Look at Waymo or Mercedes if you want to see what working FSD looks like. Tesla isn't even in the same ballpark yet.
I can tell you though, Tesla is the only company doing two things:
Making full self driving car that doesn't need an expensive and expansive sensor suite. Just off the shelf cameras and a GPU.
Making full self driving that can drive anywhere, no pre-mapping needed.
Waymo probably could do without pre-mapping, Mercedes probably not. Right now though Tesla is the only player with a car that you can buy and will "self drive" anywhere in the country. The other car companies cars only work on select pre-mapped roads, and IIRC Mercedes only works on highways and over 40mph.
The bet against Tesla is that they will not be able to pull this off. Not that competitors will beat them to the punch. If Tesla did get FSD with cameras on par with Waymo, Waymo would likely be unable to compete.
There's no indication that Tesla has solved the fundamental challenge of self-driving - making the system incredibly reliable and safe and able to handle myriads of rare situations. Tesla is at a point where multiple self-driving companies were years ago. The general experience from this field is that scaling is extremely hard because improving reliability and safety by orders of magnitude is extremely hard.
I think people are too hung up on the sensor suite. Once you solve the fundamental problem, a sensor suite is kind of an implementation detail. Waymo's system is robust to the removal of any sensor type / map. There's a good chance that Waymo in a camera-only mode would perform better than the Tesla robotaxi.
Mapping is not an issue, it's less expensive than people expect and you only need to do it once, so the cost per mile is approximately zero. And in Waymo's case, there's a lot of room for streamlining the process. The more you map, the easier and faster it gets. BTW, MobilEye has a very lightweight and crowdsourced mapping process, they're also camera-centric and have a cheap hardware package.
Waymo's long-term goal is a a system that is cheap and works everywhere. They've spent 15 years with a focus on solving the hard problem. Now they seem to be close to the finish line and they're shifting their focus and money into the easier stuff, optimizing hardware and expansion.
See this logarithmic chart: https://x.com/brianwilt/status/1827219050197610624
But you can't, Tesla is very clear about this. It is 100% your responsibility to check everything the car does, and intervene if it's taking the wrong route, or doing something illegal, or doing something dangerous.
Both Waymo and Mercedes actually understand the limitations of their cars. It's not a problem, but an enormous point of confidence that they can say exactly in which conditions they can or can't operate safely (in certain localitirs for Waymo, on certain very limited types of roads and driving conditions for Mercedes).
The fact that Tesla is trying to do "self driving anywhere, anytime", and actually has 0 clue when it might or might not be actually safe, is a huge red flag, not a thing to be confident about.
> Making full self driving car that doesn't need an expensive and expansive sensor suite. Just off the shelf cameras and a GPU.
This is the other enormous problem with Tesla's approach. They are trying an approach that could only be as safe or safer than human driving if they make a superintelligent agent. This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, and impossible to work on a small GPU inside of a car anytime in the next 50 years (good luck running a multimodal ChatGPT in your car). Adding many more sensors that humans just don't have is the only way to get a leg up on humans cheaply and efficiently.
I can get into my car, plug in a destination and not have to touch the car. Nothing but Tesla does that right now unless every video on the subject is lying regardless of whatever the defined SAE levels are.
In actual self driving systems, you either aren't even in the driver's seat (Waymo) or you can at least take your hands off the wheel and take a quick nap (Mercedes).