Tesla uberbulls often like to say that Tesla is the leader in self-driving because while it doesn’t have a commercially available autonomous ride-hailing service like Waymo, it doesn’t rely on geo-fencing and mapping like Waymo.
They argue that if Tesla wanted to do that it could, but it prefers to focus on an autonomous system that could drive anywhere, anytime, without mapping.
However, it is questionable that they could do it if they wanted to because they still haven’t done it on a project much simpler than Waymo’s operations in Pheonix and other cities: the tunnels under Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop is The Boring Company’s first full-scale loop project currently in commercial use.
Elon Musk’s tunneling start-up completed the $50 million project in just over a year.
A Boring Company Loop system consists of tunnels in which Tesla electric vehicles travel at high speeds between stations to transport people within a city. The Boring Company said that it was working with Tesla to use its self-driving system inside those tunnels, which would enables to get rid of the current drivers and lower the cost of operation.
However, 2 years and several more tunnels connected to the Loop later, The Boring Company is still using drivers in the tunnels.
The last paragraph sums up my own thoughts pretty well
It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in Tesla FSD if they can’t get it to work single-direction, zero-traffic, no weather, zero-obstruction fixed-route. It’s quite literally the easiest use case possible.
Why hasn’t this problem been solved yet?
This is a very good question. Elon why are you so pathetic at self driving?
Anyone is free to go to YouTube and see how well the current version of FSD does in traffic. To imply its performance is anything short of amazing in the year 2024 means they’re either uninformed or lying. It’s not flawless and it’s never going to be but it’s quite safe to say it drives much better than the average human driver and when it fails it’s virtually always that it got stuck - not that it caused an accident.
As a heavy FSD user in a car I hate that I own at times I…mostly agree with you. It can take me flawlessly to and from the store or work on a regular basis with a mix of freeway, city streets, unprotected turns, pedestrian activity, etc.
But dear god sometimes it is just dumb. Like getting into the opposite lane of the turn lane it needs to be in now and then bailing on its current route and taking some longer one (I’ve now anticipated when it will happen and will just make it stop, but c’mon).
It’s also safer than a human at times because it drives like a slug going uphill on a hot day. It’ll sometimes stop too long, inch forward too slow, wait too long to go, or whatever. And I get, don’t get me wrong, better safe than sorry, but 1/3rd of the time I just take over because I need to goooo.
edit: What’s confusing to me is if no cars are around, it will not always choose the same behavior in the same exact situation. Most notably the turn into my neighborhood, sometimes it just decides to miss it. Sometimes it decides to route elsewhere first. Then I’m like…yoooo, you were so close and there are no cars, no people, it’s light out, wtf are you doing.
Might have something to do with Musk’s insistence on not using LIDAR. The cameras probably struggle with the lack of distinct / unique features in the tunnels.
That’s what I’m thinking. It’s probably some obstacle created by management, not a technical issue.
This sounds like a problem setting for physics 101. Is that why they expected the hyperloop to work in a vacuum?
Didn’t they go with cameras only for their automation and like zero radar/lidar that could probably sort this out?
I believe they did. So why not paint a pattern on the walls for the cameras to follow? Elon should be ashamed that this problem hasn’t been solved in two years, but he’s a shameless jackass, so…
I hope, at least, that it’s his company that’s responsible for paying the drivers, and not the city.
Why hasn’t this problem been solved yet?
Because it’s not an easy problem to solve.
The issue is that morons like Elon want people to believe that it is.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m a moron on this and many other topics but…
This is an environment that doesnt include weather, pedestrians, many other cars, or other obstacles. I feel like my 4 year old Honda could almost manage that. It can follow a lane at a set speed without me actually driving. It can’t manage obstacles or signs or anything like that so it clearly isn’t self driving and I’m not claiming it is. The only hard part would be the intersection between two tunnels but I feel like that part has already pretty much been addressed by Tesla FSD tech.
Part of the problem is to meet their quoted throughput of passengers they would need to fully load/unload each vehicle in ~30 seconds. 4 adults in, 4 out, with luggage, with no delays or struggling. That’s… not very feasible for a commercial passenger car. They’re not designed for quick loading and unloading.
The tunnels are a single lane without a service tunnel, which the Victorians used in the 1800s for their subways. Because if a single car has mechanical issues the entire service has to stop and empty to clear it. They’re electric, so there are less mechanical systems, but they are still putting a significant amount of wear and tear on tires/axels/steering systems, all the mechanical systems they still have. Even without meeting the their goal throughput, they’re putting orders of magnitude more use on each vehicle, which are consumer cars. They’re meant to spend most of their lives parked.
If they made a “Tesla train/trolly” where the engine car was pulling a simple enclosed cart with seats it would significantly improve their throughput and loading times, and require less maintenance per passenger. But at that point you’ve just invented a train that uses significantly less efficient rubber tires on asphalt.
Just build a subway. This is already a subway with extra steps and less capacity.
FSD is an exciting prospect for a number of reasons. Creating subterranean tunnels specifically for transportation is an exciting prospect for a number of reasons. Creating subterranean tunnels for FSD cars is perplexing at best.
The whole point of FSD cars is to utilize existing public infrastructure. The whole point of digging tunnels for transport is to bypass existing infrastructure for dedicated service to key locations. I don’t see a compelling reason to combine the technologies.
You’re missing the forest for the trees:
Because Musk’s companies sell tunnels and automobiles.
You’ll probably have to have an account on X to ride in this albatross.
Tbh the it feels like a move that only makes sense in Vegas. Like a Tesla subway is one of the least absurd sites there.
I did like it better than monorail some, but if the monorail had AC in the waiting area it had it beat.
The idea of being able to make tunnels faster and cheaper is super exciting, though there’s some serious doubt that is actually what was accomplished. Still, maybe if it works out a better company can mimic it more efficiently.
I think a lot about this sci-fi race in an Anne McCaffrey book that put most of their infrastructure underground to preserve the natural beauty of their planet. I want that for us so bad. I mean, we can still have buildings and such above ground but imagine if transport was almost exclusively underground, the amount of space we’d save for building things we actually use and the amount of wildlife we’d preserve.
Burying highways would make such a difference. Things would be so quiet.
Las Vegas should be embarrassed that they let this jackass build tunnels and stations for cars that can’t even self drive instead of building a subway system. This project and concept will never be better than a subway. It is inefficient in every way imaginable.
Happy Cakeday! 🍰🎂
You too!
They built a one way tunnel system just to put taxis in? Why not a subway that could move way more people faster?
Elon started this just to push better forms of public transit out.
Elon started this just to push
better forms of public transit outmore Tesla cars.FTFY. If Musk wanted better transit this would have been a tram or train, and it would serve the whole strip and the airport.
I was saying he was pushing better transit out as in making sure it didn’t get made. Sorry if that was unclear.
Oh, gotcha, and 100% that. Didn’t he eventually admit that his phoney-baloney Hyperloop design was just an attempt to undermine California HSR? What a cancer that dude has become.
Lobbying
Because muricans haven’t learned how to use public transport
I’m thoroughly disappointed at how many people are willing to follow anything this Nazi-toddler comes up with.
He’s full of shit. If he told me that gravity keeps us on Earth, I’d seek confirmation from others based solely on his track record of ignoring reality.
A better option is to ignore it. You wouldn’t seek confirmation of something a child might say, regardless of it being sane or preposterous, would you?
This man is a failure. Too bad he failed upward.
When you start on 3rd base and money hits balls for you it’s kinda hard not to win.
The rest of us just get this “work hard and you’ll find success” bullshit…
Of course we also get the ol’ “hard work does not equal valuable work!”
Travel at “high” speeds.
As someone who has used a subway before, and traveled in a car on a highway, hyperloop is faster than neither of those. I know my experience is quite unique… many people won’t have those reference points and can be easily fooled by those claims.
I just want to plug OpenPilot. My coworker has it and I’m going to get it for my next car
OpenPilot is amazing but not full self driving. Best to think of it as extremely good cruise control.
OpenPilot is how self driving work should be done. Aggressive small wins to improve the safety of driving.
Also OpenSource! So its not black box taking in mystery cmds from a centralized server.
Was going to ask how it compares to comma.ai … only to see it’s theirs.
The thing that I don’t understand about self driving is the need for it to be this high tech super computer thing.
Especially in the case of a tunnel why not just have it drive on a wire like robots and fork trucks in factories do currently.
Outside of the system to track the wire all you need are the sensors which a lot of new cars already have for keeping distance with variable cruise control and automatic braking.
Or hell it’s a tunnel just make it a conveyor belt like the car wash.
Or i don’t know, maybe some sort of electric underground tram system. You can even give it a fancy sci-fi name like “rapid subterranean transit system.”
All those things have too much friction. What you really want are some metal rails…
Oh maybe we can chain a bunch of cars together so they can accelerate and brake in synch.
And if the wheels were metal on the metal rail, it’d be even lower friction
I bet it could be retrofitted to have a system like the “WEDway” at George Bush airport in Houston.
“Probably in a couple of weeks…”
I thought they were going to put rails down there so you could drive your car onto a platform thing and then it would zip you off wherever you wanted? That would enable the same rails to run subway cars, cargo pods, etc… Why the fuck are they trying to just have it rely on Tesla camera- only FSD? It’s a homogeneous tube with no distinguishing features. If Elon thought that was going to work then I feel like he knows even less about robotics and computer vision than I thought he did.
They could just paint some things down there to follow. This should not be that hard.
Because Elon wants to sell more cars. That’s all there is to it. If you put rails there, you’d essentially have a subway, and Elon doesn’t make as much money from that.
You should look up the videos for it. It’s a pretty funny waste of money and time. You basically wait in line to get in a car with strangers to drive 15 minutes what would have took you 5 minutes to walk.
Wow that’s disappointing
… and they have been charging Tesla buyers for the future self-driving features all along
to be fair at this point anyone buying a tesla is a rich moron. Might as well call it the gullible premium
Now you don’t even have to be rich
Classic ponzi scheme
"A Boring Company Loop system consists of tunnels in which Tesla electric vehicles travel at high speeds between stations to transport people within a city. "
Sounds familiar…
Let’s not pretend waymo is doing well either. Haven’t they caused quite a few accidents in San Francisco?
You might be thinking of Cruise. Waymo is currently honking at its own cars constantly.
Ah my bad the OTHER unwanted AI car company
All the others are good, though.
The waymos are doing well in SF. I like them way more than Ubers, they drive safer / actually obey traffic laws and speed limits. You also can choose your own music and the interiors are always nice.