Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo.
Elon operates by setting impossible goals and under delivering on them but still going faster than all the other players. Most FSD buyers are reasonably aware of the gamble they are taking.
If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. Meanwhile they are trying hard to build the damn thing and my kudos for that.
> Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo.
They are nowhere near Waymo, who is doing actually driverless rides for the public. Tesla's confidence level is still at "you need to keep your hands on the wheel at all times".
I have questions about Waymo's taxi service. I'm certain that they occasionally run into situations that require human intervention, or at least need to be prepared for such an eventuality (see examples below). In such scenarios, what happens? The passenger operates the car? A remote operator takes controls? The car refuses to move and becomes a hazard or causes congestion?
For example, you come up to a 4-way intersection and a traffic cop there signals you to stop and says you can't go through because all the man-hole covers are off, but since you want to turn left you can go through the parking lot of the corner gas station to get onto the other road.
For another example, right after the st-patrick's day parade is over or right after the college town's team has just won the NCAA championship, the street is full of people and the car has to inch forward at a rate of half of a mile per hour and the pedestrians don't get out of the way until the car is about to touch them.
In the scenarios you described, a remote operator would "help" the car. They've specifically said remote operators can't control or joystick the car, but can "answer questions" which I take it to mean plot a different course. It can also pull over at a safe spot and not get stuck in the middle of an intersection, though nobody has run into this issue to test it from the videos I've watched.
The examples you gave sound like scenarios where remote operator would instruct "don't go there, go here" and the car does it by itself. But specifically about the traffic cop, it can actually detect hand signals from them (can't find the video though).
Waymo is a joke outside a trained, geofenced area. It is fascinating to me how a company went from gee we can index search results and sell ads to we can solve one of the hardest general automation problems in the world.
They definitely are not. Anyone working in this industry overwhelmingly agrees that Tesla is far behind the well established self-driving car companies (Waymo, Cruise, ...) mainly because they continue to rely on cameras only (and not lidars)
Solving vision is an incredibly difficult problem that is made harder by the lack of stereoscopic cameras. There is fundamentally no need to rely on vision alone other than bragging rights. It provides almost no practical benefit.
It’s a common talking point, I doubt that comment was sarcastic. Musk has said that he thinks Lidar is useless because humans operate vehicles with just vision, which of course is an unfair comparison since humans have intelligence to help them.
This has always been a ridiculous argument. Human eyes have a much higher contrast ratio than commercial cameras, and have built-in stereoscopic capabilities with some degree of rangefinding thanks to the fact that they are quickly adjustable. Normal cameras have none of that.
It was not sarcastic. I'm not really sure what you're arguing. It's obvious that vision-only would be more advanced than using lidars. Lidars are expensive and take space, so that's why they're trying to use cameras only.
And it's quite obvious that there are at least some situations in which vision will not work whatsoever - e.g. dense fog. I personally would quite like my autonomous vehicle to operate happily through dense fog. If you're happy to pull over to the side of the road and wait it out, be my guest.
Having multiple orthogonal subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum at your disposal provides redundancy and diversity - two features that simply CANNOT be accommodated with a single class of sensor, not matter how advanced it may be.
Yeah, that's true. Teslas have a front-facing long range radar and multiple ultrasonic sensors around the car for close range detection. Like most modern cars. But they are there just to avoid hitting anything, but can't be used alone for driving autonomously.
How can they be at the forefront of this field? A driverless Waymo will come and pick you up from in front of the Costco in Scottsdale AZ, right now. This Tesla can't do anything unsupervised.
Of all the self-driving companies it is likely that Tesla is dead last, behind Waymo, Cruise, Aurora, and Zoox.
It is outright scary how many Tesla fanboys think that Tesla are at the front of the pack. How much Koolaid can you drink without even checking what the experts in those industries are saying?
Elon operates by setting impossible goals and under delivering on them but still going faster than all the other players. Most FSD buyers are reasonably aware of the gamble they are taking.
If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. Meanwhile they are trying hard to build the damn thing and my kudos for that.