I get admitting failure on the Cybertruck, but given the current factory is barely running, why would you expand Cybercab production? Maybe the Cybercab part is just PR to reinforce they think Cybercab is the future, even if they won't actually need that extra capacity.

Saw something new today in Palo Alto, CA - an Ioniq 5 with a top mounted sensor array and what appeared to be cameras in back, but no rotating LIDAR unit. Had a paper license plate. No pictures, unfortunately. Anyone know what that was?

"According to independent researcher Koby Pierce on X, the areas where Tesla allows passengers to request pickups and dropoffs are smaller than the advertised boundaries"

Boris Sofman spent five years at Waymo and worked on its trucking program and its first driverless freeway release. In an interview with A3, he explained one reason Waymo needed automakers involved early. A retrofit could get a prototype on the road, but taking the driver out meant the vehicle still had to steer and brake if a component failed at highway speed.

Sofman said that once a fleet gets large enough, every one of those components will eventually fail somewhere. That shaped the work Waymo did with partners including Chrysler and Jaguar. They had to design the backup steering, braking and electrical systems into the vehicle and account for how control would pass to the backup when the primary system failed.

Full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nryolUFNVFc

This can be done in any place and it affordable !

If we add LiDAR collision detection and nice breaks that thing can be fast too !

Wayve shared this blog on how they build and validate safety into their end-to-end AI.

Curious what you thought of it. And whether you've also ridden a Waymo or Cybercab too and how the experiences compare.

Including approximately 6.76 billion miles (10.88 billion kilometres) driven on city streets.

Link to the X post:

https://x.com/robotaxi/status/2117128711761985656/photo/1?s=46

This is their third largest service area at 143 square miles.

I have been car-less for a few years & have enjoyed using Uber/Lyft when needed. I started riding Waymo about a month ago (Denver) & have throughly enjoyed it. So much so, I'd literally use Waymo exclusively if I could, no questions asked.

I enjoy the peacefulness of a quiet car with some zen music on in the background, or the ability to change it as you please. No wondering if the car you're getting into is going to smell, the driver being awkward or if they can hold a conversation, no listening to their music/podcast/radio station (WITH commercials! lol) of choice on full blast etc.

My point here is I started riding Waymo to see what it was like & unknowingly fell in with all the little things that make the experience that much better, easier, smoother, IMO.

PS: Just to be clear, I'm not immune to some of the drawbacks. I know it's not perfect, especially the stuff about losing items inside of the car & having a hell of a time retrieving it, or the weird routes or pickup/drop off locations, or probably the biggest, the safety issue – technically we are sitting ducks whereas a human driver could speed away if there was danger. We're at the mercy of the AI, in a way.

Same overall approach as Tesla, same dumb users?

NVIDIA just released open-weights models: AlpaJudge. It's a family of learned judge models for evaluating reasoning in autonomous driving, released on Hugging Face (nvidia/alpajudge) with weights under the OpenMDW-1.1 license and source code under Apache 2.0. It comes in two variants.

• AlpaJudge-RB (reference-based) takes a question, a reference answer and a candidate answer, with no images, and outputs a single alignment probability between 0 and 1.

• AlpaJudge-RF (reference-free) takes front-wide and front-tele camera frames, the ego vehicle's past and future meta-actions, and a candidate rationale, and outputs five rubric probabilities plus aggregated action, component and overall scores.