If driverless taxis ever go mainstream (and that’s a big if), it will be from companies like Waymo, not Tesla. Tesla shouldn’t be seen as a serious company. I mean, they do sell legitimate products, but their $1.6 trillion market cap isn’t based on what they sell today, but what their cult member investors think they’re going to bring to market in the future. You know, all the stuff that will usher in the post-human, techno utopia. It’s all nonsense, and someday it will all come crashing down, though that could take a while. People can stay delusional for a long time.
Elon’s stupid ass dedication to using cameras and image processing for self driving will ultimately be what leaves Tesla in the dust. A combination of LIDAR, cameras, and other detection tools are way safer than just cameras alone. I’m not a huge Mark Rober fan but he did show that you can beat Tesla’s self driving with Looney Tunes techniques
It doesn’t rain or snow or get dark in Leon’s head.
People who have had chauffers drive them their entire lives have no concept of road conditions.
i was thinking TESLA is really late to the game, when google’s waymo already does it for a few years now, its still limited where it drives, but teslas already lost that race.
And yet WAYMO taxis have been driving through bus stops like it’s going out of style. They aren’t necessarily better.
Waymos were violating a Texas state law that requires cars to stop when a school bus stops, even in 2+ lane roads separated by a paved median, even for traffic going in the opposite direction:
https://liggettlawgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/School-bus-laws-img-1024x657.png
The requirements for opposite side traffic in multi-lane roads is pretty rare and might be unique to Texas. And yes, human drivers fuck this up all the time, too, leading to a lot of PSAs in Texas, especially for new residents.
A couple of weeks ago a WAYMO Taxi drove through an active crime scene.
A bit ago they had to patch their taxis firmware to prevent them running down children (something you’d think they already would be programmed to do).
Passengers have reported being held hostage by their taxi when it stopped suddenly and refused to move.
There’s a laundry list of things that have been wrong with them. Some have had reasonable fixes (and some of those fixes should have been implemented before they were allowed on the road).
Yeah, but I trust Waymo will get their shit together long before that psycho will, if ever.
I think this is a case of the lesser of two evils here. Not being Elon Musk is such a low bar to clear.
Their statements each time something bad happens with their products don’t bear out that things will change in a meaningful way any time soon. There are a lot of reasons I’d never ride in one of these but even putting that to the side, objectively they each seem to have significant problems with implementation that are receiving lip service instead of actual fixes.
Tesla is already broke, the magic bubble has popped, and they are on a steady slide to bankruptcy. They will NEVER recover their mojo. The institutional investors will keep them alive for a while, but they are already Wile E. Coyote, hanging in mid-air, and hasn’t realized there’s nothing under their feet yet.
That would happen a lot less if they just used the LiDAR + camera combo like a sane person
But who am I to judge? el*n certainly knows better riiiiigghhht?
They still drive better than Elon who is in a k hole right now 👍
Elektrek “estimated”, using incomplete data.
You could not pay me to get inside of any Tesla product. Crappy quality, crappy design, crappy materials, crappy everything. Just another PE for guys with itty bitty weenies.
I rented one once for an hour, that was all the Tesla experience I needed tbh.
Wasn’t a P100D or anything, just a Y Long Range, but I no longer have any curiosity about it. Interior was bland af, ride quality was barely any better than a cheapo Hyundai… The only good things are the giant tablet not being slow as hell, and the powertrain being fun.
You get a lot more with European cars if you’re willing to pay Tesla level prices. Or you can get a completely OK car from Korea or Japan and pay less (as long as it isn’t a Lexus, those are expensive).
If you like to watch your money burn, invest in Tesla.
For some reason you are wrong with this. Tesla is going up. I have no idea why
The stock can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
According to felon Musk, the stock will onlly stay solvent until the democrats get back in control.
Could be accurate if (lol) they’re doing something that a properly empowered FTC/SEC/DOJ would be very interested in looking into.
Look at the history, not to mention likely fraud and manipulation
and if YOU want to burn, get in a Tesla
But at a FRACTION of the cost!
Because cab drivers make $600,000 dollars a year. This whole scheme, from tech to business model only makes sense with Tesla stans.
It’s a joke, my friend.
The idea being that these amazing, efficient taxis yield more accidents, more cheaply than a human.
@return2ozma so they crash 12* more than human drivers, even though they currently *have* human drivers?! The AI makes human drivers 12* worse. Cool.
AI makes EVERYTHING worse.
Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.
I hate this timeline. We are forced to drive next to these death machines and the corporations that own them take zero accountability and just bribe the president for more welfare and to not ever investigate them.
Our whole country is bought and paid for by evil billionaires who dont care if we live or die.
2nd amendment is there for a reason.
We are forced to drive next to these death machines and the corporations that own them take zero accountability and just bribe the president for more welfare and to not ever investigate them.
Who could’ve seen this coming?
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_UfRwTwaJXLurJ0TLf16FvCr7AHEQ4bp
One thing that really gets me is comparing robotaxis with regular driving. How about comparing robotaxis to… taxis? Would not that be much more sane?
Professional taxi drivers do get into accidents. But their per-distance metric is much better than of an average Joe driving home after 10 hours work shift and a one-too-many pint after work.
Why anyone would ever compare robotaxi to anything else but a regular taxi?
I found this part to be even more alarming:
All of the Robotaxi crashes so far have occurred with human safety monitors—who have been trained to take control of the car in the event of a software error—present in the vehicles.
This is significant because, as TechCrunch reported on Monday, Tesla is starting to send out its Robotaxi fleet without safety monitors.
So despite a pitiful record with people trying to correct the cars mistakes, they’re now ready to move on to running them without assistance?!? I am furious at the idea that our safety on the roads is this negotiable.
Not trying to defend Tesla on this because fuck Musk and everything he touches but are there stats on how, when, and why the human took over? Did they just not take over? Did they take over to late? Did they take over and make the situation worse?
You raise an excellent point, one which i was hoping to find out more about as well. It turns out Tesla has been working hard to keep pretty much any pertinent information to answer your questions firmly under lock and key.
From this Electrek article https://electrek.co/2025/11/17/tesla-robotaxi-had-3-more-crashes-now-7-total/
Unlike other companies reporting to NHTSA, Tesla abuses the right to redact data reported through the system. The automaker redacts the “narrative” for each reported crash, preventing the public from knowing how the crashes happened and who is responsible.
Based on the limited information in Tesla’s reports, we know that one of the new crashes involved a Robotaxi driving into a car backing up, another involved a cyclist, and the last one involved an unknown animal.
So he’s basically fudging the numbers and anytime he’s questioned he points at the fudged numbers and says everything’s great, he’s great, now get out of the way while he deploys a fleet of these un-manned deathtraps to “half the US population” according to a properly ultra-super-inflated kind of claim only a douchebag like Leon can make. No, seriously–he actually claimed that by the end of 2025 he’ll have these things serving half the population of the US.
🫠
Proof of concept fails in a spectacular fireball?
Fuck it, owners are too invested, ship it anyway.
Feels like I work for the same company.
Why repair the plane on the ground…if it’s a real problem, we can fix it mid-flight.
It’s insane how shit the US is at managing its cars considering how aggressively they’ve forced them as the only truly viable mode of transport. It sucks horribly to drive in North America but it’s the only option given to people. Like, if you’re gunna do the worst option at least do it right and have some pride in the system.
The US doesn’t give a fuck about its people.
Feel like some sort of trap. Being able to drive anywhere feels like it gives you so much freedom, the ability to go anywhere but the reality is there so much opportunity cost and financial cost to live in a car dominated society, even all the small things like convenience and safety all adds up.
An “convenience” is such a lie. I own a car and have a metro system and I almost never use the car. If I didn’t have parking in the back where I could just keave it it’d be even worse.
Regulatory capture is a hell of a drug.
The US has absolutely mad road to traffic laws. Zero concept of lane discipline, you driving whatever lane you feel like. Don’t understand roundabouts even though it’s just a curved road, it’s really not that hard. Still don’t have standardised pedestrian crossings even when other countries had them back in the 1920s. A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right. No one obeys the speed limit, people regularly exceed it, and see no problem with that. And of course no one has separate indicator lights and brake lights because when would you ever slow down and go around a corner, definitely no need to engineer for that eventuality.
A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.
It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.
What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.
Kind of a tangent, but what really scares me about the “turn on red” rule is that it’s not the same around the globe.
There are so many international drivers here in Japan that turn left at a red light without realizing that’s completely illegal. It catches pedestrians completely off guard. I think on Montreal Island you couldn’t do this either.
Stopping at a red light when wanting to turn isn’t some rare, obscure situation, so people who are travelling have to BE ABSOLUTELY SURE about this rule before they make use of their international lisence.
And yet I cannot purchase a two thousand pound self-slamming door, which would be orders of magnitude safer.
Some things are just super obvious that even if we can, we should not
AI = anonymous indians (with video game controllers)
