That said, I still don't "trust" FSD to the point where I could comfortably be in the backseat taking a nap just yet. 99% is not "good enough" for something as critical as driving.
You should only trust it after Tesla accepts full liability when FSD is enabled.
Knowing how prone to exaggeration Elon is, my bar was low. But it blew me away honestly. After nearly 30 years working in software and with some background in machine learning and computer vision and generally just trying to make software that works reliably, it's a pretty jaw dropping experience.
Would I take a nap in the back seat and let it drive? No. But does it allow me to sit there focused on a technical podcast or an audiobook so I feel like I'm getting back an hour or two a day instead of worrying about driving? Absolutely.
It reeks of manual fitting. Tesla surveys an area and makes manual adjustments that keep the system from misbehaving for a while until something changes and then it’s back to shit.
And in the 12 months I've had the car, it has gotten noticeably better maybe 2 times. Once last year, and then once in February. After the iteration last year, it drove fairly well, but I still had to intervene once or twice per trip. Now I make it through half of my trips without intervening, and when I do intervene it tends to be to avoid embarrassment vs safety (not committing, wrong lane for an upcoming turn, etc).
Given how ai is advancing, I am pretty confident they will get this working fully autonomously with just vision, it's just a question of when.
But when the usual outcome is death, i suppose a coma is an improvement.
This year for sure, guys, for real this time!
-- Elon
If there simply isn’t enough visual information, vision-only will fail.
And in a safety-critical system, the distinction is not mere pedantry.
Waymo has 360-degree LIDAR and, not coincidentally, is the state of the art.
I'm just saying that out of two American companies, Waymo and Tesla, Tesla is more likely to benefit from government favors.
It’s actually the one case where Google’s customer service beats the competition’s. Waymo customer service is still somewhat trash. But you need it so infrequently compared with Uber, and Uber and Lyft somehow manage to make Google look like a people company, that I find myself almost exclusively taking Waymo when I’m in a city where it is an option. (Via the Waymo app.)
There is a reason even taxi companies are now partnering with Uber in places like DC.
I travel a lot between business (not as much now) and personally. I know I can land in any airport domestically and most airports internationally and can get a ride on Uber and with surge pricing someone will usually pick me up.
It isn’t financially viable to have enough Waymo cars on the road that will be able to handle peak demand and just sit there during low demand.
Sure. Waymo can absorb the usual base load. Uber and Lyft can be peakers. This is how it works in Phoenix, LA and Miami, cities one can’t dismiss as cities “of tech bros,” I assume, given during peak hours the wait time surges to 30+ minutes.
Uber is buying time, Waymo is buying velocity
Margin will never accrue to Uber in that relationship because they have no leverage.
Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.
It was probably because cops stopped enforcing traffic laws during COVID and never started again:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...
Can you say more about this?
I've heard both "This has done things more intelligently than me and prevented errors I would've made" and also "This made errors"
Statistically, it's better than human drivers. But of course, if a machine makes an error - it's going to get more headlines.
Tesla has never published the data required to substantiate this claim.
Next what you'll post is Tesla's press release where they look at accidents per mile with no segregation by driving type (city, freeway, age of car, weather conditions, etc)
Then the next step after that should be for you to say, "huh, it actually is odd that they publish something that purports to show it's safer than human drivers, but they consistently decline to publish the data necessary to actually evaluate whether it's safer than human drivers."
That should make you raise your eyebrows a bit.
Granted, plenty of douchebags will have made their money and scrammed, but founders would prefer to emulate the biggest winners which is what matters.
Nobody is out here emulating the business practices of John Studebaker though I'm sure he died plenty rich.