Self driving cars are still decades away

In My Humble Opinion
2968

Sorry to pick on you Dr. S, you just happen to be our resident Tesla optimist. This isn’t just in response to you, more of an update after the latest Tesla news about Cybercab production “starting this year.”

6 months have come and gone since Tesla’s lackluster Robotaxi rollout. I basically forgot all about the thing, which doesn’t really bode well for something that Tesla was touting as just around the corner (and, as Dr. Strangelove guesstimates above, expected by the end of 2025.)

It ends up that earlier this month, Tesla did launch a truly driverless (no safety monitor) Robotaxi service in Austin. Except… did they really? Evidently they’ve quietly rolled it back.

Let’s call this what it is: another marketing stunt.

If Tesla truly had unsupervised Robotaxis operating in Austin, riders would be posting videos constantly. David Moss wouldn’t be 0-for-42. The evidence would be everywhere.

Instead, we have a single announcement, a 4% stock bump, and silence.

So not only have they failed to deliver, they’ve apparently lied about it.

As we reported last week, the “unsupervised” Robotaxis spotted on January 22 were all being followed by trailing Tesla vehicles with safety monitors inside. Tesla didn’t remove supervision, it just moved it to a different car.

Now even that setup appears to have been scaled back or paused entirely. The vast majority of rides have safety monitors back inside the vehicle, sitting in either the driver’s seat or passenger seat.

This follows the exact pattern of the “driverless delivery” stunt from June 2025: a one-time demonstration for the cameras, timed for maximum stock impact, never to be repeated.

2969

Turns out Waymo’s “self-driving” taxis are just being driven by operators in the Phillipines.

2970

They are occasionally driven remotely when they get stuck. This is old news.

2971

And the whole “but Phillipines!” thing has a slightly racist tinge to it.

2972

It’s certainly ragingly nationalist. “Foreigners in foreign countries can’t be trusted” is one of the early planks of the Fascism cookbook.

Nothing more to see here than RW pandering to their base.

2973

Allow me to read the article for you both.

Not driven, but “influenced”, as the article goes into detail to explain. The article also covers what you just said:

Waymo has been fairly upfront about its human operators. In a May 2024 blog post, the company compared it to a “phone-a-friend.”

The headline is poor. (For that matter, the whole article is pretty shitty clickbait). From the article (bolding mine):

After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.

I don’t know why the author chose to focus in on the Philippines, and I’m not willing to watch the congressional hearing video to find out, but I can understand lawmakers being concerned that Waymo can’t even tell them where these drivers are operating from, what the training is, what the infrastructure looks like, etc. Would you be comfortable if they were operating out of Iran? I mean, it seems like a far-fetched attack vector but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for congress to ask questions and be concerned.

2974

Markey is a doddering Democrat who often pretends he understands modern things.

This isn’t even that news, since they’re not even driving remotely per the article posted.

2975

The concern I would have about remote operators (and more so in foreign countries like the Philippines) is the reliability of the internet connection. It’s part of the whole “let’s put everything in the cloud” movement out of Silicon Valley: in lots of places cellular and internet connections are not 100% reliable.

2976

Waymo is struggling with school bus STOP signals.

But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) alleged that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms were extended rather than coming to complete stops, as the law requires.

Austin ISD tried to help them, even having a half day of live training, and yet:

Still, by mid-January, over a month later, the school district reported at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place in Austin. “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people that receive one violation do not receive another,” an official with the school’s police department told the local NBC affiliate that month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it does not appear the Waymo automated driver system is learning through its software updates, its recall, what have you, because we are still having violations.”

My genuinely puzzled question: are there school buses in Scottsdale, where a lot of the training took place!?

This was my last free article on Wired; YMMV.

2977

Tesla took until relatively recently to figure it out but it works flawlessly now in my limited experience. At least there is a person in the car to hit the brakes in a Tesla. The school busses in the US have standardized designs so it should be an easy problem to solve.

2978

Well, who would want to go anywhere when it is raining anyway?

2979

They should keep driving into those floods to build out their dataset.

2980

I think Waymo is all wet.

2981

Well that didn’t happen. 14.3 has been out for a bit but it’s just an incremental point release. It is on the robotaxis also though so it’s a unified code. The “sentient” thing will (supposedly) be v15 coming to us (supposedly) in late '26 or early '27.

FSD is now fully approved in four European countries (Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania and, as of yesterday, Denmark) as well as previously approved US, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and China.

There is a very long list of countries pending approval which I will cut and paste from the article below:

Americas: Chile, Colombia

EU: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden

Euro, Non-EU: Albania, Andorra, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the U.K

Middle East: Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, UAE

Asia: India, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand

2982

Belgium just granted approval. A lot more of the EU should do so as well over the coming months.

2983

What does approval mean in this case? Before this, were cars with FSD not allowed to be sold, or were drivers not allowed to activate it, or did Tesla geofence it so it could not be enabled within a restricted country? Was Autopilot approved long ago?

2984

Every country has to give regulatory approval for it to be used there. FSD is subscription based so all cars technically have it but it won’t be able to be activated if you are in a restricted zone. This isn’t an issue in North America or China. You pay for it or you don’t.

I presume if you’re a Dane and you pay for it, it will stop working if you cross over into Germany.

2985

Holy shit. They actually delivered a version of v14 for HW3 cars. I didn’t think that would ever happen. This puts off Tesla having to do expensive retrofits on older vehicles that have lifetime FSD purchased. It’s called v14 Lite. They are currently on v12.6.

More background. The current version of hardware is HW4. HW3 cars have an older chipset and they haven’t gotten a FSD update in, I think, over a year. The people who bought a lifetime subscription in those cars three years ago and older were promised that their hardware would still work with future versions of they’d get a retrofit. I thought for sure that Elon was just slow rolling things so that more and more of them would go out of service before the retrofitting would need to be done but they appear to have pulled it off and actually on time.

2986

How much weight is “Lite” carrying? Not to be cynical, but I could take an older version of software, make some cosmetic tweaks, and relabel it to the new version number.

And this still doesn’t really address the promise of every vehicle having “all the hardware needed for full self-driving,” as far as I can tell. Does it really change the need to retrofit old hardware, other than delaying it a bit more?

2987

Good questions and I have no idea. It’s just out to early testers now. It’s v14 so it should have all of the v14 feature set. I very highly doubt they just slapped a v14 label on the older software. There are various criteria for what constitutes v14. If that was the case, they could have done that a year ago. It should do all of the v14 stuff.

As for it working for future versions, I very highly doubt that too. There’s no way but this buys at least a year or two of more of those old cars getting wrecked and falling out of service. Remember that the important distinction is it only applies to HW3 vehicles that purchased lifetime FSD which is a very small percentage of them. They did not make a similar promise to HW4 vehicles and more recently got rid of the option to buy lifetime FSD altogether.

V15 is supposed to come out in two to four quarters and will work on HW4 which includes the taxis. The claim is that it will have higher level real time reasoning. HW5 is a couple years out.