Why would they be cheaper than a guy driving a Prius? Because they don’t have to PAY the guy driving the Prius.
When your biggest expense is the driver, and you cut that out, you suddenly have a lot of wiggle room. Then when you get your magical self driving car at builder’s cost (because you built it) you can save a bit more. And when the software that costs $8,000 US for anyone else to have but you can flick it on for free then you save a bunch of other costs. And then when you can probably charge the car below the posted rates for the rest of the masses (or even if you can’t but it’s still cheaper than gasoline) and your maintenance and repair costs are at cost with no labour instead of at market rates then you can shave some more costs. So now tell me how Tesla won’t be the lowest cost and highest profit ride share provider. Goodbye Uber, Lyft, and yes eventually Waymo unless they somehow pivot to some extraordinary high end bespoke limousine level service provider.
Wormius, what don’t you understand/agree with in my description of an autonomous rideshare vehicle owned by Tesla? I think I laid it out fairly well. This is the platform where you can share counter views and point out differing opinions. What exactly has you questioning the perfectly valid and quite honestly realistic future of public transportation? It’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING in Austin and San Francisco RIGHT NOW. it’s not some science fiction set 10 years in the future. As pointed out Waymo is currently offering driverless rideshare as well. What exactly are you questioning? The significant cost savings I outlined? Or the validity of the concept of autonomous rideshare vehicle owned? I’m genuinely curious.
LOL, come on man. Tesla in Austin has a safety monitor, and in San Francisco they actually have a driver in the driver seat turning FSD on and off. Can you at least be honest about it? The reason skepticism exist with Musk is because he says the same stuff over and over, but his delivery is severely lacking. You may be happy enoguh to smile while you get lied to, but most people take issue with that. If Tesla had solved FSD, they'd actually be doing it everywhere, without geo-fences and safety drivers. Because he's talked about this since at least 2020, it's hard to take any new progress seriously until he delivers.
So please, be honest, even if you have to look some stuff up on not X before you post.
Fuzz, you are being ridiculous. When Waymo started out they too had a driver behind the wheel. In Austin the safety monitor (who sits in the passenger seat) doesn’t have access to the steering wheel or pedals, the car is clearly driving itself and you cannot dispute that. In San Francisco the safety monitor is sitting in the driver’s seat because in order to get clearance to operate a robotaxi the company applying must demonstrate 50,000 miles of exactly such proof of concept. Waymo had to do it, Tesla has to do it, and subsequent competitors will have to do it. Once again this monitor is not interacting with the vehicle, they are there because they are required to be there.
Now my question to Wormius was what was he disputing - the concept of autonomous rideshare? Because as you so wisely have pointed out, Waymo has proven the concept and now Tesla is completing the requirements to do so too. So it’s not impossible, it’s not even implausible, it’s happening. There’s no denying it’s happening. And I will gladly circle back to this discussion the day that Tesla removes the safety driver as we know they one day will.
And I cannot resist, but Fuzz you have spelled the word “enough” incorrectly three different times. Have you spelled it incorrectly so often your spell check thinks that is the way to spell it? I cannot accept your libellous posts as legitimate as long as you continue to misspell “enough”.
Fuzz, you are being ridiculous. When Waymo started out they too had a driver behind the wheel. In Austin the safety monitor (who sits in the passenger seat) doesn’t have access to the steering wheel or pedals, the car is clearly driving itself and you cannot dispute that. In San Francisco the safety monitor is sitting in the driver’s seat because in order to get clearance to operate a robotaxi the company applying must demonstrate 50,000 miles of exactly such proof of concept. Waymo had to do it, Tesla has to do it, and subsequent competitors will have to do it. Once again this monitor is not interacting with the vehicle, they are there because they are required to be there.
Now my question to Wormius was what was he disputing - the concept of autonomous rideshare? Because as you so wisely have pointed out, Waymo has proven the concept and now Tesla is completing the requirements to do so too. So it’s not impossible, it’s not even implausible, it’s happening. There’s no denying it’s happening. And I will gladly circle back to this discussion the day that Tesla removes the safety driver as we know they one day will.
And I cannot resist, but Fuzz you have spelled the word “enough” incorrectly three different times. Have you spelled it incorrectly so often your spell check thinks that is the way to spell it? I cannot accept your libellous posts as legitimate as long as you continue to misspell “enough”.
You might want to dictionary that one. My spell checker has given up on me, it appears. I can't really blame it. And the safety driver does interact with the vehicle, they use the door latch on the passenger side to initiate an override. We know this because they've had to do it and it has been recorded.
I went down the world’s shortest rabbit hole, I began wondering how flat earthers deal with the concept of gravity and I found this answer:
Spoiler!
As pointed out in Terence Kreft's answer, there are those that think it’s displacement. This is easily the most wrong answer, as he explains.
There are those that think that gravity on a flat Earth is the same gravity as on a spherical Earth. Depending on whether the flat Earth is an infinite plane or is plate shaped, this has varying levels of issues.
Then there’s “universal acceleration,” the idea that gravity doesn’t exist and the Earth is accelerating upward at approximately 9.8 m/s/s. This actually comes the closest, but still has two big issues. First, at that rate of acceleration, we’d have exceeded the speed of light long ago, even if you’re a young Earth advocate.
The second issue is that the perceived acceleration of gravity of the Earth isn’t consistent, for two reasons. The first reason being that the Earth’s mass isn’t uniform enough to keep the acceleration uniform. The second reason being that acceleration towards the center of the Earth is a fraction of a percent slower at the equator than it is at the poles. This is because the centrifugal acceleration caused by 1 revolution per day at a radius of 6371 km works out to be 0.03369 m/s/s, or about 1/3 of 1% of the actual acceleration due to gravity at sea level.
Now, while that doesn’t sound like much, it works out to be about 2 km/s/day. So in order for the Earth to be experiencing acceleration rather than gravity, the poles would have to be accelerating by 2km/s per day faster than the equator, and you’re going to have a hard time explaining how the Earth would still be flat after even a single day of that, since at the end of the first day the poles would be 86,400 km higher than the equator.
And for the record, this issue tends to falsify (think counterindicate, not disprove) all the flat Earth assertions, even when they claim it’s the same gravity that a spherical Earth would have.
Displacement theory is wildly dumb.
Flat earth having equal gravity as a round earth makes no sense, the density of different surfaces would vastly change the effect of gravity in different locations.
Universal acceleration is also wild, what force exerted on earth would cause uniform acceleration? Does terminal velocity not exist? Would the earths mass not change as pieces of the planet would fall away with no gravity to hold it in place?
Wormius, what don’t you understand/agree with in my description of an autonomous rideshare vehicle owned by Tesla? I think I laid it out fairly well. This is the platform where you can share counter views and point out differing opinions. What exactly has you questioning the perfectly valid and quite honestly realistic future of public transportation? It’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING in Austin and San Francisco RIGHT NOW. it’s not some science fiction set 10 years in the future. As pointed out Waymo is currently offering driverless rideshare as well. What exactly are you questioning? The significant cost savings I outlined? Or the validity of the concept of autonomous rideshare vehicle owned? I’m genuinely curious.
I didn’t say it was happening, I am saying it’s not profitable and the only reason they’d succeed in any marketplace is undercutting existing rideshare or conventional taxi services so that they go under. I think you’re fooling yourself if you think what they are doing is cheaper than the taxi driver in a Prius. Waymo, arguable the leader in this space, doesn’t even have any human ride-alongs to have to pay, and they’re losing about $2b a year. There’s nothing to suggest that Tesla would do better, and their FSD isn’t really ready for prime time.
Waymo is at a cost disadvantage because they have to first buy their cars from a manufacturer and then add on a suite of sensors and then map the geofenced area before sending their robotaxis into the wild. Tesla can build their cars for about one third of the cost, sensors and cameras and software included. So out of the gate they are about one hundred thousand dollars ahead of Waymo per cab. And in some districts such as Austin, Waymo has partnered with Uber so a portion of the fare collected is split with Uber in exchange for access to their ride hailing app and distribution network.
And when you compare Tesla to some guy with a Prius who drives for Uber, he has to pay for that Prius and the gas and charging and maintenance and for that he gets a portion of the fare. So let’s say the fare is $20. Ten might go to Mr Prius Driver and ten goes to Uber. Now Tesla comes along and charges $16, no middleman because their manufacturing costs are so much lower and no driver to pay. If their cost is say $10 then $6 of the $16 is profit to Tesla. If Uber wants to compete they have to reduce their fare from $20 to $16. Where does that come from? If they take it all from Mr Prius Driver and he only makes $6 whereas before he would make $10 for the same ride, he’s going to say forget it and go work somewhere else. If Uber eats the $4 reduction they are probably losing money on each ride and the shareholders start to get upset (well until they have sold their shares, then it’s no longer their problem). Or Uber could wise up and get rid of Mr Prius Driver altogether and only use autonomous robotaxis. But since Uber doesn’t own its own fleet of vehicles, they either need to partner with Waymo or a similar technology, and those partners will want to get paid, or Uber will have to spend billions developing their own self driving software, gathering real world data, training their vehicles to operate on that software and data, and oh I forgot, they’d have to go out and buy a fleet of vehicles to actually deliver the service. So since they don’t have the billions to do that, they will simply have to get by on thinner and thinner margins as Tesla continues to drive down costs (hello lower-cost dedicated two-passenger no steering wheel or pedals cybercab people are scoffing about) and it’s only a matter of time that Tesla claims the Winner Takes Most prize in the rideshare market. Now do you see how bleak it looks for Uber, Lyft and Waymo? They are at a massive cost disadvantage and the only way they could continue to charge their current fares is to offer high end ultra luxury service, which is not a mass market offering.
Do the Costco/Kirkland granola bars, give anyone else alot of farts?
They sure do, me.
You'll have to dissect them to their individual ingredients, then eat a bunch of each pile until you find the culprit. Then weaponize this newfound concentrated power.
