6 ms·

manual driving is clearly, sooner or later, going out the door. getting from A to B has been getting commodified and the notion of a "car" is rapidly moving tow

• sporkxrocket 1y ago
  Tesla has made no inroads to this story, their valuation is 100% unjustified.
• utyop22 1y ago
  Posts like this are just pure noise. Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car? Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward.
  • webdevver 1y ago
    >Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car? Many people enjoy writing code 'manually' too. But overwhelmingly, people opt to have LLMs write most of it for them. There is no way in hell I'm ever reading api docs or writing python scripts by hand ever again with gemini, unless gemini craps the bed and i'm forced to do so. listen man i'm a petrol head too... look, when FSD comes out as-standard, this turning-the-steering-wheel malarky is done-zo. its over. yes theres people who enjoy driving a car, but if you offerd people full self driving in every car with no price premium, 99% of the population would never touch a steering wheel again. >but over here in Europe bro, Europeans love daddy government to come and ** their ** up. all you have to do is tell the euro "FSD decreases traffic accidents by 5%!" and they will do the policing themselves. I can already hear it: "erm excuse me, is your car not FSD? you know, you're endangering myself and others by driving that on the road, right? do you have a license for your manually-operated car?"
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • lenerdenator 1y ago
    > Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. Maybe in the US (I dont personally live there so I couldnt care!) but over here in Europe its not that straight forward. It would be even less straightforward in the US than in Europe. Many cities are 100% car-dependent.
  • frizlab 1y ago
    > Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. They can, and have been.
  • throw0101d 1y ago
    > Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car? 1. Not as many as you think, IMHO. 2. Those folks can perhaps not turn on the self-driving feature. 3. Even those that do may have times where it is a chore (stop-and-go traffic). > Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. If self-driving can be shown to be statistically safer than hour human-driving then your insurance company may offer you discounts for always using it. No government regulation needed: those bearing the risks will incentivize you to do the less risk-y thing.
  • seberino 1y ago
    Some people also love riding horses, making their own clothes and hunting for their own food. None of that changes the march of technology for the majority. The plain fact is there are too many benefits to self driving cars like price and safety.
    • utyop22 1y ago
      Imagine comparing driving a car to riding horses, lmao!
  • Jcampuzano2 1y ago
    To be fair, there are many things that people 'enjoy' to do that are illegal or not allowed or regulated heavily. Just because you enjoy something doesn't make it the right thing to do or allow. This as a person who does not believe Tesla has the right formula to actually achieve FSD and that a pure vision approach would never work in the way they want it to (no interventions, all weather, etc). There will come a time when technology advances enough that self driving with be an order of magnitude safer than human driving, and we will have to battle with the fact that allowing humans to do so will be objectively worse for society. That may not actually be anytime soon, but it may happen.
  • davidmurdoch 1y ago
    Interesting perception. Here in the US it's unfathomable to think a regulation that doesn't allow people to drive cars would ever receive a single vote. It wouldn't happen. Citizens here would revolt and politicians in support would quite literally be murdered over this. People here really love driving their cars. Yes, to an insane degree. But from my news bubble, and my perception of much of Europe... it seems to me that it is very likely a regulation like this would happen in Europe, probably through a well-meaning green initiative. Funny how perceptions of others can be so drastically different!
    • utyop22 1y ago
      The US as it stands is a dictatorship, that thankfully, has some checks and balances to control Mr Trump. One only has to watch that recent White House dinner of the Big Tech figures getting together (minus Scamath) and the forceful nature in which Mr Trump made Zuck and Cook issue statements of large investment amounts. Nothing of that nature goes in Europe, at least not so blatantly.
    • ryanwaggoner 1y ago
      We're decades away from no one being allowed to drive manually, but people don't actually like driving. They like the autonomy of a car. That's not the same thing. If there's a button in people's cars that they can push and then play on their phone for the rest of the trip, 99% of people are going to push that button. And after a few years of that, and insurance rates being higher for manual driving, we'll start seeing some areas be automated-driving only, which will then expand...
      • davidmurdoch 1y ago
        I don't think you've been deep in car culture or just disregard them as a minority group. This minority would become extremely vocal if manual driving were to be regulated by the government. Insurance incentivization is another matter; they're used to that already.
        • utyop22 1y ago
  • axus 1y ago
    There are many people who live in dread of sudden large repair bills obstructing their ability to make a living. When drivers are no longer a prerequisite, there can be large competing fleets of ride services. Getting a ride on-demand with no down payment and lower annual cost will be attractive to a lot of people.
  • nartho 1y ago
    Not that it's currently possible, but having the infrastructure designed around self driving cars (meaning the road and signs themselves are built to communicate useful information to the car ) and the network of cars communicating with each other, we could achieve high speeds, smooth insertion in traffic etc. The benefits would be stopping congestion in cities, reducing pollution as well as reducing/eliminating car crashes In that case, there would be absolutely no way we could allow manual driving. The benefits are just too great. Obviously I'm talking about a best case scenario where things actually work as they should.
    • utyop22 1y ago
      You do realise this is never going to happen? Especially not with countries that are already running on budget deficits. If you want the roads to be privatised (whom then eventually will setup tolls) be my guest... but leave me out of it lmao.
      • nartho 1y ago
        I don't have a crystal ball no. Infrastructure evolves thankfully, that's the purpose of taxes.
        • utyop22 1y ago
          Yeah taxes are nice. Especially when running on a budget deficit. Where is the funding for all this coming from again? Remind me why councils for example in the UK, are broke and barely investing in this stuff? Ah... yeah. Lets get real.
  • Supermancho 1y ago
    I'm not saying your gut feeling is incorrect, but these arguments aren't compelling. > Have you ever considered many people actually enjoy driving a car? This has nothing to do with industry. Calculators were actually a PAID position and they went away, regardless of the number of people that enjoy mathalons. > Regulation cannot simply be imposed on people against their will. This is incorrect, historically and practically. Roads and highways, in an economic metaphor, are rivers of money. They provide capital velocity as well as smoothing labor and consumer availability. Due to the economy of scale, mass transportation and self locomotion is the only practical transport for people at the highest densities. GOODS, on the other hand, require a powered engine to move in and out. Those stacks of soda can't be transported by subway. The sodas produce trash, that also can't travel by subway. Roads themselves and trucking, in general, have kept personal vehicles in service. Cars still exist in London and New York, over a century later for this very reason. Motorized bikes dominate many cities in Asia. I can see that becoming a preferred mode in western cities, over time. After that, I could also see personal driving becoming regulated out of existence (ie huge fees to run a personal vehicle in a hyper-urban area). Maybe, just maybe, grassroots political will could have pushed cars off the road (so to speak) when the climate crisis was a meager priority, but I have lost faith in that avenue.
• Spivak 1y ago
  where do you live where transportation is "rapidly" turning into private multi-person transportation? because i don't think i can name a single city i've been in where cars are noticeably diminishing to any degree.
  • utyop22 1y ago
    Lol hes delusional. Over here in London the roads are packed more than ever. And I don't see Teslas on the road all that much.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. It's not even a good bet. There still are zero self-driving Tesla's on the road. Zero. It's even likely there will be legislation forcing LIDAR for self driving cars. Elon cannot flip the switch on self driving until they have millions of intervention free miles under their belt. Right now Tesla gets ~500 miles without intervention. One kid gets decked and the law will shutter his plan. There is another layer too, where because of his polarizing personality, a lot of critical talent is inaccessible to him. Keep in mind Elon is doing -none- of the engineering besides the social engineering. He relies on talented people who want to work for him. I know many talented people who could make a difference for Tesla, but none who would ever give Elon a single minute of time.
  • utyop22 1y ago
    Yeah as time goes on, the grift has become more apparent. But will it get fully exposed before he dies? Thats the real question.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      If you look on twitter it's full of cringey "xXWealthMastersXx" accounts falling over themselves to hype Tesla. It's a full on steel domed welded shut echo chamber.
      • utyop22 1y ago
        Its becoming more obvious that X was acquired so that Musk had control of a form of mass communication to benefit himself. Very ugly world we live in - the joker masquerades as someone who is doing stuff for the benefit of humanity and crossdresses to appeal to whomever to benefit himself.
    • blitzar 1y ago
      The amount of speical K he goes through that has a better chance of happening by the end of the year (tm) than self driving.
• grim_io 1y ago
  I don't think anything is clear about the possibility of full self driving under all conditions. We could be 2 years away from it or 200. Who knows? Elon doesn't, despite his best misinformation efforts. Also, private busses? I don't see any movement towards them that can be described as rapid.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• runako 1y ago
  > whoever invents self-driving cars first, will kill cars as we know it Are you talking about Waymo here? In any case, the timeline is not obvious.
• izzydata 1y ago
  What reality do you exist in where Zuckerberg, Cook and Gates have rehabilitated their public image? At least Zuckerberg and Cook are currently seen as Trump sycophants and are personally despised for it. Elon is not just a PR department away from being seen as an acceptable person. He did a Nazi salute for the world to see and most of the world finds him contemptible. Also the only way manual driving diminishes is if the world invests more into public transportation.
  • Jcampuzano2 1y ago
    I think you underestimate how quickly public sentiment can change. Just a few years ago there was public outcry, protests, etc for anything Musk related. Now there is none of that, not many people talking about him in a political light and I'm certain public sentiment about him has gone up given it is now already more publicly acceptable to talk about things adjacent to him and his companies. There will be die hards who will never change, but its clearly apparent on social media he is no longer getting anywhere near the hate he used to, and even people who previously weren't are now publicly praising things like Grok and recent SpaceX missions.
    • izzydata 1y ago
      Every day I see contempt for the acts he committed through "Doge". The man is irredeemable. It's not like he personally does any work anyway. Any kind of accomplishment that happens at SpaceX or other companies is from hard working intelligent employees. If not for the uncertainty around the extremely inflated Tesla stock price due to the lies he has told he would have been ousted years ago. He has no tangible vision of the future and no expertise in anything.
• Joker_vD 1y ago
  Dude, we can't get fully automated underground trains/above-ground trams yet, and those things run on bolted-down, fixed tracks (which are completely clear when we're talking about the underground).
• plooooooop 1y ago
  I was thinking about this the other day, and I don’t plan on buying another car until something self-driving is available. Waymo is rolling out to my metro this year (Denver) and I bet I’ll be able to buy a self-driving vehicle within 10 years, which is well within the life of my current vehicle.
• danmur 1y ago
  I wonder if it will ever be practical or economical to have humans and machines driving together on the roads we have now though. Maybe we'll skip that step and go to robot-only roads with more stuff built into the actual roads. On Musk, he doesn't need PR so much as to keep his mouth shut for a while and try and deliver on some of his BS instead of spouting more.
• notahacker 1y ago
  > alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem I don't think Zuck et al are avoiding criticism because of their wardrobe (I don't think they're avoiding criticism actually). But they haven't spent $44b to signal boost hatred of their core customer base and it's values or offered unconditional up front support for a presidential platform which spends taxpayer money ripping out EV chargers to own the libs, does many other things unhelpful to his businesses, but did let him have a play at destroying regulators for a bit. This has very little to do with PR departments and cost an awful lot more, so it might have been an objectively better bet for Elon not to have done this...
• JumpinJack_Cash 1y ago
  > > zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem. They all shipped products that billions of people use and those old enough can remember a world without such products and how different it was. People can remember what the world was before Musk and it's the same as it is now, the wide eye fans are those who look at the technical accomplishments such as the rockets landing on their butt, however when they are asked by skeptics "what does it mean for me?" the response is always a not well specified "handwaving about the future" as if Musk was a 21yr old out of college
• tzs 1y ago
  > he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem. I'm confused by this. Zuckerberg has persistently had image problems. Sometimes it has improved for a bit but saying it has been rehabilitated seems to be a major overstatement. Cook, on the other hand, has generally always been positive with the public except for some skepticism early that he could succeed as successor to Jobs.