I took a Waymo self-driving taxi in San Francisco. It can be easy to crap on tech, and there were some issues on my rides, but this is truly amazing.
www.businessinsider.com
As an EV realistic for the past 4.5 years due to EV ownership I found this article interesting.
Waymo like Tesla and others have spent billions of dollars to get the technology to this point of development. Billions more will be spent getting Full Self Driving mainstream in the next two decades.
One can read in this thread how Elon Musk as of yesterday is refocusing Tesla to better take advantage of the robot taxi opportunity that he and many others have been working on for years.
It was the Fall of 2019 that I observed the ICE death spiral was in progress in Norway. A Mercedes-Benz distributorship was talking about a $22 million shortfall in sales primarily due to Tesla's model S and X sales.
It was the testimony from the former Mercedes-Benz customers now driving Teslas that convinced me that the ICE death spiral was in progress in at least one country.
I knew I needed some skin in the game if I was going to learn about and talk about EVs with integrity to my kids.
In 1973 I paid $2150 for a new Datsun 1200 Coupe and have been owning Nissans for the past 50 years. While I had never driven a Leaf I knew Nissan made it.
As my luck runs I got online and found a 2016 Nissan leaf SL St. Louis which is 200 miles away and I took the pickup and drove over there and bought it and the Nissan dealership help me rent a U-Haul and loaded up and I brought it back to Kentucky that night and ran an 120 volt cord to the U-Haul trailer and topped off the Leaf's battery.
I was going to Memphis to look at some used Leafs when I found the one that we now own in St. Louis. They had reduced the price to $18,000 and I had $12,000 cash to go buy a used one. I laid that on the table and finally they came back and they said they couldn't do that but they would go for S13.5K and I could pay the balance with a credit card so we shook hands.
The new battery range was 107 mi and it was already down to 60 miles effective range in a 3-year-old car with 22,000 mi on it. But again, as luck would have it, it triggered a new battery warranty 5 weeks after I bought it. Nissan replaced it with a new 2020 battery with a range of 150 mi. So this old boy was in hog heaven.
11 Jan 2023 my son badgered me until after midnight to order a new Model Y with the 2-inch factory tow package like I was going to pay $66K for my second ever new vehicle.
As luck would have it, Elon Musk cut the price by $12,000 on the next day so the new $7500 rebate would be in play which I claimed yesterday.
I added the FSD option to enable the self driving robot which I have used daily for the last 14 months. It was awesome for cross country interstate driving but sucked for local City driving and country driving until the artificial intelligent version released a couple weeks ago in my case.
I understand why Musk announced the reorganizing of the workforce and management yesterday.
The $99 per month artificial intelligent version of FSD is awesome and there is no reason it will not go full bore sooner than later and we're not talking about 5 or 10 years from now.
If you schedule a test drive in a Tesla today the staff is now required to show you how FSD works and demonstrate it to you.
