“Robotaxi” and “Cybercab” are too unoriginal to trademark, USPTO tells Tesla

Uragan

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I have tried. 86% of all taxi rides are by single riders. 1 or 2 passengers is over 90%. So why is a taxi that can only handle 1-2 passengers automatically bad? Please more thought into it than "Musk bad....therefore bad". You are behaving no worse than MAGAs.
Willing to provide some citations for those statistics or are you just pulling numbers out of your ass?

Let’s take your numbers as valid though for a quick exercise. A taxi that can only handle one or two passengers is “bad” because if a group of people larger than two needs a taxi… the pool of vehicles that they could utilize is much smaller than the pool that a single person or pair of people could pull from. Since the pool is smaller, the chance that all of the taxis that can handle more than two people would be utilized at any given time would be quite large. That means people in a group of three or more would have to wait longer to get a vehicle to serve their needs.

Additionally, Tesla has intentionally engineered the vehicle to limit the number of passengers it can accommodate at any given trip… which doesn’t make sense if one is trying to maximize revenue per ride.
 
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Soooo… here’s the piece I don’t get. If Elon had gone all in on LIDAR in the beginning with the same approach he brought to batteries - iterative improvement, own the manufacturing process, make building the things super efficient - he’d have relatively inexpensive LIDAR that he could make a selling point in all his vehicles. That would substantially improve FSD for an investment that’s a drop in the bucket relative to Tesla’s valuation. His intransigence on LIDAR is just baffling.
He believes the German-style models of human are the pinnacle of greatness for the entire universe, and German-style humans don't have LIDAR, therefore LIDAR is obviously inherently inferior to sensing the German-human-visible light spectrum. IT'S PURE SCIENCE!
 
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Willing to provide some citations for those statistics or are you just pulling numbers out of your ass?

Let’s take your numbers as valid though for a quick exercise. A taxi that can only handle one or two passengers is “bad” because if a group of people larger than two needs a taxi… the pool of vehicles that they could utilize is much smaller than the pool that a single person or pair of people could pull from. Since the pool is smaller, the chance that all of the taxis that can handle more than two people would be utilized at any given time would be quite large. That means people in a group of three or more would have to wait longer to get a vehicle to serve their needs.

Additionally, Tesla has intentionally engineered the vehicle to limit the number of passengers it can accommodate at any given trip… which doesn’t make sense if one is trying to maximize revenue per ride.
Too lazy to do a search to verify?


View: https://medium.com/@muhammadaris10/nyc-taxi-trip-data-analysis-45ecfdcb6f91


First link found. Almost 94% of rides were 1-2 passengers.

And so what? If 10 people need a taxi now...what do they do? They won't fit in nearly any taxi/uber/etc. Oh no! If more than 2...I guess they could wait for a larger vehicle, specify that in the app...or...get this...take 2+ taxis! The HORROR. How will they ever survive?
 
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Snark218

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I have tried. 86% of all taxi rides are by single riders. 1 or 2 passengers is over 90%. So why is a taxi that can only handle 1-2 passengers automatically bad? Please more thought into it than "Musk bad....therefore bad". You are behaving no worse than MAGAs.
So 15% of all taxi rides, what, don't matter? Passengers with more than a small carry-on don't matter? Passengers with car seats don't matter? There's a fucking reason most cabs are either sedans or vans, and it's not because cab operators are cool with leaving 15% of their rides standing on the curb. Or ten, five, one percent, for that matter. There's no reason for a taxi not to cover over 99% or more of the foreseeable actual rides.

If you aren't dickriding for Musk, it's sure not clear to me how your argument would be substantively different if you were.
 
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Snark218

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Too lazy to do a search to verify?


View: https://medium.com/@muhammadaris10/nyc-taxi-trip-data-analysis-45ecfdcb6f91


First link found. Almost 94% of rides were 1-2 passengers.

And so what? If 10 people need a taxi now...what do they do? They won't fit in nearly any taxi/uber/etc. Oh no! If more than 2...I guess they could wait for a larger vehicle, specify that in the app...or...get this...take 2+ taxis! The HORROR. How will they ever survive?

Or they could just take the ride offered by a cab company that's not aggressively indifferent to their needs. Why pay for two rides? Why wait for a larger vehicle? Why not just take the vehicle that works for all the riders, not 86%, or 94%, or 99% of them?

The mask is slipping. You're bad at this. This is a stupid fucking car to be a cab. You don't actually need to defend a lazy, stupid, halfassed position.
 
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Uragan

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Too lazy to do a search to verify?


View: https://medium.com/@muhammadaris10/nyc-taxi-trip-data-analysis-45ecfdcb6f91


First link found. Almost 94% of rides were 1-2 passengers.

And so what? If 10 people need a taxi now...what do they do? They won't fit in nearly any taxi/uber/etc. Oh no! If more than 2...I guess they could wait for a larger vehicle, specify that in the app...or...get this...take 2+ taxis! The HORROR. How will they ever survive?

It’s not my job to verify your data. And what holds true for NYC may not be indicative of trends in other markets.

And we should be decreasing the amount of vehicles on the road, not increase them. Or better yet, skip the additional taxis and replace them and existing ones with mass transit.
 
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So 15% of all taxi rides, what, don't matter? Passengers with more than a small carry-on don't matter? Passengers with car seats don't matter? There's a fucking reason most cabs are either sedans or vans, and it's not because cab operators are cool with leaving 15% of their rides standing on the curb. Or ten, five, one percent, for that matter. There's no reason for a taxi not to cover over 99% or more of the foreseeable actual rides.

If you aren't dickriding for Musk, it's sure not clear to me how your argument would be substantively different if you were.
Not 15%...6%. It can hold 2 people...so 1 or 2 passengers. I don't know its cargo space.

I see that you belong to the group of people who dislike Musk so therefore everything he has done, is doing, or ever will do is stupid, crap, and deserves hate. That is cool and all, you do you, but some of us like to look at facts. Are you one of those people who refuse to say that Tesla and SpaceX has been successful despite it being obviously true? It doesn't mean you have to like him, but to deny blatant facts is just behavior that is very MAGA-y.

People have said that it sucks because it can only hold 2 people. I think that isn't entirely a good argument since 94% of taxi rides would be accommodated by a vehicle that could hold 1-2 people. That alone doesn't make it a bad design. This would be true if Musk, Waymo, or whoever.

If you are going to say it sucks, pick actual reasons. Like shitty (worse than shitty...non-existent) FSD, Musk is a Nazi fucktard, Tesla has poor build quality, etc. But that it can only hold up to 2 people isn't a real good complaint.

I have been in plenty of taxis/ubers, etc. that could hold 4 people at MOST (3 in back, packed in tight) and one in front. To use something that some like...are they traveling tuba repairmen?
 
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Or they could just take the ride offered by a cab company that's not aggressively indifferent to their needs. Why pay for two rides? Why wait for a larger vehicle? Why not just take the vehicle that works for all the riders, not 86%, or 94%, or 99% of them?

The mask is slipping. You're bad at this. This is a stupid fucking car to be a cab. You don't actually need to defend a lazy, stupid, halfassed position.
And if you have a group of more than 4, most taxis/ubers/etc can't take you either.

Why wait for a larger vehicle? Why not just take the vehicle that works for all the riders, not 86%, or 94%, or 99% of them?
Except a 2-seater WOULD work 94% of the time...no need to wait. So only occasionally would you have to think about it. Why would I care that the taxi I am getting into wouldn't work in another situation.

And from a taxi company...would you rather have 2 taxis in operation that can accomodate 94% of rides or 1 taxi that accomodate 100%. The 2 taxis would make a lot more money because they would be getting about 80-90% more revenue per invested dollar.

And there are other options if you have more people. But for most rides, it works. You don't need to build for every edge case. What if we have 20 people...what if we have 30 bags of luggage with us...etc.
 
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It’s not my job to verify your data. And what holds true for NYC may not be indicative of trends in other markets.

And we should be decreasing the amount of vehicles on the road, not increase them. Or better yet, skip the additional taxis and replace them and existing ones with mass transit.
It is you job if you are going to accuse it of being made up. Yes, NYC MIGHT not be indicative...what is your reasons to think that it isn't?

Then I guess you hate Waymo for putting more cars on the road, along with every auto maker. How DARE they make more vehicles. They should only be building and selling mass transit. Fucking Ford, VW, etc.

It is obvious (now) that a 2 seat taxi would accommodate around 90% of rides (rounding down). A solution that can accomodate 90% of situations is not automatically bad because it can't handle 100%. Especially if that 2-seater can be built much cheaper than a solution that would hold 4 with luggage.

It's funny...if we were talking about EVs and range, you and others would be talking about how the average commute is under 50 miles and therefore worrying about range would be silly since an EV would cover 90% of commutes. Seems logic only works for you when it supports your position.

I mean the whole "traveling trombone salesman" just is just that...making fun of people who come up with edge cases.
 
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So when Waymo extends its boundaries to the borders of the US...will it still be L4? And guess what...LIDAR and radar can add a bunch of those features. Also, given that eyes are like 500 megapixels...yeah. not anytime soon with cameras only.
Yes, technically. And just adding that data, by itself, is not a 1 for 1 replacement for the way our eyes provide that data. It's provided from a different perspective than the crappy cameras, with reduced quality, and requires significantly more post-processing to be made somewhat useful. For us, it's all in one data stream, so to speak, and part of the reason we can do so much with so little. My opinion is that I would rather wait for technology to catch up so that we can do autonomous driving with solid and reliable tech than try to force through the accomplishment with shitty hardware that barely meets requirements for minimum-viability and notional reliability.
 
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Komarov

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So when Waymo extends its boundaries to the borders of the US...will it still be L4? And guess what...LIDAR and radar can add a bunch of those features. Also, given that eyes are like 500 megapixels...yeah. not anytime soon with cameras only.

I think you're seriously overestimating the quality of human vision. The number of receptors on the retina doesn't really signify, for example; that's just the first level or redundancy, the optical nerve doesn't carry a 500 Mpx video stream, not even close. Image processing in the brain is entirely different than in computers:
  • First of all, only a small part of the retina is actually used for direct vision. Most of the rest (a.k.a. peripheral vision) only detects movement without details, which may cause the eyes to automagically move and focus on that signal – with a measurable latency.

  • What you think you see is not what your eyes actually see. The brain keeps filling in the blank parts of the visual field with synthesised data, some of it interpolated and some "remembered" from earlier. The eyes move involuntarily and regularly to fill in those gaps – again with measurable latency.

  • Finally, while all this suspiciously fake visual data is being integrated, the visual cortex uses pattern matching on the result to identify objects. When there's no known pattern, it takes a significant amount of time to analyse the image. Again, more latency.

  • Depth perception is a combination of parallax measurement for short ranges and wishful thinking for long ranges.
TL;DR: Human vision is good for identifying food and prey and predators, somewhat good-ish for viewing static images and not good at all for analysing fast, unexpected events. It's also not too good at estimating distance except at fairly close range, and really sucks at estimating velocity, especially of things that are moving directly in your line of sight towards or away from you.

And that last is a problem for camera-only robotic systems; hence, LIDAR for 3D modelling and Doppler RADAR for velocity measurement.

(source)
 
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Yes, technically. And just adding that data, by itself, is not a 1 for 1 replacement for the way our eyes provide that data. It's provided from a different perspective than the crappy cameras, with reduced quality, and requires significantly more post-processing to be made somewhat useful. For us, it's all in one data stream, so to speak, and part of the reason we can do so much with so little. My opinion is that I would rather wait for technology to catch up so that we can do autonomous driving with solid and reliable tech than try to force through the accomplishment with shitty hardware that barely meets requirements for minimum-viability and notional reliability.
You really don't understand technology, do you?

And I love that you say that if Waymo's L4 boundaries were the whole country, it would still be L4.
 
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So do you. If you want to dispel my belief, I invite you to try with a more convincing argument. Honestly, being proven wrong is the highlight of my day. No joke. Bring it on.
You said:
If he had used that iterative improvement process on the camera systems instead, we might actually have cameras that could perform well enough to do what he thinks they should be able to do instead of relying on lidar to marginally make up for the shitty cameras.

Tell me exactly how digital cameras would have been more advanced with Tesla's help in iterative approach? Do you really think there isn't TONS of work going on with digital cameras such that his little bit extra would have made it feasible? This belief is laughable that the only we have been lacking is Tesla's pushing camera tech...otherwise we'd have good enough cameras for FSD.
 
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Because it's still geofenced to the US. A geofence is still a geofence, even if it's within the boundaries of an entire country.
So it is only L5 if it works for the entire world, left or right lane driving, no matter the signage, language, rules of the road, etc. Gotcha.

I'm not going to play your game of No True Scotsman anymore.
 
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Cthel

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[snip]
Additionally, Tesla has intentionally engineered the vehicle to limit the number of passengers it can accommodate at any given trip… which doesn’t make sense if one is trying to maximize revenue per ride.
I'm not sure that follows - taxi fares are normally per-trip, not per-passenger, so to maximise revenue per ride you'd want individual pods (each charging the trip fare). Especially if one of the metrics you plan to report to shareholders is the number of rides...

I'm not saying it's a good business model, obviously
 
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SeanJW

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Oh yeah, no, we're not doing this. We have no idea whether Musk is autistic to any degree at all, and if he is, that has no relevance to his business decisions, deceptive and fraudulent business practices, or radical politics.

Speaking as someone autistic, ADHD and is legally and appropriately prescribed the sort of meds Musk has to get from a drug dealer with an MD... I can say with a fair amount of comfort I believe his diagnosis would be "stupid", not anything a mental health professional would try and label.
 
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SeanJW

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Overpromised and underdelivered, just like everything else.

Of course others have solar tile roofs and they actually sell them. Tesla is getting out of the solar business because their offering was more expensive and less performant than others and they could only ride the Tesla brand name for so long. Now that the name (Tesla or Musk, take your pick) is a giant anchor dragging everything associated with it to the bottom of a septic tank, Tesla Solar is dead

To be fair, it was dead before Tesla bought it. It was a fire sale of his brother's losing business after all.
 
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SeanJW

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Ain't no radar in my 2020 Forester. So bright sunlight blinds it, and it pops up a helpful message of "No can do". Same as when it gets contaminants on the top of the windscreen in front of the cameras.

(Also: Power steering??? Luxury. When I was a lad we didn't have power steering, and we liked it!)

Pfftt.... Power anything is a luxury... I've driven a truck where gravity managed the fuel from the tank. Hills were....special. So very very special.... "please god, let me get off this incline before the engine stops..."
 
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SeanJW

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So here’s the thing. When the cars were being developed in the mid 2010s, LIDAR hardware was $10k or more. So the decision had to be made whether to add that to all cars, and raise the base price, or make autopilot / FSD factory configuration option for more extra money. People were hesitant to buy FSD for $10k, let alone $20k if lidar was included. Then there would also be two different hardware configurations, which would have made their manufacturing year of hell even worse, probably would have ended up scrapping the lidar model altogether.

That brings us to today, where lidar is cheap enough to merge into the base model. But then you’ve got the legacy support problem. Needing to support millions of non-lidar cars and add lidar support to their FSD AI would basically be two separate efforts that would end up diverging pretty quick.

That would be good except Tesla has been paring back the sensors they did have, and disabling them on vehicles where they're actually installed. Like radar. And golly, that really improved things by leaps and bounds, didn't it?
 
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I'm not sure that follows - taxi fares are normally per-trip, not per-passenger, so to maximise revenue per ride you'd want individual pods (each charging the trip fare). Especially if one of the metrics you plan to report to shareholders is the number of rides...

I'm not saying it's a good business model, obviously
Exactly. And if the 2-seater can be made way cheaper than the larger more accomodating models, to maximize revenues and profits, you go with the small one. Especially since it would work most of the time.
 
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Uragan

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So it is only L5 if it works for the entire world, left or right lane driving, no matter the signage, language, rules of the road, etc. Gotcha.

I'm not going to play your game of No True Scotsman anymore.
I’m not being overly pedantic. If you have issues with SAE J3016, take it up with them.

They’ve defined L4 and L5 as such:

L4:
The sustained and ODD-specific performance by an ADS of the entire DDT and DDT fallback.

L5:
The sustained and unconditional (i.e., not ODD-specific) performance by an ADS of the entire DDT and DDT fallback.

And to explain what the acronyms mean in those definitions:

3.10 DYNAMIC DRIVING TASK (DDT)

All of the real-time operational and tactical functions required to operate a vehicle in on-road traffic, excluding the strategic functions such as trip scheduling and selection of destinations and waypoints, and including, without limitation, the following subtasks:
  1. Lateral vehicle motion control via steering (operational).
  2. Longitudinal vehicle motion control via acceleration and deceleration (operational).
  3. Monitoring the driving environment via object and event detection, recognition, classification, and response preparation (operational and tactical).
  4. Object and event response execution (operational and tactical).
  5. Maneuver planning (tactical).
  6. Enhancing conspicuity via lighting, sounding the horn, signaling, gesturing, etc. (tactical).

6. SIGNIFICANCE OF OPERATIONAL DESIGN DOMAIN (ODD)

Conceptually, the role of a driving automation system vis-à-vis a user in performance of part or all of the DDT is orthogonal to the specific conditions under which it performs that role. For example, a specific implementation of adaptive cruise control may be intended to operate only at high speeds, only at low speeds, or at all speeds. For simplicity, however, this taxonomy collapses these two axes into a single set of levels of driving automation. Levels 1 through 4 expressly contemplate ODD limitations. In contrast, Level 5 (like Level 0) does not have ODD limitations [emphasis added] (subject to the discussion in 8.8).

Accordingly, accurately describing a feature (other than at Levels 0 and 5) requires identifying both its level of driving automation and its operational design domain (ODD). As provided in the definitions above, this combination of level of driving automation and ODD is called a usage specification, and a given feature satisfies a given usage specification.

Because of the wide range of possible ODDs, a wide range of possible features may exist at each level (e.g., Level 4 includes parking, high-speed, low-speed, geo-fenced, etc.). For this reason, this taxonomy provides less detail about the ODD attributes that may define a given feature than about the respective roles of a driving automation system and its user. ODD is especially important to understanding why a given ADS is not Level 5 merely because it operates an ADS-dedicated vehicle. Unlike a Level 5 ADS, a Level 3 or 4 ADS has a limited ODD. Geographic, speed, environmental or other ODD restrictions on an ADS-DV may reflect technological limitations of its ADS, or they may reflect vehicle design limitations. [emphasis added]

Level 1 to Level 4 features are subject to limited ODDs. These limitations generally reflect the technological capability of the driving automation system. For example, Level 4 ADS-DVs that operate in enclosed courses have existed for many decades as people movers and airport shuttles. The ODD for such vehicles is very simple, well-controlled, and physically enclosed (vehicle operates on a fixed course; physical barriers prevent encroachment; protected from external events, weather, etc.). This highly structured and simple ODD makes it technologically less challenging to achieve Level 4 driving automation. However, a Level 3 ADS feature that operates a vehicle on open roads in mixed traffic, and does so in environments that include inclement weather, faces a significantly higher technological bar in terms of ADS capability by virtue of the more complex and unstructured ODD (see Figure 11).

Note also that the ODD for a given driving automation system feature potentially encompasses a broad set of parameters that define the limits of that feature’s functional capability to operate in design-specified on-road environments. It includes variables as widely ranging as specific road types, weather conditions, lighting conditions, geographical restrictions, and the presence or absence of certain road features, such as lane markings, road side traffic barriers, median strips, etc. As such, a given driving automation system feature has only one ODD, but that ODD may be quite varied and multi-faceted. Even though the ODD is composed of multiple variables, it would be incorrect to say that a driving automation feature has multiple ODDs. A feature will operate as designed (see 3.26) only when all the ODD-defining variables satisfy design criteria.
 
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I’m not being overly pedantic. If you have issues with SAE J3016, take it up with them.

They’ve defined L4 and L5 as such:

L4:


L5:


And to explain what the acronyms mean in those definitions:
So you are taking that and saying that unless the system works for the entire world, it isn't L5. That isn't what they are saying.
 
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Uragan

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So you are taking that and saying that unless the system works for the entire world, it isn't L5. That isn't what they are saying.
Yes… that’s exactly what they’re saying. Geofencing is considered a “operational design domain”. They don’t define when a geofence stops being a geofence and is just a jurisdictional limiter.
 
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Yes… that’s exactly what they’re saying. Geofencing is considered a “operational design domain”. They don’t define when a geofence stops being a geofence and is just a jurisdictional limiter.
No, that is not what they are saying, that is how you are interpreting it. I'm not surprised by your take though.
 
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Uragan

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Because if it was "geo-fenced" to USA or even North America...how would that not be L5?
Because a geo-fence is a restriction on how and where the ADS will work. The definition of L5 says literally "unconditional" performance. Did you not read the parts of SAE that I bolded?

Unlike a Level 5 ADS, a Level 3 or 4 ADS has a limited ODD. Geographic, speed, environmental or other ODD restrictions on an ADS-DV may reflect technological limitations of its ADS, or they may reflect vehicle design limitations.

Being geo-fenced to the US or NA is a "geographic restriction".
 
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Cthel

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It would be more impressive it was a single shot showing all the moves, rather than a series of short clips edited together.

Also, if the robot moved more than a foot from its starting position (which appears to always be under an overhead crane gantry*)

Boston Dynamics' Dancing Atlas video was a single continuous take with the robots moving freely around the space, which is much more challenging.

*I'm not saying that they've used VFX to paint out a cable support; more likely they've developed the moves using a crane to prevent damage if it loses balance and now they're running the saved sequence without the support.
 
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Because a geo-fence is a restriction on how and where the ADS will work. The definition of L5 says literally "unconditional" performance. Did you not read the parts of SAE that I bolded?



Being geo-fenced to the US or NA is a "geographic restriction".
So you really believe if doesn't work on the entire globe, it is only L4. Awesome.
 
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Regarding how dumb Tesla is for launching a autotaxi that only addresses 90+% of the market, explain to me how dumb:

Chik-fil-a is for not selling pizza (and burgers, tacos, chinese, etc.)
Nike for not selling dress shoes
Laz-e-boy for not making mattresses
etc.

And after you get done with that explain to me that how making a product that would target 90% of the market is dumb, while their main product only targets about 8% of the market (in US where we are talking). They must be absolutely mind-numbingly stupid to only make EVs and not ICE containing. (Go ahead and tell Rivian and Lucid too).
 
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It would be more impressive it was a single shot showing all the moves, rather than a series of short clips edited together.

Also, if the robot moved more than a foot from its starting position (which appears to always be under an overhead crane gantry*)

Boston Dynamics' Dancing Atlas video was a single continuous take with the robots moving freely around the space, which is much more challenging.

*I'm not saying that they've used VFX to paint out a cable support; more likely they've developed the moves using a crane to prevent damage if it loses balance and now they're running the saved sequence without the support.
It would also be more impressive if it were being tele-operated.
 
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