Happy First Sunday of Summer! Or, to a certain subset of humans, Happy Tesla Robotaxi Launch Day. However, everyone — people, pets, anything that breathes — should be paying attention to these autonomous cabs, especially if you live in Austin, Texas, where the self-driving rideshare service is being deployed.
This is a Tesla first. Most importantly, this is a Tesla finally. After (counts fingers) six years of saying “next year,” CEO Elon Musk can now say, “Today.” Musk first announced his vision for the Robotaxi (the service’s official name) during the company’s Autonomy Investor Day in April 2019. And in what has become a bad habit, a nervous twitch, or an uncontrollable reflex, Musk said robotaxis would be on the road in 2020. As CNBC reported at the time:
“‘I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year,’ Musk said on stage at the Tesla Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto, California. They won’t be ‘in all jurisdictions, because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere, but I am confident we will have at least regulatory approval somewhere, literally next year,’ he said.”
Um, just kidding? The year 2020 came and, mercifully, went (it was a peak viral time, ‘member?). But then, so did 2021, 2022, and 2023 come and go without a self-driving Tesla taxi in sight. Then Musk threw a curveball at our heads with the Cybercab, something he announced during the We, Robot event last October. I say curveball because, yes, although the Cybercab is a robotaxi, it’s not the one we’re actually getting. Not yet, anyway.
Prelims: Cybercab vs. Robotaxi
The Cybercab and robotaxi are not equal parts of the same name. There is a difference between the two, which are often erroneously interchanged. The Cybercab is just another autonomous vehicle (AV) concept (important keyword right there) that has no steering wheel or pedals. A robotaxi, however, can be any make or model of vehicle that has been modified to operate without a driver.
For example, Waymo launched its self-driving service with a Chrysler Pacifica. Eventually, it switched to the Jaguar I-Pace before inking partnership deals with Hyundai, Zeekr, and Toyota. Other mass-produced vehicles converted into robocabs include the Chevy Bolt, by the now-defunct Cruise, as well as the Ford Fusion and Volvo XC90, which Uber used for its self-driving fleet before selling off the whole operation. Amazon-owned Zoox is building its own bespoke van-like self-driving shuttles in an all-new manufacturing facility with public service to start soon in Las Vegas and San Francisco.
Main Card: Tesla vs. Everyone
Or, in this case, really just Waymo for now. Multiple startups and big brother-backed robotaxi services have crashed (literally) and burned out of existence. Or sued out of operations.
Cruise and Uber autonomous vehicles were involved in pedestrian collisions, some resulting in fatalities. General Motors, a 90% majority owner of Cruise at the time, shuttered the autonomous ride-hailing service before wholly buying out the company earlier this year in order to integrate the tech within its vehicle portfolio.
As for Uber, which graduated beyond peer-to-peer ride-hailing, the multi-level transportation company is not completely out of the robotaxi market. Uber has announced partnerships with autonomous vehicle tech companies, May Mobility and Momenta, to scale up its robotaxi offerings in the U.S. and Europe, respectively. Although expected to launch in Austin by the end of this year, autonomous rides won’t be broadly available until 2026. Same for Lyft, which also buddied up with May Mobility and other AV/ADAS companies Mobileye and Nexar. Its autonomous cab fleet is set to deploy sometime this year, starting in Atlanta.
Until then, there’s Waymo, which, the record will show, was the first company to launch a commercial ride-hailing robotaxi service. Those paid rides kicked off in Phoenix in 2018, a year before Musk even mentioned the idea of such a thing. Formerly under the Google umbrella, Waymo has since gone independent and currently operates in multiple cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and, you betcha, Austin. Atlanta and Miami are next on the list.
Main Event: Musk vs. Musk
I’m not even going to sugarcoat this: Musk needs a win here. Of all the promises and intent and speculation and setbacks, the robotaxi scheme, er, service has to work. Because if you haven’t been following the spectacle, Tesla sales are tanking globally, the haloed Cybertruck has become a Cyber-not, and Musk, a once favored friend with benefits to the U.S. presidency is now a frenemy at best.
But Musk is as excited as can be about today’s Robotaxi launch, which, by Tesla standards, has been rather low-key. From the announcement (psst, here’s some news) to the invites (“select guests”) to the fleet size (about a dozen Model Ys), the kickoff is more of a soft opening. As the Associated Press reports:
“The test is beginning modestly enough. Tesla is remotely monitoring the vehicles and putting a person in the passenger seat in case of trouble. The number of Teslas deployed will also be small — just 10 or 12 vehicles — and will only pick up passengers in a limited, geofenced area.”
Hmm, so, although there is no actual driver, there is a co-driver, so to speak. Now, whether this is Tesla’s own protocol or a requirement of its self-driving fleet permits with the city is unknown without me digging through Austin’s AV regulations.
The geofencing does come off as a little suspicious, though. Is controlling the service area to minimize issues on launch day and before full expansion? Tesla hasn’t stated what neighborhoods are good-to-go, but it appears that once you’re in the dedicated Robotaxi app, you’ll see a map with distinct borders, as shown in this Teslarati article. You can also see the app in action courtesy of Tesla podcaster Rob Maurer:
Here’s a quick overview of the Tesla Robotaxi app! pic.twitter.com/AAtPZS1E5T
— Rob Maurer (@TeslaPodcast) June 22, 2025
Note that access to the Tesla Robotaxi app is an invite-only deal at the moment, so you can’t request a self-driving Model Y cab without the coveted “Early Rider access.” Should you receive the golden ticket, Tesla is very clear about what its Robotaxi service currently offers. Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor and tech news source with 900,000 Twitter/X followers, shared his invite on the social media platform:
BREAKING: I have been invited to ride in Tesla’s Model Y Robotaxis on day one this Sunday in Austin, Texas!
IT’S GO TIME BABY!!! pic.twitter.com/FGzG8oW9El
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) June 20, 2025
Merritt was also allowed to share the parameters of the Robotaxi service, the privacy rules (e.g., the vehicle cabin camera will not be recording), and what costs a Tesla robocab might include. Just for today, though, Robotaxi rides cost less than five bucks. Hey, thanks, Elon:
The @Tesla_AI robotaxi launch begins in Austin this afternoon with customers paying a $4.20 flat fee!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 22, 2025
Decision: A Draw
Look, this bout should’ve happened years ago. Tesla, past its prime in terms of favorability, is late to the robotaxi market. The bright side is that those who experienced a Tesla Robotaxi ride in Austin offered nothing but praise, to which skeptics will respond, “Of course, when you select who gets a seat.” And it’s a backseat at that. Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, the Early Riders have been livestreaming their entire commute, warts and all. You can watch the first Robotaxi guests via Tesla’s feed:
First @robotaxi experiences in thread below
— Tesla (@Tesla) June 22, 2025
Many of the Early Riders have also ridden multiple times. And, knock on wood, so far so good! No navigation glitches have been reported. Even better, no collisions. For that, Musk and Tesla get a win. But it’s also a very limited group traveling in a very limited space.
When Waymo launched its Waymo One rideshare service to the public, its ridership was also limited to approved applicants. However, riders could travel throughout a greater area, including cities like Chandler, which is 25 miles away from downtown Phoenix. The Tesla Robotaxi maps that have been shared don’t look as expansive. Oh, and 100 minivans were in operation and not, you know, 10.
To get a knockout, Tesla will need to ramp up its Robotaxi fleet, even if just within Austin. But with Musk shifting his focus back on his EV company, maybe that might happen. In an interview with CNBC, Musk said:
“My prediction is that probably by the end of next year, we’ll have probably hundreds of thousands, if not over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the U.S.”
Flabbergasting. Even the CNBC host was at a loss for words. How Musk sees this happening is by using Tesla owners. The plan, which you may have heard of, will be “a model which is some combination of Uber and Airbnb” where owners can “add or subtract” their car from the rideshare fleet.
All of the above is ambitious, but what is Tesla (and Musk) without fantastic, far-reaching goals? To the doubters, what Musk said in 2019 still holds true today:
“Sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.”
Top graphic images: Tesla; Carolco/TriStar
Why do people keep huffing on Musks joint. The guy sells pixie dust and fantasy to rubes who believe his ecobs and we are the future mantra. His rockets blow up, cars cannot not find their way home and are about as modern as a Austin Allegra.
Glad I live in the rural wilds where I cannot be run over by one of these crapcans.
You also avoided the Cybertruck’s IRRESPONSIBLE drive-by-wire implementation which was GUARANTEED to go haywire and plow through everything on the road.
Oh wait, that never panned out. That’s OK because elon the nazi will come up with another idea that I can criticize before the last one’s preducted failure fails to materialize.
Keep on huffin.
Most reliable and prolific rocket of the last several years (Falcon 9) and best-selling vehicle in the world for 2023/2024 (Model Y) are “pixie dust and fantasy.”
People can bring up things that didn’t work out, OK, but pretending like there aren’t absolutely massive successes, also, is just delusional.
Ah then, let’s keep that streak going! How is 2025 going so far, not so well from the looks of it best to keep polishing.
The fact that there’s a streak at all proves your premise false.
Keep moving the goalposts, though!
I predict Tesla’s taxi service will be a money-losing flop that will generate lots of complaints the same way Waymos do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS10KWvhl1Y
In addition to that, due to Musk’s politics, I wouldn’t use this service even if it was the best service in my area.
The only way for Musk to ever pay for any of Tesla’s products or services these days is if he leaves the company and sells off his shares.
What a sorry, sad child he is.
Well, this does go live on the same day the governor vetoed the bill to ban THC products. Hmm. maybe that wascally Abbot got a little “donation” from the Musky-one.
The reason they’re geofenced is because otherwise some YouTuber would jump in and ask for a ride to LA within 5 minutes of it going live. I think all autonomous taxi services are geofenced at the moment.
Hey hey hey, you’re not allowed to make a rational post on a story about Tesla or Elon
It’s probably more than just that, but it’s a reasonable issue. You can’t have ~10 robotaxis in Austin and have half+ of them shoot off on long trips.
No navigation glitches have been reported?
Starting at 7 minutes in: https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?
Sorry but no – this isn’t close to a win. In 2016 Musk told people that all Teslas would be fully autonomous and be able to drive them from California to New York. In 2019 Musk told Tesla owners that their vehicle would turn into a fully autonomous robotaxi with an OTA update – and gave a specific time that would happen (12 to 14 months) That it would take fares while they worked and slept and pay for itself. He flat out told people to buy a Tesla because it would make them money and to buy now
Until every Tesla is fully autonomous Musk owes his customers a lot of money – even if it ever happens he still owes them a lot of money for the delay. What good is a car that becomes autonomous a day before it goes to the scrapyard?
(A friend bought a Model X in 2016 truly believing that it would drive her to work through gridlock while she slept and home from the bar after work in 2017)
How sure are we that these are truly fully self driving, and not being remotely driven like a drone?
We are talking about the same company that stuffed people into robot suits.
Citation needed, besides the ORIGINAL “robot” that was OBVIOUSLY a person dancing inside a suit and wasn’t at all intended to be a serious demonstration.
Robotaxi disclaimer: “You said you wanted to arrive at your destination, you never specified how many pieces you should be in…”
Or: “You said you wanted to arrive at your destination. You never specified that you wanted to arrive with all my wheels safely on the ground. Be careful about broken glass as you climb out of the side of the vehicle! Have a great day.”
“Welcome to RoboTaxi: When you need to get there as fascist as possible.”
What did RoboTaxi say after it hit and killed a pedestrian?
“I did Nazi him/her coming. No refund for this ride. Oh Well.”
What did RoboTaxi say after hitting the back of a stopped Semi at 50mph and burst into flames?
“Sudden Catastrophic Disassembly Detected. You have reached your final destination. Emergency evacuation sequence can be found on page 179 of your Robotaxi online user agreement. Your door is a jar – good luck opening it. Oh Well.”
Braga? Robert Picardo on the thumbnail? Is this a Voyager reunion?
That’s “Johnny Cab” from Total Recall.
Still no LIDAR or apparently even radar? Yeah, I’ll be steering clear. Apparently it’s cheaper, but I wonder if that’s still true if you include the lawsuit when (not if) it makes an error and kill someone.
You WILL be steering clear, because the car will not.
I have an idea about the geofencing.
Teslas rely on cameras to evaluate the objects around them. Several tests have identified weaknesses in their camera-only system
I bet they 3D scanned the roadways in the service area like iRacing does with race tracks. They used the data to create a model of the service area that is used to navigate around the limited area.
If that is a thing they may have done, it’s not going to scale easily. I assume it takes several passes on different days for the scan to get a clear picture of all the fixtures near the roadway, since parked vehicles would be blocking curbs and other roadside obstacles.
Basically, it’s Level 4 autonomy instead of Level 5. It’s the same reason GM’s Blue Cruise only works on certain roads.
Blue’s Cruise is a Ford thing. Super Cruise is GMs.
Fair enough, it’s easy enough to get them mixed up. Point stands, though. They only work on certain highly mapped roads. That’s part of the definition of Level 4 autonomy.
Totally understandable, I only keep them straight because Blue Cruise sounds so much like a certain children’s cartoon with Australian dogs and I think it’s a silly name.
At least Super Cruise is honest about its abilities and limitations.
Feature names like ‘Autopilot’ or ‘Full Self Driving’ are entirely misleading and will likely never be accurate with the current sensors packed in Teslas.
Considering Tesla can’t even automate their Las Vegas disco tunnel, I’m highly doubtful of their ability to do with their cheap camera based system what Waymo struggles to do with a far more advanced system.
Musk partisans claim that’s because of union agreements in Vegas but that the whole thing is insanely profitable to Tesla. I find the first part possible and the second part no way.
I wonder how long it’ll be before we see these flipped on their sides or dumped in canals?
Austin was a terrible choice to launch this considering the demographics in the city. There are so few places that would be as hostile to him as Austin that he would have to assemble a team to try to find them. Did he think that because it’s the capitol of a red state that it would just automatically be accepted? Or was this decided back when he was still the benevolent Techno Paragon and people were still using the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” for tourism?
Why not launch this in Phoenix Arizona where they’d not only be more friendly, but the streets are less snarled and it would be easier to maintain the cars because Phoenix never gets any rain?
He moved Tesla to Austin a few years ago and employs 20k people there. I assume he has clout in the area – at least enough to push through approval to set these things loose.
The Mayor of almost any other city would get an easy political win by making it difficult for Elon.
Sure the stereotype is Austin is super left wing, which is true, but there are tons of Elon fans there too. I work with a bunch of them.
I also hope it’s not very long until these are flipped on their backs like helpless turtles (as long as it’s done without risk to humans or actual turtles).
Will the inevitable traffic incidents (hopefully, no fatalities) be investigated by RoboCop?
More likely Officer Barbrady
“Nothing to see here – Everybody move along”
Waymo, the current leaders in true driverless taxi operations, is making billions on them.
Wait, no..they’re not…
How this ever replaces a business model (Uber/Lyft) where a person literally offers their own car, labor and covers all the running costs is beyond me.
Someone still has to own these things, clean up the barf in the seat, repair them etc.
“How this ever replaces a business model (Uber/Lyft) where a person literally offers their own car, labor and covers all the running costs is beyond me”
“person”, that’s how.
It’s the usual Multi-Level scam. He sells you a car and you get to eat the costs and he gets rich doing the Marketing part. You get peanuts, puke and possibly beer money. What a gig.
Uber and Lyft’s businesses are both based on the premise that eventually there will be self driving cars cars and they would be the entrenched platforms for matching riders and cars. That’s the reason that they have gone to such great lengths to avoid being employers, own cars, or anything other than the dispatching and billing infrastructure. Robot cabs, possibly owned by third parties, are the expectation that they are burning money waiting for.
They aren’t burning money as fast as they were becoming an established duopoly, and are currently sort of profitable, but their endgame is robots.
Investors will be able to buy robot taxis, turn them loose into the Lyft and Uber ecosystems, and hardly anything will change except that the expense of subsidizing licensing, insurance, and car leases in some markets will go away.
Of course Tesla will enter the dispatching market with money to burn, since money burning is their business, and probably the biggest AI and map infrastructure, probably beating Google and Apple in most places. Lyft and Uber don’t own as much real time map and traffic data as Google, Apple, Tesla and any carmaker that has ditched CarPlay. Ownership of that data stream is why GM ditched CarPlay to compete with Tesla, Apple, and Google even though it makes their product less attractive.
One interesting thing will be what happens when drivers don’t have to return home. Do people start taking long distance cab rides? Do the cars end up migrating to specific hotspots ?
I suppose the questions will be whether they will survive that long and why anyone even will take on the liabilities of owning those robot taxis if Uber/Left are sucking up all the profits.
The answer might be they create a new series of “independent” rental agencies to take those losses and only survive through a continuous series of massive government bailouts.
The most expensive part of a taxi service is paying the driver. Same with commercial vehicles.
Taxi’s are all but dead. Uber has replaced them.
An Uber is just a taxi you order through an app. It is still a human (that needs to be paid) driving you from A to B
Yes, but it’s a human who works for very little money and fronts all the labor, purchase and running costs of the vehicle.
Musk has sold this concept as a perpetual money machine because he’s a scammer and people will always ignore basic market forces when they think they can make easy money.
IF this were a profitable business, the low bar of entry will mean shit-loads of companies and individuals “investing” in an operation. In the amount of time it takes to build and roll out the cars the market would collapse under its own weight.
The reason any service model can be sustained is that there is SOME barrier to entry. In the case of Uber, it’s that you work your ass off for very little money. Taxi’s used to have medallion systems that limited competition.
None of this will be in place if we can all just farm our cars out for pay rides.
It’s simply not sustainable.
Taxis still have medallions. That’s what made the industry so unmanageable outside of large cities. Around here, the Taxi needs a medallion in any city or town where they pick up fares.
In the Boston metro area, that’s a problem. MA is a small state with 300+ cities/towns. I used to live 14 miles from the center of Boston. That drive would bring me through six different cities and a Boston-only licensed taxi couldn’t pick up a fare for the return trip so they’d charge double since they had to go all the way back with an empty taxi.
There were locally licensed taxis, but you couldn’t really rely on them unless you were a known frequent customer. If the taxi arrived within 30 minutes, you were lucky.
Indeed. I think of the poor bastards who paid a fortune for their medallion only to have Uber tank their value.
Same for liquor licenses around here. A few years ago (Ok, maybe it was a couple of decades), towns just started issuing new liquor licenses to connected restaurateurs.
Existing license holders were outraged, because most of the value of their business was just in having the limited-availability license.
The taxi system became an oafish, slow moving behemoth of regulation and government allowed monopoly-like carveouts. It’s not a shock that Uber took over so quickly because, from a customer side, it offered a legitimately better product and experience all around. It’s not without it’s issues, but there is no denying it did make a better product
Absolutely.
The best example of the corruption in the taxi business is the Las Vegas monorail.
Instead of building an actual public transit system, Las Vegas built a monorail with stations that can only be accessed through a maze snaking through every slot machine if you can keep track of the progressively smaller signs along your path.
This monorail only links casinos along the strip. It does not connect to the airport, which is literally across the street. You need to rely on taxis to get to / from the airport. I wonder who was behind that design.
Vegas is a city best avoided altogether.
I always wanted to put up a billboard at the airport reading “Welcome Losers”
Hey, some of us are just there to pick up a rental and head out to Zion, the Grand Canyon and/or the Nevada Test Site.
The powerful quote by Malcolm… I mean Model X, “We didn’t destroy the taxi business, the taxi business destroyed itself”
In there are two types of yellow cabs. One is owned by the driver, and they are all going out of business because they bought a medallion as an investment for a million bucks and it’s now worthless. Some are committing suicide it’s so bad. Most are owned by by fleets that rent the cabs to the drivers by the shift and take a commission. There are no drivers that are employees, or if there are they are vanishingly few in number.
Yes, but people sell get paid or they don’t work. A portion of the fare is still going into the driver’s pocket whether or not they are an employee or independent contractor.
Same with Uber / Lyft. It was originally conceived as gig work where people would do it part time to make some extra cash. It has become simply a taxi replacement were people do it full time as a job – they just aren’t paying for a now worthless medallion and they are kicking back a percentage to an app that provides dispatch services.
I’m more familiar with the economics of commercial freight. About 35% of the cost per mile for on-highway freight is paying the driver. The next highest expense is fuel at 25%. There is a huge incentive for large fleet owners to cut out the driver and replace them with an automated truck.
One of Tesla’s theoretical plans is to just have the equipment on consumer models, and then they can put their car in and out of the robotaxi fleet whenever they feel like it.
So the same model without drivers.
But like all of Tesla’s plans when and if that is real is unknown.
At which point the market is saturated with chancers farming out their cars. Competition will then drive the price to nil and the market eats itself. See legalized cannabis in Michigan.
In MA, too. It’s literally cheaper from a dispensary now than it was when I was in high school in the 80s/90s.
And no seeds / stems!
“Competition will then drive the price to nil and the market eats itself. See legalized cannabis in Michigan.”
Well what do you expect of a market made of edibles?
But the hail / dispatch companies will get a cut of the gross and the magic hand of the market will lure a succession of suckers to supply rides in the race to the bottom. But the hail / dispatch companies won’t care because that’s not their business.
That’s how taxi medallions happened in NYC. In 1937 everyone with a car and some spare time was driving around picking up fares, so the city issued medallions to anyone who wanted to one for $10. Then the people who owned medallions pressured the city to not issue any more, until the market for medallions was 1.2 million a piece.
The city tried to give a free medallion to each medallion owner but they shot that down. Brokers made money on fees reselling them as safe investments, and medallion owners leased them out until the market collapsed.
The medallion market would have collapsed anyway, there was no way a driver could pay the interest on 1.2 million dollars driving a cab. They would get loans using the medallion as collateral. It was a speculative bubble.
The ride hailing services certainly triggered the collapse, but something was going to eventually. Probably a Covid triggered collapse would have been worse.
Let’s hope there’s a lot of down time from vandalism.
No need to drag anyone else into this.
I hope there is a lot of down time from vandalism.
Well that’s the other thing. Look at how people treat electric scooters. They will be taking shits in these cars and everything else you can imagine.
I’m tempted to fly to Austin just to hide a flounder in the seat cushion.
I really hope the vandalism is creative / weird. Austin has a reputation to uphold.
*Pictures a fleet of white robot Tesla Xs with bloody smeared hand prints and “Free Candy” scrawled on the sides.*
As with anything Musk related, I’ll pass even if these were in my area.
I do think its funny that most of these robotaxi operations are in fairly clear climate areas, especially Tesla, that somehow with their camera only operation they’re going to take over the world. Waiting for them to try it in Chicago in January or Seattle in…any random Tuesday I guess.
At least Waymo is trying for NYC, they have to get permitting but that’s a bold move, NYC winters are no joke.
I don’t think it is funny at all. It makes perfect sense and even a autonomous system that only works in warmer climates could made a huge amount of money.
It isn’t an accident that autonomous commercial vehicles have targeted the I-10 corridor east of the Rockies and routes coming up from the US / Mexico border.
For transporting goods, yes. For transporting individual passengers, not so much.
There are a lot of people in SoCal, but they all (statistically) have cars. The east coast ‘megalapolis’ has a ton of people (~44 million) and a lot of the city dwellers do not have cars. Chicago metro area adds another 10 million. When you say ‘taxi,’ people almost automatically picture a New York taxi (even those too young to remember Danny DeVito as Louie DePalma).
Goods / People – doesn’t matter. It isn’t surprise at all that autonomous testing and trials are being done in areas with good weather most of the year. Waymo could have a good business only operating in the sun belt.
The difference is huge. Long-haul trucks and taxis operate entirely differently.
You can efficiently run a long-haul truck from any destination to any other destination. Just don’t send the truck in either direction until it’s full.
A taxi gets no advance notice and has no set pick-up or drop-off points. In order to operate efficiently so the vehicle does not travel without a paying passenger, it needs to be operating in a densely-populated environment.
There are definitely some southwest cities with large populations, but most of that population lives in the suburb-like sprawl. New York is the prize market for moving people in taxis in the US.
Waymo is already in five major non-NYC cities and may as well be fueling the vehicles with investor cash. They are not profitable and won’t be any time soon. You could buy a taxi company in NYC with five cabs and be profitable just doing curbside pickups.
I’m talking about the effect of weather on autonomous vehicles.
As to the economics of taxi service. Yes, NYC is a great place to do business and the largest metro in the USA However, they aren’t the only large city in the USA. LA, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, San Francisco, Phoenix, San Bernadino, San Diego, Tampa, etc. Plenty of cities in the sun belt with millions of people with taxi / uber service today.
It is too hot for reading.
“ A taxi gets no advance notice and has no set pick-up or drop-off points. In order to operate efficiently so the vehicle does not travel without a paying passenger”
That’s why the internet phone app based systems killed the cab business.
It also works in rural areas.
Actually, ride hailing apps really are a replacement for the car services. People compare them to taxi cabs, but that’s because most people don’t have experience with car services.
San Francisco has relatively good weather but lots of fog and some extreme topography as well as an interesting trolley system, and it’s full of the cab robots.
Back before ABS brakes the first snow in NYC was interesting with all the new Indian cab drivers.
I wonder how the robots do in a snowstorm.
I’m not aware of any self cleaning features on Tesla cameras. So on a salted road your robotaxi is gonna run about a mile before it either stops or, more likely, sideswipes a post box.
None of this matters because in the end it’s just an investment grift.
Just a reality check from Nov. 4th 2022;
https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/autonomous-vehicle-reality-check-after-160-billion-spent/
Now how many abandoned regional rail lines do you think could be rehabilitated to modern standards for that, and its benefit to traffic and pollution reduction?
For relatively flat land and basic track, expect costs between $250,000 and $1 million per mile, according to Compass International and FreightWaves.
Well it’s working as intended:
Step 1: starve the system of any public money that may go into public transit
Step 2: create a private offering to replace those options
Step 3: milk the situation created for generations.
What worked in LA in the 40s and 50s can work (and it has been working) nationally.
Those 160B could have seeded many other transpo initiatives, including some private ones.
First they get rid of the public transit, then they want to eliminate Toon Town.
Extremely deep cut. Nice.
$4.20 for a trip sounds great, but I’m waiting for the Special $1K for 100K miles discount pass.
Where K stands for ketamine?
” To the doubters, what Musk said in 2019 still holds true today:
“Sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.””
I must have missed all the “New York-DC in 30 minutes” Hyperloops, car elevators, Roadster 2.0 with SpaceX rocket thrusters, 5 minute battery swap stations, rail-beating semis, coast-to-coast car summoning, solar powered superchargers, amphibious Cybertrucks, brake pads that never need to be replaced, and SpaceX rockets between New York and London.
It’s like the inverse about the old saying for economists: They’ve correctly predicted 19 of the last three recessions.
All are just fancy ways of saying a broken clock is right twice a day.
And that time he got into an argument with Warren Buffett and declared he’d start a better chocolate company than See’s, but then it turned out he was just contracting with another company to put a different label on their products and drop shipping them
The thing about brake pads is true in the right climate. Even my hybrids never needed brake pads. My parents Prius needed 3 out of 4 calipers replaced because with all the salt use in Michigan and lack of use they pistons seized.
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Musk is the inverse of the Romans.
They did alot, but locals hated them.
Versus Musk, who does nothing, but everyone loves him.
I dont love him. Guess I’m not everyone .
Agreed, many don’t, myself included, and seemingly less everyday.
I was being hyperbolic to make, what was supposed to be an amusing contrast, clear.
The truth is that local populations had good reasons to hate the Romans, Musk has done alot, but not nearly as much as he’s promised, and only a vocal minority “love” him. But caveats, nuance, and details really detracts from a concise justification for a Monty Python quote; which is all I really wanted to do here.
Dinsdale. Dinsdale
Ketamine man. It’s the only way to fly../
So who ends up in court when it parks under a firetruck at 80mph.
The car. It was the one driving. Put that thing in jail.
And who are the traumatized passengers going to be? Not me.
s/traumatized/dead/
I think I’d rather have Jason Torchinsky as a cab driver.
They are my Taxi of Tomorrow
Wait, the lead picture isn’t Torch? I figured he was pretty fatigued by now.
When reached for comment Robotaxi responded with, “Please place the items in the bagging area.”
Help is on the way.
I don’t care how many frozen yogurt samples they pass out, I’m not buying. It took five years for this virus to show symptoms.