They haven’t even gotten self driving working with driver still at the wheel, how are they supposed to convince us that they can do fully autonomous?
I always encounter a lot of Teslas while walking my dog and it's clear they're no safer than many people who shouldn't be driving regular cars.
Driver probably felt safe and that everything was in order. The cyclists not so much.
Point is it's a matter of perspective. How many around you have to accommodate?
On the other hand, FSD won’t try to pass me on winding mountain roads with a double yellow line.
It cannot be truly an autonomous robotaxi without VERY HIGH reliability. One intervention per hour is one too many.
I think FSD 12.5 is way beyond that --- I drove over 20 miles yesterday with zero interventions. Also, having ridden Waymo in San Francisco many times, I find that the FSD is actually slightly smoother and handles stuff like going around obstacles and blockages more naturally, although, as you are no doubt aware, there are still some rough edges in rare cases.
Once Tesla has reasonable remote human assistance infrastructure in place to help out with the extreme edge cases, and the software improves at the current rate, I don't see why they couldn't roll out a robotaxi service.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general...
Have to ever tried to get in touch with a human at Tesla short of driving to a service center. Almost impossible. It would be easier for me to get the president on the line.
Having just purchased a new Tesla, I tried for 2 weeks to communicate with Tesla prior to purchase. The closest I even got was a phone tree, which after 7 levels sent me to a voicemail box that was full. Am I’m talking every day for 14 days. Had my wife not wanted it so bad I would have cancelled my deposit on the spot.
I requested service on it last week. The earliest service date is Nov. 12. I have yet to hear from an advisor on the app.
Tesla does a lot of things right, but supporting their products with actual humans is not one of them..
That said, I don't think they want to talk with you pre-purchase outside of one of their showrooms, and the showroom isn't even a large part of their sales model. I imagine that if you're trying to go against the flow, it'd be hard.
As a Waymo user I can promise you that there is, and they have it.
And they got (rightfully) pulled off the roads.
> there are still some rough edges in rare cases
Waymo has substantially lower interventions.
And, they have a huge fleet of humans running around the city attending to the cars. A few weeks ago I saw one stuck - whoever had last used it, managed to trap a seatbelt in the door. It was sitting for about 5 minutes when a guy pulled up and fixed it and sent it on its way. I'm not saying Tesla can't build that, but they're going to have to.
What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?
> What if it’s one an hour now, one a day next year and one a week in 2026?
That is a MASSIVE "what if".
What's if it's 2036? What if it's 2056? Hell, if it's 2030 then Tesla is in _serious_ trouble.
That right now is THE multi-billion dollar Tesla question.
A lot of companies have Level 2 systems. That's still a far cry from full automation.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...
Back in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stunned the automotive world by announcing that, henceforth, all of his company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary for “full self-driving.” You will be able to nap in your car while it drives you to work, he promised. It will even be able to drive cross-country with no one inside the vehicle.
It was also announced today that unsupervised FSD is coming to Texas and California in 2025.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
The disengagement events on recent videos of FSD are still the likes of "oops it almost turned into oncoming traffic" or "oops it almost ran into a pole", that's the sort of thing you have to catch before it happens, not after.
I think it’s a mistake to conflate the actual capabilities of the system with the user instructions for how the system is being used. SAE levels are primarily about the latter and about who takes liability for the operation of the vehicle. Conflating the two punishes car manufacturers who are cautious about the current state of their self-driving system.
This is fundamentally different from FSD, where the human is always responsible for driving and maintaining the safety invariants.
That's a cute euphemism for remote operators.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/j3016/J3016_table.jpg
To give an analogy, let's say you use a credit card. A machine processes the payment most of the time, but occasionally something looks suspicious, so it denies the payment and sends a message to a human (you) asking whether the next payment should be allowed. Do you consider yourself to be a "driver" in this system?
If so, imagine a system where all payments flash by onscreen for a human that's tasked with stopping erroneous approvals in realtime. Are humans doing the essentially the same job in this system such that both roles are "drivers"?
You do realize Waymo will only operate in geofenced areas in select cities that have been premapped down to the millimeter?
Waymo is not even remotely close, nor attempting to solve the same problem. This is coming from someone who lives in SF and takes Waymo regularly. Waymo is a cool tech demo and that's about it; FSD is a real tool that people everywhere can actually use to take them where they want to go.
In the last month, it’s driven onto grass where there used to be an off ramp that was redone last year, cut across 3 lanes of highway traffic within 200 feet of an off ramp, and almost ran a semi truck off the road (yes, we had the right of way, but he weighs 20,000 lbs and was in no way going to be able to stop in time).
It a cool toy to show off when you’re being hyper vigilant about keeping an eye on it, but there is no way it should be allowed on the public roads yet.
I 1000% would advise against purchasing it unless you have the extra cash and want to try it out. It’s not even close to production ready.
Edit: spelling
interesting. this wasn’t my experience. i did SF <> Lake Tahoe (which can stretch to 5hrs) a number of times when i was in SF and didn’t encounter any major issues. small issues sure, but it was definitely better than my driving.