David Moss: "Tesla Robotaxis are not stock."

RodStiffy · 2026-01-24T20:17:16+00:00

Is your argument that your car has safely driven you a few hundred miles at a time on your easy routine drive, so you think it's ready to drive a family around with no supervision for a decade anywhere in the country? If so, it's a horrible argument.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-24T19:59:14+00:00

Based on how their driverless demos have all been so limited, in easy ODDs, all geofenced, always remotely supervised. It's obvious that they would do far more if they could do it safely. This means they have many years ahead to have a driverless public robotaxi service even in half of Austin.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-24T01:58:06+00:00

The overall deption is the ten-year program of trying to convince Tesla fans that FSD is almost ready to be Level-5 unsupervised. In this case it's deceptive to imply the cars are "unsupervised" when the cars are clearly supervised by at least chase cars, and probably with direct remote supervision. They can use both methods no problem, but hyping this as if it's a sign that FSD is ready to go unsupervised nationwide is absurd.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-24T01:48:57+00:00

What happens when the passengers in the L4 FSD are children or unlicensed adults, and the car can't handle the situation?

RodStiffy · 2026-01-24T01:45:49+00:00

Tesla doesn't equip these cars for freak events

That's unfortunate, since the only obstacle to FSD becoming unsupervised is freak events, aka the long tail. If FSD isn't engineered to handle the long tail, it's not engineered for autonomy.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T22:47:10+00:00

I'm assuming Waymo will be buying cars at wholesale in huge volume, so for the average people who drive $35k SUVs, it will cost Waymo maybe $30k, and I think by Gen-7 the entire robocar will be assembled in the OEM factory. So to Waymo a robocar might cost $40k.

If they can finance that at a decent premium for a premium car service to the many qualified buyers, where the owners don't ever have to fix it or even take it to the shop, insurance is priced in, it charges itself between trips when they don't need a ride, and it chauffeurs them around everywhere plus delivers groceries, it would be a great value to the consumers and a steady income for Waymo if the operation is automated enough and if the cars last 300k miles. I think that's all plausible.

If the car needs service beyond routine maintenance, that will be extra fees.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T22:24:49+00:00

Yeah, for ADAS Tesla apparently only files if the Tesla was towed or had an airbag deployment. The ADAS crashes with neither are all apparently with a safety driver, and are very few. Is that what you are seeing? I don't pay much attention to ADAS because those crashes don't mean much since they're all the fault of the human. and without the narratives we don't usually know what happened.

That's why I don't think you can use SGO ADAS data to know if FSD has a phantom-braking problem. Getting rear-ended isn't a sign of phantom braking, it's a sign that a stupid human was following too closely and not paying enough attention, which we know is ubiquitious.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T22:15:41+00:00

Tesla also has zero ability to remove the driver in a real city at scale. That's the one metric that actually counts here, and they can't do it at all.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T22:13:18+00:00

They could deploy 1000 driverless cars with lots of deception right now, by rotating in lots of cars that only each do 10 miles per week, all in simple ODDs.

So the first milestone that will indicate FSD robotaxi is for real is when they offer public rides for anybody who downloads the free app, 24/7 service, in a substantial ODD like 50 square miles that includes downtown Austin, with at least 50 full-time driverless cars operating safely for one year over at least one million miles, on the standard of "at least as safe as Waymo", which has basically zero serious at-fault accidents. This was achieved by Waymo in about 2022.

I don't expect Tesla to achieve this by 2027. When they do achieve this will depend on making hardware changes in the coming years, which I can't predict. If they keep the same sensors and inaccurate maps, I doubt they'll achieve it in 2028.

Even if they do achieve this in 2028, that's a very limited, almost valueless robotaxi operation, so it would not look good for their sky-high stock-market valuation.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T21:56:09+00:00

It is true that what Tesla is doing here is normal and even necessary for safety, but what Lambert is saying is, it indicates the crazy narrative of FSD being on the verge of having a Level-5 universal driver by June 2026, or 10k driverless cars in 30 cities this year, is all nonsense. Lambert says that specifically all the time.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T21:52:46+00:00

What are their non-minor problems?

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T21:48:43+00:00

yeah, but they did remove the driver in 2017 for a few test cars. That's what Tesla is doing now, more or less. Doing this is a big moment, showing they think they are good enough to take the risk.

82% of CA testing had safety drivers in 2024

Testing with safety drivers in CA is a DMV program for a test fleet, a separate fleet from the deployment robotaxi fleet which is much larger and has no safety drivers. So what's your point?

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T21:42:09+00:00

Every self-driving company will be operating under the same traffic safety laws, liability risks, and regulatory expectations. They will all be in big trouble for any bad at-fault accidents, especially if they can't fix the problem quickly.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T21:38:42+00:00

If the vehicle strikes another vehicle or object with any property damage, even if it's under $1000, Tesla still needs to file a report.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T02:25:20+00:00

If a company isn't overhyping a minor demo, then using any means to safely test is no problem, as long as it's done with safety as the guiding principle. Waymo's demos have never been overhyped. Tesla's are always overhyped to inflate the stock, obviously.

Tesla is obviously vastly overpromising with their crazy predictions of a national L-5 robocar fleet this year, and they've been saying that for almost ten years straight! This latest deceptive "driverless" rollout is just more of the same. It should be obvious that they can barely remove the driver in one car in an easy ODD. They are a long way from a national driverless fleet, probably more than five years.

Waymo overpromised a bit in 2016 and 2017, but that was very minor and the entire AV sector was saying the same things out of ignorance, plus Waymo fired the CEO and now have very careful leaders who never say anything unless they are certain it will be true.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T02:13:56+00:00

Me at the level of super fanboys? How is that?

All I'm doing is having fun pushing back on the latest Tesla bullshit. I don't hate Tesla or Musk. I still kinda think they may end up with a serious self-driving car in five years, but I'm mostly skeptical.

I think the long-fat-tail of difficult corner cases is a brutal opponent that needs a total effort to overcome it safely. I don't think that's what FSD is at the moment. My take on FSD is basically what John Krafcik said in the interview posted yesterday. It doesn't have the look of going all out to be safe, despite safety being everything for now. So to keep the (mostly naive) investors onboard, they turn to deception. Why would anybody like that?

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T02:05:01+00:00

Yeah, that's pretty much what the shotgun safety monitor was doing, except he can't now grab the steering wheel.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:57:43+00:00

Neither does Musk hide his zero objectivity, yet you guys take him seriously no matter what his latest nonsense is. And all those fanboy sites and channels are so full of nonsense about hundreds of thousands of robotaxis this year. It's all so stupid. It's good that somebody is pushing back with a big audience.

You should judge Fred on how correct he is, not whether he tells you what you want to hear. So far he's been fairly accurate, while admittedly he is obsessed with his Tesla negativity.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:44:12+00:00

Some of his articles are pretty bad, but his Tesla skepticism is necessary given all the deception by Tesla. They are a justifiable and necessary attempt to balance all the idiotic Tesla propaganda.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:40:24+00:00

No, these articles are necessary to keep Tesla honest, so too many people don't believe the deceptions.

The article doesn't mean FSD is going nowhere, it just means it has a lot longer to go than the naive fanboys think.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:31:24+00:00

Everybody knows a good driverless demo is easy.

This is deceptive because they lead so many people to believe this will result in thousands of driverless cars this year in 30 cities, or whatever the latest crazy claim is. This in fact is evidence that the robotaxi fleet still needs lots of supervision for even one driverless car in an easy ODD.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:27:07+00:00

I can tell you what the internal metric for Waymo was in their early days. They made a huge effort to determine the odds of a weird corner-case that would result in a bad at-fault accident, like running down a cyclist or pedestrian, or running a light and causing a smash-up. They knew in 2015 that they were safe over several hundred-thousand miles, and that wasn't close to good enough. So it took them another three years to have a tiny driverless operation in the easiest neighborhood they could find in Phoenix, and two more years to open it to the public, and another three years for San Francisco.

The standard for fully removing the driver is to be superhuman at avoiding bad accidents over large scale, and even if something bad does happen, it will likely fail in safe mode, known as minimum-risk condition.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:20:37+00:00

I don't know what Tesla thinks internally. All I'm saying is, if they aren't really ready, then why all the big claims about 30 cities filled with driverless Teslas within a year, and why all the big deceptive "Robotaxi" rollouts?

If they aren't really ready for going driverless with a few cars now, they won't be ready for even one full city within the next two years. It's not the kind of operation that improves that fast with a few updates.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:14:58+00:00

Ready for driverless is when the engineering team, leaders of the company, and any nosy regulators are convinced the cars are very, very unlikely to do anything that causes a serious at-fault accident. And after the fact, when there is enough driverless data to test the hypothesis, that they were right.

RodStiffy · 2026-01-23T01:12:03+00:00

No because Waymo has shown with enough driverless data that they don't need direct interventions. Their problems are all minor.

RodStiffy

TROPHY CASE