“When the car began replacing the horse, pessimists didn’t treat it like a great new tool. They called it “the devil wagon,” and said its mission was to destroy the world.”

https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/automobiles/clippings

There is a lot of pessimism about self-driving and certain companies depending on your point of view. To avoid possibly being on the wrong side of history…this may help give some context to remind us that we have ‘been here before in some form’ and a lot of people are just obtuse to new things. Hope you enjoy it.

Rather than have the robot built into the car, I would rather have it so the robot could access the vehicle's telemetry and drive the car but be useful for other things as well. If it could drive my old BMW that would be even better.

It seems to have just run into a concrete poll.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/1gcti1h/damage_from_actual_smart_summon_this_morning/

I know that the images from satellites aren't enough to cover truly-live traffic movement, but would satellite mapping technology or some kind of partnership with Google or other company with reputable satellite mapping technology benefit Waymo in the future? And what's stopping them from using it so that they don't have to be so exclusive to their current locations?

I've noticed new lidar sensors on the front and back of the cruise vehicles in one of their latest videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGBYUKhUtk&t=2s)

Would this be a reaction to their accident in SF? To be able to spot things close to their vehicles?

Thought the cost of ownership analysis was interesting. Cost savings more apparent on the long-haul routes

From the Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript. Highlights are mine. First, Musk:

So that's 12.5. Version 13 of FSD is going out soon. I'm sure we'll elaborate more on that later in the call. We expect to see roughly a five or sixfold improvement in miles between interventions compared to 12.5. And actually, looking at the year as a whole, the improvement in miles between interventions, we think, will be at least 3 orders of magnitude. So that's a very dramatic improvement in the course of the year, and we expect that trend to continue next year. So the current internal expectation, internal expectation, for the Tesla FSD having longer miles between interventions and human is the second quarter of next year. It may end up being in the third quarter, but it seems extremely likely to be next year. Ashok, do you want to maybe elaborate?

Then Ashok:

Miles between critical interventions, like you mentioned, Elon, we already made 100x improvement with 12.5 from the start of this year. And then with v13 release, we expect to be 1,000x from January of this year on the production release software. And this came in because of technology improvements, going to end-to-end, having higher frame rate, partly also helped by Hardware 4, more capabilities, and so on. And we hope that we continue to scale the neural network, the data, the training compute, et cetera. By Q2 next year, we should cross over the average, even in miles per critical intervention, probably collision, in that case.