> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change.
Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow out.
Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.
Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
I drive (and have driven) a fair number of rental cars due to travel, and I have to say I feel that way about many new vehicles in their entirety. So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
> It's wickedly expensive
We own two cars, 6 and 10 years old respectively, yet I've never felt less motivated to look at new cars than I do now.
Guess our part towards saving the planet may well turn out to be 'driving that existing ICE vehicle for just a little bit longer'...
In the book Heat Monboit argues the stats show that when someone "greens" their consumption they also increase it. For example switching to "green" energy meant people stopped thinking about conserving.
In the specific case of electric vehicles (and many plug in hybrids) luckily they're such an immense improvement that my guess is that they still have a net benefit. But far from the simple efficiency math, and more likely the user will increase their consumption by some meaningful percent.
I wonder though if the more significant limitation for most people is the value placed on their time currently, so they seek to minimize travel and commute times (rather than minimizing for fuel costs). And if so, does will the rise of self-driving + EV paradoxically increase the number of miles someone is willing to sit behind the wheel in the coming decade?
EVs have a way higher initial CO2 footprint. The crossover depends on car and where you get the energy from. I think it's often around the 100 000 km mark where an EV gets the smaller footprint. But like I said, many variables factor in.
Production of EVs and batteries generate more CO2 before the first wheel turns, however, the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving.
- It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle.
- If the EV draws electricity from a coal/fired grid, however, the catchup period stretches to more than five years.
- If the grid is powered by carbon/free hydroelectricity, the catchup period is about six months.
> the total carbon footprint of ICE vehicles quickly overtake that of the EVs after 15,000 miles (24,140 km) of driving
Shouldn't we be comparing an old ICE which was already built years ago but is still operating vs building a new EV to replace it?
The carbon footprint of building the ICE is almost irrelevant, it's just the ongoing damage it is doing. Compare that with footprint of building and operating the EV that could replace it.
That would be comparing apples to oranges, you want apples to apples.
Everyone replaces their car at some point. If you are comparing a new EV, its best to compare its impact compared to a new ICE. We all know its probably best in most cases to keep any vehicle, even one that is inefficient, on the road for its useful life.
> We all know its probably best in most cases to keep any vehicle, even one that is inefficient, on the road for its useful life.
I didn’t know this until this thread. And I feel like I’ve heard people say things like they are going to improve the environment by ditching their current car for an EV, not because they’re planning on getting rid of their car anyways.
> But what if your existing petrol or diesel car is perfectly satisfactory? Obviously if you cause one less vehicle – of any kind – to be manufactured, you’re saving CO2 in the short term. But if you drive a lot of miles or your car is thirsty, then sell it to someone who drives less. Getting an EV would after a very few years move you into credit. If it’s efficient and you drive little, probably hold on to it for a while.
> In most areas of life, the greenest thing is simply to buy less stuff and keep it for longer. But with ICE cars, because they emit so much CO2 in use, it’s not always so simple.
(Apologies for the snark but...) mythbusting articles without any experimental data or references to back up claims - or claims they say they've debunked - aren't really my thing. Hopefully not really a HN thing either :/
I agree that there are shades of gray though. My counterpoint is that I am not so sure the non-commercial vehicle market is that efficient that when you sell a vehicle that it is going to the best candidate best on the miles driven. Your vehicle is still in the fleet and being used. I think the simpler argument is that for any modern vehicle, there is not a significant enough gain and you are better holding on to the vehicle until it reaches your preferred EOL.
Well pretty much everybody at some point replaces their cars. There are not many still driving around their Ford T's. So latest at that point, you will have to compare production+cost vs production+cost.
Is battery manufacturing that bad for the environment? I mean, ICE cars still have wheels, drivetrains, chassis, doors, windows, chairs, electronics, paint and many other things, same as the EVs. The electric motor I can't imagine its worse to produce than a combustion motor. So that leaves batteries as the cause of this huge disparity on day one, that takes 100,000km of fuel consumption to overtake.
Is this with the battery tech of today, december 2024? So for EVs built in 2020 let's say, it was worse? I think there is some advancement in battery making, isn't there?
> The electric motor I can't imagine its worse to produce than a combustion motor
I assumed we're attempting to weigh up keeping an ICE vehicle that already exists - like my 10 year old diesel - vs building building a new EV vehicle and scrapping the old ICE.
Nobody is crushing their ICE and dumping it in the lake when they replace their existing and working ICE with an EV. They're selling/trading in their ICE which someone else will buy and use until it's not worth servicing anymore.
Current recycling tech is pretty terrific (IIRC ~98% recovery of lithium, misc metals). Enabling the long fabled "circular" economy.
At some point we'll hit a (near) equilibrium. IIRC, ~20 years out. (Assuming Li-ion battery tech continues to improve at current rate. Thereby balancing out the lithium lost during recycling.) So we'll hit something like "peak lithium", greatly reducing mining (extraction) of new lithium.
Recycling is much cheaper than mining (both $ and CO2).
(I believe, but obliviously can't prove, that sodium (et al) batteries will enable new use cases and markets, complimenting lithium rather than replacing it.)
My guess: Most of the CO2 emissions for making cars comes from the body of the car. It is basically identical between ICE and EV. I guess a modern car body is a combo of steel and aluminium. (Is that correct?)
It suggests that making an ICE car is roughly equal to the running in terms of carbon.
In reality manufacturing is about 10%, disposal 5% and the other 85% from running it e.g. fuel and maintenance.
It then suggests that keeping an old car is better because if you keep the car for twice as long then the emissions are half per mile, but you don't scrap functional cars you sell them onto someone else. This causes a cascade with the oldest and most polluting cars being scrapped.
> In reality manufacturing is about 10%, disposal 5% and the other 85% from running it e.g. fuel and maintenance
I imagine this depends hugely on the kind of vehicle?
Our small [petrol] car cost the equivalent of $10k on the road, including all taxes. It has a tiny engine, four seats, and limited luggage space. It's fairly fuel-efficient (at least when I'm driving).
I've also recently driven a BMW 5 series (booked the cheapest "compact manual" as an airport rental vehicle, got that instead - win!) List price around 10x that of our little car. Nicer ride, of course. Bigger luggage space. Five seats.
Presumably in terms of carbon the BMW's manufacturing costs vastly exceed that of small cars, but is the carbon manufacturing cost linear with either its fuel efficiency or with its price?
That seems like an overestimate. A quick search is showing up numbers more in the 15-20,000 km region, and that's comparing a large EV running off of a mostly fossil fuel grid against a much smaller ICE (i.e. quite a conservative estimate).
The upfront is about 50% higher for an EV, so if you catch that 50% up in 1 year then you'd pay back an entire new EV in 3 years if you scrapped the old ICE one. (figures for simplicity depending upon grid and how much you drive it could be 6 months or 18 months).
But generally we don't scrap old ones.
If you instead sell the old one to someone who drives an ICE car that gets worse mpg then that's a further benefit.
In particular, grid decarbonisation means that distance to break even moves after the car is manufactured.
If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity, your break even is determined based on the higher efficiency of electric motors and of the (energy efficient but filthy) big stack coal generators compared to the relatively clean but inefficient gasoline ICE.
But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier - suddenly that distance shrinks rapidly (maybe half) even though for you as an end user nothing changed, because electricity is fungible so you charge a car from the solar farm just the same as from a coal power plant.
> If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity,
Which is almost everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
> But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier -
If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
I love solar, but don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
And if you ask the people who have done that "hey, was it cheap and easy to move your car's energy consumption to renewables?" and they reply "Yes!", please bring their story back here and share with the class.
> don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
Let's say doing things one way uses 10 units of something, and doing something another way then uses 5 units of that same something. Didn't you then avoid using 5 units of that thing?
Yeah, no. If this was 1984 you'd be right on the money. In 2024 "We mostly burn coal to make electricity" either means you're subsidising coal or you have no infrastructure investment to move to a better generation.
> Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
Where are you still seeing 80%? Last I saw was closer to 60%. A lot of that isn't coal, and the gasoline is not electricity production†. Gasoline is what we're replacing in the discussion, so "Yeah, but what about gasoline?" is a total misfire. Which mostly leaves methane. And that's a very different comparison to coal. There are indeed new methane electricity plants in lots of places.
A methane power plant might emit half or even a third of the CO2 of the equivalent coal plant. It's still a fossil fuel, but in terms of the ratio we're talking about for break-even on an EV, that's a huge difference.
> If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
You're seeing huge investments because they're expensive and make money, that's what an investment is. They're not investing in coal plants because that's a money loser. Yes, it's often subsidised, in my country the renewable energy schemes are subsidised via "Contracts for Difference" which have the effect of insuring the price paid for energy, leaving the problem of delivering the energy very much in the hands of the bidders, the government is only the hook for the agreed price of energy when it's delivered, this has the effect of making investment less risky - if you can make 1000GWh of energy over the lifetime of the project and the subsidy says you're definitely getting £50 per MWh, that's £50M, without CfD you can't be sure if you get paid £80 per MWh (we're £30M richer) or £20 per MWh (we're bankrupt) until the power auctions years after you've constructed the plant.
† Yes there are a handful of power plants running on this fuel, but they're insignificant at a global scale.
By that logic, also the CO2 footprint of manufacturing and transporting the fuel for an equivalent ICE vehicle, which is always conveniently left out of such calculations.
And also the footprint of building more generation stations (big) or building “renewable energy” generation (even bigger), which also conveniently gets left out.
The greenest choice most of us can make is an old, used car with reasonable emissions and that’s fuel efficient. Like a 15 year old Civic or Corolla. Or do what a colleague of mine did - he revived a first generation Prius, flashed newer software onto it, and salvaged a battery pack from a newer, wrecked Prius.
As pointed out by other nearby comments, that is not the greenest choice (which is to not drive), nor even the second greenest choice (which is to replace your ICE with a refurbished Prius like your colleague), or even the third greenest choice (which is to buy a new EV), but only barely beats out the worst non-green choices (buying a new ICE) and then only if you pay to make sure the car emissions controls and engine aren't becoming rusty and inefficient. Here's an article explaining: https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/mythbusting-world-...
There are also the caveats you mentioned that the analysis does assume that an EV is actually the greener choice, which is itself a function of a lot of other choices being made green also, such as whether it was constructed and powered with the most environmentally favorable choices of mining and manufacturing, most of which isn't really in the consumers direct control.
The actual scientist doing the calculations in proper LCAs do include this and production of the fuel is a notable chunk of the CO2 running cost of an ICE car (about 25%).
Relevant phrases are "well-to-tank" and "tank-to-wheel" which combine to give "well-to-wheel" numbers.
I think that analysis might have the “sunk cost fallacy” assumption? Just because we already have the ICE doesn’t make it more efficient to keep using it, over immediately replacing it with something more efficient, as long as you then keep the more efficient thing operating until it becomes inefficient to keep that operational. The crossover point seems likely it would occur much sooner if you replace the ICE now than if you wait for its end of life, regardless of the age of the ICE now
And I think this analysis suffers from ignoring the increased environmental cost of creating a new electric vehicle. It takes 15,000 to 20,000 miles of driving for the average EV to "break even" with new ICE vehicles due to the much worse environmental impact of creation.
Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Vehicles should be reduced first (drive less), reused second (keep using existing one), repaired (keep using existing ones), and finally you can recycle as best as possible.
All of this should happen prior to replacement. If you replace an existing ICE with an EV, the EV not only has to catch up with a new ICE, it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction. That's much worse than 20k miles because the cost of building your existing car is sunk. It could take as many as 50,000 miles of driving to break even against your existing used car.
Consumerism and early replacement of working goods has always been the mortal enemy of environmentalism.
Good news: in the car market, almost everyone follows 'reuse' and 'repair'. Not many people take a car and crush it for recycled parts unless it's truly worthless or super old. They sell it to someone else. For the type of person who buys a new car every 3-4 years, you are selling that car to someone else who will continue using it, likely replacing their less efficient car with yours.
This is unlike most other consumer goods which tend to be scrapped much earlier. If you're scrapping a car before its ~10-15 years old, chances are there's either something quite wrong with it, or you just drove it way too much and its gonna fall apart (i.e., something wrong with it).
> All of this should happen prior to replacement... it actually has to "catch up" with your existing already made working ICE that has no new cost for construction
That is precisely the sunk cost fallacy though: the principle is that continuing an endeavor simply because it already has been a cost paid shouldn't be done, unless the total continuing cost (including the eventual replacement) is less than the cost of immediate replacement (plus all continuing costs after initial replacement, including the eventual replacements of those in turn). Otherwise the principle says it is a waste of resources.
The 4 R's assume that the replacement is no better than the original at the job, which is why I described that analysis as the sunk cost fallacy. We don't have to take this assumption (personally, I prefer to bike over driving my ICE, so this analysis doesn't apply), but if we take the assumption that the EV does less environmental damage over its lifetime, then this assumed "environmental damage" function is minimized by discarding the ICE immediately, as any further use simply increases the total "environmental damage" caused by the choice of which car to use.
This can be seen in computers too, as newer computers are sometimes so much more power efficient then their replacement that they can very quickly save on resources by throwing out a perfectly working computer to replace it with a newer one.
As long as your old cars are like Toyota corolla/camry’s and not like giant gas guzzling SUV’s or trucks keeping them on the road is better than buying a new EV IMO. I think the current EV gen is kind of doomed because of the fact the next EV gen is going to have massive QOL features the current one doesn’t and waiting for a more compelling car is worth doing IMO
Even vehicles with poor fuel efficiency are better to keep on the road until EOL. This is why cash for clunkers was such a terrible program.
I don't follow your take on the current EV gen either. A car at the end of the day derives most of its value from taking you one place to another. The current gen of EVs do this and do it well. "current EV gen is kind of doomed" that is just hyperbole, nothing is changing in the near future that would doom current EV vehicles on the road.
Define massively. I think a 2024 M3 has ~20% better range than a 2018 M3. 2018 was the second year of the M3. The 2018 LR version still had a ~300mile range. No doubt future generations will be better but again, I don't think we will have a case that "dooms" the current generation of EVs, they will serve their primary purpose well until EOL.
I think proper V2H/V2G (vehicle to home/grid) is a big one that is very rare at the moment but is probably making a lot of people who could buy an EV at the moment (i.e. have a garage/driveway in a city) hold off until it's more common, because it makes the economics a lot more attractive.
(In general, because of cratering manufacturing costs, improving tech, and a still low trust for battery health, being an EV early adopter is an expensive option at the moment because even if an early EV is still at 80% functionality compared to new, the resale value is terrible, and I think this plus the lack of charging infrastructure is a big impediment to adoption growing to become dominant in the mainstream)
I'm not super convinced about the V2H stuff, tbh. I only need backup power at home to keep the heat on when I'm not there. If I'm not there almost certainly my car isn't either. When I am there I can light a candle and run the wood stove to keep the pipes from freezing. So a stationary battery bank for my solar system makes a lot more sense than trying to use my car for that purpose.
And probably a backup generator with a big propane tank is a better solution.
I've thought about it over the years and if I was regularly away for long periods in the winter I'd probably have spent the money. As it is, I cross my fingers and generally try not to have long periods away from my house in the winter.
Ah. I think lots of other people would like to keep their refrigerator and freezer and appliances running in the event of multi-day power outages when they are at home, even when it is not freezing (like in Florida, for example).
Sure, but if you're already going to make the investment in the grid cutoff, inverter, etc then the fact the car could in principle act as a battery/generator is a little gimmicky. Might as well also get a generator (or battery if you've already got solar). Then it works automatically whether you're there or not.
The vehicle already has the inverter, using the same active rectifier hardware in the on-board charger. People want to have electricity when they are at home. And they are home a lot of the time. So I agree that it is a very niche case to want to have a backup system to provide electricity to your house during a natural disaster when you are not even there.
Whatever you call it based on exact details, my point is that using your car for power is not "gimmicky" like they said. Based on budget you can get a transfer switch or you can get an extension cord. Either way you're making effective use out of the car you already own, and the idea that you're wasting time and should really just get a generator or fixed battery is incorrect.
Fast recharge and high capacity long life batteries.
Reliably getting 300-400 mile range (even in cold), getting 250 miles range in 10-15 minutes of fast charging, and seeing batteries comfortably make it to 150k miles with small degradation.
Unfortunately people seems to really care about edge cases (What if I have to unexpectedly drive 400 miles on a frozen January evening?), so until EVs can easily cover those bases, people are really trigger shy.
The biggest one I can think of is really stupid actually which is a NACS port and proper supercharger network access for any non Tesla (and I personally would recommend against buying a Tesla for build quality and lack of repairability). Either way ICE cars are basically about as good as they can get while EV’s have a ton of room for improvement
> So much vehicle tech is at best unimpressive and at worst positively in my way as a driver.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that new cars aren't breathtakingly awesome. It's been a really rough 5 years for everybody and we're not seeing much genuine light at the end of the tunnel. Everyone's just trying to survive. Hard to do your best work under those circumstances.
Its not what the public think of 'self driving'. Its not like you can tell the autopilot where you want to go and then sit back, sleep, turn around, do something else. You have to monitor it.
So you are basically paying to take legal responsibility for the crashes of a not-quite-ready autopilot whilst still having to keep alert.
The moment there is a true self-driving capability, where you can sit back and let the car drive even if you're not sober etc, then it would be wildly popular.
Exactly. My car has adaptive cruise control. In slow traffic, if the car in front comes to a stop, it'll also stop. But what happens if it's turned off? I honestly don't know and don't have the balls to find out, because so far it just keeps getting closer to the car in front. So if I accidentally pause it then drive the same way I would with it enabled, I might(?) rear-end someone.
It'd be the height of stupidity if it does just keep rolling forward, but who knows...
When I bought my last car, I was sort of excited about adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. But maybe because most driving I do (which isn't a huge amount) is on pretty busy roads I've sort of avoided really using it.
I’ve had a Yukon with supercruise for 18 months. It is fantastic for highway driving, particularly, we’ve driven it west from Tennessee to Colorado and Florida. Other comments claiming it’s the same as other standard driver-assist packages are incorrect. Totally hands free, no “ping pong” with the lanes.
That said, when trying to BUY a supercruise vehicle, the sales guys were clueless, I had to review the stat sheets of each car to see which ones did or did not have it. GM is treating this technology as “surveys say 2% of the market wants a self driving vehicle” (incorrect question) compared to “install on every vehicle as an available subscription, let the sales team earn their way.” I’m sure the tech is expensive, but it can’t be that much more at the OEM level.
I also have a Tesla with FSD. FSD is truly amazing but still struggles with edge cases like, my office has two entrances, one is blocked by barrels, it tries to turn into the barrels every time.
From my understanding, super cruise only works on pre-approved roads/road sections, whereas FSD works just about anywhere. When I last checked my commute to work, the main highway I take becomes unsupported half way to work, despite it being the same bland typical highway layout.
I really don't want to buy a Tesla, but from what I can tell, nobody has anything close to what FSD offers.
> Down to the point of unwanted veering towards road dividers and other vehicles.
Our 2024 Kia does this every 10-20 miles on average. You don't even have to enable lane assist. It also randomly decides to weaken the regenerative braking, or switch out of single pedal mode.
If you disable enough of the safety features it stops doing these things, but, for instance, that means you can't have blind spot detection that works when you're going over 5mph and a working steering column at the same time.
Yeah, people act like some Tesla problems are bad, but I've certainly used systems that are worse. Just in a few miles, I've had a Nissan accelerate towards stopped traffic aggressively enough to trigger its own collision warning. It'll also fly try to drive off the road in relatively shallow curves, triggering its own lane departure warnings.
The Tesla system isn't perfect, but it is far from unique in being imperfect.
That's true. I took a jab specifically at Tesla, because it's generally framed as the "leader of the pack and problem free to the point that you can sleep in it".
FSD is a very hard problem, and the systems deployed are at best alpha level. These things should be "hyped responsibly".
Not paying attention while FSD drives for you ended with a motorcyclist crushed to death under a Tesla, and a manslaughter charge for the driver near me this summer.
SuperCruise does what it claims to do, keep it up the middle on listed corridors. Most highways and interstates are eligible. I love both systems.
FSD is truly almost there for unsupervised, point to point driving. People want to virtue signal and complain about Tesla but it is an amazing piece of hardware being mass produced today. My car is 3 years old.
I worked in this industry. No, FSD is not almost there. Not even close. What matters is the long tails of events.
You might "feel" it is almost there because it gets it right 99.9% of the time but that is still way too many accidents and injuries in the long run. And the work to go from 99.9% to 99.9999% is 1000x more complicated.
We need to compare against the real human error rate (including drunk drivers, sleepy drivers etc). What is that error rate?
Also, fault tolerance error rates don’t work that way - difficulty increases exponentially as you increase fault. In other words, it’s much more difficult than three orders of magnitude to go from 3 9s to 6 9s - it’s easily 5-6 orders of magnitude.
When you're playing candy crush and FSD kills someone, whether or not it's drives better than the average driver is not something the judge and prosecutor are going to consider.
First, that’s because FSD is legally only L2 and thus legally you are required to pay attention. It has nothing to do with the engineering realities of the impact on improving safety.
When L5 becomes available then this becomes a different calculus. And it’s honestly questionable about how good the characterization actually is since Tesla’s L2 FSD seems to outperform Mercedes’s L3 and it’s more a matter of the liability the manufacturer is willing to take on vs objective measurements of quality.
yes, the long tail of difficult event is exponentially more difficult to handle. That's why I said above that people "feel" it is ready but it is nowhere to be even close to ready.
The average crash rate for human is one every 500k miles.
100 Miles literally don't matter. Even 1000. On average accidents happens every 500k miles.
Are you ready to have your tesla drive FSD with you sleeping in it for 500k?
You are letting your feeling dictate that FSD is ready. The math is more complicated.
Got it. differing expectations. Im not expecting 'unsupervised' out of the system, I dont think I would trust any system to transport me or loved ones un-piloted. Even when being driven in a taxi, I am still supervising despite not having much recourse beyond barking at the driver.
That said, based on my experience with FSD, I'd be tempted to take a nap if it let me, reinforcing my initial statement that it's very darn close.
If you drove with a very very bad driver that crashes every 50k miles (average is every 500k miles), you would have exactly the same feeling and you would also be tempted to take a nap.
Indeed, and I've held an anti-Elon position since well before he bought Twitter and went all MAGA. Personally, I don't want to support someone who continuously lies and breaks securities laws with impunity. The MAGA stuff is just icing on the cake.
This i what is so tricky with Self Driving. People "feel" it is almost there because most of their rides are mostly ok. However to make a system truly driverless you need to master the long tails of difficult events and FSD is nowhere even close to do that.
Going from 99.9% to 99.99999% is what makes a system truly driverless and where most of the work is. Waymo is way way ahead of FSD for this.
I know essentially nothing about machine learning, nor about what approaches to ML that Tesla or Waymo are using. Is there a Metcalfe-type effect possible here? Where the better FSD becomes, the more people use it, finding more edge-cases, so the driving get better, so more people start to use it. With the end result that the learning starts to get better/faster with time, in a positive-feedback like mechanism?
Your comment/question seems to assume that somehow accurate classification of performance is possible, which is demonstrably false assumption.
First, if somehow system-internal watchdog was able to detect erroneous outputs for training, it would also be able to stop those outputs propagating to control system live, leading to zero errors. Such a watchdog requires self driving to be quantified analytically, leaving implementation entirely testable and therefore control system not passing the testsuite (i.e. exhibiting erroneous behavior, i.e. still having "edge cases") not deployable in public. Many words to say that that in practice with driving being somewhat loosely defined you need humans in the training loop.
Second, vehicle operators are not only unqualified to accurately monitor behavior of these autonomous systems, in part due to not being formally trained on safety systems in general and the system they are monitoring in particular, but on top of that incentivized to underreport erroneous output.
My prediction has been that we are going to see increased number of accidents with ADAS deployments, not less, before the number can start dwindling.
> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.
Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.
Based on my anecdotal experience, another issue is that salespeople are not trained on the tech
I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own
A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fancy new feature they can’t control
I’d guess this is at least half the features on my iPhone. I’m sure it can do things that I’m not even thinking a phone can do, but nobody set anything up, and it’s not very obvious or discoverable.
At least when you purchase an iPhone new, Apple does push a "Personal Setup" session with their staff either in-store or online https://www.apple.com/shop/personal-setup (click the "Feature Focus" tab)
What tesla salespeople? They're pretty well known for flaunting the dealer model. I've never bought a tesla, but from the friends that have bought one one of the big plusses is you don't talk to a salesperson at all, you buy the car at a fixed retail price online. Has this changed recently?
Tesla has lots of showrooms with cars, test drives, and sales people. If you're there and want to buy a car, they direct you to a computer with an Internet connection.
They have a couple people to manage test drives and they will ask if you have any questions and make sure your aware of the current interest rate or other sales incentives but they aren’t sales people in the sense that you would typically be used to.
I don't want to be a jerk but the salesperson couldn't pronounce "autonomous" which tells me they aren't being trained in selling the feature at all. I can't even remember him referring to it by the marketing name.
I've bought a bunch of new cars in my life. I've never had a sales person who knew basically anything about the cars they were selling me. I have however had a variety of very good salespeople, their value has never been in explaining the car to me but in making my purchase transaction straight forward and reasonably quick.
All of the sales people could tell me how many doors each car had and what color it was when we stood next to it, but that was about it. Many of them could look up if other near-by dealers had the exact combination of options I wanted.
If sales person training about the actual cars exists, my experience indicates very few new car sales people take advantage of it.
Concur. A Toyota salesperson was once unable to tell me what the highest trim level of a Highlander was and how it differed from the model they had. Seen staggering lack of knowledge in all things, not just tech.
Older example but when I got a second hand Mazda in ~2017, the salesperson I bought it from set up Bluetooth pairing for voice calls via my phone.
As it turned out, the feature was still pretty janky and I only tried it a few times before reverting to just regular speakerphone. And when the battery died and the head unit lost all its config, I never bothered figuring out how to set it up a second time.
The whole dealership system is parasitic, rentseeking, friction. Tesla might have a point here.
Instead of transparently selling a product for fixed price, the dealer system appears based on information asymmetry, haggling, upcharges, finance bullshit, warranty bullshit, subscription bullshit, and many decades of entrenched psyops culture against customers.
On top of that, salespeople are often poorly trained on the products and dealerships seem to have an adversarial relationship with corporate, especially around the corporate website differing from the local story.
And then the dealerships steer you for whatever benefits them. In 2017 I tried to test drive a Chevy Bolt: Motortrend's car of that year. One dealer hadn't even heard of it. Another said he couldn't get one. Another tried to dissuade me from looking at it by dissing the product. Finally I found a knowledgeable dealer that knew the product, had some, and revealed they were easy for all dealers to get in our area: the others were just being obstreperous. Suck.
It's really annoying to me because I would love to just pick a dealership and go there for the rest of my life for all things automotive.
I don't like being ripped off but I'm not particularly price sensitive, so I'd love to just show up and pay a reasonable sticker price that was just The Price Everyone Paid and not have this vague haggling system expected, and not have to worry whether I was being ripped because I wanted a particular option. I hate having to think about decisions I don't particularly care about, so I would prefer to constrain my choices to "maker Y's automobiles", be it GM, Ford or Toyota for the rest of my life, so that once I have the capabilities I need out of an automobile there's only one or two choices. I would love the simplicity of the dealer being the default maintainer of my automobile and I just show up once a year or so and they take care of it in a pleasant experience.
It's irksome instead that it feels like they just want to trick you out of as much money as possible up front and that they don't want to have a maintenance department, but are legally required to.
I think service departments are actually pretty profitable for at least ICE dealerships. They certainly put the old college try into introducing you to the service manager even when you've purchased your car in a situation where you're unlikely to use that dealership for service.
My last purchase during the supply chain shortages was actually remarkably stress-free other than not being able to get the car sooner rather than later. I was paying cash. Knew there was almost certainly very little negotiating leverage on the list price. Did a bit of haggling on some "factory-installed" add-ons with a car that hadn't been built yet against my trade-in which I got IMO a good deal on.
The whole thing took me maybe an hour which is hard to complain about for a large purchase.
One of the keys is being ready and able to sever the actual purchase from the financing and the trade-in. It's when people really are stretching their financial envelope (which is common) that conflating various aspects of the transaction starts causing a lot of stress.
Of course, it also helps if you've been around the block a few times. OK, if I MUST I'll watch the stupid video about some coating product but know that the answer is no. It's annoying but no more than lots of other things.
This is definitely something that Tesla nails imo. No haggling, a single price listed on the website that changes with market conditions. A list of options available with again explicitly listed prices. No slimy car salesperson trying to upsell the scotchguard on your carpets bs. No hidden prices where the websites lists price $x but when you get to the store they tell you its $x + y. A price, a delivery and its over.
Brad Templeton's Robotaxi Timeline[1] (October 2024) shows a dozen milestones that Waymo has achieved over nearly 15 years from "Make a nice video" to "100,000 Rides per week." Waymo needs two more milestones to achieve "Production!" Waymo's competitors are behind on the timeline, but may move faster thanks to improved technology and a more welcoming social environment.
GM hasn’t been a car company since the 1980s. It’s a finance operation. Leadership only cares about developing products that are good enough to sell financing.
They really don’t know how to develop a compelling product, even though they have an enormous amount of experience and engineering talent.
It’s very similar to the failure of Boeing but GM doesn’t make anything that can kill 200 people at once so we don’t notice.
I’m one of the people that did not renew BlueCruise and the reason is kind of weird
BlueCruise vehicles were updated with the most sophisticated driver attention system ive ever seen. It will complain in less time than it takes me to change a radio station.
Before that update, I was enjoying the automated driving a little bit too much, and using it to take liberties with my attention in the car. That was awesome as a user experience.
After the update, I am paying more attention to the road than I did when I was driving a manual. There is no benefit to being able to take my hands off the steering wheel. That’s a good thing for safety, but it means that “level 2.5” driving (or whatever) adds zero marginal utility.
Ford brags that BlueCruise gets top marks from Consumer Reports but I think it's mostly because of because of this driver monitoring, rather than actual driving performance.
> Starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, we will deduct points if an [active driving assistance] system doesn’t have adequate [direct driver monitoring systems]. Right now, only Ford and GM’s systems meet our criteria for earning additional points, but others could be available soon. ...
> Ford’s BlueCruise sets a high standard among [active driving assistance] systems, aided by an infrared camera that monitors the driver’s eyes to determine whether they are looking at the road. If the driver glances away from the road for more than about 5 second... the system will give the driver a visual warning and an audible chime.
Supercruise might be comparable to Tesla's "Autosteer" product but its incomparable to Tesla's paid "FSD Supervised" product. The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
> The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
It depends how you look at it, but in the (super limited) cases where you can use Mercedes Drive Pilot you can legally and safely read a book, watch a movie, or work while in the driver's seat. [1] That's not the case with any Tesla product.
Yes there are actual "legal" notions of driver assistance "levels," but out of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously. Elon has a high conviction in the product and has continued to pour billions of dollars in GPUs, talent, supply chains, etc to make it happen. Other manufacturers don't take it nearly as seriously, unfortunately.
Sure you might not be able to legally claim that a Tesla is totally "autonomous," but the fact of the matter (to me, at least) is that they are putting in way more effort to solve the problem than legacy auto manufacturers are.
I can step into a Tesla today, press a destination, and go there without touching the wheel or pedals. Sure it won't be flawless but the fact is, I can. I can't do the same in any other consumer car, and the closest thing is a Waymo. The effort is there, I think its just a matter of time before we start seeing the legal stuff play out.
I think there's some chance that Tesla's approach will work out for them, but I'm not optimistic. Getting self-driving software to "impressively good" happened pretty quickly, and even systems from 2016 would usually pass your "go there without touching the wheel or pedals" test. But from there to "as safe as a human" let alone "as safe as we require human-replacing machines to be" turns out to be quite a hard gap to cross.
When you say "what was available" do you mean what a Tesla was capable of? Because I was trying to talk about things like Cruise driving for 90min at night in a city with no intervention: https://youtu.be/KSRPmng1cmA
If you let me pick the roads, I could easily drive 90 minutes at night with no intervention in the LA area: driving from Ventura, down the 126 to the 5 to LAX can be done basically with no interventions no problem today. It could be done with EAP two years ago too. But, FSD works well on essentially arbitrary roads and it didn't four years ago.
> driving from Ventura, down the 126 to the 5 to LAX
That's a lot simpler than what Cruise showed in their video. Dealing well with pedestrians, stopped cars, cross streets, etc are a significant challenge.
Well, there's consistently and there's consistently.
In 2016 Waymo reported their safety drivers intervening once for every 5,100 miles driven [1] - which implies to me that 99% of journeys nobody touched the wheel or pedals.
The problem is 99% isn't enough, as there are tremendous numbers of cars out there, and a busy bit of freeway would get a disengagement per minute.
It might be missing a few logging roads, private driveways and carpark lanes - but it shows Google is entirely capable of mapping streets in detail all over the world.
> and even systems from 2016 would usually pass your "go there without touching the wheel or pedals" test
This is complete bullshit. The systems in 2016 were restricted to pre-mapped areas with lots of training. (i.e. the waymo/cruise approach today) So if you weren’t in a tiny slice of San Francisco or a few other training areas, this didn’t work.
Even if an area is pre-mapped, if you're operating on public streets you need to handle all sorts of unusual things. Here's a Cruise video recorded in 2016 on SF streets, showing a tricky interactions with buses, stopped delivery vehicles, pedestrians, etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tp6Ubf6mE4
Yeah, I’m not saying they weren’t doing impressive things. I’m saying they were still severely limited and would not be capable of a “go around without touching the wheel/brakes test” like a Tesla can in the entire US now.
> of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously.
You call lying about it endlessly, misleading marketing, beta-testing on public roads, and not even having L3 properly in production "taking it the most seriously"?
No, I'm mostly referring to buying talent and GPUs.
I can't point to a single Andrej Karpathy or Chris Lattner or Jim Keller working at Mercedes, BMW, GM, etc (not to mention the not so big named people who are still very very good). And I also don't see many people crossing over from legacy auto autonomous orgs to openai, anthropic, deepmind, etc.
Other manufacturers don't have custom in car inference chips either, or spend billions in R&D for custom training silicon. This is clearly not a side project for Tesla, whereas with other manufacturers, its an obvious afterthought.
My guess is other manufacturers will just license some AV product from whoever is most successful and try to sell products like they always have - through design language and brand feel, not through breakthrough technological innovation.
So yes, I don't think any other consumer car manufacturer is taking it seriously.
From what I've seen, Tesla FSD would fail a driving test here in the EU within the 1st minute. Even the latest and greatest version behaves like a drunk teenager.
I'm not in EU so I can't comment if they have a special circumstance that makes there driving test different than elsewhere in the world, but "behaving like a drunk teenager" is not a descriptor I would use. I make use of Tesla FSD every day, 2 -3 times a day. Over the last few months I've had to engage (of my own choosing) twice, otherwise it is completely hands and foot off experience.
I travel hundred miles a day on average on a mix of local and highway, but all major roads in city and suburb.
Driving tests in Europe, certainly in northern Europe and Scandinavia, are considerably stricter than in the US and many other places in the world. In Norway the test is also not enough, there is also obligatory practice with a qualified instructor including driving on motorways and on a skid pan to simulate driving on ice.
Would definitely pay more to avoid FSD pilots, because the texters sense their surroundings more often than the drivers lulled by false advertisement and (at-best) beta grade software.
The snarky posters can stay, doesn't hurt my life or property.
Or course it would fail a driving test designed for humans.
Humans would fail a driving test designed for autonomous driving too. We don't have the reaction time comparable to computers to ..say.. avoid oncoming traffic or an object/animal on the road within a few milliseconds. Or identify dark objects easier to see in infrared. Or maintain an exact speed, to a few significant digits. Or manually do a good job with traction control.
> Yes there are actual "legal" notions of driver assistance "levels," but out of those 3 companies Tesla seems to be taking it the most seriously.
..and yet Tesla is quick to blame the drivers when accidents happen - and has disclaimers for supervision in its TOS. Mercedes on the other hand, takes all responsibility for eventualities that happen while self-driving is engaged (DrivePilot - not ADAS)
And in those same cases, you could probably safely do the same with FSD (s), but because FSD isn't as limited and the Mercedes product is not a serious competitor, there's no compelling reason for allowing it.
The MB Drive Pilot only works at ridiculously low speeds (under 40 mph), on select highways, no sharp turns, no weather, no construction zones, lanes clearly visible, etc. It's laughable to compare it against FSD which works everywhere. FSD has been flawless when driving on such easy conditions for years.
Are you assuming MB Drive Pilot couldn’t also work pretty well outside of its design domain?
This argument is always so silly because it’s just an argument about the correct way to build a safe control system (i.e. with guaranteed performance characteristics in a defined operational domain) versus the incorrect way to do it (just kinda work over an ambiguously defined set of conditions and hope you don’t kill too many innocent people to cripple your business).
MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain.
It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe.
You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).
What evidence do you have for your argument?
Restated: You are assuming that if Mercedes engineers had a similar appetite for putting millions of innocent people at risk by operating in unreliable contexts, that their system would perform far worse than FSD does. On what basis do you make that assumption?
The fact that their software is written only to just follow the car in front, and completely and immediately give up if there's no car in front or one cannot be seen due to it being dark or bad weather, on premapped roads.
Meanwhile FSD has repeatedly shown that's it's capable of driving without a car in front.
You can watch YouTube videos of FSD driving without a car in front for thousands of miles on non-premapped roads.
What makes you think Mercedes would be better at doing that?
What makes you think that MB doesn't have the same capability, but they aren't willing to ship a half-arsed highly dangerous, people killing feature like some other companies do? Unlike any of their competitors, they assume full legal liability for their car's behavior while Drive Pilot is enabled.
MB also has a luxury brand reputation to maintain. When they ship a major feature like that, it absolutely has to work 100% as advertised.
> Unlike any of their competitors, they assume full legal liability for their car's behavior while Drive Pilot is enabled.
Source? If someone gets killed when the system is driving, there is no legal framework for you as a driver to escape criminal penalties. Who at MB are they going to jail for it?
Can UPS indemnify their drivers from involuntary manslaughter charges?
I've worked on competitors to the mb system from legacy auto; generally the way we work is make the best possible system for the long term, then limit the odd to meet safety, regulatory, and brand risk requirements.
So there will be a system happily running producing target driving paths, but some monitoring system disables in the case with no car in front.
I would guess that the mb system is in fact ok without a car in front, but didn't hit their appetite for risk yet.
> You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).
Should we also assume that Mercedes cars can fly better than a plane, because we have not yet seen them fly?
What kind of logic is that?
In other news, OpenAI has solved AGI last year, but is keeping it a secret because it's too dangerous.
I have solved self driving, how can you say I didn't if you haven't seen it perform?
No, but generally you should assume a system with near-100% performance within a well-defined ODD doesn't fall off to near-0% performance immediately adjacent to that ODD.
Here's a better example: let's say by law Mercedes has to restrict their cars from exceeding 80mph. They have a car that can reach 80mph in 2 seconds. Is it therefore credible to claim that the car is actually incapable of driving at 81mph?
Or is it more credible to say, "we don't know much about its performance beyond 80mph, but it can probably achieve something outside of that."
A car not being in front means more data for cameras because they can see more of the road ahead if the system can actually do proper road navigation.
The fact that it shuts off immediately shows that they're just copying what the car ahead does.
The system is unable to function on a pre-mapped highway on a clear day with lane markings if there is no other traffic on the road. What does that tell you?
What kind of messed-up logic is that? How many products do you think you own that contain hidden features that you're not supposed to know about? Just about everything with at least a microcontroller inside has extra software modules that you never learn about as the end user (e.g. service modes and factory calibration routines).
FSD isn't driving though, you're driving. Mercedes is driving itself and you have 10 seconds to takeover. Huge difference between level 3 and level 2. One is self driving and one is just a drivers aid.
> Mercedes is driving itself and you have 10 seconds to takeover. Huge difference between level 3 and level 2. One is self driving and one is just a drivers aid.
None of that is true, it just follows the car in front in slow moving traffic during daytime in good weather on premapped roads and cannot even change lanes. No car in front anymore? It completely fails to "self"-drive.
These limitations are taboo to talk about because the Mercedes system is used as an anti-Tesla talking point, you can get permanently banned from Reddit and BlueSky for bringing it up. Thats why so many people think its a great system.
Edit: Downvotes for bringing up inconvenient facts.
I'm very much aware of how Drive Pilot doesn't handle most cases: in my comment I described it as "super limited" and linked to where Mercedes describes the details.
But within the range of cases where the Mercedes system is applicable (which recently went up to 59mph in Germany [1]) it's solidly better than the Tesla system because Mercedes did the engineering to make it reliable enough that you don't have to supervise the car's driving. If I had a highway commute in stop-and go traffic I'd be comfortable reading in a Mercedes, but not in a Tesla.
If Tesla were to artificially set up limitations like highway only, daytime, clearly visible lanes, good weather, car in front, no construction zones, no lane changes, etc, then they would easily have been able to offer full L3 and take full liability for it. Tesla FSD is practically perfected, with no accidents whatsoever, under such conditions already. But Elon wouldn't want to release this kind of gimped system as he is aiming for full self driving everywhere.
Absolutely untrue. It's not even close to perfect. I use it a few times a week and while it's seen some significant improvements over the last year, it still makes pretty dangerous mistakes, especially on left turns, right-turn slip lanes, intersections with flashing yellow lights, streets with very worn road lines or where the positioning of the road lines shift from one side of the intersection to the other. I can think of a dozen other similar situations so I'm very sure there are many others I've never even encountered.
It remains to be seen how much juice Tesla can squeeze out of a transformer approach to autonomous driving, but it's by no means a sure thing.
edit: I misunderstood the comment. I see now that "practically perfected" is a reference to the ideal conditions mentioned in your first sentence.
Thank you to post your personal experience. One pattern that I have noticed about Tesla FSD stories on HN: it is black and white, with little grey area. Either people live an area where the roads are easy for FSD to navigate, and they come here to say "It is perfect!". And vice versa: People live in a place with a bunch of complex roads and intersections where FSD does not perform well... And they come to HN to share their experience. (Privately, I cannot wait to see self-driving models try driving on Jakarta or Napoli. It will so much fun to watch those on YouTube!) I do think that Elon/Tesla is taking a crazy gamble to release FSD early to gain billions of hours of training data! I can understand where this would make some people uncomfortable, due to the safety concerns. Except Waymo, who else has the training data that Tesla has at this point? Wiki tells me that FSD has been driving on public roads since 2016. That must an astonishing amount of training data accumulated in the last 8 years! I assume he will be tasking X.ai with improving the FSD model using this enormous training data.
This is so absurd. If they could accurately predict when their system is so reliable, they could get it certified for Level 3 use in these conditions. That's not a gimped version, that's strictly better than the product they offer.
They can't though. Mercedes-Benz can. To pretend that Tesla doesn't offer a better product because they don't want to is...
There are plenty of FSD videos on YouTube where the driver didn't have to intervene at all on long trips, where the car isn't just following the car in front.
You hit it on the nail, the driver didn't have to intervene but they had to be ready to take over at any time. If FSD could safely operate where you had 10 seconds to take over for level 3, why doesn't Tesla go get it certified for L3 driving. FSD isn't even approved for being a drivers aid(hands off, eyes on) in EU and China because Tesla has not demonstrated that it is safe. Even Blue cruise is approved in EU for comparison. And it isn't because Tesla isn't trying to get ADAS certification in these markets.
Are they? they haven't start certification for self driving any market? It seems FSD is more of way to pump the stock. Mercedes is testing their same cars for L4(point to point) in china.
For past decade, with meh results consistently so far. They were/are? selling FSD as premium package and never delivered on promises, that's outright fraud in plain sight.
Technologically Tesla is far behind since one man's ego wants to trump physics and computing limitations and its failing. Still no Lidar.
I don't care about 90 youtube videos of long drives with no intervention. I care about a million out of a million (and maybe 10 on top). Either there is something I can trust with mine and my kids life with, or I am not interested with anything on top adaptive cruise control (since I don't spend my life in stop&go traffic).
I thought supercruise only worked on "qualified roads".
Tesla autopilot 1.0 has been around on tesla since 2015. It's actually pretty good on the freeway as traffic aware cruise control + autosteer. I think it's a pretty good balance of driver + assist.
Which tells approximately nothing about their relative capabilities. The fallback system is the driver (who needs to be ready to take over immediately) and the range of conditions for autonomous operation is better than Level 1.
Tesla can't self drive in any condition on any street. Hard to compare that to a level 4 company where the car can go hundreds of thousands of miles without disengagement. Being a owner FSD, its no where near being able to drive itself without supervision, it tries to run reds, misses people in cross walks and can't understand signs like "Do Not Enter".
> Hard to compare that to a level 4 company where the car can go hundreds of thousands of miles without disengagement
This is nowhere close to being true. The latest numbers I could find for 2022 are 17,060 miles per disengagement[1] for Waymo. And even then the definition is not quite clear, because these are safety disengagements from what I can tell, and not disengagements for things like getting stuck because the road is closed or something else.
> This is nowhere close to being true. The latest numbers I could find for 2022 are 17,060 miles per disengagement[1] for Waymo
Tesla doesn't reveal it's miles/disengagement stats, but according to crowdsourced data it's 690-828 miles between critical disengagement [1], which is 2 orders of magnitude worse than the Waymo number you posted, and far below their goal of besting human drivers' abilities.
Your 1 accident per 500k miles stat is an average across urban and rural areas. But accident rates in urban areas are likely significantly higher than in non-urban areas, due to higher vehicle density/congestion, despite the fact that vehicle accident fatality rates are higher in rural areas[1]. Urban areas tend to have a lot more low-speed no-injury or mild-injury collisions. When you account for all of those, AVs are in shooting distance of human driver accident rates in urban areas. Also, the accident rates are much higher for drunk, sleepy, or distracted drivers, so to the extent AVs reduce those types of driving, they bring the overall accident rates down much further.
Arguably, it would be a better comparison if the Tesla was restricted from highway driving. I understand the letting the car figure out its own route, but I’m more interested in seeing the Tesla navigate city streets.
Are we forgetting that this only happened because they got in huge trouble with regulators and had to withdraw their cars from the street for like a year? I wouldn't take their statement at complete face value and don't see any reason for pessimism for Waymo.
Yup, there is zero chance that the market is too small. The only issues are whether a company can the technology to work and obtain regulatory approval.
Size of the market is for all practical purposes function of price. The competition to robotaxis is first and foremost humans. The major question is if robotaxi companies can provide the service at the cost of ubers *profitably*.
"In the early 1980s AT&T asked McKinsey to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The consultancy noted all the problems with the new devices—the handsets were absurdly heavy, the batteries kept running out, the coverage was patchy and the cost per minute was exorbitant—and concluded that the total market would be about 900,000. At the time this persuaded AT&T to pull out of the market, although it changed its mind later. "
And in the more recent past, we asked Juicero if squeezing a small volume of bags by hand could be done more cheaply by machines, and they told us "absolutely!"
We know how big the taxi market is and it's growth rate. There is clearly room for a few businesses here alone. Then consider driverless will go beyond taxi to general transportation like trucking which is massive market. Also likely play a significant variable in what cars consumers choose.
I think the risk here is software tends to a winner (or small number of winners) gets all market.
That has to be a major risk/reward concern on the companies investing in this tech.
>Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy
Before the iPhone came out, some pretty decent/popular smartphones existed. I had clients in the industry. They sold a lot of n95s and such.
But... data plans sucked. Apple did an exclusive deal and forced them to include 2gb of data. They could not sell phones with data-less plans. Customers could not buy iphones on data-less plans.
> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
I've had one Tesla for 6 years, another for 2: I've gotten to a point where I find Autopilot boring and turn it off just for something to do.
My older Tesla has enhanced Autopilot. As impressive as it is, it's very glitchy. I primarily use it so I don't speed.
Because enhanced autopilot was so glitchy, when we added a 2nd Tesla to the household, we didn't pay for FSD. (Enhanced autopilot was too expensive given how glitchy it was in my older car.) The free trials of FSD in the 2nd Tesla are impressive... And glitchy. I constantly need to take over on surface roads; but it is very nice on freeways.
The thing is, "self driving" as a feature just isn't worth the sticker price. If you're sitting in the driver's seat, and there's nothing to do, you can just save yourself a boatload of cash and drive the car yourself. Especially if you have to remain alert at all times, the best way to cut the boredom is to drive the car.
self driving makes total sense if its the sci-fi like dream of being able to read the news or a novel in the drivers seat while your car safely takes you to your destination.
But if I have to maintain a hand on the steering wheel and monitor the car I may as well be driving.
Any of the advanced lane keeping systems are immensely helpful for lowering fatigue, especially on longer drives. I think it's quite hard to recognize how fatiguing it is to constantly make sure your car is centered in the lane with small hand movements. In my experience, long car rides are substantially less fatiguing when I just have to 'oversee' the car, rather than fully drive it.
And when you go to Tesla for a test drive, they first thing they do is shove it into auto-cruise or whatever they call it whether you want to or not! At least that is what happened to me when I test drove one 10 years ago. Maybe they don't do that anymore.
I test-drove a Model S about that time - it was hair-raising because the system would correct the cars position about a half-second after I would have. I hovered my hands by the wheel the whole time, waiting for it to careen us into a bridge abutment.
While SuperCruise is a highway only system, riding in a friend's car with it was pretty much a non-event.
Realistically, how many chances do you think the average person is going to give the alg to drive them into an object at 70mph?
Has there been a significant customer side advancement in Tesla autopilot in 10 years? From what I can tell, all Elon has accomplished is becoming the new Prius- a sprinkling of Teslas blocking the left lane of our highways (ask any Autopilot aficionado, that’s the safest place to use it) while the human inside watches TikTok.
> Has there been a significant customer side advancement in Tesla autopilot in 10 years?
Not super interested in whether you're "impressed" or not. I think the video answers your question. The part of the video you chose to point out (poor behavior in parking lots at the end of a drive caused by bad cell signal) says a lot on its own, imo.
Autopilot of 10 years ago was lane keeping and changing on highways only. Now the car does a drive from point A to point B with some erroneous behavior in the end in the parking lot, and you're like "huh, what's the difference?"
Clearly you are not coming into this with an open mind.
The video does answer my question. It shows a Tesla vehicle that (still) requires human oversight and intervention to navigate point to point. At around 6m20s in the person behind the wheel says "OK it's going the wrong way into that one way entrance again" as he puts his hands on the wheel and takes over from the system.
Tesla engineers may have made engineering progress towards their goal. Maybe they make it N miles further before requiring intervention. Maybe they can successfully navigate an additional M% of some region without issue. That is progress! However that progress does not necessarily translate into something that customers will consider an advancement or valuable. Certainly not all customers.
There is no value to me in a semi-autonomous driving platform that requires my attention and feedback. So I would not consider the performance captured in the video to be a "significant customer side advancement". The fact that others might disagree and find value in the video is OK with me. We need only to be honest with ourselves and others when describing the system performance.
There is another company actively running an autonomous fleet every day. That is impressive to me.
> Clearly you are not coming into this with an open mind.
I think it's great that you want to cheerlead for Tesla. "FSD" and "Autopilot" just don't live up to their names yet. I'm sure eventually they'll ship something worthy of the trademark and make all your evangelism worth it.
Come experience it between my house and walmart before you go telling people they need to experience it. Good luck having good weather during your drive, here in louisiana.
Self driving probably works great on Interstates with numbers like 5, 10, and the feeders. Based on my experiences with subaru self driving and watching videos and watching tesla drivers around here, a self driving car would give up after maybe 3 minutes. There were more teslas and other expensive "self-driving" style cars a couple years ago, but now i rarely see them. I wonder why?
I can consistently get my wife's subaru self driving to swerve into another lane without warning, without jerking the wheel, with very minor control inputs. Subaru keeps updating the firmware, but they haven't fixed the suicide merge!
Are you from Houston originally, by chance, or from a part of western Louisiana? Anytime I hear the word “feeder” it’s a dead giveaway the person either grew up near Houston area or hung around there long enough to use this word in their lexicon
Nope! I'm from the state where i had to consciously not type "the 5, the 10" - California. I've lived in Louisiana for 12 years, total, now, though. I couldn't think of a better name for like the 405 or 710 than "feeders" - maybe tributary; i know there is a term of art for those freeways, though.
“Frontage” is the nomenclature I usually see in lieu of “feeder”. Though I agree that feeder is more descriptive of what the road actually does when we consider a road as being as a network or graph with flow.
Though the roads you reference would probably not be called “feeders” in the same way. I take feeder specifically in the Houstonian meaning to refer to a frontage road that is used for local access that runs parallel to a limited access highway. Notably it must run parallel to the highway and exist for the primary purpose of providing local ingress and egress while preserving the limited access nature of the highway.
Yeah 10 years ago it was a bit much. It was pretty much just lane keeping and distance keeping, but it didn't read signs or lights yet. So if you're coming up on a signal it would just keep going!
> Chrysler was the first manufacturer to implement the device in 1958. They called it “Auto-Pilot” and it appeared in their luxury model as an upgraded option. Soon after, General Motors installed it in their Cadillac vehicles, naming it “Cruise Control” which has stuck to this day.
> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.
That was a your-dealership issue, not a GM issue. GM doesn't run the dealerships (though they sure have plenty of influence).
I test drove the Silverado EV a month ago and got to try out super cruise.
That's a "GM's business model" problem, which is again a GM problem.
The top-selling EV maker in the US doesn't have any dealerships, so clearly it's not an insurmountable problem. GM just hasn't prioritized surmounting it.
To be fair to GM, Tesla basically had to be a brand new auto company and work through a whole bunch of legal loopholes and battles just to have their direct sales model. GM and the rest of the legacy automakers are essentially bound to the dealership system and the dealerships represent a much larger lobbying base than the automakers themselves.
We are seeing this play out with VW’s attempt to direct-sell Scout vehicle's and immediately getting challenged/sued by dealerships over it. [1]
I could do a undergrad essay on how the dealership model is bad for the manufacturers, which would boil down to how Indian motorcycles failed (which was also due to mismanagement). However, the VW scouts are an absolute abomination that should be cleansed from the earth.
They aren't going to be any good as an off-road vehicle, the approach/departure angles are horrible. They will also be way too heavy, just as a function of being an EV. Plus, the styling is absolute garbage. I've owned a scout 80 for 18 years, it was my first vehicle. I owned an OH scout for longer than they have been collectible. This new scout doesn't have any styling cues to any prior vehicle, it just looks like if you asked an AI to generate an off-road truck. And they even had a better example, the new broncos absolutely hit it out of the park. Line I E if those up next to a mid 60s bronco and you can see the resemblance, which is why Ford did that in their marketing. These new VW scouts, if you park them next to either an 800 or a scout 2, don't even look like the same lineage. They are just an abomination, and the only car company I'd trust less with shepherding the scout brand would be stellantis2. We've seen how poor of a job they've done with the jeep.
And the stupid part is,most people don't and have never understood why the original scout was good. They were an overly heavy, underpowered, and expensive vehicle. But, they were a tremendously capable off-road vehicle, my stock scout 80 has gone places a modern Rubicon with lockers couldn't go. It's down to a very fortunate suspension design and stupidly low gearing.
Simple and rugged will beat "sophisticated" every day of the week. Underpowered is an asset because you don't break shit. Simple is an asset because you can keep it running. Steering box NLA? No problem fit one from a different vehicle. Axles? NBD just need some U-bolts, maybe some custom linkages, and any other solid axle of similar dimensions will do. Trying to make cars into some kind of disposable appliance is incredibly short sighted.
They're never going to make enthusiasts like you happy because the vehicle needs to sell to a mass market, not the kind of person who has owned a Scout 80 for 18 years.
I think you're not in a marketing mindset if you think that any significant amount of people are to buy a new Scout for off-roading. Premium-priced vehicles are more about image than the implied capabilities of that image.
Porsche sells more four door vehicles than two door sports cars. You might say that's not a real Porsche in the spirit of a Porsche, but it is what it is. It sells, and the average person doesn't need a two door car with no trunk or an off-road truck that is painful on the road. They usually need a family vehicle for mundane domestic life.
GM can’t match the lobbying power of local dealers in the state houses. Every state rep has a dealer or two in their district, and they employ staff who vote.
And, to be fair to the dealers, there is a long history of the makers trying to screw them over, and the public, too.
The dealership model is an anachronism from the days when the Big 3 US automakers were basically a cartel with a lock on the market, and predates the internet. For new sales it has no real advantages over what Tesla is doing, and for service the public would be better served by strong right-to-repair laws so people can have their vehicles serviced at any independent mechanic (or do it themselves).
Automakers started out with direct sales. Anti-trust issues quickly arose with that business model and that’s where we got dealership laws, as imperfect as they may be.
The document is rather one-sided and slanted, but I think it’s interesting to see how a dealership association explains their perspective:
Of particular interest is warranty issues. Tesla has an extra-strong interest in hiding recall-worthy issues and preventing warranty service from occurring since their service department is owned by the manufacturer.
A car dealership has the opposite incentive: every dealer-performed warranty service is a payment from the manufacturer to the dealer.
Finally, even if GM is lobbying to do direct sales, dealerships employ more Americans than the carmakers and parts manufacturers. Their lobbying group is larger and more local.
> A car dealership has the opposite incentive: every dealer-performed warranty service is a payment from the manufacturer to the dealer.
Wouldn't this be served just as well by having independent repair shops certified by the manufacturer to do recall and warranty repairs, without prohibiting direct sales of vehicles?
I would say that laws covering right-to-repair are almost entirely a different subject than laws governing retail competition.
Being forced to buy a vehicle from the manufacturer would be exactly like being forced to buy Indiana Jones and the Great Circle only from Microsoft. But it's a lot better to be able to buy it from multiple game stores, many of which compete on price.
Overall I think it's totally fine that Tesla wants to sell cars direct, and any manufacturer should be able to. But they should also be obligated to sell to dealerships at a fair price (they shouldn't be able to just pretend that their own selling process has no cost associated with it).
Dealerships also make most of their profit from the service departments which is why they don’t really like EVs. No longer do you need to go in every 3-6 months to get an oil change, belt replacement, spark plugs, etc.
1. There are still service items on a Tesla that are relatively frequent. Tires rotated every 6,400 miles, brake calipers cleaned and lubricated yearly for northern climates with salted roads, cabin air filter changed every 2 years, and two other service items every 4 years.
2. This is technically a tangent to the issue at hand. If Tesla was a gasoline vehicle startup they would have the same incentives to avoid dealership franchises, perhaps an even stronger incentive.
3. The fact that vehicle service is the most profitable part of the business is a great argument for the dealership model. Tesla owning their own service centers means that they are directly incentivized not to fix reliability problems in their vehicles, while all the car companies who have to pay out dealerships to handle recalls and warranty claims have a direct incentive to produce a reliable vehicle. Lo and behold, Tesla is about halfway down the vehicle reliability list according to consumer reports. At least they're better than Chrysler?
No, not really. Safeway's advertising and store layout isn't directly a Coca Cola problem business model problem. They care, they have some influence, but if the one seller goes under for being crappy another will pop up to take its place.
This is just a car dealership tying its hands behind its back and not competing well. If it isn't widespread it isn't a GM problem.
vehicles driving into the back of emergency vehicles, slamming on the brakes in the middle of highways - both because the CEO decreed that RADAR/LIDAR isn't necessary
Issues with its "self driving" randomly swerving at objects, pedesrtians, cyclists, other vehicles...
Enormous service/parts/bodywork backlogs
vehicles blacklisted by insurance companies becaue of high crash rates and repair costs
windows that randomly shatter
drivetrains that fail because you drive them in too heavy a rainstorm
a truck that cannot be driven in the snow (snow reflects light off the DRL bar, blinding the driver, the headlights getting blocked by snow, and the vehicle is stymied by barely a few inches of snow):
GM doesn't have any of these problems (except for a small number of Bolts which had defective cells made by LG - all replaced now, and given extended ten year warranties.)
> drivetrains that fail because you drive them in too heavy a rainstorm
Not even that, colleague's Model 3 died because it was parked out in rather normal european heavy rain over 1 night. It just completely died.
Tesla service center just took it and replaced it without any questions - clear sign this wasn't an exception and it was well known issue at that point.
People incorrectly throw around the term "rent-seeking" all the time, yet this is a case where it would be correctly applied. The dealerships petition the government to enforce the franchise model of car sales to block potential competitors. Like Tesla, but also mega-chains like CarMax.
And for good reason. The whole point of the regulation is to assure that there is someone nearby for the owner to get a vehicle repaired and be able to buy parts.
ahem Guess what Tesla has a ton of problems with?
Edit: there are a whole lot of people replying who seem unaware that I was referring to new car customers who have a vehicle which is broken under government-mandated warranties, but also that:
- The majority of manufacturers have long required proprietary diagnostic tools (the OBD-II functions in your car are only useful for the most basic diagnostic info, cannot adjust parameters, and cannot trigger diagnostic procedures such as cycling a valve or motor.) That is why some states and countries have right-to-repair laws. Automakers responded by shifting all that stuff to work only over telematics, and then claimed that online websites were not "tools."
- At one point car companies were doing bullshit like shipping parts with electronics in them "uncoded" (not uncommon, VAG does this) and not flashed with any firmware. Volvo did this. The firmware could only be flashed by a dealer, and it required them to plug the car into their internet-connected diagnostic tool through which servers in Sweden would encrypt the firmware for that specific VIN number and module, which could only be decrypted by the main control units in that specific car - and transmit it back to the technician's diagnostic tool.
- Teslas require software/online tools only provided to Tesla service centers and technicians
- You cannot buy parts for a Tesla without providing them with the VIN number of a car you own and which they still consider roadworthy. Tesla has a very arbitrary process for declaring vehicles to not be roadworthy, with relatively minor collisions triggering it, whereas vehicles nearly totally destroyed often are not declared unroadworthy and their VIN can be used to purchase parts
- Tesla does not distribute parts via third party distributors such as Worldpac, and prohibits its OEMs from selling parts, which is extremely unusual. You (and your independent mechanic) can only get parts directly from them - if they'll sell you the part at all.
The laws requiring dealerships and that they be independently owned were created because in the early days of the auto industry, people were getting endlessly screwed by automotive manufacturers producing cars that would break within weeks or months, did not have parts available for them at all, and the company would dissolve right after a production run so that customers had nobody to go after for damages.
The reason for requiring it be an independent business is simple; the state government wants to see that a local business has judged the manufacturer to have their shit together sufficiently enough to want to do business with them, and they won't be left holding the bag.
> The whole point of the regulation is to assure that there is someone nearby for the owner to get a vehicle repaired and be able to buy parts.
> ahem Guess what Tesla has a ton of problems with?
If the goal is to allow people to have vehicles repaired, then mandate right-to-repair laws, mandate that all auto manufacturers must fully document how to service the vehicle.
The problem with Tesla isn't the lack of dealerships, it's that even if you go to a normal auto repair store, Tesla won't sell repair parts nor provide detailed enough repair manuals. Tesla will void your warranty for having someone else fix it.
If the regulation is meant to allow consumers to repair their vehicles, then it should say that.
It is widely known in America that dealerships are the worst places for repairs and that c independent mechanics are generally better. I discovered this myself slowly over time.
Yea generally it's a slew of other laws that mandate the opening up of vehicles to aftermarket components that makes it viable, not necessarily dealers who just installed overpriced OEM parts.
An reasonable alternative would be for GM to have a "dealer license" mode for qualified dealers (for example, training), where they can get it enabled until the sale is complete.
It does seem strange but when one considers that the CEO of one of these competitors spent ~$260M to help elect the next President and he will have his ear on matters of autonomous car regulation, maybe not so strange.
If future autonomous car regulations are influenced by Musk and end up being lax and favour the technological approach that Tesla has taken, then GM/Cruise may have made significant irrelevant investments to solve issues that are no longer relevant, and this puts them on poor footing in the new competitive landscape.
It's possible they're bowing out early on the assumption that this will no longer be a competition that they can win.
Maybe in some small parts of the country. Tesla is dominating most everywhere else in the US. I definitely have no access to a Waymo but have been driven by FSD in heavy construction. (Do not own a Tesla myself).
Tesla is not "dominating" Waymo, they provide completely different offerings. Waymo provides a taxi service (like Uber) with autonomous vehicles. Tesla sells cars that offer a driving assistant feature, but the system is not able to operate safely without human supervision.
I can safely and legally take a Waymo home after getting drunk at the bar, this is not true of a Tesla.
It's possible that Tesla will have a massive jump in capability of their system, but currently it doesn't do any self-driving anywhere (e.g. you can't sit in the back seat).
ASS. Actually Smart Summon. You can sit in the back seat (but there's no point to, as the maximal distance to the destination and speed are appropriate only for parking lots).
I think an actual realistic goal for this is closer to 2030 or 2035. But it certainly won’t be your personal vehicle or it’ll require subscribing to an overseer system (like Waymo uses)
Btw that kinda thing is one of the few use cases that really does require 5g’s latency and bandwidth… which Tesla currently doesn’t ship. More hardware updates are going to come, despite musks promises)
My dealer experiences have included hours to swap out a dome light under warranty, 1+ hours to do a software update, and a dealer trying to claim that the manufacturers automatic engine warranty extension didn't apply to my car. Also, misread a code and tried to charge >$1k for a repair that was actually part of the same warranty repair. These were separate brands and different ownership.
On top of that, one offered free oil changes for 12 months, IIRC. They'd regularly try to sell unneeded services on top of it (alignment after <12 months of ownership without even checking it first, for example).
My experiences with Tesla have been imperfect, but vastly better by comparison. There are issues, but I'd take them over the dealer experiences 100% of the time.
Their buying/test drive experience is top tier IMO but I know multiple people who waited literally 4+ months to get undrivable cars repaired. Those experiences were mostly pre-2023 so maybe it's better now
It was bad a couple years ago but has gotten a lot better. The reason for this was that Tesla scaled up manufacturing quickly, but took longer to scale up service centers and certify third party shops. For a while there was only one certified Tesla repair shop within 100 miles of me. Now there are at least ten, four of which are Tesla service centers.
No, there is a reason they are called stealerships.
A Subaru dealership tried to charge $200 to reset a passenger window like this (literally just pushing the button to roll down the window and back up):
But they tried to just charge me for it even though I knew how to reset the window and didn’t ask them to. They were thinking I didn’t know how to do it myself, so wouldn’t know any better that they didn’t actually do anything.
I love the tesla service. Bought my car without talking to a single sales person, they come to my home to rotate my tires on my schedule. Only complaint is cosmetic service tends to have a long appointment wait time, but things like a cracked windshield were immediately serviced.
I don't know how I will switch to another car brand after this.
Similarly, there's a lot of pro-Tesla propaganda by those who own shares in Tesla. I avoid this by not considering Tesla when considering a car, as the truth is too murky.
It's not a regulatory issue. There is no federal rule requiring automakers to sell through franchised dealers. Some states have such laws. In other states the automakers have voluntarily entered into contractual agreements that prevent them from competing with their franchised dealers.
It's weird to me to see so many people thinking Tesla is "far behind", when in reality, they're far, far ahead of the competition for a general purpose and scalable self driving solution. Seems like political biases just cloud judgement so much. Youtube now has videos comparing Tesla FSD V13 with Waymo rides on the same routes.
I tried both extensively (have the full FSD package on my Model 3). FSD still feels suicidal in a good day, plain incapable on average.
I can’t imagine how someone would compare it to a multi-sensor setup - a single camera can’t match the level of prescience a Waymo or Cruise have. But also as the overall experience is just absurdly different. Waymo was the first tech thing I felt was truly magical in _decades_.
Meanwhile the best I can get out of Tesla FSD is straight highways. And even there, there’s random glitches (the forever annoying ghost braking being the one that makes me feel particularly unsafe with it)
Certain routes and models are infamous for this. I recently got a 12.5 demo from a friend that was both impressive when it worked, and truly horrendous when it didn’t. And yes, we had a phantom break event - which appeared to be due to windy road conditions. That’s inexcusable tbqh
The problem is that at the end of the day, enough people still have serious issues and Tesla wildly oversells the capability of their system.
I think they’ll “get there” in terms of functionality and reliability but it’s nowhere near what waymo is reporting
There are (crappy, dangerous-seeming) genuine full autonomous-assuming-you-don't-count-remote-safety-drivers Waymos on the street where I live, in volume, for a while now.
Tesla's equivalent system appears to be 100% vaporware. I don't understand the case for them not being far behind.
That means you live in 1 of like 6 cities in the world. Kind of hard to compare Waymo's approach and Tesla's approach and accurately judge how far ahead Waymo is. Come to my city and you will see exactly 0 Waymo's. And it isn't clear to me if it's much easier for Waymo to scale from 6 cities to tens of thousands of cities or for Tesla to scale from tens of thousands of cities to tens of thousands of cities but better.
My gut tells me Waymo is ahead, probably by a good amount. But calling Telsa FSD "vaporware" is absurd, and leads me to the same conclusion that GP already called out.
The equivalent system is no driver in car at all, and unless there's some trial I don't know about, Tesla's product that does that is announced but not existing anywhere, 0 cities, 0 cars. the definition of vaporware.
I don’t think FSD is vaporware, but I believe it has been massively overpromised and underdelivered. And also, I have reason to believe its going to require yet another major hardware revision - despite teslas protestations
Have a look at V13.2 and tell me they "underdelivered". This is the most advanced AI driving system in the world. It's essentially DriveGPT, trained on absolutely massive amounts of training data on the largest GPU super cluster in the world.
First of all, I notice that you didn't take issue with my saying another major hardware revision is due - despite Tesla's constant promises that "we totally can do it with this one bro" for the last 4 revisions.
I have been following closely. 13.2 is a major leap forward. It is VERY impressive.
It's also five years late.
It's got some serious issues, such as intervention rates (which, despite being massively lower, are still too high).
It has trouble in California-style adverse weather conditions. This is largely due to it's vision based sensors.
And by the way, I'm not saying they're not going to "pull it off". I think they're one of the few that will succeed, to be honest. I'm saying that it is nowhere close to where it needs to be to match Tesla's promises.
> This is the most advanced AI driving system in the world.
That is a bold claim, and one that I don't think is true. Tied for first or just second most advanced, I would absolutely believe. And certainly one of the five major players.
It's also missing some key customer service and realtime service components, that took Waymo over 4 years to roll out and fine tune. And Waymo is still having edge case issues!
> Just because Elon was optimistic in 2017 doesn't make this any less impressive.
That understates his repeated broken and aggressive promises, often made during investor meetings. It makes it hard to believe his claims about the future.
Well, you seem to have your head screwed on right, but here's my big disconnect: I get that you don't trust what Elon says, he's been wildly optimistic and sometimes misleading. But what does that have to do with objective reality? Would the moon landing had been less impressive if NASA had promised to land on Mars? I don't get why we have to anchor what we find impressive on what Elon promises or predicts. To me that's irrelevant.
As for the most advanced AI driving system, yes you could argue Waymo is more advanced, it's certainly more complex. By most advanced I mean that it's fully end to end, and this is a very new development in AI and robotics (which I work with). It's actually a much simpler architecture than other systems. But as we've seen repeatedly, what tends to win is simple models with a ton of compute and data.
As for V13.2, it won't be perfect, but it's also not the final version. It's approaching feature complete, and we've seen it handle snow covered roads at the very least. Rain hasn't really been a problem for recent versions. In my view, weather is mostly a matter of data collection at this point.
Maybe they should then, I was blaming humans for the unsafe/illegal right turns and deranged maneuvering in the presence of lights and sirens firetrucks.
"I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives."
Seems like
a) the salesperson might not know his vehicles and perhaps it just wasn't a Super Cruise enabled vehicle (meaning, it wasn't added-on to that specific vehicle).
b) the actual Super-Cruise module was broken in that vehicle, and that was his excuse
c) he didn't know how or wasn't comfortable with telling you how to enable it. (some people are still quite afraid of giving full control over to computers)
I have tested numerous vehicles with Super Cruise; I quite enjoyed it.
I could be wrong, but unless it's a new GM rule, afaik, and with my understanding of how dealerships work (as far as the ones I've visited), dealerships try to avoid messing with the vehicle programming as much as they can. It's rather sad, as aside from the manufactures, dealerships have the most tools and access to the vehicles programming, but rarely-if-ever stray from the service manual.
Custom programming kind of is a market for that reason.
Living in a state with a very large automotive industry, there are a lot of people who have the tools + knowledge that offer custom programming services like: Programming the key fob that if one was to hold the unlock-door button for 5 seconds, the driver side window opens. And if the lock button is pressed once, then held for 5 seconds, all the windows are rolled up. Enabling a bunch of different video codecs/formats and enabling video-playback while the car is in motion if the passenger seat detects something siting there, etc, etc...
The vehicle was equipped for Super Cruise. The feature is tied to a subscription account, and GM/the dealership do not provide subscriptions for showroom cars. After I wrote my comment, the dealership contacted me to say they had set up a demo subscription with GM for the vehicle if I wanted another test drive.
This seems like an industry wide admission that this stuff doesn't actually work, tbh. I've heard similar things from Farley at Ford--advanced lane keeping cruise control systems work, robotaxis don't. Only the "tech" companies are so committed as to double down and try to wish this sci-fi into reality. The car companies are a little more grounded in reality.
But Waymo actually works? It's limited by geography and speed but they have robotaxis carrying paying customers in multiple cities. This is reality today, not sci-fi.
When will it be profitable? The carmakers are betting that L3 autonomy is a profitable investment, but robotaxis aren't. Regardless of what Waymo can or can't demonstrate technically. So either the carmakers are wrong or Waymo is. I guess we'll wait and see.
I would think that getting to a positive cashflow shouldn't be that hard, most of the cost are fixed. Recouping the billions of R&D will take many years, but those cost are sunk. The fact that they're adding cities probably means they already have positive cashflow, or are near it.
I have absolutely not shifted a goal post. What I believe is immaterial, what's important is that the companies that really know this industry are behaving as if there's no future in robotaxis. That should give you pause.
Well GM is in the automobile industry, so maybe the automobile industry?
I’m trying to understand how this would be them determining autonomous driving is not viable, which appears to be your premise, rather than them and others just not having a path to compete.
Well now you're asking a different question. Robotaxis clearly work today and are rapidly improving. Waymo is past the technical demonstration stage and has paying customers. Alphabet doesn't report profitability for that unit but it will probably take a number of years until they can drive down costs and achieve economies of scale. The senior leadership seems to be willing to fund this initiative indefinitely.
Several other carmakers beyond GM are still pursuing L4+ autonomous technology. So apparently they don't think Waymo is wrong, although they're way behind.
It's not a different question. Passion projects that aren't profitable don't last. It doesn't matter what a technology can do if there's no reason to use it.
No. The big automakers are abandoning this idea. Why? Because they don't see a path to profit. They've been at this for 120+ years. Their judgment is probably better than some ads company with an automotive side project.
> the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives
I wonder if this is a liability thing (driver would be responsible).
Or it could suck and the chances of buying the car go down.
I remember walking into an apple store and seeing the apple vision pro headset. I asked to try it, and they said "you can't. You have to make an appointment and blah blah". If someone adds friction to the buying process, there must be some reason - they must be hiding something (poor performance, complexity, price, etc)
Super cruise started out as high definition maps of US highways that GM made themselves. At the time (around 2018/19) they were using mobile eye’s technology/SOCs and integrating it into their vehicles. Cruise was operating as a completely separate unit and nothing was shared.
GM later had a PR release for UltraCruise which was supposedly developed in house and maybe that uses Cruise technology. However, AFAIK it was never released and is rumored to be shelved.
Reminds me of my father in law's experience with Toyota (I think). The car's nav system had an update available on a CD you put into the car stereo. The dealership made him order one, instead of the much more reasonable loaning him one.
Cruise and GM Supercruise/ultracruise share nothing except the names and a VP somewhere inside GM. Entirely separate organizations and tech, at least the last time I had any knowledge of the matter.
Yeah and neither of them is close to FSD in capabilities lol. Super Cruise/Ultra Cruise is a brittle highway-only thing, only available in a handful of $200k+ GM cars, that works by localizing to a detailed lidar map of some interstate routes.
This was also available on the Chevy Bolt EUV as an add-on for $2,200. The Bolt EUV started at $28,795, so with the add-on it could be had for ~$31k before tax, title, etc. Not sure where you got the $200k+ number.
The parent post is talking about the Cruise vehicles made by the company this article is covering, a completely separate thing from the supercruise feature that consumers could actually buy. At one point many years ago, the Cruise vehicles cost >200k to manufacture.
Ultra Cruise was only available on the expensive Celestiq before it got cancelled and merged with Super Cruise. Apparently, the Celestiq starts at $340,000, even higher than my original estimate of $200k.
> Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD.
Just edited to add it in. Wikipedia says they're not going into production until 2027 though, and unlike the others I don't think they're operating in any markets.
I am not sure I have all the facts straight but: Super Cruise and BlueCruise are features available on GM and Ford passenger cars, respectively. They aren't taxi services. I tried to make the distinction between companies participating in the "increasingly competitive robotaxi market" versus just the ones that have some level of autonomous driving capability; tweaked comment.
GM was majority stakeholder in Cruise, which was gearing up to a ride hailing service. Cruise's cars have instruments like LiDAR on the roof, unlike Super Cruise-equipped cars.
Ford wrote about an "initial launch of a commercial self-driving service in 2021" but I don't think it materialized. A photo of their robotaxi bears the logo of Argo AI, a startup that shut down in 2022.
The difference is that GM and Ford have no viable strategy for transitioning these features into taxi services, whereas Tesla does.
Not sure how it's suddenly so controversial to realize that Detroit is terrible at software strategy. This has been the conventional wisdom (and with good reason) for quite some time.
I briefly owned a Chevy Volt with the worst infotainment UX imaginable. I found a quote from a Chevy spokesperson describing it as an "Apple-like experience," presumably because the graphic designer on Fiverr found the Gradient tool in their pirated copy of Illustrator CS6.
True, but even that's just at the surface level. When you dig into the architecture / planning / business strategy that happens in Detroit, it's even worse than what the UI suggests.
"Creative destruction" is coming for them real soon.
That is a 10-year old UI based on their even older designs from their ICE vehicles. The newer UI for the Ultium is much more modern. Not as severely styled as some other companies not not as overdone as that old UI.
For reference:
"Ford BlueCruise is a hands-free driving assistance feature that allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel on certain preapproved roads"
"It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board."
No, because BlueCruise sounds like an asinine feature. To make me pay $2450 more for a car for some arbitrary selection roads for that feature to be available doesn't make sense to me.
Cruise really was on to something, well w/e GM's loss!
BlueCruise is a legitimate incremental improvement over more limited driver assistance systems. It clearly has some value to some drivers. But an extra $2450 is tough to swallow on a mainstream brand when middle-class consumers are already struggling to afford a new car. In a few years Ford will probably just bundle it in with common option packages.
> Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.
My pet theory is that it really took off because a bunch of investors were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.
So it might be interesting to somehow plot total "self driving" investment against that kind of customer base projection over time.
Interesting theory but I think the investment issues are simpler, and non-revenue producing business models simply don't make sense outside of the window of the low interest rate years.
> were hoping to capture and capitalize on the baby boomers aging out of being able to easily drive themselves. They tried to speed up technological advancements in order to meet that window of a large more-affluent cohort of potential customers.
That's still a huge market. And the baby boomers are the most affluent demographic in the western world.
I just bought a new Mustang, and from what I can tell it's total junk.
Many others on forums report the same, and here's an example of a component being borked.
AEB, Automatic Emergency Braking, is on by default and always turns back on at vehicle start.
It's dangerous. An example? Even with a camera and a separate radar, it is borked. I've been behind another car, slowing for a light, and hit a downward slope of a large speedbump and SLAM the brakes come on.
Why?
The radar suddenly sees pavement, as the nose of the car is pointed down, but the camera sees car + brake light ahead.
This is at 30km/hr, and everyone is braking fine, the car ahead is not even close. And proof it's not me is the 5 times it happened in 2 weeks, it was always something like this.
I was almost hit 3 times.
It literally panic brakes. Horribly designed.
I finally had it and removed the radar sensor with forscan.
With behaviour like this in something as simple as AEB, by no means would I trust anytiong else. Forums show people complaining about:
* adaptive cruise slowing down, or speeding up because it sees speed limit signs on offramps, or even adjacent roads
* the lane assist pulling strongly because the car thinks an offramp is the main road.
* reports of swerving into other lanes when passing some vehicles, the car confused
It's just junk.
This beta testing on our roads needs to stop.
What cracks me up is this.
If you asked a skilled software dev, if they'd prefer to have software designed by a team, any team, responsible for tgeir life? They'd likely say no.
Because we've all seen the crappy code that gets produced. We know of bugs. We know of failures in testing, automated or not.
These cars ae all extremely buggy, just as any software project is. But beyond that, auto manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners.
I just can't imagine why anyone, this decade, would want to trust auto drive anything.
I cease to understand how the average HN commentator doesn’t see Tesla as the leader in this space, and my only guess is all the FUD media around them.
If you have a Tesla, you know that it’s far and above the best driver-assist software in the entire market, and next place isn’t even close.
Sure FSD isn’t Waymo, but it’s entirely different tech and it can drive infinitely more places than the two cities Waymo supports.
V13.2 is probably close to 1000 miles per critical intervention now. Geofence it, avoid stupidly dangerous UPLs and fix some map issues and they're already on par with Waymo. Next version has 3x the number of parameters and 3x context length. If you know anything about scaling laws you wouldn't be betting on Waymo right now.
Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow out.
Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.
Ford just lowered the cost of its BlueCruise subscription by 1/3rd. In an earnings call eight months prior they remarked they made a 70% margin on the service. It seems like drivers did not find the feature compelling and were not renewing. Interest in autonomous driving appears to be cooling across the board.