Thank you for caring about the deaths in Tesla cars while omitting the 40k or so car death every year in the US. You can keep your sanctimonious bs to yourself.
Accidents happen. That's life. A few less ignorant "FSD" Musk fan boi fools the better. How's that? But hey sales continue to crater so less fan bois will be dying in the future. Tomorrow is RobotTaxi day. Well the true day, months if not years from now, will be if/when the public actually uses them. Hype, hype, hype.
Tesla "self-driving" racks up another victim. This is your reminder to stay the hell out of Austin where Musk's Robotaxi service is scheduled to start tomorrow. Motorcyclist sues after out-of-control ‘self-driving’ Tesla mows him down on Texas highway https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...riving-motorcycle-lawsuit-texas-b2774095.html
Tesla's Robotaxi service requires an employee in every car and is only open to a "hand-picked a friendly crop of initial riders, which featured investors and social-media influencers who live-streamed their trips". It's not a real service actually available to the population of Austin. The "service" is pretty much a joke; way behind Waymo and others. Tesla Starts Long-Awaited Robotaxi Service With Low-Key Rollout https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-starts-long-awaited-robotaxi-003252048.html (Bloomberg) — Tesla Inc (TSLA). rolled out its long-promised driverless taxi service to a handful of riders Sunday, a modest debut for what Elon Musk sees as a transformative new business line. The first robotaxi trips were limited to a narrow portion of Tesla’s hometown of Austin, with an employee in each vehicle keeping tabs on the operations. The carmaker hand-picked a friendly crop of initial riders, which featured investors and social-media influencers who live-streamed their trips. In one video, Herbert Ong, who runs a fan account, marveled over the speed of the vehicle and the ability to park autonomously. Another influencer with the @BLKMDL3 handle on X said the trip was “smoother than a human driver.” Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor who runs an account focused on the company, called the experience “awesome.” With no kickoff event and little in the way of formal announcements, Tesla has relied largely on word of mouth and media coverage ahead of the robotaxi launch, which comes about a decade after Musk began talking about the possibility. The unveiling was uncharacteristically low-key for a company that held a “Cyber Rodeo” to mark a Texas factory opening in 2022 and an invite-only party near Hollywood last year to unveil autonomous products. Musk is reorienting the carmaker around hyped-but-still-unproven technologies including self-driving vehicles and humanoid robots. Some investors are counting on new markets to revive Tesla following a sales slump and consumer backlash against the chief executive officer. Its shares have tumbled 20% this year. “Robotaxis are critical to the Tesla investment case,” Tom Narayan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said in a note. About 60% of Narayan’s valuation for the shares is attributable to the self-driving vehicles. The videos of the robotaxi launch posted Sunday were largely mundane, showing Model Y SUVs driving short distances, navigating intersections, avoiding pedestrians and parking — albeit with no one sitting in the driver’s seat. There were some hiccups, like when one streamer tested a button to have the vehicle pull over and it instead briefly stopped in the middle of a road before the vehicle began moving again. The first riders are being charged a flat rate of $4.20 per trip, Musk said Sunday, though it’s unclear what pricing will look like longer term. Robotaxis will be available between 6 a.m. and midnight daily within a geofenced area of the city, not including the airport, according to terms of use that some early riders posted. Service may be limited or unavailable in foul weather. The launch marks a crucial test for Tesla, which is using only 10 to 20 vehicles at first. It’s aiming to show it can safely and successfully navigate real-world traffic, which has tripped up some other companies and brought regulatory scrutiny. Cruise, the now-defunct autonomy business of General Motors Co., grounded its fleet in late 2023 and had its operating license suspended in California following an accident that injured a pedestrian. Uber Technologies Inc. ceased testing self-driving vehicles after one of its SUVs struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018. Less than three years later, the company agreed to sell its self-driving business. While Tesla hasn’t said when the robotaxi service will open to the general public, Musk has pledged to scale up quickly and expand to other US cities in the near future. The company faces a crowded market in Austin. Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., is scaling up in the city through a partnership with Uber. Amazon.com Inc.’s Zoox is also testing there. Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities who rates Tesla outperform, said he expects robotaxis to be competitive with Waymo from the start. After a member of his team rode in one Sunday, the analyst told Bloomberg the robotaxi user experience was “better than expected.”
How many days until Musk's Robotaxis are banned from the streets of Austin after they hit someone. Tesla Robotaxi Videos Show Speeding, Driving Into Wrong Lane https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-robotaxi-videos-show-speeding-161403957.html (Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc.’s self-driving taxis appeared to violate traffic laws during the company’s first day offering paid rides, with one customer capturing footage of a left turn gone wrong and others traveling in cars that exceeded posted speed limits. In a video taken by Rob Maurer, an investor who used to host a Tesla podcast, the Model Y he’s riding in enters an Austin intersection in a left-turn-only lane. The Tesla hesitates to make the turn, swerves right and proceeds into an unoccupied lane meant for traffic moving in the opposite direction. A honking horn can be heard as the Tesla re-enters the correct lane over a double-yellow line, which drivers aren’t supposed to cross. In two other posts on X, initial riders in driverless Model Ys shared footage of Teslas speeding. A vehicle carrying Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, reached 35 miles per hour shortly after passing a 30 miles per hour speed limit sign, a video he posted shows. In a separate live stream from Herbert Ong, a YouTuber with more than 123,000 subscribers, he commented that the vehicle was going faster than the posted limit of 35 miles per hour. “It’s going at 39 right now, which is perfect, right, because I don’t want to drive at 35, and it’s driving at the same flow of traffic,” Ong said. “If everyone else is driving at this speed, you want to be at the same speed.” Representatives for Tesla, the Austin Police Department and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the videos. The automaker recalled more than 362,000 vehicles in February 2023 after NHTSA said its driver-assistance system may allow cars to infringe on local traffic laws. A spokesman for the city of Austin said it hadn’t received any safety incident reports regarding Tesla’s robotaxis over the weekend. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk celebrated the start of Tesla’s robotaxi operations on Sunday, congratulating employees for what he said was a successful launch. Wall Street analysts also published broadly positive reports, with Barclays analyst Dan Levy writing that the first day of service was “largely uneventful.” Tesla shares rose 9.3% as of 1:33 p.m. in New York on Monday after earlier gaining as much as 11%, the biggest intraday jump since April 9. Another video posted Sunday captured two riders in a driverless Model Y having trouble after pressing a button on the rear screen of the vehicle to indicate that they wanted the vehicle to pull over. After the YouTuber who goes by Bearded Tesla Guy pressed the button, a message popped up on the screen indicating that the Model Y would find a safe location to pull over. But rather than execute a pull-over maneuver, the vehicle came to a stop in the middle of the road. After the riders have a brief discussion with a remote customer-support worker who gets the Tesla going again, it took a second conversation with remote support to get the Model Y to route to the riders’ desired drop-off destination.
(THEDAILYUPSIDE) TECHNOLOGY Amazon’s Driverless Cab Company Zoox Revs Up ‘Toaster Taxis’ Photo via Travis Ball/Travis P Ball/Sipa USA/Newscom Amazon hopes ride-hailers love direct eye contact because its carriage-style robotaxis feature four seats facing each other. After cutting the ribbon on a new factory in California, Amazon is ramping up production of its bidirectional, self-driving cabs ahead of a planned launch in Las Vegas later this year. The Bay Area facility currently churns out one robotaxi a day, but Zoox hopes to boost that rate to three an hour by next year. After buying Zoox five years ago for $1.3 billion, Amazon is prepping a big push onto the roads of major cities (first, Las Vegas and later, San Francisco, Austin and Miami). But rivals are already there. The Road More Traveled Alphabet’s Waymo said it provides 250,000 rides a week in its self-driving cabs, up from 10,000 two years ago. Riders can hail a driverless Jaguar from Waymo’s app in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo also recently applied for a permit to operate in New York City, where state law will require a driver, though the company is pushing to change that provision. So far, Waymo is the only fully operational self-driving taxi service in the US, but Tesla is trying to join it ASAP: CEO Elon Musk promised in 2021 that Tesla would have a million robotaxis on the road by now, which … didn’t happen. Tesla did, however, put a small group of robotaxis on the road in Austin, Texas, last weekend, which Musk described in a virtual victory lap as “the culmination of a decade of hard work.” Regulators are investigating Tesla’s self-driving tech in connection with fatal accidents as critics raise red flags about its robotaxi’s lack of lidar and radar, which Waymo and Zoox use. Waymo and Zoox have been investigated after incidents including erratic driving. Yellow Light. Zoox is trying to join a race that Waymo’s already a few laps into, but Waymo may have made the road a little smoother. Waymo eased riders into the concept of driverless taxis with its fleet of Jaguars, which look like regular cars with some extra gadgets whirring around. Zoox’s autonomous taxis don’t even have a steering wheel, so Zoox has planned a marketing push to persuade riders to hop into its toaster taxis. What’ll probably be more important for swaying would-be riders is how safe upcoming robotaxi rollouts are. Written by Jamie Wilde
It won't last. People in Austin are demanding the Robotaxi service be shut down -- at the same time the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating the inability of Musk's Robotaxis to follow basic traffic rules. Tesla Robotaxi incidents eyed by regulators https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesl...mo-opens-up-service-in-atlanta-154814761.html The start of Tesla’s (TSLA) Robotaxi test apparently didn't go as smoothly as the company touted. Meanwhile, rival Waymo is expanding into another US city. In several videos posted to X.com, Tesla Robotaxis appear to violate local traffic laws by driving above posted speed limits, swerving across lanes, and hesitating to turn. In one instance, a rider named Rob Maurer posted a video in which a Tesla Robotaxi enters a left-turn-only lane, then proceeds to go straight through the intersection and cross a double yellow line the process, committing two traffic violations in the process. Tesla stock was down 2% in early trade. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has taken notice. “NHTSA is aware of the referenced incidents and is in contact with the manufacturer to gather additional information,” a spokesperson said to Yahoo Finance. “Under US law, NHTSA does not pre-approve new technologies or vehicle systems — rather, manufacturers certify that each vehicle meets NHTSA’s rigorous safety standards, and the agency investigates incidents involving potential safety defects.” NHTSA said following an assessment of the incidents, it will take any necessary action to protect road safety, adding that its investigation into Tesla’s FSD-Supervised/Beta software remains open. Tesla is operating its limited test in Austin, Texas, with select users able to summon Tesla Model Y robotaxis, of which 10-20 seem to be in operation. Bloomberg News was first to report on Tesla’s Robotaxi infractions.
I'm sure Tesla was prepared to face the onslaught of media looking to spin micro issues into macro ones.