One thing that really gets me is comparing robotaxis with regular driving. How about comparing robotaxis to… taxis? Would not that be much more sane?
Professional taxi drivers do get into accidents. But their per-distance metric is much better than of an average Joe driving home after 10 hours work shift and a one-too-many pint after work.
Why anyone would ever compare robotaxi to anything else but a regular taxi?
There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.
The only response was, “company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix.”
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
But if a corporation does it it is, “Oops, we will do better next time.”
Utterly insane.
No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.
Sounds like they Sovereign Citizens could. They just have the wrong paperwork
Oh! Driving past stopped school busses you mean. Had to look up “driving through bus stops”. :)
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.
And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.
It isn’t a unique Texas Law. It’s law everywhere in the US and Canada.
“mostly all in North America, require all surrounding vehicles to stop when a school bus is stopped with its red lights flashing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws
“And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.”
Only if you are from a different country.
Which is beside the point that if anyone else drove through 20 bus stops, they couldn’t use the excuse, “I’m from another country so I don’t know your laws.” to get out of jail.
That it’s a software fix is also beside the point. “Oh I drove illegally 20 times. I know better and won’t do it again.”
The default in most other states is that opposite direction traffic on a divided highway don’t have to stop. The states differ in what constitutes a divided highway, but generally at least 5 feet of space or a physical barrier between the lanes would qualify. In Texas, however, there is no exception for divided highways, and the key definition is “controlled-access highway,” which requires on/off ramps and physical barriers between traffic directions, or “different roadways,”
So for a 5-lane road where there are 2 lanes going in each direction with a center lane for left turns, Texas requires opposite direction traffic to stop, while most other states do not.
Yeah, a lot of school bus stops on five lane highways… /s
2 lanes in each direction with a middle lane? That’s a big chunk of Texas, especially when weighted for population.
The incidents had nothing to do with divided highways. You can see the video is at residential streets.
deleted by creator
Wow, good thing the owner didn’t fire a load of people in the government department who could prevent this.
He fired them because he knew his system sucked, and would never be roadworthy, and that was the department that would stop him. So he fired them, and here we are.
I’m actually looking forward to a lot of good crashes, that they’ll explain away as Sleepy Joe’s fault, or it’s not that bad that a school bus full of children blew up on a fire crash with a Tesla, it happens all the time, or perhaps they’ll just deny it, and MAGA will cover it up. Let them kill a whole bunch of American citizens, and then be all dismissive of any criticism.
This is the year to let MAGA fully flower, and do their worst. The Dems should just stay out of the way, and do nothing to stop them from themselves, and work the media to point out every disaster. I can’t wait for the Midterms.
If driverless taxis ever go mainstream (and that’s a big if), it will be from companies like Waymo, not Tesla. Tesla shouldn’t be seen as a serious company. I mean, they do sell legitimate products, but their $1.6 trillion market cap isn’t based on what they sell today, but what their cult member investors think they’re going to bring to market in the future. You know, all the stuff that will usher in the post-human, techno utopia. It’s all nonsense, and someday it will all come crashing down, though that could take a while. People can stay delusional for a long time.
Elon’s stupid ass dedication to using cameras and image processing for self driving will ultimately be what leaves Tesla in the dust. A combination of LIDAR, cameras, and other detection tools are way safer than just cameras alone. I’m not a huge Mark Rober fan but he did show that you can beat Tesla’s self driving with Looney Tunes techniques
Tesla is already broke, the magic bubble has popped, and they are on a steady slide to bankruptcy. They will NEVER recover their mojo. The institutional investors will keep them alive for a while, but they are already Wile E. Coyote, hanging in mid-air, and hasn’t realized there’s nothing under their feet yet.
If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.
I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.
Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn’t distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I’m not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during “boring times”?
Sorry, I’m just rambling here …
perhaps the governance of the united states was never really meant to be effective, but good enough for now, before they could usher in the new era, of His dominion upon earth. hyper-techno-christian-fascism is gonna taste so good in the chips aisle
„But that‘s as bad as it will ever be!“ I hear tech bros reciting their mantra but then it gets worse all the time somehow.
“And that’s when enshitification kicked in”
Did Robotaxi just flat out steal the Cyberpunk font in order to try to look cool? It seems like a very Musk thing to do.
He is such a dork
No he’s not in the nerdy spectrum, he tried very hard to be cool with nerds, after they made him lotsa money.
But he’s just an awful person. Dork is too cool for him. He’s such a total loser
Elon is a poser. He wants to be a cool nerd but is just a dumb c***, try hard.
He’s called Phony Stark for a reason.
Self driving cars have always been a stupid solution to the wrong problem.
We shouldn’t be investing billions in them. We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
But I guess that’s not profitable so I guess we’ll just do idiotic garbage that gets people killed.
We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
when someone figures out how to make the better options more profitable than the bad options we’ll finally see progress.
until then we’re fucked
It’s a shame someone named Arthur Pigou never figured out a solution over a century ago.
that’s nifty. now we have to figure out how to get our legislature to pass said proposed solution, which is the actual hard part.
This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.
You could not pay me to get inside of any Tesla product. Crappy quality, crappy design, crappy materials, crappy everything. Just another PE for guys with itty bitty weenies.
AI = anonymous indians (with video game controllers)
That would happen a lot less if they just used the LiDAR + camera combo like a sane person
But who am I to judge? el*n certainly knows better riiiiigghhht?
If you like to watch your money burn, invest in Tesla.
Human: pffft hold my beer… Wait no, I’ll keep it.
Perhaps their AI was modelled on their CEO IQ?
