"This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access."
It was good in the moment. The issue is maintaining it without the same cheap labor and materials. PG&E in California is a perfect example. There is no way for them to maintain the grid which is aging and causing fires. We are going to have to switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.
As long as grid upgrades & maintenance continue to work reasonably well across western Europe, bad examples from the US are not particularly worrying.
Economics of scale still very much apply; there is a point in maintaining expensive grid infrastructure. Especially so when using it to improve other expensive infrastructure, such as electric high-speed passenger rail.
We are potentially about to see a worse incident than Uber in Phoenix or Cruise in SF. 444 miles per Critical Disengagement is terrible. In 2023, Waymo reported 17,000 miles between Critical Disengagements and have made significant (as seen by a functioning robotaxi service) leaps since.
Cruise in SF was a bit of a freak accident. There were systematic issues that exacerbated the issue, but it wasn't an issue of bad disengagement numbers. In fact, Cruise 2023 actually highlights how misleading disengagement numbers can be, as they reported 0 critical disengagements the entire year over 583k miles. Waymo is extremely consistent about their numbers and they typically sandbag themselves relative to their competitors. Tesla of course doesn't officially report CA numbers, so people rely on crowdsourced data that the company and fans maintain are orders of magnitude lower than reality.
It's entirely possible that the opaqueness and small scale of the Tesla rollout could lead to situations where long tail events like the Cruise collision simply don't occur, or aren't allowed to reach public media.
The same hubris that powers faulty and half-baked implementations is responsible for lying to regulators.
The problem here is that Musk isn't really a humble man, and he's the face of Tesla. That makes everyone a little on edge. Of course, there's a lot of other people in Tesla who, I'm sure, are fantastic engineers and designers. But still, the feeling of uneasiness ensues.
If companies want to earn the trust of the public, they have to anticipate our questions and concerns and address them. It's a high bar in modern America, which is why so many industries (food, pharmaceuticals, automobiles) are plagued with low-trust.
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