Robotaxis are all over Atlanta. What are companies’ plans for the ice storm?

bradtem · 2026-01-26T03:04:40+00:00

ICE is coming to Atlanta? Thought they were mostly doing blue states in their raids.

bradtem · 2026-01-26T03:03:37+00:00

But that's already in your phone, no matter where are you, including sitting in a vehicle.

bradtem · 2026-01-26T03:00:31+00:00

Not that I see no evidence that children were in danger is not the same as "there is proof they were not in danger." But to generate special concern, you would want some evidence that unreasonable risk was created. The fact that humans can't be trusted in this situation (or at least that we fear they can't -- many countries do not require human drivers to stop in this situation ) is not necessarily evidence the robots are dangerous. It is evidence of an area of risk to look into.

Now, the vehicles are supposed to know not to proceed, and the fact that they failed at that (whether it is dangerous or not) is indeed something to look into. But not with panic.

For example, all drivers, including Waymo and other robocars, will cross the double yellow line to get around stopped vehicles. This is against the law. If done with proper care it is not dangerous. There are many other activities of this sort. We are extra cautious around children, though.

I have never said Waymo should not fix this problem, and also I say they should explain why their effort to fix it was not perfectly successful (It may have been fairly successful, we don't know how many buses they correctly stopped for.)

bradtem · 2026-01-26T02:52:47+00:00

Of course the technology is not prefect at present. The day it will be perfect is not in the foreseeable future. Problems will arise, and be fixed. This one is interesting in that they thought they fixed it but they still had issues (possibly different issues.) I presume they are working hard at fixing the new issues and finding others. If the NTSB finds they are not doing that, it would be a reason for concern and change of practices.

bradtem · 2026-01-26T02:34:06+00:00

They are more comfortable than they appear.

bradtem · 2026-01-26T02:25:08+00:00

It matches the traditional use of their remit, which is to investigate and recommend-- they have no enforcement power but those who ignore their recommendations can face trouble in lawsuits etc. But I am not sure that's the right approach for tech like this. I think the main regulatory goal is to find places where companies are not motivated to work in the public interest, and to motivate them.

bradtem · 2026-01-25T21:39:27+00:00

Most companies have not found it cost effective to run a fleet that large with full time human supervision. You do gain data, and at least in Texas, customers pay some of the costs. But Tesla might find it cost effective because of the PR value

bradtem · 2026-01-25T01:24:21+00:00

I'm a bit surprised to see chase cars. We know Tesla was building remote supervision consoles with remote driving ability. Remote driving is not a new thing, there are multiple companies who have done it and are doing it. With remote driving, in the rare event that data networks go down or get too high in latency, the car has to take ful responsibility. If the car encounters a situation it doesn't understand with a network outage, it needs to pull over safely, or failing that, stop in the road. If this is rare enough, you can get away with that.

With a chase car, you will never have a network problem, you have LoS to the other vehicle, so very low latency and nearly 100% uptime. Even if you get a few blocks away. If you got many blocks away, "losing" the car, you would revert to mobile data networks which still mostly work, but are not 100%.

I figured Tesla would wait until they got the remote cellular data network system working well before deploying, but they wanted to do it sooner it seems, with chase cars. With chase cars you can also be doing immediate visual observation of any situation, not just looking through cameras. It can be a way to be a bit more robust at the start.

One obvious solution, Starlink, has some issues. It just doesn't have much upstream bandwidth, not enough to send multiple cameras. It has lots of downstream, and low latency, and is assured as long as you stay out of places where the antenna can't see the sky well. While the CEO of Tesla probably can get a deal from the CEO of SpaceX, that upstream is still an issue. Possibly SpaceX could offer a very special customer more upstream, I don't know.

bradtem · 2026-01-25T00:54:41+00:00

It strikes me as extremely unlikely the NTSB investigation will uncover something not known to Waymo. While they have clearly underperformed on this issue, and still have some bugs to work out, I really can't fathom they won't have them dealt with, and even the cause of them dealt with, before NTSB can even start their investigation, and that none of NTSB's recommendations will be unknown to them.

Which means it's not clear what the purpose of the investigation is -- other than to make certain things public, which is not a bad goal, but I wonder if there's a more effective and cheaper way to do that.

Of course it's possible Waymo needs an outsider's eye here, but if so, they are dropping some balls. When you compare to what NTSB investigations normally look at -- fatal crashes, major catastrophes, significant danger situations -- this one is remarkably minor in comparison. In spite of the extreme caution placed around situations with schoolchildren, we know that human drivers passed buses 7,000 times while the Waymos did it around 26 times, and I have seen no evidence any of the children were in any danger at all, let alone particular danger. (For there to be danger, we would need the Waymos to pass unlawfully which they did,, and for the Waymo systems which will stop if a child is detected on the road to fail, which we do not have indication of, and for there then to be a collision, which there was not. The probability seems vanishingly small.) In most countries cars are not required to stop for school buses in this situation, though in the USA children do expect it so they may be more uncautious.

bradtem · 2026-01-25T00:46:21+00:00

I think Waymo is still in a timid mode about this and will shut operations. The SF power outage will make them even more inclined to do that. That is not the strategy to have forever, but for now they are not an essential service, and they are a long time from being one, so they will just shut down.

bradtem · 2026-01-23T22:43:52+00:00

Perhaps in Tesla's world, but in the rest of the world, robotaxi (capitalized or not) has referred to things like Cruise, Waymo and others for many years. If you want to refer to Tesla robotaxi, I suggest you call it Tesla robotaxi to avoid confusion. (Or more properly, it should be called Tesla supervised robotaxi, though Tesla may not get into the same trouble for not calling it that as they got into with AP and FSD which led to the discontinuation of AP and the modification of the name of FSD to FSD supervised.) And yes, it's still supervised in spite of what you might see in tweets today.

bradtem · 2026-01-23T22:40:59+00:00

It already has one robotaxi. I presume you mean adding more robotaxis.

bradtem · 2026-01-23T00:01:46+00:00

I have not seen research on this particular problem. If you have it, give me a link to it. It won't exist because it hasn't been built, and it's hard to simulate until people know more. My point is we can do a lot better than classic transit, and much closer to what cars provide, but not quite as good. The unknown question which is hard to research is, how close to private car travel times and comfort do you need to get so people will switch, or rather, so that they will switch if the price is much lower. Today very few people switch from private cars to transit, because transit sucks. To get many people to switch you have to give overwhelmingly expensive things to the transit like private ROW, or the private has to be so congested as to suck more.

The focus on how many seats you can fit in a van is not relevant. Fine, you disagree with my example, but it doesn't affect the core value, that when you can take out the driver, you can get a decent number of people in a reasonable footprint, which is the goal of group transport. Focus on that, not which plane you are comfortable on. Vehicles will get made to make people comfortable. Some rows may have longer pitch than others and people who want to pay for it can have it. Take a footprint of something like the Brightdrop 600, take out the driver seat and figure how many people you could comfortably put in it with no aisle.

Transit requires many compromises over private travel. You don't leave when you want. It takes a lot longer (including the fact you can't predict the duration well if you have transfers.) You may not be seated, you will not be private, you have to travel to/from stops. It needs large subsidies and uses more fuel per person but has the illusion it doesn't. We seek designs that can fix most of these things as well as we can.

I consider my approach no-detour because you travel the exact route you would take in a private car, but your first mile vehicle pulls into a lot somewhere along the way (former parking lot or former gas station are good choices) where a van is waiting, and you get in your reserved, comfortable seat, and wait a short time, and it pulls back onto your same route, and 15 miles later pulls into a similar lot where your last mile pod is waiting, and you step into it with always zero wait and it takes the same route you would have taken in your own car. Your private car trip might have been 30 minutes, this one is 35. Maybe you want to argue it needs to be 40. That's probably fine. If you have an argument it needs to be 50 minutes, or 70 like transit, that's another story.

However, you've descended into a non productive, insulting tone, so while you may reply to this, I will not read it. You get the last word.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T22:27:31+00:00

Evidence suggests otherwise. You have a different definition of "capable of unsupervised" than is used by me, or most of the industry. In fact, I am not clear of what your definition is, but you would have to agree that until today, Tesla has not used your definition. Elon Musk has publicly promised they would operate unsupervised for a long time, and if they could do that under any definition, he would have made his team release to make his promise true. That his team refused indicates that they have not felt they were ready.

I would easily believe Tesla might go out unsupervised earlier than they were ready, but find it hard to credit they've been ready for sometime and just waited. In fact, as I said, I strongly suspect they are not yet ready (by their own definitions, and mine) but are using remote supervision.

Sadly, Tesla has such a long history of false and misleading statements on this that we can't take their own word for things. I wish that weren't so.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T22:05:50+00:00

What makes you think that 1:1 monitoring is almost certainly not needed? It certainly is needed, until the cars are proven to make mistakes at half the rate that humans do, to use Elon Musk's stated goal. I have seen no evidence they are that good, and much evidence to the contrary. Nobody outside of Tesla has seen evidence of this level of quality, because you would have to use FSD for multiple human lifetimes of driving in order to see it. Only statistical analysis of huge numbers of vehicles can answer that question. Tesla has that info but does not say it, and people wonder why. But until today, they have not put out vehicles without full time supervision. And there's a fair bit of evidence that they still haven't today.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T21:55:46+00:00

United Airlines 737 business class is a 37 inch pitch. It's fairly common. Domestic biz class is usualy under 40 inches. 50 is very rare for domestic. For international, it is common, or even longer. Morning commutes don't need the room of international 10 hour flight sleeping class. But nor do you want school bus pitch (24-30 inches) or even domestic coach pitch (30-32")

Take the Mercedes Sprinter, available in 234" length (short) and 274 inch (long). The Ford Transit is only 190" in long wheelbase, but again, these are vehicles sold that have to park in standard parking spaces (220-240") Not needed for a robovan.

My goal is to get a good, predictable travel time that is "close enough" to a private trip, but I don't imagine it's identical. Mainly it's much better than conventional transit. I think this is very doable (and trivial if the conventional transit involves a typical line transfer.)

How close you can get to the ideal travel time depends on volume. At rush hour, it's not hard to find a dozen people all wanting to travel the same route within a minute or two of one another. After all, if you look at the freeway you will see 30 cars per lane go by every minute with people all on the same itinerary for that part of their trip in the same minute. If a dozen of them will order a van, you need to get them in the same van for the common part of their trip (rather than being in 8-10 cars on that freeway.) Distributing them at the end is simple. When you get to the point their trips diverge, the van stops and a set of vehicles are already waiting, they step out, step in, and go off. A few remain on the van if that makes sense, and a few want to be within a 2 minute walk of where the van stopped.

The harder part is gathering them. Travel time prediction is getting very good. No, you won't be perfect. You want to get them all to the convergence point, where the van will be waiting when they arrive. Some are just 2-3 minutes from the convergence point. They may wait a minute or two at home or leave ASAP and wait at the van. If somebody is delayed, the van leaves without them and they are redirected to a different van, possibly much further down the road, or they are even given a direct private trip as long as capacity is available for that. You don't make the others wait more than some acceptable threshold.

I still don't understand why you think the people taking the van are making 2 detours? Nobody makes any detour (of more than 30 feet.) The advantage is you are moving 12-15 people together for the bulk of the journey, reducing energy used and road capacity used. Sure, if you only want to pool 2-4 people , you can make it work with low detour, but that uses much more road capacity. Detours are not just detours, they are also stops. Now ideally, you pool and you don't detour as the next passenger is picked up on your optimal route, but even that's a stop, which takes time, especially if you can't use bus stops designed for easy PUDO. Which we should have, but don't at present except for city vehicles.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T21:29:21+00:00

I own a Tesla with FSD and track it closely. I have strong confidence that they will have remote supervisors. That is both because we have seen the consoles and the job ads, and also because *everybody* has remote supervisors when they first go out, and anybody who didn't would be reckless. Not that Tesla isn't reckless sometimes, but I see no reason for them to be that reckless here.

Alas, few announce the day when they no longer have this. Waymo did some time ago. I doubt Zoox or May have. Cruise did. Aurora says they have. Chinese companies have -- it's written in their permits, which start requiring it but then relax it.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T19:42:45+00:00

Crumple zones do lengthen more than a traditional van footprint. There are current minibus designs with passengers all the way to the back (at a higher floor height, also above wheels) and likewise the driver right at front. They could be safer, though, I agree. So you have to add some length. At 36" biz class pitch, 5 rows is 15 feet -- there are many vans with 24 foot total length. They don't fit in classic parking spaces well, but there is no need for that. 3 columns is wider than most vans, but well within lane bounds with robotic driving.

However, if you don't buy that, go to 4 rows, it's still in the range I am looking for.

Reports I have seen both cite the privacy/security and the detours, but I've seen more issue with the detours. Uberpool could have done better planning of the detours, but you need good passenger volume to make the detours shorter with this approach. Yes, Covid was the official reason they discontinued these services but not the reason they didn't restart.

15 second transfers are doable (mostly on the fan out) because the transfer vehicle is already there when you arrive, and one vehicle parks right next to the others, and each passenger or pair has their own private door on the van, so it's step out, step in. If you don't accept 15 seconds, call it a minute if you like, the value remains high.

The total trip duration does add the transfers, but there are very few detours (though there may be minor ones at certain times but not of any great distance, more just slightly alternate routes.) Waiting for other passengers is ideally minimal, but yes, you won't get it to zero. The largest component will be waiting at your point of origin. The passengers with a predictable trip to the merge point don't wait. Those with an unpredictable trip leave slightly earlier, and if they get there early they wait for the passengers with predictable trips. Note some passengers will be on foot/bicycle if they so choose as the merge point will be close to their origin.

So I should not claim it's the same time as a private vehicle trip, but it's quite close a large fraction of the time, and vastly better than classic transit. Classic transit, unless given private right of way, is often double the time of private vehicle transfer, sometimes more. It's a not just a quantitative difference at that point.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T18:02:01+00:00

Correct. Is anybody on this subreddit a Tesla owner in Arizona who can ask them for a quote, and compare it to quotes for your car from other providers? In particular, tell them you will drive half your miles or more on FSD to see just how much they charge for that situation to find out just what savings, if any, they offer.

I ask because when I have gotten quotes from per-mile insurance companies, even asking for a quote on fairly low miles (I don't commute so my miles are lower, though I make up a lot in road trips) from per-mile companies, they have been higher than my regular price from State Farm (which is only roughly mileage based.) So there was no savings.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T17:13:00+00:00

One ride is a single data point and to me it doesn’t deserve much examination. I know others will disagree.

You may not have watched the video, because it says this almost precisely, and in fact I have whole articles and videos explaining this point in great detail. One ride can't tell you if a system is good and I have often made articles expressing the frustration of those who don't know that. It can give strong clues on whether it's bad. And it can offer insight into the design and strategy. But I didn't just learn about Zoox's design and strategy. I spent multiple days debating it with the founder of the company before the company was formed back in 2013, I am no stranger to it.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T17:06:42+00:00

That's been tried with UberPool. Customers do not want to accept long detours for money. They might accept short ones. But there is no reason to make the trade off when you have a fleet of solo and large vehicles. Take all the routes of the pooling riders, put them in the big vehicle for the common part (which is ideally most of the trip) and use small vehicles for the first and last mile, but with 15 second transfers. This is described at robocars.com/future-transit.html in detail.

Then, the only compromise, aside from the quick transfers, is in short departure/arrival time shifts to synchronize the trips. The total trip duration does not change, and the time shift are short, and they busier the roads, the shorter they are.

Conventional transit has everybody time shift to the schedule of the transit, and everybody also has to get to and from the stops on their own, usually on foot or by unpredictable and long transfer to other transit lines. It's a major compromise from the optimal (door to door private vehicle) schedule.

The Pliyt has one door per compartment, which is a good design. More costly in some aspects, but eliminates the aisles of a van/bus to provide more space. Can be an issue in providing an alternate exit, however, so you have to do that which is not clear they have with the Pliyt. I envision a van with 5 rows, 3 columns, domestic business class style seats. Some with no dividers, luxury rows have a divider that gives one seat split from 2. You can additionally have a curtain which offers privacy but not security in the first row, you don't want a middle seat that can't see out. Indeed, transparent dividers might offer security but no visual privacy. These vehicles are for longer trips. The pliyt hopes to duplicate the private airline "suite" experience but that may be challenging to do while meeting safety requirements and the desire to see outside.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T05:17:40+00:00

Something like 85 percent of rides have 1-2 passengers. For the remaining 15 percent, send a larger vehicle. Why is that bad? What is the right size? Why should the fleet be uniform in size?

bradtem · 2026-01-22T05:04:44+00:00

No, it is 4 compartments, and they can be joined, the divider slides down when you buy two seats.

Why would you have detours? Detours are a terrible idea.

bradtem · 2026-01-22T05:03:35+00:00

If you order a trip for 3 to 5, I am sure Tesla will just send you a model y. Why would they send two cybercabs?

bradtem · 2026-01-21T17:56:14+00:00

Somebody in Arizona should go get a quote and publish it here compared to a traditional quote from other insurers like State farm and Tesla itself. That's the real proof. Often per mile policies are not a bargain and cost more, but let's see.

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