Technology

Elon ripped out the LiDAR

No he didn't...He never even installed it in the first place.

But the self driving taxi fleet is coming anytime now /s

More like GTA

This is literally the only way we'll ever get self-driving cars. You have to test them in real life. Simulations and tests tracks can only take you so far. Yeah it'll probably cost the lifes of some number of people but this will be greatly outnumbered by the amount of lives saved when the technology actually starts working as intented. It's not like human driven vehicles are exactly safe for pedestrians either.

Also, when a self-driving vehicle fails it almost always means it ends up getting stuck somewhere or blocking the road. It's extremely rare for it to cause an accident, though that does happen aswell.

I wonder what you then think about people who drive after heavily drinking or taking drugs. To be honest, I have more faith in technology than in humans.

Not to mention that self driving can probably solve some other problems too, like traffic jams caused by erratic driving behavior of humans, etc.

If you have vehicle to vehicle communication, it is possible to adapt the speed of all the vehicles on the street to avoid them being stuck in a traffic jam.

I'm generally the one defending Tesla in these threads but on Waymo's defence; the remote operators aren't actually controlling the car. Instead when faced with a challenging situation the car "calls home" for assistance basically asking a human to take a look at the situation and help it to decide what to do. This might be a car partially blocking the lane of traffic cones placed in a weird manner so the car justs asks for assurance that it's okay to proceed. In the most difficult situations the remote operator can suggest a route for the vehicle to take but the decision on what to do is ultimately on the vehicle itself.

And he forgets to mention the precise mapping required too. He also left out the terrible experiences Waymo has had with revoked permits, cars disabled by traffic cones, and multiple traffic stopping glitches where intersections were blocked for hours.

The author is very well aware of this dilemma, in fact that topic is the center of his article, and he is making some good points about why real autonomous driving might still take a long time until achieved.

Besides that the cars are constantly getting around without a designated driver. For the technology and for the industry that is a huge breakthrough.

"self-driving"

Someone else, forreal - driving

A couple years ago, we used to joke around the shop "Of course they used AI - An intern."