They are currently dirt cheap, because Tesla isn't looking to profit (this is a PR stunt and stock pumping excercise for now).
The rides cost $4.20. Haaah, that joke will never get old, Elon :|
And yes, the reason that it impacts the stock price so radically, is that labor is a huge portion of professional driving expense. If you can make every professional driver unemployed by automating their job, you can make a small handful of people very, very rich.
I mean, we probably shouldn't concern ourselves TOO much with the profitability of a Google subsidiary and the pet project of the world's richest man. I think they'll figure out the monetization side of things. We should be laser focused on safety, which Waymo is certainly doing to a much higher degree than Tesla.
Someone else mentioned that over on Reddit, in a very clapback sort of way. Would you happen to be in Texas? I'm learning all about regional traffic law variations :D
So, my thought here: the stop sign is simply not recognized by the vehicle. It didn't see the stop sign and decide "legally, I have the right of way." The stop sign just doesn't appear on the visualization, cameras failed to register the blinking lit up sign, and thus the computer thought it had the right of way.
As a separate critical fuckup, it only realized the pedestrian was a pedestrian like a millisecond before impact. It wasn't a good test performance at all.
I heard it in health class a bajillion times, so as a reminder, abstinence is the only effective birth cont- oh wait, no, no, Teslas are very effective at preventing pregnancy and STIs.
The "humans drive cars with just optical input" has become a weirdly tightly held misconception for Elon Musk, it's a core part of his personality where autonomy is concerned:
Humans drive with optical input, haptic feedback, and millenia of evolution to handle the decision-making and social skills required to handle a vehicle safely. No LiDAR or radar waves, sure, but I wouldn't say no if either were on offer!
The dumbest part? He developed this belief in ~2019. Lidar costs have dropped immensely since then, and are fast-dropping still. Any technologist who doesn't fucking suck knows that component prices follow that depreciation curve. So he's basically an old man shouting at a cloud at this point, it would be cheaper to fix the mistake, but it could hurt his personal branding as a guru.
Waymo is really interesting - you probably wouldn't guess it, I'm a cautiously optimistic autonomy person! Waymo is already 12x safer than human drivers, that's brilliant, I love that.
Teslas will (allegedly) start on a small, low-complexity street grid in Austin. exact size TBA. Presumably, they're mapping the shit out of it and throwing compute power at analyzing their existing data for that postage stamp.
The rub... that all points out the obvious danger of rolling out the wild-west FSD that Tesla drivers are currently employing everywhere else. If it's safe enough to trust to drive your car for you, why does it need a ton of additional guard-rails to operate without a safety driver?
The only difference being you can ask a human cabbie to slow down :,)