Latest news with #LloydLee
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Automotive
- Business Insider
Tesla updates Robotaxi app users related to launch in California, BI reports
Tesla (TSLA) sent Robotaxi users new terms-of-service agreement related to its planned launch in the Bay Area, Grace Kay and Lloyd Lee of Business Insider reports. The update details how Tesla plans to launch if Robotaxi service under tighter state oversight. 'If your ride is taking place in California, it is being conducted with a safety driver using FSD (Supervised) pursuant to authority from the California Public Utilities Commission,' the agreement says, according to Business Insider. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence.
Business Insider
12-07-2025
- Automotive
- Business Insider
I've never been off-roading or rock crawling. Watch Rivian's new $120K quad motor R1s make it easy.
EVs are a tough business, but Rivian is still out here trying to have fun. The California-based EV maker on Tuesday unveiled a quad motor package for its second-generation R1 truck and SUV. The company says the cars can deliver a combined 1,025 horsepower and 1,198 pound-feet of torque. The quad-motor R1T truck starts at $115,990, while the R1S SUV starts at $121,990. Cushioned San Francisco residents like me don't require that much power for their commute, let alone have the spare cash to burn $120K on a large car. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe recognized that during a recent roundtable interview, telling Business Insider, "It's great for the brand, but it's sort of an exercise in unnecessary capability." "Unnecessary capability" is fair: The quad is a beast of a car that most people probably won't need. The company invited media outlets to South Lake Tahoe, California, near the end of June to demonstrate its quad R1T and R1S ahead of the public launch. I got a chance to get behind the wheel of both cars to drive up to Tahoe's Donner Ski Ranch, which has a summit elevation of more than 7,000 feet. There, I took the R1S and R1T off-roading and rock crawling — essentially driving up a rocky obstacle — to test out the torque and a feature Rivian calls "kick turn," which gives the cars the ability to do a 360-degree spin on the spot. I've never been off-roading or rock crawling. My humble Mazda 3, with its low profile and 155 horsepower, isn't really fit for those conditions, but it is very reliable for my trips to the grocery store. The Rivian's quad motor, however, made traversing the dirt roads and boulders a breeze. Rivian's climb Above: Business Insider's Lloyd Lee took the Rivian on what one company employee described as a moderate-level rock crawl. Reporters were first led to two rocky mounds at a Donner Ski Ranch peak for the rock crawl. Rivian representatives endearingly called one of the mounds "Grannie's Revenge" — a play on the much more precarious trail at "Hell's Revenge" in Moab, Utah, and a nod to the granite rock at the Lake Tahoe summit. For a first-time rock crawler, I was a little worried that I might flip Rivian's cars like a pancake or pierce the undercarriage if I made the slightest wrong turn while driving over a rock. Thankfully, that didn't happen. Spotters at every point of the mound were available to direct drivers on when to turn the wheel, which obviously made the rock crawls that much easier. But aside from following directions, scaling up the mounds was a simple exercise in turning the wheel and pressing the pedal. Both the R1S and R1T climbed over the mounds without the need for me to press down too far. Rivian's R1 chief engineer, Luke Lynch, an ex-software engineer for McLaren, told me that's the benefit of having four motors. "There's so much control that you can have in the pedal, you realize how delicate you can be and the vehicle still reacts," Lynch said. "When the vehicle detects some slip, it says, 'Okay, this wheel's not got enough traction, so I'm gonna slow that wheel down with fine motor control rather than brakes,' which is unique to quad motor control." According to Oren Birwadkar, another Rivian engineer, my drive was just a sneak peek of the quad's potential. He considered "Grannie's Revenge a moderate-level rock crawl. For further testing and validation, Birwadkar said the company tested the quad platform at an obstacle located at Hell's Revenge, which attracts more extreme rock crawlers. Tesla used the same track to advertise its Cybertruck. The 'kick turn' Above: Rivian demonstrated the quad motor Gen 2 cars' new feature called the "kick turn." One function made me feel like I was playing an off-road video game: "kick turn." The kick turn is a new iteration of Rivian's "tank turn" that was never released to the wider public. Rivian says the utility behind the kick turn is to allow drivers to make extremely tight turns without the need to do a three-point U-turn. The mode is activated through the center console, and then the driver is directed to press the two thumb controls on the left and right sides of the steering wheel simultaneously. Press the left buttons to turn counterclockwise and vice versa. Once the system detects that both buttons are pressed, the driver presses the accelerator pedal to make the spin. Rivian set up a course on a dirt field that directed us to drive in a square shape and drive through cones in a serpentine path. Reader: The kick turn is one hell of a mode to experience. The driver can activate the kick turn while the Rivian is already moving in a straight path. It's almost like drifting with training wheels. In theory, the driver should be able to complete the course Rivian set up solely by pressing the buttons on the steering wheel, while the actual steering wheel stays at a 12 o'clock position. Of course, a lot of the first-time drivers like me couldn't do that. Our instinctive reaction was to turn the steering wheel every time we approached a turn, rather than solely relying on the left and right buttons. But Rivian also took us through a narrow trail to show us where the kick turn could be useful. In those situations, you would drive slowly as you approached a tight turn, stop, and then activate the kick turn. Wassym Bensaid, Rivian's chief software engineer, said the kick turn was designed for "situations with tight maneuverability in off-road" environments. "It's mind-blowing the level of control that you can have on the car with such a feature," he said. I can't immediately imagine a scenario where I would need the kick turn on San Francisco's streets. Maybe it could help me get out of tight parking, but that's OK — my humble Mazda does just fine.
Business Insider
17-05-2025
- Automotive
- Business Insider
We put Tesla's FSD and Waymo's robotaxi to the test. One shocking mistake made the winner clear.
The robotaxi race is speeding up. Tesla is preparing to debut its autonomous ride-hailing service in Austin next month, and Alphabet's Waymo continues to expand throughout major US cities. Under the hood of the Tesla and Waymo robotaxis are two key pieces of technology that the companies respectively call Full Self-Driving (FSD) and the Waymo Driver. We (Business Insider's Lloyd Lee and Alistair Barr) tested both of these AI-powered drivers in San Francisco — and the results truly surprised us. Given the positive experiences we've had with Waymo and Tesla's FSD, we expected the results of our not-so-scientific test to come down to minute details — maybe by how many times the AI-driver would hesitate or if it would make a curious lane change for no apparent reason. That didn't happen. Instead, the Tesla made an egregious error that handed Waymo the clear win. Here's how it went down. The test Our vehicles for the test included Waymo's Jaguar I-PACE SUVs and Barr's personal 2024 Tesla Model 3. The Waymo robotaxis are equipped with the company's fifth-generation Waymo Driver and guided by five lidar sensors, six radars, and 29 cameras. Barr's Tesla was equipped with Hardware 4 and FSD Supervised software v13.2.8. Tesla released a minor update to the software days after this test was conducted. The vehicle has eight external cameras. It should be noted that this is not the same software Tesla plans to use in the robotaxis set to roll out this summer. The company said it plans to release FSD Unsupervised, a self-driving system that will not require a human behind the wheel. Nevertheless, we wanted to see how far Tesla's FSD had come since its beta rollout in 2020. We couldn't compare Tesla and Waymo as a full-package robotaxi service. Tesla has yet to launch that product, so we focused only on the driving experience. We started at San Francisco's iconic Twin Peaks viewpoint and ended at Chase Center. Depending on the route, that's about a 4- to 7-mile ride. We chose these destinations for two reasons. One, it would take the cars through winding roads and both suburban and city landscapes. And two, there were a few ways to get to Chase Center from Twin Peaks, including the 280 highway. Waymo's robotaxis can't take riders on the highway yet. Tesla can. According to Google Maps, the highway is more time-efficient. For the Tesla, we went with the route the vehicle highlighted first. It pointed out the highway on the way back to Twin Peaks. We took a Waymo around 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday and the Tesla afterward at around 10 a.m. The traffic conditions for both rides were light to moderate and not noticeably different. Predictions Our prediction was that the AI drivers' skills would be nearly neck-and-neck. But in the spirit of competition, Lee predicted Waymo would deliver a smoother experience and a smarter driver, given the high-tech sensor stack the company relies on. Barr went with Tesla. He said he'd driven hundreds of miles on FSD with two or three relatively minor interventions so far, and given this previous experience, Barr said he'd have no problem riding in the back seat of a Tesla robotaxi. Waymo Throughout our ride in the Waymo, we were impressed by the AI driver's ability to be safe but assertive. The Waymo was not shy about making yellow lights, for example, but it never made maneuvers you wouldn't want a robot driver you're entrusting your life with to make. One small but notable moment in our ride was when the Waymo stopped behind a car at a stop sign. To the right of us was an open lane. For whatever reason, the Waymo saw that and decided to switch lanes, as if it was tired of waiting behind the other car. We found that a bit amusing because it seemed like such a human moment. As human drivers, we might make choices like that because we get antsy waiting behind another car, even though we're not shaving more than a few seconds, if any, off of our commute. Barr noted that the Waymo Driver can have moments of sass or attitude. It had an urgency, giving us the feeling that it somehow really cared that we got to the Chase Center in good time. "It's got New York cab driver energy," Barr said, stealing a line from BI editor in chief Jamie Heller, who also took a Waymo during a trip to San Francisco earlier this year. Sandy Karp, a spokesperson for Waymo, said the company doesn't have specific details on what happened in that moment but said that the Waymo Driver "is constantly planning its next move, including the optimal route to get its rider where they're going safely and efficiently." "This planning can involve decisions like changing lanes when deemed favorable," she said. Ultimately, though, the best litmus test for any robotaxi is when you stop noticing that you're in a robotaxi. Outside those small but notable moments, we recorded footage for this story and chatted in comfort without feeling like we were on the edge of our seats. Tesla Tesla's FSD delivered a mostly smooth driving experience, and we think it deserves some props for doing so with a smaller and cheaper tech stack, i.e., only eight cameras. FSD knew how to signal a lane change as it approached a large stalled vehicle taking up a lot of road room, and it didn't have any sudden moments of braking. Just a few years ago, Tesla owners were reporting issues of "phantom braking." We experienced none of that on our drive. Tesla also handled highway driving flawlessly. Sure, the weather was clear and traffic was fairly light, but, as noted earlier, Waymo does not yet offer public rides on highways. The company is still testing. However, Tesla FSD did make a few mistakes, including one critical error. At the end of our drive at Chase Center, we assessed how Waymo and Tesla's systems performed. We both gave Waymo a slight edge, but were also impressed with the FSD system. On our way back to Twin Peaks, Tesla highlighted a route that would take us on the highway — a route that Waymo cannot take. We kept Tesla FSD on for this trip while we continued recording. San Francisco is known to have a lot of brightly marked, green bike lanes for cyclists. There was one moment during the trip back when the Tesla made a right turn onto a bike lane and continued to drive on it for a few seconds before it merged into the proper lane. Then, as we approached the last half-mile of our ride, the Tesla, for an unknown reason, ran a red light. The incident occurred at a fairly complex intersection that resembles a slip-lane intersection, but with a traffic light. The Waymo did not approach this intersection since it took a different route to get back to Twin Peaks. The Tesla's console screen showed how the car detected the red light and came to a dutiful stop. Then, despite the traffic light not changing, the Tesla drove ahead. We didn't come close to hitting any cars or humans on the street — Tesla's FSD is good at spotting such risks, and the main source of traffic coming across our path had been stopped by another traffic light. However, the vehicle slowly drove through this red light, which left us both somewhat shocked at the time. Some Tesla drivers appeared to have reported similar issues in online forums and in videos that showed the vehicle recognizing the red light but driving ahead. One YouTuber showed how the Tesla first came to a stop at a red light and then continued driving before the light changed. It's unclear how common this issue is. Tesla hasn't publicly addressed the problem. A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. At this point, we thought the winner was clear. Verdict Since Tesla's FSD made a critical error that would have landed an automatic fail during a driver's license test, we thought it was fair to give Waymo the win for this test. The Tesla handled San Francisco's hilly and winding roads almost as flawlessly as Waymo. We also think FSD's ability to handle routes that Waymo can't handle for now — in particular, the highway — would give Tesla a major upper hand. In addition, when Lee tried on a different day to make the Waymo go through the same intersection where the Tesla blew the red light, the Waymo app appeared to do everything it could to avoid that intersection, even if it provided the quickest path to get to the destination, according to Google Maps. A Waymo spokesperson did not provide a comment on what could've happened here. Still, an error like running a red light cannot be overlooked when human lives are at stake. Consider that when Tesla rolls out its robotaxi service, a human driver will not be behind the wheel to quickly intervene if it makes an error. For Tesla and Waymo, we expected to be on the lookout for small, almost negligible, mistakes or glitchy moments from the AI driver. We did not anticipate an error as glaring as running a red light. Once Tesla launches its robotaxi service in more areas, we'll have to see how the pick-up and drop-off times compare. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company's generalized solution to self-driving is far superior to its competitors. The company has millions of cars already on the roads collecting massive amounts of real-world data. According to Musk, this will make FSD smarter and able to operate with only cameras. With Tesla's robotaxi service set to launch in June with human passengers, we certainly hope so.
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Doctors Medical Center coordinates with clinics to cover high-risk pregnancies
A physicians group has begun providing coverage at Doctors Medical Center for patients with high-risk pregnancies, continuing a collaboration with Golden Valley Health Centers, a leading safety-net provider in the Northern San Joaquin Valley. According to a news release Friday, the use of OB-GYN hospitalists — physicians who specialize in caring for hospitalized patients — aligned with Central Valley Doctors Health System Physicians will ensure coordination of care with Golden Valley and other safety-net clinics that serve disadvantaged patients in Stanislaus and nearby counties. Golden Valley's decision to cut obstetrical services at Doctors Medical Center for women with high-risk pregnancies raised concerns in January. That decision ended a Golden Valley program in which three obstetricians provided care for expectant mothers in clinics and then delivered their babies at DMC. The physicians also performed gynecologic surgeries at the hospital. Golden Valley sent notices terminating its agreements with the three obstetricians, effective April 30, and proposed new contracts requiring them to work 40 hours per week in its clinics. It was unclear who would deliver babies for Golden Valley patients with complex medical needs. Two of the three obstetricians, Lloyd Lee and Kevin Rine, have negotiated agreements to keep delivering babies at DMC. 'I am happy to be able to announce that Central Valley Doctors Health System Physicians is collaborating with Golden Valley Health Centers and we have ensured OB-GYN hospitalist coverage at Doctors Medical Center,' Jennifer Howard, chief executive officer of the physician group, said in the news release. Howard said the physicians group, which was formerly First California Physician Partners, is strengthening safety-net collaborations with Golden Valley Health Centers, other physician offices and the new Maternal Fetal Medicine Clinic in Modesto, which was opened last month by DMC and Valley Children's Healthcare. Dr. Eduardo Villarama, chief medical officer for Golden Valley, said the new services will ensure a continuum of care from early pregnancy to labor and delivery for patients who depend on Medi-Cal or other health programs. 'We are fully committed to women's health, and we are proud to advance our relationship with DMC to achieve the best for our patients,' Villarama said. Golden Valley has 47 safety-net clinics in Stanislaus, Merced and San Joaquin counties serving almost 200,000 patients per year. Villarama said previously that patient demand for obstetric services grew after the COVID-19 pandemic came to an end. Golden Valley still is trying to add obstetrical staff to provide prenatal care in its clinics but can refer some patients with high-risk pregnancies to the newly opened Maternal Fetal Medicine Clinic on Florida Avenue, Villarama said. Golden Valley has 11 obstetrical doctors caring for these expectant mothers, as well as two locums, or fill-in doctors, and another locum starting soon. Villarama added that Golden Valley is recruiting for additional women's health providers. 'We have been preparing for this transition over the past several months and have many safeguards to ensure safe, high-quality care for our high-risk patients,' he said. Dr. Susan Podolsky, a laborist at DMC, said the hospital coverage alleviates many concerns regarding who would be delivering babies for Golden Valley patients. 'I think that this decision was poorly planned,' she said. 'I still believe it puts more women of color at a disadvantage. We will have to see how it goes over this next month.'
