Tesla has simulations too, of course. Thing is, the world has fractal complexity and synthetic data only captures the variation that you tell it about. Simulations for synthetic data generation are literally my job -- this is where my intuition is at its strongest.
> if you think driving in SF is easy
I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring. Google and Waymo are used to having a scale advantage, but Tesla's fleet utterly dwarfs them.
> Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today.
That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
> So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla.
FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time. They don't even use freeways, last I checked. Slow and steady is a fine strategy, I wish them luck in the marathon, but it's a bit early to call this one for Waymo.
I'm used to holding back the enthusiasm in Tesla circles where we are naturally predisposed to call the race early for Tesla, so this is a fun change of pace.