I have friends on the Autopilot team (and a son). Their goal is by end of year. I've been on HN for 15+ years, and seemingly the only downvotes I get are when I post my thoughts and opinions on Tesla.
1:1 is going to be ruinously expensive. You need three shifts of remote operators. Even in the Philippines or Vietnam, if you can make the latency work, that's prohibitive.
> How do Elon Musk's predictions relate to Tesla achieving a robotaxi service or not?
>
> Ignore his predictions and just... look at whether or not the Tesla FSD team is making progress.
I'm seriously baffled by this comment. How can Elons comments not be relevant? How are you proposing we assess the progress of the FSD team? And why should the assessment be different to the last 5 years where FSD was supposedly ready (according to someone with intimate insight into the work of the FSD team) by the end of the year?
> How are you proposing we assess the progress of the FSD team?
...any metric you want? Miles driven under FSD. Miles driven without intervention. Miles driven without accident. Anecdata from friends of yours who own a Tesla. Whether or not a partially supervised pilot program has been launched in some cities.
If Elon Musk said in 1999 "I think we will achieve self-driving next year", that also has no bearing on whether or not self-driving is achieved in 2025 (in either the positive or negative direction). It only means that Elon Musk's "predictions" can't be trusted as an accurate harbinger of success. Which is precisely why you look beyond his words and at the reality on the ground, which strongly indicates Tesla has made a huge amount of progress in the last 10 years, and could be very close to having unsupervised robotaxi service in various jurisdictions.
If we use kilometers driven with drive assist as a metric then nearly car manufacturers will have robotaxis by the end of the year.
If we talk about anecdotal evidence then I know people who are deeply familiar with the topic (working of self driving technology at other manufacturers) and they say fully self driving is still many years away for all manufacturers. Moreover the general industry sentiment is that Tesla is behind now and that more sensors then just cameras are needed.
But instead I should believe the Tesla fan boys who just like Musk have been raving about the amazing progress and telling me that FSD is just around the corner for years.
You're not "posting your opinions on Tesla", you're literally shoveling them into everybody's throats. You'd be "posting your opinions" when it was one, two comments, and not plenty, like under this news. You're a Tesla freak or fanboy, not an objective commenter.
I think the downvotes might be due to one or more of the following:
- You're uncritically parroting the notoriously untrustworthy talking points of a notoriously untrustworthy company, and HN posters expect more critical thought in comments.
- You're redirecting to some rumored "goal" rather than a realistic prediction, which was the topic, and HN posters liked the topic.
- HN posters may think that your vested interest in tesla behooves you to think more critically than the average person on matters involving tesla, rather than less, to overcome any implicit bias you might have.
- I have a goal of end-of-month, so that means I'll have it even sooner than tesla, right? This is how many view the claim by tesla, except I, a random person, literally have less of a reputation for dissembling and failure to deliver than tesla does.