts it as engaged if it disengaged within 30 seconds of the crash.
And the links don't even touch on things that are comparable lol. Waymo might keep all the data themselves as they own the cars, while with Teslas, the drivers can and will just grab the camera data themselves, many post it YouTube.
You sound like one of those fan boys that keeps a picture of Elon next to their bed.
He's a con-man that has endangered lives by tacking on the word "beta" to a dangerous "full self driving" system for almost a decade to fool customers. Meanwhile others like Waymo did it the right, safe way. And wait no... now it's labeled "supervised" and "unsupervised" full self driving or some bs like that.
Last but not least, he's the immoral idiot that fanned hate and the political divide in America by supporting Trumps claims of a stolen election. He then manipulated a democratic election by offering million dollar in bribes (or prizes as he called them) to people who voted for Trump. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/10/20/elon-musk-offers-1-milli...
Some of them were due to the use of cameras as opposed to LiDAR for example: The May 7, 2016 crash near Williston, Florida, in which a Tesla Model S operating with Autopilot struck the side of a tractor-trailer making a left turn across the car’s path. In this incident, both the car’s camera system and the driver did not detect the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, which resulted in the Tesla passing under the trailer and causing a fatality.
Most likely it was the same driver. I was in Arizona and someone crashed into me, and he claimed he "lost control of the vehicle" which was an old truck. I can buy you lose steering or breaking, but not steering AND braking.
Tesla doesn't release the data required to assess this.
And from that information alone, you can get the gist of what that data says!
(inb4 you post the accidents per mile chart which is very obviously useless and designed to mislead midwits, as it is not controlled for age of automobile or driving conditions)
Probably none. Fatalities in Teslas grossly exceed those in comparably-priced vehicles, which is the only benchmark that matters. Unless your counterfactual is that Tesla would be even more dangerous without FSD, but I don't think that is a useful counterfactual.
The good news so far is that Tesla doesn't have a robotaxi service at all, they have a plain taxi service. We'll see what happens if they ever release a self-driving car, but for now, as in the past 7-8 years, they are way behind Waymo in the self driving car arena.
Waymo came close with me. There were two left turn lanes, and it migrated from the inner one to the outer one in the middle of the turn without a blinker while I was next to it. It got lucky that I'm young and wasn't too tired and also that it was a relatively safe place to run me off the road.
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.
Are you sure that you were in the right and there were two left turn lanes? There is an intersection by me that everyone uses wrong and you get folks using it as a double turn lane when the lanes have text that say the name of the road you are technically supposed to stay on. Really the city is to blame and not the driver because it’s confusing but still, I think the lanes are all mapped manually for Waymo (but personally I don’t have any inside knowledge)
Traveling south here on Land Park Dr there are two lanes, some people from the right lane veer left and the left lane veer right through the middle of the intersection. There aren’t dotted lines to help.
Quite certain. The two left lanes can both turn left, and the middle lane can also go straight. It's well marked (though a bit tight if you try to take it fast).
Is the turn you're referring to the one where lane 1 (the inner left) then merges into lane 2 after the receiving block segment starts? (John Daly Blvd. onto Park Plaza Dr. southbound)
I wonder how something like that is represented to the waymo or reasoned about.
Camera based guidance systems are unreliable, and the number of edge-case failure modes grow exponential in time.
LIDAR/LADAR based systems are not perfect, but do offer mm precision for guidance systems. SLAM based LIDAR systems can be very good, but are also not perfect when forced to guess where a platform is located.
He's kind of entertaining. I usually don't do this here and feel it's normally in bad taste, but he crumbles pretty spectacularly when pushed and I was curious how much material he had for me.
You should see him ascribing nephrotoxicity to a chemical from a mushroom based on the reactions of squirrels in his yard eating an entirely different mushroom. I think I really got him at his peak though just skimming through.
1. I don't like disinformation
2. I know of this subject
+. I might know more of the person than you give credit for too.
Would you consider someone writing and rating Community Notes for a hour or a few hour's sitting once in a while "unhealthy" too? You should steer away from academic institutions. Or Stack Overflow. They'd be joker's asylums for you!
That is a long explanation, but generally even human binocular disparity incorrectly guesses 3D structures and distances. Our brains automatically fill in a lot of missing information that computers just can't know a priori (example: you know a dog hidden behind a car doesn't actually vanish nor remain stationary.)
Most guidance platforms would use LIDAR/SLAM to describe the local road surface, and overlap camera vision data to extrapolate distant surfaces and objects. Note distant objects also have lower resolution, unknown non-distinctive features (speed bump, or open man-hole cover etc.), and increasing sparse data as velocity effectively lowers world-state sampling rates.
The world-state is constantly changing at every intersection, sampling constraints add latency, and the navigation way-point goals may reach contradiction with immediate path-planning due to ambiguous/expired information.
Lol, really? They either developed superman x-ray vision, or just tracked object occlusion with a common re-acquisition mitigation (so worthless when physical inertia carries a vehicle into an object collision.)
>So, it doesn't "grow exponentially",
The further the object... the more possible choices will need to be made in the guidance system. Note, guidance and navigation are related, but different problem domains. Roughly, the possible choices (and errors) if I recall grew by:
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.
> FSD is more reliable
Citation needed. And not Tesla’s typical lying with shitty statistics data (fun fact: most car accidents do not happen in places where FSD is commonly used).
Also, vision-only systems work great… if they’re backed by strong intelligence.
>fun fact: most car accidents do not happen in places where FSD is commonly used
How is that even supposed to in any way be relevant when talking exactly about cases where FSD and similar are used. Sigh.
>Also, vision-only systems work great… if they’re backed by strong intelligence.
Yes. And I do recognize that "Best, with custom in-house NN hw" might not still be "Strong" on all aspiratory statistics. But its already much above human capability, and regardless if you want to try to say the stats are 2x 3x, even 4x exaggerated, they'd still blow the alternative safety standard out of the water.
Your previous link was of that old BBC vision test, comparing being safe from danger to being able to see obviously irrelevant details of a video.
And now you link that debunked Mark Rober video that literally doesn't even have FSD turned on, while giving the most ridiculous free wins to LIDAR. Talk about writing the tests for the exact limits of a specific system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhX_fgekpk0
"Consistent" comparing a video with a literal billboard of a road in the middle of a road to real life? With the entire FSD feature turned off in the video by the way :D ?
And one fatality with the most dangerous general form of transportation we have?
And an article about a fancy pants 5 miles a hour park retrieval feature bending a few posts as if it was relevant?
Dude I don't need luck, I could roll ten D12 ones in a row and win
One of the YT videos is probably incorrect, but other data under less demanding conditions already suggests FSD camera only options don't work as advertised within cities.
I'd rather not have drivers playing dice while driving. =3
I do have the data necessary[0] to substantiate this claim.
And no, I'm not going down listening in the rabbit hole of people trying to poke pin prick holes in to a safety margin bigger than a Gigafactory.
As I said, I'm not going down the rabbit hole. You go ahead and drive right in to the fallen tree in the middle of the road as you so vehemently argue it's not there.
I think you should consider reasoning about reality in real terms instead of offloading to metaphors that, by design, don’t add any more information to the discussion than your own conclusions.
By the way, it’s a “binocular” system. “Bicameral” refers to a design for institutions like legislatures.
It is true most humans can not track more than 5 objects concurrently. However, lidar data sets tend to produce sparse unambiguous point cloud data that is a lot more feasible to process. For example, a picture/reflection of a road on a bus is not a viable option with 3D data.
Adding some stat of x things tracked adding top of your stat of "millimeters" really shows the level you're arguing here. Real world doesn't care about exact stats on some simply enumerable attributes, but adaptability. You might see 10 bisons but will instantly react to a scorpion in middle of them in your vision.
In any case. Trying to argue against vision even if LIDAR hypothetically was better (it isn't) would just lead to more deaths, maybe at best shielding the rich driving in cities. FSD's stats don't lie :|
My point was LIDAR data removes the ambiguity of camera derived data, is not fooled by featureless area ambiguity, and it is computationally easier to handle sparse data.
Many high-end multi-beam lidar also embed things like basic Bicycle and Pedestrian object detection in the sensor front end. Things have improved significantly with sensors, but the risk is never 0.
The rate of death doesn't really override an expectation of product safety, and humans understanding other humans intent.
Fragmentation of results removing instead of increasing ambiguity doesn't pass the smell check, neither isn't it not something exactly against the leading FSD engineers have commented on the issue while they were removing other non-uniform sensors, even disabling existing ones entirely in cars.
Trying to claim some entirely different stack in some third party LIDAR tower's own processing is somehow "beneficial" sounds like a project manager who thinks adding engineers equates to linearly faster progress.
Just no. On a slight tangent though, I recommend reading about Tesla's vertical integration. It's not something any other company has managed to get implemented so deep in automotive, which makes it quite incomparable in some aspects where others can't adapt even if they wanted to.
Admittedly, I only have limited out-of-date knowledge from integrating iBeo, hokuyo, and SiCK lidar models (way better models out now.) Yet in general, the SLAM algorithms tended to use optical Odometry, pose recovery, and point-cloud data. Then extrapolated the projected surface using camera data within a GPU accelerated OpenCV layer. It does require a proper global shutter machine vision camera (high fps / no smear), but does work fairly well under ideal conditions. The winners of the Darpa grand challenge documented the methods in detail, and several OpenCV books cite the work as a student project.
Let me know if you have trouble finding the projects. =3
gluing together third party stacks like there's no tomorrow doesn't make you better evaluating how a vision-only ML model with limited, yet uniquely hardware-accelerated, one-task actual real life, real-time ML model running right now would integrated with foreign data, especially as the actual relevant engineers have directly talked against such things.
It might make you headstrong in believing against something that'd be easier to see the core sensibility of if you weren't so invested in just a specific corner/angle though.
I've avoided working a work project involving LIDAR scanning before, even back then the hellishness of the hardware was a large factor. I wouldn't mind playing around with a Jetson Nano though.
>gluing together third party stacks like there's no tomorrow
That is why I don't really like ROS. lol =3
>doesn't make you better evaluating how a vision-only ML model
In general, the monocular SLAM algorithms rely on salient feature extraction, and several calibrated assumptions about the camera platform. How you interpret that output is another set of issues, as the power budget is going to take the hit.
For machine vision, I'd skip the proprietary Jetson Nano... and get a cheap gaming "parts" laptop with a broken LCD and several USB ports (RTX4090 or RTX4080 is a trophy.)
No one wants to fork over $30k for an outdoor lidar, but using only cameras is a fools errand. The best platforms I've seen commercially use camera + lidar + radar.
For student projects, one can get small radars and TOF sensors for under $20 off sparkfun (similar to the one in iPhone Pro 11/12/13). We live in the future... =3
the thing about waymo is that i suspect they're running the same ML fraud that tesla itself is running in the silicon valley in general, which is to overfit on the 20% of situations that occur 80% of times.
for waymo itself, you can overfit on 100% of the situations that will be encountered. 49 square miles isnt that large. its the real world outside that which im concerned about its efficacy in. 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.
FSD is a reinforcement learning problem, and we have no good way of training non-simulation algos for that. and a real dynamical driving environment cant be simulated accurately enough
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.
It's hilarious to see Tesla fans try to act like designing for an undefined operational domain is somehow extra brilliant and not one of the stupidest fucking ideas anyone has ever come up with.
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).
> San Francisco, Phoenix and LA represent a strong diversity of driving conditions.
This could very well be true, but if you’re looking at it from a perspective of someone who lives in a rural area with real winters, for driving purposes, those all look like pretty much equivalent large American cities without a winter.
With that logic might as well do away with all defensive armies because they've "killed so many people". Firefighters too.
FYI. FSD is safer than human drivers on large datasets. Accidents cause deaths of thousands every year. Arguing against FSD for "safety" has The Grim Reaper cackling.
You do realize that Waymo, at best, is comparable to a train with an extremely limited, and expensive, rail network on a level where Robotaxi would be a 4x4 car in a roadless world?
Waymo is SLS compared to Starship. So, not comparable and could never fit the shoes Robotaxi has been planned to fill since the initiation of the FSD project. I.E. SLS = a few academic missions. Starship: Mars colony. Waymo is as good for safety as doing nothing with its inability to scale.
Waymo costs as much per ride as one with a driver. Robotaxi is technologically fundamentally close to starting its shift after you arrive home and get out of your car. Earning you part of the profit btw. And with no growing pains, with FSD working on novel, untested roads.
There is no cost pressure on Waymo to reduce rates below Uber or Lyft as they are much smaller, they are price takers not price makers in the market. Lowering prices far below your competitors when you are supply constrained for the time being would just be lighting money on fire.
Mapping is expensive, but not really in a per-mile-driven basis. There are 4M miles of public roads which get over 3.2T miles of total driving, or ~800k vehicle-miles per road-mile. You could have pretty high mapping costs per mile and still have very low per-mile-traveled costs for mapping. And there's every reason to think the cost of mapping and updating maps on a per-road-mile basis will go down over time, not up.
Waymo is scaling pretty rapidly, and the rate of expansion is accelerating. They've been proving out the technology, and are only now starting to commission special purpose vehicles as they move out of the research phase and into deployment.
Perhaps Tesla will catch up, but for now we know Waymo's are at least ~6x safer than humans in diverse independent conditions, while FSD according to publicly available information is 50-100x less safe (with critical interventions every few hundred miles).
And with no [hypothetical] growing pains [not including the obvious practical growing pains we are all witnessing with our eyes currently], with FSD working on novel, untested roads [plus or minus a bunch of Teslas driving around with camera arrays mounted in specific, limited areas, but besides that totally novel untested roads definitely work].
FSD has simply proven untested roads work, you cannot argue against that.
>Growing pains
Robotaxi has been in testing for less than like 1/50 the time Waymo has been out, and has already once surpassed coverage in their starting city.
You know who also had growing pains? Hulk. Growing that quick.
Elon can literally draw and balls a dick on top of Waymo's long-amassed support area. Even if they want to check these starting areas a bit better with some basic mapping setups in advance, it's obvious their stack isn't hindered by requirement of hard, slow HD mapping and cars that look like they're growing mushrooms with the ugly LIDAR sensors on them.
As a control engineer who knows something about sensor fusion - No LIDAR no ride. Musk can brute-force his unsafe robotaxis on the road but they won't be as safe as Waymo. Maybe people won't care if the price is slightly cheaper vs. competition, I don't know.
The non-technical answer is that people do not care so long as it's safer and less unpleasant than the current alternative.
My last taxi ride involved jumping red lights and speeding through residential streets at 60mph because, I assume, it was early morning and the driver had learned from experience that he could get away with driving like this.
The previous experience to this was a lecture about a certain religious ideology and how I should spend the next two weeks reading up about it.
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 .
>In 10 years when robotaxi companies are short on cash and trying to IPO they will absolutely start speeding
Openly commit crimes when everything's being recorded and subject to discovery? What could possibly go wrong?
>They'll lock the doors and give you a paid presentation about Scientology during your ride.
Sounds like a good excuse for whoever's trapped to break open the side windows because he "felt he was in danger because of claustrophobia" or whatever. More seriously though, I don't see anything wrong with mandatory ads as long as it's disclosed ahead of time.
> "Accidentally" drive you to a competing store that paid for sponsored traffic, instead of the .
By your own admission "Google search has been enshittified", yet when was the last time google "accidentally" sent you to the competitor's site on the search results page?
Uh, every Google search already shows me sponsored links to competitors’ sites at the top of the results.
What would you say if in 5 years with Waymo, you want to go to Burger King but before taking you there, it suggests ‘hey, why don’t you go to this McDonald’s instead?’ At first you’d get a discount on your ride if you accept the suggestion, and then once everyone gets used to it, no more discounts and everyone ends up paying more than human taxis cost today.
Before there was an alternative used to take taxis in Toronto occasionally, and the common refrain was that the card machine was broken. And sometimes no change was available. These kinds of soft scams were common.
So it’s not a hold-up, but definitely a form of robbery.
Robbed: Bishkek, Astrakhan. Former nicked my SLR at a gas stop, I should have been more attentive, but wasn’t expecting him to loot my luggage. Latter delivered me to his buddies who threatened violence unless I turfed over every penny I had. Joke was on them as they thought I was a loaded oil exec when I was actually just a broke backpacker.
I’ve also had the old shake-down fare in Ljubljana, Bucharest, and Riga, off the top of my head - but I don’t count that as robbery, just assholes.
I have no personal experience of Kyrgyzstan or Russia, but my hunch would be that the noughts were riddled with taxi drivers like you say, while that has slightly improved over time? I mean, perestroika is known for having those problems, wasn't it? Correct me if I am wrong please anybody, thank you.
Crashes, various points over the last few decades. Three fender benders but the guy in Istanbul managed a proper one at speed, early hours of the morning and going too fast in the rain - thankfully nobody hurt but his car was trashed.
Robberies, both 2012, on the same trip.
And yes, corruption still rules the roost in a lot of old eastern bloc countries, from the government to the cops to the babushka driving the bus - it will take a long while for the mindset that the USSR inculcated to dissipate - that is, that the only way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat, and steal. 2012 was my first time east of the Urals, and these days I know far better how to deal with it than back then, when I was still wet behind the ears.
Removing LIDAR was the eye-opening moment for me re: Musk. The justification given at the time was technically bogus while it was so obviously in response to supply issues during COVID. If Tesla really wanted safe FSD they would prioritize sensor quality and multimodal input. They went for the bottom line instead.
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?
> 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.
You really expect a Tesla employee to speak out against Elon?
Right? Im not arguing against the skills he obviously has, but if we're always just piece wise approximating the underlying manifold, then there will always be new problems. The amount of data required to reliably approxate reality, in the absence of an inductive bias, is infeasible to expect to collect. Not to mention how computationally inefficient it becomes as your model blows out in size/complexity.
I guess the gamble was that there would be a certain point where the edge cases disappeared into the noise and it didn't matter that the approximation was/is "wrong" because the behavior of the car would match the requirements of the situation even if it wasn't for the right reasons.
To be fair I remember reading about GPT2 and thinking that LLMs would blow out for similar reasons.
Isn't it ultimately a cost trade off? I mean I can't see a valid argument against LiDAR and cameras if the cost of the vehicle is no concern.
If building a mass market product though the cost is a big deal.
I would assume LiDAR is much more expensive so it would be a big win to get the same performance out of cameras in the long run. I have always just assumed that was the bet.
And now he's peddling more horseshit and expecting the public and investors to swallow it:
> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.
I call bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are simply not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.
But Musk thinks you're not smart enough to know this.
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
I'm curious to know how you would act as a driver, cyclist, or pedestrian if you saw a Robotaxi nearby. Would you be more cautious, and if so in what way? Or are you mostly worried about LIDAR-less vehicles running into white walls, which it can't identify as solid walls?
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.
I dont think it's wrong, but i do think models avaliable right now lack the inductive bias required to solve the task appropriately, and have architectural misalignments with the task at hand that mean for a properly reliable output you'll need impossibly large models and impossibly large/varied datasets. Same goes for transformers for language modelling. Extremely adaptable model, but ultimately not aligned with the task of understanding and learning language, so we need enormous piles of data and huge models to get decent output.
You know quite little. No one has the kind of training data generation as Tesla does, and cases like what you describe were already discussed in 2017.
LIDAR will forever stay a niche technology. If it was so notably "better", Tesla would have just scaled that. But they went all in on vision because it has worked for 100+ years.
With respect, I disagree. Musk is obsessed with the "the best part is no part ". Which only works if you don't actually need it. Combined with an obsession with cost cutting, and you get tunnel vision insisting on a course of action which does not know with 100% certainty about the world it is trying to navigate. And this has led directly to people dying.
Being obsessed only works when you turn out to be right, and tesla's system does not work as well as lidar.
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.
The real key is that things like LIDAR are designed to work well with the types of tasks computers are good at, like taking a bunch of precise measurements every second and performing complex calculations, while a binocular vision based understanding of the world is something humans are good at because we evolved that ability over millions of years.
You can probably eventually ("never" is a long time after all) get a computer to understand the world as well as a human purely through camera based sensors, but it's a much more difficult task than taking an approach that uses tools computers are already good at. Similarly, I suspect it would be an uphill battle to have a human drive using raw LIDAR input.
Absolutely. The goal of self-driving is to be better than human drivers. Even the best drivers struggle with the sun shining from low angles, or road reflections, or snow, and so on.
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.
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?
I think optical illusions are a poor choice to illustrate this point. They are manifestations of the corner cases, peculiarities, and side effects of our visual processing system and neither cameras nor Lidar are without their own analogous issues.
If you’re saying cameras have analogous issues I fail to see how the analogy is a poor choice - looks to me like you understood exactly the point I was making.
Would Musk's argument about sensor fusion have made any sense back when they were doing lots of hand-coded C++?
I've been thinking maybe vision-only was a reasonable decision, back when lidar was expensive and the software was hand-coded. Now it doesn't, because lidar is cheaper and the software is and end-to-end neural net, and additional sensors are just more inputs to the network which will learn to use them. But Tesla is locked in because of the promises they made to early FSD buyers.
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.
Their engineers, who obviously are on the bleeding edge, going out of their way to avoid sensor fusion issues says something quite different. I could believe "Straightforward" could maybe apply for something many tiers below in complexity and safety requirements to what they're doing. But adding non-agreeing, non-uniform information sources to the most capable real-world ML vision system not driven by human-engineered code?
I don't care even if you said you had 70% of the experience their team has, what you say can't sound reasonable or caring for actually improving safety in numbers.
I've been through 3 public AV launches. I don't lead with that because "resume" measuring contests are boring and what I write should be evaluated on its own merit, not by who says it. This account is readily identifiable to anyone who knows me.
With that out of the way, it's much easier to write a hardware safety case than one for software. It's easier to write a software safety case for a traditional software architecture than one based on ML. It's much easier to write a safety case for focused models than an E2E system. None of these should be controversial statements.
You're arguing that Tesla is deliberately jumping to the hardest safety case in order to avoid the simpler safety case. I know many people who have worked on the relevant teams at Tesla. I don't think they're ignorant of the difficulty of Tesla's choices or making decisions based on what's easier to validate.
Sensor fusion is not the difficult part. You only have to look at the fact that virtually every other company in the industry (even the ones using E2E and not using LIDAR like Wayve) does it. Either we have to accept that everyone else is stupid, or there are other factors involved in Tesla's decision-making.
For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I could write a safety case about Tesla's system that meets my own personal standards. It's pretty clear from their actions and the various regulatory/legal inquiries that they don't have what I consider an effective safety process regardless.
They go out of their way to avoid sensor fusions because they are not allowed to use other sensors. Some people seem to have no limits to their credulity.
People really act like SpaceX didn't rain fifteen tons of concrete onto employee's cars because musk decided he wanted to be the first person in history to launch a heavy rocket without a flame diverter, and none of the brilliant engineers were able to convince him otherwise or had the guts to otherwise scuttle the launch for the sake of safety.
Yes. They are disallowing themselves from using other sensors. To avoid complicating the software stack and ultimately to keep it higher performing, which will make it safer in any alotted time.
This is really no different from good code practices with a complex system. Most HN readers should be familiar with rot in codebases quite comparable to "adding a few extra features to make it better" which just became a maintenance burden and take away from core features.
If you knew the slightest of how Musk has actually stayed exactly the same since the beginnings of Tesla, you'd know his hard specs are always technology-based. People that know more have said that his capability of speccing systems relatively right deep in to the future is possibly his single greatest leadership feat.
>Once Musk is near-certain about one technology pathway over another, he’s not afraid to put massive amounts of resources into that path, while still staying flexible enough in the case that a new emerging technology disrupts that particular path. Because he’s willing to make enormous (and seemingly risky) bets on these pathways, he’s able to outpace his competitors.
https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-all-that-hes-cracked-up-t...
Meanwhile, pretty much everybody else doing safety-critical real-time control prefers multiple sensor types.
For an example of that in self-driving, Huawei uses vision, lidar, radar, and ultrasound. Out of Spec let it drive them around for an hour in busy traffic in a city in China. It looked about as good as FSD, without having had several million cars providing training data for years.
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.
Given what's happening in the rest of the AI field, it seems pretty likely that it's correct.
Plus various Tesla engineers have said the same thing, Tesla does have a very large AI training cluster, and FSD quality made a big jump when they claimed to deploy end-to-end.
The question isn't whether it can be done eventually, but whether it would get safer faster with extra sensors.
Back in the day, Elon's specific objection to lidar was that it was too hard to code the sensor fusion part. With end-to-end there's no coding to deal with.
And it's not like they've replicated the visual cortex. It's the same neural net technology everybody else is using. It can deal with any sort of sensors just fine.
So human senses are all we need and we just have to solve artificial general intelligence and fully simulate a human brain? I wonder why no one has done that yet.
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.
Conflicting data is an issue even when you just have lidar, and it's not hard to deal with.
The cofounder of Waymo taught one of the first Udacity courses on this subject. He went through a small Python project that processed lidar point clouds for self-driving. The data is noisy, you get conflicting information from different points, and the code aggregates all that into the most likely 3D model of the world.
Additional sensor inputs are just more of the same, and neural nets are pretty good at this sort of thing. They'd even learn which sensors are more reliable in different scenarios.
As for "more data isn't always better," I've mostly seen that applied to training, not inference in real-time control systems. Even for training, it turned out people had been fooled by a local maximum, and once past that, more data really was better.
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.
> What are the main challenges in building software that relies solely on camera input?
Probably the main challenge is that it took nature about a billion years to get to human level visual perception and understanding of environment and nobody really knows how to duplicate it.
- 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...
> - What living creature is using wheels to move around?
A human driving a car.
I agree with you that sometimes non-natural situations are easier and can absolutely be better, but the point of bringing up humans is generally to show that it demonstrably is possible to do at least as well as humans, with humans as an existence proof.
But that it might well take too long and cost too much to get there, and that it might well in the end be cheaper and better to use additional types of sensors is a good point.
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.)
Your "cameras" have about 20 MP of active resolution between the two of them. With dead zones and pixels spread out unevenly. A modern smartphone has you beat.
There's a small, sharp, high resolution color-enabled area in each eye - but the bulk of your vision field is monochrome, and mostly sensitive to motion.
You don't notice that, because your image data is stacked and post-processed to shit to make it presentable. Your brain has been doing computational photography before it was cool - 90% of what you see at any moment in time is effectively AI-generated.
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.
There's a solid argument to be made that solving the self driving problem using only cameras might end up being roughly equivalent to solving the AGI problem because you will have essentially created a computer with a human understanding of the world around it using human senses.
What? An FSD Tesla has its very own "world model". It doesn't try to reconstruct a world "photons in", from scratch, 60 times per second. It continuously updates and refines the data it already has based on the sensor inputs, and then uses this internal representation to make driving decisions.
This "world model" is what you get to peek into through the car's screen. By now, it even has basic "object permanence". Nowhere near as good as a human yet. But AI is getting better, and an average driver isn't.
No amount of LIDAR wankery can solve self-driving.
Take any self-driving car crash where the self-driving car was found at fault. Dump the blackbox, extract the raw sensor data. What will you see?
You'll see that the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, many times over. And it didn't make the right call. That's not a "sensors" problem. The sensors are good enough. The main bottleneck for self-driving is, and always was, in AI.
Which is why you get things like that Cruise car dragging a pedestrian despite being equipped with 360 cameras and a total of 5 overlapping LIDARs. It had the sensors. What it didn't have was object permanence.
Statistically, SOTA self-driving cars are already superhuman. That holds for Waymo and Tesla both. They crash less, like for like, and the incidents they get into are less severe. But that's not because self-driving cars outperform a "top of the line" human driver. It's because they outperform the absolute worst bottom of the barrel human driver.
A big part of a self-driving car's "safety edge" is that it isn't going to go 80 in a 40, doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, and isn't capable of DUI.
Self-driving cars still struggle in some situations most human drivers wouldn't find challenging - AI issues - but they don't make the worst, the most unforced and avoidable "human factor" mistakes.
Tesla, a supposedly forward-looking car maker, operating a taxi service, which is inherently low-margin?
And the alternative scenario floated (the "appreciating asset" malarkey), that everyone would be adding their personal cars to the pool and would be making money while you sleep and/or work even more baffling. Sure, you might fool some people that they'll make money even though the wear and tear and depreciation will be much worse, and you'd need better insurance to take care of when your car seats will be knifed (a considerable risk, even before the wanton brand destruction), and someone or some thing is going to need to clean and charge the car, then charging and parking fees...
And if it were that profitable on one or two cars, then why would Tesla even sell cars to you instead of operating their own fleet?
So it doesn't hold up to scrutiny unless you own a fleet, and then you'd probably need employees. Which, again, you'd be competing with Tesla and every other likeminded fool?
I guess somehow it's started to make a perverse kind of sense recently when Tesla sales are plummeting. Someone's going to have to use the cars they make I guess.
> and you'd need better insurance to take care of when your car seats will be knifed (a considerable risk, even before the wanton brand destruction), and someone or some thing is going to need to clean and charge the car, then charging and parking fees...
Vehicle sharing companies have already solved this. The vehicle sharing company provides insurance built into their fee and vets customers. If the vehicle is vandalised (or someone makes a mess), the vehicle share company pays for everything. People wouldn't use these services if they were subject to that kind of risk.
As for charging and parking, the use case here is people who already have parking space for their Tesla. So that's where the Tesla parks when and if it's not needed. In time, I imagine, charging hubs will appear where either attendants plug in the vehicle, or the plug mechanism is automated. Or the car just comes home when it hits the predefined minimum charge, and the owner plugs in later.
> And if it were that profitable on one or two cars, then why would Tesla even sell cars to you instead of operating their own fleet?
It's a scaling strategy. The payback period is reduced to 0 if a customer pays for the vehicle. That capital can be fed back into manufacturing, lowering costs, and expanding market penetration.
“The fact that they’re hiding data should tell you everything you need to know. If you really want trust, you have to have full transparency.”
Anything Musk says is simply not trustworthy.
Not just my opinion but proven over and over again.
Hiding safety data is just icing on a cake that he has been baking for years. The real problem here is that those who choose to trust him and his companies are putting others at risk.
Those who own/drive a Tesla typically have insurance but what about those who hire robotaxis? Can they be held personally liable when their roboride hurts someone?
“On Monday, Musk thought it would be funny to expand the area covered by its three-week-old Austin robotaxi service to resemble a giant penis when seen on a map.
“Harder, better, faster, stronger,” the $1 trillion company wrote on Monday, a double entendre referencing the synth pop track of the same name by Daft Punk, a duo appropriately known for performing as robots. Musk approvingly reposted the phallus-shaped service map, adding the fare would now be hiked to $6.90 per ride from $4.20 previously, both numbers the 54-year old often employs for comical effect.”
It’s amazing that anyone still takes him seriously. One of the first riders almost hit a train, and this is what he’s spending his time on. It’s inexcusable, but his fans lap it up.
I'd agree with you, and mention that there's always the option to short TSLA stock, if you believe that the fans will stop being fans soon enough.
A lot of people have lost a ton of money shorting TSLA.
It's not a stock, nor a company. It's a religion. Quite hard to bet against a religion. You never know if it's the one that's going to last 2,000 years.
A decade ago his antics were seen as whimsical and perhaps funny, especially to his fan base. With that fan base ever shrinking his antics today are disgusting and trying to appeal to the crowd which still appreciates something this low-brow.
A decade ago the antics seemed less childish, imo. E.g. calling the starship "BFR" or racing the snail with the boring machine, or the Tesla "plaid" mode.
The obsession with 420, 69 and dick jokes seems another level.
The U.S. only switched to hand-over-heart in 1942, and not because anyone had a sudden change of heart about mass saluting the flag - just that it became embarrassingly identical to the enemy’s gesture.
In your world view, what would you personally do if you start one, or multiple, incredibly successful companies and amass $ billion(s) of equity in the process?
Thankfully all of these problems are just money problems - price tags on a shelf no billionaire wants to pay apparently. If it turns out these are actually just hard problems, whoever will we blame?
In case it wasn't clear my original comment was sarcasm. These are hard problems that are not solved by being funded, but people like to peek in the pockets of billionaires and ask why they haven't bought solutions yet. I have not heard of California Forever though and will look into that.
Need more info on this, because its really easy for somebody to stick a camera at an angle that if somebody waves at the crowd it becomes iffy.
Was interesting to see actual video of a newish public figure wave at the crowd, wince and look in the direction of the camera. Clearly newly trained not to wave at the crowd.
hes always been like this. from faking video games to pushing memecoins.
his being cringe itself isnt the issue. its the lack of EQ that leads to someone being a slave to wanting to be liked. it doesnt inspire confidence in his ability to think rationally. like how hes perfectly fine grifting and contributing to the decrease of trust in society. its messed up
He made a space rocket company called Space Sex and your choices of Tesla cars are S3XY. Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days, but ever since he has been loud in public, he has been like this loud in public.
Let's be clear that the PayPal days consisted of his company merging with a company that was doing something his was failing at, spending 4 months as the CEO arguing that the entire thing that Comenity had built (which was "PayPal", that they'd already built a working version of, trademarked, etc., before the merger) be thrown away and rewritten in ASP, because he didn't understand Java.
So horrific was his tenure at PayPal that, in a world where CEOs "pursue opportunities", "spend time with family", etc., Musk was openly fired. In absentia. The morning he left for his honeymoon. How badly do you have to fuck up as CEO for the Board to do that to you?
Musk's "contribution" to PayPal is mostly just "cashing dividend checks".
The difference is that it used to be combined with some pretty cool stuff. He was a loudmouth jackass but he was (running companies that were) doing neat things with electric cars and rockets. Now the cars and rockets are stagnant, his newer ventures are jokes, he blew up Twitter, and is making a decent attempt at wrecking the country I call home. The loudmouth jackassery was kind of amusing when there was cool stuff to go along with it. Not so much anymore.
He wasnt running those companies so much as they were running him. These groups had dedicated soft protocls for handling elon's bullshit and disasterous influence. He's always just been the money guy. His ideas have always been shit, and the ideas he shared that were good invariably were ones he was handed and was repeating (often handling related questions rather poorly).
just look at his consistent and extreme lack of comprehension of fairly basic engineering. The man is a talentless hack, who paid his way into fame and the appearance of success. His contribution to paypal was his money. When paypal and x (at the time elons online bank) merged, paypal's code etc. Weren't really infleunced by elon or even x. X was crazy unsafe and unreliable, and so merging really only brought together intelligent havenots with a decent product with an unintelligent nepobabies wealth.
he didnt invent tesla either. He just bought into the company and bought the right to call himself a founder and marketed that angle aggresivley.
elon is an idiot, and always has been. Idiots need symbols though, so other idiots idolize him, propping him up.
Was he just lucky, then? SpaceX and Tesla have both been very successful, with business models that looked pretty dubious at the time. Electric cars and rockets looked like good ways to turn large fortunes into small ones, not the other way around.
If I were Vernon Unsworth I'd be fine with searches for "Vernon Unsworth pedo" coming up with discussions about how stupid Elon Musk is for calling me a pedo out of spite and how he really should be in jail for that absurd defamatory statement, but isn't because he's politically untouchable.
There's a model Y with The Sticker on it in my street, introduced years after he showed his colors like that. No, dear neighbor, when you bought that car, you knew.
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.
Funny how people who live lives of unfathomable luxury are the ones “taking chances,” while the people who literally die in the process are just the price of progress.
Musk is a clearly brilliant man who does not know how to keep his mouth shut or not act like a teenager. I know he doesn't need my respect... But he's certainly lost all of it by now.
And for people who are like "yeah but he gets results," are you really saying he wouldn't be getting more results if he didn't spend the last 10 years being an idiot online?
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
We need stats, not anecdotes. Last I saw, Tesla’s “full self-driving” required human intervention something like once every couple hundred miles. That’s absolutely atrocious. It’s probably better now, but still a long way from where it needs to be. For comparison, the average American driver goes around 100,000 miles between collisions.
Tesla Robotaxi is a classic case of premature optimisation - with Waymo they decided to deploy whatever technology worked best and did not cost-optimise at the start. Each Waymo vehicle is much more expensive than a Tesla, and has much more expensive sensors and compute.
Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle.
There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)
FSD itself is not a failed bet as a driver-assist system. When it started Tesla was cash poor and often on the verge of collapse, so cutting costs made sense. They will never do as well as a mature Lidar-based solution, but over the years FSD added some value to some people, and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars.
I also think Tesla and their robotaxis are egregiously overhyped, but cutting Lidar was not a terrible business decision at the time. Though it's a terrible decision to have still stuck to vision-only (and using low-quality cameras apparently) when they could have at least got Radar and cheap Lidars.
I wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot. FSD is amazing and I use it door to door wherever I drive. I got a LOT better about a year ago.
But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera)
I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.
I’m not saying autopilot was a bad business decision - autopilot has fuelled sales and no doubt has been a great success and is amazing tech for being in consumers cars at fairly low cost.
I’m saying if the goal is to invent true robotaxis (because that’s the market you are going after) then I think waymo’s approach of following what works and cost-optimising later gets you there faster if you have enough funding.
Tesla is a shrinking company with terrible margins. Now that EV credit sales are worthless I don’t see how they’ll be profitable going forward.
Waymo is Google, and thus has infinite money.
Waymo has a level 4 driving system. FSD is certified as level 2.. so as it currently stands Tesla’s offering is competitive with Mercedes/GM/Ford/BMW’s driver assistance systems. Not really a stunning accomplishment, though certainly it’s a decent showing.
People that think those other systems are anywhere comparable to FSD smell of cognitive disonanace. Just try it at some point and compare yourself. Or watch one of a million videos.
> Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.
In financial terms you could call that a liability, and you might reasonably expect to have to pay off that liability at some point i.e. delivering functionality people have already paid for! In that framing I would be more careful in framing FSD as a financial success.
If the key unlock for self-driving is maximizing real-world training data, then Tesla’s approach of using cameras make sense since it allows them to utilize their entire fleet to deploy incrementally better FSD to.
I think we should require robotaxis to have the same abilities as professional drivers. I driven professionally in various jobs and consider it a skilled profession above what the average driver can do.
Some of the scenarios I've encountered truely tested my limits, such as someone trying to commit suicide by pulling out in front of my bus in Las Vegas, or various insurance scam accidents attempted on the bus because the bus company had deep pockets.
What you are casually asserting is that Tesla "eyeballs" and driving AI will duplicate the abilities of a professional driver real soon now. Count me skeptical. I wouldn't ride in a vision only Tesla without a safety driver and don't recommend anyone else do it either.
The more you require of them, the less of them you'd have on roads with their 1x-10x safety rating compared to other members of the traffic.
If you do the calculus, The Grim Reaper is cackling and cheering you on, agreeing that no Robotaxi should be allowed on the road unless it has achieved a 100x human safety rating.
Idk if its just me but it seems the link to the article is not working, I believe this is the original https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-serv... . Honestly really excited in general for the expansion of driverless vehicle services like robotaxi/waymo, but I am a bit cautious on the robotaxi camera only approach (correct me if I’m wrong) compared to Waymo’s combination of LiDAR, radar and camera
Robotaxi is not a driverless taxi service, though, it's a regular taxi service with a human driver in every car. It's laughable to even compare it to Waymo.
Waymo has already proven that they can drive without any human in the car. Tesla have not, at all - and as this article points out, their cars continue to make major driving mistakes, like driving into an on-coming train, running red lights, driving on the wrong side of the road. These are not subtle issues. So I see no reason to assume that they'll ever work without the human driver.
Remember also that FSD can't even be trusted to drive the 2 miles of one-way tunnel at the Las Vegas Loop - even those cars require a driver today.
Tesla's architecture is the only one of the robotaxi providers which actually _can_ scale. Not being dependent on exact HD maps, having the same standard as humans do "if you can see enough to drive" means eventually there'll be scant roads Robotaxi can't serve. By this strength it'll serve in areas that would never work for LIDAR/pre-HD-mapping requiring solutions
I've never understood this argument. When I drive, I'm relying on more than just vision. I'm relying on sound, tactile feedback, an understanding of traffic law, an understanding of human behavior on the road (some of which is specific to my locality, the time of day, etc.), an understanding of weather conditions and geography, past problems I've run into on the road and heuristics I've learned over time to improve safety, weighing the risks vs benefits of certain maneuvers (especially considering how specific cars around me are behaving), and so forth. Some of this a purely vision focused FSD could simulate. But much of it it cannot. That's why alternate sensing systems really are needed, whether it's LIDAR or something else.
Every thing is a sensor. It provides input. Tesla decided to remove more and more input while claiming it’s better. Even Tesla knows because the robo taxis need more sensors than they sell in stores. So latest HW4 you buy is already obsolete
Saying Elon Musk won’t succeed at something that is a hard technological problem is foolish, yes. His companies have done what everyone said was impossible for ages.
But I do wonder if rising nations will instead just build their infrastructure to line up with technology (e.g. HD mapping their streets as they build them, installing signed beacons to inform AVs). The cost of this tech is cratering. One possible future, though admittedly an unlikely one.
The whole article is based on an incident a YouTuber talks about in one of their videos. The incident was not captured on video and was not even described as dangerous by the YouTuber himself.
I would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.
The whole article is not based on that incident. For example:
>The former U.S. Marine hosts the crowd-sourced FSD Community Tracker, the single most sophisticated and reliable form of empirical data collection and analysis on Tesla’s self-driving technology that is publicly available. Car executives like Volkswagen Autonomous Mobility CEO Christian Senger speak highly of it as a benchmark, and even Musk—who has his own internal data on disengagements that he refuses to share—singled it out as proof the company is making progress.
>Currently, its data shows even the latest FSD version from Tesla results in a critical disengagement roughly every 340 miles between both city and highway at present. Called 13.2.9, it rolled out in May just weeks before the Austin service launched. “You sometimes hear Elon saying, ‘we’re having a hard time finding disengagements.’ That is such BS,” Martinez adds.
Quite simply, standardising public transport across the globe, ( and in turn bringing economy of scale ) , can solve the transport problem , problem is that this is not economically viable for car companies
I recall that Teslas have a mode where it shows its camera and labels what it sees. I would love to see what these failures look like in that mode. What did it think was there? Nothing at all? Something far away? Insect on the lens?
What that mode shows is that the Tesla thinks there is nothing there.
AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized.
What it should do is model the entire world around it in 3d and consider that. But it doesn't. Cow on the road - problably not recognized. A child in an uncommon halloween costume chilling / lying in the middle of the road - pretty damn sure not recognized and the Tesla would just kill that child. Yep.
(I drove a Tesla Model 3 with the latest "self-driving" software for a bit a year back.)
> AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized.
This is not true; in modern FSD the visualization is disconnected from the actual driving model. The visualization runs a lightweight model that labels some stuff and shows it; the actual heavy lifting is now a single model that takes pixels as input and outputs control commands. My car very clearly reacts to stuff that doesn’t appear in the visualization.
The sad thing is that based on your telling of it, if it detects a small child in a weird costume in the middle of the road but doesn't recognize it as a small child that it's not at least recognizing that something is in the road that should not be regardless of what it is. That should be the minimum in recognizing the road and then recognizing any object within the road.
This approach is all backwards anyway. You don't need to detect obstacles per se, you need to detect safe conditions to proceed.
Clear roadway is safe. Following behind a detected vehicle is conditionally safe.
Cow in the road? Not clear road way, not a detected vehicle. Does not match any safe conditions, so do not proceed.
This approach is why you see so many reports of Waymos stopped somewhere that's outside traffic rules. But it's so much better to stop safely in situations where it's not really needed than to not stop in situations where it is needed.
A while back electroboom did a test with his Tesla's self driving and in most cases had to slam on the brakes himself when it didn't recognize obstacles he had set up for it. Also have seen videos of Tesla's navigation screen having a difficult time with freight trains. It stopped for the trains but was very confused about what it was, showing it as various oddly shaped cars and trucks that often morphed into other oddly stretched vehicles.
I recently ran across this weird world of the influencers who have been trotted out (invited) to post social media posts about their rides in the robotaxi. It is amazing how many are “other than the thing(s) that went wrong it was very safe and worked great”.
Some of those things that went wrong were dropping people off in the middle of an intersection, not recognizing railroad track guard rails… and simply not being able to get them to their destination at all.
To be fair. I live at Mission Bay (SF) that has Caltrain railway nearby (and you have to cross it if you take particular ways in/out). I drive (and like it a lot!) Waymo. Waymo avoids crossing it (it takes a longer way to drive a bridge). So, they probably realized the risk and still to this are not willing taking it.
Why are people mad there’s more competition? Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has. I think there will be some inherent risk in getting in the first full self driving vehicles, but their success to date has been nothing short of incredible
> Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has.
My research shows that you can arrive at these numbers only if you compare Tesla’s FSD incidents that are only reported if airbags are deployed, to all Waymo incidents, which are reported even when only a minor damage is occurred.
Literally every self driving car service, including Waymo [1], Cruise, etc, initially launched as an invite-only program with a safety driver --- in the driver seat no less, rather than the passenger seat like for the Tesla robotaxi. I don't know why people point to the safety operator somehow like it's proof that Tesla is bad. It's just a normal thing for a very early phase of deployment. In the worst case Tesla is just a few years behind Waymo but that by no means is absolute proof that they cannot scale up and improve it just as Waymo has.
> The service will initially be limited to "early riders" who've already been a part of Waymo's test programs. This first wave will also find human drivers ready to take over in the event of a problem.
> Last night, Elon Musk did what he does best: promise “millions” of autonomous Tesla vehicles would be on the road by the end of next year.
And this tiny little disclaimer:
> Last year, Musk said that Tesla would rollout “unsupervised” robotaxis in Austin, Texas starting in June 2025. And in the call last night, Musk stuck to that deadline, but added a little more color about what to expect. He said the paid ridehailing service would consist of 10-20 Model Y vehicles with remote operators in case any of the cars get stuck.
Ahh, unsupervised, if you ignore the supervisors! And wow, a whole 10-20 for the city!
> Musk has long promised Level 5 autonomy, which describes driverless vehicles that can travel anywhere, under any conditions, without limitations. But last night, he corrected himself: there will be some limitations.
Ahh, geofencing sucks unless Tesla does it, got it.
> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.
I smell bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.
Genuine questions for AI engineers, or self driving car people: is the Tesla approach of only using cameras inherently flawed? I've read that the AI is directly hooked up to the cameras, with no explicit intermediate 3D representation... everything is done in latent space. If true, this seems inherently hard to improve; throw more data at it, sure, but you can't necessarily understand how and why it fails when it does. That seems... non-optimal for safety-critical systems like self-driving cars.
There's plenty of visualizations of their intermediary voxel representation. Hardly worse than any LIDAR for the task but without all the downsides of LIDAR.
OT, but we need smart roads before we get a reliable robotaxi. You need lidar + road sensors embedded into the road. You basically have multiple sensors covering a section of the road that constantly updates specific to that section. And you have robotaxis pinging these stations wirelessly. When disconnected, autonomous feature also disengages. You don’t need to install a ton of sensors on every cars.
Nonono. Externalizing the part of the compute is bad idea. increasing the cost and complexity of a socialized infrastructure is bad as now it relies on external reliability, we can barely maintain roads in there current form
It’s not binary. You ran way too far. having simple, generalized infrastructure that’s repair ability can be democratized, and having a free market of what can use said infrastructure is robust. Road infrastructure cost a lot of money to maintain, adding more technology to maintain makes no sense
No? Public roads are fine. They've been fine for as long as they've existed. So the right option is to just make tech that works with them, and works like cars and roads have always been interacted with. By turning vision in to wheel inputs.
With what we can do with x amount of technology in given volume improving, increasing cost and making motoring just more unreliable (and to only work in cities) would be a strategy short sighted as running in a forest with your eyes closed. And sounds like Solar Roadways lol
We already have to pave and paint and illuminate nearly every road. If humans have to take over on gravel that's not really a big deal, very few people drive on unmaintained roads
Do you not see my point? How about traffic lights? Or street lights. It’s the same thing. You make it sound like things can’t improve from status quo. Let me guess you are a Java dev.
As much as I hated boilerplate having to write some java last month for the first time in like 5 years, I hate other kinds of bloat and fragmentation as much.
I don't think we'd do away with street lights even if the cars could see in the dark. Traffic lights we'll need for as long as human driving isn't illegal, which is at least 50 years.
Safety is pretty much irrelevant unless its uniform with no large dips in intended design. Have existing roads. Have human driver cars, and autonomous cars which use all the same signals the humans use. These things don't advance as fast as some areas, so putting the cart before the horse has no benefit here. Even if we want to progress as fast as possible!
And there's streets outside cities too. The ugliness of fragmentation with your way is too painful to think of. Like soviet roads where suddenly its undrivable.
Having worked at Uber, I can tell you that most people vastly overestimate how many Uber drivers are working at any one time. A medium sized city like Seattle might have a few hundred at peak hours.
There is a limited scale to any taxi service, at least until it becomes cheap enough that the company can afford to have lots of cars sitting parked and idle for much of the day. Otherwise, the rush hour peaks will be less convenient and affordable than having a private car.
Pretty much. Has the air of the oil&gas funded "journalist" piece where he ran circles in a parking lot then wrote about it suddenly running out of battery, and was disproven by logs lol
Tesla has to create new revenue sources. The Supercharger moat is evaporating. Elon is otherwise pretty successful in torching the brand loyalty. Regardless of one's personal opinion, Tesla owners as a whole are at odds with Elon politically. Tesla owners skewed educated, living in blue states and are environmentally conscious. I think this will go down as one of the biggest self-owns in history.
The only thing preventing Tesla from going bankrupt is trade barriers on Chinese EVs.
Elon has always been a snake oil salesman and I suspect this robotaxi venture will blow up in his face in a way that's potentially fatal for Tesla. All it will take is someone to be killed in or by a robotaxi. That'll bring in the authorities and likely reveal what a shitshow it is behind the scenes.
It won't be fatal for Tesla, I'm not sure it will even be fatal for Musk as CEO. As long as the stock price goes up or even sideways Musk will be CEO of Tesla and they will sell cars and Musk will play whatever financial games / hype to keep the party going.
TSLA has defied gravity for years. Fundamentally, it makes no sense. It's been valued at between $500,000 and $1 million per car sold in a year. That's utterly insane.
But we know that stock prices are based on expectations for the future not fundamentals. So massive growth is built into the stock price but we have to start asking where this growth is coming from. That's why there's a robotaxi effort.
EVs are becoming a commodity. So over time Tesla's price direction is towards the Big Three. But with more risks, namely the Chinese supply chain for batteries.
You can view Tesla as an investment in Elon, which I think the market has. But that's on incredibly shaky ground. He's torched his relationship to the current administration going so far as to call the sitting president of the United States a pedophile [1]. Elon doesn't seem to appreciate that Trump could end Tesla with an executive order.
My point is that Elon is volatile and can so easily become a liability to Tesla. They're paying him billions so firing him can immediately and massively improve the bottom line.
As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So I'm not predicting the imminent collapse of Tesla but I think it will come and it'll be sudden and dire.
I have the misfortune of living in this city and godforsaken state where they let any company with enough money use it as a testing ground.
Cruise was/is fucking awful. But these tesla taxis somehow 10x worse than Cruise. Going to end up live the governor of this state and without the ability to recover funds due to awful tort reform.
There's people that straight faced make the claim that FSD is worse than GM, Ford, Toyota etc. driver assistance systems. Meanwhile we can put an address in while in the driveway, go through the streets and highway, and arrive at a destination without ever touching the wheel. It's alternative facts at this point.
Not too long ago Edmonds gave FSD the lowest rating for their self driving test because they had to occasionally touch the steering wheel to prove they’re still paying attention. It was the only system that drove on city streets and was by far the best system on the highway.
Tesla went from the upstart everyone loved to the incumbent they love to hate, regardless of facts
Of course it can't scale. Putting 10000 cars with 1 human in them into a city is hard and just creates traffic. Putting 100 buses with 100 people in them is much easier.
Also why don't you use something what has less degrees of freedom like a train and thus is much easier to automate and also much easier to scale by just connecting more cars. You got that Loop thing, expand onto it and turn it into a subway...
Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state - buses, subways, trams. There is natural development behind it, it is not like somebody said that city people shall only sit next to a stranger - you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that. Unless you will use existing mass transportation solutions.
I agree with your take on public transport, but I don't understand your point.
Tesla's robotaxis are not trying to replace public transport, they are trying to replace taxis, and eventually private cars. Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty, perhaps Tesla can do the same thing, in principle, with another degree of accessibility and cost-effectiveness. If anything, they may reduce the number of cars on the streets if more of them are shared.
I haven't yet formed a strong opinion on the viability of their vision, but that's beside the point.
Public transport is the last thing they will replace, and it is to a large degree complementary just like it has been for the last century. Public transport is of course far more efficient if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of immediacy and, well, interacting with the public. For the rest there's the private transport option, with various degrees of who drives and how much you own the car, that's where Tesla is aiming.
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!
Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.
> when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion
Of course it is. Banning street-side parking would double or triple most cities’ navigable road space.
You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow?
Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that?
While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.
Waymo isn't really the answer to congestion, busses and other public transport solutions are. If Waymo is the answer, what is the question?
Q: How can I get to the gym and use the treadmill without having to walk all the way to the bus stop?
Its been proven over and over, and there are tons of studies that show that more lanes doesnt help congestion.
> more lanes doesnt help congestion
It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand.
And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees.
Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.
Streets with parked cars are residential and don’t need better throughput. They need safety rails so little kids can exist without being run over. They need to be exempt from gps routing so people can quietly live their lives.
In some places throughput isn’t needed… safety is.
Who said they had to be car lanes
>Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion.
Presumably they're not just roaming around aimlessly. They're also providing transportation to whoever's sitting inside.
Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option.
Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.
Anecdotally, what I observe in SF is empty waymo cars driving around
Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans.
That is why parking lots make places un-walkable.
> Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans.
But that's not what congestion means.
It's adding indirectly, more space taken by parking lots means that you have to spread further, which begets the need for more cars
Less parking spaces > denser enviroments > more walking(Or other more compact forms of transport) > less cars (To an extent) > less congestion
The US has multiple (smaller) countries worth of parking space
I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.
It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive)
There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse.
I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.
On the same idea, I think the densest enviroments are a bad comparisson There's a noticeable middle ground between US Style Sprawl and say, Tokyo
But the alternative to Tokyo isn't Tokyo but with 20 million cars, it just stops being Tokyo
Density accounts for situations that expansion can't
So optimal would be to get entirely rid of private and single user vehicles likes taxis. Thus density could be maximised.
If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)
Robo-taxis can pack significantly more densely into a dedicated parking space than regular cars. Snout to butt and no room side to side, as there's no need for maneuvering. A robo-taxi parking lot just becomes a dense FIFO queue.
Taxis just aren't that highly demanded of a service. It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.
One car owned per adult is very inconvenient to deviate from in a car friendly urban environment, even if robotaxis can be made to have overall cost parity to car ownership.
The net result, I think, is that robotaxis can only ever increase the total number of cars and concurrent drivers.
Would you disagree? Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Or, similarly, for single people to switch from 1 car or no car, just transit, to robotaxis?
Robotaxis seem to me to have potential well solve the niches human taxis are bad at: late night safe driving, very long point to point going out of an urban core into a rural area, perhaps even personal cargo shipping, if a robo van could enable you to do furniture shopping without renting a truck. But these are edge cases that compete with private cars pretty intensely. I'd only prefer a late night taxi if I'm drunk. I'd only want a robotaxi to a rural area if I'm an urban living rock climber or hiker, and I don't care to own a car. The total available market is just wildly incompatible with the current and speculated valuation, as far as I see it.
> It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.
That’s because you live with scarce and expensive taxi service. I know plenty of people in Dubai who use taxi or uber/Careem for their daily commute and I have done so in periods too.
Cheap taxi could be only if there are cheap cars and cheap (imigrant) labor available.
Some parts of the world, like the countryside of many European countries, if you don't own a car, or are unable to drive for for whatever reason, taxi is the only available transport.
People help to drive the cost down by sharing taxis on common routes.
We have great public transport network, but only if one is lucky enough to live close by to well known cities.
Otherwise, you might have a few bus connections through the day if at all, and they might require walking down the village down to the closest stop a few km away.
Or cheap cars and no labor, which is the entire goal of driverless taxis
Nothing about autonomous driving—how it's being pitched, the valuations, hardware, etc—suggests it's going to be cheap
Really? That appears to be one of the primary applications, and it's discussed in many investor calls re Waymo and Tesla. The driver component in the total cost of taxi service is 60-70%. EVs also have a lower total cost of ownership, and this scales with the number of miles driven because electricity is cheaper than gas. Even if the price of EVs stayed exactly as they are, autonomous taxis would cost 70-80% less than convention taxis. That's a market disrupting drop.
> Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis?
Why wouldn’t the cost of car ownership be a factor?
It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas.
I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2]
[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-t...
> it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation
Anecdote: I wouldn’t be able to take public transit to the airport in San Francisco or New York without the last (EDIT: first) mile being done in a rideshare. The alternative would be calling a private car for the whole journey.
I don’t know what you mean by this, unless there’s a personal reason. LGA has a free shuttle bus from the subway, JFK and EWR have AirTrains connected to the subway, and SFO has a direct BART connection. I use public transit exclusively to get to all of those airports.
I have a place on 26th & Broadway. If I have a heavy case or a pet or it’s raining, I need a way to get to Penn Station. And I’m incredibly close to multiple subway stations.
As for the Bay Area, it’s all suburbs.
> Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty,
Maybe in US, turns out most of the rest of the world didn't had the same problem, nor the lack of regulations US suffers from.
Across African countries we were already calling into taxi like systems via WhatsApp, some European countries had taxi apps, and the US gig economy doesn't work here, so not only is Ûber regulated after a few court cases, it is also integrated with the taxi network.
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.
Why take a plane to Europe with 300 pax when you can take an oceanliner with 7000 pax , fewer degrees of freedom, more energy efficient and use ports and harbors that have existed for 1000s of years rather than building new runways and introduce noise pollution?
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.
To be fair, I absolutely would take ocean liners for this purpose if such a thing existed.
The closest that you can get on this front is basically seasonal route switches for cruise liners. The thing is, cruise lines price gouge on WiFi, so I'm not really able to work while taking the slow route, and I'm also having to pay food, lodging, etc.
The latency itself / limited freedom for a week or two, I don't mind. But it's the other expenditures and tradeoffs that are rather hard to stomach.
But when you want to roundtrip transport 1M people a day, then you are kind of missing space in the air.
There’s 20k planes in the air at any one time. You can do the maths from here.
Have you used busses or the metro recently? My girlfriend refuses to ride them because they are dirty, uncomfortable, and most crucially, unsafe. And although I am an ardent supporter of public transportation, I tend to understand her side quite well when I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride.
I use public transportation frequently. But I feel that 50 years of work on public transportation has created a system that fails a large percentage of the population. Perhaps another solution is needed.
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.
I don't think you can compare public transport outcomes in the Netherlands with those of the US and use it as an indictment of the US implementation. The US has 50% more crime (including 5x more homicides) and ~$12k extra income (ie Americans can afford a little more comfort); the Netherlands has 5x the population density. Comparing the results of transporting a very different population through very different places doesn't reflect on either implementation on its own.
Population density is similar in the us and the netherlands, when you only count places that matter for transit. Farmers rarely get transit. Look only at the cities and not the rocky mountains and the us is plenty dense
Not that simple. Take Amtrak Northeast Regional. Service from NYC to Washington D.C is a very busy business travel route that goes down the densest population corridor in the country, but it still crosses areas (especially in northeast Maryland) that could be properly described as rural farmland.
That area is still very dense compared to what trains pass through elsewhere in the world. Of course as a tiny country the Netherlands has nothing to compare with. However France has plenty of not dense farmland their trains pass through. Spain has even worse terrin that their trains pass through and again a great system.
Nobody lives in the all the empty land in the US. The majority of people in the US live in urban areas. The density argument never makes any sense. We're talking about public transit within a single city, not between Chicago and Denver.
The Netherlands as a whole is less dense than NYC. If density were the issue, why does public transportation in NYC have problems that the Netherlands does not?
The population density of a whole massive country like the USA doesn't matter for public transportation that reaches its largest cities, you have pockets of very high density and an immense flyover space where few people live.
With the density of the Northeast Corridor you could have the exact same setup as the Netherlands has, the Northeast is only 20% less dense than the Netherlands while housing 50m people, there's almost a whole France in there but nowhere close to the infrastructure the Netherlands nor France have to move people around.
The USA is massive so there's a lot more space for localised solutions that work for different parts of the country, the West and East coasts could have similar solutions to interconnect the whole N -> S, there's enough density for it. If Sweden with 10m people and a frigid climate can run trains, public transportation, etc. in all major population areas along an area equivalent to the whole West Coast then I don't see any reason, except cultural-political ones, the USA couldn't.
My point is that we've had 50+ years of "trying to do it well" in the US. For all the claims that "it has been done better in other countries", how come not a single city in the US has been able to extract the je ne sai quoi of what makes it work over there when it doesn't work here? What exactly is the time horizon for fixing all our issues? 50 years wasn't long enough to make a dent - if anything, things have gotten worse in that time.
> how come not a single city in the US has been able to extract the je ne sai quoi of what makes it work over there when it doesn't work here?
Manhattan sort of nails it. Between the subway, Metro-North, LIRR and taxi system you don’t need to own a car and it massively increases life expectancy.
> it massively increases life expectancy.
Life just seems longer. When I lived in small cities and walked mainly, all of my health numbers went in the wrong direction. Higher blood pressure, poorer quality sleep, worse glucose control. It took me quite a while, but I eventually determined the problems were connected to noise, nighttime lighting, and too many people.
Living outside of cities and better controlling my sleep environment has significantly improved my quality of life.
My city's public transportation is excellent. It's a vital service for people like me who don't drive and need timely transport loops.
Wait, are you arguing that we’ve tried to do it well in the US?
What I'm saying if we've had 50 years to try to get it right and we have failed.
As the sibling comments suggest, I don't think the US has really been trying to very hard get it right. Leaving alone European countries, I've experienced and commuted using better public transportation in poorer countries of varying sizes 2+ decades ago.
Plenty of other places have figured it out. There's nothing so special about America that it can't work there too.
No, sorry, the US has had 50 years of "trying not to do it at all if we can get away with it"
Absolutely not been trying to do it well.
Despite this, Washington Metro is pretty solid, i take CTA or my bike everywhere in Chicago, and i was able to navigate Philly and NYC reliably without a car without issue.
US transit agencies have been deliberately and systematically underfunded and poorly maintained. Public transit works great all over the world when governments actually care about doing it well.
But public transport in the Netherlands works because society as a whole isn’t broken. There aren’t even any noticeable homeless populations, for godsakes.
Which is why I’m happy to pay taxes there. It’s really worth it in quality of life.
> and most crucially, unsafe
This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.
For example, on the NY subway you have a 100x greater chance of dying by driving instead of taking the subway. 100x.
If you look at the risk of injury it's not any better.
The thing is that feeling unsafe and actually being unsafe are two different things. Cars feel safe because you're isolated, you have walls between you and everyone else. Public transit feels unsafe because you can directly see other people and there's nothing stopping them from just walking up to you.
Like, for your point on drugs, on a subway you can literally see the people on drugs, which makes you feel unsafe. In a car, you don't know who is on drugs, so you feel more safe. But, you're not. People are still on drugs, but now, they're also operating a deadly weapon.
> on the NY subway you have a 100x greater chance of dying by driving instead of taking the subway
Is this comparisons solely based upon deaths by (car passenger * distance traveled in NY streets) to deaths by (passenger * distance traveled in the NY subway)? The total amount of car passengers victims of accidents happening on highways, for example, seems not pertinent to me.
> This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.
Sure, you can make that argument. I can even agree with you. But you're not going to convince my girlfriend, or most women for that matter, that they're "actually more safe" in a car than BART. Especially if she has to dodge people yelling or cat-calling her to get on the station. You or I can be totally fine with that. But I can't find it within me to fault her for not being OK with that, and wanting to call an Uber instead.
I already included this in my post - feeling unsafe is a different thing. I don't know how to solve people feeling unsafe, because it's a combination of human's irrational risk management and real-world limitations.
If you remove walls and sound barriers, i.e. you go public for transportation, I'm not sure there's any way around the "feeling unsafe" problem.
> This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.
I think GP was referring to lack of safety due to crime, not accidents.
My (European) understanding of US public transport is that you get stabbed or shot at every station. (Full disclosure, everything I know about US public transport comes from "Death Wish" (1974).)
I included injuries in my comment. Yes, you are more likely to be injured by vehicles, too, and again - it's not even close.
Do people get stabbed? Yes. But what happens way more often is car accidents resulting in injuries.
It's still safer than driving when you account for crime on public transit, which is itself a largely overblown problem.
I understand women feeling uncomfortable (am woman, have been harassed on trains) but I've had one time I've ever felt truly unsafe on public transit in many years of riding, I'm not going to let that stop me.
I realize i should add: it's basically impossible to drive on an expressway in Chicago without some jackass putting your life in danger cutting you off at the last second or weaving in and out of traffic with inches of clearance. It is genuinely far more dangerous, and far more scary, than riding a CTA bus alone at night.
> 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...
Just enforcing basic laws and rules on buses would go a far way. Also fare enforcement is talked about in Seattle not as a way to raise more revenue for the system (indeed, fare enforcement costs more than it brings in), but to make it safer (no one wants to ride Link and get stabbed at Capitol Hill station).
Make crime crime again and get rid of the loud music and drug use?
As a society we forgot how to just stand up and say no. We relegated people doing so as Karens instead of supporting them.
I strongly agree. Laws are a reflection of our values. If our values are that people should be free to blast loud music in public, spit on the sidewalk, and harass and intimidate others, our laws will permit that behaviour. Many Asian societies ensure their laws prevent people acting that way, often with harsh penalties. As long as we have such a strong movement to "defund the police," and "abolish prisons," our societies will never be as safe as theirs.
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.
This has never happened to me in a taxi or Uber, and one such incident would be more than enough for me to never take public transit again.
I'd rather see drunks on my bus/in the metro than on the road.
I know it's dismissive of real fears and anxiety caused by that kind of behaviour, I understand where it comes from. But intellectually, I know I'm infinitely more safe having effective public transportation than not, even if emotionally I might not always feel the same.
I agree, but at that point I'm in favor of just having a bus that carts drunks and druggies around the city and normal people have no expectation of using it. In my experience in a big city this is already how public transit is used.
Vast majority of public transit riders in big US cities are perfectly normal people. Majority of my office takes transit (or other non-car method) to work here in Chicago. It's similar in NYC and Washington. And yes we all can afford to drive (i even own a car) it just doesn't make sense to take a car downtown, ever.
I've taken the bus all over the city too. Overwhelming majority of people are not drunk or high or anything, and it's not considered weird for normal people to ride the bus.
In fact, i haven't touched my car since i last visited friends in Wisconsin back in May. Most of my friends don't own cars, several can't even drive
> In my experience in a big city
Do you mean "in the US"? There is a whole part of the world where public transit is actually working well.
Yes, in the US. Public transit does work well here, doing its part to commute the above categories of people around. Anyone who can afford to opts out because point-to-point travel is literally always better no matter where you are in the world.
> point-to-point travel is literally always better no matter where you are in the world
Yeah, cycling is better than public transportation in cities in most scenarios.
My experience in the US is that it's not always worse than a car. I tried multiple times going from the San Francisco airport to Oakland. The BART was systematically faster than a taxi stuck in the traffic. I feel a lot safer going to the airport with the BART than with a taxi, because with the taxi I may miss my flight.
Similar experience driving in Los Angeles. So much traffic, whenever there is a train it's better.
In NYC, the subway works really well, too.
Even with the slow ass 2025 CTA and a transfer in the loop, it's faster for me to take the train to get home at rush hour than to drive. Getting to Midway i could technically save 25 minutes driving, but at 10x or more cost.
I think these are just different measurements of safety. I do trust a subway to get to its destination on a reasonable schedule to a greater degree than an Uber, but to me that's a very different question than physical safety. The NYC subway is a great example of this actually, since it does seem to run very well but in the last year has had multiple horrifying incidents.
> The NYC subway is a great example of this actually, since it does seem to run very well but in the last year has had multiple horrifying incidents.
Boeing has had multiple horrifying incidents in the last years. Would you say that aviation is unsafe?
Again I think these are different concerns. On a plane I am with a section of the public that can hold their life together enough to buy a plane ticket, and I do not feel overtly physically threatened by them. On a subway I am with a section of the public so prolifically jumping over turnstiles that it's a systemic concern for for the subway itself. Concerns about the engineering mettle at Boeing or whoever provides the subway cars for NYC are separate.
That's not what I meant.
I understand that there are uncomfortable experiences in the subway in big cities. But statistically, what percentage of the people get physically hurt as compared to the total number of travellers?
Same applies to planes: the quality of Boeing seems to have gone down in the last few years to the point where I choose airlines flying Airbus. That's my feeling, it is valid as a feeling. But statistically, the likelihood of my flight with Boeing ending up in a crash is very small.
For me it comes down to a very binary decision. Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause over taking a taxi or Uber. It doesn't happen on planes, and taxis and uber have better audit trails, and the bad stuff mostly happens outside the US, where I live. In both of these situations I'm also at the mercy of a bunch of lazy engineers and a Jira board. It's valid to try to pick the better engineers. But my immediate concern is my physical safety, and the safety of the people I bring with me, and a private situation is always going to be the safer option when the primary threat is the strangers around me.
> a private situation is always going to be the safer option when the primary threat is the strangers around me.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that maybe you over-estimate the threat.
> Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause
I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights: Boeing planes have crashed because of technical issues. The fact that they haven't crashed on the US soil doesn't say it's safer to fly them in the US.
So there is a measurable number of deadly incidents that happened with Boeing planes. I find it interesting that it doesn't give you pause at all, but the subway incidents do.
Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus. The granularities of the stats don't affect my decision much.
> I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights
Because again technical and social issues merit different weighting. If I'm flying on a 787-MAX I am at the mercy of all the good and bad design decisions that went into producing it. Those will be relatively consistent between flights for better or worse. The population of people traveling on a bus or subway routinely changes and is much less predictable. That predictability matters a lot here (to me). And given the option between weighting the threat of strangers around me vs. the threat of technical issues with a particular manufacturer, it seems to me that Boeing would have to crash a lot of planes on US soil before it would outweigh the number of people threatened or made uncomfortable on other forms of public transit.
> Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus.
Pretty sure it's not. But it definitely feels safer.
I think that you make your decision based on your feeling. Don't get me wrong, it's fine. But it's irrational. You don't avoid the NYC subway because it's dangerous, you avoid it because it feels dangerous to you. That's a valid concern, but you should be aware of the difference. Because I'm pretty sure that the actual statistics will tell you that it is not as dangerous as you feel.
If you said "I take the car because I don't feel safe in the subway", I'd say "it's unfortunate, I wish they could improve the experience in the subway". If you say "I take the car because taking the subway is a bigger risk on my physical integrity", I'll say you're probably wrong.
It's literally not safer to take an Uber
> Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause over taking a taxi or Uber.
But any measurable number of car-on-car incidents in the NYC is not enough to give you pause? Uber drivers aren't exactly known for their safe driving you know...
I am actually less scared of having my purse stolen than getting killed by a reckless driver.
If literally everyone who can avoids it, I'm not sure it works that well
I avoid having a car because I live in a place where I can get by with busses, public carpools and the occasional uber, having a car would mean having to deal with finding parking for it, finding a mechanic I trust, driving in traffic and having to still ocasionally use any the former if I want to have a beer
It's not a matter of quality, it's a matter of preference. I don't own a car. I live three blocks from a bus stop and I Uber everywhere instead, because it's cheap and predictable. The buses are clean, they run on time, but the population is well-off enough that there's almost no reason to take them, and that filters to buses being full of people who for one reason or another (often significant problems integrating with society) cannot pay for an alternative.
If one takes public transit it's because of convenience, cost, or virtue, and convenience is often the leg lacking, because it doesn't come to your house. I have walked blocks to and stood at many bus stops in my life surrounded by unwell people and telling myself that I'm being socially efficient does not smooth that over particularly well.
It's the association with unwell people that I don't get, and I do agree that it feels particularly US Centric
Coming from a place where it's a lot more normalized, I've taken the bus, twice a day for the last say 7 Years, the worst I've seen has been the ocassional drunk person (I've also slept 90% of my commute plenty of times, that's how safe I feel)
Mostly it's working people and high school students (But also, old people running errands or going to church) I assume most of those druggies/thiefs/etc, know that there's a lot to lose if they get caught messing with people on the bus (And I have seen a couple times a driver refusing service to specific people)
All the drivers know each other, and people on the same route are more often than not in you community and will tell people around
On the same note, a common thief usually avoids "working" places near his own house, because that's one quick way of destroying your life even if police never gets involved
That's reasonable, and as I noted in another comment I've only lived in the US and can only provide that perspective. Though I see a lot of discourse around this dismissed as "US-centric" while avoiding the fact that the US, the melting-pot of the world, is potentially one of the best test-cases for whether public transit works.
All of the situations you describe are just carpooling with extra steps.
Public transit as described in the US is a bunch of strangers with different goals and different jobs getting together in the same car at approximately the same time to go to roughly the same block. As a system it needs to be able to handle those, and when you scale it past the carpooling step, it doesn't.
Perhaps that's the problem to be solved, but if the US isn't handling it, I'm not sure you could point to a country solving the same problem and doing it better.
> Though I see a lot of discourse around this dismissed as "US-centric" while avoiding the fact that the US, the melting-pot of the world, is potentially one of the best test-cases for whether public transit works.
This is extremely US-centric :-). It's the exact cliché of how Americans see the world: "if it doesn't work for us, then it doesn't work at all", suggesting "because we are the best".
Go pretty much anywhere in the world: the US are perceived as the least capable in terms of public transit. I am not saying "it's the worse because there are conditions in the US that make it impossible to work" (which is what you suggest with "the US is the melting-pot of the world"). I am saying that public transit doesn't work in the US because the US doesn't understand how to make public transit work (and because the urban planning was often a complete failure in that sense).
There are many things that the US do really well. And there are many things that the US do really badly. The cliché, which honestly you kind of confirm here, is that the US people can't apprehend the thought that maybe they could learn something from other countries. "If it doesn't work for us, it means that it is impossible". And I'll end by quoting you saying pretty much exactly this:
> if the US isn't handling it, I'm not sure you could point to a country solving the same problem and doing it better.
I don't think I follow, all of those people in my example are taking the same route / the same bus, How is that different? Or what difference would there be on a carpool / not a carpool?
On the same idea, walking a few blocks is the expectation here, being left on the same block on public transport would be enough to increase real state value
The bus I take everyday usually has:
- A random assortment of (Usually european) backpackers
- Some hospital workers
- A few factory workers
- Some office monkeys like me
- Random people dressed normally that I can't categorize
We just go along roughly the same route at the same hour
This is also mostly true in the US but replace the backpackers with people who often have little or no reason to be on the bus at all; panhandlers or people whose specific motive during the day is to harass people on the bus for money or fun. There are people who spend all day on the bus following its route back-and-forth to harass passengers. It's a not-insignificant amount of people; I have no doubt they exist in some form in other countries and maybe the generalized social solution lies outside the transit system, but I do think it's a product of having truly public transit in a place where the public is a sample of everybody everywhere.
EDIT: The distinction I make with a carpool is that you all know each other - you know the passengers, you know the drivers, everyone knows each other, the social contract enforces that nobody does anything too off-putting. Truly public transit has to assume that every passenger is a stranger to the other, and that's harder.
Where the fuck do you live dude
Not saying that you're wrong at all, but that feels pretty specific to the US. Which to me confirms that it is an urban planning failure.
In many places in the world, it's not remotely like that. I understand that "public transportation sucks in the US", but I feel like US people conclude from it that "public transportation sucks". And this is wrong. It's really a failure in the US.
That's fine, I've only lived in the US and can only provide that perspective. However I cannot imagine a version of public transit that would be so good that I would actually use it - and this includes looking at the options available in other countries, because as far as I know we're still operating with buses, trains, subways, carpools, etc. Until ya'll have free taxis that come to your house and take you directly to your destination, it's just not a comparable sell.
To that extent I think it comes back to preference and maybe culture, and doesn't indicate any kind of failure. In the US we can afford not to take public transit and exercise that preference, in many places, it's not an option.
> In the US we can afford not to take public transit and exercise that preference, in many places, it's not an option.
Public transit is objectively a better solution than individual cars. It's not that other countries have public transit because they don't have a choice. They do: they just choose the better option.
> To that extent I think it comes back to preference and maybe culture, and doesn't indicate any kind of failure.
Sure, it was built like this in the US because of the culture. But retrospectively it was a mistake. Driving an individual car emits more CO2 than taking a bus or a train, period. The US is probably the only place in the world where a swasticar is considered "ecological": it's using a lot of energy, just because it's heavy.
Plenty of Europeans can afford to do whatever they want and still take transit. Same in Japan, China, all over the developed world.
I just fundamentally can't get why you're so offput by trains.
You've never had a road rager try to run you down or follow you somewhere?
And this doesn't even begin to account for injury or death due to car accidents. People die all the time in cars.
There have been plenty of people that have got into an Uber or taxi only to find out the driver is unlicensed or has bad intentions. One such incident would be more than enough for me to never get in a car alone with a stranger again.
An Uber i was in pulled straight out into traffic and if not for oncoming cars slamming their brakes we'd have been t boned. Like 4 Ubers I've been in featured a driver watching YouTube.
Sometimes you don't really have a choice. But I basically always choose the bus instead of i can help it.
See my other comment here but this is exactly my point. On a bus with dozens of strangers I have 0 recourse. In a car with someone who at least had to provide some kind of ID, I have more power. Consider that strangers just being present is not likely to protect you.
EDIT: I don't think your original comment included the licensing bit (apologies if I just read it poorly), but it doesn't change my point. If you have to provide some paperwork, however illegal, however incorrect, it is a barrier to crime that public transit does not have, and is a paper trail.
Be grateful you've not been assaulted by a taxi/Uber driver then. On the topic of self driving cars, I'd much rather put a woman in a Waymo at 2am after the bars close than an Uber.
I am grateful and this is exactly my point. On a bus I am at risk of being assaulted by dozens of people who did not need to provide any ID to be there. In an uber or taxi I am likely to have recourse.
If the Uber driver kills you, you're just as dead as if some random on the bus killed you, unfortunately.
I don't disagree, but I still have more recourse as a dead man who hired an Uber with a license plate and never made it to his destination vs. stabbed to death on a subway with 100 people, CCTV and no witnesses.
I second this.
The drunk people you find on a bus are just driving themselves home in the US. Not sure which option is safer. As a European it's mind boggling that you would find a big parking lot next to a bar
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.
This seems like a false dichotomy. In general, the drugged up people on the bus probably don't have cars.
11,000 dead Americans a year disagree. (Alcohol is a drug too.)
No one is saying that people who use drugs (or alcohol, which you refer to) don't ever drive cars. My point was that the ones on the bus probably don't. People who ride the bus are disproportionately poor, and unable to afford a car.
As for your point about drunk driving, I would guess most people who drive drunk would be more likely to take an uber/cab than ride the bus, which is not point-to-point, and which often takes much longer.
You’re making a guess. Who can say? There are many people who have a car and don’t want to pay Uber prices when they don’t want to drive, and there are many cities where public transportation is convenient.
That sounds like a self centered culture problem not a public transportation problem.
People die or are grievously injured all the time in car accidents. The subway has a very particular kind of unsafeness concern (visible poverty). Cars as an insulated bubble for people to avoid ever being in the same physical space as a poor person is a mess.
How about just fix those problems in public transport. Weve put zero thought/resources into it
Off the top of my head, we spent 90M[1] over the last few years adding new gates to prevent fare-hoppers. That's a far cry from "zero thought/resources".
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-fare-gates-...
Sorry Im from LA.
Still though, compare 90M to the amount of money that goes into car infrastructure, including the ~$500+ (on average, 20% of peoples income) people pay monthly for their automobiles.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DMVSRC1A027NBEA Over 360 billion spent in 2024 alone
> I tend to understand her side quite well when I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride.
That seems to describe city streets. I had a relative that until recently refused to visit major cities because of this, using basically those same words (unsafe, uncomfortable, dirty).
That's a reflection on your city and society rather than busses.
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.
The former is what individual people are interested in solving. The latter is not on their minds outside of threads like this.
Oh no, not fare hoppers, the most terrifying urban creature!
Why do people care about this. How does this affect you.
Using public transport is, statistically, safer than a private vehicle.
It is often perceived as unsafe, but perception is not reality.
The likelihood of getting stabbed on a bus is probably higher than in a car.
Perception of safety isn't just about accidents.
Now I'm curious whether or not this is true. I'm much more likely to be killed or assaulted by friends or family than by a random person, and if I'm being killed by someone, the most likely killer by far is also the person they killed, even in the US. Further, while I know people who were shot in their car, I know nobody who was shot on a bus (I don't know anyone involved in knife violence in any capacity).
Do you have any reason to only care about being stabbed in particular? Is another car running a red light and smashing into yours, leaving you to bleed to death within the hour preferable to being stabbed somehow?
In America or elsewhere? In America, they are dirty and unsafe because they are drastically underfunded, because of people like Elon Musk. This is the history of public transportation in America. America also has a despicable homelessness problem because of all the libertarian nonsense.
Nah. Here in my corner of eastern europe public transit gets a fuckton more funding compared to wild 90s. Yet it’s getting worse and worse.
Your robo taxis will also become dirty, unsafe and unclean.
The quality of service a private entity will provide, does not magically make it better.
It’s better only because of competition driving differentiation in order to capture more market share.
But if you cannot compete further on quality, you will compete on price.
The airline industry is a good example of this.
Public Safety, public transit, can be very good, provided the incentives, funding and institutions to serve it are funded.
People take pride in their work, including the work that results in world quality public services.
How will the robotaxis become unsafe? The reason public transit is unsafe is because of the other passengers on board with you, but you have the robotaxi to yourself.
> How will the robotaxis become unsafe?
Apparently they already are: they need a supervisor human for every ride.
Are Waymos unsafe too? Didn't they also have them at first?
My point was that the robotaxis have to become safe before we can think of them becoming unsafe again :-). I don't remember mentioning Waymo.
They already aren't safe
Pricing - the point of the airline industry example is to highlight the level of nickel and diming that happens.
I’ve been on the best ranked airline, and had dirty toilets - before take off.
I’m not alluding to enshittification here - just that if your commuters don’t have the money to pay for better quality taxis, they are going to get dirtier cabs, and less safer cars.
Being private isn’t a magic bullet- it’s a matching of incentives and markets that produces outcomes.
This doesn’t mean that public goods and services can’t be equivalently good.
But when people complain public transit is unsafe, they don't mean that it's dirty (even though that's usually also true). They specifically mean they're worried about being the victim of a crime committed by someone else on it with them, and robotaxis solve that regardless of price.
There was a gang operation in India that targeted drivers stuck in traffic.
They tapped on the side of the car, making it seem like there had been an impact.
When the driver opened their window and leaned out to find out what would happen, they grabbed whatever was on the windshield and ran.
Automated cars have been stopped by … consecutive stop signs.
Look - Safety is - at some point - a societal issue. Yes, being in your own taxi is cool, and the threat you are concerned about is reduced.
But this is assuming things remain the same.
Airplanes are dirty, unsafe and unclean?
The robotaxis will have someone cleaning them between uses? Maybe they can sit in the front seat!
By letting people report messes in the taxi that arrives and passing on the vehicle if it’s soiled, then you can quickly determine and evict the messy people from the system.
Airplanes usually have crews cleaning them after every flight + crew keeping order during the flight. Have you ever seen an airplane which just landed after 12 hours flight? What a mess huh?
I have never seen an airplane anywhere near as filthy as nearly every subway I've been on.
I did. Long haul flights are always yummy. And the toilets there are just the cherry on the top.
> Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation
If done well, this should fix the most critical gap in public transit. You can move massive amounts of people via trains and buses -- but that doesn't get them from transit to home (unless you're lucky enough to live near an access point).
The robotaxis should be solely used for that 'last mile' -- reduce the need for transit parking (which is insane for commuter lots).
About the only place I’ve ever been to where this complaint really rings true in suburban areas is the US, and I’d be inclined to put that more down to poor funding and planning than anything else. If anything I kinda have the opposite complaint; there are bus routes in Dublin with literally a stop every hundred metres, in weird winding routes, and you can’t get rid of them because people will write to their TD (MP).
This is what happens when you move a bus stop: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/03/18/legal-a...
Bus routes and other expansions are constantly fought against in the suburbs, not because they don't want to conveniently get to the city, but because they don't want certain people conveniently coming from the city to the suburbs. There's a history of exactly why the suburbs exist in the US.
Humans have these weird appendages called "legs". Non-americans often use them to get places.
More seriously, bicycles exist.
There is no "gap in public transit". Transporting people in cities is a solved problem. It's trains+trams/buses+bicycles. There, done.
I see this as a call for the robo-rickshaw.
> you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that
There's no space for 4-seater sedans each carrying a single person. How about tiny 1-seater self-driving golf carts going no more than 30mph? They take up as much space as 2 bus seats. This is ok because you're saving the space from the bus's aisle and driver compartment, and because buses rarely run completely full so they already waste some space.
These vehicles don't exist today. But I bet you could design and build them much cheaper than subway systems in most North American cities. These cities tend to be less dense than European or Asian cities, where trams and subways are more economical.
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.
No you don't have to converge to that. Railways and trams tend to be defined by track switching. In-car switching creates a different class of system as the track is dumb, headways can be much tighter, and with a network of rails you don't have to go to a central hub, to go to another central hub, to then go to where you actually want to go.
Stations can be frequent and offline, individual transports can be smaller to transport a family / sleeper car / pallette-load of goods, land use under the track becomes available ie. new routes over farmland become viable, tracks can cross easily in 3D, and can as they are prefabbed, a line can be constructed and repaired quickly.
Although it's (IMHO) not ideal, https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/2011/11/climbing-chain.htm... can give you an idea of the possibilities.
You are just creating an expensive infrastructure for few individuals. If you want to justify the cost, you need to push as many people through it as possible. And most efficient way to do that is train. Thus every pod nonsense will get converged into a train or train like setup.
Couple of things here, you're discounting completely the effect of distributing the passenger load across a network, secondly there's no reason why small minicars can't run on the network on high-traffic routes in addition to the smaller ones.
The important points are:
Point-to-point unlike trains (hub-hub) and busses (every stop). As a result, load is distributed across the network. Small offline stops like busses. Complements other systems (tube, freight trains etc.) - if you can separate freight from passenger rail that's a massive win (eg. capacity, schedules). In-car switching lowers headway, does not require centralised coordination. Cars do not need to park - recycled on the network. Sleeper cars. Cars can go direct from warehouse to local shop, as the small cars can berth inside the warehouse/shop for loading/unloading. Power supplied in-track, possibly with backup batteries, but not neccessary depending on implementation. Separate track from pedestrians etc. Prefabbed track for quick build-out and maintenance. Rail and road require preparing the surface rather than driving poles into the ground. Separated steering, load, drive systems, unlike rail which has to compromise with a single conical wheelset. No derailment. Tighter turning than busses and trains, so you can fit it where they cannot go, note we don't always need to run at high speeds in cities, only intercity. Suspended systems can easily tilt - better ride comfort and tighter turning at high speed. Weatherproof, more so than bus or rail. More tolerant of natural disasters if above grade (flooding, earthquakes etc). Better land use if pole-mounted, lighter cars (say 20 people max) than light rail allows lighter-weight structures, and hence lower wear and noise. Heavy vehicles wear roads and rail much faster.
Dumb cheap rails, only power, no switching or coordination. This is a big cost for trains which need to rely on slots and schedules. Coordination is done via protocols to allow for decentralised on-demand use. 3D track allows say transport to halfway up a building. If you have dual-size compatibility (big and small) this allows individual parcel delivery, recycling collection, use in factories etc. with the small system.
Conventional trains cannot do any of these things (tilt is not as good). Yes they are THE most efficient at transporting large numbers of people / freight from eg. the Superbowl, but history has shown they are far from a complete solution.
The features I'm talking about here are not gadgetbahn ideas, they are real advantages for what is a new system, not a car, a bus or a train. This can complement existing systems. Cost is a misnomer when you factor in switching and coordination for busses and rail. Last mile becomes much less of a problem. Pitching a more personalised transport is easier. If you standardise the track and protocols you can have many companies building it. You can run fibre, power, solar panels (if suspended) in the same track for infra buildout in 3rd world countries.
For comparison, the numbers for an example system: At full occupancy (which seems to be what everyone quotes for rail, discounting economies of running routes off-peak etc.) 20 people with 10sec headway = 7200 people /hour on one rail. If we say we can fit 2 rails per train rail width-wise and another 2 heightwise, that's 28800 people down the same railtrack profile, which is comparable.
This is also leaving out platooning eg. Virtually coupling 2 cars together, so slightly longer platform which doubles your throughput to 57600. This is different to a train as platooning is a temporary arrangement.
Given a 2min loading time, you would need say 12 platforms to support this from a single station, but that's normally aggregated from multiple stations funneling into the same track, so you'd only require that at terminuses for instance.
> you will find out that these vehicles needs their own infrastructure, because... people [cross] streets on lights.
Isn't handling that part of the definition of "self-driving"?
People repeatedly crossing lights will create traffic in the city, self driving or not.
Using your own infrastructure negates what self driving tech bros are trying to achieve - pods on existing roads.
Your vision for public transportation sounds like "trains, walk, bike, or gtfo".
There's 0 room for buses. If someone lives 2 miles from a train station and can't bike, too bad.
Maybe you don't mean that, but it sounds like that to me. Please explain how last-mile connectivity works in your world.
This edge case always comes up as counter argument to better public transports and cycling infrastructure. The few who can't combine walking or a bike with some form of public transport will simply rely on less efficient modes of transport on the now much less busy roads... be it a (small) car, a shuttle, a taxi, or whatever makes sense.
It'd be silly to suggest we don't need escalators because the elderly only use the elevator anyway.
> The few who can't combine walking or a bike
Outside of dense metros, getting to the nearest bus stop or train station (note: nearest, and not necessarily the one you need for that trip) entails a minimum 10 minute walk. Most people don't live in NYC where you climb down from your apartment and board the bus/subway. Add on a 10 minute walk at the other end of the ride as well, and some waiting for the bus or train, and your trip is already 30 minutes long without going anywhere.
So then you resort to biking to save time. Even assuming 100% of the population can bike (not true because elders, small children, people with disabilities etc.) buses only have 2 bike racks. Trains are somewhat better but even they don't have space for everyone's bike.
Train-heavy solutions work best in dense urban environments. Most of North America is not like that. You need complementary modes of transportation. They aren't for "edge cases". They are a holistic solution that makes the entire system accessible. A train is useless if people can't get to it easily. If there are frequent, fast bus routes to get people around then train ridership goes up too. It's not a competition.
Even in a place as dense as manhattan (where I live), it’s very common to spend 30 minutes on your commute still between walking to/from the subway and waiting for the train. Without sounding too harsh, a 20-minute walk really shouldn’t be a major hurdle for the vast majority of working adults.
Whenever I visit other parts of the US I’m struck by how resistant people are to walking even half a mile in the best of circumstances: wide, well-lit sidewalks etc. It’s remarkable how often we default to driving for trips that clearly don’t require it, and it’s like I’m speaking heresy for even suggesting it when visiting somewhere that has pedestrian paths.
At the heart of the public transit debate, it seems, is a simple reality: Much of the country simply doesn’t want to move at all, even short distances. Suggesting someone walks half a mile sometimes feels like suggesting they run a marathon. All the pedestrian infrastructure in the world won’t change that.
If you are not a bed ridden, you can walk from a stop to your home. Solution does not need to be perfect, it just needs to be acceptable (price and capacity) for most of people and pods aren't either cheap nor have enough capacity.
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.
> 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.
Isn't the money from things like vehicle registration fees and gas taxes already doing that?
Gas taxes and registration fees don't cover the whole cost. Federal subsidy is mostly essential for the US road network, and most states use other tax sources on road costs as well. A person who's never purchased a car nor gasoline has still paid into the road system one way or another.
Not really. Those types of things don't even cover operation of the land as vehicle transport, since the highway trust fund has to keep getting bailed out. But I'm not really talking about the operational costs, I'm talking about land rents.
There are surely places in the USA where there are no competing uses for land, and having ppl drive on it is not depriving the public at large of anything. But this stops being true in any town or city above a modest size.
For non-transport land uses, we ask those uses to compete amongst themselves for the land. But for some reason, we don't apply this same logic to vehicle transport. It's considered the govt's job to expand the supply of land for vehicles in an unlimited fashion. If anyone suggested it should be govt job to provide unlimited free land for any other use - housing is the most obvious example - they'd get laughed out of the room. But put 4 wheels on it and suddenly they will bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to find the land for it.
So my modest proposal is that if people want to drive on some publicly owned land, the govt should put the use of the land for a fixed period, say 50-100 years and auction the rights. Let the prospective drivers compete with other uses - say apartment buildings - for the land and see what the public is missing out on by setting the price at $0.
Not really, because it doesn't encourage more compact road usage. It just encourages fewer cars and less fuel consumption respectively.
I'm not opposed to congestion pricing. I think it is inevitable as self-driving technology becomes widespread. Robodrivers remove the pain of being stuck in traffic. So you need something else to prevent forever traffic jams.
> buses and trains, but they get to divide that land consumption by the number of people inside, making the comparison much more favourable
Buses and trains rarely run completely full. A one-seater golf cart is a "bus" that runs at 100% occupancy.
A 60' bus going 60mph might need 5400 sqft of land vs the 2600 sqft of the car. It would only need 2 passengers to beat it.
re: "completely full" - the vehicle is irrelevant. Neither the full one seater golf cart, or the full 50 passenger bus make the road way completely full, but they have very different land costs per person and as owners of the land, we should be asking why we've set the price for using 2600 sqft of land the same as the price for using 26 sqft of land - $0.
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.
I like this "city golf cart" idea. Just take a golf cart type of vehicle, give it a better battery. 30mph is all you need in a city.
In fact, you could even take the self-driving element out.
"this is ok because..."
you might want to think a bit longer on the inefficiencies here.
Do tell...
I see half-empty city buses running all the time and no one says boo about "inefficiencies" then. And even then city buses outside of dense metros run no more frequently than every 15 minutes, but only during rush hour, and only on popular routes. That's no way to get everyone loving public transport.
I want to take public transport. I don't want to spend hours waiting for the bus. I don't want to wait 20 years for a subway to be built either. What do I do?
The only answer is more frequent, smaller buses. But drivers are expensive. So then self-driving buses. And if the buses drive themselves, you really want to them to be completely full, all the time. What kind of "bus" is always completely full? A single-seater golf cart.
Even a half empty bus is considerably more efficient than most forms of personal transportation.
Is a half-empty bus more efficient than a 4-seater sedan carrying 3 people? Or an electric scooter? An electric trike? A golf cart?
The buses used here (double decker) take 80-100 people depending on model and are 12-14 meters long (about three smallish cars nose to tail. Half full they are massively more space efficient than cars. Even mostly empty, really.
The story is a _bit_ worse for single decker buses, but honestly not much.
Yes
Yes, probably but I haven't done the math, yes, and yes.
_In principle_, the electric scooter is probably more efficient per unit volume, but only if arranged in a biker gang style convoy.
The problem here, the great limiting factor, is volume. We have finite volume to occupy things with and these carts would be way less efficient than a bus. Bus drivers may be "expensive" but are entierly affordable in a public transport system. Hard to profit from though so america is fucked on that front. You're unlikely to see it without cultural revolution. Doesnt make proposed solution any less bad, or prone to simply perpetuating the ecact same issue plaguing the system now.
as for fsd busses, much more feasible with public infrastructure as you can give the bus eyes via cameras mounted at any difficult points in the city, things hard to make privately accessible due to abuse but fairly reasonable for a well made and maintained publically managed privacy focused system.
The answer is just more frequent buses.
I hope at some point, ride hailing companies will start offering something like a bus service. The trick will be normalizing prescheduling trips. Like, if I schedule a vehicle to pick me up at 8:15am to drive me to the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and a return trip at 5:30, you'd be able to better optimize picking up more people on the way who are going to a similar location and to do so in an appropriately sized vehicle. That would bring down prices a whole lot, while mitigating congestion.
I'd be willing to pay a bit more vs a bus if it means I can have a reliable pickup time, a guaranteed seat, and I feel safe.
Uber Shuttle already exists:
https://campuslifeserviceshome.ucsf.edu/transportation/uber-...
https://www.timeout.com/chicago/news/you-can-now-get-a-ride-...
> Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state
No, Elon wants to cancel public transportation. Just like in the 1930's when car companies bought public transportation to shut them down.
He already delayed public transportation work with his Boring company.
The average people won't agree to spend money on public transportation when there are robotaxi available 24/7 on "already existing infrastructure".
> 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.
Americans might hate American public transport, but it doesn't have to suck like the stuff I saw there on my visits.
I live in Berlin since 2018 and use public transport for almost every commute (almost, because a few times I just walked), and even used public transport when buying stuff from a building supply store. Don't get me wrong, it's slower than a car would be, but it's a really low-stress experience.
I have not even owned a car since 2016.
> I live in Berlin since 2018 and use public transport for almost every commute
How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?
In Germany overall, 68% of people regularly drive, versus just 14% who use public transit: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germans-commute-car-ins.... And Germany is about as dense overall as the state of Maryland, and well over twice as dense as California.
When I grew up (in America) there was a “school bus” that came to everyone’s house and took us all to school. I don’t know what happened where parents now all have to take a huge amount of time out of their day to do a second and third commute dropping off and picking up kids from school. Whatever is going on there, it seems like a huge regression.
> How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?
This is a very American question to ask. Why you should drop them off? Just give them public transportation pass, drill the route with them few times and off they go. Kids are not stupid.
Crazy idea, but why do kids need dropping them off to school?
If school is not further than 1 km, kid can just walk there. And in most German (and other European) cities schools are nearby.
And for locations that are remote, there are school buses, and public buses too...
Kid transportation is important, but it doesn't have to be cars. (I won't even go into kids who bycicle to their schools.) Of course, I understand that for kindergarten it's a different topic, but if we are taking about schools a person is already of age where they know where their home is and where they are going to.
You’re going to let your first grader (6yo) use public transit in America solo? In Copenhagen maybe but sounds like lunacy here.
> You’re going to let your first grader (6yo) use public transit in America solo? In Copenhagen maybe but sounds like lunacy here.
I mean, that's the exact point being made. The problem isn't public transport, it's American public transport. The USA could just copy what works from the rest of the world, if only it didn't already suffer the misapprehension of being the best at absolutely everything and having nothing to learn.
The rest of the world doesn't understand the US's problems. There are portions of the problem that are as easy as cutting and pasting transit systems from elsewhere, but unfortunately those are the easy parts.
Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.
> Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.
These are also places where the USA could do better if it didn't think it was already the best.
Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence", while the UK is apparently a crime-free haven in comparison because the British *Police* are not armed by default and overwhelmingly don't want to be.
Sprawl is harder to fix once the cities are built. But even dense cores I've seen in the USA don't have great public transit networks.
I have absolutely no idea why, or even if, America has more untreated mental health issues than Europe in general. But your governments at each level ought to.
They're all interrelated problems with multidecade response times to policy and dispute about the best path to fixing them. And the solutions to each aren't the same as in Europe, and the US has a hard time with consistent policy when there's no immediate payoff.
> Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence"
Without a hint of the self-awareness that the most likely person to be shot by your gun is yourself, either in the obvious case of suicide or where the gun has been taken from you either by family or theft.
> How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?
Sadly none, but if I did the nearest school is two stops along the bus route that passes almost by my front door.
Also, I can say from experience, that a lot of kids do use normal public transport here.
Furthermore, school hours don't line up with work days. Back when I was a kid myself, living in the UK, I was driven to and from infant (K-3) school, walked to middle school (4-6), and was given a bus pass and just expected to be able to figure it out for myself for secondary school (7-11). But even the primary school trip was never driven by my working dad. Different school hours here in Germany than back in the UK, but neither lines up with office hours.
> In Germany overall, 68% of people regularly drive, versus just 14% who use public transit: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germans-commute-car-ins.... And Germany is about as dense overall as the state of Maryland, and well over twice as dense as California.
The correct metric for commuting isn't the overall density, as vanishingly few people are attempting to cross farms (or in CA's case, winding mountain roads surrounded by flammable trees) on any given day. Look at each municipal commuter area separately for that, e.g. Berlin's commuter zone population is somewhat less than either the Bay Area or Los Angeles commuter zones, and all three are loosely-coherent commuter regions.
So many posters I this thread are obviously child free. The idea of carting kids to soccer practice on the bus, or shopping for a family of 4 and taking the bus with 100 pounds of groceries is absurd.
I guarantee half the people posting here will change their tune as soon as they have any responsibility beyond themselves.
I rode the bus for 15 years...when I only had to take care of myself.
In a whole lot of the world, children from 6-10 have a lot of responsibility and navigate public transit, etc, themselves. Of course, those countries are dramatically safer than the US.
It wasn't so long ago that kids even did this in the US, though the US was even more dangerous then.
The fact that kids have such a tiny range and have their basic needs ministered to such an extent by adults is not good for the kids and isn't good for the adults.
If i had kids, they could walk to the school and soccer field in the neighborhood in under 10 minutes. There's a playground at the end of the block. There's a high school a 15 minute walk away, and i would trust a teenager to take the bus to baseball practice or whatever.
I see families on the train and bus all the time. It's actually very easy to take a stroller on the train.
Why do people insist on buying 100lbs of groceries at a time, either?
My coworkers had kids, and a longer commute, and still took public transit to get to work.
> The idea of carting kids to soccer practice on the bus,
10 minute walk, not that I was interested in soccer as a kid (or as an adult).
> or shopping for a family of 4 and taking the bus with 100 pounds of groceries is absurd.
We have this fantastic new invention in Europe, called "deliveries". It's like Amazon, but it's your own supermarket.
Also, see previous point about building supplies. 25 kg may be ~55 lb not 100, but I have hauled both a 25 kg bag of cement and on a separate occasion a 25 kg bag of decorative rocks, in my rucksack, on a bus. I have *literally* seen someone take an actual kitchen sink with cabinet on the tram around here, something like this: https://www.amazon.de/Küchenschrank-Küchenspüle-Unterschrank...
Even on the one time I wanted more than I could carry (four 25kg bags of cement at once, and it seems these stores don't deliver specifically cement despite delivering everything else I've ever wanted), is was a case of "ask a friendly neighbour" not "buy your own car just for this"; but even if the neighbours had not been available, the building supplier does have rental vans specifically for people buying lots of stuff, so still no need to buy a car for this very occasional scenario that the thing you want is something they sell but don't deliver and it's too big or heavy to take on the bus.
Also, lunch breaks are generally long enough, and stores numerous enough and convenient enough, to do whatever top-up shopping is needed every day (except Sunday) rather than putting the whole thing into a single massive shop — and even if I forget shopping during lunch, my previous commute took me past at least 7 supermarkets and other decent-sized stores, plus two entire shopping malls at exactly where I changed lines — and additional options on two more shopping malls if I took a marginally longer route than my default.
Other things you may find ridiculous "what about a hospital visit!": it is between "very cheap" and "free" to call an ambulance here, and not "unaffordable even if you need it" like I keep hearing it is in the USA; and also the nearest hospital is a 16 minute public transport route, of which 14 is "bus" and there's a total of 100m walking (in total between both ends) going between the bus stops and the building doors.
Strollers/push chairs/wheelchairs: there's dedicated space on the bus, and more than enough space on the trains even on the ones without designated zones for them (and many do have dedicated zones for them and bikes).
(One thing I don't know and don't claim to know is how good in practice wheelchair access is in Berlin stations: I do know that the London network wasn't as good as it needed to be when I left the UK, but that's all).
Kids walk or cycle to school autonomously from the age of 6 in many other countries than the US.
I live accross from an elementary school and most of the children either walk (/bus + walk), take their scooter or their bike to arrive. Not to say the street isn't filled with cars before school starts, but considering how many children the school teaches it most certainly isn't the majority.
== How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?==
This is the definition of moving goalposts. What about this work-from-home that everybody on HN is always hyping? People in cities can often just walk their kids to school. Plenty of students in Chicago take the bus.
> 90% of people hate public transportation. They want to be in a private cabin that takes you directly to where you’re going.
Where do you get this number from? I used public transportation as a kid, and now as an adult and I always loved it. I like the feeling of people around me, that’s why I, for example, live in a big city. I also can’t imagine my life without walking, and this makes me hate cars oriented cities.
I also won’t be able to read on my phone while driving, and when taking uber I get sick (Waymo is better in this regard though).
But overall point it’s very clear pros/cons in my mind, partly because of the experience, partly because I understand it’s a lot of people around and we need to live together more efficiently. A lot of people advocating for public transportation on these threads are showing there are def more than 10% of people liking it.
People can hate as much as they want, but if getting from one part of the city to another takes 2 hours in a car and 20 minutes in a subway, people will take subway in 90% of cases.
> if getting from one part of the city to another takes 2 hours in a car and 20 minutes in a subway
But that's not the case anywhere, and there are no proposals that would even come close, unless you count ones that artificially slow down cars instead of making subways faster.
That's a case everywhere with subways, because car need to stop on lights for pedestrians, other cars and every intersection - while subway just goes?
Can you name a specific pair of locations that I can plug in to Google Maps and see that outcome?
How about the World Trade Center to Yankee Stadium. Driving is 32 min with a $9 toll, or 38 min with no toll. Subway is 31 min with $3 fare.
And this is a Sunday afternoon, I’m sure the drive gets dramatically worse on a weekday.
> How about the World Trade Center to Yankee Stadium. Driving is 32 min with a $9 toll, or 38 min with no toll. Subway is 31 min with $3 fare.
When I checked that route just now, I saw 31 minutes driving with a toll, 35 minutes driving without a toll, and 42 minutes on the subway. And even with your numbers, that's very, very far from the 2 hours vs. 20 minutes that was originally claimed.
> And this is a Sunday afternoon, I’m sure the drive gets dramatically worse on a weekday.
When I set a departure time of tomorrow at 5pm, it says 41 minutes on the subway and a range of 30-60 minutes for driving. (Still not even close to 2 hours vs. 20 minutes.)
It says 42 minutes via subway because you have to walk to the station and wait a few minutes for the next subway. Plus if you were driving, you’d of course need to park at the destination (either expensive or time-consuming, possibly both).
> It says 42 minutes via subway because you have to walk to the station and wait a few minutes for the next subway.
Google doesn't seem to count the time of waiting for the next subway train. It looks like they give you a departure time a few minutes in the future, such that if you leave then, you'll arrive just in time for the train. Since most people probably won't cut it that close, doesn't that mean it will probably take even longer than Google suggests? In particular, longer enough to counteract the time spent parking if you drive?
> Google doesn't seem to count the time of waiting for the next subway train.
Pretty sure it does. My understanding is that it computes the time simply as (estimated_end_time - start_time), and it determines the estimated_end_time as whenever you would reach your destination, which accounts for train schedules and walking time.
> Since most people probably won't cut it that close...
At least in NYC, IME people did cut it that close because during regular hours (that actually extend pretty late into the evening) the frequency is high enough that if you miss a train you only need to wait a few minutes for the next one.
The other thing that has not been mentioned so far in this sub-thread (but maybe elsewhere) is that public transport is very relaxing. Even if it's crowded and you have to stand, you can use your smartphone because there is wireless reception on the subway.
And if you consider the madness that is driving in NYC traffic, there is no comparison. It's maddening even just sitting in a rideshare. I'm surprised you're seeing driving times being comparable. I'm actually doubting the Google Maps estimates, which are usually rock solid.
> The other thing that has not been mentioned so far in this sub-thread (but maybe elsewhere) is that public transport is very relaxing.
No it’s not. In NYC it’s crowded, loud, and full of weirdos. You often have to stand and can’t get a seat. You have to really get good at tuning everything out. Meanwhile, driving (especially with supervised self driving or even modern adaptive cruise control and lane keeping) is quieter, has better climate control, and you can listen to a podcast or music without headphones.
> My understanding is that it computes the time simply as (estimated_end_time - start_time), and it determines the estimated_end_time as whenever you would reach your destination, which accounts for train schedules and walking time.
It does do that. But it moves start_time into the future, and that's what makes it not count the time of waiting for the train.
Liverpool Street station to LHR terminal 2, tomorrow afternoon at 1630.
Car gives up to 2hr, train gives 46min.
Abbey wood to LHR, up to 2h40 by car or 1h02 by train
46 minutes is a lot more than 20 minutes, and "up to 2hr" is doing a lot of work since Google says "typically 1-2 hr". And isn't London the city that instituted the ridiculous 20mph speed limit? So even if the 2 hours vs. 20 minutes were true there, I'd put London in the "artificially slow down cars" category.
The average speed on the Kennedy in Chicago at rush hour very well might be less than 20mph. It's taken me a full 75min to go 7 miles, the bulk of which was "expressway"
The train gets me home in an hour, every time. I could bike and save even more time.
Cars just don't move fast in cities.
It's too bad they don't give an estimate for how long it would be if the 4 million tube journeys per day were cars on the street.
Individuals don't make that choice, though. Individuals consider the transit modes available to them, and don't consider the externality of slightly delaying everyone else if they take a car.
Driving from the north shore of Chicago (Evanston/Wilmette/Winnetka) to downtown takes anywhere from 45mins - 90mins depending on traffic. Taking the Metra (commuter rail) is a guaranteed 30mins. There's no contest.
I picked a random address in Evanston and a random one downtown and we're looking at 35m by car or 1h 7m by train, assuming that I catch the first train (comes every 20m)
edit: the metra wasn't considered because it takes longer but what's worse, the station near Evanston trains run every 60 minutes! If you're timing is perfect its still far worse than a car, and if your timing is bad, sheesh.
At rush hour trains run every 20 minutes or better. A rush hour train does indeed take 30 minutes between Davis and OTC (tomorrow's 7:11 is scheduled for 29min)
You are absolutely not, without question, making that drive in under 75 minutes at rush hour.
Obviously the equation changes at different times of day, but the vast majority of trips between downtown Evanston and downtown Chicago are office workers.
Google Maps says Evanston to Chicago by transit right now takes 1 hour and 24 minutes.
Cool, you didn't even read my comment.
People not actually reading comments is indeed a common and frustrating thing on the internet (HN is better but still has it's share of issues), but in this case I don't think your comment said what you think it said, or you didn't read his comment
We’re making two different points. His argument though makes no sense when evaluating public transit since “I can jump in my car whenever I want” has never been a cogent argument against the efficiency of public transit.
Huh? You said it was a guaranteed 30 minutes. I went to verify that for myself and am pointing out the discrepancy I saw.
So it says that taking the Metra takes an hour and a half?
Whoops, it turns out Google was showing me the L and not the Metra, because the Metra's headways are so far apart today that you'd get there sooner by taking the much-slower L than you would by waiting for the next Metra. But even when I do pick the Metra, it's still showing a 50 minute journey.
Davis to OTC is 30mins so not sure what you’re looking at.
The Metra dumps you somewhere downtown that's nowhere near [pick many addresses downtown], and hence is slower.
It's not that drastic, but at rush hour it's noticeably faster for me to take the train than to drive from downtown to my house.
It is too bad we don't build our public transport for speed. We always build them to be everything to everyone.
Even in Tokyo it’s rarely faster to take public transit than an Uber.
Tokyo might not be the best example. Shanghai, Peking, Moscow, as per my experience, there is a risk of getting stuck for 2+ hours with car. Even if it was faster sometimes by car, there is a risk of getting completely stuck.
That only happens in third world countries.
It happens in the US if that was your point
It happens in Taipei and Seoul as well.
A good public transport system can be faster than driving, tho. Really take any city with a large metro system. And driving in such a city only works as well as it does because most people use the metro system. Move everyone to cars, and it grinds to a halt.
> A good public transport system can be faster than driving, tho. Really take any city with a large metro system.
Does DC count as having a large metro system? Because in DC, driving at the slowest, most congested time of day usually seems to be faster than the metro.
> Really take any city with a large metro system.
Which city? It’s not true in New York City or Chicago. For the most part it’s not true even in Tokyo unless you’re talking about going between two tourist locations that are both right next to subway stations.
It's definitely true for New York City. (Statistically speaking, of course. Late night hours things change because traffic drops to negligible levels and train frequencies drop as well. But most people care about regular work hours on weekdays.)
It’s not true even in New York City. I used to live at 86th and amsterdam and commute to 45th and lex. Google shows Monday at 8:30 am that’s a 27 minute drive or subway ride. That’s pretty much best case scenario for transit. Same address to our current NYC office at 55th and Park is a 15 minute drive versus a 30 minute train ride.
And of course, living at 89th and Amsterdam is insanely expensive. In practice, the folks at my company that work in New York City live in Queens or Brooklyn. Their train commutes are an hour+, similar to how long it takes me to commute 36 miles from Annapolis to the west side of DC.
This actually happened in 2002 and 2013 in Prague where subway temporarily ceased operations after flooding. Getting anywhere in the city was such a hell on earth, that walking or cycling was only kind-of reliable way to get around.
It's not just speed. Public transportation entails being closed in a small space with a completely uncontrolled group of the general public. When normal people think public transportation they aren't considering how well driving scales, they think cell phones blasting music out loud, homeless people, conversations on speaker phone, and random acts of violence.
Until that is fixed, people are going to prefer private transportation.
Do you actually regularly take public transport, or is this just what you imagine it to be like?
I think you know the answer to that question
It is. Try living in a civilized country, rather than one who's people aren't known internationally for being rude and having guns.
New York City doesn’t have guns but is dirty and full of rude people. Salt Lake City has lots of guns and is clean and full of really nice people.
SLC residents are perfectly capable of, and very happy to be rude to you and treat you with disdain for a multitude of reasons (and SLC is the most "tolerant" city in Utah. Anywhere out of downtown and you find that rapidly disappearing). My former employer was in SLC so I spent a lot of time there.
NYC people are superficially rude, sure, as a stereotype. But when I've had a genuine issue or question, I've found most people there willing to help. SLC people are just as superficially "really nice", for that comparison.
== There’s nothing you can do about it other than to impoverish the population.==
So dramatic. I know plenty of economically successful people who take public transportation. Visit Chicago, New York, London, Shanghai, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco and I bet you will see plenty of well-off people on public transit. Some of the richest places in the world, now that I think of it.
I don't know a single person like your described. Most everyone i know in Chicago takes public transit and rarely drives if they own a car at all.
Surely you have a source for that 90% number, is what I'm saying.
Come to a place with working public transport, then try and argue that.
I just want to get where I'm going cheaply, quickly and with the minimum of effort. In america, you need cars, outside of a few mega cities, because there is no public transport, and the stuff thats there is shite.
People want to move out of NYC because its fucking expensive, and the space you want to raise a family is very expensive. You would move to queens, because it had good train links to nyc. But as they've not extended the lines in any meaningful way for ~40 years, queens is now too expensive. (in practice nothing really since the 50s.)
> Come to a place with working public transport, then try and argue that.
I travel to Tokyo twice a year. When I came with my wife and three kids, we took an Uber everywhere because we could. I’ve also lived in Chicago, NYC, and DC.
In all of those places, even if you’re rich enough to live right next to a subway station, driving is usually faster, you don’t have to walk at either end during hot weather or rain, and you don’t have to share a cabin with the general public.
> People want to move out of NYC because its fucking expensive
If that were really true, demand for an NYC apartment would go down, and then prices would go down until people didn't want to move of NYC "because it's fucking expensive". Some people do actually want to live there!
You can have something most people don’t want, but prices may still be high if supply is limited compared to that demand.
I said it was expensive, not that no-one wanted to live there...
FTFY:
>> 90% of AMERICANS hate public transportation.
Get out into the rest of the world and you'll see public transportation isn't some status simple that means your poor if you use it. Americans are just status conscious showoffs at the demise of their own surroundings.
This 90% figure is entirely untrue, just hyperbole to backup one off anecdotes
The privacy is an illusion though. I'd rather have a sensitive talk in the subway than in a car where everything is recorded and tracked.
[dead]
>No, Elon wants to cancel public transportation. Just like in the 1930's when car companies bought public transportation to shut them down.
Except that's not what happened. Streetcars were already on the decline when car companies bought them. Claiming "car companies bought public transportation to shut them down" makes as much sense as "hospice doctors gave cancer patients painkillers to kill them".
From wikipedia:
>Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries' difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, consumerism, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.[
I guess we should make some comparisons between marketing budget for cars presented as "freedom" and public transit as outdated VS public transit discrediting cars.
Why were there tax incentives to own cars? Because cars were manufactured locally and required a lot of labor so we can say that it was a relatively positive thing for the economy.
But how come that some countries have both a strong public transit and huge car industries like France or Germany?
I've found that most Americans literally don't know that France has a car industry at all
Many would be astonished to learn that a French car company saved AMC from bankruptcy when AMC owned Jeep.
> Streetcars were already on the decline when car companies bought them.
And yet... LA has, still, 1,000 miles of light rail, and many other locations 500 miles plus.
And then you have Melbourne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Melbourne
> ... consists of approximately 1,700 tram stops across 24 routes. It is the largest operational urban tram network in the world and one of the most used, with more than 500 trams and 250 kilometres (160 miles) of double tram track. It carried 154.8 million passengers over the year 2023-24. Trams are the second most utilised form of public transport in Melbourne after the city's metropolitan commuter railway network.
Literally the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Can you point to an article about the 1930s? This is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
By 1918, half of US streetcar mileage was in bankruptcy
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How about 300 automated mini-buses carrying 30 people each?
You'd have higher frequency and variety of buses, so less walking / waiting needed. Maybe they can also have more flexible routes than ordinary buses.
It’s actually not that much easier. Putting cars on the road with digital dispatch means that the cost to route is near zero. But getting efficient allocation for buses is very hard.
You need high frequency for urban transit to work. A single line at once per fifteen minutes is 48 bus visits at each stop in a 12 hr day.
Just try it. Put 100 buses in Austin in some sim. You won’t get 100 people in them. SF is 49 sq mi with 800k people. Second densest city in America. 1200 buses.
It’s a doomed proposition with 100 buses.
Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation in a way that he profits from.
Who is going to subsidize money-losing enterprises?
The tax payers currently subsidize pretty much all of our transportation infrastructure. The question is what is the best way to spend that money.
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Billionaires obsession with transporting people in tiny little private pods and calling it the future continually perplexes me.
I've seen billionaire-backed projects that are literally just 6 passenger pods that use existing rail infrastructure. Sounded neat, until you realize that just a handful of 6 person pods would clog up a small rail system just as much as a handful of small trains capable of carrying 60 passengers each.
It's like they're completely detatched from the needs of everyday people. All they can think of when they see public transit is "gross, I have to sit next to poor people!" and they try to solve only that problem and nothing else.
You clearly have a pet issue. Why do you think that it's in any way relevant to the conversation at hand though?
Do you seriously think that the main challenge Tesla is going to face when trying to scale Robotaxi up is that there isn't enough room on the roads for all the Teslas? In a world where there's currently a dozen Robotaxi Teslas per city?
> In a world where
If you consider that "the world" is "the US". But in countries that did not completely fail their urban planning, public transportation works. Now admittedly the US probably has to compromise because of how it was built.
No way the robotaxi works e.g. in Europe. And that's without considering the fact that robotaxis belong to a guy who makes nazi salutes.
I feel it is the oppoosite way around.
The US is a modern country and was built in grids, incredibly easy to build any kind of transportation network on top of.
In Europe, large portions of cities and road networks were built before any kind of engine was even invented, and so it is incredibly difficult to retrofit onto winding lanes and tiny cobbled city streets.
The US was built for the individual car. That's what I consider a failure. Maybe it was not obvious back then, but retrospectively I think we can say it is a failure.
In cities in Europe, you can actually walk. Many times you're faster by bike than by car. And public transportation works well (plus you can put your bike in the bus/tram/train if necessary).
> it is incredibly difficult to retrofit onto winding lanes and tiny cobbled city streets.
Agreed. But on top of making them more beautiful, the fact that it's harder to have 6 lanes full of cars is desirable to me.
How has the US failed urban planning?
Countless US cities demolished their downtowns to build parking lots and countless more kicked minorities out of their homes to build highways
If you are living in US, can you walk to your nearest grocery store?
Yes, and I used to live within walking distance to several, and this has been the case everywhere I've lived in the US. However I don't even really think of walkability to grocery stores as a good metric for urban planning - I've since moved and get groceries delivered instead. I don't need to own a car, there are fewer cars on the road doing specific tasks. Good urban planning is flexible around the reality that the physical world is hard to plan and change for.
Rarely have I been on a bus with 100 riders outside of a few cities like Vancouver. Even there, it's only during limited periods of time per day. Most buses in most cities run with only a small fraction of the bus's capacity. Transit systems can try to bump up utilization by making buses less frequent but then that lowers overall ridership. Simply creating more capacity doesn't itself create greater ridership. I'd argue for 500 buses with 20 people if you really want people to change their behaviors as reliability and frequency is far more important for attracting riders with options than larger buses that are less frequent.
How about smaller buses then? This is quite common in the Nordic region it seems.
Your argument defeats itself. Robotaxi users won't be some sudden additional people in to the existing system, they'll instead replace that exact crowd who doesn't want to use public transit but live private rides with more freedom. Elon obviously knows more of this than your arrogant ass does.
And for the cities being filled? What cities are filled with are cars that are used 5-20% of the time. Tireless robotaxis instead, will multiply that number and thereby require a fraction of cars for the same ability, enabling greener, less contested cities, with _higher_ traffic throughput!
You hit a nail here: Some weeks ago, there was a story that people paid a premium of whatever double-digit-USD to get a PERSONFREE robo-taxi. This clearly shows that people will accept robo taxis, because this shows most are more comfortable in a "private room" than in public transport (esp. when i think about public-toilets like Berlin or Frankfurt) And by today, peoplre are already paying a premium, so i see a clear opportunity here.
Are you familiar with the concept of induced demand? It's often used in the context of road expansion, in which adding another lane increases the number of trips taken, and hence cars on the road. Often, traffic is often very similar to before the upgrade, if not worse (because the connecting infrastructure was not upgraded).
Demand for trips is elastic, and depends on many factors.
Similarly, if the Tesla robotaxi system is better than driving for anyone, it will necessarily increase the number of trips taken. Whether that's people who prefer to let the machine drive than drive themselves, or people who can't drive themselves (no car or no license), there will be more trips. Additionally, some number of people will take them instead of public transit, which will increase traffic without increasing trips served.
I know in Europe so I do know of walkable cities and how things do find a way with some limitations. We even reduced the amount of roads accessible to personal cars, literally 2 blocks from where I live.
With Robotaxi? Especially with the unavoidable fact (that I kind of don't like) of human driving eventually becoming curtailed with regulations, we can just use all of the existing capability that isn't used by transit, for Robotaxis that don't ever need to park even close to high traffic areas.
Induced demand won't ever overload the much more fluid system, especially as in peak times the prices can just go up a bit, and centers will become "gentrified" in favor of the more controllable Robotaxis way before driving your own car becomes literally illegal. Hell, driving your own car in Finnish cities is already ass.
> Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding
Given Elon's enviable track record of proving the doubters wrong, I'd be hesitant to make such a claim.
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.
An appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, unless the authority is an expert in a relevant field.
Elon is an expert at overturning conventional wisdom of what can be done in high risk enterprises. And transportation is one of his enterprises.
So your argument is basically that he is just very smart and good at being a disruptor therefore any questioning of his ventures is doubtful because he is successful at previous disruptions?
You really think that's a valid argument? Or is this just being an Elon fan wrapped in additional language.
> You really think that's a valid argument?
What you made up is not what I argued.
No, that is indeed what you argued. I suppose I’ll repeat the same question you’ve been asked several times now, do you have an actual argument against the valid skepticism of Elon’s robotaxi business?
> valid skepticism
There's a large gap between that and "without a shred of understanding".
The fact that you disagree with my argument does not make it not an "actual" argument.
FSD next year right buddy? How's your truck holding up?
> an expert at overturning conventional wisdom
Did you just invent a field so you can win an argument? Does it mean you revolutionized the field of inventing fields to win an argument?
What about his less successful ventures like the Boring Company or Solar City?
The world is full of one or two hit wonders thinking they have some insight on everything.
> one or two hit wonders
Very few are two hit. Three is incredibly rare (Steve Jobs).
Let's look at his hits:
1. Paypal
2. Tesla
3. SpaceX
4. Starlink
5. xAI
6. Neuralink (looking promising)
7. X (looking promising)
8. Boring (successful, but not a breakout success)
9. Solar City (less successful, now part of Tesla)
BTW, Jobs had his failure too - Next
By any objective measure, Musk's business success is incredible.
I'm not just making an argument. I invested in his companies, and am enjoying the returns.
When you list it like that, it's incredibly impressive. He's clearly autistic, and says and does very socially awkward things, but this is the kind of person which moves society ahead by decades. SpaceX alone has reduced space transport by 10 *times.* Starlink provides internet to everyone, anywhere in the world. [This](https://youtu.be/sX1Y2JMK6g8?si=rV5_BKsbPc2GPg3n&t=195) is like something out of a really cool sci-fi, but it's real life. It's going to be in the history books forever.
It's so impressive, I would never have believed it possible.
What's so sad is how others dismiss it all with "you didn't build that" and other nonsense.
Does that mean you are invested in Tesla or do you have private stakes in his other companies? Because all the other companies are separate and I feel like some people are investing in Tesla thinking they get part of SpaceX or something
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.
Im not a big Musk supporter, but none of those things you mentioned are illegal. So why should he be in jail? Just because you dont like him?
Lying about FSD has resulted in loss of innocent lives
Please list some of the things he's "proved the doubters wrong" about.
He demonstrated that electric cars are viable. Or that rockets can be reused.
But he also started the tunnel company that went nowhere, claimed we'd have fully autonomous self-driving by now, and for some reason lied about being good at video games.
I wish we'd see some nuance in this figure, and realize he's more self-serving than benevolent.
Possibly you omitted an (in America) from your original post? The first practical lithium ion battery car was either the Nissan Leaf or a weird Renault, depending on how you define practical (the Renault Zoe was built on the same platform as the weird Renault whose name I can’t remember , but came out about a year later). Both came out before the model S (though I think not in the US).
Really, the electric car revolution, such as it is, was largely driven by battery tech; lithium ion batteries crossed a threshold from not good enough (there were electric cars based on such batteries, notably some weird VW Golfs, but they did not sell well) to good enough.
The rocket thing was more business case than tech; both the US and Soviet Union studied reusable rockets from at least the 70s, but the economics wasn’t compelling.
> US and Soviet Union studied reusable rockets from at least the 70s, but the economics wasn’t compelling.
What could be more compelling than reducing launch costs by 90%? "Studying" something and "delivering" something are very different things.
> was largely driven by battery tech
Regenerative braking was a crucial enabling technology.
> The first practical lithium ion battery car was either the Nissan Leaf or a weird Renault
Too bad they didn't take the world by storm like Tesla did. Tesla got the formula right, the others did not. The success of the Tesla speaks volumes.
> What could be more compelling than reducing launch costs by 90%?
You, ah, might be overselling that a bit. An Ariane 5 (20 tonnes to LEO) launch cost about 150 million at the time it was discontinued (launch costs for the new ones are murky as they've only launched a couple of payloads so far). A Proton launch (similar size) costs $65m. Atlas V Heavy (18 tonnes) costs $110-$190m. A Falcon 9 reusable launch (17 tonnes) costs $70m.
Like, it's _cheaper_, but nowhere even remotely close to 90%.
> Regenerative braking was a crucial enabling technology.
Indeed! Given that it was invented in 1886, tho, I'm not sure what it has to do with Tesla. Apparently the first electric car with automatic regenerative braking was in 1967. The first really successful mass-market example would probably be the Toyota Prius (at least for cars; it's shown up in trams for a long, long time). The Leaf, of course, also had regenerative braking.
> Too bad they didn't take the world by storm like Tesla did.
Again, you're _really_ mostly talking about America. They're a little under 10% of the BEV market in Europe, about 5% in China. They were the best selling manufacturer in Europe for a couple of years, but were never enormously dominant.
"Falcon 9’s price per pound to orbit is roughly $2,700, while NASA’s SLS is a whopping $70,000."
https://www.technowize.com/how-much-does-a-spacex-rocket-cos...
The SLS is not a commercial launch vehicle, and does not in any way serve the same role as the Falcon 9. If you need to launch payloads that big, it is essentially the only game in town for now. In any case the launch cost estimates for SLS are pretty handwavey and incorporate a lot of r&d.
The Falcon 9 is clearly not 90% cheaper than launch vehicles of a similar role, ie ~20 tonne commercial launchers.
See: https://impulso.space/tools/blog/posts/sls-and-starship
Again, 10% of the cost.
If everyone else did it before and better, why was Tesla such a breakout success?
The leaf was also a breakout success, you're just pretending it wasn't
The investors in Tesla think otherwise. The Leaf is nothing like Tesla, as Tesla's success has shown.
I add "in America" to every post on here except the ones about EU tech regulations.
I mean yeah I agree with you. What he did doesn't justify the idealized view of him that people have. It's just that he's in the news 24/7 so the perception of his importance and greatness gets imprinted on you regardless of whether you want it or not.
> he also started the tunnel company that went nowhere
The Boring Company has had unexpected success in digging tunnels for cables and other city infrastructure.
Boring machines aren't new, nobody doubted he could do it, because it's been done many times before.
The Boring Company is making a nice profit doing it, because it's more cost effective.
The Space Shuttle had reusable rockets. Sorry, Musk didn't invent the idea or even prove it could be done first - that was NASA in the 1970's.
He also didn't "demonstrate" the first "viable" electric car, either. There were other electric cars before Tesla that were "viable" (and I don't really care where your goalposts are for that word). He bought his way into Tesla, so it wasn't even his idea - Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
Got anything else?
I'm not gonna die defending Elon, so you should assume a less combative tone. I absolutely don't love that he has the power that he does and what he does with it.
But electric cars are mainstream, he lands reusable rockets, and has a private space company that reaches orbit. People doubted that it will succeed, and he proved them wrong, I guess.
It doesn't mean that everything he does will be successful, or that whatever he does is worth doing, or the right thing to do, but he did achieve these things (using his wealth and power).
>so you should assume a less combative tone
You should stop assuming someone's tone from a single internet comment, especially when you're making up the tone in your own head. It completely derails the comment thread, because now we have to talk about how you're misreading things and trying to scold someone based on your own assumptions. But maybe your whole intention with your comment was to troll me?
Nothing in your comment is really changing any minds.
Have a nice day!
I'm ok with not changing your mind, as I said, I don't care for Elon, and honestly people should be way more critical of him.
> He bought his way into Tesla, so it wasn't even his idea
When Musk bought Tesla, Tesla was an office with no design and no car and no money. Technically, Musk did not found Tesla. In any practical sense, he did found it.
Tesla had previous engineering work before musk got involved
Previous engineering work is a long, long, long way from having a car design, let alone a successful design. Before Musk, Tesla was going nowhere.
“What have the Romans ever done for us?”
Sure, Tesla cars will be able to drive themselves next year for the last ten years.
I hear this argument often. Subways require billions in infrastructure and over 20 years of lead time. And they operate on fixed routes.
Additionally, robotaxis and Waymo-style systems are trying to replace the private car and on-demand ride-hailing, not mass transit like subways or buses.
Our country operates on 4-year political cycles, not 20+ years infrastructure visions. Hence long-term megaprojects are mostly pipe dreams.
> Subways require billions in infrastructure and over 20 years of lead time
Of course they does, because purpose of subways is to transport hundred of millions to billions of people a year. You just can't fit that on a road with a unscalable thing like a robotaxi.
Actually it's mass public transit that can't scale. Despite $1.3T in cumulative subsides US public transit usage is tiny: ~1.5% of trips and ~1% of passenger-miles.
Getting 100 people in a bus is not "easy" because very rarely do 100 people all want to from/to the same place at the same time. We end up bunching people in both time and space and making multiple stops and/or connections - which all make the journey longer and less competitive with alternatives.
And even then buses are only near capacity in our very biggest cities (top 10-15) for a hundful of hours during weekday rush hours. For example, in SF while buses/railcars may occasionally get crowded they are usually empty: Muni averages only 6 passengers per vehicle, BART only 8 per traincar. On a passenger-mile basis this makes the service very expensive (Muni ~$4 and BART ~$2 including capital) and very energy inefficient (Muni(LRV) ~400Wh and BART ~600Wh). Explaining why both systems are struggling financially and require massive ongoing subsides keep operating.
Because busses/subways/trains (i.e. mass transit) require lots of passengers to make financial - or even environmental - sense they will always be a niche, if very important, part of transportation. Robotaxis are competing in the much, much larger car/light truck market (80-85% of trips and passenger-miles). Uber/Lyft (plus traditional taxis) is already much bigger than public transit (~2% vs ~1-1.5%) and still growing and with what should eventually be a much lower cost structure robotaxis should greatly expand this. In other words robotaxis like Tesla will likely be much more scalable than public transit.
This is so wrong outside US.
SE Asia and Europe is proof of public transport being viable.
Not as familiar with EU statistics but for shorter trips (under 300km) public transit is well under 10% of trips while cars are over 50%. For all intra-EU travel in passenger-miles cars are around 75% while busses/trains of all types is well under 15%. Viable sure, more scalable probably not.
You have numbers for SE Asia?
Having taken Waymo rides multiple times in San Francisco I can attest to how awesome Waymo is. I am worried Tesla will bring a bad name to the whole robotaxi industry. Waymo has never had an at-fault injury accident. Tesla FSD has killed many people.
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.
Still way more (no pun intended!) than Waymo, which has had 1 Waymo involved in a 6 car crash that killed someone in one of the other cars. Besides the human fatality a dog was also killed, and 5 other people were injured, some seriously. The Waymo was empty at the time.
Ironically this crash was due to a Tesla.
The Waymo and the other cars were all waiting at a red light when the Tesla rear ended them at 98 mph.
The driver of the Tesla was not impaired at the time of the crash. He says he tried to stop but the brakes were not responding.
The driver was from Hawaii, and it was later discovered that there is someone in Hawaii with the same full name, Jia Lin Zheng, with a record of around 20 traffic crimes over the last 20 years, including excessive speeding and running red lights.
I don't know if it had been determined if the Jia Lin Zheng visiting from Hawaii who caused the San Francisco crash is the same Jia Lin Zheng as the Hawaiian Jia Lin Zheng who has the long record of unsafe driving.
I'm not familiar with the naming conventions of whatever country/culture that name comes from. Is Jia Lin Zheng the kind of name that probably many people have in Hawaii or is it one that is likely rare?
> 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.
> They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident.
Even if that were true, any accident where FSD was disengaged up to 30 seconds prior is counted as being engaged. And 30 seconds is long enough in driving that if FSD disengaged that long ago, there's no possible way any accident at that point was related to it.
>Even if that were true, any accident where FSD was disengaged up to 30 seconds prior is counted as being engaged.
source?
https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
Well that, and most of the incidents I've seen haven't been using FSD but instead traditional Autopilot which hasn't received updates in years.
Bullshit. And I am tired of having to call people out on it.
Autopilot shuts down when it can't handle the situation it's in. This doesn't help it "avoid blame" at all. Because Tesla considers Autopilot implicated in any crash that happened within 5 seconds from Autopilot being disengaged.
> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.
NHSTA's reporting requirements are even more conservative:
> Level 2 ADAS: Entities named in the General Order must report a crash if Level 2 ADAS was in use at any time within 30 seconds of the crash and the crash involved a vulnerable road user being struck or resulted in a fatality, an air bag deployment, or any individual being transported to a hospital for medical treatment.
It’s still counted as FSD enabled. Would you prefer FSD to remain active and potentially cause further collateral damage after an accident causing who knows what kind of damage to the vehicle? Safer to shut it down when systems are working and brace for impact. Seriously use your brain.
Can you elaborate on how things are counted?
Is it "counted" if FSD was engaged within a certain time frame prior to a crash? If so, do you know what time frame?
Or only if it was disabled automatically due to detecting a potential crash?
The latter would still be problematic, as a human driver noticing a problem just prior to the FSD disabling itself would potentially be missed (right?).
Do you know who does the counting and who makes the rules in this regard?
Asking as you seem to have more knowledge here than me.
30 seconds by law: https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
Your argument is ridiculous. Might as well attribute all accidents with any Tesla close in vicinity to FSD then?
The data is collected in all of these incidents, and most people have seen the clips of FSD avoiding otherwise potentially lethal accidents, so "They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident" is also just patently untrue.
Tesla’s disengage their self driving just before a crash. That’s how the company can say FSD hardly ever causes crashes.
They don't do that, but even if they did, it wouldn't skew the statistics, since the NHTSA still counts it as engaged if it disengaged within 30 seconds of the crash.
Wrong. They disable it because it’s a safety thing. They still count it towards their metrics that FSD was enabled.
Wrong. Tesla doesn't release safety metrics:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/musks-tesla-seeks-g...
Waymo publishes tons of safety metrics on their website. Here's an analysis/summary:
https://www.damfirm.com/waymo-accident-statistics.html
You're immediately proven untrue: https://x.com/Tesla/status/1793561959734051273?referrer=grok...
And the links don't even touch on things that are comparable lol. Waymo might keep all the data themselves as they own the cars, while with Teslas, the drivers can and will just grab the camera data themselves, many post it YouTube.
Trying to prove something regarding Tesla by linking to the personal disinformation platform of Tesla's CEO makes me laugh.
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He's an absolute fucking dumbass with rich ass parents. He's hired a lot of smart people.
You sound like one of those fan boys that keeps a picture of Elon next to their bed.
He's a con-man that has endangered lives by tacking on the word "beta" to a dangerous "full self driving" system for almost a decade to fool customers. Meanwhile others like Waymo did it the right, safe way. And wait no... now it's labeled "supervised" and "unsupervised" full self driving or some bs like that.
He's a con-man that cheats his customers by manipulating odometers (https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a64555...)
He's a con-man that destroyed Twitter but did some bs financial engineering with his XAI to make X suddenly valued exactly the same as when he bought it (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-high-price-114...).
He's the con-man that remotely controlled his autonomous robots (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-10-15/tesla-opti...).
Last but not least, he's the immoral idiot that fanned hate and the political divide in America by supporting Trumps claims of a stolen election. He then manipulated a democratic election by offering million dollar in bribes (or prizes as he called them) to people who voted for Trump. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/10/20/elon-musk-offers-1-milli...
Okay, point us to the data Tesla publicly releases telling us they do or don't count it.
Why would you trust a word they say when Elon has lied out of his teeth at every single investor meeting for the last decade.
I say this as an owner of a Tesla myself.
Source ?
There are 50+ deaths if you include Autopilot. Source: https://www.tesladeaths.com/
Some of them were due to the use of cameras as opposed to LiDAR for example: The May 7, 2016 crash near Williston, Florida, in which a Tesla Model S operating with Autopilot struck the side of a tractor-trailer making a left turn across the car’s path. In this incident, both the car’s camera system and the driver did not detect the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, which resulted in the Tesla passing under the trailer and causing a fatality.
Most likely it was the same driver. I was in Arizona and someone crashed into me, and he claimed he "lost control of the vehicle" which was an old truck. I can buy you lose steering or breaking, but not steering AND braking.
He was simply looking at his phone in reality.
As for 'Jia Lin Zheng'—it's a typical Chinese name. I can confirm that, as I am Chinese myself.
Who would doubt that this is a typical Chinese name?
I'm layman regardin this but this would have been my vote in a quizz :)
The question wasn't whether or not it is typical. It is whether or not it is common.
For example, in the US John Smith and Scott Baker are both typical US names, but John Smiths are way more common than Scott Bakers.
How many people saved by the tech?
Tesla doesn't release the data required to assess this.
And from that information alone, you can get the gist of what that data says!
(inb4 you post the accidents per mile chart which is very obviously useless and designed to mislead midwits, as it is not controlled for age of automobile or driving conditions)
Probably none. Fatalities in Teslas grossly exceed those in comparably-priced vehicles, which is the only benchmark that matters. Unless your counterfactual is that Tesla would be even more dangerous without FSD, but I don't think that is a useful counterfactual.
Only 15-20% of Teslas in the US have FSD.
How many have autopilot
Saying the Waymo was even involved in the crash is misleading. It was a victim along with most of the other vehicles.
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.
Unreasonable? Society is breaking down all around us because of this shit. MCCA
Yes, I think that people should be prosecuted for killing people with their cars. WAWA
The good news so far is that Tesla doesn't have a robotaxi service at all, they have a plain taxi service. We'll see what happens if they ever release a self-driving car, but for now, as in the past 7-8 years, they are way behind Waymo in the self driving car arena.
Waymo came close with me. There were two left turn lanes, and it migrated from the inner one to the outer one in the middle of the turn without a blinker while I was next to it. It got lucky that I'm young and wasn't too tired and also that it was a relatively safe place to run me off the road.
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.
Are you sure that you were in the right and there were two left turn lanes? There is an intersection by me that everyone uses wrong and you get folks using it as a double turn lane when the lanes have text that say the name of the road you are technically supposed to stay on. Really the city is to blame and not the driver because it’s confusing but still, I think the lanes are all mapped manually for Waymo (but personally I don’t have any inside knowledge)
Traveling south here on Land Park Dr there are two lanes, some people from the right lane veer left and the left lane veer right through the middle of the intersection. There aren’t dotted lines to help.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
Quite certain. The two left lanes can both turn left, and the middle lane can also go straight. It's well marked (though a bit tight if you try to take it fast).
https://maps.app.goo.gl/n2kUUHmDKaSURFqx9
Is the turn you're referring to the one where lane 1 (the inner left) then merges into lane 2 after the receiving block segment starts? (John Daly Blvd. onto Park Plaza Dr. southbound)
I wonder how something like that is represented to the waymo or reasoned about.
John Daly Blvd onto Skyline southbound, where the two left turn lanes continue into two highway lanes.
Camera based guidance systems are unreliable, and the number of edge-case failure modes grow exponential in time.
LIDAR/LADAR based systems are not perfect, but do offer mm precision for guidance systems. SLAM based LIDAR systems can be very good, but are also not perfect when forced to guess where a platform is located.
Cheers, =3
> edge-case failure modes grow exponential in time.
How so? Honestly asking.-
Failures in automotive programs are surely linear to time over a year with all seasons.
Failure rates are a different area, and most engineers have proven it is not linear. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
>Exponential
>Bathtub curve
you should try your luck selling exotic snake oils.
They were conflating computational feasibility with sensor device failures.
Ask questions if you don't know, as being rude is not constructive. =3
Quite rich for you to accuse others of being rude. My comparison is apt, borne of your own behavior.
He's kind of entertaining. I usually don't do this here and feel it's normally in bad taste, but he crumbles pretty spectacularly when pushed and I was curious how much material he had for me.
You should see him ascribing nephrotoxicity to a chemical from a mushroom based on the reactions of squirrels in his yard eating an entirely different mushroom. I think I really got him at his peak though just skimming through.
Try not to thread hijack, and read the papers you were sent =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
Says the guy that demanded that I cite sources for something someone else said.
You're too funny.
Edit:
The very first one on the now locked comment said he misidentified the mushroom in question.
I'll assume from there you read none of it.
Edit:
Now he edited the post to remove the first cited paper, omg.
Let's do this:
The 4th one is the one you already admitted had bad data.
At least one of the other two clearly states that the mushroom was unidentified. You will have to read or delete both.
You should take a breath and consider why you are so emotionally triggered by criticism of Tesla.
For real man. You are wound up and have left dozens of increasingly irate comments.
This is not emotionally stable behavior. Why are you so heated over criticism of a corporation and by extension a person you don’t even know?
Worth taking a moment for some self reflection, this isn’t healthy.
1. I don't like disinformation 2. I know of this subject +. I might know more of the person than you give credit for too.
Would you consider someone writing and rating Community Notes for a hour or a few hour's sitting once in a while "unhealthy" too? You should steer away from academic institutions. Or Stack Overflow. They'd be joker's asylums for you!
That is a long explanation, but generally even human binocular disparity incorrectly guesses 3D structures and distances. Our brains automatically fill in a lot of missing information that computers just can't know a priori (example: you know a dog hidden behind a car doesn't actually vanish nor remain stationary.)
Most guidance platforms would use LIDAR/SLAM to describe the local road surface, and overlap camera vision data to extrapolate distant surfaces and objects. Note distant objects also have lower resolution, unknown non-distinctive features (speed bump, or open man-hole cover etc.), and increasing sparse data as velocity effectively lowers world-state sampling rates.
The world-state is constantly changing at every intersection, sampling constraints add latency, and the navigation way-point goals may reach contradiction with immediate path-planning due to ambiguous/expired information.
Cheers =3
So, it doesn't "grow exponentially", you just wanted to express that there are "many".
> you know a dog hidden behind a car doesn't actually vanish nor remain stationary.
Computers can do that, too. It's not that different ... guessing missing words.
I think it was two years ago that Tesla told the public that they could do that.
I wonder if - at some point - AI might not do the "filling in" of information the brain does by generation (ie. filling in the gaps) or something.-
Maybe, but first a real "AI" will need to be invented.
I suspect a Amish horse buggy is more practical. =3
>Tesla told the public that they could do that.
Lol, really? They either developed superman x-ray vision, or just tracked object occlusion with a common re-acquisition mitigation (so worthless when physical inertia carries a vehicle into an object collision.)
>So, it doesn't "grow exponentially",
The further the object... the more possible choices will need to be made in the guidance system. Note, guidance and navigation are related, but different problem domains. Roughly, the possible choices (and errors) if I recall grew by:
((m cars) * (k lanes ) * (r occlusions) * (s sign laws) * (1 + world_sate_delta_error(t)) ) ^ (n intersections + w way-points) = 1/hype_correction
...but that doesn't even cover the projected future risk(t). =3
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.
> FSD is more reliable Citation needed. And not Tesla’s typical lying with shitty statistics data (fun fact: most car accidents do not happen in places where FSD is commonly used).
Also, vision-only systems work great… if they’re backed by strong intelligence.
So would you rather have the actual data fed to you by a different parent? Airplane goes brrrr ! https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data...
>fun fact: most car accidents do not happen in places where FSD is commonly used
How is that even supposed to in any way be relevant when talking exactly about cases where FSD and similar are used. Sigh.
>Also, vision-only systems work great… if they’re backed by strong intelligence.
Yes. And I do recognize that "Best, with custom in-house NN hw" might not still be "Strong" on all aspiratory statistics. But its already much above human capability, and regardless if you want to try to say the stats are 2x 3x, even 4x exaggerated, they'd still blow the alternative safety standard out of the water.
Only cameras? I respectfully disagree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
Your previous link was of that old BBC vision test, comparing being safe from danger to being able to see obviously irrelevant details of a video.
And now you link that debunked Mark Rober video that literally doesn't even have FSD turned on, while giving the most ridiculous free wins to LIDAR. Talk about writing the tests for the exact limits of a specific system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhX_fgekpk0
You're really running out of steam :D
Kind of sus, but it is consistent with other reported incidents including at least 1 fatality with FSD.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/business/nhtsa-tesla-smart-su...
Best of luck =3
"Consistent" comparing a video with a literal billboard of a road in the middle of a road to real life? With the entire FSD feature turned off in the video by the way :D ?
And one fatality with the most dangerous general form of transportation we have?
And an article about a fancy pants 5 miles a hour park retrieval feature bending a few posts as if it was relevant?
Dude I don't need luck, I could roll ten D12 ones in a row and win
One of the YT videos is probably incorrect, but other data under less demanding conditions already suggests FSD camera only options don't work as advertised within cities.
I'd rather not have drivers playing dice while driving. =3
some data suggests maybe this result in maybe some condition maybe
ok
Tesla always seems to find its telemetry data when they get sued. Some of their customers are less then honorable. lol =3
Company doesn't spread all its private data all over the internet all the time
more at 5
I didn't know Teslas come with a House of Lords
Probable, based on the cyber truck build... lol =3
> Human bicameral driven cars are unreliable too, but FSD is more reliable.
You do not have the data necessary[0] to substantiate this claim.
[0] Accidents per mile controlled for at least vintage of car and driving conditions
I do have the data necessary[0] to substantiate this claim. And no, I'm not going down listening in the rabbit hole of people trying to poke pin prick holes in to a safety margin bigger than a Gigafactory.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data...
1. Autopilot is not FSD
2. Autopilot, being a typical ASAD, is used exclusively on highways and in conditions where typical ASADs work reliably
Weird to brag about being unwilling to apply even first order criticality to a press release but you do you.
Thank you for reaffirming that in fact you do not have the data required to substantiate your claim.
As I said, I'm not going down the rabbit hole. You go ahead and drive right in to the fallen tree in the middle of the road as you so vehemently argue it's not there.
I think you should consider reasoning about reality in real terms instead of offloading to metaphors that, by design, don’t add any more information to the discussion than your own conclusions.
By the way, it’s a “binocular” system. “Bicameral” refers to a design for institutions like legislatures.
It is true most humans can not track more than 5 objects concurrently. However, lidar data sets tend to produce sparse unambiguous point cloud data that is a lot more feasible to process. For example, a picture/reflection of a road on a bus is not a viable option with 3D data.
Cheers =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
Adding some stat of x things tracked adding top of your stat of "millimeters" really shows the level you're arguing here. Real world doesn't care about exact stats on some simply enumerable attributes, but adaptability. You might see 10 bisons but will instantly react to a scorpion in middle of them in your vision.
In any case. Trying to argue against vision even if LIDAR hypothetically was better (it isn't) would just lead to more deaths, maybe at best shielding the rich driving in cities. FSD's stats don't lie :|
My point was LIDAR data removes the ambiguity of camera derived data, is not fooled by featureless area ambiguity, and it is computationally easier to handle sparse data.
Many high-end multi-beam lidar also embed things like basic Bicycle and Pedestrian object detection in the sensor front end. Things have improved significantly with sensors, but the risk is never 0.
The rate of death doesn't really override an expectation of product safety, and humans understanding other humans intent.
Have a wonderful day =3
Fragmentation of results removing instead of increasing ambiguity doesn't pass the smell check, neither isn't it not something exactly against the leading FSD engineers have commented on the issue while they were removing other non-uniform sensors, even disabling existing ones entirely in cars.
Trying to claim some entirely different stack in some third party LIDAR tower's own processing is somehow "beneficial" sounds like a project manager who thinks adding engineers equates to linearly faster progress.
Just no. On a slight tangent though, I recommend reading about Tesla's vertical integration. It's not something any other company has managed to get implemented so deep in automotive, which makes it quite incomparable in some aspects where others can't adapt even if they wanted to.
Admittedly, I only have limited out-of-date knowledge from integrating iBeo, hokuyo, and SiCK lidar models (way better models out now.) Yet in general, the SLAM algorithms tended to use optical Odometry, pose recovery, and point-cloud data. Then extrapolated the projected surface using camera data within a GPU accelerated OpenCV layer. It does require a proper global shutter machine vision camera (high fps / no smear), but does work fairly well under ideal conditions. The winners of the Darpa grand challenge documented the methods in detail, and several OpenCV books cite the work as a student project.
Let me know if you have trouble finding the projects. =3
gluing together third party stacks like there's no tomorrow doesn't make you better evaluating how a vision-only ML model with limited, yet uniquely hardware-accelerated, one-task actual real life, real-time ML model running right now would integrated with foreign data, especially as the actual relevant engineers have directly talked against such things.
It might make you headstrong in believing against something that'd be easier to see the core sensibility of if you weren't so invested in just a specific corner/angle though.
I've avoided working a work project involving LIDAR scanning before, even back then the hellishness of the hardware was a large factor. I wouldn't mind playing around with a Jetson Nano though.
>gluing together third party stacks like there's no tomorrow
That is why I don't really like ROS. lol =3
>doesn't make you better evaluating how a vision-only ML model
In general, the monocular SLAM algorithms rely on salient feature extraction, and several calibrated assumptions about the camera platform. How you interpret that output is another set of issues, as the power budget is going to take the hit.
For machine vision, I'd skip the proprietary Jetson Nano... and get a cheap gaming "parts" laptop with a broken LCD and several USB ports (RTX4090 or RTX4080 is a trophy.)
No one wants to fork over $30k for an outdoor lidar, but using only cameras is a fools errand. The best platforms I've seen commercially use camera + lidar + radar.
For student projects, one can get small radars and TOF sensors for under $20 off sparkfun (similar to the one in iPhone Pro 11/12/13). We live in the future... =3
the thing about waymo is that i suspect they're running the same ML fraud that tesla itself is running in the silicon valley in general, which is to overfit on the 20% of situations that occur 80% of times.
for waymo itself, you can overfit on 100% of the situations that will be encountered. 49 square miles isnt that large. its the real world outside that which im concerned about its efficacy in. 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.
FSD is a reinforcement learning problem, and we have no good way of training non-simulation algos for that. and a real dynamical driving environment cant be simulated accurately enough
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.
It's hilarious to see Tesla fans try to act like designing for an undefined operational domain is somehow extra brilliant and not one of the stupidest fucking ideas anyone has ever come up with.
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).
> San Francisco, Phoenix and LA represent a strong diversity of driving conditions.
This could very well be true, but if you’re looking at it from a perspective of someone who lives in a rural area with real winters, for driving purposes, those all look like pretty much equivalent large American cities without a winter.
Waymo has done winter testing in Buffalo, Tahoe, Michigan FWIW.
> 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™.
FSD works in small towns today. Source: small town FSD user.
With that logic might as well do away with all defensive armies because they've "killed so many people". Firefighters too.
FYI. FSD is safer than human drivers on large datasets. Accidents cause deaths of thousands every year. Arguing against FSD for "safety" has The Grim Reaper cackling.
It’s that Waymo is both more widespread and better. If there were no Waymo, then sure. But there is Waymo.
You do realize that Waymo, at best, is comparable to a train with an extremely limited, and expensive, rail network on a level where Robotaxi would be a 4x4 car in a roadless world?
Waymo is SLS compared to Starship. So, not comparable and could never fit the shoes Robotaxi has been planned to fill since the initiation of the FSD project. I.E. SLS = a few academic missions. Starship: Mars colony. Waymo is as good for safety as doing nothing with its inability to scale.
Waymo costs as much per ride as one with a driver. Robotaxi is technologically fundamentally close to starting its shift after you arrive home and get out of your car. Earning you part of the profit btw. And with no growing pains, with FSD working on novel, untested roads.
There is no cost pressure on Waymo to reduce rates below Uber or Lyft as they are much smaller, they are price takers not price makers in the market. Lowering prices far below your competitors when you are supply constrained for the time being would just be lighting money on fire.
Mapping is expensive, but not really in a per-mile-driven basis. There are 4M miles of public roads which get over 3.2T miles of total driving, or ~800k vehicle-miles per road-mile. You could have pretty high mapping costs per mile and still have very low per-mile-traveled costs for mapping. And there's every reason to think the cost of mapping and updating maps on a per-road-mile basis will go down over time, not up.
Waymo is scaling pretty rapidly, and the rate of expansion is accelerating. They've been proving out the technology, and are only now starting to commission special purpose vehicles as they move out of the research phase and into deployment.
Perhaps Tesla will catch up, but for now we know Waymo's are at least ~6x safer than humans in diverse independent conditions, while FSD according to publicly available information is 50-100x less safe (with critical interventions every few hundred miles).
And with no [hypothetical] growing pains [not including the obvious practical growing pains we are all witnessing with our eyes currently], with FSD working on novel, untested roads [plus or minus a bunch of Teslas driving around with camera arrays mounted in specific, limited areas, but besides that totally novel untested roads definitely work].
FSD has simply proven untested roads work, you cannot argue against that.
>Growing pains
Robotaxi has been in testing for less than like 1/50 the time Waymo has been out, and has already once surpassed coverage in their starting city.
You know who also had growing pains? Hulk. Growing that quick.
Elon can literally draw and balls a dick on top of Waymo's long-amassed support area. Even if they want to check these starting areas a bit better with some basic mapping setups in advance, it's obvious their stack isn't hindered by requirement of hard, slow HD mapping and cars that look like they're growing mushrooms with the ugly LIDAR sensors on them.
Tesla is hindered by the fact that there are human drivers in every single "robo-taxi"
Yeah the appearance of the 2 ton rolling robot is the important part
Oh okay it’s like Hulk. Got it.
[dead]
As a control engineer who knows something about sensor fusion - No LIDAR no ride. Musk can brute-force his unsafe robotaxis on the road but they won't be as safe as Waymo. Maybe people won't care if the price is slightly cheaper vs. competition, I don't know.
The non-technical answer is that people do not care so long as it's safer and less unpleasant than the current alternative.
My last taxi ride involved jumping red lights and speeding through residential streets at 60mph because, I assume, it was early morning and the driver had learned from experience that he could get away with driving like this.
The previous experience to this was a lecture about a certain religious ideology and how I should spend the next two weeks reading up about it.
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 .
Then customers choose a self-driving taxi which doesn't try to kill them. People aren't forced to take the murder taxis.
>In 10 years when robotaxi companies are short on cash and trying to IPO they will absolutely start speeding
Openly commit crimes when everything's being recorded and subject to discovery? What could possibly go wrong?
>They'll lock the doors and give you a paid presentation about Scientology during your ride.
Sounds like a good excuse for whoever's trapped to break open the side windows because he "felt he was in danger because of claustrophobia" or whatever. More seriously though, I don't see anything wrong with mandatory ads as long as it's disclosed ahead of time.
> "Accidentally" drive you to a competing store that paid for sponsored traffic, instead of the .
By your own admission "Google search has been enshittified", yet when was the last time google "accidentally" sent you to the competitor's site on the search results page?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlCrcMeVZHs
Uh, every Google search already shows me sponsored links to competitors’ sites at the top of the results.
What would you say if in 5 years with Waymo, you want to go to Burger King but before taking you there, it suggests ‘hey, why don’t you go to this McDonald’s instead?’ At first you’d get a discount on your ride if you accept the suggestion, and then once everyone gets used to it, no more discounts and everyone ends up paying more than human taxis cost today.
Over the years, I’ve had four human driven taxis crash, and two taxi drivers rob me.
Never heard of those two occurrences happening for a taxi customer, ever.
Perhaps you live in a location that lends itself to such events...
Before there was an alternative used to take taxis in Toronto occasionally, and the common refrain was that the card machine was broken. And sometimes no change was available. These kinds of soft scams were common.
So it’s not a hold-up, but definitely a form of robbery.
Chicago taxis were pretty bad. Had taxis driven by the guy not in the card. Broken seat belts. Mega speeding. It was terrible.
I was in a Chicago taxi where the driver was basically passing out but (I think) chewing qat to keep awake
Crashes: New York, Istanbul, SW UK, Cairo.
Robbed: Bishkek, Astrakhan. Former nicked my SLR at a gas stop, I should have been more attentive, but wasn’t expecting him to loot my luggage. Latter delivered me to his buddies who threatened violence unless I turfed over every penny I had. Joke was on them as they thought I was a loaded oil exec when I was actually just a broke backpacker.
I’ve also had the old shake-down fare in Ljubljana, Bucharest, and Riga, off the top of my head - but I don’t count that as robbery, just assholes.
Can I ask what time periods?
I have no personal experience of Kyrgyzstan or Russia, but my hunch would be that the noughts were riddled with taxi drivers like you say, while that has slightly improved over time? I mean, perestroika is known for having those problems, wasn't it? Correct me if I am wrong please anybody, thank you.
Also, kudos on your travel.
Crashes, various points over the last few decades. Three fender benders but the guy in Istanbul managed a proper one at speed, early hours of the morning and going too fast in the rain - thankfully nobody hurt but his car was trashed.
Robberies, both 2012, on the same trip.
And yes, corruption still rules the roost in a lot of old eastern bloc countries, from the government to the cops to the babushka driving the bus - it will take a long while for the mindset that the USSR inculcated to dissipate - that is, that the only way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat, and steal. 2012 was my first time east of the Urals, and these days I know far better how to deal with it than back then, when I was still wet behind the ears.
If that happened to me in America I would count it as robbery.
Well, you can't say that again.
Removing LIDAR was the eye-opening moment for me re: Musk. The justification given at the time was technically bogus while it was so obviously in response to supply issues during COVID. If Tesla really wanted safe FSD they would prioritize sensor quality and multimodal input. They went for the bottom line instead.
Tesla's never had LIDAR to remove. They had short distance ultrasonic parking sensors that they removed.
They also had and then removed radar.
Thank you, I think I’m conflating the radar that was present with his staunch anti-LIDAR stance. You can s/LIDAR/radar/ in my original comment.
Not true, they had lidar in at least one model. It's written in his bio too.
They had lidar on some models they were using for internal testing, but they never sold them.
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
> 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.
You really expect a Tesla employee to speak out against Elon?
Especially when $10M+ TC is on the line?
But Andrej is no longer with Tesla?
Andrej "train it on more data and the problem will go away" Karpathy
Right? Im not arguing against the skills he obviously has, but if we're always just piece wise approximating the underlying manifold, then there will always be new problems. The amount of data required to reliably approxate reality, in the absence of an inductive bias, is infeasible to expect to collect. Not to mention how computationally inefficient it becomes as your model blows out in size/complexity.
I guess the gamble was that there would be a certain point where the edge cases disappeared into the noise and it didn't matter that the approximation was/is "wrong" because the behavior of the car would match the requirements of the situation even if it wasn't for the right reasons.
To be fair I remember reading about GPT2 and thinking that LLMs would blow out for similar reasons.
Isn't it ultimately a cost trade off? I mean I can't see a valid argument against LiDAR and cameras if the cost of the vehicle is no concern.
If building a mass market product though the cost is a big deal.
I would assume LiDAR is much more expensive so it would be a big win to get the same performance out of cameras in the long run. I have always just assumed that was the bet.
And now he's peddling more horseshit and expecting the public and investors to swallow it:
> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.
I call bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are simply not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.
But Musk thinks you're not smart enough to know this.
So much of the stuff he's said about rockets is designed the same way, to sound smart to people who don't know any better.
Surely photon detection wouldn't be cheaper than LIDAR, given it's impossible to mount to a car lol
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
I'm curious to know how you would act as a driver, cyclist, or pedestrian if you saw a Robotaxi nearby. Would you be more cautious, and if so in what way? Or are you mostly worried about LIDAR-less vehicles running into white walls, which it can't identify as solid walls?
I already stay tf away from Teslas if i can help it, I'm taking my bike to a different street if there's a driverless one
can binocular cameras replace lidar you think? they should result in just as reliable distance estimation
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.
I dont think it's wrong, but i do think models avaliable right now lack the inductive bias required to solve the task appropriately, and have architectural misalignments with the task at hand that mean for a properly reliable output you'll need impossibly large models and impossibly large/varied datasets. Same goes for transformers for language modelling. Extremely adaptable model, but ultimately not aligned with the task of understanding and learning language, so we need enormous piles of data and huge models to get decent output.
You know quite little. No one has the kind of training data generation as Tesla does, and cases like what you describe were already discussed in 2017.
LIDAR will forever stay a niche technology. If it was so notably "better", Tesla would have just scaled that. But they went all in on vision because it has worked for 100+ years.
With respect, I disagree. Musk is obsessed with the "the best part is no part ". Which only works if you don't actually need it. Combined with an obsession with cost cutting, and you get tunnel vision insisting on a course of action which does not know with 100% certainty about the world it is trying to navigate. And this has led directly to people dying.
Being obsessed only works when you turn out to be right, and tesla's system does not work as well as lidar.
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.
The real key is that things like LIDAR are designed to work well with the types of tasks computers are good at, like taking a bunch of precise measurements every second and performing complex calculations, while a binocular vision based understanding of the world is something humans are good at because we evolved that ability over millions of years.
You can probably eventually ("never" is a long time after all) get a computer to understand the world as well as a human purely through camera based sensors, but it's a much more difficult task than taking an approach that uses tools computers are already good at. Similarly, I suspect it would be an uphill battle to have a human drive using raw LIDAR input.
I think you underestimate how many guesses, approximations, and filling in your brain does to what you think you're seeing.
Absolutely. The goal of self-driving is to be better than human drivers. Even the best drivers struggle with the sun shining from low angles, or road reflections, or snow, and so on.
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.
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?
I think optical illusions are a poor choice to illustrate this point. They are manifestations of the corner cases, peculiarities, and side effects of our visual processing system and neither cameras nor Lidar are without their own analogous issues.
If you’re saying cameras have analogous issues I fail to see how the analogy is a poor choice - looks to me like you understood exactly the point I was making.
Would Musk's argument about sensor fusion have made any sense back when they were doing lots of hand-coded C++?
I've been thinking maybe vision-only was a reasonable decision, back when lidar was expensive and the software was hand-coded. Now it doesn't, because lidar is cheaper and the software is and end-to-end neural net, and additional sensors are just more inputs to the network which will learn to use them. But Tesla is locked in because of the promises they made to early FSD buyers.
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.
Their engineers, who obviously are on the bleeding edge, going out of their way to avoid sensor fusion issues says something quite different. I could believe "Straightforward" could maybe apply for something many tiers below in complexity and safety requirements to what they're doing. But adding non-agreeing, non-uniform information sources to the most capable real-world ML vision system not driven by human-engineered code?
I don't care even if you said you had 70% of the experience their team has, what you say can't sound reasonable or caring for actually improving safety in numbers.
I've been through 3 public AV launches. I don't lead with that because "resume" measuring contests are boring and what I write should be evaluated on its own merit, not by who says it. This account is readily identifiable to anyone who knows me.
With that out of the way, it's much easier to write a hardware safety case than one for software. It's easier to write a software safety case for a traditional software architecture than one based on ML. It's much easier to write a safety case for focused models than an E2E system. None of these should be controversial statements.
You're arguing that Tesla is deliberately jumping to the hardest safety case in order to avoid the simpler safety case. I know many people who have worked on the relevant teams at Tesla. I don't think they're ignorant of the difficulty of Tesla's choices or making decisions based on what's easier to validate.
Sensor fusion is not the difficult part. You only have to look at the fact that virtually every other company in the industry (even the ones using E2E and not using LIDAR like Wayve) does it. Either we have to accept that everyone else is stupid, or there are other factors involved in Tesla's decision-making.
For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I could write a safety case about Tesla's system that meets my own personal standards. It's pretty clear from their actions and the various regulatory/legal inquiries that they don't have what I consider an effective safety process regardless.
They go out of their way to avoid sensor fusions because they are not allowed to use other sensors. Some people seem to have no limits to their credulity.
People really act like SpaceX didn't rain fifteen tons of concrete onto employee's cars because musk decided he wanted to be the first person in history to launch a heavy rocket without a flame diverter, and none of the brilliant engineers were able to convince him otherwise or had the guts to otherwise scuttle the launch for the sake of safety.
Clearly Tesla engineers will do the same
Yes. They are disallowing themselves from using other sensors. To avoid complicating the software stack and ultimately to keep it higher performing, which will make it safer in any alotted time.
This is really no different from good code practices with a complex system. Most HN readers should be familiar with rot in codebases quite comparable to "adding a few extra features to make it better" which just became a maintenance burden and take away from core features.
If you knew the slightest of how Musk has actually stayed exactly the same since the beginnings of Tesla, you'd know his hard specs are always technology-based. People that know more have said that his capability of speccing systems relatively right deep in to the future is possibly his single greatest leadership feat.
>Once Musk is near-certain about one technology pathway over another, he’s not afraid to put massive amounts of resources into that path, while still staying flexible enough in the case that a new emerging technology disrupts that particular path. Because he’s willing to make enormous (and seemingly risky) bets on these pathways, he’s able to outpace his competitors. https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-all-that-hes-cracked-up-t...
Meanwhile, pretty much everybody else doing safety-critical real-time control prefers multiple sensor types.
For an example of that in self-driving, Huawei uses vision, lidar, radar, and ultrasound. Out of Spec let it drive them around for an hour in busy traffic in a city in China. It looked about as good as FSD, without having had several million cars providing training data for years.
> 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.
Given what's happening in the rest of the AI field, it seems pretty likely that it's correct.
Plus various Tesla engineers have said the same thing, Tesla does have a very large AI training cluster, and FSD quality made a big jump when they claimed to deploy end-to-end.
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?
The question isn't whether it can be done eventually, but whether it would get safer faster with extra sensors.
Back in the day, Elon's specific objection to lidar was that it was too hard to code the sensor fusion part. With end-to-end there's no coding to deal with.
And it's not like they've replicated the visual cortex. It's the same neural net technology everybody else is using. It can deal with any sort of sensors just fine.
> But if you have a good enough AI, sensors that replicate the human senses are all what is needed.
What is your example or evidence for this?
Concentrated and well-rested drivers with good eyesight not under the influence are able to drive very well.
Yes, but we're a long way from putting AI hardware in cars that's as powerful as the human brain.
Plus our cameras aren't as good as human eyes.
So human senses are all we need and we just have to solve artificial general intelligence and fully simulate a human brain? I wonder why no one has done that yet.
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.
Conflicting data is an issue even when you just have lidar, and it's not hard to deal with.
The cofounder of Waymo taught one of the first Udacity courses on this subject. He went through a small Python project that processed lidar point clouds for self-driving. The data is noisy, you get conflicting information from different points, and the code aggregates all that into the most likely 3D model of the world.
Additional sensor inputs are just more of the same, and neural nets are pretty good at this sort of thing. They'd even learn which sensors are more reliable in different scenarios.
As for "more data isn't always better," I've mostly seen that applied to training, not inference in real-time control systems. Even for training, it turned out people had been fooled by a local maximum, and once past that, more data really was better.
I have a question:
- What are the main challenges in building software that relies solely on camera input?
- Which specific modules or tasks still require LiDAR to function reliably?
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.
> What are the main challenges in building software that relies solely on camera input?
Probably the main challenge is that it took nature about a billion years to get to human level visual perception and understanding of environment and nobody really knows how to duplicate it.
Using tools like LIDAR can fill some gaps.
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What version of Lidar does your head have?
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...
> - What living creature is using wheels to move around?
A human driving a car.
I agree with you that sometimes non-natural situations are easier and can absolutely be better, but the point of bringing up humans is generally to show that it demonstrably is possible to do at least as well as humans, with humans as an existence proof.
But that it might well take too long and cost too much to get there, and that it might well in the end be cheaper and better to use additional types of sensors is a good point.
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 "cameras" have about 20 MP of active resolution between the two of them. With dead zones and pixels spread out unevenly. A modern smartphone has you beat.
There's a small, sharp, high resolution color-enabled area in each eye - but the bulk of your vision field is monochrome, and mostly sensitive to motion.
You don't notice that, because your image data is stacked and post-processed to shit to make it presentable. Your brain has been doing computational photography before it was cool - 90% of what you see at any moment in time is effectively AI-generated.
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.
There's a solid argument to be made that solving the self driving problem using only cameras might end up being roughly equivalent to solving the AGI problem because you will have essentially created a computer with a human understanding of the world around it using human senses.
I have thought that Tesla will be forced to learn many things from the only camera approach.
And they may well end up with something "that works". But... many buts.
What? An FSD Tesla has its very own "world model". It doesn't try to reconstruct a world "photons in", from scratch, 60 times per second. It continuously updates and refines the data it already has based on the sensor inputs, and then uses this internal representation to make driving decisions.
This "world model" is what you get to peek into through the car's screen. By now, it even has basic "object permanence". Nowhere near as good as a human yet. But AI is getting better, and an average driver isn't.
No amount of LIDAR wankery can solve self-driving.
Take any self-driving car crash where the self-driving car was found at fault. Dump the blackbox, extract the raw sensor data. What will you see?
You'll see that the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, many times over. And it didn't make the right call. That's not a "sensors" problem. The sensors are good enough. The main bottleneck for self-driving is, and always was, in AI.
Which is why you get things like that Cruise car dragging a pedestrian despite being equipped with 360 cameras and a total of 5 overlapping LIDARs. It had the sensors. What it didn't have was object permanence.
Well an under-carriage camera would have obviated this failure mode.
So you could define it as a sensor issue
How many car crashes does waymo have per mile compared to average drivers?
Statistically, SOTA self-driving cars are already superhuman. That holds for Waymo and Tesla both. They crash less, like for like, and the incidents they get into are less severe. But that's not because self-driving cars outperform a "top of the line" human driver. It's because they outperform the absolute worst bottom of the barrel human driver.
A big part of a self-driving car's "safety edge" is that it isn't going to go 80 in a 40, doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, and isn't capable of DUI.
Self-driving cars still struggle in some situations most human drivers wouldn't find challenging - AI issues - but they don't make the worst, the most unforced and avoidable "human factor" mistakes.
The whole thing never made sense to me.
Tesla, a supposedly forward-looking car maker, operating a taxi service, which is inherently low-margin?
And the alternative scenario floated (the "appreciating asset" malarkey), that everyone would be adding their personal cars to the pool and would be making money while you sleep and/or work even more baffling. Sure, you might fool some people that they'll make money even though the wear and tear and depreciation will be much worse, and you'd need better insurance to take care of when your car seats will be knifed (a considerable risk, even before the wanton brand destruction), and someone or some thing is going to need to clean and charge the car, then charging and parking fees...
And if it were that profitable on one or two cars, then why would Tesla even sell cars to you instead of operating their own fleet?
So it doesn't hold up to scrutiny unless you own a fleet, and then you'd probably need employees. Which, again, you'd be competing with Tesla and every other likeminded fool?
I guess somehow it's started to make a perverse kind of sense recently when Tesla sales are plummeting. Someone's going to have to use the cars they make I guess.
> and you'd need better insurance to take care of when your car seats will be knifed (a considerable risk, even before the wanton brand destruction), and someone or some thing is going to need to clean and charge the car, then charging and parking fees...
Vehicle sharing companies have already solved this. The vehicle sharing company provides insurance built into their fee and vets customers. If the vehicle is vandalised (or someone makes a mess), the vehicle share company pays for everything. People wouldn't use these services if they were subject to that kind of risk.
As for charging and parking, the use case here is people who already have parking space for their Tesla. So that's where the Tesla parks when and if it's not needed. In time, I imagine, charging hubs will appear where either attendants plug in the vehicle, or the plug mechanism is automated. Or the car just comes home when it hits the predefined minimum charge, and the owner plugs in later.
> And if it were that profitable on one or two cars, then why would Tesla even sell cars to you instead of operating their own fleet?
It's a scaling strategy. The payback period is reduced to 0 if a customer pays for the vehicle. That capital can be fed back into manufacturing, lowering costs, and expanding market penetration.
“The fact that they’re hiding data should tell you everything you need to know. If you really want trust, you have to have full transparency.”
Anything Musk says is simply not trustworthy.
Not just my opinion but proven over and over again.
Hiding safety data is just icing on a cake that he has been baking for years. The real problem here is that those who choose to trust him and his companies are putting others at risk.
Those who own/drive a Tesla typically have insurance but what about those who hire robotaxis? Can they be held personally liable when their roboride hurts someone?
“On Monday, Musk thought it would be funny to expand the area covered by its three-week-old Austin robotaxi service to resemble a giant penis when seen on a map.
“Harder, better, faster, stronger,” the $1 trillion company wrote on Monday, a double entendre referencing the synth pop track of the same name by Daft Punk, a duo appropriately known for performing as robots. Musk approvingly reposted the phallus-shaped service map, adding the fare would now be hiked to $6.90 per ride from $4.20 previously, both numbers the 54-year old often employs for comical effect.”
It’s amazing that anyone still takes him seriously. One of the first riders almost hit a train, and this is what he’s spending his time on. It’s inexcusable, but his fans lap it up.
I'd agree with you, and mention that there's always the option to short TSLA stock, if you believe that the fans will stop being fans soon enough.
A lot of people have lost a ton of money shorting TSLA.
It's not a stock, nor a company. It's a religion. Quite hard to bet against a religion. You never know if it's the one that's going to last 2,000 years.
A decade ago his antics were seen as whimsical and perhaps funny, especially to his fan base. With that fan base ever shrinking his antics today are disgusting and trying to appeal to the crowd which still appreciates something this low-brow.
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?
Why the boards of directors of any of his companies do not ban him from making social media posts from his personal account is beyond me.
I doubt that the personality that leads to this behavior would accept being told not to do something by anyone.
They’re his buddies and are set for life. Why rock the boat?
A decade ago the antics seemed less childish, imo. E.g. calling the starship "BFR" or racing the snail with the boring machine, or the Tesla "plaid" mode.
The obsession with 420, 69 and dick jokes seems another level.
Nazi salutes won't be forgotten.
On national TV.
In a presidential inauguration.
A permanent stain on US history.
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If you actually read that link you posted you would've found that it was discontinued in 1942.
So no, you're not because its meaning became muddy at best
The U.S. only switched to hand-over-heart in 1942, and not because anyone had a sudden change of heart about mass saluting the flag - just that it became embarrassingly identical to the enemy’s gesture.
And therefore no longer "as American as it gets".
Does the Bellamy salute include a repeated motion from chest outward?
All billionaires are permanent stains on US history. Musk is just the poster child for this behavior.
In your world view, what would you personally do if you start one, or multiple, incredibly successful companies and amass $ billion(s) of equity in the process?
Without subsidies from the Obama administration, Tesla never succeeds.
Without government contracts, SpaceX never succeeds.
Without a mysterious visa, Musk never stays legally in the U.S.
All of those are true, but what do they have to do with the question posed?
Donate aggressively to the local community, mostly towards public transit, education, child development, and housing.
Try to socialize LVT and other policies that will improve everyone’s lives.
Thankfully all of these problems are just money problems - price tags on a shelf no billionaire wants to pay apparently. If it turns out these are actually just hard problems, whoever will we blame?
Billionaires are trying to make that happen with California Forever, but of course you'd have to believe what they say in order to believe in it.
In case it wasn't clear my original comment was sarcasm. These are hard problems that are not solved by being funded, but people like to peek in the pockets of billionaires and ask why they haven't bought solutions yet. I have not heard of California Forever though and will look into that.
Land Value Tax?
Ideally that wouldn't be possible. The actual workers that built the companies would realize the gains.
Shut the hell up and stay the hell out of politics.
Need more info on this, because its really easy for somebody to stick a camera at an angle that if somebody waves at the crowd it becomes iffy.
Was interesting to see actual video of a newish public figure wave at the crowd, wince and look in the direction of the camera. Clearly newly trained not to wave at the crowd.
Weird they didn't include a photo, tweet including commentary confirming the juvenile justification:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1944688226037325868
Probably because major news outlets are reluctant to include pictures of penises, even stylized ones, in their articles.
hes always been like this. from faking video games to pushing memecoins.
his being cringe itself isnt the issue. its the lack of EQ that leads to someone being a slave to wanting to be liked. it doesnt inspire confidence in his ability to think rationally. like how hes perfectly fine grifting and contributing to the decrease of trust in society. its messed up
He was definitely not always like that, at least loudly in public.
He made a space rocket company called Space Sex and your choices of Tesla cars are S3XY. Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days, but ever since he has been loud in public, he has been like this loud in public.
> Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days
Let's be clear that the PayPal days consisted of his company merging with a company that was doing something his was failing at, spending 4 months as the CEO arguing that the entire thing that Comenity had built (which was "PayPal", that they'd already built a working version of, trademarked, etc., before the merger) be thrown away and rewritten in ASP, because he didn't understand Java.
So horrific was his tenure at PayPal that, in a world where CEOs "pursue opportunities", "spend time with family", etc., Musk was openly fired. In absentia. The morning he left for his honeymoon. How badly do you have to fuck up as CEO for the Board to do that to you?
Musk's "contribution" to PayPal is mostly just "cashing dividend checks".
The difference is that it used to be combined with some pretty cool stuff. He was a loudmouth jackass but he was (running companies that were) doing neat things with electric cars and rockets. Now the cars and rockets are stagnant, his newer ventures are jokes, he blew up Twitter, and is making a decent attempt at wrecking the country I call home. The loudmouth jackassery was kind of amusing when there was cool stuff to go along with it. Not so much anymore.
He wasnt running those companies so much as they were running him. These groups had dedicated soft protocls for handling elon's bullshit and disasterous influence. He's always just been the money guy. His ideas have always been shit, and the ideas he shared that were good invariably were ones he was handed and was repeating (often handling related questions rather poorly).
just look at his consistent and extreme lack of comprehension of fairly basic engineering. The man is a talentless hack, who paid his way into fame and the appearance of success. His contribution to paypal was his money. When paypal and x (at the time elons online bank) merged, paypal's code etc. Weren't really infleunced by elon or even x. X was crazy unsafe and unreliable, and so merging really only brought together intelligent havenots with a decent product with an unintelligent nepobabies wealth.
he didnt invent tesla either. He just bought into the company and bought the right to call himself a founder and marketed that angle aggresivley.
elon is an idiot, and always has been. Idiots need symbols though, so other idiots idolize him, propping him up.
Was he just lucky, then? SpaceX and Tesla have both been very successful, with business models that looked pretty dubious at the time. Electric cars and rockets looked like good ways to turn large fortunes into small ones, not the other way around.
If Tesla fails to deliver on the tech hype promises, is he really that rich?
He bought Twitter, he bought an election, he founds startups basically for fun.
And even if Tesla evaporated today, he’d still be one of the richest people on the planet.
He lost me when he called (EDIT: REMOVED NAME) a respected cave diver a "pedo". (I guess 7 years ago now.)
The man refrenced might prefer his name be continually indexed with said term.
If I were Vernon Unsworth I'd be fine with searches for "Vernon Unsworth pedo" coming up with discussions about how stupid Elon Musk is for calling me a pedo out of spite and how he really should be in jail for that absurd defamatory statement, but isn't because he's politically untouchable.
That was the moment the veil was lifted.
There's a model Y with The Sticker on it in my street, introduced years after he showed his colors like that. No, dear neighbor, when you bought that car, you knew.
I don’t think a majority of Tesla buyers knew about the “pedo guy” thing. His recent antics have been much more high profile
I think you can estimate the later bound of his meltdown to when he called the rescue diver a "pedo"?
Business practices are being enshittified to the point of 4chan. Profit, for the lulz.-
Not so long ago you'd gain traction through insight or depth. Now it's absurdity that wins the price, vanity upon vanity.-
At some point the idiogarchs are going to celebrate (celebrate) their accidents and dead as a win. Lol.-
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.
Funny how people who live lives of unfathomable luxury are the ones “taking chances,” while the people who literally die in the process are just the price of progress.
You first then
I feared it sounded familiar. There it is.-
Musk is a clearly brilliant man who does not know how to keep his mouth shut or not act like a teenager. I know he doesn't need my respect... But he's certainly lost all of it by now.
And for people who are like "yeah but he gets results," are you really saying he wouldn't be getting more results if he didn't spend the last 10 years being an idiot online?
Citation for the "clearly brilliant" part?
> Musk is a clearly brilliant man
proof left as an exercise for the reader.
“One of the first riders almost hit a train“
How many human drivers almost hit something?
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
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.
2yrs ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhyqKdhoYaM
We need stats, not anecdotes. Last I saw, Tesla’s “full self-driving” required human intervention something like once every couple hundred miles. That’s absolutely atrocious. It’s probably better now, but still a long way from where it needs to be. For comparison, the average American driver goes around 100,000 miles between collisions.
Right and if you remove elderly, drunks and teens, who are generally not your taxi driver of choice, the driving stats skew even better.
So average driver is a low, probably incorrect bar to meet.
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.)
Tesla Robotaxi is a classic case of premature optimisation - with Waymo they decided to deploy whatever technology worked best and did not cost-optimise at the start. Each Waymo vehicle is much more expensive than a Tesla, and has much more expensive sensors and compute.
Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle.
There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)
FSD itself is not a failed bet as a driver-assist system. When it started Tesla was cash poor and often on the verge of collapse, so cutting costs made sense. They will never do as well as a mature Lidar-based solution, but over the years FSD added some value to some people, and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars.
I also think Tesla and their robotaxis are egregiously overhyped, but cutting Lidar was not a terrible business decision at the time. Though it's a terrible decision to have still stuck to vision-only (and using low-quality cameras apparently) when they could have at least got Radar and cheap Lidars.
I wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot. FSD is amazing and I use it door to door wherever I drive. I got a LOT better about a year ago.
But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera)
I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.
I’m not saying autopilot was a bad business decision - autopilot has fuelled sales and no doubt has been a great success and is amazing tech for being in consumers cars at fairly low cost.
I’m saying if the goal is to invent true robotaxis (because that’s the market you are going after) then I think waymo’s approach of following what works and cost-optimising later gets you there faster if you have enough funding.
>and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars.
Not if openpilot is competitive
Tesla approach is so much better financially (leaving aside morality and false promises).
Waymo has sunk billions of dollars with almost 0 return yet.
Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.
Tesla is a shrinking company with terrible margins. Now that EV credit sales are worthless I don’t see how they’ll be profitable going forward.
Waymo is Google, and thus has infinite money.
Waymo has a level 4 driving system. FSD is certified as level 2.. so as it currently stands Tesla’s offering is competitive with Mercedes/GM/Ford/BMW’s driver assistance systems. Not really a stunning accomplishment, though certainly it’s a decent showing.
People that think those other systems are anywhere comparable to FSD smell of cognitive disonanace. Just try it at some point and compare yourself. Or watch one of a million videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oWDVJ4FjfU
Huawei is better than Tesla according to 'Out of Spec'. Both are level 2. Waymo is level 4. Completely different animal
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g
> Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.
In financial terms you could call that a liability, and you might reasonably expect to have to pay off that liability at some point i.e. delivering functionality people have already paid for! In that framing I would be more careful in framing FSD as a financial success.
If the key unlock for self-driving is maximizing real-world training data, then Tesla’s approach of using cameras make sense since it allows them to utilize their entire fleet to deploy incrementally better FSD to.
I think we should require robotaxis to have the same abilities as professional drivers. I driven professionally in various jobs and consider it a skilled profession above what the average driver can do.
Some of the scenarios I've encountered truely tested my limits, such as someone trying to commit suicide by pulling out in front of my bus in Las Vegas, or various insurance scam accidents attempted on the bus because the bus company had deep pockets.
What you are casually asserting is that Tesla "eyeballs" and driving AI will duplicate the abilities of a professional driver real soon now. Count me skeptical. I wouldn't ride in a vision only Tesla without a safety driver and don't recommend anyone else do it either.
The more you require of them, the less of them you'd have on roads with their 1x-10x safety rating compared to other members of the traffic.
If you do the calculus, The Grim Reaper is cackling and cheering you on, agreeing that no Robotaxi should be allowed on the road unless it has achieved a 100x human safety rating.
I'd ride in a Waymo because it is not vision only. Waymo with it's extra sensors has a better chance of reaching the level of a pro driver imho.
Robotaxis, with no widespread release and human drivers, has proven to be 10x safer, after just ten cars in one city?
Quite the extrapolation
I'm actually kind of stunned at the report by the guy that almost got turned into chum by a train.
The stan is strong, in that one...
They only have ten cars on the road? What a farce, the stock is inflated with hopes and dreams and hot air.
Only needs a little bit of work to not drive into trains.
Idk if its just me but it seems the link to the article is not working, I believe this is the original https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-serv... . Honestly really excited in general for the expansion of driverless vehicle services like robotaxi/waymo, but I am a bit cautious on the robotaxi camera only approach (correct me if I’m wrong) compared to Waymo’s combination of LiDAR, radar and camera
Robotaxi is not a driverless taxi service, though, it's a regular taxi service with a human driver in every car. It's laughable to even compare it to Waymo.
Sounds like all the same things Waymo has when they launch in a new area?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/waymo-cars-are-coming-to-new...
Waymo has already proven that they can drive without any human in the car. Tesla have not, at all - and as this article points out, their cars continue to make major driving mistakes, like driving into an on-coming train, running red lights, driving on the wrong side of the road. These are not subtle issues. So I see no reason to assume that they'll ever work without the human driver.
Remember also that FSD can't even be trusted to drive the 2 miles of one-way tunnel at the Las Vegas Loop - even those cars require a driver today.
It's actually more than one driver, there's a remote person who can intervene as well.
Can you post a photo of the said driver?
Thanks! Yeah the AOL link gave me a menu bar and a blank page on Firefox.
This article will age so badly lol.
Tesla's architecture is the only one of the robotaxi providers which actually _can_ scale. Not being dependent on exact HD maps, having the same standard as humans do "if you can see enough to drive" means eventually there'll be scant roads Robotaxi can't serve. By this strength it'll serve in areas that would never work for LIDAR/pre-HD-mapping requiring solutions
I've never understood this argument. When I drive, I'm relying on more than just vision. I'm relying on sound, tactile feedback, an understanding of traffic law, an understanding of human behavior on the road (some of which is specific to my locality, the time of day, etc.), an understanding of weather conditions and geography, past problems I've run into on the road and heuristics I've learned over time to improve safety, weighing the risks vs benefits of certain maneuvers (especially considering how specific cars around me are behaving), and so forth. Some of this a purely vision focused FSD could simulate. But much of it it cannot. That's why alternate sensing systems really are needed, whether it's LIDAR or something else.
Which of the things in your list can LIDAR provide a replacement for?
Every thing is a sensor. It provides input. Tesla decided to remove more and more input while claiming it’s better. Even Tesla knows because the robo taxis need more sensors than they sell in stores. So latest HW4 you buy is already obsolete
Except for right now a robotaxi requires a driver
Saying Elon Musk won’t succeed at something that is a hard technological problem is foolish, yes. His companies have done what everyone said was impossible for ages.
But I do wonder if rising nations will instead just build their infrastructure to line up with technology (e.g. HD mapping their streets as they build them, installing signed beacons to inform AVs). The cost of this tech is cratering. One possible future, though admittedly an unlikely one.
I do see that as much more likely for China than western, more ossified cities.
But even then, it'd only be for cities. FSD functioning basically as a human driver would function, anywhere they would function is the real deal.
The whole article is based on an incident a YouTuber talks about in one of their videos. The incident was not captured on video and was not even described as dangerous by the YouTuber himself.
I would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.
The whole article is not based on that incident. For example:
>The former U.S. Marine hosts the crowd-sourced FSD Community Tracker, the single most sophisticated and reliable form of empirical data collection and analysis on Tesla’s self-driving technology that is publicly available. Car executives like Volkswagen Autonomous Mobility CEO Christian Senger speak highly of it as a benchmark, and even Musk—who has his own internal data on disengagements that he refuses to share—singled it out as proof the company is making progress.
>Currently, its data shows even the latest FSD version from Tesla results in a critical disengagement roughly every 340 miles between both city and highway at present. Called 13.2.9, it rolled out in May just weeks before the Austin service launched. “You sometimes hear Elon saying, ‘we’re having a hard time finding disengagements.’ That is such BS,” Martinez adds.
That does not prove that Tesla's robotaxi service cannot scale.
A robotaxi service is geofenced. The community tracker is not.
As soon as Tesla manages to nail Austin, they can expand aka scale.
How close are they to operate safely in Austin and to rid of the safety people? I don't know. But sooner or later they will, that is for sure.
Quite simply, standardising public transport across the globe, ( and in turn bringing economy of scale ) , can solve the transport problem , problem is that this is not economically viable for car companies
I recall that Teslas have a mode where it shows its camera and labels what it sees. I would love to see what these failures look like in that mode. What did it think was there? Nothing at all? Something far away? Insect on the lens?
What that mode shows is that the Tesla thinks there is nothing there.
AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized.
What it should do is model the entire world around it in 3d and consider that. But it doesn't. Cow on the road - problably not recognized. A child in an uncommon halloween costume chilling / lying in the middle of the road - pretty damn sure not recognized and the Tesla would just kill that child. Yep.
(I drove a Tesla Model 3 with the latest "self-driving" software for a bit a year back.)
> AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized.
This is not true; in modern FSD the visualization is disconnected from the actual driving model. The visualization runs a lightweight model that labels some stuff and shows it; the actual heavy lifting is now a single model that takes pixels as input and outputs control commands. My car very clearly reacts to stuff that doesn’t appear in the visualization.
I've seen it stop in front of squirrels. Your simplification is simply untrue.
If you think "it is not at all safe" you should probably not go outside with your caution level. FSD miles are ~11x safer than human drivers mind you.
The sad thing is that based on your telling of it, if it detects a small child in a weird costume in the middle of the road but doesn't recognize it as a small child that it's not at least recognizing that something is in the road that should not be regardless of what it is. That should be the minimum in recognizing the road and then recognizing any object within the road.
This approach is all backwards anyway. You don't need to detect obstacles per se, you need to detect safe conditions to proceed.
Clear roadway is safe. Following behind a detected vehicle is conditionally safe.
Cow in the road? Not clear road way, not a detected vehicle. Does not match any safe conditions, so do not proceed.
This approach is why you see so many reports of Waymos stopped somewhere that's outside traffic rules. But it's so much better to stop safely in situations where it's not really needed than to not stop in situations where it is needed.
A while back electroboom did a test with his Tesla's self driving and in most cases had to slam on the brakes himself when it didn't recognize obstacles he had set up for it. Also have seen videos of Tesla's navigation screen having a difficult time with freight trains. It stopped for the trains but was very confused about what it was, showing it as various oddly shaped cars and trucks that often morphed into other oddly stretched vehicles.
I recently ran across this weird world of the influencers who have been trotted out (invited) to post social media posts about their rides in the robotaxi. It is amazing how many are “other than the thing(s) that went wrong it was very safe and worked great”.
Some of those things that went wrong were dropping people off in the middle of an intersection, not recognizing railroad track guard rails… and simply not being able to get them to their destination at all.
To be fair. I live at Mission Bay (SF) that has Caltrain railway nearby (and you have to cross it if you take particular ways in/out). I drive (and like it a lot!) Waymo. Waymo avoids crossing it (it takes a longer way to drive a bridge). So, they probably realized the risk and still to this are not willing taking it.
Why are people mad there’s more competition? Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has. I think there will be some inherent risk in getting in the first full self driving vehicles, but their success to date has been nothing short of incredible
> Tesla has had FSD for years, and has an incident rate half of what Waymo has.
My research shows that you can arrive at these numbers only if you compare Tesla’s FSD incidents that are only reported if airbags are deployed, to all Waymo incidents, which are reported even when only a minor damage is occurred.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_ae23a802-40b4-4545-a3a1-abb1...
More Musk absurdity that he describes this as having “launched” the Robotaxi service when for all intents and purposes they still have a human driver.
Also, their remote control center staff have steering wheels on their desks, to take over when needed, see discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1li0swv/do...
Literally every self driving car service, including Waymo [1], Cruise, etc, initially launched as an invite-only program with a safety driver --- in the driver seat no less, rather than the passenger seat like for the Tesla robotaxi. I don't know why people point to the safety operator somehow like it's proof that Tesla is bad. It's just a normal thing for a very early phase of deployment. In the worst case Tesla is just a few years behind Waymo but that by no means is absolute proof that they cannot scale up and improve it just as Waymo has.
> The service will initially be limited to "early riders" who've already been a part of Waymo's test programs. This first wave will also find human drivers ready to take over in the event of a problem.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-05-waymo-one-launches.html
Well except that according to musk, Tesla has had a 10 year head start and it's still behind
i dont like musk but the driver it there during this initial phase to take over in emergencies right? they arent actually driving the whole time?
i do agree he should say its in early access or something
> Last night, Elon Musk did what he does best: promise “millions” of autonomous Tesla vehicles would be on the road by the end of next year.
And this tiny little disclaimer:
> Last year, Musk said that Tesla would rollout “unsupervised” robotaxis in Austin, Texas starting in June 2025. And in the call last night, Musk stuck to that deadline, but added a little more color about what to expect. He said the paid ridehailing service would consist of 10-20 Model Y vehicles with remote operators in case any of the cars get stuck.
Ahh, unsupervised, if you ignore the supervisors! And wow, a whole 10-20 for the city!
> Musk has long promised Level 5 autonomy, which describes driverless vehicles that can travel anywhere, under any conditions, without limitations. But last night, he corrected himself: there will be some limitations.
Ahh, geofencing sucks unless Tesla does it, got it.
> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.
I smell bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.
Genuine questions for AI engineers, or self driving car people: is the Tesla approach of only using cameras inherently flawed? I've read that the AI is directly hooked up to the cameras, with no explicit intermediate 3D representation... everything is done in latent space. If true, this seems inherently hard to improve; throw more data at it, sure, but you can't necessarily understand how and why it fails when it does. That seems... non-optimal for safety-critical systems like self-driving cars.
There's plenty of visualizations of their intermediary voxel representation. Hardly worse than any LIDAR for the task but without all the downsides of LIDAR.
OT, but we need smart roads before we get a reliable robotaxi. You need lidar + road sensors embedded into the road. You basically have multiple sensors covering a section of the road that constantly updates specific to that section. And you have robotaxis pinging these stations wirelessly. When disconnected, autonomous feature also disengages. You don’t need to install a ton of sensors on every cars.
Nonono. Externalizing the part of the compute is bad idea. increasing the cost and complexity of a socialized infrastructure is bad as now it relies on external reliability, we can barely maintain roads in there current form
Based on that view, maybe we shouldn’t have public roads at all. Go back to scavenging for food.
It’s not binary. You ran way too far. having simple, generalized infrastructure that’s repair ability can be democratized, and having a free market of what can use said infrastructure is robust. Road infrastructure cost a lot of money to maintain, adding more technology to maintain makes no sense
No? Public roads are fine. They've been fine for as long as they've existed. So the right option is to just make tech that works with them, and works like cars and roads have always been interacted with. By turning vision in to wheel inputs.
With what we can do with x amount of technology in given volume improving, increasing cost and making motoring just more unreliable (and to only work in cities) would be a strategy short sighted as running in a forest with your eyes closed. And sounds like Solar Roadways lol
We already have to pave and paint and illuminate nearly every road. If humans have to take over on gravel that's not really a big deal, very few people drive on unmaintained roads
Do you not see my point? How about traffic lights? Or street lights. It’s the same thing. You make it sound like things can’t improve from status quo. Let me guess you are a Java dev.
As much as I hated boilerplate having to write some java last month for the first time in like 5 years, I hate other kinds of bloat and fragmentation as much.
I don't think we'd do away with street lights even if the cars could see in the dark. Traffic lights we'll need for as long as human driving isn't illegal, which is at least 50 years.
Safety is pretty much irrelevant unless its uniform with no large dips in intended design. Have existing roads. Have human driver cars, and autonomous cars which use all the same signals the humans use. These things don't advance as fast as some areas, so putting the cart before the horse has no benefit here. Even if we want to progress as fast as possible!
And there's streets outside cities too. The ugliness of fragmentation with your way is too painful to think of. Like soviet roads where suddenly its undrivable.
Good design is good design. Road dosnt need to be anything more than a path with consistent surface texture.
If we want to develop general purpose machines, then we can rely on placing external sensors in the environment
AOl is still alive? Wow.
The fact that at one point there were over 80% odds of a full rollout within this year shows how delusional some people are.
I own a Tesla, I use FSD all the time. It is nowhere near viable enough yet to release it unsupervised to the masses with no driver at the wheel.
I have also ridden in Waymos and felt way more comfortable with how it drives. It's in a different league.
These are like articles saying why Tesla won't make an electric car. Just more doubters to be proved wrong, again.
Having worked at Uber, I can tell you that most people vastly overestimate how many Uber drivers are working at any one time. A medium sized city like Seattle might have a few hundred at peak hours.
There is a limited scale to any taxi service, at least until it becomes cheap enough that the company can afford to have lots of cars sitting parked and idle for much of the day. Otherwise, the rush hour peaks will be less convenient and affordable than having a private car.
Or like the solar roof, battery, swap, Cybertruck best selling vehicle of all time...you know, things people said wouldn't work, and didn't.
Elon has a good track record, but he has some duds in there too.
If Cybertruck is such a flop now is the time to snap a collectible deal.
Didn't Tesla start as an electric car maker?
Pretty much. Has the air of the oil&gas funded "journalist" piece where he ran circles in a parking lot then wrote about it suddenly running out of battery, and was disproven by logs lol
Any day now
https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
Full self driving next year bro
Tesla self driving has always been doomed to fail without lidar.
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Tesla has to create new revenue sources. The Supercharger moat is evaporating. Elon is otherwise pretty successful in torching the brand loyalty. Regardless of one's personal opinion, Tesla owners as a whole are at odds with Elon politically. Tesla owners skewed educated, living in blue states and are environmentally conscious. I think this will go down as one of the biggest self-owns in history.
The only thing preventing Tesla from going bankrupt is trade barriers on Chinese EVs.
Elon has always been a snake oil salesman and I suspect this robotaxi venture will blow up in his face in a way that's potentially fatal for Tesla. All it will take is someone to be killed in or by a robotaxi. That'll bring in the authorities and likely reveal what a shitshow it is behind the scenes.
It won't be fatal for Tesla, I'm not sure it will even be fatal for Musk as CEO. As long as the stock price goes up or even sideways Musk will be CEO of Tesla and they will sell cars and Musk will play whatever financial games / hype to keep the party going.
TSLA has defied gravity for years. Fundamentally, it makes no sense. It's been valued at between $500,000 and $1 million per car sold in a year. That's utterly insane.
But we know that stock prices are based on expectations for the future not fundamentals. So massive growth is built into the stock price but we have to start asking where this growth is coming from. That's why there's a robotaxi effort.
EVs are becoming a commodity. So over time Tesla's price direction is towards the Big Three. But with more risks, namely the Chinese supply chain for batteries.
You can view Tesla as an investment in Elon, which I think the market has. But that's on incredibly shaky ground. He's torched his relationship to the current administration going so far as to call the sitting president of the United States a pedophile [1]. Elon doesn't seem to appreciate that Trump could end Tesla with an executive order.
My point is that Elon is volatile and can so easily become a liability to Tesla. They're paying him billions so firing him can immediately and massively improve the bottom line.
As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So I'm not predicting the imminent collapse of Tesla but I think it will come and it'll be sudden and dire.
[1]: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-pedophile-dig-aft...
Because there's always some new thing that will bring infinite wealth, and shareholders believe Tesla will be the leader in it.
Now it's robots, $10 trillion market.
I have the misfortune of living in this city and godforsaken state where they let any company with enough money use it as a testing ground.
Cruise was/is fucking awful. But these tesla taxis somehow 10x worse than Cruise. Going to end up live the governor of this state and without the ability to recover funds due to awful tort reform.
It's the LIDAR, stupid.
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Yeah yeah.
Negative assertion by sarcasm implied by duplicated agreement, my favorite, also works for sure sure but not for true true.
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There's people that straight faced make the claim that FSD is worse than GM, Ford, Toyota etc. driver assistance systems. Meanwhile we can put an address in while in the driveway, go through the streets and highway, and arrive at a destination without ever touching the wheel. It's alternative facts at this point.
Not too long ago Edmonds gave FSD the lowest rating for their self driving test because they had to occasionally touch the steering wheel to prove they’re still paying attention. It was the only system that drove on city streets and was by far the best system on the highway.
Tesla went from the upstart everyone loved to the incumbent they love to hate, regardless of facts
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