Teslas burst into flames 1/10th as often as gas cars. They just get a lot of news coverage when they do, because they’re new and thus news-worthy. Sadly the reports tend to leave out the relevant context.

That’s not what happened in this case - the car locked up with no warning. Which is of course concerning. It’s the first time I’ve seen such a report, so it’s likely pretty rare given how Teslas seem to get wide reporting.

There’s actually a fairly long range in Teslas when they hit 0% on the battery, on top of which…

This is all a wild overreaction to 11 collusions with emergency vehicles over 4 years. In reality, emergency vehicles drive and park unsafely quite often, since they’re doing unusual things in order to respond to emergencies, and as a result are about 5x more likely to be in accidents, and cause deaths, than normal…

Autopilot in a Tesla means exactly the same thing as it does in an airplane, which is where they got the name. That is, it’s a system that automates the boring parts of flying/driving, and the pilot/driver has to maintain awareness and be prepared to take control. Teslas with Autopilot engaged have 1/10th the…

Keep in mind that ‘chip company’ is different from ‘chip fab’. For example, Apple is now a chip company, making a huge volume of high performance custom chips, but they don’t fab the chips - that’s TSMC. it would make zero sense for Tesla to build their own chip fab when there are so many very good fabs available.

In terms of Cybertruck alone, sure, a delay is a shame. But from Tesla’s perspective, would you rather put resources into scaling up Y production volumes since they have infinite demand, or in starting to produce the Cybertruck which will ramp up over the following year? The financial math is pretty obvious.

For a challenger, a ‘divisive’ design is a win, because they literally have nothing to lose, and if only 10% of truck buyers like the Cybertruck, that’s still a huge success for Tesla - the Truck market is huge, and a 10% market share would keep them selling every unit they could make for years. And doing a radically…

99% of road damage is caused by freight trucks, almost all from trucks illegally driving over-weight. Consumers shouldn’t have to pay anything because they’re not causing the costs. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/06/22/murphys-law-how-trucks-destroy-our-roads/ . Thus the question of how to measure mileage driven by…

No, consumer vehicles do near-zero road damage. Virtually all road damage is large freight trucks, mainly with illegal over-limit freight. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/06/22/murphys-law-how-trucks-destroy-our-roads/ .

If we want to actually cover the costs, we should shift the payments to align with costs.…

Exactly - they don’t need to know precise position, just miles driven, which is measured by the odometer.

Note that if the goal is to pay for instructure based on the cost incurred by the vehicles, then almost 100% of the cost should be covered by 18-wheelers, 75% by drivers illegally driving over the legal weight, as…

Everyone doing voice recognition does something like this, for the same reason - they need tons of voice samples from a wide variety of people, listened to by people in order to generate training data to make their voice recognition work on a wide range of people using a wide range of vocabulary and phrasing.…

Exactly! And it writes out to a USB drive plugged into any of the car’s USB ports, just like the dashcam capability they added a few months ago.

You mean like how the “shorts” filed an unnecessary lawsuit and released a press release, to try to manufacture bad news for Tesla? If they weren’t trying to manipulate the stock, they’d just wait for the SEC to complete an investigation...

It’s only “actionable” if he doesn’t have the financing lined up that he claimed. There’s no particular reason to think that’s the case, and a pretty strong reason to think that’s not the case - it would require Musk to not understand the SEC’s rules at all, which is pretty hard to believe given how much of his life…

Let’s be realistic - autonomous vehicles don’t have to be 100% perfect, they just has to be at least as good as human drivers, at which point they’ll win in many cases due to economics (and mobility enabling the elderly, kids, handicapped, etc.). And given that many humans are distracted, tired, drunk, etc., that goal…

People who can’t drive (kids, elderly, handicapped) actually a huge market now for shared ride services, and if AVs drive costs down, that would only increase.

Too often you are right. But Grand Central Station is wonderful. And anything done during the time when NYC gave tax breaks for public art and public spaces is _much_ nicer. Sure, businesses are motivated by money, but when it’s doing its job the government can use that greed towards the public good.

No, this is what happens when you do infrastructure projects in densely packed cities full of businesses and people who file lawsuits whenever they are affected by construction. Specifically “ the authority claims it had to reduce the width of the station so it remained under the Second Avenue roadbed without…

Interesting read at https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/transportation/bus-versus-rail .

The 46,000 is just the number of people who were bumped off of a flight because the airline couldn’t talk people into taking some compensation and “voluntarily” taking a later flight.

Overbooking averages more than one “bumped” seat per flight - it’s extremely common these days, which is why passengers are so pissed…