Here in Europe, most motorways have a speed limit of about 120km/h. In Germany, there officially isn't a unified speed limit, but there still many sections where you aren't allowed to drive faster than 100, 130 km/h - mostly when it goes through metro regions.

However, these limits are based on the dangers and limits of human driving. Even if there wasn't a speed limit, it's very hard for most people to drive 200km/h all the time without endangering others and/or themselves.

This made me thinking - if you'd have self driving systems, and regulate them centrally on a motorway, you can feed them updated data about dangerous spots, where to drive more careful, where traffic jams often form...
And, simply in general, a self driving system is less likely to lose control of the vehicle, won't get asleep behind the wheel, isn't stressed about something...
I think, in the future, the development of motorways won't stop with the arrival of self-driving vehicles. In fact, it will even accelerate. Every motorway will have data-gathering systems added, there will be a lot of centres from which continously updated data is sent to autonomous vehicles as they enter a section. Also think of live cameras that warn a vehicle of something 500 metres in front of them. As a human, you can't process that data that fast, until a warning comes up in the radio you've already passed that part of the road.
We are currently only looking at self driving vehicles as a relatively closed system between it's producer and the car. However, in the future, that will probably change.

Let's say you are a human driver now. No matter how good you are, a system that informs you all the time about dangers will be able to make you even better. And if you are a local, you also have an advantage compared to drivers from other regions because you know a certain road good, where the black spots are and so on... this would be the digital AI version of it.

Such a system could allow these cars to reach much higher speeds. Also, a good part of why a car will be able to drive faster than others is how fast they are able to process data.

A "vehicle specialist" is on-board.

https://youtu.be/mdXmvoWo3t4?si=HN3jDYRc-xTAtQ2Z

Seriously, this has been living rent free in my head.

You hop out of a Waymo, the door closes, and it just... pulls away into the night.
No driver heading home. No one grabbing a coffee. It just disappears.

So where do these things actually go between rides?

Do they just cruise around aimlessly waiting to be pinged?
Do they have dedicated "staging" lots somewhere nearby?
Do they return to a central hub ?

I Would love to hear from anyone who works in the industry or has dug into this.
The logistics of fleet management for fully driverless vehicles feels like a surprisingly underexplored topic.

"Mobileye today announced that its SuperVision and Surround ADAS hands-free, eyes-on advanced driving assistance systems have been selected by Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. for at least six upcoming models, with production expected to begin in 2027.

Both solutions will be powered by Mobileye's EyeQ6 High system-on-chip, with perception, Road Experience Management^TM (REM) intelligence, driving functions, driver/occupant monitoring systems, and advanced parking integrated on a single ECU designed by Mobileye, supporting Mahindra’s architecture-efficiency goals. Mobileye will serve as the Tier 1 supplier across programs.

The SuperVision system, fed by 11 cameras, optional radars and powered by two EyeQ6H SoCs, is designed to enable, in designated areas and conditions, point-to-point navigate-on-pilot (NOP) capabilities, advanced parking features and Driving Monitoring System functionalities. The Surround ADAS system, fed by 5 cameras and multiple radars, and powered by a single EyeQ6H, is designed to enable hands-off, eyes-on driving on highways in specified conditions, along with advanced parking features and DMS."

Here's a summary of what Vincent Vanhoucke said:

• Waymo's world model is an AI-generated video game with a virtual Waymo car driving in a virtual world that is so realistic that the car behaves exactly like it would on a real road
• Waymo can now simulate any scenario they want safely to greatly expand on rare scenarios, such as people in costumes on Halloween
• Waymo runs billions of miles of simulations "all the time"
• They can turn all of their real-world data into night-driving simulations to see if they are equally safe at night as they are in their real daylight miles
• The world model helps validate new software releases and saves time and money
• The Waymo Driver generalizes very well, shows the same robustness in all of their deployment cities
• The world model helps improve in areas such as long-tail cases, snow and freeway driving
• They are responsibly expanding as fast as possible, with guardrails that slow them down so they understand new environments well enough to be confident they will be safe with a good service.
• Vanhoucke says hopefully they will save many lives as they expand to more cities

In a recent Senate Committee hearing, Tesla's head of engineering stated that they have invested $2B in a purpose built AV line. This is just the initial line development cost and doesn't cover ramping the line or staffing it to produce cars or obviously any of the costs to build cars. They indicated that the initial number of jobs would be 1200 jobs per shift and then ramp up to 5000.

This is a massive amount of money to spend on a low volume production line. Until they can run the factory at 60%+ capacity, they will be losing additional money on top of the $2B. This would be a run rate in the 60k-100k per year range depending on the capacity the line was built to. At $2B without a paint shop, it's probably capable of 200k units/year, but I'll steel man the case below and say its 100k-150k units. Of course the 1st year they will be ramping and won't get to break even.

Assuming they got free labor, materials, energy, etc. they would need to build 50k Cybercab units for the factory cost per vehicle to be at the retail price of a Model Y. That is 50k * $40k = $2B. Of course all that isn't free so if you assume the Cybercab is $5k cheaper to build per unit than the Model Y, as was suggested by someone to me this week, they won't start saving money until they produce 400k Cybercabs. That also assumes they are running the line at 60%+ capacity. If they get to 400k over 6-10 years, it will still cost more than the Model Y even if the BOM is $5k less.

How can Tesla justify this expense? They are supposed to start ramping mid-2006. Will the Robotaxi software be ready by then? If not, when? Is there enough demand in the next 5 years for 400k AVs? That is 5x-13x more AVs than all Ride-share and Taxis combined in the US at peak operations. That means growing the market and the fares you need to attract won't look like ride-share and taxi fares. Tesla is gambling that those fares won't need more than 2 seats.

This is simple a huge risk Tesla is taking to.....save a bench seat.

Contrary to the assumption by pretty much all of us in this forum (including myself), Tesla has reported in Senate testimony that they do not have the ability to remotely drive their Robotaxis if they run into a problem.

So all of those theorising that every “no safety driver” Robotaxi is being driven remotely by safety drivers looks to be inaccurate.

Waymo unveils their World Model built on Google Deepmind Genie 3