- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or # to comment.
There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.
The only response was, “company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix.”
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
But if a corporation does it it is, “Oops, we will do better next time.”
Utterly insane.
No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.
They wrote the legislation that allowed themselves to operate self driving vehicles. Every one of these vehicles is a symbol of the oligarchy at work.
Sounds like they Sovereign Citizens could. They just have the wrong paperwork
Takes roughly a billion $1 pieces of paper.
Then send a ridiculously small number of those to your state representatives.
Oh! Driving past stopped school busses you mean. Had to look up “driving through bus stops”. :)
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.
And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.
It isn’t a unique Texas Law. It’s law everywhere in the US and Canada.
“mostly all in North America, require all surrounding vehicles to stop when a school bus is stopped with its red lights flashing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws
“And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.”
Only if you are from a different country.
Which is beside the point that if anyone else drove through 20 bus stops, they couldn’t use the excuse, “I’m from another country so I don’t know your laws.” to get out of jail.
That it’s a software fix is also beside the point. “Oh I drove illegally 20 times. I know better and won’t do it again.”
The default in most other states is that opposite direction traffic on a divided highway don’t have to stop. The states differ in what constitutes a divided highway, but generally at least 5 feet of space or a physical barrier between the lanes would qualify. In Texas, however, there is no exception for divided highways, and the key definition is “controlled-access highway,” which requires on/off ramps and physical barriers between traffic directions, or “different roadways,”
So for a 5-lane road where there are 2 lanes going in each direction with a center lane for left turns, Texas requires opposite direction traffic to stop, while most other states do not.
Yeah, a lot of school bus stops on five lane highways… /s
2 lanes in each direction with a middle lane? That’s a big chunk of Texas, especially when weighted for population.
My commute to work includes a main city road with two lanes each way and a turning lane, and sometimes there is a school bus that stops.
The incidents had nothing to do with divided highways. You can see the video is at residential streets.
It’s not just Texas. It’s a requirement to stop for a school bus with its flashing lights on and stop sign out pretty much everywhere in the US.
Remember when the argument for self driving cars was that they don’t need to be perfect, just better than humans?
@[email protected] @[email protected] well that’s still Waymo’s argument I think. Elon is a bit different in many ways…
I think that’s still a valid argument since perfection will probably never happen.
For me it’s more like, remember when the expectation was that Tesla would ever produce a version that didn’t suck ass?
One thing that really gets me is comparing robotaxis with regular driving. How about comparing robotaxis to… taxis? Would not that be much more sane?
Professional taxi drivers do get into accidents. But their per-distance metric is much better than of an average Joe driving home after 10 hours work shift and a one-too-many pint after work.
Why anyone would ever compare robotaxi to anything else but a regular taxi?
Yet $TSLA stock just keeps going up. Remember when news like this would actually mean something in the stock market? America’s economy is like 🤏 this close to collapse because everything is fake and nothing matters.
The US Economy after the inevitable, next global depression:
If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.
I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.
Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn’t distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I’m not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during “boring times”?
Sorry, I’m just rambling here …
I don’t think the blank cheque handed to these emergent technologies is a function of the times in which they emerged. Rather it’s the fact that technology advances much faster than the wheels of government turn; it’s nearly inevitable that new technologies will be largely unregulated until government can catch up.
perhaps the governance of the united states was never really meant to be effective, but good enough for now, before they could usher in the new era, of His dominion upon earth. hyper-techno-christian-fascism is gonna taste so good in the chips aisle
I found this part to be even more alarming:
All of the Robotaxi crashes so far have occurred with human safety monitors—who have been trained to take control of the car in the event of a software error—present in the vehicles.
This is significant because, as TechCrunch reported on Monday, Tesla is starting to send out its Robotaxi fleet without safety monitors.
So despite a pitiful record with people trying to correct the cars mistakes, they’re now ready to move on to running them without assistance?!? I am furious at the idea that our safety on the roads is this negotiable.
It’s insane how shit the US is at managing its cars considering how aggressively they’ve forced them as the only truly viable mode of transport. It sucks horribly to drive in North America but it’s the only option given to people. Like, if you’re gunna do the worst option at least do it right and have some pride in the system.
The US doesn’t give a fuck about its people.
The US has absolutely mad road to traffic laws. Zero concept of lane discipline, you driving whatever lane you feel like. Don’t understand roundabouts even though it’s just a curved road, it’s really not that hard. Still don’t have standardised pedestrian crossings even when other countries had them back in the 1920s. A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right. No one obeys the speed limit, people regularly exceed it, and see no problem with that. And of course no one has separate indicator lights and brake lights because when would you ever slow down and go around a corner, definitely no need to engineer for that eventuality.
A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.
It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.
What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.
Regulatory capture is a hell of a drug.
Proof of concept fails in a spectacular fireball?
Fuck it, owners are too invested, ship it anyway.
Feels like I work for the same company.
Why repair the plane on the ground…if it’s a real problem, we can fix it mid-flight.
Not trying to defend Tesla on this because fuck Musk and everything he touches but are there stats on how, when, and why the human took over? Did they just not take over? Did they take over to late? Did they take over and make the situation worse?
You raise an excellent point, one which i was hoping to find out more about as well. It turns out Tesla has been working hard to keep pretty much any pertinent information to answer your questions firmly under lock and key.
From this Electrek article https://electrek.co/2025/11/17/tesla-robotaxi-had-3-more-crashes-now-7-total/
Unlike other companies reporting to NHTSA, Tesla abuses the right to redact data reported through the system. The automaker redacts the “narrative” for each reported crash, preventing the public from knowing how the crashes happened and who is responsible.
Based on the limited information in Tesla’s reports, we know that one of the new crashes involved a Robotaxi driving into a car backing up, another involved a cyclist, and the last one involved an unknown animal.
So he’s basically fudging the numbers and anytime he’s questioned he points at the fudged numbers and says everything’s great, he’s great, now get out of the way while he deploys a fleet of these un-manned deathtraps to “half the US population” according to a properly ultra-super-inflated kind of claim only a douchebag like Leon can make. No, seriously–he actually claimed that by the end of 2025 he’ll have these things serving half the population of the US.
🫠
Self driving cars have always been a stupid solution to the wrong problem.
We shouldn’t be investing billions in them. We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
But I guess that’s not profitable so I guess we’ll just do idiotic garbage that gets people killed.
I mean the US is heavily car centric. Self driving cars are an attempt to adapt to what the reality of the world currently is.
We should absolutely be doing things to make cars less of a requirement by improving public transit and creating more livable spaces that don’t require cars, that can even be the primary goal, but it won’t eliminate cars completely, and if it does it will take A LOT longer than self driving cars.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
Quick edit: Also the cars Musk is developing are not even close to what we need. He’s being deliberately obtuse and creating more problems than he’s solving.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
Why are they a great idea? What are they making better? How is it worth the real and opportunity costs?
Paradoxically, the large scale deployment of self driving cars will improve the walkability of neighborhoods by reducing the demand for parking.
One can also envision building on self driving tech to electronically couple closely spaced cars so that more passengers can fit in a given area, such that throughout of passenger miles per hour can increase several times over. Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.
How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?
That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.
Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.
Once again reinventing buses and trains
They’re safer than human drivers. Tesla cars absolutely are not. But Waymo cars? They do seem to be.
It’s still early. We still need more data. They should be closely watched. But self driving cars do appear to be safer. That’s why they are a great idea. They are making driving and roads better.
I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).
While I’d absolutely love better and more public transit, it just doesn’t make sense in a lot of areas that are too spread out or don’t have enough people per square mile.
We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
when someone figures out how to make the better options more profitable than the bad options we’ll finally see progress.
until then we’re fucked
It’s a shame someone named Arthur Pigou never figured out a solution over a century ago.
that’s nifty. now we have to figure out how to get our legislature to pass said proposed solution, which is the actual hard part.
Wow, good thing the owner didn’t fire a load of people in the government department who could prevent this.
He fired them because he knew his system sucked, and would never be roadworthy, and that was the department that would stop him. So he fired them, and here we are.
I’m actually looking forward to a lot of good crashes, that they’ll explain away as Sleepy Joe’s fault, or it’s not that bad that a school bus full of children blew up on a fire crash with a Tesla, it happens all the time, or perhaps they’ll just deny it, and MAGA will cover it up. Let them kill a whole bunch of American citizens, and then be all dismissive of any criticism.
This is the year to let MAGA fully flower, and do their worst. The Dems should just stay out of the way, and do nothing to stop them from themselves, and work the media to point out every disaster. I can’t wait for the Midterms.
He fired them because he was under 17 active NTHSA investigations.
Whatever, poeple who buy Teslas or get into a Tesla cab or buy TSLA deserve everything coming to them.
Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.
I will never take any auto autonomous Tesla. Waymo maybe, but always a taxi or Uber and better yet a bus or train.
I can’t remember how many safety features Tesla has foregone in the name of profit, but my perception of them is that they’re death machines for both riders and pedestrians. No thank you
It’s not even about profit any more, Elon’s ego just won’t let him admit that he was wrong about a camera-only system, when the entire rest of the industry is using LIDAR. Genius businessman doesn’t understand the concept of sunk cost.
They still drive better than Elon who is in a k hole right now 👍
If driverless taxis ever go mainstream (and that’s a big if), it will be from companies like Waymo, not Tesla. Tesla shouldn’t be seen as a serious company. I mean, they do sell legitimate products, but their $1.6 trillion market cap isn’t based on what they sell today, but what their cult member investors think they’re going to bring to market in the future. You know, all the stuff that will usher in the post-human, techno utopia. It’s all nonsense, and someday it will all come crashing down, though that could take a while. People can stay delusional for a long time.
And yet WAYMO taxis have been driving through bus stops like it’s going out of style. They aren’t necessarily better.
Yeah, but I trust Waymo will get their shit together long before that psycho will, if ever.
Did Robotaxi just flat out steal the Cyberpunk font in order to try to look cool? It seems like a very Musk thing to do.
He is such a dork
No he’s not in the nerdy spectrum, he tried very hard to be cool with nerds, after they made him lotsa money.
But he’s just an awful person. Dork is too cool for him. He’s such a total loser
Feeling a bit smug since I was early adopter of calling “self-driving” cars a grift. Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
Six months from now. Just as true today as it was ten years ago.
Waymo self driving cars are very good imo, I live near a location where they operate and drive along side them daily on my way to work and have ridden in one twice. They are way better than human drives in my area.
Does waymo even make a profit yet? Look at all the high tech crap they have to have on the cars just to operate in highly developed city. As long as the USA’s road conditions remain on par with subharan Africa that’s never coming to consumer cars.
Honestly, no clue. Probably not. You’re right, they have a big obstacle in the way of becoming profitable if they aren’t because they only operate in certain areas they have a lot of training data for.
My campus has a self driving mini bus service though there’s a real driver in the driver’s seat jic.
Funny part was that tesla taxis also had a human attendant, but for the sake of appearance made them sit on the passenger side. They deliberately limited staff from being able to interact with steering and pedals.
They eventually moved those to the driver seat.
I wonder if they had passenger side brake pedals like driving instructor cars do.
They did not, they had some touch screen button.
They basically needlessly increased risk for the sake of avoiding optics of a safety driver with direct controls possible.
So was it worth it, if you still have to employ a mini-bus driver…?
No idea, when I attended, I walked to school after riding the train.
I’ve never heard that. Like, anywhere. Lol
musk:
2016 “We should be able to do 90 percent of miles driven [autonomously] within three years.”
2015 “A Tesla car next year will probably be 90-percent capable of autopilot. Like, so 90 percent of your miles can be on auto. For sure highway travel.”
2018 “From a technology standpoint, Tesla will have a car that can do full autonomy in about three years, maybe a bit sooner.”
2018 “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
2019 “I consider autonomous driving to be a basically solved problem. … We’re less than two years away from complete autonomy. Regulators however will take at least another year; they’ll want to see billions of miles of data.”
there are about 20 more entries like this.
you apparently haven’t paid attention to the grifter in chief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk
That’s only musk though. Hardly “was undeniable fact”.
Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
I’ve never heard that. Like, anywhere. Lol
the person I replied to.
If you like to watch your money burn, invest in Tesla.
and if YOU want to burn, get in a Tesla
