Anybody know why the autonomous taxi isn't just a model 3?
I don't see the point in a purpose built two seater with no steering wheel or pedals and I don't know why regulators would approve an autonomous car with no way to manually override it.
Imagine if you could have one human operator able to go anywhere in the city for every 50 active cars ! Of course you can scale the number up and down based on actual needs. Kinda like Tesla AAA. Overhead will be less than having a driver per car and could be reasonable.
How long would it take for the single operator to reach a stuck car, worst case and average? I don’t know how it’s in the US but I’m pretty sure you could never get this certified in the EU, you can’t have your cars stuck and blocking traffic for 20 minutes before someone comes to get it unstuck. I think remote control would be much better for this.
Imagine a hurricane knocks out mobile internet and every car in the fleet is offline, x% of all cars on road stop operating, or maybe they have some independence, but if they get stuck, are stuck immobile until comms are restored. I guess at least if they're small other vehicles can shove them out of the way.
Barring all the issues, if you did build a huge fleet of autonomous taxis - smaller, lighter cars with less moving pieces would save you a lot of money.
2 seater - smaller car
No wheels or stuff - saves money on the build and parts.
They are probably planning to reuse lots of parts from model 3 to save money
And people are creatures of habit and highly social so version 1 of robotaxis will 100% look like normal cars. Regardless of whatever benefits you can come up with on paper. Once it's normalized then you experiment.
This is the company that released the CyberTruck. V1 will probably look mostly like what was presented. Every single prototype they have ever unveiled eventually ended up looking very similar to the production model.
Mark my words: the "final form" of robotaxis will seat 4 (up to 6 in a pinch) people on facing seats, will be able to drive in both directions and have all 4 wheels fully steerable for more flexibility.
I assume robo taxi will be significantly cheaper to manufacture. You can get away with much less range and creature comforts being quite a bit less. People care much less about comfortable for something they sit in for twenty minutes versus buy for $50k
Creature comforts, fine, they can go, but a shorter range? I thought the idea was for me to be able to have my car galavanting around the city all day being a taxi for people to help me make money. Forgive my ignorance, but how is a shorter range going to help with that?
Yeah I would be interested in seeing how the costs shake out.
There is logic in this design being cheaper to manufacture but I would think that it would be a long while before you "broke even", so to speak, compared to using a design that you already know exactly how to make.
I have no first hand knowledge here, but thinking from first principles. From Robotaxi fleet perspective you want autonomous maintenance, cleaning, charging, and lowest cost. From Robotaxi user perspective you want climate / music / entertaiment / safety. So the idea for robot taxi is that it should be better than model 3 in some or all of those dimensions.
Now speculating for the moment, from Elon perspective you probably want things to be more cyberpunky as that is how future looked in his childhood and he is trying to build it. Also, engineers / designers were likely mandated to handle all of the maintenance and possibly production by Tesla Bots.
Yes, I think you're spot on. They showed a video of a robot arm cleaning the car's inside, and it appears the vertical opening doors make that kind of access easier. The car will also have wireless charging, which makes that easier to automate as well.
Like any robot on a vehicle assembly line, it’s going to be trivial to get it to follow a pre programmed path. All the cars it has to clean are identical…. So actually it will be simple.
Because all the work of allegedly building a new vehicle platform is a better excuse for making no profit on the robotaxi initiative for the next ten years.
What's the deal with cynical, low effort comments like this that add nothing to the discussion? There's obviously more to the story than what you're saying. HackerNews is supposed to be for discussion, not Reddit-tier snark. Comments like yours are just visual pollution.
I mean, you've got to look at the context. This isn't happening in a vacuum; they've been promising this any minute now for the last eight years. At a certain point, the benefit of the doubt becomes strained, and every ostensible delay starts to look like a delaying tactic.
>What's the deal with cynical, low effort comments like this that add nothing to the discussion?
People are starting to wake up to the (shitty) new reality that Big Tech created for us. The cynical nature is just the natural reaction to a serial grifter becoming the world's richest man.
I don't think anyone but the most naive actually believes anything in this PR piece will come to market.
Oh yeah, look at all the terrible things Tesla has done, sell more EVs than everyone else, and make them for less cost, and include a good infotainment system in a car, what a terrible reality
The future I was promised was utopian, and instead my appliances all play ads and spy on me, and the robber barons at the top of the heap will use their billions that they got selling my personal data to advertising scum to leave legacy trusts that will continue to erode the fabric of society and increase wealth disparity long after said billionaires are dead and buried.
But sure, your Tesla has a good infotainment system so that's cool.
Which CEO is leaning into far-right conspiracy theories and using Twitter to boost the electoral chances of the most dangerous US presidential candidate in history?
Yes. Sadly, it's always been this way. Look up the response posts to Dropbox, Ethereum, .. Every few years I'm like "I think it's gotten worse" and then I'm like "I'm going to spin up some sentiment analysis to prove it's gotten worse" and then I read some old posts and I'm like "I miss jacquesm, but nah it's pretty much the same." And then I think "this is still the best forum on the internet."
Their cars currently produce an audible request to close the doors. In practice it doesn't happen often, I've never seen it happen in person. They also have support just minutes away usually.
The Zeekr vehicle they're testing now, and presumably the Hyundai they're starting to develop, will have self-closing doors.
I've heard in the past that the OEMs don't want to be relegated to being just some whitebox manufacturer so many of them have been very cold (in receptiveness) to working with Waymo. Probably explains the terrible selection of vehicles they have used, Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Jaguar i-Pace, the ionic 5 was surprising since I suspected the others were just OEMs offloading their turds onto Waymo and telling them to take a hike. Maybe Hyundai is getting something good in exchange.
Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.
Tesla sold a bunch of cars to Hertz which turned out to be terrible for Hertz, but great for Tesla.
>Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.
They very much care if they are selling their cars to an entity that is striving to make them irrelevant.
Think about it: If the world moves to a car sharing system where any type of car is available on demand and no one actually owns a car, do you think anyone will actually give one hoot about the badge on the front of the car? That puts manufacturers into the worst possible business model. Competing solely on price...ie a commodity.
So the manufacturers will either not want to work with them, give them whatever junk they can't sell and then tell them to go away...or they expect to get something big in return maybe like some technology sharing or a exclusive partnership.
Why else has Waymo partnered with the bottom of the barrel OEMs up to this point? Why not a Toyota or a Mercedes or hell even get the good cars from the OEMs they have partnered with?
Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.
They’re one of the few companies mass-manufacturing affordable EVs in the US.
Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
>Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.
What does one have to do with the other? The I-Pace was built in Austria. They dont seem to care about where it was built.
>Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
The Chrysler Pacifica was a gas powered vehicle, The I-Pace had a starting MSRP of ~70k. They didn't seem to care about propulsion method or cost of vehicle either.
What they do have in common is that they were both poorly selling cars made by manufacturers that were desperate to sell.
>Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
Any evidence to prove this assertion?
Going back to my previous comment I mentioned that an OEM could want to partner with them if they got something meaningful out of the deal. Seems like thats what Hyundai is getting: Waymo Tech transfer/possibly an exclusivity agreement.
>I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
You ignored the rest of my response which is again driving the point: What does Hyundai really get out of this?
Circling back to my point, this does not really explain why they are partnering with Waymo. Waymo is a rounding error in sales for Hyundai.
If Waymo was solely focused on cost, then they should have stuck with the pacifica which is cheaper or gotten something even cheaper like a Toyota. It makes no sense to go with Hyundai which is not even the cheapest for the features that it offers(compared to id 4, Niro EV, Hell even Kona EV). It is a smaller car compared to the Pacifica and the i-Pace and is far less equipped in terms of comfort and space.
We dont even know if they specifically wanted to go with an EV. Thats just something you just asserted without evidence.
It sure seems like their self-imposed constraint is EVs. Their goal beyond that is cost reduction. It seems like the actual key right now might be volume:
“The team at our new manufacturing facility is ready to allocate a significant number of vehicles for the Waymo One fleet as it continues to expand. Importantly, this is the first step in the partnership between the two companies and we are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration.”
but to your point, Hyundai may see this as an opportunity for “future collaboration” to get autonomous driving tech into their vehicles. But selling a “significant number of vehicles” is also very much in Hyundai’s interest.
If Hyundai was making the Niro or Kona EV in the US, then they may have been an option, but they’re not. They are not eligible for the tax credit. Toyota won’t make EVs here until 2025 or 2026.
The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
Uh that article is clearly a PR puff piece timed to coincide with the retirement of the Pacifica fleet which is nearing 5-6 years of service at that point.
Again given their strange choices in the past and their backpedaling on previous initiatives (having Chrysler produce special Pacificas and then going back to retrofitting them by hand themselves, going from commiting to purchasing 65k pacificas to NOT purchasing 65K Pacificas, getting Magna to go a custom design of the iPace for them to not having them do a custom design) I dont see this as a deal that Hyundai got into without major concessions.
>The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
If my theory is correct I suspect they are not getting a warm reception from many manufacturers and they have to pick whatever they can get. I'd imagine their ideal company is Toyota. They have experience with those cars from the early days, they make cars that can help minimize downtime due to their reliability and costs can be reduced. There is a reason so many taxis are prisues. Why not apply that common sense cost savings to Waymo's fleet?
Because that isn’t different or new enough to get investors excited.
The point of this presentation was not to spell out technically how they are going to accomplish this. Agreed, a fleet of model 3s would work great.
The point of this presentation was to look like a cool visionary tech company that is going to change the world, to justify that your Market cap is now larger than EVERY OTHER MAJOR AUTOMAKER COMBINED!
Same reason the prototypes need to look like they were lifted from Blade Runner.
Many reasons. Model 3 is to big. The Model 3 is missing many features needed, like inductive charging, automatic doors. And has lots of things not needed, like a steering wheel column. Model 3 is build on a much older architecture, even the upgraded versions. Model 3 still uses traditional car wiring.
With all the changes you would have to do to M3, its basically a new car.
This Robotaxi will have all the drive-by-wire architecture of the Cybertruck. The new electronics architecture and Ethernet bus. And things like wireless charging.
I don't see the point in a purpose built two seater with no steering wheel or pedals and I don't know why regulators would approve an autonomous car with no way to manually override it.