Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Tesla says you could buy a Cybercab or hire out your regular Tesla as a robotaxi and make big money from it. Since I first proposed that in 2008, many problems appeared.

Elon Musk promised the June Austin Robotaxi would operate "unsupervised." New disclosures suggest that won't happen, but what will?

The cars don't come home, they are owned by their maker, and it's all over-the-air software updates for all robotaxi recalls

There's 50 times the energy in a big-semi truck, so this is a big deal

Uber would love for users to come to them, as they do today, seeking a ride, and match them up with a suitable robotaxi from a variety of fleets.

Robotaxis are what you do first, but eventually people want private cars too. Using insights from working for and studying these companies, here are some details.

That's much better than current FSD, but much worse than humans or Waymo. They revealed a number of other interesting details

Tesla showed a Robovan with the CyberCab but said little. Here's how self-driving vans could be the future of public transit

The regulations for robotaxis in China are much stricter than most of the US. Here are some details, plus a report on rides in both Chinese and US robotaxis

BYD's charger will be fast, but probably quite expensive, and you won't need it, and only want it some of the time. So does it change the game?

Even if you can't charge at your home or office, there are still ways to never wait for your car to charge. Here's how.

I’ve put 50,000 miles on my electric car, around half of them on long distance road trips. But when people ask, “Don’t those take a long time to charge?” my response is that I’ve spent less time waiting to charge than I used to spend filling up with gasoline. You just have to know how to do it right, and you need right charging infrastructure. That latter factor is why I have to say “almost,” because this is not always true in these early days of EV adoption, but it will be true almost all the time as the EV transition continues.

After Mark Rober's video on Tesla vs. a LIDAR car, somebody tries to replicate the test on FSD instead of Autopilot, as Rober should have. One FSD works, another fails.

Mark Rober's tests were pretty artificial and examined Tesla's obsolete driver-assist system, not its prototype self-driving system.

It took a while, but Waymo is now servicing its HQ and the place it was born. I worked there 13 years ago and have seen it grow up.

The more extreme Trump gets, the more the non-MAGA Republicans, whom I will call the "GOP," would like to be free of him. They always distrusted him, but their desire for power overwhelmed that distrust. The alternative to Trump was the Democrats. Opposition to Trump meant being pushed out of the Republican party like Liz Cheney. Now they live in fear. Only the GOP have the political power to remove Trump. 4 in the House. 4 in the Senate could pass a resolution, including a resolution declaring Trump an insurrectionist.

With Waymo up to 200,000/week, total rides are now well over a million a month. The robotaxi is here. But people mistake it for Uber because it looks like that today.

People want to run EV charging stations as a business, but could you sell gasoline for $4/gallon if almost everybody has a $1/gallon filling station at home?

Trump has joked about a third term, but we all know the 22nd amendment limits Presidents to 2 (or 2.5) terms, right? Fortunately, Trump is 78, and the odds of health getting in the way are significant, but it's also pretty probable he'll be up for it. And being who he is, want it. He may not be joking. But how could he do it?

We look at Musk's very specific words from the earnings call, and what they might translate to in Austin to make a service when the software's not yet ready