I have over $100k in Tesla puts. There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week. Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road. I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FS…
Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
21–30 of 198 posts
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#22I own two Teslas, and drive between Portland and Seattle about once every 10 days, using FSD nearly the entire way. FSD has gotten amazingly better over the last year, it can and has taken me from driveway to driveway between two cities... when the weather is nice. As soon as there is any weather however, things start to fall apart. It's very clear to me that vision alone wont be the solution to FSD, and is the main…
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#23Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#24Tesla had more chance to succeed than Waymo. It's impossible for Waymo to match Tesla in real world training and testing data. Somehow Waymo is winning.
This is a crippling disadvantage. Consider what it takes to evaluate a single software release for a robotaxi.
If you have a simulator, you can take long tail distribution events and just resimulate your software to see if there are regressions against those events. (Waymo, Zoox)
If you don't, or your simulator has too much error, you have to deploy your software in cars in "ghost mode" and hope that sufficient miles see rare and scary situations recur. You then need to find those specific situations and check if your software did a good job (vs just getting lucky). But what if you need to A/B test a change? What if you need to A/B test 100 changes made by different engineers? How do you ensure you're testing the right thing? (Tesla)
And if you have a simulator that _sucks_ because it doesn't have physics-grounded understanding of distances (i.e. it's based on distance estimates from camera), then you can easily trick yourself into thinking your software is doing the right thing, right up until you start killing people.
Another way to look at it is: most driving data is actually very low in signal. You want all the hard driving miles, and in high resolution, so that you can basically generate the world's best unit testing suite for the software driver. You can just throw the rest of the driving data away -- and you must, because nobody has that much storage and unit economics still matter.
This is to say nothing of the fact that differences between hardware matter too. Tesla has a bunch of car models out there, and software working well one one model may not actually work well on another.
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#25I have over $100k in Tesla puts. There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week. Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road. I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FS…
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#26I have over $100k in Tesla puts. There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week. Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road. I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FS…
I also got the free month of FSD about four months ago and tried it out on my Model 3, and was astonished at how bad it was in the greater Seattle area: I had to manually intervene on about 4 out of every 5 drives. I do not understand how I continue to see so many comments online raving about how great FSD is; I have to conclude these are coming from either desperate stock-boosters or people who drive exclusively on…
Unless FSD improves on these -- which I don't think it does, I think it just adds features -- I can't imagine trusting it.
Yes, I'm a control freak, but I wouldn't be happy with a human driver doing the things AP does, so why would I be happy with the car doing it?
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
So - the cooked-ness of Tesla may depend on what you think Musk's goal was with Tesla. If you believe he was out to change the world - maybe he'll let Tesla die. It's unlikely they are going to accomplish much else at this point, better, smarter more experienced competitors are sweeping the board. If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can, he'll probably course correct at some point. Lidar it is clear w…
I don't understand how you could look at Elon's actions and think he has any interest in making as much money as he can. He's already made his money. Now he's gone full Howard Hughes. "I would like to die on Mars" is a direct quote.
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#28I own two Teslas, and drive between Portland and Seattle about once every 10 days, using FSD nearly the entire way. FSD has gotten amazingly better over the last year, it can and has taken me from driveway to driveway between two cities... when the weather is nice. As soon as there is any weather however, things start to fall apart. It's very clear to me that vision alone wont be the solution to FSD, and is the main…
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#29I have over $100k in Tesla puts. There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week. Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road. I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FS…
Re: Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
#30We are potentially about to see a worse incident than Uber in Phoenix or Cruise in SF. 444 miles per Critical Disengagement is terrible. In 2023, Waymo reported 17,000 miles between Critical Disengagements and have made significant (as seen by a functioning robotaxi service) leaps since.
It's entirely possible that the opaqueness and small scale of the Tesla rollout could lead to situations where long tail events like the Cruise collision simply don't occur, or aren't allowed to reach public media.