[karlgkk]

In summary:

> 10-or-so cars

> human driver behind the wheel (except in this beta)

> invitation based (apparently a very limited audience)

> geofenced not only to a city, but to a small handful of neighborhoods

> early reports suggest disengagement requires remote re-engagement

I hope they get there, more competition in this space is good. But, this is pathetic. They're so far behind Waymo it isn't even funny.

[blackjack_]

Let’s give it a little bit of time to see, but gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants is not the choice you make when you are confident with a product…

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants

Are they sycophants or are the other sites haters? Take a gander at every tech website's headlines regarding Tesla for the last few years and tell me they aren't following the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra.

The people invited to preview Robotaxi were not only unedited, they were also allowed to live stream.

[karlgkk]

Early videos are showing results that are not great, to say the least.

[_ea1k]

I understand the thinking here, but this is too early to be too negative, IMO. For the first day, I think this looks like a reasonable first step.

If they are still doing this in 3 months, it'd be a bad sign, of course. Their plan is for rapid growth next year.

We'll see if they are able to do that.

[__m]

"next year" is Musk speak for "not going to happen anytime soon"

[trainsarebetter]

Sounds like there’s actually around 32ish, based on photos from the “war room” where all the engineers have live feed from all the cars and 112 rides ? https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/1936865682810946035

[jfoster]

They had said 10 - 12 prior to launch.

Are you looking at the feeds from the cars to reach 32? Each screen is from the cameras around a single car, so you're actually only seeing 5 cars from that.

[darth_avocado]

No human behind the wheel but there are still people in the passenger seat

[jamessinghal]

The beta today was without a driver behind the wheel. Granted, the geofence is much smaller than Waymo's in Austin.

[jen20]

If you can eventually guarantee you’ll get a robotaxi instead of a car with a driver when you call one (unlike Waymo in Austin, now, thanks to their dumb partnership with Uber), they’ll likely do ok in the longer term.

[jamessinghal]

I'm rooting for Tesla being able to provide some driverless taxi competition to Waymo. Hopefully both can increase supply enough to allow for a guaranteed robotaxi booking, although anecdotally I haven't found it that hard to get a Waymo through the Uber app depending on the time.

[jen20]

I’ve only tried twice (after using it ~30 times during the preview directly through the Waymo app) - neither time resulted in a robotaxi though, and one resulted in a driver that smelled so bad I’ve sworn off ride sharing until the end of summer.

Hopefully the Tesla app forces Waymo to reconsider their deal with Uber altogether and just run it themselves like they do in San Francisco.

[jfoster]

It's only day 1.

[jnsaff2]

Day 1 or year 10. Depends on perspective.

[jfoster]

Development and releases are two different things.

[smallmancontrov]

"Tesla has self-driven 4B miles in every corner of the USA, Waymo has only self-driven 0.1B miles in select cities, how pathetic! They are so far behind Tesla it isn't even funny!"

- Me, if I wanted to be equally ham-handed in throwing the comparison for Tesla.

In reality, we are seeing two bets on two different approaches. Do you scale up supervised driving to maximize data collection/diversity and then go unsupervised? Or do you go unsupervised and then scale up problem solving as you go? The cool thing is that both of these approaches are being tried so we will find out. If you want to place a bet of your own, you can find the casino in your favorite brokerage app!

In any case, the videos of what is possible with supervised FSD are quite amazing, certainly not "pathetic," and what remains to be seen is if they can successfully navigate the supervised->unsupervised jump, which is certainly not trivial.

Arc de Triomphe: https://youtu.be/o2xKpbKZLVA?t=7

Busy China: https://youtu.be/ybBpRN4Hqbc?t=13

Manhattan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qafr3RrJRfU