Waymo already beat Tesla to Full Self Driving. I use Waymo frequently in SF and it's great. It makes this Tesla robotaxi with an undefined release date not very interesting.
They're currently discussing how difficult it was to design a credit card reader for the Robotaxi that would reliably fail whenever it detects cash in the passenger's wallet.
The event has started. They have some Teslas driving slowly around the Warner Brothers lot with no people in them. Musk is talking.<p>The closed captions are running ahead of the talking.
He talks about the tyranny of parking lots, but this is a solved problem! The whole presentation is an exercise in steadfastly not talking about public transportation.
After seeing the Chinese company Unitree tease this <a href="https://youtu.be/GzX1qOIO1bE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/GzX1qOIO1bE</a>, Optimus seems very unarticulated and clunky. And Unitree claim it would be a bit more than half the projected cost of the Tesla offering.
Time will tell.
My bets right now are not on Elon leading a Tesla supremacy in anything in the future—and that is unfortunate. I wish an American company could pull it off.
I can only imagine the kind of last-minute drama the Robotaxi team is going through, behind the scenes.<p>Hopefully they will pull through and get started soon enough.
Presentation is over. They're having a party.<p>Overall, this demo looks a lot like the self driving vehicles at Guangzhou Bio Island. They have slow self-driving buses and taxis in a somewhat controlled environment.[1] That sort of thing has been working for about five years now.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3sCm1GGC5I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3sCm1GGC5I</a>
It was a medical emergency. <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1844567949144883345" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1844567949144883345</a>
What a bizzare world we live in. He's promising some version of the thing he did in 2016 [0], he's promising a lower than $30k price point, also the famous "unsupervised full self driving" (how many more adjectives does one need for autonomous vehicles?).<p>Perhaps he's made another deal with the board for a better $100B pay package so he can lie to the shareholders (who'll eat it up) and he'll dump subpar products onto these people who are heralding him as another "genius" or whatever.<p>He's just another run-of-the-mill, out of touch conman at this point.
He was great, but he didn't hold onto his own greatness.<p>edit: Something about a park ride?! ... Jesus.<p>[0] - <a href="https://qz.com/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-timeline-1851664786#:~:text=Elon%20Musk%20has%20been%20promising,for%20more%20than%20five%20years&text=We%20may%20earn%20a%20commission%20from%20links%20on%20this%20page.&text=Elon%20Musk%20first%20promised%20that,first%20popped%20into%20his%20head" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-timeline-1851664786#...</a>.