Remember when the argument for self driving cars was that they don’t need to be perfect, just better than humans?
I think that’s still a valid argument since perfection will probably never happen.
For me it’s more like, remember when the expectation was that Tesla would ever produce a version that didn’t suck ass?
There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.
The only response was, “company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix.”
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
But if a corporation does it it is, “Oops, we will do better next time.”
Utterly insane.
No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.
Oh! Driving past stopped school busses you mean. Had to look up “driving through bus stops”. :)
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.
And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.
It isn’t a unique Texas Law. It’s law everywhere in the US and Canada.
“mostly all in North America, require all surrounding vehicles to stop when a school bus is stopped with its red lights flashing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws
“And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.”
Only if you are from a different country.
Which is beside the point that if anyone else drove through 20 bus stops, they couldn’t use the excuse, “I’m from another country so I don’t know your laws.” to get out of jail.
That it’s a software fix is also beside the point. “Oh I drove illegally 20 times. I know better and won’t do it again.”
The default in most other states is that opposite direction traffic on a divided highway don’t have to stop. The states differ in what constitutes a divided highway, but generally at least 5 feet of space or a physical barrier between the lanes would qualify. In Texas, however, there is no exception for divided highways, and the key definition is “controlled-access highway,” which requires on/off ramps and physical barriers between traffic directions, or “different roadways,”
So for a 5-lane road where there are 2 lanes going in each direction with a center lane for left turns, Texas requires opposite direction traffic to stop, while most other states do not.
Yeah, a lot of school bus stops on five lane highways… /s
2 lanes in each direction with a middle lane? That’s a big chunk of Texas, especially when weighted for population.
The incidents had nothing to do with divided highways. You can see the video is at residential streets.
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If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.
I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.
Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn’t distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I’m not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during “boring times”?
Sorry, I’m just rambling here …
I don’t think the blank cheque handed to these emergent technologies is a function of the times in which they emerged. Rather it’s the fact that technology advances much faster than the wheels of government turn; it’s nearly inevitable that new technologies will be largely unregulated until government can catch up.
perhaps the governance of the united states was never really meant to be effective, but good enough for now, before they could usher in the new era, of His dominion upon earth. hyper-techno-christian-fascism is gonna taste so good in the chips aisle
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?
Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.
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.
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.
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.
🫠
Did Robotaxi just flat out steal the Cyberpunk font in order to try to look cool? It seems like a very Musk thing to do.
All the billionares watched a few too many 2077 YouTube videos.
Why do you think they’re so specifically interested in space datacenters? And AR glasses? And AGI, and corpo states? Just to start.
He is such a dork
Elon is a poser. He wants to be a cool nerd but is just a dumb c***, try hard.
No he’s not in the nerdy spectrum, he tried very hard to be cool with nerds, after they made him lotsa money.
But he’s just an awful person. Dork is too cool for him. He’s such a total loser
He’s called Phony Stark for a reason.
„But that‘s as bad as it will ever be!“ I hear tech bros reciting their mantra but then it gets worse all the time somehow.
“And that’s when enshitification kicked in”
To apply the breaks watch these five ads or join our premium service subscription.
It sounds like the Teslas are breaking just fine as it is.
They will integrate it with GROK. Fur der Fatherland! as it drives off an overpass.
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.
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).
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.
This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.
Yet $TSLA stock just keeps going up. Remember when news like this would actually mean something in the stock market? America’s economy is like 🤏 this close to collapse because everything is fake and nothing matters.
Feeling a bit smug since I was early adopter of calling “self-driving” cars a grift. Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
Six months from now. Just as true today as it was ten years ago.
I’m sure all the Tesla apologist that kept saying “it only has to be safer than a human” whenever we pointed out how poorly the Tesla self-driving system works will change their tune now.
… Right?
Some of the lidar based systems might work eventually, but Musk’s “humans only have eyes, so we only need cameras” is unlikely to ever work
Waymo self driving cars are very good imo, I live near a location where they operate and drive along side them daily on my way to work and have ridden in one twice. They are way better than human drives in my area.
Does waymo even make a profit yet? Look at all the high tech crap they have to have on the cars just to operate in highly developed city. As long as the USA’s road conditions remain on par with subharan Africa that’s never coming to consumer cars.
Honestly, no clue. Probably not. You’re right, they have a big obstacle in the way of becoming profitable if they aren’t because they only operate in certain areas they have a lot of training data for.
My campus has a self driving mini bus service though there’s a real driver in the driver’s seat jic.
Funny part was that tesla taxis also had a human attendant, but for the sake of appearance made them sit on the passenger side. They deliberately limited staff from being able to interact with steering and pedals.
They eventually moved those to the driver seat.
I wonder if they had passenger side brake pedals like driving instructor cars do.
They did not, they had some touch screen button.
They basically needlessly increased risk for the sake of avoiding optics of a safety driver with direct controls possible.
I’ve never heard that. Like, anywhere. Lol
musk:
2016 “We should be able to do 90 percent of miles driven [autonomously] within three years.”
2015 “A Tesla car next year will probably be 90-percent capable of autopilot. Like, so 90 percent of your miles can be on auto. For sure highway travel.”
2018 “From a technology standpoint, Tesla will have a car that can do full autonomy in about three years, maybe a bit sooner.”
2018 “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
2019 “I consider autonomous driving to be a basically solved problem. … We’re less than two years away from complete autonomy. Regulators however will take at least another year; they’ll want to see billions of miles of data.”
there are about 20 more entries like this.
you apparently haven’t paid attention to the grifter in chief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk
That’s only musk though. Hardly “was undeniable fact”.
Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
I’ve never heard that. Like, anywhere. Lol
the person I replied to.
Yeah me neither. I’ve heard claims that automation will take away jobs from drivers in the future, but not anyone actually saying “it’s undeniable that by 2025 most cars will be driving entirely by themselves”. And I remember when GPS was a spy-gadget daydream you imagined having when using maps. (Actual, physical maps. Not Google/Apple Maps.)
I heard it in the same vane that I heard that we would have a moon base by 2020 a mars base by 2025 and nuclear fusion in just 10 more years
To be fair, the progression estimate loading bar for fusion was stuck at “estimate… 30 years” for fucking ages.
And now there are actual reactors. Experimental, but still.
“With the completion of the conceptual design phase, the project will now shift to engineering design, accelerated engineering R&D, and will proceed with site selection, site preparation, regulatory approvals, and the procurement of long-lead items, with the aim of construction after 2028,” it said.
Most importantly, the projections of fusion being 30 years away depended on assumptions about funding, when political considerations made it so that we basically never came anywhere close to those assumptions:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png
Fusion was never vaporware. We had developed working weapons relying on nuclear fusion in the 1950’s. Obviously using a full blown fission reaction to “ignite” the fusion reaction was never going to be practical, but the core physical principles were always known, with the need for the engineering and materials science to catch up with alternative methods of igniting and harvesting the energy from those fusion reactions.
But we never really devoted the resources to figuring it out. Only more recently has there been significant renewed interest in funding the research to make it possible, and as you note, many different projects are hitting different milestones on the frontier of that research.
I wrote a school report about iter back in middle school or high school when it was still in the design process and still occasionally check their job listings because I would love to work there and on fusion but we still don’t know if it will ever work like we hit the scientific breakeven with inertial confinement but the scaling on that is terrible and I don’t believe we hit even the scientific breakeven with magnetic confinement
Then we still need to harness the energy from that turn it into work, turn that into electricity and distribute it with enough excess to pay for the whole system which is still a lot of hurdles we need to climb
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
Some things are just super obvious that even if we can, we should not
