> As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.
So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Let's not. If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
> So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items?
Most of America has no public transit, and cars are mandatory to transit any appreciable distance (Texas, Florida, most of California, for example). That is unlikely to change, and therefore it is reasonable to discuss efforts and resources into improving environment attributes for self driving vehicles of all manufacturers. Roads are already governed by safety and regulatory standards, there is no reason those standards setting bodies should not take input from developers of self driving vehicles.
> If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
Sure, that stop sign (or rather, the roadway segment attributes necessary for the vehicle to infer that a stop is required) should be in OpenStreetMap anyway, which should be used as canonical digital ground truth for roadway intents by automakers, regulators, and roadway O&M alike.
COVID drilled a huge dent into perceived viability of public transportation. IMHO some form of self driving, self cleaning car shares is the future. At least in the underpopulated countries
Not sure why you are being downvoted since the facts agree with you. Public transport has taken a massive drop all over the world thanks to Covid. Meanwhile demand for cars has exceeded rapidly.
A bit less blak-or-white please. Demand has stayed the same, if anything. There were just restrictions put in place that prevent or at least discourage public transport use. Where I live I know people who use the bus now since their usual car sharing buddy is not driving in to work these days.
You want everyone to invest in a technology that currently only benefits a select few.
Why don't we invest that money in making current technology economical before we go asking single mothers driving clapped out Ford Taurus's to pay for it.
How else is the technology going to benefit everyone if not for spending resources on it and scaling up? That is the investment. No one donated Tesla the capital required for a $600 million global Supercharger network; their Model S and X buyers ("wealthy consumers of goods") paid for that (out of vehicle margins). Self driving vehicles will be no different, and those capabilities will trickle down as most technology does over time, from only the wealthy paying for it ($10k is a hard pill to swallow for Autopilot) to mass adoption.
Model S and X buyers are the only ones who can use them. Therefore logic dictates they should be the only ones who pay for them.
You conflate scaling Tesla up with scaling the technology up. You want everyone to invest in Tesla so that Tesla can fulfill the promises Tesla made to Tesla owners.
> Model S and X buyers are the only ones who can use them. Therefore logic dictates they should be the only ones who pay for them.
You misunderstand. All Tesla vehicles can use Superchargers. S and X owners paid for the network build out for the 3 and Y buyers (and future S and X owners, which there are less of naturally due to the 3 and Y cannibalizing higher end sales [Musk's statement from an earnings call indicates they continue to sell the S and X as "art pieces" and for "sentimental reasons", backed up by their most recent quarterly report]). Tesla has offered the network to other automakers in a cost sharing agreement, and publicly no one has agreed to that (privately, an automaker is testing interoperability). The point is that someone has to make the investment, those funds have to come from someone's pocket. The US government didn't cough up significant EV charger funds until this year as part of COVID relief [1] (and the goal is for 500k chargers by 2030 ಠ_ಠ). As of February 18, 2021, Tesla operates over 23,277 Superchargers in over 2,564 stations worldwide (an average of 9 chargers per station). Tesla's Supercharger network build was started in 2012 [2].
> You conflate scaling Tesla up with scaling the technology up. You want everyone to invest in Tesla so that Tesla can fulfill the promises Tesla made to Tesla owners.
No. I don't care if you invest in Tesla. I'm not invested in Tesla. It won't even matter if you invest in Tesla (institutional money and index funds are driving the show there, retail is just along for the ride). You're arguing that someone should come along and invest in self driving for everyone's mutual benefit, and that entity doesn't exist. Tesla likely won't even be held accountable for false marketing if they can't deliver on FSD other than a class action (for those who were savvy enough to opt out of arbitration) where purchasers receive a trivial payout, attorneys walk away with a chunk of change, but it's a slap on the wrist compared to revenue and enterprise value (which was able to grow faster than the potential penalty cost of Musk's tenuous promises). Not saying it's fair, nor right, just how it's always played out.
It's going to be interesting when class actions start happening for companies pushing the mandatory arbitration garbage. If a class action still proceeds because enough people have opted out, then it will demonstrate real damages. After which, everybody who didn't opt out will have a pretty strong case to arbitrate asking for at least the same compensation - while a settlement isn't an admission of guilt it does demonstrate merit, and the arbitrator will not want to admit that they're an outright sham. And once this gets popular (eg a one-stop website for submitting your arbitration claim), the company is going to be stuck paying all of those separate arbitration case fees as they promised.
>And once this gets popular (eg a one-stop website for submitting your arbitration claim), the company is going to be stuck paying all of those separate arbitration case fees as they promised.
Almost exactly a year ago, the article below was published talking about this exact thing. Since companies tried restricting class action lawsuits, there are now instances of death by 1,000 arbitrations.
Judge William Alsup, who also handled Oracle vs. Google, is quoted:
"Your law firm and all the defense law firms have tried for 30 years to keep plaintiffs out of court, and so finally someone says, ‘OK, we’ll take you to arbitration,’ and suddenly it’s not in your interest anymore. Now you’re wiggling around, trying to find some way to squirm out of your agreement. There is a lot of poetic justice here."
The companies made this bed, and they don't seem to like laying in it.
Ah that sounds familiar but I must have forgotten. It looks like the arbitrators are reinventing class action lawsuits (which makes sense). Of course that doesn't do anything to fix the larger issue of the huge conflict of interest.
The chargers should be open to all makes and models of EV. Single brand plugs and chargers is wasteful infrastructure.
Tesla switched to CCS in Europe. They should switch to CCS in the US as well. The next step is to open the chargers to all EVs like the other charging networks do.
You can fuel an ICE car at any fuel station so you should be able to charge an EV at any charging station. Not being able to do so makes EVs less practical than internal combustion vehicles.
Everything newfangled is expensive and thus available only to the wealthy. But if governments never spurred economic investment in new technologies we’d be 100 years behind where we are.
It's worth spending just for the improvement to the average human driver. From what I've heard, policy makers are asking autonomous car designers what would be helpful on the roads, and the first thing they would like is just better road maintenance/design to existing standards (which is something the politicians are keen on because it's too boring to get any positive press).
So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Let's not. If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.