Tesla being irresponsible about this aside, self-driving cars/transportation have existed for years - it's called rail.
Yes, yes - there will always be room for personal vehicles. But this conundrum is the epitome of excessive and terrible infrastructure design, to the N-th layer.
Look at how much fuss this causes when it's better replaced by competent public transit.
Mark it as another useless invention to paper over a huge crack just so we can continue to sell everyone a car.
Road, policing, signage, emergency services, ... Not even counting the loss of space and air pollution you are much cheaper in the long term with rail.
And the Teslas need expensive highways to run on. You should be comparing highway vs rail, and Tesla vs train.
A railway has a much higher and faster capacity, even if it does indeed cost that much ( it doesn't, it varies highly based on terrain, conditions, regulatory framework, etc.).
Is that a problem of public transport in general or just of the public transport available to you? In most European cities e.g. buses have separate lanes and go every 10 minutes bringing you often faster to your destination than a private car can, not even counting the cost and time burden of finding parking, maintaining your car, insurance, ...
It all depends on your local context, but where I live there is great and cheap transport and if I have a need for a car I can get one from stations across the city for 2-5€/hour + 1-3c/km, significantly cheaper than even a fully paid off car would be for the same trip, if you count insurance, maintenance, and petrol.
Trains go from a place you don’t want to leave from to another place you don’t want to go at a time you don’t want to leave. Now imagine instead of rails, we built roads (much cheaper) only for autopilot vehicles (including busses or whatever proletarian fantasy you prefer). You’re welcome.
Or they're built with some sense and actually cover the population's needs. I wonder how it is that trains are so successful across Europe and Asia, but are a proletarian fantasy that couldn't possibly work in the US.
Trains aren't sucessful in europe. They are a massive drain of resources that survive primarily as a result of subsidies and government policy.
The US ironically has a much more efficient and sustainable train network, it's just that the thing trains are really efficient at is cargo, not personal transportation.
Are you implying that being successful and receiving subsidies are mutually exclusive? In which case the petroleum industry would like to have a word with you.
Much like with healthcare, European countries (generally) tend to think that it's decent idea to spend government resources to provide value to their citizen.
Having regularly commuted using trains in Europe for a decade and a half, I would argue they are a pretty great, comfortable mode of transportation – and I can feel slightly more at ease knowing I'm not contributing as much to our carbon emissions.
You are missing the obvious point that infrastructure is a main use of taxes. Do you think roads are profitable?
Rail (& other public transport) has many other benefits, e.g. you'll need less policing and maintenance of roads if they are less used; air pollution from fossil fuels and tire wear are reduced, stress and accidents are reduced thereby decreasing healthcare costs, etc.
It all is a matter of building up the proper network, rather than to give more subsidies to big oil and the car industries (see the eternally repeating bailouts).
The Federal government in the United States does not require tax revenue to fund road construction. The only tax actually earmarked for this purpose is the gasoline tax, which is less than 2% of the Federal government’s appropriations for highway construction. Federal taxes are largely punitive and coercive (we want you to do this thing like have children, or live here, or not get too rich doing that thing because otherwise Lockheed lobbyists get upset).
All I had to do was google “Are roads fully funded by the gas tax” to find a contracticting source:
> Nearly as much of the cost of building and maintaining highways now comes from general taxes such as income
and sales taxes (plus additional federal debt) as comes from gasoline taxes or other “user fees” on drivers. General taxes accounted for $69 billion of highway spending in 2012.
Perhaps my use of the term “earmarked” was confusing. This refers to a congressional requirement that certain tax revenues be allocated for specific purposes. That’s the gasoline tax and very very very few taxes are written this way.
Have you actually been in any European country? Trains are heavily used for short, medium and long distance travel. High-speed rail in Western Europe is huge. Many many people commute via train or subway.
Profitability has absolutely nothing to do with it. High speed rail in France is hugely profitable, but the state subsides many lines because it's the right thing to do. Railways have a higher capacity, are much cleaner and faster, and are provided as a common service. You don't expect the fire department or forest service to be profitable, do you?
I have lived in europe all my life, and have extensive experience with both trains and other forms of public transportation in several European countries.
But often requires you to travel a few hours to a faraway airport. It has its place and is cheaper and faster on specific combos ( e.g. Barcelona to Warsaw), but trains are usually faster/more pleasant/cheaper and always cleaner.
I think Tesla is definitely going to end up killing more people with their software, but it probably ends up being a rounding error in the big scheme of things. People driving themselves home after a few too many beers are killing more people than driving AIs, and I honestly expect it to stay that way even with Tesla's reckless approach.
Personal automobiles have a huge cost to society. Self-driving doesn't really change a lot of that.
You can send someone to prison if they hurt someone driving drunk or distracted. Can we do the same thing to Autopilot users? Someone has to be seriously punished when they hurt people, and unless there's some meaningful way to send Tesla to prison, the beta testers will have to do.
If my brakes fail and I hit an innocent bystander (assume I could not have reasonably prevented this collision), am I going to prison? No. Are the manufacturer or designer of my brake being sent to prison? Probably not, as long as this isn't a consistent issue.
Tesla should be penalized for reckless behavior in the promotion and development of their FSD. However, reality is any product performing a sufficiently risky action for sufficiently many people will have a very small number of catastrophic failures. I could make a similar argument to yours for cars, planes, much of modern medicine, most electric products, alcoholic drinks, etc, etc.
While just an anecdote, Leo Laporte mentioned recently his Tesla often tried to run him into the same barrier. Based solely on news like that and others I get the sense that Tesla's radar-averse solution is far worse than the average driver.
Yeah. I think Tesla is making a mistake in going for cost optimization before their product actually works. You can see that it's technically possible to drive on sight alone; that's how humans drive cars. (But, it's not completely clear cut to me. Having the cameras in every Tesla means that they have a lot of data to use in their simulations, and that might help them more than depth data from lidar. I don't really know.)
Their current strategy does get people hyped. I wonder how many people you can program a machine to run over before it becomes an unprofitable activity.
I have a random comment I'll interject but it's totally off topic. My impression from watching people show off their Teslas is that they are constantly in awe of being able to get to work without controlling their car. But many of us have been commuting to work hands free for decades -- it's called public transportation. One person uses the power of electricity to take hundreds of people around the city, every 1.5 minutes during rush hour. It is pretty nice. But we didn't need self-driving cars to get there, we just needed to design our living and working spaces for hands-free commuting. Shrug.
What about an AI that refuses to start for a drunk driver? Boom, problem solved at the fraction of complexity and no innocent people get butchered up in the testing phase of a software that simply can’t reliably work with current tech.
Personally I like the ability to drive myself to the ER or away from an abusive spouse not being dependent on the false-positive rate of some device built by a notoriously shoddy car manufacturer, but to each their own I suppose.
As everything, it is a tradeoff. I would personally prefer not to have neither drunk drivers, nor overhyped smart-vacuums going around the roads.
But as for the very specific emergency case while you are drunk, it could be overridden with some visible sign turning on notifying other drivers - but it would need some law background, so eg. a cop can escort you in that case, etc. But tesla’s fake self-driving doesn’t help anyone.
Uh... self driving electric cars actually change 2/3 of the problem. In a couple of iterations it will be orders of magnitudes safer than drivers, to the point where you'll be able to get home drunk in your own car. Also orders of magnitude less pollution where humans live.
Last 1/3 is simple car size, aka congestion. Ironically, this will probably be solved by the Boring Company and teslas.
I'm a huge proponent of bike lanes + e-vehicles. But let's be serious, Teslas really are changing the game. Well, or will, once the price goes down in 10 years.
There hasn't even been a single crash by a driver using the full self driving beta yet. And they have a screening system in place before people can use it that will filter out bad drivers.
My college friend was fatally wounded in a Tesla. From time to time I go on Tesla's forum and was always surprised to see discussions there heavily leaned toward "Pilot Error" on any Tesla self-driving related accident. Like in what zones or some specific type of roads you should not enable FSD, if driver failed to remember then it's pilot error. I'm always confused about the *F* in FSD.
> If driving behavior is good for 7 days, beta access will be granted.
People pay for software that's supposed to drive the car. Why does it matter how the passanger drives? Well, because the software is a student driver. It fucks up in weird ways. It needs close supervision by an expert driver.
Isn't that the promise of self-driving? To be passenger?
Tesla could have called it "supervised self-driving", and that would be fine with me. But "full self-driving" sounded like more value when they wanted to sell the feature. So they went with that.
there is no data whatsoever to suggest that autopilot is a net safety hazard. And The White House excluded tesla from their “American Made Electric Car” day. When asked why, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg said “this is not a luxury event.”
It’s just goes to show you how utterly false all alleged progressive politicians are. Tesla is singlehandedly solving climate change with sustainable energy but because it’s workers vote not to unionize, they must be stopped.
Yes, yes - there will always be room for personal vehicles. But this conundrum is the epitome of excessive and terrible infrastructure design, to the N-th layer.
Look at how much fuss this causes when it's better replaced by competent public transit.
Mark it as another useless invention to paper over a huge crack just so we can continue to sell everyone a car.