Bloomberg: “Tesla Optimus Bots were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event”

Some attendees said on social media afterward that the robots had help and at least one video posted online purportedly from the Oct. 10 Cybercab event shows an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being assisted by a human. That wasn’t stated by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk during his remarks on a webcast.

The use of human input raises questions over the capabilities and market readiness of the bot, which Musk said last week he expects to be the biggest product ever of any kind. The CEO told the crowd it will handle many household tasks and could eventually be available to consumers for $20,000 to $30,000 each.

What can it do? Musk said. It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.

Edward Ludlow & David Welch

Awkward for the part that ‘stole the show’ for some attendants to have been faked all along (I chuckled at the top comment on The Verge calling them Decepticons). The main event itself, the launch of Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi, was considered underwhelming due to its vagueness on technical details and the economics of the supposed robotaxi business – more of a concepts showcase than anything else. At least this time around the company was met with a frosty reaction on the stock markets, with shares dropping 9%, the worst decline in more than two months.

Reuters: “Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints”

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer”, allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said.

Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged, the person said, adding: When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.

Steve Stecklow & Norihiko Shirouzu

I would totally trust this Musk guy to safely land people on Mars!

CNBC: “Elon Musk: Work from home ‘morally wrong’ when some have to show up”

I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, Let them eat cake, Musk said. It’s not just a productivity thing, Musk said. I think it’s morally wrong.

Musk referred to tech workers as the laptop classes living in la-la-land, telling Faber it was hypocritical to work from home while expecting service workers to continue to show up in person.

Rohan Goswami

How detached from reality can you be to call remote work ‘morally wrong’ while holding who-even-knows how many job titles simultaneously and bouncing between them in your private jet!? As the owner of an automobile company, Musk has a commercial interest for people to commute more as it drives up demand for cars, including his own. If there’s a Marie Antoinette in this scenario, that’s most certainly Elon Musk himself.

The New York Times: “Why New York’s Giant Trash Bag Piles may be an Endangered Species”

New York City is a bit of a global pariah when it comes to trash. On garbage days in Manhattan, towers of fetid trash bags line the streets, with food and liquids oozing on to sidewalks. Sanitation workers carry out the Sisyphean task of carting away 24 million pounds of trash and recycling every day.

Other cities have successfully reined in their garbage. Amsterdam uses underground storage and electric boats. Singapore and other cities use a pneumatic pressure chute system. Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Paris rely on shared and individual trash containers, providing the most useful examples of what is possible in New York, city officials said.

---

In a highly anticipated new report being released on Wednesday, city sanitation officials estimate that it would be possible to move trash to containers on 89 percent of the city’s residential streets. To do so, however, will require removing 150,000 parking spots, and up to 25 percent of parking spots on some blocks.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons

I was genuinely taken aback to learn how (poorly) garbage is handled in New York City. Every metropolis has its fair share of issues and garbage can easily pile in densely populated areas, but in New York this is the rule rather than an exception… Obligatory comment: only in America would people value their cars and parking spots more than having cleaner streets.

Energy Monitor: “EU ICE ban: Did Germany just kill the electric car?”

Germany wants the law changed to allow for the sale of ICE cars after 2035 if they run on hydrogen-derived e-fuels, which are produced by electrolysis with added carbon. Since, unlike Italy, Germany has enough voting power to kill the legislation simply by abstaining in the final vote, the European Commission has started drafting a compromise to allow this. French President Emmanuel Macron, who strongly supports the ICE ban, is meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at an EU summit in Brussels today. Macron may support the compromise in exchange for German support for nuclear power as a ‘green’ tool to fight climate change.

---

Most automakers actually supported the original legislation because they see a market opportunity in EVs, the campaigner points out. The vast majority of automakers don’t even want this, says Keynes. Ford, Audi, VW and Volvo have all come out 100% against this idea. Basically, Porsche is the only carmaker that has openly said they are investing in this [e-fuels]. This is really a solution for sports cars, because it is so expensive.

---

The benefit of e-fuels is that they are a ‘drop-in’ fuel that can be fed into any ICEs already on the road today, either blended or pure. A hard 2035 ban on ICEs could kill investment in e-fuels – potential markets in aviation and shipping do not on their own provide a sufficiently strong business case to get e-fuels off the ground, says the industry – and deprive drivers of a potential medium-term climate solution.

Dave Keating

I’ve been loosely following this debate on Twitter with a mix of bemusement and disbelief – the law received final approval from EU energy ministers on Tuesday. You would think the entire climate strategy of the EU rested on this single piece of legislation, which doesn’t even apply to heavy trucks and buses by the way. In reality, transitioning to electric cars reduces greenhouse gas emissions only insofar as the electricity consumed comes from carbon-neutral sources – a caveat that applies equally to vehicles powered by e-fuels. Otherwise we’re just shifting the source of the emissions from roads to powerplants – which may improve air quality in cities, but does nothing to address global warming.

The Wall Street Journal: “Elon Musk’s Boring Company ghosts Cities across America”

Dazzled by Boring’s boasts that it had revolutionized tunneling, and the cachet of working with the billionaire head of EV maker Tesla Inc., the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail and embraced the futuristic tunnel.

When it came time to formalize the partnership and get to work, Boring itself went underground—just as it has done in Maryland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline.

The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to solve soul-destroying traffic, only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.

Every time I see him on TV with a new project, or whatever, I’m like: Oh, I remember that bullet train to Chicago O’Hare, said Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack. Boring had backed away from its proposal for a high-speed tunnel link to the airport there.

Ted Mann & Julie Bykowicz

At this point, it should be blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of reason that you should never take Elon Musk’s promises at face value. They are intended primarily to reinforce his public perception as a visionary tech mogul and discourage projects that might compete with his existing businesses (such as selling cars). The real question in this reporting should be why local administrations continue to fall for his perpetual deception. In my view, the issue is how social media has skewed politics, amplifying grand but hollow announcements and vows – propaganda basically – while quiet but reliable administrators who deliver results for their communities are dismissed as boring and lacking presence.

The Verge: “Check out BMW’s color-changing concept car in action”

For this year’s CES, BMW showed off the i Vision Dee, an electric sports sedan concept that previewed a whole raft of technologies we could see in the immediate future, like AI-powered virtual assistants and full-windshield heads-up displays. But it also included a full-color version of the E Ink technology seen on last year’s concept for the first time ever.

This means that the i Vision Dee — which looks like a kind of cross between a vintage BMW and a Tesla — can change colors on command. Instead of just black, white, and gray, 32 colors are now available. Not only that but the i Vision Dee is made up of 240 E Ink e-paper segments, all of which can be controlled individually. This means the i Vision Dee can shift to one solid color or put on one hell of a light show.

This allows an almost infinite variety of patterns to be generated and varied within seconds, BMW said in a statement.

Patrick George

A cool concept that could cause unfortunate side effects on the roads. A car changing colors while driving could prove distracting to other drivers and people on the road. The effect could be even more perilous at night: electric cars already produce less noise that combustion engines; imagine a silent vehicle adopting a dark color on the streets. With the headlights off it would be nearly impossible to spot for pedestrians. And a full-windshield heads-up display, bombarding the driver with notifications or – gasp! – running ads! seems like an accident waiting to happen too.

Gizmodo: “Silicon Valley’s Push into Transportation has been a Miserable Failure”

Marx: But it’s not just that it would become a huge revenue stream that would transform the business, it’s more just that I think there’s this general faith in technology and the way that technology develops and that they can achieve these things. Because I would say it’s not just Google who had that faith in self-driving technology, all these companies who are working on it did to a certain degree, and really believed that it was something that they were going to be able to figure out and make a reality within a few years. Then they had to be hit with the hard reality of how difficult to realize their goal actually was. I think it just speaks to a bigger kind of faith in technology that exists within many of these companies and even the society as a whole, to a certain degree, that you just kind of turn these big data sets toward what you want to achieve. And they eventually figure it out. And time and time again, I think we’re seeing that’s not really being realized.

---

I think it also goes back to what I was saying earlier in terms of the distraction that Elon Musk has achieved really effectively. To try to distract from real solutions to the problems that the automobile has created and things that would require less car dependence and to actually offer people alternatives to the car and to instead kind of intervene and say, no, actually, I have these ideas that are going to be even better than that, and we should pursue those instead to try to sap energy from alternatives. So the Hyperloop, for example, he admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project and to get in the way of that actually succeeding.

Rhett Jones

I rarely find articles I can agree with almost unconditionally, and this is one of those rare examples. It covers multiple aspects of transportation, from the environmental issues of electric vehicles (particulate pollution from tire wear and dust, and the fact that the electricity consumed generally does not come from renewable sources), to Uber’s unsustainable business model, to Musk’s numerous initiatives that instead of solving practical issues aim to entrench the use of automobiles and thus benefit Musk’s business at Tesla.

Fortune: “Elon Musk’s regulatory woes mount as U.S. moves closer to recalling Tesla’s self-driving software”

On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact, suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has often claimed that accidents cannot be the fault of the company, as data it extracted invariably showed Autopilot was not active in the moment of the collision.

While anything that might indicate the system was designed to shut off when it sensed an imminent accident might damage Tesla’s image, legally the company would be a difficult target.

All of Tesla’s current autonomous features, including its vaunted Full Self-Driving tech, currently in beta testing, are deemed assistance systems in which the driver is liable at all times rather than the manufacturer.

Christiaan Hetzner

It sure looks as if Tesla designed Autopilot to shut off immediately before an impact so the company can deny its software was at fault and evade legal liability…

Reuters: “Tesla recalls almost half a million electric cars over safety issues”

The model years affected in the recall range from 2014 to 2021, and the total number of recalled vehicles is almost equivalent to the half a million vehicles Tesla delivered last year.

Around 200,000 Tesla vehicles will be recalled in China, the country’s market regulator said on Friday.

The U.S. electric vehicle manufacturer is recalling 356,309 2017-2020 Model 3 vehicles to address rearview camera issues and 119,009 Model S vehicles due to front hood problems, the federal regulator said.

Hyunjoo Jin

Turns out having a chaotic manufacturing process and an unpredictable boss do eventually have negative consequences. Evidently it’s not the first time Tesla issued recalls, struggled with glaring faults, or rolled back software upgrades, but to recall a year’s worth of deliveries is remarkable. The stock market though has blissfully ignored the signal, as it has done in the past, and Tesla’s stock barely moved on the news. Ironically, just days before this was announced, Elon Musk sold another $1 billion in Tesla shares (overtly to pay a massive anticipated tax bill) – almost as if he expected significant negative news around the company…

The Washington Post: “Tesla is rolling back ‘Full Self-Driving’ for some users because of software issues”

The update had already proved troublesome earlier in the weekend, as Tesla delayed its initial release Saturday morning because of what Musk wrote was “regression in some left turns at traffic lights” found by internal quality inspectors. But he said Sunday that the company has proceeded with the rollout, noting that it leans on the public to gather more data on driving conditions and parameters.

Users reported sporadic issues including hard braking events, forward collision warnings and other system misfires that had not been present in previous versions.

It was the latest twist in a saga that has disrupted typical car industry practices and drawn the attention of safety advocates and regulators, who fear the consequences of Tesla foisting the largely untested software on the public. Full Self-Driving is an expanded iteration of the software that Tesla calls Autopilot, which can navigate highways, summon and park cars, and conduct other maneuvers with an attentive driver behind the wheel. Full Self-Driving brings those capabilities to city streets, allowing the software to navigate Tesla cars through local roads and residential areas. Users must pay attention at all times, and the software — despite its name — is not considered autonomous by industry or regulatory definitions.

Faiz Siddiqui

Considering Musk’s aversion to safety rules and regulations, this might be another reason behind the decision to relocate Tesla’s headquarters to Texas – aside from the obvious tax benefits for Musk: the Texas Attorney’s Office proved easily corruptible in the Boeing 737 Max case. If Tesla lands in legal trouble because of these rash decisions that might one day cause fatal crashes, Musk might be able to buy his way out of accountability…

The Guardian: “Dirty lies: how the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions”

And, as it turned out, Volkswagen wasn’t the only one evading the law. Less flagrantly, but to similar effect, the vast majority of diesel cars were making a mockery of emissions rules. In the wake of the revelations in the US, European governments road-tested other big brands too. In Germany, testers found all but three of 53 models exceeded NOx limits, the worst by a factor of 18. In London, the testing firm Emissions Analytics found 97% of more than 250 diesel models were in violation; a quarter produced NOx at six times the limit. As the data kept coming in, our jaws just kept dropping. Because it is just so systematic, and so widespread, German says. VW isn’t even in the worst half of the manufacturers. With a few honourable exceptions, everybody’s doing it.

---

As Mock spoke, I began to absorb the particulars of Europe’s stunning failure. It starts with an enforcement structure that almost seems designed to let violators through. The European commission sets the rules on how much pollution a car is allowed to produce. But the job of enforcing them falls not to Brussels, but to national governments. And a car company preparing to release a new model can choose which country certifies it; every EU nation must then honour the approval. A savvy carmaker opts for a place where it provides lots of jobs, where officials are likely to be pliant.

The national enforcement agencies, for their part, are generally understaffed, poorly funded and lacking in technical expertise. Britain is an exception, but in most nations these weak agencies don’t even test cars themselves. About a dozen individual vehicles must be checked before a new model is approved, and the tests are often run by outside contractors. When they are done, the manufacturers hand the paperwork to regulators, and the results, says Mock, are usually accepted with little question.

Beth Gardiner

An older story, but exemplary to how big corporations can act against public interest if left unsupervised by government regulations and proper enforcement. The drive of senior management towards generating profits incentivizes them to search for shortcuts, to circumvent inconvenient rules and discard alarm signals from within the organization. And sooner or later this leads to negative outcomes, from the many toxic consequences of Facebook’s influence on public information, to unnecessary deaths, as it was the case with Boeing and even NASA.

The Atlantic: “Stop Worrying and Love the F-150 Lightning”

Or more relevant, for our purposes: Ford sells about 900,000 F-150s every year; all automakers collectively sold 250,000 new EVs total last year. This may be one of the important products in decarbonization, Tim Latimer, an energy-industry veteran, tweeted last week. (He is now the chief executive of the geothermal company Fervo.) An electric F-150 opens up an enormous new market for EVs and signals that climate-friendly technology has reached the soybean fields and construction sites of middle America.

---

An electric vehicle is, at a mechanical level, a giant battery on wheels. Ford is pitching this not only as a technical necessity but as a feature: They want you to plug stuff into the car. Let’s say you’re at a tailgate or at work. You can set up a cement mixer, a band, or lights and draw only half the power the truck is capable of producing at a time, Linda Zhang, the chief engineer on the Lightning, told me. Like all electric vehicles, the F-150 replaces the hefty internal-combustion engine with a much smaller electric motor, and like many EVs therefore has a storage compartment under its front hood: a “frunk”. Except the F-150 has a “power frunk”—the most marvelous three-syllable phrase American marketing has produced since “half-priced apps”—meaning that it both opens to the touch of a button and has multiple plugs for appliances.

The Lightning can store so much power that, in a blackout, it can supply a house’s normal power usage for three days, according to Ford. If the house conserves power, it can keep the lights on for more than a week, Zhang said. Talking about this feature, Ford employees and Farley himself have referenced the Texas blackouts. The Lightning is a technology of resilience, of climate adaptation.

Robinson Meyer

I don’t write about cars that much because I’m not that interested in the subject, but this product launch feels significant for the future trends in the US market. If Americans won’t switch to public transportation to reduce their emissions, if the government won’t invest enough in proper infrastructure to promote safe and fast public transport, at least they could adopt electric vehicles en masse.

Wired: “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life inside Tesla’s Production Hell”

Unfettered genius. Unpredictable rages. Here’s what it was like to work at Tesla as Model 3 manufacturing ramped up and the company’s leader melted down. Illustration by Mike McQuade

Some company executives say they began reading celebrity tabloids. If the magazines reported turmoil in Musk’s love life, they knew to wait to deliver bad news. And executives followed his tweets and retweets closely. We called it management by Twitter, a former Solar City employee said. Some customer would tweet some random complaint, and then we would be ordered to drop everything and spend a week on some problem affecting one loudmouth in Pasadena, rather than all the work we’re supposed to do to support the thousands of customers who didn’t tweet that day.

---

Musk would say I’ve got to fire someone today, and I’d say, No you don’t, and he’d say, No, no, I just do. I’ve got to fire somebody, one former high-­ranking executive told me. (A Tesla spokesperson disputed this but added that Musk makes difficult but necessary decisions.) At one meeting Musk, agitated, broke a phone. During another, he noticed that an executive was missing and called him. The man’s wife had recently given birth, and he explained that he was taking time off as she recuperated. Musk was angry. At a minimum, you should be on phone calls, Musk told the man. Having a kid doesn’t prevent you from being on the phone.

---

Whether it was because of Musk’s management style or in spite of it, progress continued. And that was the weird part, a high-­ranking engineering executive said, because we were doing amazing work. I don’t want it to seem like the whole experience was negative, because when people were shielded from Elon, Tesla was amazing. We did incredible things.

Charles Duhigg

An article providing a lot of insight into the difficult working environment at Tesla while ramping up production at their factory in Fremont. ‘Management by Twitter’ and randomly firing people for the slightest misstep sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump.

Bloomberg: “Apple Shifts Leadership of Self-Driving Car Unit to AI Chief”

Apple Inc. has moved its self-driving car unit under the leadership of top artificial intelligence executive John Giannandrea, who will oversee the company’s continued work on an autonomous system that could eventually be used in its own car.

The project, known as Titan, is run day-to-day by Doug Field. His team of hundreds of engineers have moved to Giannandrea’s artificial intelligence and machine-learning group, according to people familiar with the change. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

---

Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning before being promoted to Apple’s executive team as a senior vice president later that year. He ran Google’s machine-learning and search teams before that. At Apple, in addition to the car project, he is in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple’s products.

Mark Gurman

In other news around self-diving cars… In contrast to Uber, Apple should have both the engineering resources to design custom chips and sensors for autonomous vehicles, and the finances to support long term development. Where Apple struggles is the AI component – subordinating this project to the same leadership in charge of Siri does not exactly inspire confidence in future breakthroughs, considering how poorly Siri performs compared to other digital assistants. Project Titan underwent several reorganizations and scale-backs over the years, and according to recent reports it performed significantly less public road testing in 2019; I would not be surprised if it is completely abandoned in coming years.

The Washington Post: “Uber offloads troubled self-driving unit to startup Aurora”

The company is selling its self-driving division to start-up Aurora in a deal that values the ride-hailing giant’s autonomous vehicle unit at about $4 billion, according to the companies and people familiar with the matter. Uber executives have long pointed toward a future in which the company could automate its fleet, removing a huge portion of the costs that help prevent it from attaining profitability.

The sale represents the final chapter for an ambitious but troubled division that was left reeling after one of its vehicles was investigated in the first known pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle.

Uber has been the dominant player in the ride-hailing industry over the past decade, but the pandemic has strained its business and forced it to rely more on food delivery while cutting back on longer-term investments and experimental projects.

Faiz Siddiqui

Hardly surprising, considering how little progress Uber was making in the area and the broader context of the pandemic and economic recession. After cost cuts and several rounds of layoffs, and the realization that the home delivery business may be more lucrative for the near future, a speculative line of business with little prospect of success over the next five years at least was bound to be the next to go. In case anyone remembers, in early 2017 Uber also started a flying car initiative, Uber Elevate, which Uber is now selling to Joby Aviation.

The Guardian: “Collision course: why are cars killing more and more pedestrians?”

Here is what the frustrated safety experts will tell you: Americans are driving more than ever, more than residents of any other country. More of them than ever are living in cities and out in urban sprawl; a growing number of pedestrian fatalities occur on the fringes of cities, where high-volume, high-speed roads exist in close proximity to the places where people live, work, and shop. Speed limits have increased across the country over the past 20 years, despite robust evidence that even slight increases in speed dramatically increase the likelihood of killing pedestrians (car passengers, too – but the increase is not as steep, thanks to improvements in the design of car frames, airbags and seatbelts). American road engineers tend to assume people will speed, and so design roads to accommodate speeding; this, in turn, facilitates more speeding, which soon enough makes higher speed limits feel reasonable. And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit.

---

There is simply a very good business reason for car companies to sell people a future where everything is better, especially when the way to get there is by purchasing a lot of cars, says Peter Norton, perhaps the most prominent historian of how Americans think about traffic safety. As Norton pointed out, car manufacturers have long made a practice of stoking consumer dissatisfaction, and yoking it to utopian visions of the future in which cars of the future solve problems created by cars of the present. I don’t think there’s any chance that autonomous vehicles will deliver us a safe future, and I don’t necessarily think the companies think so either. I think they think we’ll buy a lot of stuff. The safe future will recede before our eyes like a desert mirage.

Peter C Baker

I have linked to this article before, after Tesla launched the Cybertruck, the ultimate symbol of car-centric culture to the detriment of pedestrians – and on some level of the American ‘Cult of Selfishness’ that has damaged the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Vice: “Proposition 22’s Victory shows how Uber and Lyft break Democracy”

Of the $203 million spent by the Yes on Prop 22 campaign, some $57 million was contributed by Uber and another $49 million by Lyft. By Wednesday morning, news of the results had rapidly increased the ride-hail companies shares prices and valuations by tens of billions of dollars in premarket trading. Uber saw a return on its spending of nearly 19,300 percent, while Lyft saw a more modest return of around 3,670 percent.

The methods through which this was achieved were, in a word, dirty. Yes on Prop 22 spent millions on misleading “progressive” voting guide mailers, sent out chief executives on media tours, and paid $85,000 to a firm run by the leader of California’s NAACP chapter in a bid to paint themselves as champions of racial justice. The campaign made misleading claims about wages and worker flexibility, and Uber and Lyft weaponized their popular apps to push Yes on Prop 22 propaganda to customers and drivers alike.

To recap: corporations with some of the most exploitative labor practices in existence wrote a law to crush labor, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create propaganda to convince (or, failing that, mislead) voters, won, and saw massive returns on their spending as stock prices rose. This sort of flagrantly anti-democratic behavior is normal for corporations in America, where they are empowered to write their own laws and buy support for them among the public.

Edward Ongweso Jr

I am certainly no expert in American legislation, but this outcome sets a dangerous precedent for future regulation of tech companies. California’s Proposition 22 overturns both a 2018 State Supreme Court ruling and a 2019 state law that would require gig economy companies to employ drivers and pay for health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits. Instead of abiding by the law, a group of companies decided to fight it by aggressively campaigning for Proposition 22 through messages in their respective apps – and they were very much successful! A direct lobbying effort for direct democracy. While some Uber drivers filed a class action lawsuit against this unlawful pressure, I doubt it will make much difference now that the measure passed the vote.

Teslarati: “Will Tesla Cybertruck fit inside a home garage?”

Reactions from some Cybertruck reservation holders and users of the AR app show that future owners of the upcoming vehicle may need to find a larger garage for their all-electric pickup.

Tesla enthusiast Tesla Raj outlined these findings in a recent video, with the Model 3 owner using the AR mobile app to see if the all-electric pickup fits in his car garage. Average two-car garages in the United States are about 20×20, 22×22, and, in other cases, 24×24 ft. These spaces are more than enough for sedans like the Tesla Model 3 or crossovers like the Model Y, but when it comes to larger vehicles like the Cybertruck, garages like a 20×20 would be a bit too small.

Simon Alvarez

You can rest assured that the engineering team did a thorough job designing the car when the CEO feels the need to correct its size immediately after the announcement because they haven’t considered an insignificant detail such as… actually parking the car! I know some people argued years back that Apple should acquire Tesla, but from this it sounds like there is a huge disconnect between their cultures and internal processes, which would make it difficult to integrate Tesla.

Bloomberg: “Lyft Confirms What We Know and What We Don’t”

Optimists can point to the fast rate of growth, which has outpaced the rate of cost increases. The negative 40 percent operating margin was a drastic improvement from a negative 76 percent margin in early 2017. The company seems to be getting better efficiencies from some its spending, and that kind of operating leverage may eventually allow Lyft to generate tidy profits.

On the pessimistic side, I was surprised at the scale of Lyft’s costs for items like insurance, credit-card payments and expenses to run its technology systems. Those costs eat up more than half of Lyft’s reported revenue, and it shows that on-demand rides may never have the type of high-margin profits that investors love in internet and software companies. This is a company that doesn’t have to spend to produce a physical product yet has the gross margins of a clothing retailer.

---

But for me, this is the biggest unknown about Uber and Lyft: How big is this market? About 12 percent of people in a recent Deloitte survey said they use on-demand ride services such as Lyft at least once a week. That number decreased from an earlier survey. That relatively small share is either good news — Lyft and Uber have a large untapped market particularly outside of big cities — or a sign that even with the oodles of money that Lyft and Uber spend on subsidizing fares and marketing to attract drivers, the natural demand for on-demand rides isn’t that big.

Shira Ovide

It’s pretty remarkable for a company to warn it may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future, when profit is the primary mission of any normal business. And the numbers shared so far don’t contradict this extraordinary statement: as Lyft was able to grow revenues, operating costs have grown at a similar pace. Maybe, just maybe, this means that public transportation is difficult, if not impossible, to run as a for-profit enterprise, and it should simply be a public service, funded by local taxes – a concept that will be hard to swallow for Americans.