More On Robotaxis

Cybercab

Liam Denning reports on Tesla's quarterly results flop in Someone Call Tesla a Robotaxi, or SpaceX, Quick. He notes that:

The curated list of investor questions that gets teed up ahead of these affairs had indicated some brewing discomfort about the big issue: Tesla’s lack of progress on its long-promised mass rollout of robotaxis. Musk duly tried to finesse this by pointing out that the “constraint” is safety, with Tesla trying to scale as fast as possible “while trying to ensure that we do not harm anyone.”

It is good that Tesla is "trying to ensure that we do not harm anyone" but they need to try much harder. In last February's Tesla's Not-A-Robotaxi Service I quoted Fred Lambert:

By the company’s own numbers, its “Robotaxi” fleet crashes nearly 4 times more often than a normal driver, and every single one of those miles had a safety monitor who could hit the kill switch. That is not a rounding error or an early-program hiccup. It is a fundamental performance gap.

But I went on to point out that Lambert was making the wrong comparison:

However badly, Tesla is trying to operate a taxi service. So it is misleading to compare the crash rate with "normal drivers". The correct comparison is with taxi drivers. The New York Times reported that:

In a city where almost everyone has a story about zigzagging through traffic in a hair-raising, white-knuckled cab ride, a new traffic safety study may come as a surprise: It finds that taxis are pretty safe.

So are livery cars, according to the study, which is based on state motor vehicle records of accidents and injuries across the city. It concludes that taxi and livery-cab drivers have crash rates one-third lower than drivers of other vehicles.

A law firm has a persuasive list of reasons why this is so. So Tesla's "robotaxi" is actually 6 times less safe than a taxi.

In any rational jurisdiction, six times worse than the competition even with a safety driver would get the regulators to force Tesla back to the drawing board.

The New York Times article was the best I could find at the time but it was from 2006. We now have much better and more recent data. Follow me below the fold for one of the reasons why Tesla's numbers are bad, very probably even worse than six, and even some criticims of Waymo's numbers.