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
@sifutweety yep, my sense is that the current fad for "scaling" is about hitting arbitrary investor targets. I guess it's their money, but generally speaking it's a good idea to actually build something complete and profitable before scaling.
@sifutweety yeah, taxis are for sure not the easiest use case... but if you look at the labor market, the cost of ridehailing, the likelihood of ongoing inflationary pressures, there are some surprising tailwinds (which will probably bite more in trucking first anyway tho)
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).
@adamjcook I think that's a really reasonable approach.
Lately, I've been telling people about how my dad let me drive at age 12 on camping trips in Eastern Oregon, taking over when we would get to towns. There's no question I could drive, I just couldn't get a license, insurance, a job driving, etc. That's all part of the driving value chain, and what needs to be solved for.
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).
@Aminorjourney they are getting more expensive, but then so is everything else!