Shouldn’t they have investigated that before it was allowed to operate?

US allows carmakers to self certify first

That’s what I’m complaining about

The US loves self regulation. It’s a crapshoot. The DOT allows self certification for motorcycle helmets as well. Their admittedly low sample count of random helmet testing still fails at a rate of ~40%.

US, the land that keeps giving.

That’s abysmal. You should look for CE marked helmets (and things in general) that have been approved for sale in the European Union.

My understanding is that the testing methods have diverged enough that very few helmets meet both the ECE 22.06 and DOT(FMVSS 218) certifications. A European helmet with only the ECE certification would not be ‘street legal’ here in the states. I own a Shoei RF-1400 with a Snell/DOT rating. I believe the EU sells it as the NXR2 (with only ECE 22.06) but while they look identical they have tiny differences for the certifications they need to pass. I think the ECE 22.06 standard is better than the DOT one by far and I wish the US would just conform with most of the world but we don’t really do that. The major problem helmets are generally not from big name manufacturers but the hundreds of ‘DOT certified’ helmets you can find on Amazon for $30-100 from brands like GIDLVV and other such gibberish. You can basically guarantee those are absolute junk but they come with the correct sticker…

That sounds like a right mess.

What the fuck?

Normally, it makes sense to allow companies to certify their compliance with these types of regulations. It would be a waste of resources to have the government inspect every new model ahead of time to make sure they have things like mirrors and steering wheels. It’s not like they can lie on the forms and no one will notice. Nor would a normal car company have any reason to, since they’d just be setting themselves up for lawsuits, fines and costly recalls.

The difference here is that Tesla decided they could issue themselves an exemption from regulations, which is not the same thing. They want to declare the car street legal without including basic items mandated by law. Other companies making self-driving cars that wanted approval for models that lacked required equipment got exemptions before they launched their models. Tesla just said “it’s fine, we gave ourselves an permission” without even consulting NHTSA.

But that’s pretty much the way Tesla operates. They have a long history of ignoring laws, lying to regulators, withholding evidence, and generally acting like they can do whatever the hell they want. It’s been backfiring on them a little in more recent years, but not nearly as much as it should.

He and Trump invented an entire government organization to cripple the people who would look into his bullshit.

As if I needed another reason to not not drive to/in Texas

Hey I just saw one of those this morning and didn’t know what it was. Also looked like it was crab walking down the highway.

The fuck… It’s for two people?

God forbid you have two kids but apparently this targets 80+ of all rides and makes things cheaper

I mean, there’s no problem here. In fact, I think it’s super sensible to make this a 2 seater.

Clearly their plan is ultimately for this robotaxi service to be something you can run on any Tesla car. Meaning that the majority of cars on the service will be 5 seaters.

On the other hand, I’d bet anything that the vast majority of rides requested are for a single rider. So if you’re going to make a vehicle specifically to be the optimal car for this purpose, it should definitely be a 2 seater. Smaller, lighter, better mileage, cheaper. If you need to order a ride for more people, a different car can do that and there are more of those available anyway.

The only gripe i have, is that this really could have been a 3 seater. Generally cars have adjustable front seats because the driver needs to be able to reach the pedals comfortably. But since that isn’t an issue here, it would have made a lot of sense to make it a bench seat just like most cars have in the back. Then again, the car does look quite small, so perhaps making it a 2 seater helped them constrain the size a little bit more.

Edit: Oh yeah, don’t refute the post, just down vote it, that’s a sane and well adjusted thing to do. I mean, I’m not even saying anything controversial…

I have significant doubts about this “any Tesla as robotaxi” idea at least if you’re referring to Musk’s empty promises about how you could make money off your own Tesla while not using it.

The simple explanation is indeed that they’ve noticed 2 seats is enough for most taxi usage and IIRC I’ve seen some articles say the data supports that. They’ve optimized the Cybercab to be their taxi in this and other ways. Clearly they’ve also made efforts to maximize its range and chosen an interior that is easy to clean, removed the glass roof and even the rear window that would possibly not last so long in heavy use etc.

If there’s ever going to be a bigger taxi from them I’d expect it to be another purpose-built vehicle.

If 80%+ of rides is 2 people or less, I dont think it make sense to necessarily make a purpose built vehicle when you already make a vehicle you sell to consumers that can fill the small gap? (Edit and I dont mean use their cars, but their own internal fleet like they use today)

Thats a lot of capital expenditures for a small slice of the rides, of which you wont even be the only company serving.

They are also working on a purpose built small bus type vehicle, but that wont be a hail for 3 people kinda thing, itll be for routes that people get on/off of.

My bet is theyll make another vehicle they can sell to consumers for personal non taxi use, but will also be cheaper and work for the up to 4 or 5 people taxi rides. So not quite purpose built, but with some intentions towards it.

You doubt something that already exists???

Regular Model Ys are already on the road as robo taxis. They have far more of those than the cyber cabs.

I’m in Austin right now for a race, and there’s a million of these fuckin things. I rode in a regular autonomous Model Y taxi last night. You can call either of them in the app, so you’re not limited to the two seater if you have more people.

Obviously my point was not that Model Y cannot function as a robotaxi, just that since they seem to be needing to gradually expand a geofence, validate, continuously monitor the vehicles in operation and are even picking the strategy of not utilizing existing cars that much and instead building the Cybercab. This suggests that no opportunity for millions of Tesla owners to sign their own vehicle up for robotaxi duties is coming any time soon.

I have significant doubts about this “any Tesla as robotaxi” idea at least if you’re referring to Musk’s empty promises about how you could make money off your own Tesla while not using it.

Oh man, I have serious doubts about that! But that’s what they’ve claimed they want to do. And I can see the profit motive there, so I have no doubt they’ll try. I’m not saying it’ll work.

You know, to fuck in. It takes two.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is updating vehicle standards to make it easier and faster for driverless cars to deploy on public roads. It’s currently tweaking eight rules, including those requiring car parts that driverless cars don’t really need: brake pedals, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors. But for now, years-old standards remain in place.

Beyond private companies using tax dollars to manage their special regulatory environment, privatize and monetize public roads, and test their unfinished and unregulated products on citizens, I expect these to be fully-equipped roving surveillance and oppression machines:

• Each car can be covertly equipped with a suite of LPR or facial recognition cameras, sensors, and signals intelligence equipment.

• Autonomous cars can patrol and surveil large areas to gather intelligence while acting as innocuous taxis.

• Journalists, brown people, or pregnant woman making the mistake of entering one of these could simply be recognized and driven to a “detention” center for arrest.

• Vehicles can autonomously work in tandem to hunt down and assault other vehicles, or serve as transport for domestic military operations, or blockade roads.

• Service can be selectively denied to certain areas or social groups to curtail and manage movement during protests or events.

I mean, just use your imagination as to how an authoritarian federal government could collude with a Fascist tech CEO to leverage a large autonomous robo-taxi fleet set upon the population:

I love and hate your comment.
Thanks for pointing out couple more nightmares to come and stay! :)

I expect these to be fully-equipped roving surveillance and oppression machines:

• Each car can be covertly equipped with a suite of LPR or facial recognition cameras, sensors, and signals intelligence equipment.

• Autonomous cars can patrol and surveil large areas to gather intelligence while acting as innocuous taxis.

• Journalists, brown people, or pregnant woman making the mistake of entering one of these could simply be recognized and driven to a “detention” center for arrest.

• Vehicles can autonomously work in tandem to hunt down and assault other vehicles, or serve as transport for domestic military operations, or blockade roads.

• Service can be selectively denied to certain areas or social groups to curtail and manage movement during protests or events.

I mean, just use your imagination as to how an authoritarian federal government could collude with a Fascist tech CEO to leverage a large autonomous robo-taxi fleet set upon the population

Whoa, that’s scary, but you probably right

It feels like we’re heading for the bad part of Manna faster and faster. If you haven’t read Manna, do yourself that service and spend 45 minutes read it. It used to be free on the authors website, but, the website was removed, when the author died, but it’s easy to find

This has always been my problem with the future of self-driving cars too, and of course several people have argued with me that I’m stupid.

I don’t trust any corporations now and I don’t trust that the government will always be benevolent - if you’re in the US, it already isn’t, at least mine is still fairly sensible, but that could change easily too.

One of the biggest problems is that self-driving cars either are, or one day will be safer than human drivers. Which of course is a great thing! But then there will be a push to ban manual driving. First we’ll get I, robot, where manual driving is frowned upon. It’ll happen step by step.

Also: a fast means of transport for me and my family that doesn’t stop working when comms go down and isn’t restricted to a specific route, is what keeps me feeling much safer living <200 km from the Russian border. Buses or trains need to wait till they get enough people on. Self-driving cars likely won’t go anywhere. Bicycles and feet are great for day to day life in a livable city, but they don’t let me cross 4 national borders in 16 hours.

“Does this thing run on gasoline‽‽ Gas explodes, you know!!!”

Always wished that the cop had told the doctor that was specifically how it worked.

I should rewatch it tbh. Been a long time, I’d forgotten that line.

This has always been my problem with the future of self-driving cars too

It’s not an issue with self-driving cars. It’s an issue with internet connected vehicles, regardless of autonomous driving.

A decade ago I would have thought you were paranoid. If the last few years have taught me anything it’s that you’re just being realistic. :/

Oh awesome. They don’t have steering or pedals so when the cloud service fails in 5 years, the entire car will be complete e-waste.

Okay, look. I’m picking on this comment because it appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Before I pick on it, please know:

1. I am a progressive and have been for more than three decades.
2. I despise fascism
3. I hate Musk, the nazi
4. While I’m a technology enthusiast, this autonomous bullshit is not ready for prime time, I don’t think.

So with that in mind:

Oh awesome. They don’t have steering or pedals so when the cloud service fails in 5 years, the entire car will be complete e-waste.

First of all, these cars would not depend on “the cloud”. “The cloud” refers (or at least originally referred) to a method of storing data on servers where you don’t really care about how many servers it takes or where they are or managing them, you just get a blog of space to shove data.

Even if you extend the definition of “the cloud” to include controlling these cars… that’s… really a huge stretch. And if you DO extend the definition, what you are saying at that point is “if the internet stops working” which is not going to happen. I don’t care what anyone thinks about the state of usability of social media or whatever, the internet itself is not just going to disappear.

The vehicles will not magically go bad. Maybe the business might choose to destroy them if they stop the service or something like that, but that would be a stupid business-type decision, not a technical one.

I just get tired of people saying things out of emotion that are just completely off-base. So I’m picking on this one as an example of what I see all day on Lemmy.

And I’m sure I say shit that qualifies as such. I do try to keep an open mind. I have been persueded on subjects before - by facts from sources and such. Or just good ways of thinking about things that I didn’t know before.

There’s plenty to rail against, but when we use boneheadedly wrong information to do so, it’s really much less effective.

And again, I’m just using this comment as one example of things I see day in and day out. And once again I emphasize that I know I’m probably guilty of it myself - and I get called out and sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t (sometimes someone calling me out is wrong, too - like… MSG, for a completely different topic. It’s been studied. It’s a safe ingredient. Maybe there’s EXTREMELY rare problems, but 99.999% of people who say they’re allergic definitely aren’t. It’s bullshit, and the myth was built on racism.)

Anyway.

All it takes is a software update for these to be bricks. If (and when) Tesla goes under, I doubt they will allow driverless cars that are no longer owned by a company. They will inevitably lock their firmware down as much as possible. It will, for all intents and purposes, just stop working the day the company stops existing.

Or the new model will come out and they’ll just stop supporting them. Or any number of other cynical tactics that Tesla and companies like it have shown time and again that they are totally open to doing.

How are these going to be any different than the e-waste scooters and bikes that have to be Frankensteined (Berm Peak YT link) to barely get working? And these can’t even be used as traditional cars as a fallback. They are made only to be driven by wire.

Now any minor stoppage is a journey ender. Need to go around an accident and an officer is directing but your car is confused? Can’t. Need to interrupt it as it starts approaching an animal or child it doesn’t see? Can’t. Need to pursue in rough weather because someone is injured in the passenger seat? Can’t.

Sure, you might say, “But you wouldn’t hire one of these vehicles in those scenarios.” But now that vehicle is destined for a short life as an upscale taxi that will never be used for anything practical. No second chance to do literally anything practical or useful.

These are all things every single car up to this point has been expected to be able to do. It’s a machine at the end of the day. The new standard is to start taking those things away and finding a ways to make us pay a premium to get them back. Trust me when I say the end goal in these people’s minds is that we all sit in cars that we pay for but never get to drive.

So yes, I am cynical because every one of these companies has given me nothing but reason to be cynical.

It’s going to be like everything where where you will own nothing and be forced to pay a subscription.

Morning commuter subscription: $500 a month. Oh but wait, it’s demand based so $700 a month depending on your area.

“The cloud” refers (or at least originally referred) to a method of storing data on servers

The cloud is more than storage. It’s also compute. It’s Web apps. It’s virtual machines. It’s all kinds of things.

what you are saying at that point is “if the internet stops working”

No one is saying that. Tesla is selling these cars so people can earn money selling taxa services. What happens if Tesla decides this wasn’t profitable anyway? They shut down the service that enables people to book the car. Can you still hail the cap? Can you make it drive if it’s not connected?

that would be a stupid business-type decision, not a technical one.

Like when Sonos decided they didn’t need to support 1st devices because they now needed to do more than they were capable of, so they just wanted to brick them (but ultimately didn’t because of massive backlash)? How long will it be in Teslas best interest to support this particular platform? What if they include a new sensor in a later model and decide that the old model isn’t relevant any longer? Will we see 1st gen cybercabs in 30 years, like we do other cars?

As someone else pointed out, “Cloud” is a buzz word that also means rented compute. Pull the plug, cars die. IDK how exactly. They could get confused and attempt to ALL drive back to their parking lots I guess. Although it sounds like they will be wasted to me, still.

They’ll probably just stop and do nothing if the software is designed anything like the hardware.

Hmmm, from what I’ve heard Elon had the least influence over the software (apart from “lol just make it a computer and hire Qt devs”), so it’s actually not that bad. Well, in comparison to some other cars, that is… So yeah, would not at all be impressed if that will be the case.

As already was said, the cloud is and always has been composed of “cloud storage” AND “cloud compute”. We may see way more compute these days of course with tokenized work or services like GeForce Now or Shadow that let you play games and stream the video back to you, but they’ve both always been available. Tesla using Cloud compute is not a new decision, they’ve always been processing all of that data remotely as well, even if the car is doing some and eventually all of the work. You’re trying to be weirdly pedantic here for some reason, and are just way off base anyways. Even if 100% of the compute is being done in the car, the ride hailing service is all that needs to disappear to brick these cars and Tesla owns access to the service and can shut it down any time.

I’m so happy for you that you haven’t had your soul properly crushed by corporate America this decade. There’s nothing logical about how corps operate - the market never judges anyone appropriately for awful practices, government almost never holds them accountable for awful practices, and so they keep doing worse and worse shit that turns a quick buck. “Bad business decisions” are repeatedly rewarded in the market:

• WB took a write off rather than market and release Batgirl (completed film, $90M spent) and Coyote Vs Acme (completed film, $70M spent, only allowed the film makers to shop it around and released 3 years later because of enormous backlash for a highly anticipated film).
• Disney removed 50 titles from Disney+ and Hulu for the sake of a $1.5B tax write off, only achievable by lowering the value of their service. Often the only place the content was available, now it is just deleted off the internet with no legitimate way to watch it.
• Paramount did the same content cancelation and complete eradication for millions of dollars of write-downs. Just weeks after airing the finale of one particular show, it fully disappeared from the internet.
• Sony’s Concord wasn’t performing well and so after 8 years of development and millions spent, the solution wasn’t fix it, market it better, tweak the business model. The solution, 11 days after release, was to erase the game. All 10 people (/s) who bought it were refunded and they turned off the game servers. Game completely dead.
• Microsoft shut down Blizzard’s “Odyssey” after 6 years in development over fixing their engine.
• Anthem (EA) and The Crew (Ubisoft) were live service games that were just shut down. Ubi took it a step further of revoking all licenses previously sold. They could open source the server software of a game they don’t want to support any longer, or they could continue to sell the game box and strike a deal with another company to operate the servers. Instead, just pull the cord and fuck all the fans who paid money for it. ¯\(ツ)/¯

And this doesn’t even start down the path of private equity buying up companies, strip mining their assets, ruining everything that gave the brand it’s good reputation (because it’s expensive to do things right) , and selling them once they have turned them to utter shit.

The world’s politicians are failing us - the fact that any of this shit is legal is obscene. The internet doesn’t need to “stop working” for some dipshit with a balance sheet at Tesla to decide, “well, we sold all our Cybercab hardware and have no liabilities here - and software dev and server hardware is costing us too much, shut that shit down.” After all, they’ve been claiming autonomy for so long, yet they have not achieved it. They don’t have the ability to do what they claim, yet they’re STILL selling the product today on the promise of future updates.

This is the same company that sold $50,000 pre-orders for a Roadster that a decade later STILL has not been released, fraudulently sold FSD for $15k to drivers for 2 decades with a promise all their cars would be upgraded as necessary (they haven’t), artificially created a monopoly and actively blocks independent shops from working on their vehicles, manipulates their odometers digitally, and shuts off its FSD system moments before it causes a crash so that they can legally blame the driver for fucking up and take zero responsibility. So you’re saying the only logical reason for cybercab to die is “the internet stops working”, that THIS company who has repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered for their entire existence would NEVER just shutter the whole project and leave owners holding the bag? That THIS company who has yet to “solve” autonomous driving (despite claims) somehow has no technical hurdles that could destroy this project?

Bull. Shit.

Fugly pieces of shit, like everything connected to Nazi cunts. It would be a real shame if all those coal rolling fuckheads were to target these things and run them off the road. A real shame.

Wait wait wait… THATS WHAT THESE ARE??? I’ve seen these on the roads for maybe 4+ months now and always wondered what these ugly fucking Mac Mouse as looking cars are as there’s no branding on them, and it turns out their Teslas??? Fucking of course.

xkcd.com/37/

You just know imma be pulling up in front of these things and slowing waaay down.

Still looks right out of Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Down to the gold color in the desert zone. Sliders are literally self driving taxis you can call.

This man has no original ideas. We knew that already though.

Such a great classic. Loved those Bowie concerts

they look like they are perfect for stickers

😂 would be hilarious if people start putting swastika stickers on these, perhaps on the bonnet/hood .. like mercedes has the star, would make a true tesla logo

Swastickers?

They’re probably chock full of cameras the way the nazi truck is.

Don’t you insult Saturn. They were amazing for the price of them.

No insult to Saturn. Just another in the string of examples of how unoriginal and lame Musk is.

TBH it doesn’t look very different from that electric Ferrari

Oh? Elon got from the edgy to the fancy phase?

“Before you ride today, Elon needs to know a little bit about your voting history.”

Is it painted gold because that’s Trump’s favorite color?

The rust will be harder to spot

whether it meets federal safety standards.

I’m just gonna throw out a wild guess: NO.

Have you considered who’s currently in charge of federal safety standards?

I’d still like my autonomous cab to have windshield wipers. I’ll feel better.

has been deployed … already under investigation.

Is “already” really the word to use.
Don’t vehicles need the investigation being done before getting on the road?
I’d say the investigation started a bit too late.

Vehicles don’t have to be tested before going on the road? Do they just issue license plates to any new car model?

Plates don’t come with the cars here. Individuals go and get plates after they buy a new car. Hell, in a lot of places now, the plate follows the person and not the car when it gets sold used…

I would get in a jonhy cab way before one of these.

I saw one speeding (10 over the limit) on the Interstate in Kansas City. Had a California plate, but I’m assuming it came from Austin?

No fucking way, I’m getting into one of those death traps and then letting it drive me across country.

There’s no way that thing self drove itself there. How would it have recharged multiple times?
Although I do believe that it’s possible that their shitty software could get confused about where it is supposed to go and try to make a cross country trip.

I can’t stop smiling at the idea of someone trying to hail a cyber cab in Paris Tx and then numerous cyber cabs go flying off docks on the eastern side of the country. Every few minutes another cab, each one going slightly faster than the last.

On the surface, this could be entirely legit, not worth the outrage.

I can easily believe

• regulations are not ready for self-driving vehicles
• a manufacturer decided some required equipment is not suited for a car meant to be self-driving only
• the manufacturer self-certified, with exemptions where there is no regulatory framework yet.
• government agency sees that and starts an investigation to see if they agree

Even before you get into what you think of this specific manufacturer and whether they’re really ready for self-driving, this is a “normal” process

I’m more worried about regulations defining what self driving needs to be capable of and tests to qualify it

Whether a cyberCab is capable of safely self-driving is a different question from whether a self-driving vehicle is required to have a steering wheel

TBF it’s not “already under investigation” as if something bad already happened. It and other robo-cabs are being evaluated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for conformance to new safety standards designed to accommodate self-driving cars - such as not requiring them to have steering wheels or brake pedals.

I like how they only have 2 seats. Whenever I take a cab, I’m looking to have 1 seat for me and maybe 1 other person. I don’t ever want to take my kids or friends with me. More braindead bullshit from the dipshit fascist.

So then you would call one of the other robotaxis with 5 seats….

Which they already have more of

@Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world They may have more of them now (probably 4 seats usable really) but since their current fleet is tiny you can't really deduce anything about what their fleet composition is going to be going forward from it.

@technology@lemmy.world

The robotaxis are just regular consumer model Ys. They have 5 seats. They’re literally exactly the same as every other model Y on the road. They just have a dumb “Robotaxi” paint scheme in the cybertruck font on them.

They’ve been operating those for about a year and have about 10x as many of those as the new cybercabs.

I was just in Austin where there are a million of them. Like every 10th car on the road was either a Robotaxi or a Waymo. I rode in them.

They’ve explicitly stated their plans. The two seater cybercabs, regular model Ys, and an autonomous 20 passenger van.