The Last Driver License Holder tracks autonomous vehicles, analyzing California disengagement reports, Waymo's finances, and the shift from oil to electric vehicles.
HN commenters link it in debates on self-driving safety and Waymo's computing costs, with some skeptical about how meaningful short test journeys are.
> If you've ever tried to squeeze yourself under the kitchen sink, work one hand behind the 5" gap around the garbage disposal, work the other hand around the tiny gap between the garbage disposal and the main sink, try to coordinate the 2 hands to tighten the faucet, then I'm sure you'll agree with OP.
What's hard for me doesn't tell you anything about what's hard for a differently shaped body, and robots don't need to look like us — two left hands is easy, extra joints is easy.
Most robots don't look like us, one way or another. Famously Spot, but there are as many sizes and shapes as there is commercial demand for them. Humanoid ones are popular right now, but I grew up hearing about how that was "actually a bad shape for a robot" (was the past just sour grapes, or are the current humanoid ones CEOs watching too much SciFi?)
> We don't even have a commercial robot to unload and store dishes from the dishwasher nor unload and store clothes from dryer.
Both dishwashers and clothes driers are special purpose robots designed to solve problems without having to first solve human-level sensation or dexterity.
> What makes you think robotics will be solved in a century, let alone ten years?
Have you seen demo videos from the last 12 months? The videos are sped up, indicating they're compute-bound; the accuracy of joint positioning, the strength, etc. is already superhuman whenever we want it to be.
Quality of vision, that's the hard part. Cars can only lose their steering…
Why is that interesting? Do you expect them to get into a crash in a simple 15 mile journey? Humans go around 1,000,000 miles between crashes. You literally need to make such a journey over 50,000 times in a row without a crash to be a actual viable autonomous vehicle solution. If you are still worried about the possibility of a problem in a single 15 mile journey you are so far away from adequate to be driverless it is not even funny.
As a example, by end of 2016 Waymo was doing 5,000 miles between interventions [1]. It took them until end of 2020 to reach ~30,000 miles per intervention [2]. They only began driverless operations in 2022. 6 years of improvement from a capability level of 5,000 miles per intervention before they thought it was safe enough to hit the roads with no driver.
In contrast, Tesla is averaging 500 miles at best [3] and the incident rate of their pilot program corroborates that their "Tesla Robotaxi" version is not materially better. As such, getting a cherry picked 15 mile journey should be expected, but is not at all indicative of actual adequacy for scalable autonomous operation. And despite that, they still failed to actually follow the law for the entire duration failing on a task as trivial as not parking in a gigantic red fire lane.
This is also in spite of starting their autonomous driving development by 2016 at the latest. So, after 9 grueling years they are still too immature to handle simple signage such as fire lanes. After 9 grueling…
Every 24 months of EV production in China destroys 1 million barrels a day of global oil demand, as of this comment, at current rates of EV production. We should expect these rates of production will continue to increase. Total annual light vehicle sales are ~90M units. Globally, over 1-in-5 (22%) of new cars sold were electric in 2024. This share was 92% in Norway, and in China, it was almost 50%. In 2025, it was 1-in-4 (25%). The world has 20-30M units/year of EV manufacturing capacity. Light vehicles and heavy vehicles are solved for with battery electric.
Aviation and petrochemical use cases are unlikely to disappear in our lifetimes, but that is a small slice of today's oil demand (lets call it ~15-20% for the sake of argument), and will be the remainder as renewables and batteries eat global energy demand. ~40% of marine shipping disappears when you're not moving energy around the world, the remaining half can burn renewable energy produced ammonia or methanol for fuel. Like bankruptcy, the change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden. China now has more power than OPEC because of the facts in this comment and their vast strategic petroleum reserves.
It is easy to say "this flywheel is spinning slowly" before it is spinning very fast, while you're watching it spool.
How China became the world’s great oil power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49238158 - August 2026
Laos went 100% electric vehicles overnight with a drastic approach -…
Zoox did several years of closed course testing and started on public roads in San Fransisco about 1 year ago with just 10 cars. Last fall they did a press event and took a few dozen journalists around for rides and everyone had good things to say about the performance of their vehicles. Their first set of disengagement reports for 2017 had them at 1 every 430 miles, which is worse than Waymo or Cruise, but way ahead of everyone else, and especially impressive given how few test miles they had racked up at the time. It lends credibility to the claims some have made that Jesse Levinson is the brightest guy in the industry.
Ashley Vance for Bloomberg did a big puff piece on Zoox a month ago, the video is pretty interesting, it's the first we've been able to see of their prototypes in action, and I had been waiting years to see if they were actually following through with their original vision:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-07-17/zoox-and-its-800-million-robo-taxi-dream-video
A couple days ago some pics of an unidentified av test vehicle was spotted, and one of the smart guys in my subreddit called it out as a zooxmobile with an new sensor configuration arranged to match the configuration of their protoypes:
https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/08/21/unidentified-suv-spotted-in-dogpatch-neighborhood-in-san-francisco/
Tesla's FSD has different approach / tradeoffs compared to dedicated robotaxi services. FSD has to be cheap and energy efficient, run completely on-board, and it must work everywhere. They're trying to do more with less, which has so far been impossible. Their cybercab and robotaxi service will probably work more like Waymo, with a slightly relaxed set of limitations.
Some differences compared to Waymo:
- Waymo has / can use more on-board compute, from [0] "It has also been revealed that Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements."
- Waymo uses remote operators. This includes humans but can also have remote compute.
- Waymo's neural network model can be trained / overfit on specific route or area. FSD uses the same model everywhere.
- Waymo's on-board hardware can use more energy, because it's possible to charge the battery between trips.
- Robotaxi services charge customers per mile, so it makes sense to run longer routes which are also easier to drive, i.e. the routing algorithm can be tuned to avoid challenging routes. This would be possible to implement on FSD too, but it seems that FSD drives fastest route.
[0] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6-billion-round-and-details-of-the-ai-used/
I genuinely don't think this is true. FSD is better than a lot of people make it out to be, but I'm pretty sure they're still leagues behind Cruise who is behind Waymo.
I don't think Tesla publishes their data, but from the 2021 report [1] Cruise is at 42,022 miles/disengagement and Waymo is at 7,800. In fairness, Waymo switched their car base car, which seems to be causing issues. Waymo was at 29,944 miles/disengagement in 2020.
The videos I've seen of Teslas appear to have a much lower miles/disengagement number. Even if we presume they're going 60mph the whole time (they're not), they would need to have 1 disengagement per 130 hours of video just to keep up with Waymo's new, much lower stats. They'd need 1 disengagement per 700 hours of video to keep up with Cruise. With a more realistic estimate of an average 15mph, you'd have to quadruple those numbers.
There's some wiggle room, because disengagements and whether they're reportable is somewhat subjective. The delta seems large enough to say that Tesla isn't particularly close, though.
1. https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/02/09/2021-disengagement-report-from-california/ (the dataset is available from the CA DMV, but it's in CSV so I used this because graphs)