Condition for resolving this market:
At least 10000 commercial rides have happened
Tesla's robotaxi is available to the general public in the US. So not behind a waitlist.
The robotaxis are fully driverless and FSD.
The type of car doesn’t matter nor if it has a steering wheel. Just needs to be self driving without any humans in the chain.
Rides should happen from a ride hailing service.
1,000
3.00@DavidFWatson I'd say the critical feature is whether it's self-driving. Who really cares whether it has a steering wheel at that point, if it's just some backup thing that barely ever gets used?
@makoyass I'm concerned that it could become a question of words rather than reality. The current Teslas literally have a feature called "full self driving", and yet we probably agree that they do not qualify as 'self-driving'.
Perhaps it could be based on whether the 10k commercial rides involved the car driving empty to pick up the passenger?
@DavidFWatson We can certainly easily agree about that :/ I don't think it's really difficult to call whether it's an autonomous service. I think the 10k is a decent criterion.
@makoyass I had a small bet with a friend regarding Waymo rolling out self driving taxis to all of SF. Now that it's clearly 'YES' he argues that it's not because the cars 'aren't actually self-driving' given that they can request assistance from humans at waymo if they get stuck.
"Are thousands of cars driving around with no one in them" is a nice easy benchmark that no one will argue about later.
@DavidFWatson so, you're saying remote-controlled would qualify as self-driving? I'd strongly disagree.
@deagol not completely remote-controlled, but if it's very rarely remote-controlled when there's a problem that seems fine? it's how i would intuitively take it to mean. tesla having the ability to override the ai doesn't mean the ai isn't driving, or wtv
@deagol Latency and connectivity are such that you can't reliably remote control a car over long distances. But there's also no reason to build such a system, because it'd be uneconomical to operate.
Worrying about distinguishing that end of the spectrum doesn't seem valuable to me.
On the other hand, I'm interested in a criteria that handles the other side of the spectrum cleanly: cars that are never helped with remote assistance vs cars that are helped remotely once per a hundred trips.
@deagol you can have a viable self-driving car business with the occasional intervention. But if you're more interested in the technology then the economic implications you won't be impressed by self-driving that requires interventions. It's also going to be difficult to call exactly how much intervention would be allowed.
@deagol why care about it for anything other than the economic implications!
If you built a truly self driving car but it was non viable because the computation absolutely required 100kw to operate, no one would care!
@DavidFWatson The steering wheel doesn’t matter. Just self driving autonomously without any humans. Rides should be in function of a ride hail service.
@professionalgambler Yes the car doesn’t matter it just needs to be self driving and the passenger doesn’t touch the steering wheel. The rides I mentioned should be from a uber like service that is available. (Ride hailing).
@DavidFWatson No, robotaxi refers to the service not the car. The car doesn’t matter. The question is more about general availability.
