https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/5f/06/195f06fd7941802cd1f5307dd3697186.gif

Watch these Tesla’s eat shit in “Full” Self-Driving mode because there’s fog, it’s sort of darkly hilarious that human needed to intervene to avoid hitting a fucking freight train:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4f-crzpZ9w

I’m personally skeptical, probably won’t enjoy for myself (at least not til I’m REAL old), but hey, I love this for folks who can’t or don’t like to drive!

Fewer car accidents is good for everybody.

That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I’m going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.

You’re the engineer, I’m just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I’m assuming that I’ve just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.

The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they’re now low six figures. I anticipate they’ll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.

This comment section is surprising me with both thoughtful and dark observations about the article. Well, that’s rad! I was expecting a more “good news” crowd on the Uplifting News board, but if y’all want Dark Futurism, I can hang.

You’re 100% correct. Non ADAS vehicles will be a luxury good. There will probably be social pressures, similar to seatbelt adoption, pressuring folks to not drive themselves. 2050 feels like a reasonable time horizon for that to start.

The article covers an academic-style research paper. You might find that section of the full research paper interesting! You spotted something important, but I think you think that city driving is safer, when the opposite is true:

https://waymo.com/research/do-autonomous-vehicles-outperform-latest-generation-human-driven-vehicles-25-million-miles/

Here’s the part you might find interesting, the “12x safer than human” claim likely greatly understates the safety advantage, just due to the methodology of the study:

“The garaging zip code of the insured vehicle was used as a proxy for the city (Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin) in which the vehicle drives. Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk. For example, commuters from the city would likely experience a reduced crash risk as they travel to less densely populated areas (Chen et al., 2024). Previous studies have shown that most injury collisions occur within a small radius from residency, and that American drivers rarely travel far from their place of residence, with approximately 80% of one-way household trips being less than 10 miles (DOE, 2022). Third, the benchmark drivers garaged in the Waymo deployment area are not operating with the same distribution of mileage within the geographical limits as the Waymo ADS. Chen et al. (2024) explored the effect of Waymo’s driving distribution on benchmark crash risk and found that - should the benchmark driving distribution match Waymo’s in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles - the benchmark police-reported crash rates would have been between 14% and 38% higher. Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative. Surely, there is an opportunity in future work to leverage new data, such as insurance telematics, to more precisely define and leverage the benchmark driving exposure data to better account for this potential confounder.”

I can’t say that it is certainly fraud.

… But I can certainly say that Tesla has historically never come close to registering that sort of single weekend sales performance while taking advantage of the iZEV program in Canada :)

For some reason, their most lucrative rebate performance came after Elon’s controversial backing of a US president who, among other things, is calling for the annexation of Canada under the threat of economic (and maybe military?) ramifications.

How about that! You would think that would be really unpopular to be associated with, seeing as how Canadians have a proudly independent streak. It’s causing ~50-75% drops in sales in politically-similar NATO states. Then, just in Canada, that talk apparently coincided with huge sales gains, and just as the EV rebate program was due to run out of funds. Strange!

These next few weeks are going to be really interesting as the Canadian Transportation Minister confirms the details on that rebate program, like she has stated she intends to.

TL;DR: Yes, it is shit.