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Comment by y1426i | Hacker News Reader

Over last 6 months, since their latest upgrade, I have been driving my Tesla mostly on FSD. And it is nothing short of amazing, out of this world. The car drives like a pro and exceptions have become very rare. You have to drive this to believe it. Unlike Waymo which is full of gizmos, this is just a regular car that drives itself. The bet on camera and simplified architecture shows here.

If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.

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We've all been reading this exact comment for years now. Maybe it's actually different this time, I don't know.

What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake.

Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?

It has felt much much better in recent months. Did a drive from SF to Yosemite that was basically fully autonomous - can’t do that on Waymo. That being said, I still had two issues in the city where it completely screwed up by being in the wrong lane. Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane and try to safely just go the wrong direction and recover and instead just tries to take the “correct” route at all costs which can be a safety issue.

I agree that Waymo is generally safer for in city driving. It’s still not technically fully autonomous even though it appears that way; it has a lot of support people on the backend to resolve when the cars get stuck and whatnot. Waymo still can’t go on the highway or leave well-defined city limits whereas I can use my Tesla on every trip I’ve taken. I think comma.ai is a closer comparison point at this time as I can’t have a Waymo for my own personal use that I can take anywhere whenever.

"Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane"

This is actually very deadly.. at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on. An autonomous vehicle may behave in unpredictable ways and cause carnage. It only takes one incident to completely shutter it forever.

> at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on

Your experience must be very different. I've been on the road long enough to know that humans will try all sorts of things to not avoid missing the turn & Tesla behaved very similarly.

FWIW, it was signalling all the right ways and no collision seemed imminent and I doubt it would have gotten into an accident. I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself.

As someone that has driven thousands of miles, and encountered some interesting roundabouts and junctions - I cannot relate to your experience whatsoever.

"I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself."

So basically you had to intervene and it doesnt meet the standard of a fully autonomous vehicle. Do all the mental gymnastics all you want mate lmao.

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