> Is it that hard braking events are broadly indicative of surprises of lots of sorts,
Of apparent surprises to the driver. And since actual, factual surprises are extremely rare, if a driver is regularly being surprised, they're a bad driver.
"Not at fault" as far as the law is concerned, is a low bar. If you're one of the last cars in a queue, you should be checking your mirrors for exactly this scenario. Throwing your hands up in the air saying "well the law says I did no wrong!" isn't the way. Unless you like getting into accidents.
Also, having two of the same type of accident twice in such a short time is so improbable, that I'm seriously doubting your friend. I'd say it's way more likely she braked too suddenly or has other bad driving habits that make such accidents more likely than that she got this unlucky.
Driving predictably and smoothly is good. The only time there should be any braking considered remotely "hard" would be when something surprised you, which should almost never happen.
> Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient.
Fundamentally impossible. You're moving some 2 tons of mass in a 2x5m box on polluting rubber tires to move a single 100kg human.
I can always take whatever efficiency gain you've thought up and simply make the vehicle bigger, decreasing the cost and space used per passenger, and maybe even put it on rails, making it less polluting, and more energy efficient.
You can't engineer your way out of the laws of physics.
Neither does the car — it won't drive into what LIDAR sees as a wall. But stopping is not good enough, it needs to be able to navigate the obstacle as well.
Also, even if the car behaved perfectly anyway, these scenarios are useful for testing — validating that the expected behavior happens.
Not entering a roundabout when it's clearly safe to do so is a mark against you at a driving exam. So would be always driving at 5mph. It's just not that simple.
> IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used as a point against them.
Only if you're comparing them to another company, which you seem to be. So yes, yes it can.
Seriously, the amount of sheer cope here is insane. Waymo is doing the thing. Tesla is not. If Tesla were capable of doing it, they would be. But they're not.
It really is as simple as that and no amount of random facts you may bring up will change the reality. Waymo is doing the thing.
Waymo has (very shrewdly, for prospective investors at least) executed a strategy that most quickly scales to 0.1% of the population. Unfortunately it doesn't scale further. The cars are too costly and the mapping is too costly. There is no workable plan for significant scale from Waymo.
Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of the population.
> Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of the population.
So, uh… where is this “scale” then? This “strategy” has been bandied about for better part of a decade. Why are they still in a tiny geofence in Austin with chase cars?
Waymo is doing it right now. Half a million rides every week, expansion to a dozen new cities. Tesla does a few hundred in a tiny area.
Scale is assessed by looking at concrete numbers, not by “strategies” that haven’t materialized for a decade.
Of apparent surprises to the driver. And since actual, factual surprises are extremely rare, if a driver is regularly being surprised, they're a bad driver.
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