Elon Musk's robotaxi will have a human driver for 'safety' reasons

So it's a taxi.
Motherfucker loves trying to reinvent the wheel only to end up at the goddamn wheel.
"I'ma invent a giant system that goes underground so we can move people around faster!" That's a subway, you santorum-covered condom.
- Par for the course for techbros. His hyperloop was a shittier train. UberPool is a shittier bus. All these dumbfucks grow up being told they're the specialest boys, so of course people who made better things before them were clearly wrong.
  
  Hyperloop was a raging success - it stopped funding of railway. I believe he even admitted that this was behind it to begin with.
- Motherfucker loves trying to reinvent the wheel only to end up at the goddamn wheel.
  A shittier version of the wheel.
  
  An oval.
  
  A wheel that may very well kill you, depending on a number of factors that they are well aware of, but unwilling to admit to, in order to fix them.
- props for the accurate use of "santorum."
- Oh I didn't. I use it regularly.
- The story behind that was that there was a actual plan for public transportation in California, but the hype trains surrounding this diverted all that attentionaway from meaningful changes
- “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
  -Elon Musk

Will have a driver in the "robo" taxi
Will need to only run on specific area at specific time frame
Won't run in "bad" weather
Has all other kinds of small rules and quirks.
This seems like a complete waste of time for everyone involved.
- It's almost like it's a grift for government contracts

Imagine that job though. It is your job to be a scapegoat for traffic collisions.
- Fantastic use of traffic collision, great reference.
  "Accident implies there's nobody to blame."
- I can imagine very few people will be lining up for that job.
  
  You underestimate how desperate people are becoming to feed their family
  
  There is a lot of people willing to lick Musky's taint.
  
  In this world where people are DoorDash delivery drivers I wonder what the hell you were thinking and why you don’t think that people aren’t poor enough everywhere to sign up for this
  
  Reserve army of labour

So..... A regular taxi, then? 🤔🤭😂😂😂😂
- No, this will be less convenient and more expensive. Like the tesla tunnel thing in Vegas: subway, but much worse.
  
  The autonomous taxis near me are legit more expensive than lift and Uber, the only time I tried to use it at least.
  They've also got agents watching you inside the autonomous taxi at all times, so that's fun.

I thought it was a 2 seater with no controls. Lemme guess... It's a fleet of Model 3s.
- The driver fits in the trunk.
  
  Why do you think that Teslas have a “frunk”? It’s for holding the driver, of course.
  
  Ah, so the Model S.
- Didn't Tesla choose not to allow Tesla vehicle lessee's to not buy their cars so they can convert them to robo taxis and also software upgrade them so sell at a higher price in the certified pre-owned market?
  
  That was the initial plan but it hit a number of roadblocks.
  The release of the Robotaxi product was much delayed, and had Tesla kept to the "no buyout of leased cars" they would have been swimming in returned vehicles with nothing to do with them yet.
  The policy was put in place at a time when the autonomous hardware was thought to be the "final" version (referred to as Hardware 3). It turns out the "final" version wasn't powerful enough, so a new final version was released (Hardware 4). So all the cars that were leased were not going to be useful as taxi cabs, so they offered those for sale to their leasers.
- Cybertrucks pulling wooden carts.
  
  Gotta do something with all that extra and unsellable inventory.
- The purpose built one coming in 2026 is a 2 seater. This launch is using the new Model Y's
  
  Oh so it'll be a fleet of Model Y's.

So just a regular Taxi then.....groundbreaking.
- if he innovates even more he might eventually invent trains!
- He did it again. Except now you have a shitty robo taxi with a driver that pays no attention. The worst of both worlds.

For ‘driving’ reasons.

The "human driver" in question:
- Hey man, I got 5 kids to feed
  
  I thought you said six

I must say, it's been a little nicer not having this dipshit in the headlines every single fucking day. I guess he's going to start saying things again and fuck with my peace of mind.
I think Musk should 100% trust his fucking piece of shit robotaxi tech and use it exclusively. Good chance it drives him off a bridge.

Waymo doesn't need it, but he does? lol
- That's because Tesla self-driving takes a different, and imo way worse, approach.
  Waymo relies on mapping, the entire city is basically 3D modelled and loaded into the car memory. It's more or less 'on rails'. It also uses LIDAR for live data alongside imaging cameras, again building a 3D model of its environment combined with image recognition.
  Tesla decided that, for some reason, they want their cars to drive 'like humans', only relying on vision and deployable anywhere, without pre-mapping.
  Demanding a computer to behave like humans, instead of using a computer's strengths, seems like a very poorly thought out move to me.
  
  drive 'like humans', only relying on vision […] without pre-mapping.
  Demanding a computer to behave like humans
  So basically their taxis will go into the job of driving a taxi without any prior knowledge of the city? Like a human? Only relying on road signs? Will it also stop to ask for directions? Like wtf? What kind of stupid idea is this from Tesla. Sounds absolutely moronic.
  A human taxi driver doesn't work like this. They are people who know the city very well going in, or at least used to before GPS navigation in vehicles came to aid.
  
  Arguably mapping out cities to this degree across the globe is a ginormous effort, on an order of magnitude more so than what Google Maps etc. currently provide. Thus I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to try designing something that operates purely in terms of sensory input (and of course map data where available, those approaches don't have to be mutually exclusive).
  
  While I don’t want to fanboi too much ….. as long as nobody is able to do self driving, any approach has potential. Teslas approach has the huge advantage of starting with millions of potential vehicles and they will soon be able to crank out a quarter million robotaxis every year, whereas Waymo is not ready to scale up. They’re going all in with a potential approach and if it succeeds are in position to disrupt the industry.
  It might not succeed, but no other company has succeeded yet either. The difference is they went all in, and they were willing to try something different than Internet wisdom
  (Actually, as a big fan of what Tesla used to represent, this worries me about their future: Cybertruck flopped, robotaxi may not succeed for years, semi is a very conservative market they may not be able to break into or will be slow take up , and Optimus doesn’t yet have a market. They’re making some extremely risky moves at the same time their profit margins are under a lot of pressure. )
- Waymo also has much more reliable tech. To my knowledge waymos are level 4 while Tesla is only level 2 (which doesn't even qualify as autonomous)
- Waymo have laser beams on their heads.
- Didn't Waymo start with assisting drivers though? Like I get it, fuck this shitstain, but this seems like a very reasonable approach to self driving cars.
  Step 1: Prove the concept in a closed environment.
  Step 2: Prove the concept in an open environment, but with traning wheels in case something goes wrong.
  Step 3: After extensive testing in step 2, full rollout of final product.
  
  Elon made the intentional decision to NOT use LIDAR because he's a cheapskate and unwilling to take input. He is not using an even remotely reasonable approach. He chose not to use a reasonable approach on purpose.
- When waymo was first getting qualified, they had human drivers too. Once they had so many miles, they quit needing the humans.

I'm planning to launch a human-only taxi service, but to cut costs the humans will be AI.

Will the driver be dressed like Optimus?

This is even worse than I expected. I expected another delay, or a autonomous taxi with a remote driver constantly monitoring at best. This is no better than a regular taxi.

More fraud.

yeah, totally not to keep the robotaxis from being molotoved. although after what musk did, not sure the presence of drivers will stop people.
- More like: "If a "driver" is present and the car decides to kill someone, we can blame it on the human instead of the shoddy programming"

And only handpicked hardcore cult-members are invited for the "beta-phase", and are invited to share their experiences via Video and Photo for Stock Pumping

Yet another fantastic win for the world's greatest business genius^TM.

SMH not even 700 ppl remote working in India like Amazon
- Are they allowed to honk?

Elon spent all this money on making a taxi that drives itself but needs a driver and only works some of the time.
Elon is a genius.....

This is exactly what happened with his stupid Hyperloop

Tech bros doing tech bro shit. Lord knows we didnt have taxis before.

Tesla's brand of self driving is unsafe, you say?

Remember his robots - ROFL

More like Hobotaxi, am I right?
Or Nobotaxi, if that's funnier. Whichever you like is fine.

Is the human able to get out and pee? Does it have le...like, a body? With legs? Or more like RoboCop? "Accidentally" dead person comes back to life in taxi form.
- Diapers. And an electric explosive collar if they try to run. Its cheaper than sending them to.el salvador.

Like the Paris metro

We are truly living in the future. 🤯

Can't wait for Nat geo to make a series about maga-inventions. Must be some wild never-published concepts in there.

so... uhh... what's the point?

smh.

That makes sense. At least for a year in the test case.

So the headline is pretty inaccurate.
There will be a person in the passenger seat. They aren't a safety driver, or driver at all. They've been operating with an actual safety driver for around a year now for employees only.
We don't really know what they'll do, but I highly doubt it's jump for the wheel if it's about to do something. I think it's going to be more of a, the car decides it can't do anything and is just sitting there incorrectly and they won't have to dispatch someone to fix it like Waymo does. This could be a legitimate saftey issue if the car is just stuck on the road.
Once they're happy it's not getting in situations like that they'll remove the person and dispatch people as needed.
But we won't know for a few more days when we get reports of what they're doing while the first people test it.
- The article says, "This is basically a human supervising driver whose entire job is to watch the car and make sure it does not drive itself into a ditch."
- It's a safety driver. Their systems are L2 autonomy.
- Designated scapegoat
- Another card carrying church of Elon Cult menbdr

Hate for Elon aside, would be good to get an unbiased report so, you know, we can decide for ourselves whether or not we like or dislike.

This is not news. It was always the plan to start using model y’s with drivers. Consider the timing - they are supposed to start offering the services now or soon, but are not yet building robotaxi.