The End of Tesla?
youtube.comElons nazi salute will go down in history as one of the most expensive blunders.
Hes so dumb (and high on ket) that he did not understand 95% of his customer base are not maga nutjobs, but progressive democrats. This is even more evident in Europe.
It's hard to even game theory what he wanted from it. I'm not a complete Musk detractor, I don't think he's so autistic that he didn't know what he was doing. The only good-faith explanation seems to be that he needed to pull the cord on his progressive image ASAP to fulfill some perverse incentive we don't know about. Something pressured him enough to crack, resulting in awkward performative gestures to try and grab the attention of the media.
That, or he's a Strangelove incarnate that managed to hide his proclivities for Nazism up until now.
Oh I'm sure he understood that. He just thought that the combination of going all in on the other side + insane political leverage (which he managed to lose quite fast) would bring more profit than it would dissipate. Thankfully this turned out to not be true.
If he ever gets investigated for the massive promotion(?) misinformation(?) propaganda(?) campaign he did for Trump to win, I'm gonna love it.
And I used to like Elon. Such a shame.
One day, we will have a safe autonomous car, but not yet from Tesla.
Waymo and Apollo (probably the two leaders) are arguably already safer than humans. The disengagement data is publicly reported in California, and there have been other studies as well: https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents...
I find analogy to flight travel very relevant.
Imagine air travel invented but with current societies standards, cultures and laws.
Would it have been difficult to introduce it and convince that it is safe?
Air travel also was initially slightly unsafe but over time became safer with lots of deliberate effort put.
The similarities are striking: you could have one or two crashes like the person who unfortunately encountered the accident with Tesla. Just like you could have a few crashes.
I am not so sure about that. Flight travel offer incredible benefits, well worth the risk.
Self driving is really not that ground braking, from a transportation point of view. There are already trains and buses where you can get in, sit, and play with your phone so you don't have to drive.
I think it is very fair for people not willing to bear the risk. For planes though? Even now, if you sold people the idea of easy overseas vacations, they would be willing to risk it I'd say, or at least allow others to take the risk.
Incorrect. What are the price savings possible with self driving cars because there is no driver to pay?
It’s more than 70% discount. This has so many implications everywhere - cost of living comes down. Things that were previously too costly to achieve will be profitable now.
The driver cost - outside of Taxi services - are pretty much irrelevant. On the extreme end you're looking at long distance trains with about 1000 passengers - but even for a standard bus with 70-200 people capacity you're splitting that cost over so many passengers that it doesn't really matter.
The cost of building 100 Teslas for transporting the people we'd be able to stick into one bus is significantly higher than what we ever could save by not having a driver - and that's _before_ looking at the extra infrastructure cost we'll have: The 100 Teslas use way more space than a bus or a streetcar (capacity: 200-400), so needs more and wider roads, and will contribute to congestion, instead of easing it.
Self driving trams are already being tested - and are way easier to deal with than self driving cars, especially when you isolate them from the road to some extend. It won't change much in terms of personnel cost - countries which had been reducing conductors in trains ended up replacing them with security, so I'd expect we'll still have paid people in buses and trams, they'll just have a different job description now.
Sorry none of what you said is relevant IMO.
Cars exist at the moment and they serve a purpose. Public transport exists and serves a purpose too.
Self driving taxis and self driving cars will reduce the cost that people paid when they previously used cars. It might also make it more sensible to choose the convenience of a car instead of a tram or bus which may not take you to your exact location.
I agree that air travel is on a different scale but the similarities are there. The promise of a faster and cheaper means of transport but with possible safety concerns - both for self driving cars as well as air travel.
You and the other person may be talking at cross purposes. I took them to mean self driving cars give you a taxi experience without the labour cost of a human driver.
The person before was explicitly referring to mass transit.
For taxi service it indeed could make limited sense - but that alone is not a big enough market to justify the development cost. From over here in Europe it looks like US tech companies are trying to compensate for that by making the market bigger through pushing taxi rides as replacement for bus or other mass transport rides - which is a horrible idea. I'm aware that the US has a bit more messed up public transport in general as we do over here (and taxi is considered part of public transport) - but even there, the right thing would be fixing mass transport, not introducing mass single person transport in cars.
In many countries over here taxi rates set by the state for individual regions to make it a reliable part of public transport. They're taking into account the cost of running the car, and other factors - the goal is to keep it affordable during peak times, while still being profitable for companies outside of those. Quite a few people rely on taxi service for things like going to the doctor or even just to the shop. In those cases a driver is not just a cost factor, but also a vital component of the provided service by providing assistance.
If we ever get fully automated taxis over here I'd expect them to be charged at the same taxi rates - otherwise it'd incentivize taxi companies to only run the cheapest option, which might cut off some person groups from the service, which - again - is public transport, and should not be discriminatory.
It may be the case that market may not be big enough in Europe because of public transport popularity. Cars are still being used however and with scale self driving cars will become cheap enough that it would be quite obvious for anyone to purchase it instead of a normal car. Why would some one choose to drive normally when they could be doing something else? The massive utility increase from personal cars as well as cost decrease in taxis will create a big enough market.
Your last point is genuinely naive - do you expect people to pay high costs for taxis by forcing them to pay as much as cars with drivers just to not discriminate against a few disabled people?
This is peak European policy decision I’ll give you that.
Well, it's certainly going to be cheaper, but it's completely naive to believe it's simply "the cost today, less the cost of the driver". Driverless is a new paradigm.
For one single issue, look at the society we live in; who is going to clean the car when the inevitable happens? How will that even work? Or do you think people will happily jump in a dirty car?
So, while you do not pay the driver (who makes little anyway), there will be new costs.
Very, very low. A bus or train can carry hundreds of people with a single driver.
There's a reason we still have cars now. They serve a purpose that buses or trains can never serve. Cars are popular even in non car centric countries like Western Europe.
I am not discounting the need for cars, there are places where clearly the economics of public transport do not make sense. Read the comments again.
I am discounting your equation of self driving cars to the aviation industry.
Yes, because believe it or not, lot of people love cars, car ownership, and driving.
Other people detest public transit.
You think Robotaxis are a solution to either of these?
I agree on car ownership but not on driving. People like owning but not driving. Spending time doing what is actually mentally and physically stressful activity. The few people that do like driving can keep their old cars. Majority will shift to Tesla.
I think one of the key factors to consider is whether the people pushing these new technologies are communicating clearly and acting in good faith. Many of these self driving technologies are pushed using very confusing and misleading names.
Beyond that, Elon has a history of making claims and promises which don't pan out, without ever taking accountability. In 2016 Elon claimed that you'd be able to summon a Tesla from New York to Los Angeles autonomously by 2018. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he really believed that claim in 2016; at what point between 2016 and 2018 do you think he realized it wasn't going to happen and why didn't he speak up at that point? It would've been as simple as tweeting: "wow, we really underestimated the challenges, my previous claim was wrong and this problem will take longer to resolve".
It's fine to have ambitious deadlines and talk about what timelines you're hoping to hit. But this should be tempered by taking accountability and providing updates when new information becomes available. Nobody expects perfection, just the bare minimum of transparency and honesty.
The accountability and lack-of-transparency problems persists to this day. Elon has made tons of claims over the years and he rarely provides any updates or follows up. A recent example: he talked up how Twitter would open source the recommendation algorithm, but instead we got a one-time source snapshot which never got updated.
> Beyond that, Elon has a history of making claims and promises which don't pan out
Unbelievably generous take, to the point of naivity.
When describing his cars abilities, he said they can go from car park in New York to car park in California. He said "We can do this today".
No, he's just a liar.
In 2008 Elon promised an entirely solar powered Tesla Roadster. I was young and dumb enough that it took me until about 2011 to realize it was never coming and he's a liar.
"deliberate effort"
That would be regulation and institutional oversight by the government.
Inconvenient to say out loud on the altar of big tech capitalism.
It is in the incentive for capitalists to make their products safer.
That incentive exists only when there are regulations around third party testing and lying in ads. Otherwise it is cheaper to flood the zone with lies, both about own product safety and dangers of other products.
End result is unregulated market of unsafe products with toxic myths around them
Why would companies just not increase safety instead of short term risky things like lying? Lying can only help you for the next one year but sustainably increasing safety can help you keep profits for decades.
Lying isn't that risky as companies can just dissolve themselves and then a different brand can pop up having bought/transferred the whole shebang from the previous one. It's a different matter if a lot of effort has been put into making a well known long lasting brand - then there certainly is the risk of damaging the brand. However, damage to brands only really happens when consumers have access to accurate information which the company will obviously try to conceal.
Because lying is not risky for companies. Not unless there is also a regulation and enforcement punishing them if they overdo it.
Lying can help you for years and years.
Actual safety is visible only in long term and again, abset neutral parties and data able to verify it does not matter. You get further by lying about safety. And those neutral parties can exist only if there is regulation.
That’s crazy! Who said lying is not risky for companies?
You need to build brand trust when there is a lot of competition especially in the case of self driving where safety is of maximum concern. People are already skeptical and would look out for signals on such things.
You can’t keep things hidden for too long - word would spread that some cars are actually unsafe.
In general it is simply more simple and sustainable to not lie. Some times things fall through the cracks and you get problems like you see on Tesla.
Self driving is actually nice example of situation where lies about safety worked nicely for years. And where they are breaking up, it is not because of lies, but because of politics.
> Who said lying is not risky for companies?
Practical results. Lying works, unless there is regulation, lawsuit or something like that.
Only if their potential customers have full and accurate information about those products and their competitors. Unfortunately, that's very rarely the case and it ends up being a race to the bottom (The Market for Lemons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)
What planet are you from?
Yeah no. Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about safety if it costs money unless forced by rules and regulations. It’s a profoundly anti-consumer system. It cares for one thing: profit in the short term.