How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale

Taxis just aren't that highly demanded of a service. It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle.

One car owned per adult is very inconvenient to deviate from in a car friendly urban environment, even if robotaxis can be made to have overall cost parity to car ownership.

The net result, I think, is that robotaxis can only ever increase the total number of cars and concurrent drivers.

Would you disagree? Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Or, similarly, for single people to switch from 1 car or no car, just transit, to robotaxis?

Robotaxis seem to me to have potential well solve the niches human taxis are bad at: late night safe driving, very long point to point going out of an urban core into a rural area, perhaps even personal cargo shipping, if a robo van could enable you to do furniture shopping without renting a truck. But these are edge cases that compete with private cars pretty intensely. I'd only prefer a late night taxi if I'm drunk. I'd only want a robotaxi to a rural area if I'm an urban living rock climber or hiker, and I don't care to own a car. The total available market is just wildly incompatible with the current and speculated valuation, as far as I see it.

Also, I realized a side effect of a hypothetical world where everybody rode in robotaxis/waymos/even ubers is we’d effectively get congestion pricing everywhere (due to “surge” pricing), and the use of roads would actually fit into regular supply and demand market forces!

It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas.

I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2]

[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-t...

The scaling problem is the Robotaxi implementation details. Waymo is scalable in the way you describe. Tesla’s Robotaxi current restrictions make is what is holding back scalability.

Indeed, individuals optimise for latency not throughput. They may be willing to go for high-throughput low-latency options if the cost-savings are significant, but that is often not the case.

But when you want to roundtrip transport 1M people a day, then you are kind of missing space in the air.

Sure but this is not a fundamental issue with public transport, it's an issue with the implementation of public transport in the US. There are plenty of places where it's done well, and it is felt deeply.

Living in major city in the Netherlands I have never felt any need to own a car. I've been quite open to it a few times and I can afford it no problem, but it was just not worth the hassle, it's just an inferior option.

> and most crucially, unsafe

This is more or less a completely imagined issue. The most dangerous form of transportation is personal vehicles, and its not even close.

For example, on the NY subway you have a 100x greater chance of dying by driving instead of taking the subway. 100x.

If you look at the risk of injury it's not any better.

The thing is that feeling unsafe and actually being unsafe are two different things. Cars feel safe because you're isolated, you have walls between you and everyone else. Public transit feels unsafe because you can directly see other people and there's nothing stopping them from just walking up to you.

Like, for your point on drugs, on a subway you can literally see the people on drugs, which makes you feel unsafe. In a car, you don't know who is on drugs, so you feel more safe. But, you're not. People are still on drugs, but now, they're also operating a deadly weapon.

I live in northern Europe now. The only time I ever felt unsafe on a bus, was once when a raving junkie walked up and down the bus with a scissor in his hand, trying to "sniff out the snitch". Turns out the bus I took, was the bus that also went to a halfway home.

But that's about it. I've taken thousands of rides, and have felt safe.

Sure, there are some annoying aspects - like teens blasting music, drunk people going out on the weekends, but most of the time it is pretty good.

Then again, taking the bus isn't looked down on in Europe - and carries no shame , so to speak. That goes for the metro, too.

> I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride

It has very little to do with public transports and everything to do with our declining western societies. I've never witnessed any of these in any part of developed Asia I know of...

> Perhaps another solution is needed.

Reducing inequalities, funding education, local police, etc. all seem like a more sustainable way forward than shielding ourselves from the shit in a robotaxi...

That sounds like a self centered culture problem not a public transportation problem.

For what it's worth, I prefer drugged up people in a bus rather than behind the wheel. It's better to be annoyed by them than to be dead from a car crash with them.

> I tend to understand her side quite well when I see fare hoppers, people blasting loud music, shouting incoherently or doing drugs - and I probably see one of those every time I ride.

That seems to describe city streets. I had a relative that until recently refused to visit major cities because of this, using basically those same words (unsafe, uncomfortable, dirty).

How about just fix those problems in public transport. Weve put zero thought/resources into it

None of those things particularly contribute to the traffic problem.

If the problem you are trying to solve is "interacting with random humans" then sure Robotaxi is good. If you are interested in "moving a lot of people to where they need to go efficiently" then it's not.

Using public transport is, statistically, safer than a private vehicle.

It is often perceived as unsafe, but perception is not reality.

In America or elsewhere? In America, they are dirty and unsafe because they are drastically underfunded, because of people like Elon Musk. This is the history of public transportation in America. America also has a despicable homelessness problem because of all the libertarian nonsense.

Your robo taxis will also become dirty, unsafe and unclean.

The quality of service a private entity will provide, does not magically make it better.

It’s better only because of competition driving differentiation in order to capture more market share.

But if you cannot compete further on quality, you will compete on price.

The airline industry is a good example of this.

Public Safety, public transit, can be very good, provided the incentives, funding and institutions to serve it are funded.

People take pride in their work, including the work that results in world quality public services.

About the only place I’ve ever been to where this complaint really rings true in suburban areas is the US, and I’d be inclined to put that more down to poor funding and planning than anything else. If anything I kinda have the opposite complaint; there are bus routes in Dublin with literally a stop every hundred metres, in weird winding routes, and you can’t get rid of them because people will write to their TD (MP).

This is what happens when you move a bus stop: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/03/18/legal-a...

I see this as a call for the robo-rickshaw.

Well then you will find out that these vehicles needs their own infrastructure, because they don't exist in a vacuum, but in a city where lot of other elements are using the roads, like people crossing streets on lights.

And when you will get your own infrastructure, well you are converging back to a subway or overhead light railway.

Most of the land consumed by vehicle operation is not consumed by the vehicle itself, but by the headway in front of the vehicle that’s necessary for safe operation at a given velocity.

For instance, at 0 mph, car might be 20 feet long and occupy a 10 foot wide lane, for a total land consumption of 200 ft². However, at 60 mph using the two second rule for safe following distance it needs an extra 240 feet of distance for a total land consumption of 2600 ft.².

By limiting your one seat golf carts to 30 mph, you’ll certainly need less headway then something people expect to operate at 60 or 70 mph, but it will still be much larger footprint than simply the vehicle itself.

Of course, this is true of other vehicles, including buses and trains, but they get to divide that land consumption by the number of people inside, making the comparison much more favourable.

IMO Better than arguing about what type of vehicles people should and shouldn’t use, we should simply stop giving away public land for vehicles as if it’s free. Require the public, as owners of the land, be reimbursed for land consumed by private vehicles, including headway. If you’re Elon Musk and you’re terrified of strangers on transit, that’s fine. You just have to reimburse the public for the extra land required to travel alone in your robot car.

Regardless, you'd need to get Americans out of their huge SUVs.

Whether it is into golf carts or trains, I bet you there will be resistence.

"this is ok because..."

you might want to think a bit longer on the inefficiencies here.

Uber Shuttle already exists:

https://campuslifeserviceshome.ucsf.edu/transportation/uber-...

https://www.timeout.com/chicago/news/you-can-now-get-a-ride-...

> 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.

>No, Elon wants to cancel public transportation. Just like in the 1930's when car companies bought public transportation to shut them down.

Except that's not what happened. Streetcars were already on the decline when car companies bought them. Claiming "car companies bought public transportation to shut them down" makes as much sense as "hospice doctors gave cancer patients painkillers to kill them".

From wikipedia:

>Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries' difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, consumerism, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.[

Literally the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Can you point to an article about the 1930s? This is interesting.

Who is going to subsidize money-losing enterprises?

> In a world where

If you consider that "the world" is "the US". But in countries that did not completely fail their urban planning, public transportation works. Now admittedly the US probably has to compromise because of how it was built.

No way the robotaxi works e.g. in Europe. And that's without considering the fact that robotaxis belong to a guy who makes nazi salutes.

You hit a nail here: Some weeks ago, there was a story that people paid a premium of whatever double-digit-USD to get a PERSONFREE robo-taxi. This clearly shows that people will accept robo taxis, because this shows most are more comfortable in a "private room" than in public transport (esp. when i think about public-toilets like Berlin or Frankfurt) And by today, peoplre are already paying a premium, so i see a clear opportunity here.

Are you familiar with the concept of induced demand? It's often used in the context of road expansion, in which adding another lane increases the number of trips taken, and hence cars on the road. Often, traffic is often very similar to before the upgrade, if not worse (because the connecting infrastructure was not upgraded).

Demand for trips is elastic, and depends on many factors.

Similarly, if the Tesla robotaxi system is better than driving for anyone, it will necessarily increase the number of trips taken. Whether that's people who prefer to let the machine drive than drive themselves, or people who can't drive themselves (no car or no license), there will be more trips. Additionally, some number of people will take them instead of public transit, which will increase traffic without increasing trips served.

How about smaller buses then? This is quite common in the Nordic region it seems.

That's an appeal to authority. Either make an argument for why his reasoning is good or don't. But don't appeal to someone's reputation.

That being said, I do think what the parent commenter is missing is that those other modes require significant investment. With cars you get profit and can scale one by one. So less up front investment. Should do nicely in all sorts of cities.

The lies about FSD, the webcams instead of Lidars, the fake robot controlled by a human being, the obsession with shitcoins, firing useful people, the lies about his subway thingy, or being a literal Nazi in front of the cameras?

I'm wondering what track record you could talk about, because I believe this guy should be in jail forever but you will surely prove me wrong.

Sure, Tesla cars will be able to drive themselves next year for the last ten years.

Please list some of the things he's "proved the doubters wrong" about.

> Subways require billions in infrastructure and over 20 years of lead time

Of course they does, because purpose of subways is to transport hundred of millions to billions of people a year. You just can't fit that on a road with a unscalable thing like a robotaxi.

> In the US it is officially 2 deaths involving Teslas with FSD engaged, with a couple more under investigation but not yet verified that FSD was engaged.

That is not a useful metric for Tesla. They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident.

Tesla’s disengage their self driving just before a crash. That’s how the company can say FSD hardly ever causes crashes.

Most likely it was the same driver. I was in Arizona and someone crashed into me, and he claimed he "lost control of the vehicle" which was an old truck. I can buy you lose steering or breaking, but not steering AND braking.

He was simply looking at his phone in reality.

As for 'Jia Lin Zheng'—it's a typical Chinese name. I can confirm that, as I am Chinese myself.

How many people saved by the tech?

Zheng Jia Lin is a common name. And there are many Chinese/Taiwanese in Hawaii. Source: wife’s family is Taiwanese.

I remember this incident. It happened a couple of blocks away. Unreasonable that they let him go.

This is tough for people to get right too. Near my house we’ve got 2 left turn lanes that merge into a 3 lane road without any lane markers, and I’ve got to maintain constant vigilance for people drifting into my lane.

Are you sure that you were in the right and there were two left turn lanes? There is an intersection by me that everyone uses wrong and you get folks using it as a double turn lane when the lanes have text that say the name of the road you are technically supposed to stay on. Really the city is to blame and not the driver because it’s confusing but still, I think the lanes are all mapped manually for Waymo (but personally I don’t have any inside knowledge)

Traveling south here on Land Park Dr there are two lanes, some people from the right lane veer left and the left lane veer right through the middle of the intersection. There aren’t dotted lines to help.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https://www.google.com/maps/@3...

Human bicameral driven cars are unreliable too, but FSD is more reliable. And more reliable, with way more data than any competing technologies.

Using vision for driving is something that has worked for as long as cars have existed. Trying to push some "millimeter precision" solution with unproven feature set and prohibitive hardware accessibility is just asking for no real safety improvements and just more lives lost.

Cheers.

> edge-case failure modes grow exponential in time.

How so? Honestly asking.-

Waymo works in a remarkable range of situations. I took a waymo in LA and our route came through an awkward four-way intersection at the crest of a hill on a residential street. Another driver went through the stop when we had right of way, saw us and then just stopped, completely blocking our side of the road. The waymo just backed up a couple of yards and then slowly went round the wrong side and proceeded on its route. That is, in a weird situation it did exactly what a good, cautious human driver would do. Small sample, but it makes me think they are not doing what you say, they are just actually trying to approach the problem seriously rather than Tesla’s “full speed and damn the torpedoes” approach.

> if you put a waymo in a small town that no alphabet engineer has ever even heard of, then youll see it fail badly as well.

Which is why it is a non-goal for Waymo. It should be a non-goal for Tesla too, given the state of the art.

> i think if you put a waymo in a small town that no alphabet engineer has ever even heard of, then youll see it fail badly as well.

Waymo is not claiming to work in small towns.

Tesla is. Soon™.

San Francisco, Phoenix and LA represent a strong diversity of driving conditions. Certainly not all driving conditions, but no one is throwing a Waymo into a small town in the way you describe. Expanding slowly and cautious seems like the rational thing to do, I’m not clear what you are proposing as an alternative (or specifically what the alleged fraud is).

It’s that Waymo is both more widespread and better. If there were no Waymo, then sure. But there is Waymo.

Remember that the robotaxi industry is currently doing everything they can to look good. They are being watched like hawks. Look at how everyone was horny for Uber rides, until Uber needed to actually make money so they jacked up fares, cut driver pay and let anyone with a piece of shit car join. Or how Google search has been enshittified.

In 10 years when robotaxi companies are short on cash and trying to IPO they will absolutely start speeding. They'll lock the doors and give you a paid presentation about Scientology during your ride. "Accidentally" drive you to a competing store that paid for sponsored traffic, instead of the .

Over the years, I’ve had four human driven taxis crash, and two taxi drivers rob me.

Tesla's never had LIDAR to remove. They had short distance ultrasonic parking sensors that they removed.

The part that I always found difficult to square was not that Elon Musk towed this “no need for LiDAR” line so hard, but that Andrej Karpathy, who I generally consider a very reliable voice in this space, was also in strong agreement that cameras were all that was needed. Does anyone know if he still believes cameras is all you need?

Edit: Here is a link to Karpathy discussing the trade-offs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0&t=5276s

Many LIDARs are blinded by direct Sunlight, and often see highly reflective surfaces like mirrors as black hole or distant ranged areas. These still need tertiary safety sensors like mm RADAR for safety in dust/rain/sunlight.

In cities, high-speed rail and e-bikes make more sense than a honking traffic jam at 4am. lol =3

And now he's peddling more horseshit and expecting the public and investors to swallow it:

> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.

I call bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are simply not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.

But Musk thinks you're not smart enough to know this.

Well an under-carriage camera would have obviated this failure mode.

So you could define it as a sensor issue

How many car crashes does waymo have per mile compared to average drivers?

No, they don't. Look at what has happened when a tesla has mistaken a motorcycle with two small rear lights that is nearby for a car that is further away but with the same lighting configuration. Did not end well for the motorcyclists.

He's just wrong about this.

They are complementary sensors. It's a much easier engineering feat to combine two (cheap) sensors that are good at different things and fusing this information than creating one perfect sensor that does everything.

Private moon landers (the Japanese being most recent one) keep crashing because they rely on a single high-quality altimeter and expect it to work perfectly, all the time. If they had a complementary low-quality backup altimeter that operated independently, they would have had a less failure prone distance estimation system.

Can cameras do it eventually is a bit of a tangent.

All the information is there in a video feed, but the amount of work to get reliable perception from it is not small. With LIDAR and radar you get to the end goal with less uncertainty.

Ever heard of optical illusions? If a brain can be fooled by input from its two cameras like this, what hope does a dumb (or worse, artificially “intelligent”) computer have?

Camera vision and LIDAR perfectly complement each other. Camera vision is no good detecting unknown/outlier obstacles quickly and accurately. LIDAR is great at detecting unknown obstacles quickly and accurately.

You can tune the camera obstacle detection to be hyper-sensitive, which results in phantom braking, causing Passengers to feel that the car is "unreliable" while it actually is safer. Humans are better at braking the appropriate amount when they see something strange, dynamically tuning their sensitivity in a new situation.

You can lax the sensitivity, which will reduce false alarms, but will actually cause more crashes, deaths, and injuries. You don't want your customers to feel unsafe, so from a business perspective you will inevitably reduce the sensitivity.

> What are the main challenges in building software that relies solely on camera input?

Probably the main challenge is that it took nature about a billion years to get to human level visual perception and understanding of environment and nobody really knows how to duplicate it.

Using tools like LIDAR can fill some gaps.

Sensor fusion is pretty straightforward. You can think of it like sorting algorithms in CS. There's a bunch of standard techniques simple enough to teach undergrads that work fine in production, and enough technical depth beyond them to last the rest of your career.

If you actually look back at the E2E tweet, musk only says that the NN replaced 300k lines of "control code". Control code usually doesn't encompass the entire AV software stack, but neither should it take 300k LOC. As far as I'm aware no one is 100% sure what they mean by E2E and if it's actually the standard meaning or something else that's been widely misinterpreted.

> and the software is and end-to-end neural net,

Well considering Musk record for adherence to reality, question is if you can really believe that or if Musk thinks that this is happening or it is not happening at all and Musk is just making it up.

You've got it exactly backwards.

When the software was hand-coded, having Lidar and a high-res map was vital.

But if you have a good enough AI, sensors that replicate the human senses are all what is needed.

The real question is: when will we get good enough AI that can be applied to all cars?

It's not "Musk's argument," it's Andrej Karpathy's.

Also, if you've ever done any ML you would note that more data isn't always better. Plus there's the piece about which thing to believe when you get conflicting data. It's a lot more to it than what random Hacker News people are saying in this thread.

Counterquestions

- What living creature is using wheels to move around?

- What kind of birds come strapped with a jet engine?

Sometimes non-natural solutions are easier and often better than attempt to replicate nature for every cost. Imagine your logic applied on a plane - birds flap their wings, thus this 737 should spread it wings and flap away like a goose. Now take military goose and flap fast enough to get supersonic...

There's no reason to think the best performing, or even adequately performing, technological solution to a problem would mirror how humans have solved it. Submarines don't swim like fish after all.

But more specifically to this case, human eyes are attached to brains with (generally) vastly better image recognition and reasoning abilities than any camera based self-driving car. Because of this, humans are better able to recognize visual input even in degraded or unusual conditions compared with a computer.

That's a bit like saying cars should use legs instead of wheels.

(Also, I don't know what star-system you grew up on by my lidar sensors are next to the tubular sheaths on my cephalothorax, right where Xoc'tlz'ik (the Creator) intended them to go.)

My head contains intelligence hardware that far outstrips anything in these cars. Plus my cameras are a lot better.

Despite all this, a lot of modern cars are adding lidar to make things easier for me.

Your head has a general intelligence, so it can do sensor fusion in a way a car can only dream of.

It's not that we lack lidar, but we what we have in addition to "cameras".

We possess a spatial intelligence (e.g. how your brain has an approximation of: It feels like I walked three blocks) that will never exist in this "photons-in" "controls-out" fantasy.

Probably because major news outlets are reluctant to include pictures of penises, even stylized ones, in their articles.

A decade ago the antics seemed less childish, imo. E.g. calling the starship "BFR" or racing the snail with the boring machine, or the Tesla "plaid" mode.

The obsession with 420, 69 and dick jokes seems another level.

It's like a different dumb jackass assumed that role some time ago.

Why would they use what was a science role model that way?

Nazi salutes won't be forgotten.

On national TV.

In a presidential inauguration.

A permanent stain on US history.

He was definitely not always like that, at least loudly in public.

Citation for the "clearly brilliant" part?

> Musk is a clearly brilliant man

proof left as an exercise for the reader.

They are "the men in the arena" taking chances pushing humanity forward, we are on the sidelines, doing nothing but criticizing people greater than us. Death is necessary for humanity to progress. Eleven workers died building the golden gate bridge, etc.

Most of the time when a human does it is because they were either operating the car while they were tired or ill which interfered with their ability to pay attention or they were doing human stuff that distracted them such as dealing with kids, talking to others in the car or by phone, daydreaming, looking at something interesting on the side of the road, panicking because they just noticed a big spider on the ceiling above them, and so on.

A self-driving car should not get tired. It shouldn't be doing any robotic equivalent of those things that distract humans.

This is why almost hitting things is a bigger deal for self-driving cars. Humans are expected to almost hit things, because we do a lot more than drive cars and we are easily distracted.

A self-driving car is a specialized system designed for that one task. If it almost hits something it is either a sign that there is a flaw in how the system works, the real world testing was not good enough, or it has hit an extremely rare edge case

I wonder: when a human does it "we" have someone to blame. I think as a species we like that.

When a machine kills someone do we go after … the company? (Maybe we should all be shorting robo-taxi companies.)

In the 1000s of miles I have been a passenger in Ubers, taxis, etc.. I have never had one try to drive through a railroad crossing.

Tesla is a shrinking company with terrible margins. Now that EV credit sales are worthless I don’t see how they’ll be profitable going forward.

Waymo is Google, and thus has infinite money.

Waymo has a level 4 driving system. FSD is certified as level 2.. so as it currently stands Tesla’s offering is competitive with Mercedes/GM/Ford/BMW’s driver assistance systems. Not really a stunning accomplishment, though certainly it’s a decent showing.

> Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.

In financial terms you could call that a liability, and you might reasonably expect to have to pay off that liability at some point i.e. delivering functionality people have already paid for! In that framing I would be more careful in framing FSD as a financial success.

That does not prove that Tesla's robotaxi service cannot scale.

A robotaxi service is geofenced. The community tracker is not.

As soon as Tesla manages to nail Austin, they can expand aka scale.

How close are they to operate safely in Austin and to rid of the safety people? I don't know. But sooner or later they will, that is for sure.

I do see that as much more likely for China than western, more ossified cities.

But even then, it'd only be for cities. FSD functioning basically as a human driver would function, anywhere they would function is the real deal.

> AFAIK what Tesla's software does is object detection (cars, people, bikes, road sides) and only uses that. Which of course is not at all safe since there can always be things on the road that are an obstacle but not recognized.

This is not true; in modern FSD the visualization is disconnected from the actual driving model. The visualization runs a lightweight model that labels some stuff and shows it; the actual heavy lifting is now a single model that takes pixels as input and outputs control commands. My car very clearly reacts to stuff that doesn’t appear in the visualization.

I've seen it stop in front of squirrels. Your simplification is simply untrue.

If you think "it is not at all safe" you should probably not go outside with your caution level. FSD miles are ~11x safer than human drivers mind you.

The sad thing is that based on your telling of it, if it detects a small child in a weird costume in the middle of the road but doesn't recognize it as a small child that it's not at least recognizing that something is in the road that should not be regardless of what it is. That should be the minimum in recognizing the road and then recognizing any object within the road.

A while back electroboom did a test with his Tesla's self driving and in most cases had to slam on the brakes himself when it didn't recognize obstacles he had set up for it. Also have seen videos of Tesla's navigation screen having a difficult time with freight trains. It stopped for the trains but was very confused about what it was, showing it as various oddly shaped cars and trucks that often morphed into other oddly stretched vehicles.

Sounds like all the same things Waymo has when they launch in a new area?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/waymo-cars-are-coming-to-new...

It's actually more than one driver, there's a remote person who can intervene as well.

Negative assertion by sarcasm implied by duplicated agreement, my favorite, also works for sure sure but not for true true.

Not too long ago Edmonds gave FSD the lowest rating for their self driving test because they had to occasionally touch the steering wheel to prove they’re still paying attention. It was the only system that drove on city streets and was by far the best system on the highway.

Tesla went from the upstart everyone loved to the incumbent they love to hate, regardless of facts

TSLA has defied gravity for years. Fundamentally, it makes no sense. It's been valued at between $500,000 and $1 million per car sold in a year. That's utterly insane.

But we know that stock prices are based on expectations for the future not fundamentals. So massive growth is built into the stock price but we have to start asking where this growth is coming from. That's why there's a robotaxi effort.

EVs are becoming a commodity. So over time Tesla's price direction is towards the Big Three. But with more risks, namely the Chinese supply chain for batteries.

You can view Tesla as an investment in Elon, which I think the market has. But that's on incredibly shaky ground. He's torched his relationship to the current administration going so far as to call the sitting president of the United States a pedophile [1]. Elon doesn't seem to appreciate that Trump could end Tesla with an executive order.

My point is that Elon is volatile and can so easily become a liability to Tesla. They're paying him billions so firing him can immediately and massively improve the bottom line.

As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So I'm not predicting the imminent collapse of Tesla but I think it will come and it'll be sudden and dire.

[1]: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/elon-musks-pedophile-dig-aft...

Based on that view, maybe we shouldn’t have public roads at all. Go back to scavenging for food.