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Tesla Robotaxi

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Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#581

Post by ZeroGravitas »

modeless wrote: post #372
nikcub wrote: post #41

Here's an idea - take the Robocab car design, strip out all the FSD/autopilot stuff, put in a steering wheel and dash and sell it starting at the end of the year for ~$25k. It would sell +++

It has no rear window and wacky doors and only two seats. It would not sell. It's purpose built as an autonomous taxi, where those choices make perfect sense. They are also doing a $25k car, they just aren't revealing it today.

The rear window thing is also done by Polestar in one of their latest cars.

I believe the reason was it adds strength that let's you have higher wider glass roof above passengers heads.

And the rear view mirror replacement uses cameras.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#582

Post by rchaud »

narrator wrote: post #393
malermeister wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Reading any HN thread connected to Musk is so annoying because all the political obsessives come out and crapflood the thread with rants about "manbabies."

Imagine what it was like just a couple of years ago when these threads would be flooded with "he's trying to save the world, what have you done?" type comments.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#583

Post by kmlx »

jaarse wrote: post #82
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it every day, but HN says it doesn’t work

I also have a 2024 Tesla with FSD, but stopped trusting it. Here’s the thing, it works great for 30-40 minutes, until it doesn’t and makes a completely wrong move almost causing an accident without user intervention. And yes, I’m talking about v12.5.1 In the last month, it’s driven onto grass where there used to be an off ramp that was redone last year, cut across 3 lanes of highway traffic within 200 feet of an off…

> Here’s the thing, it works great for 30-40 minutes, until it doesn’t and makes a completely wrong move almost causing an accident without user intervention

interesting. this wasn’t my experience. i did SF Lake Tahoe (which can stretch to 5hrs) a number of times when i was in SF and didn’t encounter any major issues. small issues sure, but it was definitely better than my driving.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#584

Post by matthewfelgate »

ulfw wrote: post #366
rob74 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see Musk's vision of that in Las Vegas: in tunnels (so it doesn't disturb "regular" motorists), but still using cars (what else?).

Cars driven by a human driver. He can't even to FSD in a 2.4 mile TUNNEL after years

I don't understand how they can't get autonomous working in a tunnel. It sounds like the perfect controlled environment.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#585

Post by rchaud »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #553
bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What useful product did Enron ever build?

Power plants, lots of them. Then they hired Wall St MBAs who thought executive compensation should be based on how well they can pump the stock. Sounds a lot like Tesla come to think of it.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#586

Post by stetrain »

15155 wrote: post #404
ben_w wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it also released at a significantly higher price than announced? """In 2019, Musk claimed that the Cybertruck would be available in late 2021, starting at $39,900. The date was later pushed to 2022, and eventually it was pushed to late 2023, with a starting price of $60,990.""" - according to the Wikipedia page. I'd definitely count that as bait and switch from the price change alone.

Ah right, the price should have remained the same despite the highest worldwide monetary inflation rates in the last 40 years. I can't imagine why would a company want to sell a product at a profit.

So the announced price for the ~300mi, dual-motor version in 2019 was $49k.

Today that price is $79k. ($99k if you want the first-edition Foundation series which has been the only one delivered to customers so far).

CPI inflation calculation puts $49k in 2019 as $60k today. So inflation means the price should have gone up ~$10k, but it has actually gone up ~$30k.

Also in 2019, $69k was supposed to get you 500 miles of range. The highest range configuration of the truck they shipped is 340 miles, with potentially up to 470 miles if you fill half the bed with an additional $16k battery pack that is only installable/removable by a Tesla Service Center. Nobody has seen this pack demonstrated yet or how it will handle things like Supercharging. Having half the bed taken up to achieve the max range was definitely not part of the 2019 sales pitch.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#587

Post by noch »

kibwen wrote: post #563
noch wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same old nonsense story. Most of the passionate (embittered? salty? flavourless?) critiques of Elon always sound like a confession: His critics can't explain why he is successful, why his companies are successful, nor why he is wealthy. When they attempt an explanation, it's less an explanation and more a dismissal: luck, other people, teams, theft, subsidies, corruption, "the system is broken!", a technoaccelerati…

I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.

> I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.

I wonder if the critics of Musk's "fans" realize that deflecting all criticism with "they're just Musk fans, bro" says more about their own anemic ability to imagine the legitimacy of another perspective, their utter lack of humility and complete poverty of intellectual honesty, than about the so-called fans they're flaccidly trying to discredit?

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#588

Post by Ukv »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #578
Ukv wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the number of things that can potentially happen is far greater than the number of training examples we could ever produce Models don't need to have been trained on every single possibility - it's possible for them to generalize and interpolate/extrapolate. But, even knowing that it's theoretically possible to drive at human-level with only the senses humans have, it does seem like it makes it unnecessarily difficu…

>Models don't need to have been trained on every single possibility - it's possible for them to generalize and interpolate/extrapolate. They do have some in-distribution generalisation capabilities, but human intentions are not a generalisation of visual information.

"human intentions are not a generalisation of visual information" is a bit confusing category-wise. Question would be to what extent you can predict someone's next action, like running out to retrieve a ball, given just what a human driver can sense.

Clearly that's possible to some extent, and in theory it should be possible for some system receiving the same inputs to reach human-level performance on the task, but it seems very challenging given the imposed constraints.

Also, for clarity, note that the limitations don't require the model be trained only on driver-view data. It may be that reasoning capability is better learned through text pretraining for instance.

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#589

Post by enragedcacti »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #566
enragedcacti wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well taxi's only have four seats, and four is basically three, which when you really think about it is only two" IDK it just seems weird to me how completely unimaginative the Cybertaxi is. Its ostensibly a revolution in transportation but everything about the form and function is essentially identical to an unpainted 2011 Honda CR-Z. It makes zero effort to imagine how a driverless car could be different or better…

Many taxis shield off the driver; so the front right seat is not available for passengers. That's why I said two. In any case. The vast majority of rides is just one passenger, regardless of the size of the vehicle.

Ignoring for a moment that three is still more than two, drivers in the US don't love it but its usually fine if you are respectful and have a reason, especially in an Uber or Lyft. Elsewhere its more common to sit up front or even considered rude not to. Regardless, I think your argument speaks to my point. Even if the cybertaxi compares similarly in capability to a traditional taxi, Tesla isn't positioning it as one, they are positioning it as the vehicle of the future but the design betrays a complete lack of imagination for what that future will look like beyond playing Cyberpunk on your commute. Why should we be comparing it solely against the 2% niche of vehicle miles in ridehailing instead of the other 98% that its promising to make obsolete?

Re: Tesla Robotaxi

#590

Post by AlotOfReading »

acd10j wrote: post #467
AlotOfReading wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that you don't save 25%. Yes, there are small savings, but they're dominated by the fixed costs of producing a vehicle at all.

Ok, lets think of it other way, all things equal, if you are tasked with cutting costs of vehicle without cutting back things which makes your brand unique, and without reducing margin or running on loss how will you do it? You make vehicle simpler, with less expensive parts. That's how hardware design works. Cutting back on quality or software expense is not a option for Tesla as that will make Tesla equal to any ot…

Look upthread. I would reuse an existing vehicle platform because it's cheaper at any realistic volume.
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