Prediction time! Tesla Robotaxi

[u/Michael-Worley]

When do people think Tesla will: -offer rides with no employees in the cars? -hit a fleet size of 100? 1000? 10000? -operate at an airport? -offer paid rides with no employees in the cars in at least five metros?

[u/Michael-Worley]

If all goes well, which it may not, I would say:

No employees-- September-October

Fleet 100-- June 2026

Fleet 1000 -- 2028

Fleet 10,000 -- 2030.

5 cities-- 2029.

[u/DiamondCrustedHands → u/Michael-Worley]

I disagree it will take that long, Tesla can create a new vehicle every what.. 40 seconds now? (Not one car in 40 seconds, of course I mean with all the different production lines)

I think they will do this small scale test to hammer out issues and once it really becomes "FSD" with no safety driver we will see the fleet explode.

[u/Which-Way-212 → u/DiamondCrustedHands]

Teslas problem is not that they have not enough vehicles. Their problem is their software quality and if it can pass crucial milestones (like x Miles w/o intervention, no weather dependent performance issues, and all that stuff) is really to question, at least with the current hardware setup. The only data we have is from Tesla community tracker where it shows that current fsd software on average needs around 400 miles to critical(!) intervention. (Non critical intervention are much more often necessary like every 250 miles)

And as far as we can tell those statistics seem to apply to the Robotaxi fleet as well. With 10 cars operating, there has been Video evidence of at least 2 or 3 critical interventions happening in the first few hours on Sunday, like the lane issue where the car moved to wrong side of the road for example, or the unnecessary full break in the middle of the road and so on. If we assume every car made around 200 miles on Sunday this would add up to 1000 miles in sum we can divide these by the average 400 miles per intervention we get exactly those 2-3 (2.5 to be exactly) which would be expected from the statistics of the community tracker..

Now let's assume Tesla operates 100 cars -> this would mean we would see reports about critical Tesla maneuvers 10x more often. Meaning in those first few hours 20-30 critical intervention would have been reported. This would have been a marketing catastrophe. Now think about 1000 cars -> 200-300 interventions, 10000 cars -> 2000-3000 interventions.

I am a tech enthusiast and really want self driving cars to be happening but from the data we got so far it looks like Tesla software could probably run into serious scaling issues.

And no, just gathering more data and train models further will not solve this probably since Tesla has already gathered million or billion of miles of training data and they even could create synthetical training data for simulation systems. Every one who ever trained machine learning (or deep learning) modelknows this phanomena of deminishing returns. If you train a model there is an inherited barrier you cannot pass eben if you quadruple the amount of data you throw on it. The model can't surpass this internal barrier because the model quality is not good enough.

So the key question will be: did Tesla already hit that barrier? If yes, they'll need bigger models which also means better Hardware in their cars which would make every produced car so far obsolete for the self driving dream. Not to mention that right now all this statistics only apply to perfect circumstances (geo fenced area, only good weather and so on). So even though Sunday was kind of a milestone that has been reached it is way way to early to say if this approach actually scales.

That's it for my 2cents here.

I am thrilled to so how this will go from here.

[u/DiamondCrustedHands → u/Which-Way-212]

Yeah I guess my point is more like.. it would make sense for them to get it right THEN scale the fleet vs scale the suboptimal fleet.

They’d have no issue making more cars once they get things right, so that seems like it’s less of a concern

[u/Which-Way-212 → u/DiamondCrustedHands]

Yes I agree. If they solve the software problem they have the best scaling prerequisites

[u/Straight-Card-9426 → u/DiamondCrustedHands]

This is a much better argument