Driverless cars still 5 years away – again. The Tesla version costs $130K and is geo-fenced to a 25 square mile grid.

Photo above – this is NOT the 2026 Tesla robotaxi. It’s an autonomous car from HBO’s WestWorld TV series, 5 years ago. The actual Tesla robotaxi looks like a base Model Y and costs $150,000. Robo taxis are not yet permitted to use the interstate.

Intel shares were up 14% yesterday alone. Somebody – a lot of people - are convinced that AI is going to drive profits to the moon, at the same time if throws millions of people out of work.

Tesla shares are down 5% YTD. Their price-earnings ratio is a mind-blowing 400. Each share costs 400X what the earnings per share are. The historic average for the stock market is a 20-25 PE. So Tesla is testing the limits of investment lunacy.

Telsa is also telling anyone who will listen that there is a consumer market for its $150,000 driverless robotaxi. This thing costs as much as a Maserati or Porsche but looks like a Chevy equinox. Still, you can’t rule it out, even though a KIA Ev starts at 1/3rd the price and is far snazzier. And Chinese EVs with stolen self-driving tech are knocking on the door (see link below)

The reason Tesla and Waymo self driving taxis are penned inside specific city blocks is that those blocks have been ultra mapped in ways normal roads cannot be, with low speed limits. This is why Telsa has stopped advertising the “full self-driving” feature on its retail cars. They are not only NOT self-driving, FSD Tesla Model Y's struggle to exit a parking lot competently.

There certainly IS a market for full self-driving cars. But it probably doesn’t start at $150,000 base, before options. Old people will want self-driving cars, to remain independent as their vision and coordination deteriorate. Drunks with DUI suspended licenses. Probably busy executives will buy them too, until they realize that self-driving vehicles – for insurance and liability reasons – will NEVER exceed the speed limit by even 1mph, will always to come a full stop at every vacant intersection, and yield to everything else when a merge is imminent. Add 50% to your commute time, big shot.

If you need any other reasons to be skeptical that AI is about to liberate us from the tyranny of competent humans, just consider the closed captions on any TV broadcast. I was watching a show about archaeology last night. The caption “toot tank amen” came up when the narrator spoke the phrase “Tutankhamun's mummy”. This wasn’t the only gaffe, merely the most hilarious. No wonder software developers have to examine and revise every line of code concocted by AI. It now takes twice as long to debug code which AI has written.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Who will drive the driverless car revolution?

https://archive.is/1DJGu