What Riding in a Self-Driving Tesla Tells Us About the Future of Autonomy

Key passages that highlight what Tesla is doing wrong:

"The moment highlighted the difference between Tesla’s self-driving technology and “robotaxi” services being developed by companies like Waymo, owned by the same parent company as Google, and Cruise, backed by General Motors."

"The robotaxi companies are trying to reduce these unexpected moments by tightly controlling where and how a car can drive. Using laser sensors called lidar, they build three dimensional digital maps of individual neighborhoods that give cars a fine grained understanding of their environment. Then they spend months or even years testing cars in these contained areas."

Elon Musk appears to have a Reality Distortion Field that's preventing him from realizing what is possible with today's technology. The fact that he is summarily firing everyone that disagrees with him (see recent public activity on his Twitter feed) is probably not helping.

For those hitting the paywall: https://nyti.ms/3AiWsB7