- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.


Isn’t waymo just using remote workers to drive the cars?
Not exactly; they’ve got a remote worker facility where they’ve got about 1 person per 100 cars, who maps out what to do in situations where the software can’t handle it, but doesn’t do a full-on remote-drive. This enables them to gracefully handle the long tail of situations the software can’t do yet, so long as not every car hits it at once (as with, say, a power outage causing all traffic lights to fail in San Francisco, or flash flooding causing issues all over Phoenix)
I’d prefer that to them just letting an AI do it
I’d rather pay a taxi driver.
For a lot of people, the main risk with a taxi is being attacked by the driver.
They said taxi, not uber.
Those have the same problem, but less concentrated ownership
Well, yeah…