I saw the Tesla Robotaxi:
- Drive into oncoming traffic, getting honked at in the process.
- Signal a turn and then go straight at a stop sign with turn signal on.
- Park in a fire lane to drop off the passenger.
And that was in a single 22 minute ride. Not great performance at all.
Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.
/s
Let’s see bug balls what he has to say.
But Musk told me it’s ready for primetime, why would he lie?
Imagine you’re the guy who invented SawStop, the table saw that can detect fingers touching the saw blade and immediately bury the blade in an aluminum block to avoid cutting off someone’s finger. Your system took a lot of R&D, it’s expensive, requires a custom table saw with specialized internal parts so it’s much more expensive than a normal table saw, but it works, and it works well. You’ve now got it down that someone can go full-speed into the blade and most likely not even get the smallest cut. Every time the device activates, it’s a finger saved. Yeah, it’s a bit expensive to own. And, because of the safety mechanism, every time it activates you need to buy a few new parts which aren’t cheap. But, an activation means you avoided having a finger cut off, so good deal! You start selling these devices and while it’s not replacing every table saw sold, it’s slowly being something that people consider when buying.
Meanwhile, some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives) and a pinball flipper attached to a rubber brake that slows the blade to a stop within a second when the AI model sees a finger in danger.
This new device, the, “Finger Saver” doesn’t work very well at all. In demos with a hotdog, sometimes the hotdog is sawed in half. Sometimes the saw blade goes flying out of the machine into the audience. After a while, the company has the demo down so that when they do it in extremely controlled conditions, it does stop the hotdog from being sawed in half, but it does take a good few chunks out of it before the blade fully stops. It doesn’t work at all with black fingers, but the Finger Saver company will sell you some cream-coloured paint that you can paint your finger with before using it if your finger isn’t the right shade.
Now, imagine if the media just referred to these two devices interchangeably as “finger saving devices”. Imagine if the Finger Saver company heavily promoted their things and got them installed in workshops in high schools, telling the shop teachers that students are now 100% safe from injuries while using the table saw, so they can just throw out all safety equipment. When, inevitably, someone gets a serious wound while using a “Finger Saver” the media goes on a rant about whether you can really trust “finger saving devices” at all.
Anyhow, this is a rant about Waymo vs. Tesla.
Waymo is also a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work. It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights. At least it kind of works isn’t exactly helping my opinion of it. Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA and robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work
Silicon valley doesn’t have objectives like “putting transit workers out of work”. They only care about growth and profit.
In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.
The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We’d still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don’t think so.
It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights.
Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they’ve been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It’s 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There’s nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.
Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that’s at all possible.
Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA
Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.
robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?
I mean Waymo is way better at their job than Tesla and are more responsible, but this rant makes them out to seem perfectly safe. Whilst they are miles safer than Tesla, they still struggle with edge cases and aren’t perfect.
AFAIK they’re as safe as SawStop table saws. There has only ever been one collision involving a Waymo car that resulted in a serious injury. It was when a driver in another car, who was fleeing from police, sideswiped two cars, went onto the sidewalk and hit 2 pedestrians. One of the cars that was hit was a Waymo car, and the passenger was injured. Obviously, this wasn’t the fault of Waymo, but it was included in their list of 25 crashes with injuries, and was the only one involving a serious injury.
Of the rest, 17 involved the Waymo car being rear-ended. 3 involved another car running a red light and hitting the Waymo car. 2 were sideswipes caused by the other driver. 2 were vehicles turning left across the path of the Waymo car, one a bike, one a car. One was a Waymo car turning left and being hit on the passenger side. It’s possible that a few of these cases involving a collision between a vehicle turning and a vehicle going straight could be at least partially blamed on the Waymo car. But, based on the descriptions of the crashes it certainly wasn’t making an obvious error.
IMO it would be hard to argue that the cars aren’t already significantly safer than the average driver. There are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out, but for the most part they don’t seem to be safety-related bugs.
If the math were simple and every Waymo car on the road meant one human driver off the road with no other consequences or costs, it would be a no-brainer to start replacing human drivers with Waymo’s tech. But, of course, nothing is ever that simple.
Source: https://www.understandingai.org/p/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most
I was a Waymo stan before Tesla made it cool!
https://fuelarc.com/news-and-features/insurer-study-waymo-is-12-5-times-safer-than-human-drivers/
Seriously, though. I am an avowed enemy of the grim reaper, I’m a fan of Volvos for the same reason. And I like how transparent Waymo is with their data. The independent study linked is really illuminating if you like automotive safety stats.
That was great, the first comparison that came to mind after reading it was they are both a game of russian roulette…
Waymo - you get one chamber loaded with a blank, might kill you if you get it. Tesla - you get one empty chamber… And the gun is loaded by your worst enemy
Waymo is so much better, yeah. No problems with waymo. except all the times they almost hit me.
Waymo times than Teslas?
Ba dum tish
This put a smile on my face.
Excellent work
Really good analogy. loved this
Awesome read, thanks!
Wow…
Haaa, finally !! An AI taxi that behaves like a normal taxi driver. It must feel so refreshing.
So it emulates a standard BMW driver. Well done.
Still work to be done, it uses the blinkers.
At least they were used incorrectly to be just as unpredictable.
Cruise cars were already doing this and performed far better. GM is fucking braindead and pulled the plug like usual though.
Leave it to GM to find a way to thread the needle and seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
Navigation issue / hesitation
The video really understates the level of fuck up that the car did there…
And the guy sitting there just casually being ok with the car ignoring the forced left going straight into oncoming lanes and flipping the steering wheel all over the place because it has no idea what the hell just happened… I would not be just chilling there…
Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten in this car in the first place, and I know they cherry picked some hard core Tesla fans to be allowed to ride at all…
I’ve come to the realization, at least where I live, that a hell of a lot of accidents are prevented because of drivers who are actually aware and safe. This goes a bit beyond defensive driving IMO. I’m talking flat out accident avoidable. There is an entire class of drivers who are not even aware of the accidents they have almost caused because someone else managed to avoid their stupid driving.
The majority of accidents that are likely to happen with these robocoffins will be single car or robocoffin meets robocoffin. The numbers on safety after a year will be acceptable because non accident causing error prone driving is not reported in any official capacity.
I still maintain that the only safe way to have autonomous vehicles on the road is if they do not share the road with human drivers and have an open standard for communicating with other autonomous cars.
open standard
Soery, no, that’s infrastructure.
Parking in a fire lane to drop off a passenger just makes it seem more human.
Yea, this one isn’t an issue. If you are dropping off passengers, you are allowed to stop in a fire lane because that is not parking.
Which brings up an interesting question, when is a driverless car ‘parked’ vs. ‘stopped’?
When the engine is off?
Of course, how to tell this with an electric car?
Yeah, tell that to police who bust people with DUIs when the engine is still off.
When the motor drivers are energized?
They turned the empathy dial to 5%. Works great, right?
Welcome to johnnycab
So, Tesla Robitaxis drive like a slightly drunk and confused tourist with asshole driving etiquette.
Those right turns on red were like, “oh you get to go? That’s permission for me to go too!”
I know many people who believe that “right on red” means they have the right of way to make the turn and don’t have to stop first or yield to traffic.
I know many
peoplefucking moronsI almost failed my first drivers test because I stopped at a stop sign instead of just yielding on a right turn. Still to this day it seems… wrong.
Why would you have failed? You are supposed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign.
No kidding, they fail you if you DON’T come to a complete stop.
Where I live, a few stop signs have a square white sign below them that says “EXCEPT FOR RIGHT TURN”, i.e. you don’t have to actually stop if you’re turning right. It’s incredibly fucked up - it works fine if you’re a local and you’re familiar with these signs, but people new to the area don’t know anything about it and if they’re on the crossroad they actually expect the other driver to stop since all they see is the backside of the octagon. It’s pointless to have these signs anyway since people usually roll through stop signs as it is.
We should arm pedestrians so we can shoit the subhuman filth who take rights on red.
Remember guys, Tesla wants to have a living person sitting behind the wheel for “safety.” Don’t YOU want to get paid minimum wage to sit in a car all day, paying attention but doing nothing unless it’s about to crash, at which point you’ll be made the scapegoat for not preventing the crash?
Welcome to the future, you’re gonna hate it here.
I mean, compared to getting minimum wage flipping burgers in a hot kitchen, or picking vegetables in the sun, or working the register in a store in a bad neighborhood, or even restocking stuff at Walmart… yes, I would sit all day in an air conditioned car doing nothing but “paying attention”.
You seem to have missed the point. Whether or not you think that would be an easy job, the whole reason you’d be there is to be the one that takes all the blame when the autopilot kills someone. It will be your name, your face, every single record of your past mistakes getting blasted on the news and in court because Elon’s shitty vanity project finally killed a real child instead of a test dummy. You’ll be the one having to explain to a grieving family just how hard it is to actually pay complete attention every moment of every day, when all you’ve had to do before is just sit there.
How about you pay attention and PREVENT the autopilot from killing someone? Like it’s your job to do?
Expecting people to be able to behave like machines is generally the attitude that leads to crash investigations.
This is sarcasm, right?
The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.
A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.
So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.
A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.
Are you me? I love weaving through traffic as fast as I can… in a video game (like Motor Town behind the wheel). In real life I drive very safe and it is boring af for my ADHD so I do things like try to hit the apex of turns just perfect as if I was driving at the limit but I am in reality driving at a normal speed.
Part of living with severe ADHD is you don’t get breaks from having to play these games to survive everyday life, as you say it is a stressful reality in part because of this. You brought up a great point too that both of us know, when our focus is on something and activated we can perform at a high level, but accidents don’t wait for our focus, they just happen, and this is why we are always beating ourselves up.
We can look at self driving car tech and intuit a lot about the current follies of it because we know what focus is better than anyone else, especially successful tech company execs.
I’m glad other people understand the struggles required for daily life in this respect
A man who can’t launch a rocket to save his life is also incompetent at making self driving cars? His mediocrity knows no bounds.
To be fair Musk only has money and doesnt Do shit at either Company
He meddles. That much is apparent. The cybertruck is obviously a top down design as evidenced by the numerous atrocious design compromised the engineers had to make just to make it real. From the glued on “exoskeleton” to the hollowed ALUMINUM frame to the complete lack of physical controls to the default failure state turning it into a coffin to the lack of waterproofing etc.
It’s hilarious to me that Musk claims to work 100 hours a week but he’s the CEO of five companies. Even if the claim were true (and of course it isn’t) it means being the CEO of one of his companies is a 20-hour-a-week job at best.
Seriously. I waa better at rocketry than him by age twelve.
What’s crazy is that the safety driver’s hair has gone completely grey in just two days.
That safety driver did not give a single fuck about driving on the wrong side of the road…
He must have seen so much worse to not even be flinching at that.
Hooray! I feel so safe. I think I’ll move to Texas so I can get obliterated by this taxi from the future.
