I'm more of an urbaneist, actually
E.W. Niedermeyer
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This gentle soul. Author of LUDICROUS. Co-host of The Autonocast. Not sure how much more mobility innovation I can take. YMMV. Still on the bird app, for now.
I have a particular interest in Noah Goodall's debunking of Tesla's Autopilot safety claims because I wrote a post roughly outlining the same critique for The Daily Beast when Tesla started making these claims back in 2016.
You can read that here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exaggeraged-safety-claims-about-autopilot-and-cars
You can find the [free] updated preprint of Noah's paper debunking Tesla's Autopilot safety claims here: https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1973/version/4094
For years, Tesla and its supporters have waved away detailed investigations tying Autopilot's design to multiple deaths, claiming that the safety benefits outweighed them.
Now, finally, we have published academic work proving that Autopilot has no safety benefits, when you adjust the numbers for road type and driver age. In fact crashes appear to be 11% higher with Autopilot!
Huge thanks to Noah Goodall of the Virginia Transportation Research Council for this work!
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19439962.2023.2178566?journalCode=utss20
A good, nuanced read on the EV battery mineral problem here, from Canary Media.
People need to get this through their heads: scaling manufacturing and scaling resource extraction are NOT the same. The scale of mining and processing expansion needed are mind-boggling, and these are not tidy, rationalized activities (especially mining/exploration).
Adam Cook@niedermeyer I have argued that instead of terms like "solving" or "achieving" (which is the typical nomenclature that Tesla employs for #FSDBeta) for Level 4-capable fleets that the true metric is a "Passenger Revenue-Minus-Continuous Validation Economic Model" - which closely resembles commercial air travel.
Continuous validation is extremely costly and continuous validation never ends (hence, why a concept of a "finish line" in safety-critical systems does not exist).
I actually just submitted a draft on another aspect of this problem to an editor. I didn't think I'd end up writing about this topic as much as I have been (boring old regular cars, really?) but it's been a really interesting topic to explore. We're in a fascinating moment in our long and dramatic relationship with cars, and that's all I'm gonna say for now so I don't scoop myself here lol
As I wrote last year in the Times opinion section, the EV market's addiction to big batteries is a fundamental problem. We can't scale battery supply fast enough, so not only are EVs largely unaffordable (in the US) but we aren't going to start seeing scale-based efficiencies until we get through a decade of supply shortages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/opinion/electric-car-battery-range.html
Big, data-viz-y article from the NYT on a fairly well-understood point: giant, expensive EVs aren't better for the environment than small non-EV cars.
Slowly we're coming to terms with the fact that Elon sold the public a load of goods. We've been subsidizing these luxury EVs for years, hoping it would lead to something better. It hasn't. We've been had.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/17/climate/electric-vehicle-emissions-truck-suv.html
The speed with which Waymo is standing up driverless operations in San Francisco and LA definitely disproves the theory that they would be stuck in "easy mode" because they started in Phoenix.
The only problem is that the operations they are scaling aren't profitable. That's the hurdle that counts in robotaxis now.
