Comment by lateforwork
4 days ago
Tesla's Robotaxis are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving. The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo. When they hear about these Robotaxi crashes, they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone, dangerous and irresponsible.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value.
Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.
Yep. Especially when one of the brands is Tesla.
Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself.
Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.
I think the Tesla brand and the Elon brand have always been attached at the hip. This was fine when the Elon brand was "eccentric founder who likes memes, wants to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and plans to launch a Mars colony." It only became a marketing problem when he went down the right wing rabbit hole and started sieg heiling on stage.
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I’m not so sure. I think Tesla is so tied up in Musk’s personality that Tesla and Waymo aren’t in the same field, likewise with Optimus. Tesla isn’t self-driving, it is Tesla. Especially now that many mainstream vehicles ship with various levels of self-driving, a lot of people have a lot of exposure to it. Tesla has the best brand recognition but they no longer define the product. Tesla is Tesla, Waymo is self-driving.
Most people are able to be more nuanced than your typical hn zealot. They strongly dislike Musk, but are begrudgingly able to give credit where credit is due wrt Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
I really don't think that's true. Think Uber vs. Lyft. I know I distinguish between the two even if the experience is usually about the same and people I know where this has come up in conversation generally see Lyft as "off-brand" and a little more skeevy. They only take Lyfts when it's cheaper or quicker than Uber.
I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed).
I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road.
Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.
I worked in some fully autonomous car projects back in ~2010. I would say every single company and the industry at large felt HUGE pressure to not have any incidents, as a single bad incident from one company can wreck the entire initiative.
Which is ironic as human driven vehicle collisions are so common-place that they don't even make the news.
Right, but humans are never marketed as infallible, nor do you pay big bucks for them. You just are one already, and you know the limitations of humans.
Yep, feels a lot like that submarine that got crushed trying to get to the Titanic a year or two ago. It made the entire marine industry look worse, and other companies making submarines were concerned it would hurt their business.
The difference is the OceanGate Titan failure only harmed those who didn't do their due diligence and the grossly negligent owner. The risk was contained to those who explicitly opted in. In this case, Tesla Robotaxis harm others to keep Tesla's valuation and share price propped up. The performance art is the investor relations.
Inb4: not remotely in the marine field, so a genuine question. Would it really make an impact?
Robotaxis market is much broader than the submersibles one, so the effect of consumers' irrationality would be much bigger there. I'd expect an average customer of the submarines market to do quite a bit more research on what they're getting into.
Having the whole world meming on rich dudes in submarines could plausibly make the whole industry seem less cool to people with the money to buy even a good submarine. Imagine being a rich dude with a new submarine and everybody you talk to about it snickers about you getting crushed like Stockton. Maybe you'd just buy a bigger yacht and skip the submarine, which you were probably only buying for the cool factor in the first place...
yes, I talk to people and they have confidence in tesla. But then I mention that waymo is level 4 and tesla is level 2, and it doesn't make any difference.
I don't know what a clear/direct way of explaining the difference would be.
This is actually a rational explanation for this. Perhaps Elon wants to sink the whole industry until he can actually build a self driving car like Waymo's.
Perhaps he's bad at his job
He wants to break trust in the whole industry by giving Tesla a massive black eye, undoubtedly hurting their stock and sales significantly, in order to, later, create actual self driving cars into the market that he's already poisoned?
Totally rational.
Elon's drug addled brain doesn't make rational decisions.
Well, admittedly maybe I should have said "rational to Elon on Ketamine"
> are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving.
A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.
> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone
The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.
Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.
They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.
> dangerous and irresponsible.
These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.
Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
That’s the problem right there.
It’s EXTREMELY hard.
Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”
I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.
So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem.
Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.
It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.
If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.
> Some of us call them out.
You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?
> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
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dunning-kruger effect at the corporate level?