I have been reading (and loving) Slashdot for so long, I cannot remember. (When was it founded?) And other than The Register (whose previous editor I knew), Slashdot has remained outside the dumb creepy toxic hateful rude childish woke behaviour of The Verge, Reddit, WIRED and in particular, Gizmodo. But I am saddened to read the comments below this column on the Robotaxi trial. You may notice that a few days ago, Starship 10 exploded during fuelling for an engine test. Despite the huge fireball and such, not a singe person was injured, never mind killed. That's because SpaceX are very careful about safety. Likewise this small Robotaxi trial in Austin, Tesla were making sure that if something did go wrong, the chances of injury to pedestrians and/or passengers was remote. Nothing they did interfered with the ability of the software to control the vehicles autonomously. Now this has been achieved, with only one error (that did not result in any harm and the vehicle corrected itself), Tesla can move to the next level with more vehicles, less supervision etc in baby steps. Once they do that, we're talking Level 4 autonomy. Yes, they are late with FSD, but damn, it's taken no longer than the 10 years it took Sony, Philips, Toshiba, Matsushita etc to develop DVDs, a far less involved achievement.
(I own a Model Y LR with FSD here in UK. Cannot use FSD yet, but I paid £6000 for it because I know it will eventually work, and as a software dev, understand some good things take time.)