Posted by CharlesW 8 hours ago
But some claims he makes seem like they’re plain factual. For example he’s claiming that Robotaxi rides in Austin don’t have human supervision now (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2014397578352226423). Is that true or is it that they’re just remotely monitoring them instead of sitting in the car?
Elon also retweeted Bloomberg’s fawning review of how perfect FSD is (https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2014721293950590985), but I also see lots of people saying FSD is far less reliable than something like Waymo, and that intervention is frequently needed. To me it seems like all of a sudden, when it became obvious that Waymo is far ahead and Tesla’s stock is overvalued and China’s FSD competitors have caught up, there has been a push to say FSD is ready to be on streets just like Waymo.
Is this just a dangerous experiment on the public? Or has it actually improved in some way? Have they said what specific software improvements they built to make it ready for the public?
Of course this is the same system that likes to ignore train crossing red warning lights [3] so it can run into crossing trains. Very advanced.
[1] https://xcancel.com/joetegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794
[2] https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
[3] https://xcancel.com/RealDanODowd/status/1968788791805583629
Who is to say anyway? I don't trust Chinese company claims any more than I do Tesla's. Probably less because in America so many folks dislike Elon that even sometimes the negatives are blown out of proportion and are much more widely reported on.
Waymo's claims I trust a little bit more because they're often operated in extremely limited circumstances (why not just take a bus or walk or something), with supervision, and because I've heard of a number of bizarre incidents.
All of these tools and technologies are of moderate utility - if you're going to drive it's probably eventually going to be safer for most people (most of whom are exceptionally poor drivers) to just let the car drive. But if you remove the need for hopping in a car to go to Costco to get a jug of milk and instead allow people to just walk down the street a little ways you realize that these are just additive technologies.
If we built cities properly we wouldn't need to spend $50,000 on a car, plus maintenance and insurance, and now a $99.99 starting subscription which, will probably become mandatory at some point for insurance purposes, just to participate in daily life. That's not to say there's anything wrong with cars, I have one, a Tesla in fact, but requiring a car for existence leaves us all poorer and worse off.
e.g. if it has a 99.9% chance of doing your daily commute without crashing and without you intervening, you can monitor it closely from the driver's seat for 6 months and there'll be ~90% chance that everything looks fine and you never need to intervene. But then if you start napping in the backseat on your commute, there's a 70% chance you'll crash within 5 years.
So instead of admitting they were wrong all along and doing what's necessary to catch up (add LiDAR to their sensor stack), they are going to quietly "pivot" Tesla to a "ai and robotics" company, with the monthly fee they'll continue to bilk anyone who is still enthralled enough to believe them on their FSD grift, but they will run the same scam as they did with FSD (Musk will say "humanoid robots for the home in in 3 years", yet we will still be waiting for them to be useful in the year 2035)
Waymo isn't just the Waymo Driver technology and sensor suite. It's charging and cleaning depots. It's product support both for the customer and the vehicle that scales. It's an insane amount of LiDAR acquired 3-D mapping data, plus real time data from Google maps and navigation.
Meanwhile Tesla has replaced some of the drivers sitting in the front seat with chase cars. Just to make the technically correct claim that the cars are no longer supervised by someone in the car.
- George Lucas
Except they do.
Which is why there's FDA certification and regulation and the Lifepak 15s I used as a paramedic cost around $40,000.
Mercedes was also willing to put their money where their mouth was and accept liability for vehicle software issues. (Cue here the Tesla stans talking about "how limited" that was. Almost perhaps as if it was for a good reason and not "if it compiles, ship it").
I don't think that's actually your point, but it sort of sounds like it.
And "in the context of something that is designed to save lives"... well, absolutely, many manufacturers do and will and even "have to".
I'm not a Tesla fan, I will never own a fully self driving car, but I don't have a problem with a company charging money for features that consumers want. There are about a dozen other car manufacturers in the US alone that can sell self driving cars without a subscription if they want to.
Autopilot is not self-driving, it is lane-centering with traffic aware cruise control. It has not gotten any maintenance or updates in years, as far as we can tell.
Identical functionality is available from many competitors with no subscription. This is a noteworthy decision for Tesla because AP has long been one of their defining features, dropping it is a big step backward just as the market caught up.
Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, correct, but that isn't a requirement for newsworthiness.