I see Waymos at lot … probably on average once a week. They drive through my neighborhood all the time.
Yesterday, I had my first “interaction.” I was crossing a street, and the Waymo wanted to turn right in front of me. It didn’t run me over. Yay!
I’m not LSLGuy, but possibly because in the end its primary benefit goes to a fascist, snake oil selling idiot?
Nearly all CEOs of major companies are assholes. Elon is an outlier but he’s in good company. Where do you draw the line? Just one company that you wouldn’t use regardless of the CEO?
Elon owns 12.5% of the company. Around two thirds of the company is institutions so small investors and IRAs. And again over 125,000 employees.
Try again.
Nah, you try again. If that’s not enough for ya, where do you draw the line? I won’t buy their products and wouldn’t invest in the company. So if they fail it’s no great problem for me.
You wouldn’t anyway. That’s not a real boycott.
So it’s all about you?
Wrong, and very poor ad hominem. I was considering buying one of their cars when my wife last replaced hers. She opted to not get one.
It’s not all about me, but strangers lose their jobs because the management has run the company in the ground every day. Telsa is beyond ripe for a “correction”.
Ok. I rescind the boycott part. It’s still sociopathic to root for a big company to fail. Yeah, it happens all the time. It’s happened to me a couple times. It may well be due for a correction but to hope for that to happen is just weird.
Anyway, this is a hijack and I apologize for taking part. You can have the last word.
Just to be clear, he said Optimus would be 80% of its value, not 80% of its revenue. Given that Tesla’s valuations make no sense, that could mean anything.
This should probably not be in the thread for self driving. Optimus isn’t about that. I think here would be more appropriate
Yeah, I posted here because I found it interesting how quickly Musk pivoted from robotaxis to the next shiny object. It’s not so much what he says about Optimus that is interesting; it’s what he isn’t saying about robotaxis.
But posting here was bound to lead to a tangent, so apologies.
According to Tesla’s crash reports, spotted by Brad Templeton over at Forbes, the automaker experienced not one but three crashes, all apparently on its first day of testing on July 1. And as we learned from Tesla CEO Elon Musk later in July during the (not-great) quarterly earnings call, by that time, Tesla had logged a mere 7,000 miles in testing.
There was also a fourth, unreported crash in a parking lot.
I’ve commented at various points upthread about the ADAS in my 2022 BMW. It’s adequate to good at what it does, but it doesn’t do a lot versus anything that could be described as “self-driving”.
I’m now traveling and rented a 2025 BMW of a lesser model. And, as expected, it’s outfitted pretty much as a stripper, not like my own fully loaded feature set. It has dumb cruise control = speed hold, but no other ADAS features. No lanekeeping, no following the car ahead at a safe distance, no nothing.
Driving in sorta busy freeway traffic it was very interesting to see how used to ADAS I’d become and how very inconvenient it was to have to drive manually in those circumstances.
How quickly we learn to depend on our crutches.
To protect road workers from errant self driving cars Colorado is deploying self driving safety trucks.
Safety trucks with large crash bumpers on the rear follow behind road crews to provide a physical barrier between the crew and drivers on their phones. Some of the trucks are being deployed with a self driving system that automatically follows the trucks ahead, at a safe distance. The forward trucks will have connections to cameras on the safety truck, and can control it if necessary, but mostly it will just slowly follow behind the crew.
The safety truck will be driven to the job site, but once deployed will not have anyone on board risking injury from a collision.
It’s to protect them from all cars. Do non-self driving cars every kill highway workers?
I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I was driving a rental. Much of that driving was in San Francisco. During which I encountered a LOT of Waymos.
There are certainly lots of “interesting” features to SF city traffic, between teeming pedestrians, unfamiliar gawking tourists, streetcars, busses, regular cars, narrow hilly streets, on-street parking, etc. It’s the opposite of a simple low-stress modern wide open suburbia like Mesa AZ.
Every Waymo I saw or interacted with drove skillfully. They weren’t tentative or wacky. Very quickly I learned to simply treat them as any other car, not something needing extra caution around.
The surest way to avoid being hit by a self-driving car is to not drive on the shoulder with flashing lights. Just saying.
Actually, I don’t know how big the problem is, but it’s a clever use of self-following technology.
There is nothing in that article about the trucks being used to defend against self-driving cars as distinct from human-driven cars. I see the humor in @echoreply’s lede, but it’s just that; humor. “It’s self-driving all the way down. 
”
Lotta road crews in much of the country have crash deflector trucks following them. And have had for decades before any sort of smart cruise control or self-driving was invented much less deployed in significant numbers. The threat has always been the vastly more numerous and wildly inattentive (and impatient) human drivers.
The innovation here is getting the sorta-sacrificial driver out of the crash deflector truck. While using a very special-purpose limited form of ADAS so the unmanned follower truck stays in tight formation with the human-driven work truck just ahead.
Yeah, I was just following on the joke with another joke!
It’s all fun and games until your safety crash deflector truck slowly rolls over you.
I love threads like this because the OP was created 8 years ago to the month, and it really interests me to see how people’s predictions are working or if people’s opinions have changed over time.
I still feel the same way, and that is the highways and byways are not going to be full of self-driving cars in the foreseeable future. Has anyone else’s change significantly over what it was 8 years ago? If so, I’d be interested in knowing how and why.