There's a fascinating thread here, where Elon seems to go nuts for anything Google is doing, and funds "competition" for their work based on the assumption that they are much farther along than they are.
semafor.com/article/03/24/… This is literally how Tesla ended up going into driving automation tech! Most people still don't know that Google developed a system called "AutoPilot"but didn't bring it to market based on the exact safety concerns plaguing Tesla's version
thedrive.com/tech/29877/dr-…

This is a really good way to prove that you're not just a jerk, but someone who doesn't engage with technology in a thoughtful way as well.

https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1638931996666916864

Here's the thing about automation: "understanding the technology" is barely half the battle. If you don't understand the work you're trying to automate, you'll never succeed. The people who proclaim rampant job loss from automation grok the tech, but are clueless about the jobs.

Now that the "self-driving car" bubble has burst, why not spend the technology dividend on solving this actual, real-world problem?

https://twitter.com/davidshepardson/status/1638552667768193026

Right now the auto industry is planning to spend the technology dividend on Level 2 systems, which provide an enticing simulacrum of self-driving without delivering any actual proven safety benefits. That's where the money is, so never mind about safety I guess!

I asked Midjourney to show me a Persian miniature of a robotaxi and it gave the thing a lidar dome that looks like a mosque 🥹 I've been having fun trying to understand how Midjourney imagines the term "robotaxi" in different contexts, so I'll continue to post the results in this thread.

Here we have one of my favorite examples of an ancient Egyptian robotaxi, complete with a massive infotainment system

It says a lot about the Tesla fandom that the response to revelations about Tesla's malfeasance is always "oh well every other automaker does this, you just never hear about it, and though I don't actually cite any sources just trust that I have looked into this."

https://twitter.com/DuncanA22088014/status/1636034100451586051

Tesla has tried to do this itself, for example in its only public statement on my reporting about its record of environmental violations at Fremont.

I dug into their claims, and the comparison Tesla drew actually shows how much worse their record is
thedrive.com/tech/28432/tes…

The whole "this wasn't VCs, this was just SVB" narrative elides a major point of this whole episode: insularity concentrates risk in lots of ways. You think it was a coincidence that a bank so embedded in this specific ecosystem failed to hedge for higher interest rates?

https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1634925951220867072

Like, I guess it's probably a good thing that Silicon Valley didn't do all of it's Finding Out all at once (as much as some players might deserve it)... but let's not pretend we can or should prevent that Finding Out from happening in a more orderly fashion.

Good morning, today is March 1st and it is the fourth anniversary of the passing of Jeremy Banner.

Jeremy wasn't the first person to die in a Tesla with Autopilot active, but his crash is one of the most shocking Autopilot deaths because it shows how little Tesla cares 🧵 The crash that killed Jeremy was a new kind of crash, where the driver had plenty of time to see the obstacle but was inattentive due to overreliance on Autopilot. The @NTSB found Banner had clear line of site for five seconds when the truck started turning but didn't brake.

https://twitter.com/business/status/1619067240422248456

"SEC officials are weighing whether Musk may have inappropriately made forward-looking statements."

No kidding, what made them suspect he might have done that?

I don't know who needs to hear this, but "Tesla's quarterly profit proves that Twitter wasn't a distraction and Elon is actually a genius after all" is less of a serious auto industry take and more just a writhing mass of online discourse brain worms. Just for starters, the things that contributed most to this particular quarter's performance were not only put in motion long ago, but also aren't actually likely to be positive factors longer-term

https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1618361357367414785

Elon Musk has touted one fix after the other for Tesla's high insurance cost problem over the years, but none of them have made a difference. @Reuters finds even brand-new Teslas are being totaled for minor collisions with <10k miles.

reuters.com/business/autos… Needless to say, this is a great way to boost demand in the short run. Minor fender-benders lead insurers to total even low-mile vehicles, magically turning one Tesla sale into two Tesla sales.

It's just too bad this approach isn't the most sustainable for the planet...

When this "Level 3" functionality is active, Mercedes takes legal responsibility for the system's actions.

This is the where "self driving" becomes a real thing, from a legal perspective.

https://twitter.com/MB_Press/status/1618671113286094849

It's easy to roll your eyes when AV companies say they "are in the trust business," but this is very literally the case.

A vehicle only becomes "self-driving" when the company trusts its own technology enough to take legal responsibility for it.

wardsauto.com/industry-news/…

Pro-Tesla influencers continue to argue that Autopilot safety benefits outweigh the deaths and crashes it has contributed to, based on Tesla's utterly debunked "safety report" data:

THERE IS NO SAFETY BENEFIT: engrxiv.org/preprint/view/… This is why @NoahGoodall's debunking of Tesla's "Quarterly Safety Report" is so important: Tesla and its supporters are unable to deny that Autopilot contributes to crashes, so they have to justify it with a false and deceptive statistical comparison.

On the recent Space with @eriz35 and @MoodyHikmet, I talked about how people at the highest levels of financial and political institutions are the last bastion of support for Musk, because they are disconnected from a lot of the substance of the work. This is exactly what I mean.

https://twitter.com/business/status/1616095764840648705

Like, OK dude... let's just look at The Boring Company alone. You know, the very first example that leaped to mind for you.

What exactly about that company speaks to Musk's entrepreneurial acumen?

What precisely has that company accomplished, in technical or financial terms?

I knew we were experiencing truly remarkable times in mobility technology when the town I grew up in, Eugene, Oregon, had its own certified unicorn EV startup.

It looks like that wild ride is finally coming to an end.
oregonlive.com/silicon-forest… My history with Arcimoto goes back more than a decade now (!), dating to the 2011 "launch" event for the Arcimoto Pulse EV.

Re-reading my coverage, what's amazing is how much the first EV mini-bubble (2006-10ish) reflected post-the industrial blues.
thetruthaboutcars.com/2009/09/featur…

Looks like maybe car ownership isn't as "finished" as Kara claimed in 2019...

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1616087797131251713

Kara claimed in 2019 that her Ford Fiesta would be her last car, comparing car ownership with equestrianism. Yet here she is, some four years later, claiming at least partial ownership of a Kia.

thedrive.com/tech/27119/how…

Spiro: "this ['funding secured' tweet] basically means 'I got this'... and he expressed that inartfully." Spiro seems to be arguing that Musk was concerned that a leak from the Saudis could blow up his take-private plans... which were being funded by... the Saudis?

Another big, meaty, but ultimately frustrating piece on Autopilot and "FSD" from the NY Times. Some really good reporting, and some absolutely incomprehensible choices like letting fans compare these systems to COVID vaccines.

nytimes.com/2023/01/17/mag… The worst thing about the "self-driving car bubble" is this entire line of logic, and nobody abuses it like Tesla. The only way this analogy is worth airing is if COVID vaccines had zero benefit, but their makers pushed fake statistics "proving" otherwise.

Not. The. Same.

Good morning, Tesla's head of Autopilot software doesn't know what an Operational Design Domain is.

For context: that's like a baker who doesn't know what "gluten" is, or like a carpenter who is unfamiliar with "wood."

https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712

In my interviews with (mostly lower-ranking) engineers working on Tesla's driving automation, I found that most knew what ODDs are but nobody ever knew what the ODD for Autopilot or FSD were supposed to be. Most didn't know Elon had explicitly sold FSD as Level 5 autonomy.

Over the past year or so I have wanted to believe that the Tesla story had turned a corner, and that long-overdue consequences had become inevitable. Today I find myself recommitting to the one thing that has been true all along: nothing is inevitable. Justice must be fought for. Everyone has been so focused on the tech and the money, that nobody has made an accounting of Tesla's human cost. The workers at all levels who were chewed up and spit out. The customers who were induced into overreliance on unsafe tech, injuring and killing themselves and others

Who are you calling a hater? Not sure there's much to add to the existing consensus on The Boring Company's Las Vegas Loop: this is the dumbest fucking idea to ever pose as a transit solution. Clumsy, labor-intensive and positively saturated in cringe. Feels bad, man.

It's more than just car dependency, Las Vegas is simply one of the most anti-mobility locations on earth. Getting around it just sucks, no matter what mode you use.

https://twitter.com/PeterCBigelow/status/1610699440591114240

Like, I get that casinos are supposed to be adversarial spaces. They are literally designed to get you lost and disoriented, without even a view outside to orient yourself. I guess if that's the baseline, the rest of Vegas seems pretty reasonable to navigate by comparison?