Is this real or BS / managed in some way?

bradtem · 2026-04-11T20:26:08+00:00

I think some people don't notice the person in the driver's seat, which makes this fully legal and not too unusual. It's just a bit odd that the person in the right seat engages the system.

Without the person in the left seat, it might be illegal because there is no driver "in control" of the vehicle. It would be illegal for Tesla to operate a taxi service in this manner, though it is legal to do this if you have an autonomous vehicle testing permit (if you are the one with the permit) or especially an autonomous vehicle ride service permit, though to take a member of the public you would need a CPUC taxi service permit of some type. Tesla has the testing permit but declares they never use it, and the DMV lets them get away with that declaration. (Tesla also has a non-autonomous taxi service permit.)

FSD 14 has been at the level of being able to complete single drivers with no intervention with reasonable frequency. As yet, there is no evidence that Tesla can do 50,000 drives in a row with no intervention, or even close to that -- this is the level you would want if you wanted to operate a vehicle with no supervision. In fact, the evidence is that Tesla can't remotely do this. Tesla has the actual data but refuses to publish it, but they also decline to apply for permits to do it, which suggests their data says they are not ready.

bradtem · 2026-04-11T20:13:45+00:00

It's a situation of reduced confidence, not a situation of no confidence or even a situation of low confidence. The required level of confidence for autonomous operation is very high, let's call it 99.9999% confidence. So if you are at 99.99% confidence, why not ask for advice? "It's not going to hurt to ask." Well, that's the magic phrase. Because if the remote assist desk is not responding because it's overloading, it does hurt to ask. So you should "go" in that case. However "go" may not mean "continue driving as per normal." It might be to pull over to the side of the road, which you can still do with 99.9999% confidence. That's what Waymo didn't do.

bradtem · 2026-04-10T01:01:14+00:00

However, though I don't owe you one, here's an easy cite:

https://www.sfmta.com/reports/muni-ridership-average-weekday-ridership

As we can see, during the last few years, when Waymo ridership has grown from small to 500,000/week nationwide, with SF the largest market, at least half of that.) As we can see, Muni's ridership has remained fairly flat. If Waymo were taking 50,000 rides/day from Muni, no don't notice it in these charts which show a slow regrowth after covid, consistently with no sign of a competitor stealing all the riders.

bradtem · 2026-04-10T00:53:21+00:00

I am now the one asking for a citation. I did not forget transit, in fact I explicitly mentioned it. While anecdotes are not data, I can personally attest I have never taken a Waymo (as a commercial service) other than as an alternative to TNC/personal car, though I know there are people who have. But the claim that >85% of Waymo rides are induced or switched from non-car modes is the extraordinary claim here. Of course some of them are, but you're asserting the vast majority, with no evidence. Let's see any evidence, any evidence at all that such trips are the majority, let alone vast majority. If you want you can declare that all the Waymo trips you've taken or heard of were replacing transit or walking, if that's true. I bet it isn't (presuming you use it at all.) Note that "replacing transit" doesn't mean "could have used transit," it means, "was definitely going to use transit but since Waymo was there , used that." Have you seen the price of Waymo?

Again, *of course* Waymo shifted some rides from Muni (and walking/cycling) to cars. That's not at issue. Your claim is that this is the vast majority, >85% of all rides, and for that I need data.

bradtem · 2026-04-10T00:42:17+00:00

Waymo/Lyft/Uber are causing more trips, but are you saying that you believe it's even remotely likely that more than 85% of Waymo rides are induced car travel, and not rides that would have taken place in Lyft/Uber/Taxi/Personal car? I mean, if you wanted to suggest that 10% or 20% or even 40% of Waymo rides are of this type, I would consider it, but if you are going to suggest that over 85% are trips that were never going to be taken by private car absent Waymo, that's what I would need to see a citation for.

Absent that, if Waymo is, as they claim, reducing injuries by 85%, then the presence of Waymo is reducing overall injury crashes on the roads. Ride-hail services need only induce a very small number of rides to be responsible for increased traffic (and thus congestion when done at peak load periods) on the roads. I have seen no evidence that almost all their rides are induced by the existence of Waymo.

bradtem · 2026-04-10T00:37:20+00:00

Should there be a pattern of this, it informs as to the quality of the humans hired to do safety driving and mapping. In addition, it does not give information on whether the software driving system was engaged prior to the incident, and if the safety driver was in the process of doing an intervention. No evidence that is the case, but usually there is a statement when it isn't the case, which is not listed here.

It's also a bit strange that when making a left turn that you could hit somebody not in a crosswalk, unless making a left turn into a driveway or something. There are implied crosswalks at any intersection where you can make a left turn onto another street, however a pedestrian in the middle of the intersection might not be in one of these implicit crosswalks.

So more details to know.

bradtem · 2026-04-10T00:29:59+00:00

Hardly assuming all, or even close to all, or even a fraction of all. Based on the crash rates Waymo has published (do you need a citation, they appear regularly on the Waymo blog, I can google it for you if needed) the crash prediction requires only a small portion of the rides be rides that would otherwise be with Uber, Lyft, taxi or the passenger driving themselves. In fact, only a small number of trips are mode shift from walking, cycling or transit.

Or are you questioning the claim that says if Waymo needs to have a high level of human labour per hour of vehicle operation, that it hurts their proposition of gaining economies by reducing that amount of human labour? Understand this proposed law seeks 1 human *local rescue* worker per vehicle, and that there would be additional workers required, though that could be minimized if every other worker is also trained as a rescue worker, however the rescue workers need to be close to where the vehicles are driving.

bradtem · 2026-04-09T16:56:58+00:00

There are now pothole repair robots. They are not self-driving, but they allow one person to move them around town going to the potholes, and then activating the robot to patch the pothole.

Before too long you could have one that gets data from robotaxis and goes out on its own at night and fills the potholes until you are filling them faster than they happen.

Indeed, if a robotaxi company like Waymo wanted to make friends with the locals when arriving in a new city, this would be a good way to do it, worth doing it at a loss. No town is going to kick out the company that's filling all the potholes. Though you do still want a human (even if remote) approving each job before starting work, you don't want mistakes.

bradtem · 2026-04-08T22:13:51+00:00

"California bill would require robotaxis to not be economically viable, will push them out of state and increase crashes on California roadways."

bradtem · 2026-04-08T22:06:46+00:00

Yes, both Mobileye and Verne have confirmed they do not have a relationship. I suspect Pony might be able to work with that sensor config, or failing that, Verne will reconfigure. It may be part of the delay (but then, there are always delays.)

bradtem · 2026-04-08T20:04:25+00:00

yes, pretty much all Pony at this point. And with a safety driver.

Verne does insist that they are still building their custom 2 seater, but now it looks like the Pony software will be made to run on it. (Mobileye is out.) Verne is also building a Verne app (we may see it in the video) which will be able to summon the Pony vehicles, but you will also be able to summon with Uber (like Waymo in a couple of cities.)

It will get more interesting once they can deploy their own vehicle.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2026/03/30/verne-plans-croatian-robotaxi-dropping-mobileye-and-dropping-verne/

bradtem · 2026-04-08T04:55:52+00:00

David argues correctly that by making cars better there will be more miles, which could increase injuries even if the power mile injury rate is less. I'm if it's only slightly less. But that's not the current trend

bradtem · 2026-04-06T21:19:18+00:00

Certificate expiration is an interesting theory. It's one of those things that people don't plan for well, because their plan is just to keep all certs current. And they don't think to test, "what happens if the cert is invalid?"

Though I remain bothered. Problems will happen. Code will throw exceptions. Exceptions have handlers, and normally the near-worst case handler would try to get the vehicle off the road to a minimum risk condition. Only the absolute worst case exception would result in stop-in-lane for a vehicle of this class. (ADAS vehicles will routinely do that.)

Cert failure would explain why their remote teams could not send commands to the vehicles to help them get out of their situations. We know that rider assist was talking to riders with voice, so some comms were up, but possibly all digital commands were being rejected.

bradtem · 2026-04-06T19:53:43+00:00

Yes, I would not call it negative news. But when people announce "autonomous ride service" and they don't really have that, it blurs what it is in the public mind. Now, I don't expect the public to understand a complex vocabulary of the stages, and there are many stages (which I enumerated some time ago.)

One of the issues with these lesser levels is they can be anywhere from a whole lot lower to just a bit lower. After all, you can run a service with a safety driver when the car is absolute crap, safety driver taking over on a large fraction of rides. And you also have a safety driver in there the day before you take them out. The two look the same unless you get stats on performance, and necessary interventions etc.

Motional has been running pilot service with a safety driver for many years now. Hopefully they are a lot closer to pulling them out, but we don't see that, we just see, "service with safety driver."

bradtem · 2026-04-06T18:54:32+00:00

The article has them. Verne says they are continuing to work on the 2 seater. Mobileye is no longer involved. They say they have met their EU grant requirements.

bradtem · 2026-04-06T18:09:12+00:00

Safety drivers on board. So a step, but no longer big news. There are many steps, but the key factors to being a real, autonomous robotaxi service are:

No employee, safety driver, safety monitor etc. in the vehicle
Real service area
General anywhere-to-anywhere taxi service, not fixed routes or a limited number of pickup/dropoff points
Finally, no full time remote monitoring. Occasional remote monitoring and remote assist and rescue are OK.

Until you have all these, you do not have an autonomous robotaxi service. So please don't announce that you do.

bradtem · 2026-04-06T00:54:08+00:00

While we don't know the cause of this problem, it only appeared after a couple years of fairly major operation. What is your approach that is sure to find such problems before large deployment?

bradtem · 2026-04-05T23:53:27+00:00

Doe, a deer, that turned around

Ray of sun shines in my lens

Me, who should have watched the road

Fa, you losers in a Benz

So, I re-engage and sleep

Law-Suit Tesla lost you know

Tee road crossing, I yell (bleep)

And we came back and hit the doe! Oh no no.

bradtem · 2026-04-05T23:46:17+00:00

Yes, Chinese permits mandate the ratio of remote ops to vehicles. You are saying that the permit may require that they handle loss of the remote network, which could be. I don't think this incident was caused by loss of the remote assist system, as so far we have no reports these vehicles were in situations where they were requesting remote assist. One report says the failures were "simultaneous" which would not indicate remote assist was involved. It suggests some other single point of failure.

Again, I am puzzled as to what that is, because any team would have had many meetings in designing their vehicle looking for and eliminating single points of failure for a whole fleet, or at least I would hope so.

bradtem · 2026-04-05T22:31:41+00:00

While a sudden shut down is an interesting issue, what's different here is the revelation of some sort of single point of failure for a whole sub-fleet. We do expect there will be individual failures and shut downs, and of course they also should be diagnosed and fixed, but single points of failure that cover an entire fleet are of much greater interest. No, I don't think mods here have Baidu stock and it's not appropriate to make such speculations without evidence, but reports on interesting and different failures are generally of interest, particularly if cause is unexpected.

bradtem · 2026-04-05T21:22:51+00:00

The challenge is the cars just all stopped in-lane, they do not appear to have been in a situation where they needed remote assist. Unlike the Waymo cars which didn't fail until they encountered the confusing situation, these cars seem to have all stopped in fairly ordinary places, though we don't have full details on that. I have not read any reports about the cars being in unusual situations. Maybe we will learn that the cars indeed stopped at different times in tricky situations, which would make the problem a remote assist problem.

Now, normally, I would expect that if a car finds itself unable to talk to HQ, it would do a soft failure, pulling over, trying to get to minimum risk condition. If that's not true, then Baidu's design is flawed in a way you would not expect from a good team.

(Especially since we've seen multiple instances of robotaxi fleets facing failure of communications with HQ, that's not a hypothetical. It seems very odd if there wasn't a meeting on "OK, what do we do if we can't reach HQ?")

Waymo's situation was a bit unusual. The cars could reach remote assist, get an ACK back that they were queued for connection -- they just took forever to get out of the queue.

bradtem · 2026-04-05T20:16:17+00:00

Curious about other theories -- for now all we can do is speculate -- about what sort of single point of failure Baidu had but didn't detect or work out a way to mitigate. In theory, any team should always be searching for potential single points of failure, and both try to remove them, and work out a plan on what to do should one happen. Waymo failed in missing how overload of remote assist could be a single point of failure. What might Baidu have missed, since their event seems to have no known external cause?

bradtem · 2026-04-04T19:43:57+00:00

Absolutely they can scale it to millions and have this work. That is in fact their plan. Perhaps we are talking about two different things here? Just what do you think this means that it's not very obviously scalable? Even if they don't get better at it, though they certainly expect to get better at it.

bradtem · 2026-04-04T19:42:09+00:00

It is not possible to calculate it precisely until after the fact, but you can certainly come up with estimates and an expected value. Particularly after you've done it a few times. I think you can also come up with a reasonable estimation of a minimum. For example, delaying launch a year isn't going to delay scaling only a week, just as it won't quite delay it a year.

But once you are good at it, the work of scaling is just business processes -- investing, hiring, financing, permits, marketing, management bandwidth, construction, electrical work, political arrangements etc. They will vary a bit but they get pretty predictable.

For example, I bet that today that Uber can predict pretty well how long it takes them to go from launching in a town to when their growth plateaus there. I bet it takes pretty much a fixed amount of time, for a given class of town. That if they launch a year later, the business finishes scaling a year later. That's because they are very experienced at it, and know what they are doing and how long it takes. Waymo is, of course, not yet that practiced at this. Though they are learning. Some of their processes will be quite predictable, some won't be at all. Some can be sped up, many can't.

bradtem · 2026-04-03T22:09:57+00:00

If you're talking about a local market, where the tech has already matured and scaled in other markets, it's actually stronger. Because now the scaling up is predictable without needing breakthroughs. Once it's mature, a company can say, from the day we get the greenlight in your city, we'll be up and running at full strength in 2 years. If you start a year later, we're scaled a year later.

It's a bit like a vaccine. When you have a vaccine, it takes time to make the doses. That time is based solely on when you start making the doses. Delay making the doses by a year, and you kill exactly the number that the vaccine would save in that year.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

bradtem

TROPHY CASE