The gap between Waymo and all other competitors in the self-driving space continues to widen.
They should keep on doing what they're doing. Make ~$1000 gadget that makes driving less of a chore. Doubtful they'll get to driverless in next 10 years.
There can be many players in the market at different offerings and price points. Comma is a sweet spot where they are handsomely profitable, don't need to raise another round and get incrementally better.
Waymo has unlimited money from Google. Cruise, Zoox, e.t.c will have to face reckoning at some point.
It was smart of Uber to get out of self-driving car billion dollar money burning pit. They can always enter the race again. They have market size advantage.
Frankly, I didn’t see any benefit of Tesla over most of the lane centering and adaptive cruise solutions in the market. It felt so unpredictable that I preferred to simply drive by hand.
For me, that's the end-all-be-all of self driving promises. It doesn't matter whether they call it level 3, 4, 5, or 420, what the branding and promo copy says, it matters how it gets handled from a legal standpoint.
Unless you can get the vendor to accept liability, you're either hands-on-the-wheel driving, or sitting there tensing and waiting for the "you must jump back to hands-on-the-wheel driving in the next 3 seconds or we plow into the side of a lorry" alarm.
In a way, this is the same heuristic as "the company that offers a long warranty can't make crap." No company will willingly put themselves on the hook from the estate of pedestrians and other drivers until they know they've solved it to a statistically high level.
Invite-only is quite literally the opposite of public. It's private.
FSD has been set to come out in a year or so since 2014. At this point nobody should be foolish enough to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt; if they have a self-driving car, then they'll take legal liability for its actions, and if they won't take legal liability for its actions, they don't have a self-driving car. This is as true for any company as it is for Tesla, although Tesla is the only one who's seen fit to lie about it for a decade.
I encourage you to watch some of the videos on Twitter.
It's here. It's now.
I, for one, will be surprised ... in fact put me down for "very surprised".
12.5.1.3 is incredible. But it's still Level 3, attempting to do something stupid at least on every trip I've been in one.
I think Tesla will figure out Level 4 in the near future. What makes the "year or so" unrealistic is it will have to convince regulators that it's safe. For a variety of reasons, partly legitimate and partly due to Musk's antics, that might be difficult in a lot of the most lucrative markets (and markets where Teslas are).
Top comment's estimate for 2030 parity with Waymo et al is more realistic.
It did a few things better than my Ford and Hyundai vehicles, but it was wildly unpredictable when it’d just decide to stop working. That’s a big problem for me.
In a Waymo, you sit in the back seat and scroll your phone and it gets you safely to your destination every time. These are not even remotely comparable products.
Tesla's generalized driving algorithm vs Waymo's cherry-picked routes and ideal weather.
Tesla is winning. And the gap is getting wider.
This necessarily involves some kind of generalized driving algorithm but more usefully, it gives you a clear goal and distribution to measure against.