Self driving cars are still decades away

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.