That’s… encouraging.
So who is the leading edge now? Just Waymo–who hasn’t announced any plans to sell to the general public?
Oh yeah, Elon said that the cars with the latest hardware (HW4, shipped starting in the Spring of ‘23) will be capable of fully autonomous driving.
TSLA drops about 8% following vaporware event. Kevin Drum:
As usual, if you really want to judge where autonomous car technology is, look to Waymo. They’ve (finally!) started broad testing on freeways, and you can legit set a Waymo car on its way and then take a nap while it drives you around. I don’t think they’ll quite make my forecast of a real driverless car on sale to the public by 2025, but it will be close.
“If you must forecast, forecast often.” Drum targeted 2025 back in (I think) 2018, rolled the target back to 2022, ate crow, and here we are. If Waymo releases a car for sale in 2027 I think Drum can declare victory: long run technological forecasts are hard, especially by amateurs.
Me? I haven’t a clue.
Waymo doesn’t work outside of a few metro areas. They need to get the highway going and country roads. (I know you know this). I don’t think they are any closer but I’d definitely consider a Waymo crossover if they crack it with a long range battery pack.
Where do you get this nonsense? It’s a completely different platform. It’s a much smaller vehicle than the 3.
More importantly, it’s being constructed entirely differently than previous cars, using their “unboxed” assembly method, which is impossible on any car not designed for it from the start.
They can say whatever they want about it while providing no way to validate it. If the prototypes are anything other than reskinned model 3s I’ll eat a hat. When they drove people around in the CyberTruck prototype, it was a bunch of Model 3/Y parts under the skin. That’s why it took another 5 years from that stage to go to production, because they had, to you know, actually design a car after the “design” was announced.
This isn’t even a dig on Tesla, most early prototypes are built on existing platforms. They should be doing stuff like this. It’s just… not that impressive when you’re trying to sell the moon.
Musk doing the usual: https://jalopnik.com/teslas-beer-serving-optimus-robot-was-controlled-by-a-h-1851670923
He’s well on his way to politics–lie AND coverup.
You can literally just look at them with your own eyes. They’re nowhere close to the same size as the Model 3. The wheelbase is much shorter.
I guess we aren’t even totally disagreeing here, since we both acknowledge that they’re prototypes and probably most of the internal components are pulled from the Tesla parts bin. Then again, that was true anyway since all of Tesla’s vehicles have similar equipment, from the motors to the batteries to the screens to the electronics. Even the Tesla Semi uses slightly modified Model 3 motors. In fact I think all of the current models have the same motors with only small variations.
But it definitely isn’t just a reskinned Model 3; it’s missing like 3 feet from the second row!
It remains to be seen how their “unboxed” production works out. But Tesla has pushed through significant, genuine production advances before–the gigacastings being the most notable example. Even now, no one else is doing that (and paying the price).
The primary way that Tesla continuously confounds its critics is that they promise the moon and only end up in low Earth orbit. Whereas their competitors promise New York and end up in Cleveland.
Circling back to the actual topic, it’s still funny to hear people say that Waymo is way ahead. When can I actually buy a car with Waymo tech? Is it on the horizon at all? My Tesla does 90% of my driving, whereas there doesn’t seem to even be a plan for when I can buy a Waymo car for any price. However far away we are from actual FSD, they are still infinitely ahead of the competition as far as I’m concerned.
Somebody gonna get fired. “You were supposed to talk in a ROBOT voice, idiot!”
Back in high school I remember being really excited about VW announcing a new Beetle. I had no nostalgia for the Beetle but the boomer journalists I was reading certainly did, and there was hype. Oh man, such hype. Finally, a new people’s car! Something light! And cheap!
And then they dropped the New Beetle on us and it was just a reskinned Golf. Which is the same car as a Jetta, including the Jetta station wagon. Or an Audi A3/4.
Point being, all of those cars had very different wheelbases, because changing the length of a car isn’t actually that big of a deal. The Honda CRX was a reskinned Civic, a Toyota Crown is a reskinned Highlander (which is just a RAV4 at this point), etc.
Maybe they had to design a smaller battery pack to fit in their sawzalled chassis but until Munroe tears one of these down I’m going to assume it’s all tack welds and duct tape like most prototypes.
I guess we’re gonna have to disagree on what it means for a car to just be a reskinned something-else.
All of Tesla’s cars use pretty much the same motors, the same battery packs (resized a bit), the same computers, the same screens, the same cooling system, the same software, etc. There’s really almost nothing else. So a Semi is just a reskinned Model 3. Slightly bigger battery pack, three motors instead of 2, different wheelbase… the rest of it is just the body shell.
The 2027 Waymo will look ridiculous, suck hard, cost $80,000+, and lose money. But if the designated driver can truly take a nap, read their paper or a book, fiddle with a spreadsheet, and safely use their phone while the vehicle safely transits them to their destination it will be a game changer, and people will get used to having a weird dome on their roof.
I don’t know whether all of that will ever be possible due to motion sickness. Roads are a lot curvier than train tracks.
If you can be a passenger and be on your phone, you can do the same as a “driver”. I love my car driving me back to Santa Barbara from Hollywood after a concert. Imagine how much better it will be if I can grace you all with my posts at the same time.
We have no proof that it was on any kind of autopilot. It certainly wasn’t using FSD which hasn’t even launched in China. The driver may have been using some kind of cruise control. But ok…
As I understand it, Tesla’s “Autopilot” is meant to assist the driver by avoiding collisions and helping with lane changes. Basically glorified cruise control. It’s not meant to be completely hands-off.
Yes. I doubt they were using that when the crash happened
It is, in fact, the same technology that other auto makers call things like “Advanced Adaptive Cruise Control with Lane Centering”.
My new car calls it “Driver Assistance” And that’s a pretty good name for it. I’m still getting used to its quirks and ignorances. Which are vast.
Faced with the barrier in that Chinese Tesla crash vid, it’d start beeping madly about an imminent collision ahead just barely in time for quick reflexes & max effort manual braking to save us. If that wasn’t forthcoming from me then it’d stomp on brakes itself, but probably too late to prevent an expensive low(er)-speed collision. It almost certainly would not simply plow right into the obstacles at full speed. Though as I understand it, the computer would would not try to steer evasively at all. So we’d have the same crash, just at reduced speed.
I will give the Chinese construction crew / management great credit for how they laid out their protective barriers. That managed the collision nicely and diverted the flow of wreckage into the safest space available while also managing the deceleration rates to keep the collision certainly survivable, and probably low- or no-injury, for the car occupants.
Different topic, same thread …
As I’ve mentioned, my GF has a Tesla. Riding with her is my only experience with Teslas. And so far I haven’t watched it drive, I’ve only watched her drive while the screen shows us indirectly what the car is “thinking”. I don’t know how much the screen represents the AI’s full model of reality, or only the nearby “highlights” for lack of a better word. Do any of our Telsa gurus know?
I like the presentation in that the distance and periphery is a gray fog out of which objects slowly emerge as blobs and eventually are recognized as specific [whatever]s. That’s a very nice metaphor for what’s happening in the computer’s model of reality and inside the human driver’s head as well.
What I notice most strikingly is that my own model of reality sees much farther in every direction than it does. And with far more detail. e.g. I’ll have identified two bicyclists 1/4 mi ahead, one male, one female, both about 30, she’s blond, and both riding slowly. The car will display (notice?) a blob when they’re about 100 yards ahead. and they’ll resolve into one or two bicycles when barely 100 feet ahead. I knew all that 1500 feet earlier = almost 30 seconds sooner at 30mph.
And the Tesla system is vastly, vastly smarter with vastly more detection range than the “Driver Assist” in my car.
The Tesla did something funny yesterday. Around here there are lots of smallish waterways and hence lots of drawbridges. Waiting the 3-5 minutes for one bridge or another is a daily occurrence.
We roll up to a bridge as the stop lights are on, the railroad-style crossing gates are going down, and the bridge is still in the lowered position. There’s one car ahead of us, which the Tesla sees and recognizes as a car. It also sees the red traffic lights.
Now the bridge starts going up. First the Tesla sees a blob in front of the car in front of us. Then the blob becomes a van / SUV. Then it becomes the back of a semi-trailer. Then it becomes two semi-trailers side by side. Then as the growing bridge gets silly huge compared to any plausible vehicle it turned back into a nondescript blob/obstacle thingy.
As the bridge came back down it went through the same transition then disappeared from the screen as the bridge halves came together.
It reminded me of a skit that comedian Steve Martin used to do. Playing a yokel seeing something for the first time, he keeps saying over and over “What the heck is it?” in his clueless hick accent with ever more bewildered looks, confused sounds, contorted face and body language as he moves around on stage for a better view of whatever’s out there beyond the 4th wall, etc. Funny as hell. I can see the Tesla’s “mind” having the same problem.