Zoox brings its robotaxis to Austin and Miami, California regulator confirms Tesla is ‘not operating an autonomous vehicle service’, and Is Uber paying the price for giving up on driverless cars?
The law enforcement dependency point from the TechCrunch piece is interesting.
What makes it tricky is that it's likely circular: emergency vehicles arrive to help, but the AV detects them and enters an emergency state. Now it needs to get out of the way, but that often means breaking traffic rules a human driver would bend instinctively. So the vehicle stays stuck, and the officer ends up moving it themselves.
At 500K rides per week, that stops being an edge case.
Yea I think there needs to be a tech solution here. It's a bit ridiculous to rely on first responders to move AVs out of the way and this problem is only going to get worse.
Stay tuned though as I'll be featuring an interesting guest post from UC Berkeley ITS about this topic shortly :)
From a TDD reader via email: Curious to hear your thoughts on Tesla’s robotaxi prospects. Some argue their low production costs could eventually let them dominate, but progress still seems pretty slow so far.
My take: That’s the big “what if” with Tesla. If they can actually crack self-driving and get anywhere close to Waymo on safety, they’ve got some massive structural advantages from their vertical integration. They can produce 5k+ cars per day, while Waymo’s entire fleet is only around 3,500 vehicles. On top of that, they’ve got a pretty rabid fan base that could put personally owned vehicles onto a Tesla robotaxi network, in addition to fleet vehicles, which could help solve the peak demand problem that Waymo and other AV operators run into.
The law enforcement dependency point from the TechCrunch piece is interesting.
What makes it tricky is that it's likely circular: emergency vehicles arrive to help, but the AV detects them and enters an emergency state. Now it needs to get out of the way, but that often means breaking traffic rules a human driver would bend instinctively. So the vehicle stays stuck, and the officer ends up moving it themselves.
At 500K rides per week, that stops being an edge case.
Yea I think there needs to be a tech solution here. It's a bit ridiculous to rely on first responders to move AVs out of the way and this problem is only going to get worse.
Stay tuned though as I'll be featuring an interesting guest post from UC Berkeley ITS about this topic shortly :)
From a TDD reader via email: Curious to hear your thoughts on Tesla’s robotaxi prospects. Some argue their low production costs could eventually let them dominate, but progress still seems pretty slow so far.
My take: That’s the big “what if” with Tesla. If they can actually crack self-driving and get anywhere close to Waymo on safety, they’ve got some massive structural advantages from their vertical integration. They can produce 5k+ cars per day, while Waymo’s entire fleet is only around 3,500 vehicles. On top of that, they’ve got a pretty rabid fan base that could put personally owned vehicles onto a Tesla robotaxi network, in addition to fleet vehicles, which could help solve the peak demand problem that Waymo and other AV operators run into.