A 2025 Tesla Model 3 in Full-Self Driving mode drives off of a rural road, clips a tree, loses a tire, flips over, and comes to rest on its roof. Luckily, the driver is alive and well, able to post about it on social media.
I just don’t see how this technology could possibly be ready to power an autonomous taxi service by the end of next week.
Elon Musk decided they absolutely would not use lidar, years ago when lidar was expensive enough that a decision like that made economic sense to at least try making work. Nowadays lidar is a lot cheaper but for whatever reason Musk has drawn a line in the sand and refuses to back down on it.
Unlike many people online these days I don’t believe that Musk is some kind of sheer-luck bought-his-way-into-success grifter, he has been genuinely involved in many of the decisions that made his companies grow. But this is one of the downsides of that (Cybertruck is another). He’s forced through ideas that turned out to be amazing, but he’s also forced through ideas that sucked. He seems to be increasingly having trouble distinguishing them.
He really hasn’t. He purchased companies that were already sitting on profitable ideas. He is not an engineer. He is not a scientist. He has no training in any design discipline. He takes credit for the ideas of people he pays. He takes credit for the previous achievements of companies he’s purchased.
What is it going to fucking take for people to finally actually see the grifter for what he is? He’s never had a single good fucking r&d idea in his life 🙃 he has wasted billions of dollars researching and developing absolutely useless ideas that have benefited literally no one and have not made him any money. It is absolutely incredible how powerful his mythos is, that people still believe him to be or have been some kind of engineer or something. He’s a fucking racist nepo baby. He’s never done a single useful thing in his life. He wasn’t the sole individual involved in creating PayPal (and was entirely unrelated in turning it into the successful business it became), he didnt found tesla nor is he responsible for any of the technological developments it made (except for forcing his shitty charger design that notoriously breaks down and charges at half the speed that competitors do), he did not found SpaceX and by all metrics involved has been loathed by everyone at the company for the past decade for continuously committing workers rights violations and fostering a racist sexist and ableist work environment. The man has done nothing but waste people’s time stoking his ego and sexually abusing a slew of employees for the past 2 and a half decades.
He’s utterly incapable of admitting that one of his ideas is garbage.
There is a reason he fawns all over Trump and that’s because both of them are of a type. Both of them have egos large enough to have their own gravitational fields but lack any real talent. Look his family up, they’re all like that.
They removed their lidar sensors after the prices had already come down.