Tesla FSD Unsupervised is Already Being Used By Employees

10 thoughts on “Tesla FSD Unsupervised is Already Being Used By Employees”

1. There will clearly be a commercial market for unsupervised FSD. But I’m not convinced that the majority of individual car owners will pay for it. For instance how can individuals make a profit on robo-taxis when they will be competing with fleet owners?

   • Yes, the claim that you will be able to make money with FSD is a myth. Big fleet owners will make money because they will be able to cut on drivers, but they will still employ cleaners and mechanics (and the proper type of insurance). The private owner (single car or small-scale fleet) will not be able to make any money out of it, and will have all the issues of customer-facing passenger service (increased vehicle depreciation, wear and tear of the interiors, cleaning, requiring perfect maintenance (otherwise, insurance companies might litigate and delay on everything in case of problems).

     • 2024 TURO Tesla vehicle Reported Earnings

       One Tesla owner reported making $4,475 over a 7-month period with 5 Tesla vehicles, averaging about $639 per month across all vehicles

       Another Turo host estimated that a single Tesla Cybertruck could generate between $4,000 to $7,000 per month

       A different Tesla owner reported earning $151 for a single day rental of their Model 3, with a net profit of $71.10 after expenses.

       • Hi Brian, thank you for your reply, but I am unsure of its relevance.
         TURO is a peer-to-peer car rental service valid for any car type. The customer drives the car. It is not specific to self-driving and does not operate in a space where self-driving exists.
         If/when FSD (or other automatic driving systems) will become mainstream, I assume a few things will happen (so here I am the one making predictions, and you will have all the right to complain/shame me if they are wrong 😉 ):
         1) There will be significant investments from taxi/cab companies and public transport companies as they can purchase cars in bulk, reducing the cost of each car+automatic driving software + relevant insurance (I specifically mentioned insurance in my first comment because it is particularly relevant, and I find interesting that you replied mentioning Turo as it was prevented from operating in NY state manly for insurance reasons).
         2) Cabs are built for wear and tear, and even when standard cars are used as taxis/cabs, you see some models way more than others because they are better for that job. Unless you are in the luxury car rental business, you want something sturdy and easy to clean. This is not necessarily your choice for your private car (where you might choose more bells and whistles and more comfortable but less sturdy interiors). This long, meandering paragraph is just to say that cars used for passenger service will experience MORE wear and tear (and therefore MORE DEPRECIATION) than normal, especially if they are not models planned for such use in mind. Commercial taxi companies and public transport companies will order cars optimized for the service; therefore, they will have a second cost advantage compared to typical private owners. (I think it is not a coincidence that the TURO 75 insurance plan, the one that leaves 75% of the trip price to the car owner, does not cover some forms of wear and tear, and if you want that protection, you need to accept the 60% plan, so a 20% cut on your revenues)
         3) If point-to-point automatic driving becomes commonplace, most people gravitating around urban areas will not purchase new cars (this has already happened in the past when the coach service (the horse-pulled ones) gained traction in big cities like London and Paris: most upper middle class and even some aristocrats stopped having their horses and stables in the city (they still maintained them in their countryside mansions and villas). In many cities in Europe, the trend is to improve public transport and reduce private car ownership, I think automatic car service will move more people away from private car ownership in urban areas.
         4) Nonurban areas will likely be less attractive to big car rental companies (unless such companies are nationwide, and then they might be forced to grant coverage of rural areas as part of their business licenses like phone companies do), so you will probably still own a car there, but, if private ownership declines, the global car sales might go down (that depends also on the rate of turnover of the automatic cars), making each individual car more expensive. In that case, the individual customer might end up paying more for their car, and they might not be interested in renting it, and might not find much demand for it (because the vast majority of the people in rural areas might still own a car).
         5) In the case that automated cars for commercial service have high turnover (provided that the business remains profitable), they will become a more and more relevant percentage of the produced cars. Suppose extra tech/sensors are introduced as standard in these cars (because it reduces the insurance costs of a fleet owner). In that case, each individual car might become more expensive, and that might further reduce private ownership from individual customers.

         I know that you will probably not agree with some/many/all of the points above, but I do not think they are particularly unrealistic or unreasonable, and in general, in every industry sector, we see the bigger player leveraging their scale to reduce the profitability of the smaller ones.

         Regards,
         AAA

         • There is minimal taxi integration with Uber. Yellow cab and some other have deals to access the Uber network but taxi usage in Uber is rare. Less than 1%.

           Out of 2 billion cars in the world about 20 million taxi, 8 million Uber/Lyft and 15 million Didi.

           Companies operating and managing airbnb out of 8 million. Large companies seem to be less than 4% total of Airbnb. Hotels did not transition to Airbnb.
           Vacasa: A large full-service vacation rental management company in North America that was founded in 2009 (44000)
           Onefinestay: A top vacation rental site that manages 5,000 upscale properties in popular vacation spots across Europe
           RedAwning: about 1000 properties
           Evolve, AvantStay, Rabbu, SkyRun, Casago, and Belo.

     • My guess is it will a partnership deal with Tesla. Tesla will keep maybe 1/3 of the revenue, but will provide a blanket type insurance plan that covers the car during robotaxi use. With all the sensors, cameras and computers that will be very easy to track. Tesla may provide automatic cleaning systems at supercharger locations so the car can go charge and clean, and again be part of Tesla’s cut.

       • Self-driving service provider, car manufacturer AND insurer are three distinct roles with significant conflicts of interest and should not be held by the same entity: if either the hardware or the software fail, the manifacturer/software provider/insurer has all interest to reject liability and blame it on the user, who will not be able to prove that the system was according to spec (as the diagnostics are done by the manufacturer/service provider side).

     • Plenty of people in the world, everyone will get a cut. Stop being slow.

2. Interesting, my comment about private corporations, monitoring private individuals was not posted.

   • “Big Brother” is NOT our government (unless you want to do something seriously wacko), it’s corporation’s that crawl up your information a**…

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