Ask HN: What could I build to make your life a little easier?
9 points by uint9_t 1d ago 10 comments
Ask HN: What is the state of support for mutable torrents?
5 points by absurdistan 3d ago 1 comments
How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale
159 Bluestein 515 7/20/2025, 1:16:51 PM aol.com ↗
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
As for the Bay Area, it’s all suburbs.
Of course it is. Banning street-side parking would double or triple most cities’ navigable road space.
Presumably they're not just roaming around aimlessly. They're also providing transportation to whoever's sitting inside.
That is why parking lots make places un-walkable.
But that's not what congestion means.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Do you mean "in the US"? There is a whole part of the world where public transit is actually working well.
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.
Boeing has had multiple horrifying incidents in the last years. Would you say that aviation is unsafe?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
As a society we forgot how to just stand up and say no. We relegated people doing so as Karens instead of supporting them.
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.
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).
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-fare-gates-...
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
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.
It is often perceived as unsafe, but perception is not reality.
Perception of safety isn't just about accidents.
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.
Apparently they already are: they need a supervisor human for every ride.
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.
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.
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).
This is what happens when you move a bus stop: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/03/18/legal-a...
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.
And when you will get your own infrastructure, well you are converging back to a subway or overhead light railway.
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.
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.
Given a 2min loading time, you would need say 12 platforms to support this from a single station, but that's aggregated from multiple stations funneling into the same track, so you'd only require that at terminuses for instance.
Isn't handling that part of the definition of "self-driving"?
Using your own infrastructure negates what self driving tech bros are trying to achieve - pods on existing roads.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't the money from things like vehicle registration fees and gas taxes already doing that?
> 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.
Whether it is into golf carts or trains, I bet you there will be resistence.
you might want to think a bit longer on the inefficiencies here.
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 story is a _bit_ worse for single decker buses, but honestly not much.
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'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.
https://campuslifeserviceshome.ucsf.edu/transportation/uber-...
https://www.timeout.com/chicago/news/you-can-now-get-a-ride-...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
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.
And this is a Sunday afternoon, I’m sure the drive gets dramatically worse on a weekday.
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.)
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?
Car gives up to 2hr, train gives 46min.
Abbey wood to LHR, up to 2h40 by car or 1h02 by train
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.
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.
Until that is fixed, people are going to prefer private transportation.
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 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.)
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.
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!
>> 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.
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.[
No comments yet
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.
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.
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.
Given Elon's enviable track record of proving the doubters wrong, I'd be hesitant to make such a claim.
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.
Elon is an expert at overturning conventional wisdom of what can be done in high risk enterprises. And transportation is one of his enterprises.
You really think that's a valid argument? Or is this just being an Elon fan wrapped in additional language.
What you made up is not what I argued.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%? "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.
The Boring Company has had unexpected success in digging tunnels for cables and other city infrastructure.
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?
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.
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.
Have a nice day!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That is not a useful metric for Tesla. 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.
source?
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
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
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.
And Tesla knows it.
You cannot compare "the subset of conditions, locations, weather, street markings where FSD is available, because if they're not suitable, you can't use it" against "all drivers, all conditions, all weather, all the time, whether suitable or not" and keep a straight face.
Also, "fun" facts:
Tesla doesn't count an incident as an accident if the airbags don't deploy. Modern airbag systems don't blindly deploy on impact at a certain speed. Sensors assess speed, intensity of impact, angles, chassis intrusion before determining whether to trigger airbags. Sometimes it just might be seatbelt tensioners that fire. You can hammer into someone at 30mph and because of those variables, airbags don't deploy (I've also witnessed this literally hundreds of times as a firefighter/paramedic). But no airbags? That 30mph collision? "Not an accident". This also includes accidents where damage to the vehicle was so severe that airbag systems were unable to deploy. Not an accident in Tesla's "statistics".
Even more egregious - Tesla specifically does not count fatality accidents in its accident stats. Why? Who the hell knows, but they don't, and have said so themselves.
Tesla also redacts more information than any other company to the NTSB about driver assistance system incidents. Including Waymo.
So, due respect, nothing has been "immediately proven untrue". The only thing known is that Tesla is happy to pimp themselves on garbage logic and math that there's no earthly way they know is not a number that's close to useless and deceiving.
FYI. Outputting a wall of text trying to beef up an already losing-in-relevance point because its the only one you feel like you have detailed info of doesn't make your argument seem more believable. It just makes you seem like you want to believe it harder, and would continue doing so regardless what you saw in the future.
> But statisticians have pointed out serious analytical flaws, including the fact that the Tesla stats involve newer cars being driven on highways. The government’s general statistics include cars of all ages on highways, rural roads and neighborhood streets. In other words, the comparison is apples and oranges.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-27/tesla-stop...
Biased media?
Then let's try Tesla's own words:
> and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. (Our crash statistics are not based on sample data sets or estimates.)
https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/VehicleSafetyReport
You're trying too hard to cope. Tesla's own vehicle safety report says that they don't count accidents without airbag deployment.
There's plenty of points about Musk's bullshit. Just a few months ago he was telling investors that Teslas can ignore noise from dirt, dust, snow, because Tesla's cameras do photon counting.
Spoiler: they don't. they can't. Photon counting requires special cameras. It requires an enclosed lab so you can you know, actually count the photons.
But then there's people like you, who can't seem to understand why his repeated garbage spewing might engender skepticism in others, and instead put it down to them being haters or jealous or something.
Also, trying to discredit Elon himself is pretty much the weakest road you can take. His track record might be of being overly optimistic of timelines, but never eventual results. There's literally no comparison for a single person with as much success in leading teams solving hard technological problems.
There's little more than misinformation, jealousy, and constant debunkable bullshit character assault bombardment making people actually have a bad view of him. Criticizable for specific things sure, but not in general for anyone in tech with any vision and memory. Good thing is that being a hard tech maverick leaves a permanent mark in history, and people tend to get less jealous when they see the benefits themselves, and less misinformed when the machine fueling the misinformation runs out of hydrocarbons. And bad views fade with no footing, while the then-accusers won't be proud of their old words.
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.
He was simply looking at his phone in reality.
I'm layman regardin this but this would have been my vote in a quizz :)
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)
I remember this incident. It happened a couple of blocks away. Unreasonable that they let him go.
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...
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
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
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
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/business/nhtsa-tesla-smart-su...
Best of luck =3
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
I'd rather not have drivers playing dice while driving. =3
ok
more at 5
Cheers =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
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 :|
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
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.
Let me know if you have trouble finding the projects. =3
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.
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
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
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data...
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.
By the way, it’s a “binocular” system. “Bicameral” refers to a design for institutions like legislatures.
How so? Honestly asking.-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
>Bathtub curve
you should try your luck selling exotic snake oils.
Ask questions if you don't know, as being rude is not constructive. =3
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
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.
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.
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!
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
> 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 suspect a Amish horse buggy is more practical. =3
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
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
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.
Waymo is not claiming to work in small towns.
Tesla is. Soon™.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
No comments yet
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.
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 .
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?
Perhaps you live in a location that lends itself to such events...
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.
Also, kudos on your travel.
Edit: Here is a link to Karpathy discussing the trade-offs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0&t=5276s
You really expect a Tesla employee to speak out against Elon?
Especially when $10M+ TC is on the line?
In cities, high-speed rail and e-bikes make more sense than a honking traffic jam at 4am. lol =3
> 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.
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.
So you could define it as a sensor issue
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.
He's just wrong about this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
What is your example or evidence for this?
Plus our cameras aren't as good as human eyes.
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.
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.
- 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...
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.
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.
(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.)
Despite all this, a lot of modern cars are adding lidar to make things easier for me.
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.
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.
And they may well end up with something "that works". But... many buts.
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.
Waymos which cost as much as an actual taxi and aren't scalable are nothing but a VC money carnival.
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.
“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.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1944688226037325868
The obsession with 420, 69 and dick jokes seems another level.
Why would they use what was a science role model that way?
On national TV.
In a presidential inauguration.
A permanent stain on US history.
Without government contracts, SpaceX never succeeds.
Without a mysterious visa, Musk never stays legally in the U.S.
Try to socialize LVT and other policies that will improve everyone’s lives.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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?
proof left as an exercise for the reader.
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.-
How many human drivers almost hit something?
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
When a machine kills someone do we go after … the company? (Maybe we should all be shorting robo-taxi companies.)
So average driver is a low, probably incorrect bar to meet.
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?
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...
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)
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oWDVJ4FjfU
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g
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.
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 would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.
>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.
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.
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.
Elon has a good track record, but he has some duds in there too.
https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The stan is strong, in that one...
Keep whining from the sidelines while the ones actually building continue to create wealth for everyone else.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/waymo-cars-are-coming-to-new...
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.
> 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
i do agree he should say its in early access or something
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.
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.
What is everyone smoking? TDS? MDS?
Tesla went from the upstart everyone loved to the incumbent they love to hate, regardless of facts
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.
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...
Now it's robots, $10 trillion market.
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.
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
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.
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.