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.
A passenger in the drivers seat could easily kill everyone by bumping the steer wheel (and reverting control back to... themself!) or by resting their foot inadvertently on the pedals.
You're right, it's purely optics, a stock pump play. The system would be safer with the Tesla employee behind the wheel, but these techbro influencer videos would be less impressive that way.
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?
My better half and I were actually discussing exactly this.
I'm shopping for an EV used, and magically, the price is exactly the same for EVs that are eligible for the credit and the ones that aren't.
The dealerships treat the rebate as basically a manufacturer spiff, I pay the same either way.
So yeah, I agree. Pulling all of them at once might cause some market disruption, though, and legacy autos are already not committed to EV transition, so it will worsen an already problematic tendency, I think.
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.