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Transportation Robotics

Elon Musk Unveils Tesla Cybercab, Robovan and Updated Optimus Robot 251

Posted by BeauHD from the future-is-now dept.
At Tesla's "We, Robot" event at Warner Bros. Studios tonight, Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Cybercab, Robovan, and an updated version of the Optimus robot. Slashdot is at the event capturing photos and getting demos of everything announced. You can follow along on X. Below is a summary of each of the offerings.

Tesla Cybercab: The Tesla Cybercab is a futuristic, fully autonomous robotaxi designed without a steering wheel or pedals, positioned to revolutionize mass transit with extremely low operating costs. It features a sleek design with upward-opening butterfly doors and a compact cabin that seats two passengers. Musk said the Cybercab uses inductive charging instead of a traditional plug-in. "Something we're also doing is and it's really high time we did this is inductive charging. So the robotaxi has no plug it just goes over the inductive charger and charges so yeah, it's kind of how it should be." The vehicle is expected to cost under $30,000. Regulatory approval will be needed before it can go into production, which is projected to begin by 2026 or 2027. Tesla Robovan: The Tesla Robovan is a dustbuster-shaped electric passenger van featuring sliding glass doors, a bright interior, and carriage-style seating for up to 20 passengers. "One of the things we want to do and we've seen this with the CyberTruck is we want to change the look of the roads the future should look like the future," said Musk. Musk also claimed that autonomy will "turn parking lots into parks," as fewer cars will be needed and they won't sit idle for most of the day. Pricing and release details were not disclosed. Tesla Optimus: The updated Tesla Optimus robot is a humanoid designed to handle everyday tasks, such as retrieving packages or serving drinks. Optimus walked on stage and interacted with attendees, though its current capabilities are still limited. Elon Musk envisions the robot as a transformative product, with plans to produce millions of units at a price of around $20,000. "It'll be able to do anything you want. So it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do." Optimus is expected to start performing useful tasks by the end of the year, with broader availability projected by the end of next year. In closing, Musk said: "I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind. Because I think everyone of the 8 billion people of Earth, I think everyone's going to want their Optimus buddy." Developing...
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Elon Musk Unveils Tesla Cybercab, Robovan and Updated Optimus Robot More

Elon Musk Unveils Tesla Cybercab, Robovan and Updated Optimus Robot

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  • Doubled down on stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday October 10, 2024 @10:52PM (#64855861)

    The camera locations on the cybercab, like those on the model y and 3 etc. are shit. In FSD mode, on certain intersections .. Tesla vehicles have to jut about 3 feet further into it than a human driven car. And yes that 3 feet makes a difference, it's annoying to the cross traffic and causes them to stop and then if there are two lanes to cross it is another mess. It's really starting to look like someone like Benz may solve autonomous vehicles before Tesla.

    • I'll stick to my JohnnyCab thanks. I mean, Musk got us to Mars years ago so he must have JohnnyCab technology in these new FSD cabs... right?

      I thought he also had fleets of Model 3 FSD cabs on the streets already. I recall him promising that if you bought a Tesla for $30K you could use it as a FSD cab and make a fortune -- that was years ago so the numbers must be huge already.

      It's not like this guy would promise the earth and deliver a hand full of dirt -- is it?

      • Remember when he said it would be fiscally irresponsible to **not** buy a Tesla and let it make you money as a cab when you weren't using it yourself?

        This idiot has been full of shit for years, and people are still happy to lap it up.

    • Re:Doubled down on stupid (Score:4)

      by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @01:04AM (#64856041) Homepage
      They Cybercab, same amount of random crashing, not a damn thing you can do about it since there's no manual controls. The Future!

      Inductive charging! We're losing a lot of capital building chargers so we're gonna have the government build it out for us. The Future!

    • Re:Doubled down on stupid (Score:4, Informative)

      by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @02:03AM (#64856103)

      Careful with posts like that, you might summom teh Rei

      • Re:Doubled down on stupid (Score:4, Informative)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @07:21AM (#64856531) Homepage

        I don't know how many times I have go go through and link my posts over the past 7 years talking about how I'm not an optimist about self-driving timelines, but apparently it will never be enough times, so I'm not going to bother doing so again for the 20th time.

        The closest people ever find to cite is a post of me stating that I find it possible that FSD will be feature complete by the end of the year, pretending that "feature complete" means "as good as a human", and ignoring all of the posts of me stating that I don't believe that will happen any time soon. There had been long been a list of "upcoming features" attached to FSD - ability to handle stop lights, stop signs, city streets, and on and on - and one by one they were whittled off. Feature completeness was announced, if I recall correctly, early the next year after I wrote that. Additionally ,I think there was also one post long ago where I mixed up the definitions of SAE levels, in the same manner that most people mix them up (they're not based on what features you offer, let alone how reliable said features are, but rather, what you allow the driver to not need to do, and what liability you accept).

        Apart from that, of the hundreds of posts I've written in threads about Autopilot, I've been consistently pessimistic about FSD timelines - here, on TMC, and on Twitter - for years on end. And I encourage you to check my record here and on those sites if you doubt that. I often got into arguments with Tesla fans who were optimists about the timelines. Yet for some reason, people keep trying to pretend that because I was optimistic about Tesla, the company, when the vast majority of you were pessimistic about it - something that earned me quite a bit of money, FYI, wherein any of you pessimists who shorted it lost your retirements - that that must mean that, despite me repeatedly stating otherwise, I must secretly have been hugely optimistic about FSD timelines. I wouldn't have even bought Autopilot had it not been changed to be included standard with the vehicle when I got mine (though I'm glad I have it).

        My investment thesis never had anything to do with autonomy. From the automotive perspective, it was about the overall growth of the EV market, with Tesla being one of the few companies that could produce profitably, their rate of innovation, and the high owner satisfaction (and that most of the stuff that the TSLAQ bears believed was sheer nonsense). From a non-automotive perspective, it was about the energy-storage market (something that is still IMHO highly undervalued). I think autonomy and robotics are good things to be involved in, from a long-term perspective, but they're not near-term products.

        I do believe that autonomy will happen eventually. But "eventually" isn't "soon". I do see progress, and continue to see a proper path forward. But proponents consistently underestimate the challenge and complexity of the task. And commonly shoot themselves in the foot, with arguments like, "Well, humans only have two eyes, so that should be enough for a car too!" Those two eyes are attached to the best thinking machine in the known universe; you have to make up for your processing weakness by other means.

        Also, humans don't only rely on sight. I once was towing a trailer after having swapped out onto my summer rims. The car was driving fine, but I kept hearing a whomp-whomp-whomp sound. There wasn't a good spot to stop, but I did my best. Turns out I forgot to fully tighten the bolts, and they were so loose that I could turn them with my fingers. That would have been a nasty accident without sound. Not just sound, but also smell and other senses can clue you in to mechanical failures as well. Your sense of acceleration is a big clue toward whether your wheels are gripping right, and feelings of vibration magnitudes and frequencies also transfer important information about the road.

        I'm not a big fan of LIDAR. It's the same spectrum as your cameras, so if something is blocking your cameras' views, it's hurting LIDAR even worse. You can spend effort tying to clean up LIDAR data, but it's fundamentally a data source vulnerable to obstruction. Especially in snowy areas - a heap of snow on the ground and a child laying on the road look the same to LIDAR. LIDAR can help you "jumpstart" a self-driving program, but it doesn't alleviate the need to solve visual imagery, so what do you actually get from the jumpstart? Instead, I'm much more of a fan of high resolution radar. Radar gives you a modality that's very different from visual and provides a lot of (weather-insensitive) data not just of positions, but also helps let you probe materials and surface roughness. In fact, rather than just single self-contained radar units, I've often thought a pair of units, one on each side side of the car, which self-calibrate their distance from each other, so that they can do interferometry and thus have an effective aperture the width of the car.

        (That said, if you can add a LIDAR-like modality cheaply, such as time-of-flight cameras, then by all means!)

        But TL/DR:

        * Architecture MATTERS. Hugely. It's not just "how many parameters and how much training data can we put into a simple DNN" (though that is also important).
        * Multimodality MATTERS. The more modalities fed into the same model, the better. Even a text modality is of use, as the vehicle may encounter something it has never seen before, but has still read about before. Information in models transfers between modalities, and they work cooperatively.
        * Your sensor data needs to be way better than a human, because your "brain" isn't as good as a human.
        * You're in a game of edge cases. You're going to be chasing those edge cases for a LONG time. In fact, you may even face deliberately adversarial edge cases at times.

        • My investment thesis never had anything to do with autonomy. From the automotive perspective, it was about the overall growth of the EV market, with Tesla being one of the few companies that could produce profitably, their rate of innovation, and the high owner satisfaction (and that most of the stuff that the TSLAQ bears believed was sheer nonsense). From a non-automotive perspective, it was about the energy-storage market (something that is still IMHO highly undervalued). I think autonomy and robotics are good things to be involved in, from a long-term perspective, but they're not near-term products.

          Telsa is still enjoying a first mover advantage in EVs. But the traditional companies are entering the market and Tesla is waaay behind in sales. It's naive to think that Tesla will continue to dominate the EV market once everyone else goes into it full bore. Especially when their sales are already plateauing [cleantechnica.com].

          And as a car company Tesla is insanely overvalued [reddit.com].

          Power and batteries can help, but enough to make up for the Vehicle valuation gap?

          I think autonomy and robotics are good things to be involved in, from a long-term perspective, but they're not near-term products.

          Weirdly enough I think robotics is an easier nut to crack than autono

          • Robotics, for manufacturing and such, is at a decent point, they're efficient and reliable. Expanding this out to applications where you can't just program them for repetitive actions is much more difficult, and it's going to be a lot fuzzier. The goal though in all of it is to reduce number of workers.

            Which seems to be a lot of the goal of autonomous driving. And autonomous driving _should_ be independent of EV vs ICE anyway, there's not a "natural" extension of Tesla to do autonomous driving except for

    • FSD should eventually arrive at least ahead of fusion. For set routes FSD seems doable. buses kind of fill this space now especially with mini buses but they only operate at intervals often 30 minutes to an hour wait and only during core hours. There are some pilot simple routes but slowly building confidence for expansion.

    • It's really starting to look like someone like Benz may solve autonomous vehicles before Tesla.

      Well given that Benz has certified level 3 autonomous driving systems and Tesla doesn't, yes they will. But in reality several companies are way ahead of Tesla when it comes to autonomous driving. When talking about Musk people seem to forget the millions of miles other companies have driven fully autonomous for years now. It's like the word Musk somehow makes Waymo cease existing.

      • Re:Doubled down on stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

        by shilly ( 142940 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @04:31AM (#64856293)

        I can never quite get my head around these things. I just took a look at MB's description of what Level 3 enables, and it says this: "On suitable freeway sections and where there is high traffic density, DRIVE PILOT can offer to take over the dynamic driving task, up to the speed of 40 mph. The control buttons needed for this are located in the steering wheel rim, on the left and right above the thumb recesses. Once conditions are suitable, the system indicates availability on the control buttons. When the driver activates DRIVE PILOT, the system controls the speed and distance, and effortlessly guides the vehicle within its lane. The route profile, events occurring on the route and traffic signs are correspondingly taken into consideration. The system also reacts to unexpected traffic situations and handles them independently, e.g., by evasive maneuvers within the lane or by braking maneuvers"

        So -- speed and distance within lane on freeways, accelerating and braking depending on traffic, road signs, etc, up to 40mph.

        The thing is, I have an EQA with Driving Assistance Package, which is not described as Level 3, yet it can also do speed and distance within lane on freeways, accelerating and braking depending on traffic, road signs, etc, up to 70mph (and maybe beyond, IDK, the legal limit in the UK is never higher than this on public roads). I just drove 5 hours from Durham to London, and the car did 95% of the work, including coping with stop-start traffic on the motorway when there were roadworks and accidents, etc, changing speed down and up per road signs, etc. The only thing it wasn't great with, was when road markings were faint combined with two different road surface colours in the middle of lanes, which threw off the lane keeping a bit. But it was pretty great. So I'm just not really clear what extra things Level 3 does beyond what the Driving Assistance Package already offers. (I also didn't think the Driving Assistance Package was especially cutting edge, eg it can't handle lane changes. It was just leaps ahead of what I'd had in the past).

        • I just drove 5 hours from Durham to London, and the car did 95% of the work, including coping with stop-start traffic on the motorway when there were roadworks and accidents, etc, changing speed down and up per road signs, etc. The only thing it wasn't great with, was when road markings were faint combined with two different road surface colours in the middle of lanes, which threw off the lane keeping a bit. But it was pretty great. So I'm just not really clear what extra things Level 3 does beyond what the Driving Assistance Package already offers.

          Your car doesn't have certified level 3 driving meaning that you still had to keep you hand on the steering wheel, and if you didn't you would be warned and driver assist would disengage itself. The question of level 3 driving isn't if it can offer you simple driver assist - that shit is easy. The question is if it can reliably keep to the lane in a wide variety of circumstances. Most can't. I also drove some several hours through France letting driver assist do 95% of the work. That 5%? Well that was the c

    • Re:Doubled down on stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @06:42AM (#64856467) Homepage

      I've never remotely bought this argument. First off, the cameras are NOT three feet. The side camera is basically at the same position as my head (though I like a relatively relaxed seating position; those who like more forward positions might be different). I can lean forward and the camera can't, but not a bloody meter, and leaning forward (A) doesn't happen all the time, and (b) lowers your viewing height, obstructing your view of low features. Secondly, Teslas are already relatively driver-forward compared to the average car; they don't have long hoods. So measuring from the front of the car, I just simply do not see any sort of unusually backwards camera position. And of course this is just talking about the side camera.

      That said, obviously this is nowhere near ready. I could point to the FSD tracker [teslafsdtracker.com] for example, where there's about 100 city miles on average between "critical disengagements". This is up threefold from two years ago, and certainly, you can't just say every "critical disengagement" equals an accident - it just means that the driver felt there was a chance of an accident and didn't want to wait to see what the car did. But even if you multiply that severalfold, that's up against a rough ballpark of 1 accident per 20k human city miles. So it's improving, but it's still off by two orders of magnitude. I don't expect two orders of magnitude improvement in 1-2 years, obviously. I wouldn't rule out one order of magnitude, given the rate of advancement of AI in general and with clear applicability to FSD. But I'd put the odds of two orders of magnitude in that timeframe at less than 5%. And is "human level" really good enough? I'd think most people would want at least an order of magnitude better than humans before they'd accept robotaxis all over the place.

    • Re:Doubled down on stupid (Score:4, Informative)

      by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @11:49AM (#64857053)
      This is just plain false. The cameras are both higher and more forward than a human head in the driver seat.

      • How is it "more forward than a human head" .. Your head is behind the B-pillar? I don't believe you. I'm very tall, and even my head is not behind it.

    • It seems to me that Waymo is the one that's leading the pack right now, their autonomous taxis are not perfect but they are level 4 autonomous and are actually in use in the real world today (in selected areas).
  • Maybe it's just the cult I'm way over my head in at this point, but these new products look amazing. I certainly would never characterize them as phugly boondoggles that only a volunteer auto-lobotomy patient could enjoy.

  • * Cybercab idea seems like a decent idea but it will need heavy initial investment, assuming it actually gets regulatory approval.
    * Robovan seems to still be in the idea stage.
    * Optimus will remain a plaything for the rich until they start making it more capable which requires a lot more R&D time.

    • Re:Cybercab seems OK (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday October 10, 2024 @11:58PM (#64855937)
      Cybercab is silly, he's too far behind Waymo to catch up.

      A Tesla van would be fine if he could get the cost down, but he can't. He's been doing absolutely nothing to improve his tech for over 5 years now.

      His robotics division isn't even a joke, it doesn't exist. He's just making it up.

      This is all silly hype and nothing else. He's getting ready to try and take that $55bn dollar pay package again and he's pumping the stock. That's what the Cybertruck was, but then that lawsuit completely screwed up the timing.

      If we enforced laws Musk would be in jail for these pump & dump schemes. It didn't used to be legal to lie about your products like this. Liz Holmes is doing 20 years for it. It's got to gall her to see Leon getting away with it because he didn't rip off anyone important.
      • I guess that is why the cyber truck is the number one selling electric truck and number one selling vehicle over $100k in the US? How is that pump and dump. If you think Tesla is way behind Waymo you have no idea. Tesla fsd can go anywhere. Waymo can go anywhere where they have taught it to go. Also Waymo requires the installation of tens of thousands of dollars worth of complicated sensors. Teslas just use cameras and nothing else. There is a big difference. Also, Waymo has like a few hundred vehicles.
        • When you make the categories really small it does make the cybertruck look impressive. But when you look at the actual benefit these products serve the world, the impact is really laughably small.

  • no steering wheel or pedals and low cost = owner doing hard time when that thing kills some one.
    And that owner may be like an amazon dps owner lots of liability but no real control.

  • put the Robovan in the las vegas loop

    • Have you seen what the ground clearance looks like on that thing? I don't know if they added a skirt to it or what, but it looks to me like it can't handle gradient change (which exists in the Vegas loop). I'm not sure how that thing can handle speed bumps.

  • If Musk says 2027, given his track record... I'll put money down on 2035 at the earliest. Although I'm betting the inductive charging is never going to happen, this will end up being a plug-in vehicle like the rest.

    For the Robovan... given Musk's past non-Tesla vehicle announcements, I'm betting 4-5 years from now this "van" will have morphed into just another Tesla car model that holds 4-5 people. And all the fanbois here will claim "you are mistaken - it was never anything but a Tesla car model".

    Optimus..

  • I came in with low expectations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday October 10, 2024 @11:29PM (#64855911)

    He failed to meet them.

    The trouble with the Cybercab is it needs unsupervised self driving. So I expected he'd do what Cruise and Waymo are doing, LIDAR and a carefully mapped section of a city and build from there. Instead it was a (hardcoded) demo on a studio lot. Instead it's going to be vision only and NNs top-to-bottom, so it will work in only a year for the next 30 years.

    The Robovan, also autonomous. So again, not happening.

    And then the Optimus, a robot that can currently walk slowly and awkwardly, and carrying out some dance moves that involve not moving its feet, is going to become a generalized personal servant.

    Here's a question, if the Optimus is so close to being a domestic servant then why is Musk giving the Cybercab lossy inductive charging? Why not have a robotic charger that can automatically plug in the car?

    And if the Cybercab is going to be under $30k then why can't he make a regular EV for under $30k?

    The only part of the show I can see being an actual product line in the next decade is the the inductive charging. But except for people with enough solar and home battery storage that the power is basically free (or they don't care about the cost) I'm not sure that's useful.

    • The reason Tesla will not build a regular EV below 30k, is for the same reason Apple will not release an iPhone below $400. There are just too many customers buying their more expensive products, there really is no need to go lower.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      if the Cybercab is going to be under $30k then why can't he make a regular EV for under $30k?

      I expect the Cab has a much smaller battery, which is the most expensive part of a Tesla. An autonomous cab can have a 50 mile range and recharge between jobs. It is overall lighter and simpler. Does not need so much power if restricted to urban areas.

    • The only part of the show I can see being an actual product line in the next decade is the the inductive charging.

      In a world where we are increasingly trying to charge cars as fast and efficiently as possible I see inductive charging as a great example of early onset dementia of everyone involved. This is even more critical for commercial vehicles. Unless his Muskness intends his cars to sit around unused for most of the day it is a hugely stupid design decision.

      The whole reason Tesla was at the forefront of the EV taxi industry was precisely because of the ability to have minimal downtime.

    • And if the Cybercab is going to be under $30k then why can't he make a regular EV for under $30k?

      The price of the Cybertruck doubled from what Musk promised at its launch event. So on that basis, the Robtaxi's production cost will be about the same as his regular EVs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Tesla has been trying and failing to build a robot charger since around 2012, that's why they went with inductive charging. Meanwhile Nio has had public battery swap tech for years now, with the car automatically parking itself in the correct spot and the process taking about 4 minutes.

      The way Optimus walks tells us that they haven't mastered the basics yet. The reason it looks constipated is because it has to maintain balance at all times, so can only take very small steps. The big leap forward (pun intend

    • As a Tesla shareholder, I'm annoyed that absolutely none of these items are currently available for pre-order. Tesla just spent tens of millions of dollars for a semi-autonomous amusement ride for it's shareholders, and didn't announce anything that's going to add to revenue for at least the next 2 years Elon's own super optimistic estimates are for late 2026, which means that we probably won't actually see these things on city streets until 2028.

  • This is so obviously false (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday October 10, 2024 @11:52PM (#64855927)
    the SEC should investigate. Tesla has none of this tech. There nowhere's near ready for self driving cars unless they're gonna license waymo/google's tech and they're not getting that down to $30k. And their robot tech is roughly on par with the stuff Toyota was doing in the 90s.

    We all know he's lying to us, why do we let him do this?
  • What do we all want? A cheap efficient compact electric car. What did we get? A "Cybercab" that won't see the light of day for at least 3 years, and maybe never. Same with the "Robovan," which Musk strangely and repeatedly pronounced, "Rubavin." His humanoid robots still seem a decade behind the stuff from Boston Dynamics and other dedicated robot companies. Also, why was all this shown to us in the dark? Does Elon have something to hide? Anyone else feel this event demonstrated a company going nowhere?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      It is really sad to see this shite, instead of a Model 2 that would actually have been compelling for Europe and SE Asia, and possibly could even have made smaller cars more alluring for US consumers after years of bigger being better. Instead, we got all this shite. It's absurd. It screams of a man who has lost his way, in every sense (because let's face it, Tesla's strategy is set by him, soup to nuts)

      • It seems like he has some psychological block towards making a model 2. Its all anyone wants, its what the investors are always screaming about.

        Weird because I suppose he could just copy a Chinese electric car that's better than a tesla anyway and sell it as the model 2 for that magical $30,000 price tag. Maybe that's harder to do than it sounds or maybe his mind is so busted now days he simply can't manage even that.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shilly ( 142940 )

          I'm sure it's hard, but Tesla did already demonstrate the ability to scale and lower costs twice before (Roadster to S, S to 3), so it seems odd they can't manage it a third time. After all, the de-contenting is pretty straightforward and saves quite a bit of cost right from the off -- cheaper glass, manual seats without heating and ventilation, etc. And the BoM is obviously lower for a smaller car, and Tesla is great on mpkwh so they can use a smaller battery pack too. It really should have been feasible t

      • At this point Musk has lost interest in cars.

        The Cybertruck is the one he dreamed of and sketched when he was 8 years old and said he would get people to make for him when he grew up. That is now off his bucket list and he is switching to politics and feuding on Twitter/X. Lately he has been doing about 60 tweets per day, practically full time. That is in addition to the four or five other companies he is supposed to be running, plus attending the numerous court cases and hearings that he has incurred

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by shilly ( 142940 )

          It is really sad to see. It was a genuine business success, which did some pretty fantastic things, by no means perfect, but undeniably leading the way on electrification of ground transport, and he's pissed it up the wall by focusing on new obsessions instead.

      • Well he just rigged the vote to get the biggest CEO payout in world history , possibly the future too... all to keep him interested in Tesla. Somehow people fail to realize that a ton of Tesla's success was it's people and not the CEO and when the CEO started believing his own Yes men and PR firm get got TOO INVOLVED in Tesla and gave us that shit truck (also looks like shit and from a bad movie made into a PS1 game.) and an idiotic semi truck. just go look at how easily people with access to both product

    • Re:Move along, nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @09:26AM (#64856781) Homepage

      What do we all want? A cheap efficient compact electric car.

      So, why didn't you buy a Leaf?

      Turned out that what people didn't want was a cheap efficient compact electric car; what they wanted (and were willing to pay for) was a long-range luxury vehicle.

  • ... on a 1) one-way road, 2) that he built, 3) where the only other cars are Teslas [jalopnik.com]

    Normal people figured out long ago that Elon Musk isn't a real-life Tony Stark, he's a real-life Lyle Lanley [nocookie.net]

    Any article title that starts with the words "Elon Musk" should only contain variations of the words "worthless" and "fraud"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      "Trains suck, so I reinvented the train to replace the train, and my reinvention of the train sucks even more".

      • Re:Musk can't even get self-driving cars to work.. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @04:04AM (#64856265)

        "Trains suck, so I reinvented the train to replace the train, and my reinvention of the train sucks even more".

        Musk's hatred of trains has been a long-standing motivation of his. I guess he got stuck at a level crossing one day while one of those slow mile-long freight trains went past. Similarly the LV Boring tunnel idea came to him while stuck in a traffic jam, so had the idea of a rat-run for millionaires - although it hasn't worked out anything like that because of practicalities. Musk doesn't cope well with practicalities.

        The USA has a very different type of railway system from Europe, with very few passengers so very few people there understand them or have even travelled on one. If you read Musk's Hyperloop "white paper", which he wrote in the hope of destroying railways, you can see that he is absolutely ignorant about them. The only thing he does know about them is that he hates them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      I took a look at that article. The article pointed out the stupidity, the cost, the lack of accessibility, etc. But it didn't say that the cars actually failed at the self-driving, which is what you seem to be implying.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      Except the last time I checked, Lyle Langly hasn't revolutionized the car and AI industries, put people and more than 7000 satellites into space using his own rockets that also are the first to be reusable and self-land, or bought internet to everywhere in the world, put transport tunnels under LA and Vegas, and gone from nearly broke to the richest person on Forbes billionaire list in maybe 15 years.

  • Musk. (Score:2)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    Hilarious that someone thought Slashdot would be the place to "reveal" this like we'd all be hanging on Musk's every words with credit card in hand.

    • Hilarious that someone thought Slashdot would be the place to "reveal" this like we'd all be hanging on Musk's every words with credit card in hand.

      I don't see anywhere that anyone thought that. In fact TFA sounded like a neutral and factual account of the event, with any claims preceded by "Musk said ...", which most people take as a red flag these days. Neutral as it was, TFA does gives the impression to anyone with half a brain that the presentation was another typical load of Musk BS. We've heard it before and it's getting tedious.

      I haven't seen the presentation itself yet, but I don't have high expectations. The whole idea of buying a Robota

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shilly ( 142940 )

        Isn't it also quite heavily regulated in many US places? It certainly is in the UK. For example, in London, you have to get a licence to operate a private hire (taxi) company, and the duties are quite onerous.

        • It's heavily regulated where there is a lot of competition. In other places it is not very difficult. Also, I don't know how it works in Europe, but in the US you can drive a taxi on your basic license. You don't need a commercial one until you are dealing with a heavy truck operated commercially (forget the number and too lazy to look it up but it's something like GVWR over 14k lb.) So you can operate a car or van as a taxi pretty cheaply in most places, unless you live in a state with expensive insurance.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by ledow ( 319597 )

            You need a PSV licence in the UK if you're driving the public for profit, basically.

            https://www.gov.uk/psv-operato... [www.gov.uk]

            It's the way we try to stop anyone claiming to be "a taxi" when they have myriad convictions etc.

            You can't get the licence, you can't register as a cab, you can't register on those services without being a cab, and you have to display regulated plates that require that registration to operate as a cab (which means passengers can literally look up your vehicle to see if it's an officially regi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        I have rarely, if indeed ever, seen a Slashdot article with the line:

        "Slashdot is at the event capturing photos and getting demos of everything announced."

        They've literally gone there specifically as an organisation to get this news, whereas almost all other stories are actually submissions, etc.

  • To just have Optimus prime drive already existing vehicles?
  • Is any of this stuff real at all or is it just more of musk trying to pretend there is somehow something special about him?

  • I think Robo-taxis will not work in the real world. Not because of their driving abilities, but because - in the absence of a driver - idiots are going to trash them. Tell me human nature isn't like that.

    As for Optimus: This robot, or something like it, will be a real product, and genuinely useful. Not in the timeframe that Musk promises, but perhaps in 10 years. Something like ChatGPT can already tell you the steps to perform a certain action. However, actually executing those steps on robotic hardware,

  • Cyber cabs will need to be extensible.

    Obviously they will need to be customised to fit into a fleet of vehicles offering a differentiating service from the other fleets.

    Custom interiors,
    Ability to display ads and offers, Imagine a robocab from the airport offering deals and other odds and things.
    Ability to be a mobile office. So connectivity, Workspaces, conference calling etc.
    Aged care transport, So entry and exit assist, options for standard medical observations, EG connect to your smart watch to m

  • Seriously, I am tired of hearing of Musk having another public wank.

  • I would rather chew on broken glass than give Elon Musk any money.

  • Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by newslash.formatblows ( 2011678 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @12:37PM (#64857177)
    There is 0% chance Elmo can do these things for these prices on this timeline. He doesn't have an autonomous car, he sure as hell can't make even a human-driven car for $30K, and the $20k robot may be even less likely to happen.

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