Is there any consumer car that is anywhere close? My understanding is that no other car has things like automatic lan change and route following. Let alone stopping at stop signs / red lights etc.
So... I'm actually fine with renaming it. People shouting "fraud" on the internet want somehow for a different name to magically make the product bad. But the product is great.
[1] Yes, including Waymo and Cruise, who work only on carefully calibrated geofenced areas. My Tesla will take the highway when it needs to and honor a five-way stop sign. Waymo won't even make an unprotected left turn.
The most important metric for self driving is the distance a car can travel before it needs assistance from an occupant. That’s what self driving is. Tesla is very far behind the leaders here.
Also, Tesla might not in theory be geofenced, but in practice it will refuse to drive on many roads making it effectively geofenced.
That's reductionist to the point of meaninglessness. A car limited to a specific track could keep going autonomously until it breaks down, thus having an infinite metric on the distance a car can travel before it needs assistance from an occupant, yet practically it could easily be useless as a self-driving vehicle.
Being able to handle self-driving without being restricted to carefully chosen "good spots" and instead being able to generalize is at least on par in importance with distance the vehicle can travel.
Also, the vehicle determining that it can't handle a certain road well enough yet is a desirable feature and isn't really comparable to a bunch of people deciding if a certain road is safe for their vehicle before allowing it to self-drive there, as the latter simply isn't practical at scale.
There are under 4.1 million miles of roads in the US. ~70 people could map every mile of that every year assuming average speed of 30mph and 2,000 hours of work per year. It’s literally trivial compared to building a self driving system.
Tesla’s insistence on good road markings is a far larger limitation than simply pre mapping roads.
One of the problems with this discourse is the propensity for people to talk past each other. No one is interested in mining automation here, no matter what level of SAE autonomy they qualify for.
> Tesla’s insistence on good road markings is a far larger limitation than simply pre mapping roads.
And another problem is people's insistence on arguing from bad information and ignoring the testimony of those who have good info. I honestly don't know what you're referencing here, FSD works fine on unpainted roads (I live on one).
Yet, it clearly disproved your point. A self driving Taxi or Semi needs to be fully autonomous to be useful, coverage area is a useful feature only after you can get rid of the driver.
I’ve seen a FSD Tesla have issues with bad road markings recently. That’s a complete failure from an autonomy standpoint, because if they can’t predict and thus avoid bad situations the system is completely dependent on a human driver.
And that’s the problem, Tesla has been stuck at at the cool tech demo stage for years and adding features alone isn’t progress because something that generally works as long as a human can take over is so vastly easier they can just gloss over the hard bits. Eventually they will run out of new feature that sort of work and the cars will still still be unable drive anywhere by it’s self. Perhaps they start trying to level 4+ in a few years, but their going to need to start over getting each feature to actually work without that safety net.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41117967/ford-bluecruise-...