Are robotaxis the future? Or instead, the past?
Are robotaxis the future? Or instead, the past?
Cars, being fast moving and heavy, are quite dangerous. They should be well regulated for safety. But it turns out regulations can be bought and paid for by lobbying money…
NY Times reports on how Baidu had a major outage in Wuhan, stranding passengers in the middle of busy streets and even causing at least one collision. In fact, robotaxis from China have had a very questionable safety record.
Wired reports that Tesla acknowledges that their "robotaxis" are sometimes actually driven by humans. This is of course not a surprise given the Tesla Optimus robots are known to actually be just teleoperated puppets. Certainly is peculiar that the company is valued at $1.4T based on robotaxis and humanoid robots.
Benzinga reports that the California Public Utilities Commission has declared that Tesla does not have true autonomous capability and therefore does not have an actual robotaxi system. Whoops. You can always count on Elon to not speak the truth.
NBC Bay Area reports on how rideshare drivers filed a formal complaint with the CPUC alleging that Waymo "has been knowingly violating the conditions of its state permit by transporting unaccompanied minors." This is a known and ongoing problem that Waymo has acknowledged occurs.
Bloomberg reports that with autonomous vehicles we should expect a significant increase in traffic, making it yet another tragedy of the commons.
NY Times reports on an additional issue with riding in a Waymo robotaxi: one might be the subject of a great deal of hostility.
NY Times reports on how automous trucks are coming to certain highways (Texas) soon. But no one knows if they will cause serious safety problems due to phantom braking.
FastCompany looks at a database of problems the San Francisco transit agency has had with Waymos, and it turns out to be far worse than Waymo lets on to.
BBC reports on how and why the San Francisco group Safe Street Rebel is disabling Waymo vehicles.
SF Standard reports that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors grilled Waymo on the epic disaster when 1,500 Waymos got stuck during a power outage. Waymo has still not acknowledged that a large part of the problem was that cellular communications completely went down for swaths of San Francisco once the backup batteries for the cell towers ran out of juice. Waymo's only solution for this problem is not talking about.
We already knew that remote operators were involved in driving Waymo "autonomous" vehicles. But this NTSB report provides a concrete example of the remote operator dangerously providing incorrect information, causing the Waymo robotaxi to pass by a stopped school bus. Credit goes to Phil Koopman for calling out this problem.
NY Times reports on how the state of New York is expected to withdraw its proposal for expanding autonomous vehicles outside of New York City. The humans (mostly labor groups and taxi drivers) have spoken!
The Verge reports that Waymo is still trying to hide that remove drivers in the Philippines are actually controlling the vehicles in some situations.
electrek reports that Tesla has dodged a 30-day suspension in California by finally changing their false marketing campaigns. Tesla is completely dropping "AutoPilot" and will only refer to FSD through the amazing contradiction of "Full Self Driving (supervised)"
electrek reports that Tesla Rbootaxis keep on crashing. And finally Tesla admits to one of their robotaxi crashes resulted in hospitalization.
