Essay by Eric Worrall
Buy Electric, lose your job?
CEO steps down after being hit with expensive EV repairs and low resale prices following purchase of 100,000 Teslas
BY ERIK SCHATZKER, DAVID WELCH, SRIDHAR NATARAJAN AND BLOOMBERG
March 16, 2024 at 10:06 AM GMT+10Hertz Global Holdings Inc. is replacing its chief executive officer in the wake of a disastrous bet on electric vehicles that the company began unwinding in recent months.
Stephen Scherr, who ran Hertz for just over two years after three decades at Goldman SachsGroup Inc., has decided to step down, the rental-car company said late Friday in a statement. It’s replacing him with Gil West, the former chief operating officer of General Motors Co.’s Cruise robotaxi unit. West also will join the board of directors on April 1, according to the statement, which confirmed an earlier Bloomberg report.
Scherr, 59, joined Hertz several months after it emerged from bankruptcy and started making splashy wagers on electric vehicles. Under new owners Knighthead Capital Management and Certares Management, the rental company announced plans to order 100,000 vehicles from TeslaInc., sending the automaker’s market capitalization soaring past the $1 trillion mark at the time.
…
Those bets went awry last year, when Tesla slashed prices across its lineup to keep growing vehicle sales. This hammered the resale value of used Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers just after Hertz had added tens of thousands of those vehicles to its fleet.
By December, Hertz started selling off 20,000 electric vehicles, or about a third of its EV fleet. Germany’s Sixt SE — a leading car-renter in Europe — is taking even more drastic measures, phasing Teslas out of its fleet entirely.
…
Read more: https://fortune.com/2024/03/15/ceo-steps-down-prices-following-purchase-teslas/
WUWT ran a story in January this year, in which we predicted Hertz’s impairment cost for selling used EVs would likely be a lot worse than the $12,250 loss per vehicle they allowed for. Who in their right mind would want a used EV? Especially a used rental EV, which has suffered who knows what abuse?
Remember, any bump, knock or production fault can potentially turn an EV battery pack into a ticking time bomb, capable of napalming any house structure it is unlucky enough to be parked in, that is if it doesn’t BBQ the occupants of the vehicle while on the road.
I guess we’ll know for sure exactly how much Hertz lost on their disastrous EV gamble, when their final EV fire sale numbers are published.
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I’m sure he has a golden parachute. He won’t be hurting.
It’s probably worth a few million to the shareholders to get rid of him. But can you imagine getting paid a bonus for getting fired?
Yeah. Stephen Scherr will move on to a new CEO position with another company that wants his connections and he wont lose out, these people never do.
“I guess we’ll know for sure exactly how much Hertz lost on their disastrous EV gamble, when their final EV fire sale numbers are published”
Fire sale!
I see what you did there.
Hertz has over 400,000 vehicles
They are typically sold after a year or two
The sale of 20,000 EVs in 2024. no matter how large the annual depreciation charge for them, will most likely be hidden by the depreciation charges for 100,000 to 200,000 Hertz ICE used car sales in 2024
It seems unlikely that leasing half their EVs to Uber and other ride hailing companies for 2 to 3 years lost money for Hertz.
The sold and aren’t buying new ones.
That’s only if Hertz can actually sell them – used EV sales have fallen way down and people just aren’t buying them. Do you have any evidence that they have actually sold them on?
If the Hertz CEO had sense he would not have announced 20,000 EV sales, Used car sales are a normal business practice as their 400,000 vehicles are turned over every two years or less. The EVs were 2 to 3 years old with very high mileage. Ready for sale with no publicity needed..
Hertz should not have announced high EV repair costs before the sale. Who does that?
I’m sure the EVs will be sold at low prices because they are all high mileage EVs not in much demand.
Just like new EVs. Not in much demand.
I live in Manassas, Virginia, about 30 miles south of Washington DC. Three years ago, Teslas were an unusual sight around here. I’d spot one maybe every three trips to the grocery store. Starting a year and a half ago, they started appearing more frequently, and the gain was steady. Today I can’t drive more than 20 minutes without seeing a score of them, at least. I don’t know what is driving the demand, though DC virtue signalling compared with the high pay government employees (GS 14 and up) enjoy make it a fertile environment.
That is one area where we don’t agree. You think Hertz can still sell the cars at a low price and I don’t think they’ll sell for much more than scrap value – I think the losses will be bigger when the cars fail to sell. Incidentally, Hertz don’t plan on buying more EV’s, they announced they will replace them with ICE vehicles with much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the greenies!
Hertz is still spamming YouTube with ads for their Tesla rentals.
There are horror stories of customers getting stuck with Teslas and bad things happened.
Hertz still have some with the car share fleet and a few in the rental fleet but I don’t think the ones they put up for sale will actually sell at anything more than scrap value. Does anyone know if they’ve even managed to sell one of them?
Hate to bomb this discussion, but does anybody know what is going on with UK wind yesterday and today? This chart comes from gridwatch.co.uk.
It appears wind was great until until 16:30 and by 16:40 had nearly stopped.
Check a few weather stations and find reports of average wind speed half-hour before and after 16:35. Ccgt ramped-up as wind failed.
One can see similar rapid changes in the Oregon/Washington region every week;
BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER
Combined Cycle Gas Turbine ( Ccgt ) ramped-up as wind failed.
Yikes. I went to Ventusky. It shows the collapse of windpower throughout the UK on March 19th between noon and 3 pm, EST, which, when you add four hours, is the same time as the chart shows windpower collapsing.
If this sort of experience doesn’t affect people’s opinion about windpower, nothing will.
for many, NOTHING will.
Could it be a contractural purchasing issue rather than a physical supply issue?
Wiser folks have more insight than people like me.
They point out that like the CEO is not going to suffer much. He will be rich for the rest of his life.
They say he came from Goldman Sachs. They are scum financial wizards. It would come as no surprise that somebody in GS was shorting Hertz as this ill advised strategy was being considered.
It would be fun to find out what if any communications occurred between the CEO and his buddies back at GS.
The elite in our society play us like violins.
New strings, please.
There are plenty of charging stations at Sears. Oh wait.
Schadenfreude.
Epicaricacy.
Faith conquers all – until you lose your job.
Punished for following divine teaching? Or just being caught out?
From the article: “Who in their right mind would want a used EV? Especially a used rental EV, which has suffered who knows what abuse?”
Yes, that would be my question, too.
many people are quite ignorant of all the downsides.
The collapse of the used EV market would seem to indicate that many are not so ignorant as you assume.
Additional question: Who would want a new EV that will quickly depreciate to a used value not significantly greater than zero?!
Depends what the scrap value of a Tesla is in the US? It won’t be quite as low as zero.
Remember, any bump, knock or production fault can potentially turn an EV battery pack into a ticking time bomb, capable of napalming any house structure it is unlucky enough to be parked in, that is if it doesn’t BBQ the occupants of the vehicle while on the road.
What a drastic choice of words… 😀 – but a non unrealistic possibility.
Yeah, the occupants usually escape before the BBQ proper begins.
Few cars drown billionaires, but notch at least one up to a Tesla.
Can you blame Tesla for someone not knowing which gear is forward and which is reverse? If it’s a design flaw, wouldn’t there be more coverage on that topic before now?
I may be mistaken, but there have been multiple cases of deaths, via fire or drowning, because car doors could not be opened. Probably can’t blame Tesla for poor vehicle operation but being unable to exit one’s car in any situation is a defect.
As it turns out, batteries that are on fire or soaked under water DO NOT provide reliable power to electrical devices. When your design depends on that battery for power to exit, you are out of luck. Doubtful that was disclosed at the time of sale.
Sounds like explosive bolts are needed on Tesla car doors. They put them on space capsule doors, so it’s not like it’s a secret.
There’s supposed to be a panel on each door, that when you remove it, you can access the manual door release. The owner’s manual will give details.
Quick! The batteries caught fire or your vehicle plunged into the water!
Have the presence of mind during the inferno, or while the frigid dark water is deepening and the car is turning over while passengers are hysterically screaming, to recall that a commenter on a blog mentioned that details on how to pull apart the interior fascia is available if you can thumb through the owner’s manual that is locked in the glovebox that can’t be opened because the power has failed.
Not to many people are Left of Bang to look up and practice emergency exit procedures in an electric car.
And very few read the manual under any conditions.
Or hire Boeing door makers .
(For those who are unfamiliar with the reference, this is in regard to the death of Angela Chow, who backed her Tesla into a pond and drowned. https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/death-angela-chao-sister-law-mitch-mcconnell-criminal-investigation-reports)
You won’t be able to open any car door when the vehicle is submerged in water. The pressure needs to be equal, or nearly equal. You have to wait for the interior to be filled with water, in other words. This is not the best strategy.
You should be able to use the electric windows, however, at least for a few minutes after your vehicle is submerged.
Apparently she was able to make a couple of calls from her cellphone before her drowning.
AutoZone or the like sells car escape tools — one-piece unit can cut through seatbelts and a hardened point to break glass.
But their girlfriends?
Had they taken 200 EVs and placed 50 in each of four cities with “assumed” good prospects for use, example Las Vegas, they would have learned the idea was a looser – the Lead-Balloon concept.
Those infected with the “green virus” have brain issues. This man’s next gig will show whether or not he has been cured.
Given the politics of the Biden regime, Hertz’s EV bet seemed sound to many people. But so did GM’s and Ford’s EV bets.
These people live in a bubble.
“Ready Fire AIM” was a popular slogan in the ‘80s & ‘90s.
“loser”
Hertz get it badly wrong as Shell sees the true light and the way-
Electric Vehicles Take the Lead: Shell Shifts Focus from Gas to Charging Stations (msn.com)
(it makes a great headline until you read the fine print)
I rent from Avis all the time. They can’t give EV’s away. I see them sitting all over their lots. The try to rent them at low rates as a “mystery car,” and also try to “upgrade” me to them with almost every rental.
Who thinks anything about an EV makes sense as a rental car? Epically when they send them out at only 70% charge and will charge you if you don’t return it at at least 70%.
Unlike a normal gasoline powered rental, where they make bank on selling you gas that takes them 5 minutes to top of and sent back out on a new rental. If you bring your EV rental back with an empty charge, even if they have the facilities on hand, its hours before it could be turned around an rented again, and in states like CA where peak time power is very expensive, it could get really bad.
I can just see some greenie having to wait for their EV because it came back with no charge, and now their late for a meeting, boo hoo.
Yeah no quick dive into the gas station as you rush to return your rental. With a worse-than-useless EV, you have to set aside an hour, and that assumes (a) you can find a charging station near the rental place; and (b) that you’re first in line at the charger.
Oh, and (c) the charger is working. You can’t take that for granted, unlike you can with gas pumps.
Have no idea why the rental people don’t have charging stations at their rental facilities and charge the car when you bring it back for a nominal fee. It might not be a big money maker, and it might even lose some money, but it would encourage use of their EV’s as rentals.
I really think America has become a dumb nation. At least the people who are in positions of authority seem really stupid. They are detached from reality. I suspect this means people firmly grounded in reality cannot raise to positions of authority in America anymore. Makes sense.
Almost any airport rental lot WILL NOT have much access to BIG MWH electrical service. I mean they are always just LITTLE buildings and parking lot lighting and not much else, and usually remote from the airport.
SO the cost of running the upgraded infrastructure to the parking lot, installing the chargers, purchasing the power from the electrical utility AND decreasing the total number of cars that you can keep due to needing to use parking spaces for charging would be a Lose/lose for the rental car company.
So does this give you some clarity?
Why do that when they can OVERCHARGE you when you bring your worse-than-useless EV rental back with less “charge” than your rental agreement requires?
It’s a “profit center” for rental companies to take advantage of suckers who rent EVs.
This just demonstrates despite some hotshot with supposed financial credentials fails to get an assessment from competent people who probably could have advised Hertz CEO this was not a worthy investment. As they say, “Go woke, Go broke.” An EV is nothing more than a glorified golf cart useful for around town for the well to-do who don’t think twice about dropping over $65,000 for the appearance to show-off their virtue. I would have no part of an EV. A crummy return on investment given all the limitation’s. I have a 2006 Sienna with 307,000 miles. Outside of routine maintenance and parts replacement, still going strong. I wonder how many batteries 307,000 miles would require had this been a EV?
I wonder more about how many HOURS that vehicle would have had to spend “charging” to rack up those miles…
Bentley reconsiders going all EV. Not exactly a volume brand but they are apparently waking up.
Huh? Imagine that! There actually can be a real downside to virtue signaling with regards “climate change™”.
Caveat emptor.
go woke go broke
I’ve recently stayed at a few hotels with EV charging stations. How does this work, when the hotel has 2 charging stations but multiple guests who need to charge an EV? There’s no attendant to swap out a charged vehicle for one that needs charging. I’m sure the guests don’t get up in the middle of the night to move their car so the next guest can charge their EV.
First come, first served.
With EVs it’s actually first come, ONLY one served.
Why any car rental agency would think EVs are a good choice for their customers is beyond me. Who wants to learn about where/how to charge a car just for temporary use and take the chance of being dead in the water?
Well to be fair there was a big fanfare that Tesla in particular was finally flogging plenty of cars and earning a quid. In that respect there’d likely be demand to hire a Tesla by those needing a hire car to suck one and see as they’re the most likely new car buyers going forward. No doubt Tesla were thinking along those lines with a cosy deal with Hertz until the EV market tanked (along with the car market in general) Nevertheless Hertz should have been more cautious pioneering new tech and business framework jumping off the deep end.
The upshot is there’ll never be an economic case for the vast majority of public chargers as the marketplace has now discovered and nobody wants to pay anywhere near ICE car residuals with battery degradation/failure risk so most will be junker value out of battery warranty. Any economic analysis of car running costs shows depreciation is the biggest line item in cents per km and Hertz just broadcast it again loud and clear for prospective new car buyers. Why Toyota are laughing all the way to the bank with their proven hybrid tech and order books. (10 months dealer estimate wait for the missus Corolla Cross when I can get a BYD Atto3 right now and we have offstreet parking and charging capability for any second car shopping trolley)
“take the chance of being dead in the water?” Only if you can’t get out of reverse gear.
Or open the windows. Or doors.
If you think about it, rental cars are a terrible use case for electric cars.
One use case works – a business trip where you drive from airport to hotel to work to dinner to hotel to work to airport and its way less than the range. But if it’s cold or the battery doesn’t have full range anymore, or you decide on a restaurant further away even this can get scary. And if your stay is extended, now you have to figure out where to charge it.
I sort of disagree. For most of my business trips, an electric rental car would have worked very nicely, provided that I didn’t have to recharge the battery before returning the car. Coldest place that I’ve been on a business trip in the last decade was Reno, so very cold weather driving has not been an issue.
A business trip to a northern Plains state in the middle of winter would be a whole ‘nother story.
“For most of my business trips…” So you are at a meeting with your best/only client and they invite you to a dinner honoring your company for making the most positive contribution to their bottom line at a cool restaurant ‘just a little bit out of town’.
BIG proviso, considering the “standard” on rentals is you return it with as much gas, or “charge” as it had when you took it.
So unless you like paying an exorbitant rate for THAT, you WILL need to charge it before returning, which compared with a small topping up of a gas tank will be HUGELY inconvenient.
You have to charge it anyway, or get hit with a big fee for returning it with less “charge” than you got it with.
The future that won’t happen.
Now for the truth about Hertz rather than conservative lies from anti-EV zealots who will believe anything they are told that makes EVs look bad. EVs are bad news versus ICE and hybrids but there is no reason to lie about them to make them look worse.
The suckers who waste money on EVs will eventually run out, just not yet.
Ford BEV sales in February 2024 were up +80% from February 2023.
Global BEV and PHEV sales combined, in January 2024, were up either +63% or +68% from January 2023, depending on which source you believe
Hertz bought about 50,000 EVs, not 100,000
Half were used by Uber and other ride hailing services on long term leases
When the leases ended these Tesla EVs were 2 to 3 years old, with about 30,000 miles a year.
They were older and with more mileage than used ICE vehicles that Hertz sells to the public
Noting the low resale value for EVs, partly because of Tesla price reductions, someone at Hertz, maybe the CEO, decided to keep the used Tesla EVs and distribute them to nationwide Hertz retail locations
Hertz did not offer the old EVs at bargain prices and charged $35 to recharge them. Another $25 charge if an EV was brought back under 10% charged
People out of town on business or a vacation rarely want to rent EVs. Hertz already had enough EVs in their fleet without adding the old Uber EVs. And Hertz knew EV repair costs were high, or so they claimed (perhaps just a fake excuse for selling them and not buying more?).
The experiment to rent the old off-lease EVs failed, and Hertz decided to sell 20,000 of them . which they should have done in the first place
The Hertz CEO had announced in late 2021 that Hertz would buy 100,000 Teslas with no knowledge of whether or not his customers wanted that many
Hertz eventually bought about 50,000 Teslas and currently has about 35,000 in service.
The foolish promise to buy 100,000 Teslas ended up making Hertz look very bad,
How many vehicles does Hertz have?
Hertz’s fleet in the Americas peaked at 428,700 vehicles for the year ended Dec. 31, 2022, of which 11% were Tesla cars, the filing showed. The company had an additional 1,187 Teslas in its international fleet.
So you’re saying the truth is worse than the fiction?
The sale of 20,000 older high mileage EVs starting in late 2023 was a public relations disaster, but not something unusual for the rental car business.
Hertz did not buy 100000 EVs to rent to retail customers, and then was forced to sell most of them because no one wanted them.
hertz bought most of about 50,000 EVs for long term wholesale leases and then would normally sell them after the leases ended.
The only story is the CEO announced 100,000 EV purchases in late 2021 — which leftists and Tesla celebrated — but that never happened.
Hertz retail customers rarely want EVs. That was true in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Nothing changed.
The CEO has been changed.
Any evidence that doesn’t support the position that RG has decided to take, doesn’t matter.
I’m glad you’re here to tell us the truth.
Thank you for the complement
Richard, will you please drop me an email?
https://sealevel.info/contact.html
Richard, will you please drop me an email?
https://sealevel.info/contact.html
This post was based on a Bloomberg article. Is Bloomberg a conservative outlet full of anti-EV zealots?
I never read Bloomberg articles and have no idea what they claim.
The claim that Hertz purchased 100,000 EVs is false
The claim that no one wanted Hertz EVs is false. The fact that the Uber rentals / leases had very high mileage is evidence the Hertz EVs had a lot of use.
The only true fact is a CEO announced 100,000 Tesla purchases in late 2021 and later changed his mind.
The reasons might have been high prices, high repair costs and fast depreciation. The high prices were known in 2021. The other factors may have made profits less than expected.
You started this post denigrating people who “lied” about electric vehicles, then proceeded to illustrate how EVs and Hertz didn’t fare very well. What is your point? Richard, I believe you just like being contentious.
With Richard, it really depends on which of his multiple personalities is posting on any given day. Often the personality changes in the MIDDLE of the post, so there is that also.
He CAN liven up discussions and often does bring some new information, but primarily, I am sorry to say, I agree with the sentiment in your last sentence.
An insult post unrelated to the article with no attempt to refute even one sentence in any of my comments. The mark of an angry old man.
Hertz made profits with 50,000 EVs
Maybe lower profits than expected because of higher repair costs and faster depreciation than expected.
I believe you just like insulting, which does not refute even one sentence in my comment.
This is 2024.
Uber has a deal with Hertz so that Uber drivers could rent Tesla EVs by the week or lease them.
Or a Toyota Prius hybrid.
They can drive up to 1000 miles a week and EVs were cheaper to “fuel” than ICE cars for their job.
Hybrids saved money versus ICEs and were more convenient that EVs.
There was no news on whether Uber driver demand for EVs has changed.
The news was reported, obviously you didn’t look hard enough Richard, Hertz are still leasing some EV’s to the car share/Uber market but nowhere near as many as before. The demand for the EV’s hasn’t changed but the insurance companies writing off 500% more EV’s means that Hertz will allow only the drivers with a proven safe history near them. Hertz had a lot of their initial buy of EV’s lost after small collisions and span it as ‘high maintenance costs’.
There is a long history of middle-aged “leaders” going along with a stupid, reckless and/or sometimes deeply harmful plan because it’s in the zeitgeist.
Just following orders. In this case, not as many orders in the end as he would have liked.
I’m sure he knew better. But when you wave that management salary in the face of one of these creatures, they’re all smiles and no conscience.
So my question is, why has not the ENTIRE BOARD resigned. They hired this @ssh@tt, and went along with his plan. They ALL should get the boot.
Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr became the Hertz CEO on February 28, 2022
HTZ closing price that day was $19.21
HTZ closing price yesterday was $7.20
It seems logical that an over 60% decline of the HTZ stock price was one cause of his ouster.
The decline in stock price was due to HIS actions. SO his actions were the cause of his ouster.
Come on Richard, you are WAY smarter than this comment indicates. Unless, of course, it is your 13 YO personality that posted that comment.
HTZ
$34.39 on 11/1/.2021
The Hertz stock price declined from $34.38 to $19.21 before CEO Scherr got his job.
The stock price decline started BEFORE CEO Scherr got the job and continued after he got the job.
Are you allergic to facts?
Meanwhile in the alternate reality that is Planet UK, the NHS, the British nationalized health service, is replacing its diesel ambulances with electric ones.
The diesel ones typically cover a couple hundred or more miles a day, and spend quite some time waiting with engine running to power the systems, with patients in them while a bed is cleared in emergency for them to be transferred to. These are quite long waits. They’ll have a range of several hundred miles on a tank and would take 10 minutes to refuel.
So the health service (and this is across England at least, not sure if its also Wales and Scotland) plans to replace these with ambulances which will have a range of 85 miles, and take hours to refuel.
At least, it will now, while there is still a working substantially gas fuelled power network to charge them. When the Labour Party gets in this autumn and tries to take the country to net zero in power generation by 2030, which means wind at these latitudes, forget it, they won’t be able to refuel at all. Find someone with an ICE car and have them drive you to hospital, its the only way you’ll get there. And hope the lights are running on diesel backup when you do.
There is already a crisis in ambulance services in the UK, with people waiting hours for one, sometimes dying while they wait. And this is the health service reaction to that?
They are also changing various medications to less effective ones. Why? Because the less effective ones have less carbon emissions, and this is supposed to contribute to the NHS plan to get to net zero.
Meanwhile, the service does not only have a crisis in ambulance services, it has a crisis in basic care too. It has a waiting list of over 8 million people which shows no sign of coming down, but all its managers seem to care about is climate change gestures and trying to pretend that biological sex is not a thing.
The country has gone mad. Along with most of the rest of the English speaking world. Because mad as this is in terms of the functioning of the service and what its goals ought to be, even if the UK as a whole makes its mad net zero objectives the effect on global emissions or the climate will be zero.
Full self driving will be a game changer, especially for rentals and uber. Hertz may have moved a bit early but it’s not far off now with Tesla’s.
Self drive will be a massive game changer, but will they be EV also, on current tech no.
Remains to be seen. Tesla’s move to full stack AI with version 12 has been amazing.
Having worked on autonomous navigation systems, I can tell you that self-driving cars are not going to do what has been promised.
First, they assume GPS will always be there. GPS has some difficulty with clouds (optical depth penetration diminishes the signal). Rain and snow are much worse. Ask anyone with a satellite TV.
Wind, icy roads, and the ever growing list of challenges.
While it is easy to implement collision avoidance, it is not so easy keeping your car it its lane for all types of road surfaces.
Driver assisted, sure, but the technology still is not there for self-driving cars. Yet.
I still don’t know why they haven’t tried self-driving trains yet – surely the technology would be a bit less complicated?
The London Docklands Light Railway has been selfdriving for decades without any problems.
For navigation perhaps, but not for “full self driving”.
It’s not far off now with Tesla’s.
I assume you mean self-driving cars aren’t far off and Tesla is in position to be a leader?
I’ve heard that self-driving cars are imminent for at least a dozen years. I suppose each year, it does get a little closer. I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of it happening this year or next.
This post isn’t about autonomous cars, btw. It’s about Hertz’s foolish gamble on the demand for EVs.
Do yourself a favour and look up Tesla 12.3 drives on YouTube. There are an increasing number of drivers with access to it and they’re showing it off.
If you haven’t seen what the latest releases are capable of (and particularly V12 releases) then prepare to be shocked.
The value of Tesla is pretty much entirely from their full self driving tech, not the fact they’re EVs. Being an EV is a hindrance today.
Hertz bought about 50,000 EVs and rented or leased them. How is that a foolish gamble?
Say the wrong thing online and the self driving car can whisk you off to the MAID center.
No thanks.
They will never be able to “train” a car to understand every traffic situation, and all those fancy sensors can never get clues from other drivers.
When I taught my daughters to drive, I made sure they learned to look at the other drivers EYES at intersections and when they had turn signals on. Just because they signaled they were turning didn’t mean they WERE turning.
It really helped them to avoid accidents from inattentive drivers.
Can AI see that well?
I dunno. I was trained to look at the front tires. If they never stop they are going to pull out in front of you. If they start up then they didn’t see you coming. Served me pretty well during 50 years of riding motorcycles on the street.
Tesla’s AI is trained on the whole scene so it’ll see car (front tire) movement and it’ll see driver eyes assuming they’re visible to the camera. It’ll also see a myriad other tells that we humans can at best “feel”.
And AI doesn’t take a break or be looking in the other direction. AI driving will be statistically much better than we are even if it doesn’t account for every single situation it comes across, perfectly on the day it becomes driverless.
Will AI be able to honk the horn to wake the driver ahead of you to the fact the light is now green? Or will it just sit there holding up all the traffic behind it?
Will AI be able to pull the car over in traffic so that help can be offered to a driver/pedestrian/whatever that is in distress? Or will it just drive by?
Will the AI be able to call the police about a drunk driver that has run a stop light/ is weaving down the road/hit a parked car? Or will it just blissfully go on down the road?
Will the AI be able to choose the best course of action when a deer jumps unexpectedly into the road? Will it hit the deer, will it drive into the ditch, a combination of both? What if it is a child instead of a deer.
What will the AI do if it is the second car arriving at a 4-way stop? Will it wait forever for the other car to go? Or will it eventually time out and go ahead, thus risking a collision if the other car starts ahead at the same time? Can the AI wave to the other driver to go ahead first?
“Statistics” simply aren’t an answer to the unique situations which are encountered during life. Judgement – *human* judgement – simply won’t be replaced by AI any time in the near future, perhaps not even in the far future.
Why dont you watch videos and see for yourself.
What if its some variation on the trolley problem? What would you do? What’s the right thing to do, anyway?
They’re all hypothetical situations that are largely irrelevant to the vast majority of driving.
AI driving cars will do what they’ve been trained to do but at the end of the day the people in the car still have control in the sense they can stop the car and do whatever they feel is necessary.
But I ask you this, if you could make the decision to have the road toll decrease by 90% but take driving out of the hands of humans, would you make that decision?
“What if its some variation on the trolley problem? What would you do? What’s the right thing to do, anyway?”
That’s the issue! Do you trust an AI to decide the right thing?
“They’re all hypothetical situations that are largely irrelevant to the vast majority of driving.”
They are *all* situations that both myself and my wife have encountered, not just once, but several times. They are *not* routine. We have both had interactions with deer, MULTIPLE times. Encountering inattentive drivers at stop lights is not uncommon. Same with 4-way stops.
The correct thing to do is not typically able to be resolved by following a flow chart.
It doesn’t go unnoticed that you didn’t address any situation involving interaction between humans, such as waving someone to go first at an intersection.
How long will humans remain “in control” of the vehicle after depending on the “self-driving” AI for an extended period? There is such a thing as “attention span” for most people. Not being required to be attentive on a continuous basis eventually leads to inattention and inattention leads to not being “in control”.
“But I ask you this, if you could make the decision to have the road toll decrease by 90% but take driving out of the hands of humans, would you make that decision?”
I’d rather pay the toll and remain in control than give up control of the vehicle and depend on someone else’s ability to program and train an AI to handle all possible situations that could be encountered.
I ask you this: would you put an AI in control of a nuclear plant operating position? Or would you keep that in the hands of a human?
I answered in two ways. They’re trained with real life driving experience and you can watch videos to see for yourself.
But they avoid deer and if a human would continue when waved through then that’s what the AI will do. I’ve seen video examples of both.
That’s not how it works at all.
And that’s not how it works either. The Tesla AI is trained with examples not programmed to do actions for each set of circumstances.
The fact you would prefer to have 10x more people die when going from A to B just so they can be directly responsible seems irrational to me.
Specifically for this question, nuclear power plant operation is already highly electronically automated/controlled. Exactly what aspect are you suggesting might be AI controlled to our detriment?
You certainly have a lot more faith in AI than I do.
Exactly what aspect are you suggesting might be AI controlled to our detriment?
Given your faith in AI, what do you think should NOT be AI controlled and why?
AI can potentially be used pretty much anywhere but why would you use it when a much simpler and cheaper control works just as well?
That’s not much of an answer.
Let me rephrase, to better clarify what I am interested in knowing – where would you not TRUST it to be used, and why?
Linear control systems are best used to control linear systems so if you needed a known and precisely calculated response to an input, then you will be better off not using AI.
But many systems are not linear and driving is one of them.
Tesla’s version 12 software is exclusively trained on driver experience so “traffic situations” is all they’ve got.
All Tesla’s sample their driving data and Tesla, the company, can request the cars send that back for training.
To put that in perspective, there have been 5M Teslas sold to date. If you assume 4M are on the road for an average of an hour per day and you assume a driver also drives an average of an hour a day for 60 years then that means an average driver experiences 60 x 365 x 1 = 21,900 hours worth of driving over their driving life.
And that means Tesla has access to about 4M / 21,900 = 182 driver lifetimes of experience from their cars every single day.
The amount of driver experience Tesla has access to, to train with is difficult to comprehend.
Nope! I LIKE driving.
So do I. I expect there are people from 100 years ago who would have said “Nope! I LIKE Riding”. Its a mindset we have that future generations wont even understand.