I award you the dubious honor of “Best Pun on the Thread”

Waymo had non-standard stop-signs figured out six years ago XD Feels essential to running a half-way responsible autonomous car service?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu8gmFhiGko

I heard it in health class a bajillion times, so as a reminder, abstinence is the only effective birth cont- oh wait, no, no, Teslas are very effective at preventing pregnancy and STIs.

Yeah. Yeah, can’t use it in any failure-sensitive field right now.

No more than you could use a human who periodically hallucinates (and that means you are NOT good to drive, give me them keys XD )

The “humans drive cars with just optical input” has become a weirdly tightly held misconception for Elon Musk, it’s a core part of his personality where autonomy is concerned:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-tesla-doesnt-023035552.html

Humans drive with optical input, haptic feedback, and millenia of evolution to handle the decision-making and social skills required to handle a vehicle safely. No LiDAR or radar waves, sure, but I wouldn’t say no if either were on offer!

The dumbest part? He developed this belief in ~2019. Lidar costs have dropped immensely since then, and are fast-dropping still. Any technologist who doesn’t fucking suck knows that component prices follow that depreciation curve. So he’s basically an old man shouting at a cloud at this point, it would be cheaper to fix the mistake, but it could hurt his personal branding as a guru.

Waymo is really interesting - you probably wouldn’t guess it, I’m a cautiously optimistic autonomy person! Waymo is already 12x safer than human drivers, that’s brilliant, I love that.

Teslas will (allegedly) start on a small, low-complexity street grid in Austin. exact size TBA. Presumably, they’re mapping the shit out of it and throwing compute power at analyzing their existing data for that postage stamp.

The rub… that all points out the obvious danger of rolling out the wild-west FSD that Tesla drivers are currently employing everywhere else. If it’s safe enough to trust to drive your car for you, why does it need a ton of additional guard-rails to operate without a safety driver?

Fortune reports, they’re testing them with employees taking the rides right now, and they’re just plain old Model Ys.

https://fortune.com/2025/05/26/tesla-robotaxi-demo-austin-officials-launch-first-responders-waiting-key-info/

Was just thinking… mm. Toasty in waxed masks and wool coats.

This little subthread .

Oh thank you :D

“Can Kay Write a Decent Headline?”

That’s not how that works, New-account-with-negative-2500-karma. You supply evidence for your own claims, others can review the evidence.

My better half and I were actually discussing exactly this.

I’m shopping for an EV used, and magically, the price is exactly the same for EVs that are eligible for the credit and the ones that aren’t.

The dealerships treat the rebate as basically a manufacturer spiff, I pay the same either way.

So yeah, I agree. Pulling all of them at once might cause some market disruption, though, and legacy autos are already not committed to EV transition, so it will worsen an already problematic tendency, I think.

I’m not a journalist, I’m a comedian, we heckle back :) If you can’t read 2 sentences deep, I really don’t give a fuck what you think

(Lol, thanks for the downvote. Let me get you a full refund.)

First two sentences clear that up, don’t you think? Here, I’ll add the TL:DR to the article description above.

It is honestly hard to see what the strategy is. It’s tough when you squint at the administration and wonder how an adversary-backed Manchurian Candidate type might do things differently, and you come up mostly dry.

…is literally never going to get any better it’s always going to be this bad.

Hey now! That’s unfair. It is constantly changing. Software updates introduce new reversions all the time. So it will be this bad, or significantly worse, and you won’t know which until it tries to kill you in new and unexpected ways :j

Someone who doesn’t understand math downvoted you. This is the right framework to understand autonomy, the failure rate needs to be astonishingly low for the product to have any non-negative value. So far, Tesla has not demonstrated non-negative value in a credible way.