Latest news with #selfDriving
Forbes
08-07-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Prominent Analyst Says Tesla's Board Needs To Rein In Elon Musk
One of the best-known Tesla analysts laid out a plan for the electric and self-driving vehicle giant's board to curb the firm's controversial CEO Elon Musk, the latest evidence of Wall Street growing fed up with Musk's non-Tesla actions, including an ugly spat with President Donald Trump. The plan includes what amounts to babysitters for the world's richest man Musk. Getty Images Tesla's board 'needs to act now and set the ground rules for Musk going forward around his political ambitions and actions,' wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a Tuesday morning note to clients. Ives, whose criticism is particularly notable since he's the most bullish on Tesla stock of any of the 55 analysts tracked by FactSet, laid out a three-pronged recommendation for the board. They should approve a new compensation package that would roughly double Musk's voting rights at the company to 25%, simultaneously setting a provision on exactly how much time Musk is required to spend at the company—a long-desired policy by many investors because Musk dedicated much of his time in recent years to right-wing politics, social media and his private companies. Most crucially, Ives recommended what amounts to a babysitting group for the 54-year-old Musk. The board should 'create a special Board oversight committee for Musk around his political ambitions and ground rules that would violate his pay package,' suggested Ives. Shares of Tesla rose 1% in premarket trading, but remained down more than 10% since Musk began to publicly go after Trump last month. The stock tumbled 6% Monday as investors reacted to Musk's launch of a new political party, leading to a $12 billion drop in Musk's net worth. This is a breaking news story and will be updated. Further Reading Forbes Pension Funds Have Had It With Tesla's Board And Musk By Alan Ohnsman Forbes Elon Musk Net Worth Slides $12 Billion As Investors Grow 'Tired' Of Musk's Political Activity By Derek Saul
Bloomberg
08-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Uber Traders Shrug Off Robotaxi Risks as Stock Powers to Record
Uber Technologies Inc. investors are brushing aside potential threats from self-driving competition to bet that the company has plenty of room to expand in the near term. Uber shares have rallied 60% to a record this year as partnerships with robotaxi startups like Alphabet Inc. 's Waymo and growth in new markets have given bulls reasons to cheer after the stock underperformed in 2024. The advance has made Uber the seventh-best S&P 500 performer in 2025.
Forbes
07-07-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
How Did Tesla Self-Deliver A New Car When Its Robotaxi Needs A Human?
One Tesla customer did not have to go to the dealer to pick up their new car, it drove itself to ... More their home for delivery. In an impressive demonstration, Tesla last week showed off delivery of a new car to a customer near their Austin factory by having the Tesla drive itself to the customer's home, with nobody in the vehicle. Further, Musk stated that the delivery was 'fully autonomous" and there were 'no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point.' The delivery was about a 15 mile trip, including city streets and freeway. Tesla's robotaxi pilot, on the other hand, still keeps an employee in the car. This person, known in the field as the 'safety driver' though they are not expected to drive, has various ways to command an emergency stop, and they can grab the wheel if needed. In just a few days of operation, these vehicles have been involved in a variety of minor mistakes, and one contact leaving damage on another car. Tesla still has a fair bit to do before they can make an autonomous taxi--but it's possible to do a delivery of this form long before that's ready. Indeed, many projects have one single demonstrations of rides with no safety-driver before, going back over a decade, though not generally using only computer vision. There are a lot of ways to do this delivery safely even though you can't really drive autonomously yet, and Tesla has already shown these abilities. Sadly, Tesla's past actions demand skepticism of any such demonstration. Starting with their first 2016 FSD demo film, which declared the safety driver was only there for legal reasons but which involved a number of tricks, or their regular release of grossly misleading statistics for Autopilot safety, Tesla must be held to a higher standard of proof than other companies (who also still must be held to a high standard.) User experience shows that Tesla's current FSD13 system can complete trips fully autonomously, perhaps as many as 40 in a row. That's nice, but an actual working car delivery or robotaxi service requires being able to do 10,000 to 40,000 trips in a row, or perhaps 100,000 in a row to reach Musk's stated goal of 'much safer than a human.' That's a whole different ballgame which Tesla has yet to play in. If you have a remote intervention ability (which Tesla has said they are building and shown remote driving consoles for) this sort of demonstration is fairly easy. Send off your car for delivery. If you can do 40 trips in a row, you have a 97.5% chance everything will work the first time. In the event of the 2.5% chance of a problem, you intervene, and simply don't report that attempt to the public. Instead, just send out another, and once you do get a flawless run, report that. This is known as cherry-picking and it's been a very common tactic for most robcar teams. Musk only (and I think, carefully) said that there were no remote drivers in control. Not that they weren't watching, ready to take control, or even just ready to command an emergency stop. He speaks the truth when he said this drive was autonomous, and we've already seen FSD do such drives autonomous many times. It just can't do enough of all the time yet. A Tesla robotaxi pilot vehicle moves in Austin, with a human operator in the front right seat ready ... More to intervene when things go wrong. It's even easier if you are picking the route. First, you pick a route that you know will be easy and within the capabilities of your vehicle. You can even do test runs to make sure there is nothing the vehicle won't understand on the way. You can pick the time and the weather and the traffic levels--all things you can't do in a real, running service where customers are choosing everything. You can probably reduce your chance to 1 in 1,000 of not having it all work great on the official run. (In addition, the Tesla car was clearly followed by chase cars, at the very least just to film it, but they might also have had an employee in one of the chase cars with a means to intervene, for safety reasons. It would be the right thing to do.) It's not just Tesla, pretty much everybody has done cherry-picking like this in their first demonstrations, when they first released videos, or first gave rides to the press. It's a baby step. It's why opening up a service to the public, and letting them pick the routes and times is a big deal. Tesla has done this, in a limited area, for their Robotaxi pilot, but that's why it still needs a safety driver. The message is not that Tesla's demonstration delivery isn't a worthy step, it's that it should not be taken as more than it is. If it really worked, Tesla would start regular deliveries this way, as it's very cool. When Tesla is ready to do more, they should start doing multiple deliveries, and be up-front on whether there is remote intervention capability, rather than just saying it didn't happen on a particular delivery. They built that room of remote driving stations for a reason, after all. Someday, they can graduate to the vehicles not having full time monitoring, and only needing remote assistance when they get into some confusion. Delivery is an easier problem, not just because there's no passenger to harm, but because the car isn't in a hurry, and you can deliberately choose easier and slower streets, times and conditions. Self-delivering Cars Delivering cars to customers seems like a financial win. When I got my Tesla delivered, a human drove it from the factory and took an Uber back. But he also did my paperwork, took my payment and walked me through important features of the car, plus we did my inspection for defects. It's not entirely clear the savings justify car delivery with no human contact quite yet, though possibly it could be done over a video call. On the other hand, delivered car-share, which I have called a 'whistlecar,' is a very valuable proposition, particularly before you can provide a full wide-service-area robotaxi. If I could get a 'Tesla on demand' which comes to me, and then I drive it (with Supervised FSD) and leave it at a curb for a reasonable price (much better than Uber) that's a service many would use, or even give up car ownership for. If the car could do freeway unsupervised self-driving (as Mercedes cars can do today in Germany and soon in the USA) it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, there are companies offering early versions of such services today. Yes, I would not get my time back (at least until I get to the freeway) in the same way, but I would get a large fraction of the benfits of the robotaxi.
NHK
03-07-2025
- Automotive
- NHK
Railway Kingdom Japan: The Shinkansen's Punctual Perfection
The shinkansen: world-renowned for exceptional on-time performance. We explore the highly skilled drivers and equipment that make it possible, through history and into a future of self-driving trains.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Tesla sends driverless Model Y from factory to customer to promote its robotaxi tech
Just a few days after launching a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, Tesla pulled off an additional stunt meant to show off the progress of its self-driving car software. The company let a Model Y SUV drive roughly 15 miles from Tesla's factory to the apartment complex where the car's new owner lives, completing what CEO Elon Musk called the first 'autonomous delivery' of a customer car. The vehicle was supposedly equipped with the same software Tesla's robotaxi Model Ys are using in Austin, but upon delivery was downgraded to the commercially-available Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software that requires drivers to pay attention and be ready to take over at any moment. No one was on board and Musk claimed no remote assistance was given to the car. The stunt came at an auspicious time for Tesla, which is set to release second-quarter delivery figures this week and financial results for the period later this month. Those numbers are expected to be grim for Tesla, which saw sales fall in 2024 — before Musk took a chainsaw to the company's public image by getting involved with the Trump administration. Sure enough, Tesla's stock price shot up late Friday after Musk first posted about the drive (although it has since fallen after a rough day of trading Monday). I used to live in the city and have driven through this area of South Austin a lot; the path the Model Y took was complex, even on a bright, sunny day in the middle of the afternoon. In the 30-minute video of the trip (Tesla also posted a sped-up version that lasts around 3.5 minutes), the car merges on and off of a highway, turns right on red, navigates a small roundabout, and makes an unprotected left turn. These were challenging scenarios for autonomous vehicles that were in development just a few years ago, so it's striking to see a car navigate them all in one go in real day-to-day traffic. Tesla's not the only one that can tackle this mix of highways and surface streets. Waymo vehicles have been driving on highways in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco (so far, only for employees), and even Zoox gave us a driverless ride across a mix of 45-mile-per-hour roads and side streets in Las Vegas in January. While Tesla's video of the drive is straightforward, it inspires a list of questions. One of the biggest is about what kinds of preparations Tesla made before letting this car through the factory door. It's a relevant question because Tesla famously released and promoted a video of one of its cars supposedly driving itself through the Bay Area (with an employee acting as a safety operator in the driver's seat) in 2016 that was, at best, misleading and, at worst, essentially staged. At the time, Tesla made that drive seem effortless. But the company had pre-mapped the route and attempted it multiple times before the drive shown in the video, with the car requiring that the safety operator take control. Tesla engineer Ashok Elluswamy said in a 2022 deposition that the 'intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system.' Musk was also intimately involved in the making of that video. Tesla vehicles have been spotted using lidar and other external sensors in the area of South Austin where the limited robotaxi trial is taking place — were those vehicles used to prep this particular drive? We've asked Tesla, but the company no longer responds to media requests. Also, can Tesla's software safely run this route dozens of times without intervention (in-car or remote)? Hundreds of times? Thousands? Doing this once is an accomplishment, but it's the ability to repeat this kind of drive and do it safely that is the ultimate test of whether the technology is reliable. What's more, this customer delivery drive lives in the shadow of a much bigger promise Musk once made (also in 2016, although he repeated it in years since) about how Tesla's self-driving software would be able to take a car from Los Angeles to New York City without any interventions. As is the case with the early robotaxi test, there's still a lot we don't know about how well things are going, and how any of this is supposed to scale. One thing that seems notable, though, is that worst criticism Dan O'Dowd, one of the most outspoken critics of Tesla's FSD software, could raise in an email to TechCrunch about the delivery drive was that the car ultimately came to a stop in a fire lane outside the new customer's apartment. A fair criticism, but a minor one coming from a guy whose organization was hurling child-sized dummies in front of Model Y SUVs just a few short weeks ago. Sign in to access your portfolio
