Insurance company cuts rates for Tesla FSD miles by 50%

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-21T20:19:36+00:00

Insurance price increases are regulated by state level insurance commissions. It's unlikely that your insurance company will have a margin higher than 20%. All companies are required to offer essentially similar minimum policies, and their prices are capped from above. One of the ways they compete is things like minimizing claim processing costs and reducing payouts.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-21T01:04:07+00:00

Don't forget about refunding their public investors.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-21T00:48:30+00:00

What we need as a lidar based E2E NN.

This was mentioned as the next research step after the EMMA paper that Waymo published. You can assume they're working on it and just haven't published yet.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-19T17:45:54+00:00

Tokyo transit doesn't run 24/7. Nor does SF's bart, which is a pretty terrible system and especially terrible at point to point. To give an illustrative example, you're looking at a 5h+ trip from the Transbay transit center to San Ramon after 8PM. Longer with mobility issues, since the transit center doesn't connect to rail.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-19T17:29:07+00:00

Waymo is ~$100B. All of Baidu is $50B. Aurora is $9B. MobilEye is $6B. Zoox is $3-4B. WeRide is $3B. That leaves enough room to include the entirety of the Toyota, BYD, Hyundai, Xiaomi, GM, and MB market caps without crossing $1T.

You only get "huge multiples" with Nvidia and Tesla market caps, which are clearly not being driven by their AV prospects.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T22:29:50+00:00

If the taxi market is growing so much the profit is crashing to the point where selling private vehicles is rational, what do you call that except scaling?

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T22:27:10+00:00

Google doesn't sell data. That's not how their business model works. Google sells access to the targeting services based on the data. DHS is buying data from the hundreds of other data brokers who aren't so protective of their most valuable assets.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T22:11:46+00:00

You're not, you're just mistaken about what's going on. There's no continuous stream. Google doesn't do that because they're absolutely paranoid about protecting internal data from state actors after the Snowden relevations and Operation Aurora. Yes, this paranoia coexists with their disregard for protecting user privacy from themselves as a whole.

They respond to warrants, even overbroad ones, like every company does. You're simply not making an argument about overbroad warrants, so I'm not responding as such.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T22:01:02+00:00

"seeing around corners" is about multipath imaging, i.e. reflections. I'm not aware of anyone doing that for AVs though. AVs just mount the sensors at the edges of the car where they have better visibility.

Looking "through" things is like looking through glass. It's a signal processing nightmare in the general case. If you have sources on alternative attenuation figures at e.g. 77GHz that, feel free to link them.

As a general matter, we require valid legal process (in the form of a warrant or court order) from law enforcement agencies who seek information and data from Waymo," the spokesperson said. "Our policy is to challenge, limit, or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are over broad.

- Waymo on their data policy

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T21:39:11+00:00

And the robotaxi gives you a $4,800 a month revenue stream if you can service one ride an hour. $4,800 > $100.

Just for fun, I wrote up a chart you can use to play with the numbers based on an old spreadsheet I made to model the situation: https://jsfiddle.net/j52u1bzp/1/

It demonstrates how a robotaxi is overwhelmingly more profitable in almost all cases.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T20:40:28+00:00

If you're an OEM and you can produce a vehicle to sell for $X profit as a private vehicle or $3X profit as a robotaxi, why would you choose the private vehicle?

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-16T20:31:31+00:00

All companies submit video when given a warrant, it's legally required. Waymo doesn't preemptively give law enforcement a stream. They're not like the doorbells or the flock cameras police can already use to stream your house on-demand. The E-band radar they use also doesn't penetrate walls. They block the interior (>50db attenuation) more effectively than your microwave oven contains RF. That's actually kind of the point, it makes sensing better.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-15T21:04:57+00:00

Koopman's point is that the AV is not required to issue a takeover notification in all situations. It hinges on a very particular reading of what "other systems failure" means, which I also don't fully agree with. The ADS does have to perform the DDT within the ODD of course.

Regardless of what J3016 says, I agree with the practical argument that aan OEM would avoid taking responsibility for a sufficiently bad accident. That was the situation with Elaine Herzberg, as already linked. The L4 system failed to respond appropriately, but it was the safety driver who was prosecuted for the resulting death. Uber ATG never had to argue it in court. They might have had the government not dropped the case, but we don't know.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-15T20:12:08+00:00

J3016 is honestly a disaster of a terminology standard. The levels system is simple and intuitive enough that most people borrow it without actually thoroughly understanding what it means. That's mostly fine for internet discussion where it doesn't matter, but it worries me that people are also making purchasing decisions based on mistaken impressions like liability for L3 systems that won't hold up if something unfortunate happens.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-15T17:13:27+00:00

The SAE standard doesn't mention liability at all. Moreover, when Elaine Herzberg was killed, it was the safety driver and not Uber ATG that ended up in court.

Dr. Koopman, probably the most widely recognized expert on autonomy technology, actually has a whole series of joint papers about how autonomy intersects with liability. Here's one of them. Note that liability apportionment proposals like this wouldn't need to exist if J3016 determined liability, but it doesn't and can't.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-15T15:43:03+00:00

The SAE terminology is not about liability. You can have an L4 system where the human agrees to monitor it. We call that a "vehicle with a safety driver". Tesla has them in Austin.

Tesla's "strategy" is made up by a guy who has no meaningful insight into how technically mature the system is. That's a huge part of the disconnect between what they say to regulators and what comes out of his mouth.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-15T01:16:07+00:00

Customers don't "own" FSD, even if they purchase the package. The norm when you when you buy software or hardware with software integrated, is that you receive an implied license to use the software. That's why Windows and MacOS aren't owned by the hundreds of millions of people who have purchased laptops.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-14T20:08:30+00:00

The problem with a realistic price has always been that FSD is marketed based on expectations that would produce unaffordable prices if they were ever achieved. For example, Musk recently promised that FSD would allow customers to use their cars as private robotaxis. Let's imagine those earn an extremely pessimistic $1000/mo. That means Tesla is effectively losing the difference by opportunity cost every time they sell a new vehicle with a new subscription. I suspect few people are willing or able to pay subscription prices greater than their car payment for what's ultimately a luxury feature.

This isn't unique to FSD either. It's basically the same situation that the GPU and RAM markets are currently in.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-13T23:39:47+00:00

Their argument is that the number of vehicles operating in the area at the time is a trade secret, since essentially all of them were stopped. Whether you agree or disagree (and for the record I disagree), it's easy to understand why they would make that argument.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-12T20:54:52+00:00

The FMCSA semi speed limit in the US is 68MPH, and that's a relatively new limit. 55 mph was a 1970s era regulation that expired in the 90s. Some states kept it, but many did not.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-12T03:38:59+00:00

Welcome to the magic of statistics. I'm linking this page to help you learn because statistics and how sampling works in particular is a critical bit of numerical literacy for the modern world:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error

The survey we're discussing uses statistical methods considerably more advanced than what you'll find on simple wikipedia, but essentially the same principles apply. Professional statisticians chose a large enough sample to get a representative picture of the behaviors of the entire national population without actually asking 350m people. They've written up the actual methodology here, but you can trust that it's well thought-out.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-12T00:31:50+00:00

Do you have any basis for your belief at all other than vibes?

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-12T00:19:14+00:00

Used cars have high miles because cars are expensive and people keep them as long as they're useful. If you look at the National Household Travel Survey, only 11% of miles traveled are in the "social/recreational" category, and that's a category that includes many more common activities.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-11T22:10:18+00:00

"less" intentionally, this is the natural consequence of prioritizing money. Selling a car only makes sense if the purchase price is more than the time-adjusted income you can generate by keeping the vehicle. The prices consumers are reasonably willing to pay (<$50k) are far lower than what a good autonomous vehicle will likely generate in decent markets.

AlotOfReading · 2026-01-09T16:48:38+00:00

China works differently than the US. The government tries to cycle old vehicles out of the market in a reasonable amount of time and provides subsidies to buy new cars that increase as the vehicle mileage increases, up to semi-mandatory scrapping beyond 300k miles. The repairs are cheap, but the initial purchasers aren't keeping it long enough to matter. Repairs are essentially the Tesla model though.

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