Remember when the argument for self driving cars was that they don’t need to be perfect, just better than humans?
If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.
I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.
Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn’t distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I’m not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during “boring times”?
Sorry, I’m just rambling here …
Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.
i prefer human taxis
I will never take any auto autonomous Tesla. Waymo maybe, but always a taxi or Uber and better yet a bus or train.
I can’t remember how many safety features Tesla has foregone in the name of profit, but my perception of them is that they’re death machines for both riders and pedestrians. No thank you
They still drive better than Elon who is in a k hole right now 👍
Human: pffft hold my beer… Wait no, I’ll keep it.
Some things are just super obvious that even if we can, we should not
Feeling a bit smug since I was early adopter of calling “self-driving” cars a grift. Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
Waymo self driving cars are very good imo, I live near a location where they operate and drive along side them daily on my way to work and have ridden in one twice. They are way better than human drives in my area.
My campus has a self driving mini bus service though there’s a real driver in the driver’s seat jic.
Funny part was that tesla taxis also had a human attendant, but for the sake of appearance made them sit on the passenger side. They deliberately limited staff from being able to interact with steering and pedals.
They eventually moved those to the driver seat.
So was it worth it, if you still have to employ a mini-bus driver…?
Six months from now. Just as true today as it was ten years ago.
I’ve never heard that. Like, anywhere. Lol
musk:
2016 “We should be able to do 90 percent of miles driven [autonomously] within three years.”
2015 “A Tesla car next year will probably be 90-percent capable of autopilot. Like, so 90 percent of your miles can be on auto. For sure highway travel.”
2018 “From a technology standpoint, Tesla will have a car that can do full autonomy in about three years, maybe a bit sooner.”
2018 “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
2019 “I consider autonomous driving to be a basically solved problem. … We’re less than two years away from complete autonomy. Regulators however will take at least another year; they’ll want to see billions of miles of data.”
there are about 20 more entries like this.
you apparently haven’t paid attention to the grifter in chief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk
That’s only musk though. Hardly “was undeniable fact”.
Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
I’ve never heard that. Like, anywhere. Lol
the person I replied to.
Yeah me neither. I’ve heard claims that automation will take away jobs from drivers in the future, but not anyone actually saying “it’s undeniable that by 2025 most cars will be driving entirely by themselves”. And I remember when GPS was a spy-gadget daydream you imagined having when using maps. (Actual, physical maps. Not Google/Apple Maps.)
I heard it in the same vane that I heard that we would have a moon base by 2020 a mars base by 2025 and nuclear fusion in just 10 more years
To be fair, the progression estimate loading bar for fusion was stuck at “estimate… 30 years” for fucking ages.
And now there are actual reactors. Experimental, but still.
“With the completion of the conceptual design phase, the project will now shift to engineering design, accelerated engineering R&D, and will proceed with site selection, site preparation, regulatory approvals, and the procurement of long-lead items, with the aim of construction after 2028,” it said.
I wrote a school report about iter back in middle school or high school when it was still in the design process and still occasionally check their job listings because I would love to work there and on fusion but we still don’t know if it will ever work like we hit the scientific breakeven with inertial confinement but the scaling on that is terrible and I don’t believe we hit even the scientific breakeven with magnetic confinement
Then we still need to harness the energy from that turn it into work, turn that into electricity and distribute it with enough excess to pay for the whole system which is still a lot of hurdles we need to climb
Most importantly, the projections of fusion being 30 years away depended on assumptions about funding, when political considerations made it so that we basically never came anywhere close to those assumptions:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png
Fusion was never vaporware. We had developed working weapons relying on nuclear fusion in the 1950’s. Obviously using a full blown fission reaction to “ignite” the fusion reaction was never going to be practical, but the core physical principles were always known, with the need for the engineering and materials science to catch up with alternative methods of igniting and harvesting the energy from those fusion reactions.
But we never really devoted the resources to figuring it out. Only more recently has there been significant renewed interest in funding the research to make it possible, and as you note, many different projects are hitting different milestones on the frontier of that research.
Self driving cars have always been a stupid solution to the wrong problem.
We shouldn’t be investing billions in them. We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
But I guess that’s not profitable so I guess we’ll just do idiotic garbage that gets people killed.
We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
when someone figures out how to make the better options more profitable than the bad options we’ll finally see progress.
until then we’re fucked
I mean the US is heavily car centric. Self driving cars are an attempt to adapt to what the reality of the world currently is.
We should absolutely be doing things to make cars less of a requirement by improving public transit and creating more livable spaces that don’t require cars, that can even be the primary goal, but it won’t eliminate cars completely, and if it does it will take A LOT longer than self driving cars.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
Quick edit: Also the cars Musk is developing are not even close to what we need. He’s being deliberately obtuse and creating more problems than he’s solving.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
Why are they a great idea? What are they making better? How is it worth the real and opportunity costs?
Paradoxically, the large scale deployment of self driving cars will improve the walkability of neighborhoods by reducing the demand for parking.
One can also envision building on self driving tech to electronically couple closely spaced cars so that more passengers can fit in a given area, such that throughout of passenger miles per hour can increase several times over. Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.
How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?
That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.
Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.
Once again reinventing buses and trains
They’re safer than human drivers. Tesla cars absolutely are not. But Waymo cars? They do seem to be.
It’s still early. We still need more data. They should be closely watched. But self driving cars do appear to be safer. That’s why they are a great idea. They are making driving and roads better.
I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).
The challenge is one approach only needs to modify the transit infrastructure. The other means having to tear down and build new commercial and residential properties and force people and businesses to relocate in order to have a vaguely sane transit system. My area desperately wanted to do transit but even with rather significant hypothetical funding, they could only service about 10-15% of typical trips. They’ve settled on a plan that is much less money, but only serves like 5% of trips. To go with that plan, they are making restrictions around zoning to force mid density mixed use construction only, favoring one of the two chosen transit corridors.
They are trying but just people are distributed very awkwardly for mass transit.
It took like 100 years to build the car-hell we have now. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to fix it.
And people are, famously, stupid. They’ll fight like hell to avoid change, but once it’s in they’ll fight like hell to keep that change.
Plus there’s a lot of selfish idiots that need to be overridden.
I’d actually be genuinely curious to see how it compares to taxi drivers, bus drivers, or ubers. Since they drive professionally, you’d hope they’d drive a bit safer than the average human.
I’m sure nothing will be able to compete with the safety numbers of trains or just being close enough to walk though.
That’s a good point, also if you can compare like to like conditions and what the data does if you exclude teen drivers. Also if you can identify incidents related to bald tires and brake failures that wouldn’t apply.
Also would be interesting to compare human augmented driving miles to full autonomous miles. With the automated emergency braking/collision alert/lane centering assist. Anecdotally was teaching my teen to drive. Suddenly a car pulls out right in front of us, zero warning. If that happened to me, with experience on a formerly normal car, I’m pretty sure I would’ve wrecked. However my kids reflex to swerve triggered the cars “evasive steering assist” and did an action movie worthy maneuver, avoiding going off into the ditch and returning just right into the lane after getting around the other car.
Thing about autonomous driving is that it seems to get the stupid easy stuff wrong in dangerous ways, but if you have a demanding precise maneuver to make, it has a better chance once that maneuver is needed.
I believe china has self driving trains.
What does this have to do with self driving cars in America?
While I’d absolutely love better and more public transit, it just doesn’t make sense in a lot of areas that are too spread out or don’t have enough people per square mile.
So leave that problem for later. Let them keep driving themselves, and focus on improvements where people actually live.
Most people live in or close to cities.
To be fair I don’t have 100% confidence that self driving is safer than human driving. I just believe that based on the current data, it seems to be. If new data comes out tomorrow, then I’ll look at and evaluate that data.
I also don’t believe that investment is a zero sum game. We should absolutely be investing in both. Both are valuable. You don’t have to only invest in one.
There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.
The only response was, “company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix.”
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
But if a corporation does it it is, “Oops, we will do better next time.”
Utterly insane.
No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.
And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.
It isn’t a unique Texas Law. It’s law everywhere in the US and Canada.
“mostly all in North America, require all surrounding vehicles to stop when a school bus is stopped with its red lights flashing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws
“And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.”
Only if you are from a different country.
Which is beside the point that if anyone else drove through 20 bus stops, they couldn’t use the excuse, “I’m from another country so I don’t know your laws.” to get out of jail.
That it’s a software fix is also beside the point. “Oh I drove illegally 20 times. I know better and won’t do it again.”
The default in most other states is that opposite direction traffic on a divided highway don’t have to stop. The states differ in what constitutes a divided highway, but generally at least 5 feet of space or a physical barrier between the lanes would qualify. In Texas, however, there is no exception for divided highways, and the key definition is “controlled-access highway,” which requires on/off ramps and physical barriers between traffic directions, or “different roadways,”
So for a 5-lane road where there are 2 lanes going in each direction with a center lane for left turns, Texas requires opposite direction traffic to stop, while most other states do not.
It’s not just Texas. It’s a requirement to stop for a school bus with its flashing lights on and stop sign out pretty much everywhere in the US.
They wrote the legislation that allowed themselves to operate self driving vehicles. Every one of these vehicles is a symbol of the oligarchy at work.
Oh! Driving past stopped school busses you mean. Had to look up “driving through bus stops”. :)
Sounds like they Sovereign Citizens could. They just have the wrong paperwork
Takes roughly a billion $1 pieces of paper.
Then send a ridiculously small number of those to your state representatives.
This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.
its most likely a regular tesla with all the sensors stripped out, and the software dumbed down.
You could not pay me to get inside of any Tesla product. Crappy quality, crappy design, crappy materials, crappy everything. Just another PE for guys with itty bitty weenies.
I rented one once for an hour, that was all the Tesla experience I needed tbh.
Wasn’t a P100D or anything, just a Y Long Range, but I no longer have any curiosity about it. Interior was bland af, ride quality was barely any better than a cheapo Hyundai… The only good things are the giant tablet not being slow as hell, and the powertrain being fun.
You get a lot more with European cars if you’re willing to pay Tesla level prices. Or you can get a completely OK car from Korea or Japan and pay less (as long as it isn’t a Lexus, those are expensive).
I found this part to be even more alarming:
All of the Robotaxi crashes so far have occurred with human safety monitors—who have been trained to take control of the car in the event of a software error—present in the vehicles.
This is significant because, as TechCrunch reported on Monday, Tesla is starting to send out its Robotaxi fleet without safety monitors.
So despite a pitiful record with people trying to correct the cars mistakes, they’re now ready to move on to running them without assistance?!? I am furious at the idea that our safety on the roads is this negotiable.
It’s insane how shit the US is at managing its cars considering how aggressively they’ve forced them as the only truly viable mode of transport. It sucks horribly to drive in North America but it’s the only option given to people. Like, if you’re gunna do the worst option at least do it right and have some pride in the system.
The US doesn’t give a fuck about its people.
Feel like some sort of trap. Being able to drive anywhere feels like it gives you so much freedom, the ability to go anywhere but the reality is there so much opportunity cost and financial cost to live in a car dominated society, even all the small things like convenience and safety all adds up.
An “convenience” is such a lie. I own a car and have a metro system and I almost never use the car. If I didn’t have parking in the back where I could just keave it it’d be even worse.
Regulatory capture is a hell of a drug.
The US has absolutely mad road to traffic laws. Zero concept of lane discipline, you driving whatever lane you feel like. Don’t understand roundabouts even though it’s just a curved road, it’s really not that hard. Still don’t have standardised pedestrian crossings even when other countries had them back in the 1920s. A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right. No one obeys the speed limit, people regularly exceed it, and see no problem with that. And of course no one has separate indicator lights and brake lights because when would you ever slow down and go around a corner, definitely no need to engineer for that eventuality.
A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.
It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.
What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.
Proof of concept fails in a spectacular fireball?
Fuck it, owners are too invested, ship it anyway.
Feels like I work for the same company.
Why repair the plane on the ground…if it’s a real problem, we can fix it mid-flight.
Not trying to defend Tesla on this because fuck Musk and everything he touches but are there stats on how, when, and why the human took over? Did they just not take over? Did they take over to late? Did they take over and make the situation worse?
You raise an excellent point, one which i was hoping to find out more about as well. It turns out Tesla has been working hard to keep pretty much any pertinent information to answer your questions firmly under lock and key.
From this Electrek article https://electrek.co/2025/11/17/tesla-robotaxi-had-3-more-crashes-now-7-total/
Unlike other companies reporting to NHTSA, Tesla abuses the right to redact data reported through the system. The automaker redacts the “narrative” for each reported crash, preventing the public from knowing how the crashes happened and who is responsible.
Based on the limited information in Tesla’s reports, we know that one of the new crashes involved a Robotaxi driving into a car backing up, another involved a cyclist, and the last one involved an unknown animal.
So he’s basically fudging the numbers and anytime he’s questioned he points at the fudged numbers and says everything’s great, he’s great, now get out of the way while he deploys a fleet of these un-manned deathtraps to “half the US population” according to a properly ultra-super-inflated kind of claim only a douchebag like Leon can make. No, seriously–he actually claimed that by the end of 2025 he’ll have these things serving half the population of the US.
🫠
