Robotaxi. No steering wheel or pedals!

[HemiEd]

We have several electric car threads, but this is bye week and the first time I have noticed no steering wheel or pedals. Just wow.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the highly anticipated robotaxi last night, a driverless, $30K vehicle called the Cybercab. Tesla says the car—which lacks pedals and steering wheels—will go into production by 2027. The company also debuted a 20-person robovan and touted its Optimus robots.



The debut is almost a decade in the making and comes amid a series of lawsuits and investigations over Tesla's supervised driving vehicles. The company's investors hope robotaxis will generate almost 90% of Tesla's value and earnings by 2029. This would involve drivers being able to rent their vehicle through an app when not in use, earning passive income in a "part Uber, part Airbnb" model. Tesla hopes electric vehicle sales will eventually account for only 9% of Tesla's value.



Tesla is not the first company to pursue this model; Google’s Waymo already services 100,000 paid rides per week, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Amazon's Zoox is coming soon to San Francisco.

[Otter]

I can actually buy into that under perfect circumstances a driverless vehicle is safer for everyone but what happens when there's an emergency such as a fire, accident, car jacking, dead battery, smoke coming from the engine, robbery, or a deer runs out and you go off the road let alone the one other million things that can happen.

How do you know that soulless robot isn't going lock the doors and entrap you while you're shitting your pants waiting for the AAA guy to come a shrug his shoulders because it's a robot?

There's approximately 137,000 libraries in Python and as far as I know no one has come up with:

import WhenShitHitstheFan.

[Delano]

The robots are controlled to some degree by, what is essentially, drone operators. If you trust the meme economy, the cars are probably driven remotely from an Indian call center.

[Otter]

Someone is going to have a hell of a bar story sooner or later.

[POND_OF_RED]

Originally Posted by DaFace

People are shitty drivers and could kill you just as easily.

Originally Posted by HemiEd

Curious, do you trust AI more than the average human to make emergency decisions?

I want a lot of people to have an auto driving vehicle but I definitely wouldn’t want one myself. I rent a lot of cars with the lane sensing features and the annoying cruise control feature that slows you down when it senses a car in front of you. One time I was trying to pass an oversized vehicle and getting over a little extra and the car tried steering me back into the oversized vehicle. While this feature is probably very nice to inattentive drivers, I wouldn’t trust it to save my life in a situation it’s not used to seeing which is why they call them accidents. They would work if everyone had them, but the mixture of self driving and idiot driving vehicles is very dangerous in my opinion

[BlackHelicopters]

Originally Posted by HemiEd

We have several electric car threads, but this is bye week and the first time I have noticed no steering wheel or pedals. Just wow.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the highly anticipated robotaxi last night, a driverless, $30K vehicle called the Cybercab. Tesla says the car—which lacks pedals and steering wheels—will go into production by 2027. The company also debuted a 20-person robovan and touted its Optimus robots.



The debut is almost a decade in the making and comes amid a series of lawsuits and investigations over Tesla's supervised driving vehicles. The company's investors hope robotaxis will generate almost 90% of Tesla's value and earnings by 2029. This would involve drivers being able to rent their vehicle through an app when not in use, earning passive income in a "part Uber, part Airbnb" model. Tesla hopes electric vehicle sales will eventually account for only 9% of Tesla's value.



Tesla is not the first company to pursue this model; Google’s Waymo already services 100,000 paid rides per week, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Amazon's Zoox is coming soon to San Francisco.

No thanks.