Stock down 7.5% today after 10/10 Robotaxi event. Elon arrives nearly an hour late and showed off concepts of a plan of cybercab and cyberbus.
Reminder that Google and Baidu literally have robo taxis in the street right now. They’re not great, but I’m not aware of any of the cars killing anyone.
They have remote controlled taxis driven by people in India.
Man their ping must be awful, no wonder their K/d is zero
They’re pretty automated, since there’s plenty of cases of Waymo’s blocking traffic, driving through police lines, and getting confused at things that wouldn’t confuse any human. If they have humans, it’s got to be such a high ratio that it takes 5+ minutes to get to a particular car when it’s confused.
Baidu started at 1 human:4 taxis, IDK what they’re at now. There’s quite a few other companies running robotaxis right now, some at <35 cents a mile, for those prices, they can’t afford that many Indians.
The big difference is they all use LIDAR, while Musk still insists AI will make his camera approach work, eventually.
Reminder: It’s been 8 years since Full Self Driving works ’now’ and your Tesla has ‘appreciating value’ because you can set it to do uber rides automatically when you aren’t using it, and Tesla will be releasing a $35k priced car ‘next year’.
https://electrek.co/2016/10/19/tesla-fully-autonomous-self-driving-car/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/business/tesla-autonomous-autopilot-vehicles.html
Comprehensive catalogue of failed promises and fraudulent claims:
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-tesla-self-driving-cars-anniversary-autopilot-1850432357
Additional reminder:
At the time of the beep, it will have been 6 years, 10 months, and 25 days since Musk took people’s actual real world preorder money for the 2nd generation Roadster, and still has not produced or delivered a single one of the promised vehicles.
[beep]
They’re several years late, but they’re finally realizing he’s full of shit.
Where are the billionaire hypemen for trains as people transport in the US? They’d stand to make a great deal.
I mean he does hype the boring company and hyperloop occasionally.
Neither are trains that move people like standard trains already do. They are gimmicks, just like this taxi thing.
My grandparents were not billionaire-rich, but still quite wealthy. They were huge proponents for investing in the community and would often tell us “high taxes are a good thing. The higher your taxes are means you made more money that year and more people will be helped from you earning money!”
But, because they weren’t billionaire-rich, most of their big projects required help from other investors who inevitably always fucked them over. My grandfather tried building an area that would be driven by big businesses and be primarily filled with inexpensive starter-homes. His intention was to attract young talent to the area and help families find success. His business partners eventually pushed him out and now it’s one of the more expensive parts of town that’s constantly under construction. The whole area is a massive blemish on the face of an ugly city.
Since the late '80s, my grandparents had been trying to get investors to lobby for/fund a trans-Texas railway, but the airline lobby was always too big to tackle. In the early 2000s, not long post 9/11, he started making a lot of headway since there was a lot of fear around airplanes. A few days after after returning from a big meeting in Dallas where reps from Southwest Airlines were infuriated listening to arguments about how the railway would primarily serve people who couldn’t afford to fly, my grandparents were shocked to find out that Southwest had placed them on their no-fly list. Because of the huge reaction to 9/11 and the fact that airlines found themselves more empowered instead of punished, getting placed on Southwest’s no-fly list landed them on a federal no-fly list and they had to sit through a lot of very intimidating interviews to get taken back off.
So where are those billionaire hype-men? They don’t exist. The closest thing to that are collections of millionaires getting shit on by billionaires. And for the record, fuck my grandparents’ disproportionate capital. They tried their best to do the best they could with their money, but what’s the fucking point in building a community center to “help those less fortunate” when the most destitute will be forced to move and continue to starve? Wealth vacuums are the craziest fucking things to watch people try to justify.
Billionaires would not get on no fly lists for such things. They’d cause such a shit fit.
Trains are for poor people and there’s no “disrupting the industry” to hype up to investors.
Plus trains need tracks and getting easements is expensive and complicated.
Especially when we had many many times the amount of track in the States than we do now. The big railroad companies have a monopoly and squeeze profit with the smallest overhead so bye bye existing infrastructure. Railroads should be nationalized.
Imagine if states build railroads like they built highways…
Good
Elon and Trump are the same type of con men. Grifters. Charlatans. Their wealth inflated on lies. Always “two more weeks” or “very soon.
FSD was supposed to be available in—(wait for it) …
2016!!! 😆🤣😭
Like Trump’s “healthcare plan”— It’s been nothing but empty promises, kicking the can, and a pocket full of lint. Always “In a couple more weeks…”
Y’all didn’t like the weird metal shoe coasting onto the stage at 2mph? It’s autonomous, we promise!
“What? No there weren’t any stage hands pushing it from the other side.Those guys wearing black behind it were just supervising.”
I saw that guy walking out from under the overpass last night.
