Making a working self-driving car is hard, but there's a ton more to do to open a robotaxi service area. Here's an outline of the surprisingly long list of things.

A few days ago, I wrote about Olympics Streaming and the challenge of quickly navigating around streaming/downloaded sports programs with typical streaming or cloud DVR services.

I tend to make heavy use of "jump" buttons which skip forward or back amounts like 10, 15, 30 or 120 seconds. With a local disk DVR (and some very good streaming ones) this is done with super fast response time and a live preview, so it's easy to move around a program to what you want.

I cut the TV cord many years ago, and watch everything streaming or downloaded. When it comes to sports, though, particularly the Olympics, streaming and Cloud DVR don't remotely cut it, and so I record the over-the-air broadcast to a local disk using open source DVR software, and watch from my local disk, sometimes delayed just a few minutes to an hour from "live."

Robotaxis may not look like old-school cars. What will be their key innovative features, and what is Tesla likely to show in their October concept reveal?

Canceling the Origin is a sad moment for Cruise, but it's the right decision on their path to rebirth. Get the software right, then do the hardware.

Some plan fleets of robotaxis. Others, like Tesla may expect private owners to hire out their cars into networks, like Ubers they don't have to drive. Which is best?

In election season, we regularly see references in the USA to "The popular vote" as well as nationwide polls comparing presidential candidates. These are self-destructive, and ideally should be curtailed.

A busy pedestrian city core is common in Europe, and the jewel of any city, but US cities rarely make it work. Cars are banned but they also bring in pedestrians

The market's upset that Tesla may delay their robotaxi reveal, but the truth is they are many years away from having a production robotaxi

If Tesla FSD-S does get that good, will it trigger "automation complacency" and create a danger?

Manhattan's plan to charge up to $15 to drive downtown won't happen, but there are better, more high tech ways to do it.

Tesla FSD has learned some antisocial behavior. But what if self-driving systems work together to make a more cooperative and social road?

It's time to radically scale back the postal service, by banning the mailing, on paper, of computer files.

The US Postal Service delivers 44% of the mail in the world. 127B total pieces of mail, plus packages, and 46B pieces of first class mail (down from 103B at the peak) of which 13B are "single piece" first class mail with a stamp. That's a lot of trees and a lot of energy.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Agency is investigating 31 incidents involving the robotaxi company s vehicles.

Baidu, the tech company sometimes called the "Google of China" has a new robotaxi at half the price, and a plan for profits

Cruise is Back, Waymo is doing 50,000 rides/week with nobody in the car, Motional lays off half their staff, and Tesla still teases a Robotaxi. It's interesting times.

I recently rented a Tesla from Hertz, for an experience that tried to be wonderful but failed.

What reasons could Tesla possibly have to laying off its entire Supercharger team when most consider it to be one of the company's prized jewels?

Some day robots may roam the streets without cargo, just showing ads. What will we do about it?