Goes to show empty promises and fraudulent showmanship sell better than actual working products that people use.
Tesla is clearly a meme stock though, and an example of how the market can say irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
It needs to beat Sp500 to be considered right.
A better approach is to look at the full range of your bets and try and decide if the betting strategy was good. But that gets difficult when you consider outcomes are linked through wider economic trends.
Google makes around $300B a year. Uber's entire business makes around $50B and that took a decade. Waymo would have to become a major business to move Alphabet's stock price in the near term.
Considering Waymo is very likely losing money, experiment very slowly with scaling up, and still raising billions in private capital outside Google... idk. Doesn't seem as simple as buy $goog in 2025.
Otherwise I agree Tesla is a bit of a meme stock.
Now compare to how much money the average person spends on driving per year.
If Waymo winds up running half the market in autonomous transportation over the next several decades, it'll make search look like peanuts in comparison.
Google made ~$265B from its ads last year.
The global driving market.
When these are ubiquitous enough, the vast majority of people who currently own cars won't need to. It'll be so much cheaper and easier to use rideshare.
If I lived in a city and garaging a car were inconvenient/expensive? Maybe. But that's not me or a lot of other people.
But if it's half the price over the course of a year? And you can summon it in advance cheaply? And it basically never takes more than 5 min to arrive anyways, since they're everywhere?
You might decide it's worth it to keep the stuff you really need in a messenger bag or backpack or something, the way people in NYC do. And maybe roof racks don't matter if you can just summon a second autonomous van behind you to hold whatever you were going to put on your roof.
Obviously if you're a contractor or something you'll need your own vehicle. But the point is that for most people, sure they can't keep stuff in their trunk all the time, but that's a happy tradeoff if the total cost of driving is 50% less.
The winner in self driving will likely be enabled by extreme vertical integration - you want to be building your own cars, cleaning your own cars, repairing your own cars, and so on.
The average American spends something like $12,500 in car+taxi/rideshare per year. Suppose with Waymo that goes down to $7,000 and it's 20% profit. That's $1,400/person in profit per year.
Obviously it gets much more complicated -- the profit margin depends on whether there are serious competitors to Waymo and how much Waymo's head start matters. Waymo will bring costs down further with shared vans and buses on demand. Profitability will rise with video ads in vehicles that you pay not to see. And so forth.
But autonomous rideshare is going to be larger than search any way you look at it. Profits won't be as high as search, but the barriers to entry are so high that profits will be high for a long time.
I also think you're overestimating the impact of things like ads, buses, etc. The second Waymos become less pleasant than any remotely comparably priced option, they will lose customers.
And yes I assume Waymo will have high profit margins for an extended period of time because they have such a massive head start, and for a long time will be competing primarily against rideshare with human drivers, so won't be pushed below that. Their marginal costs will be much cheaper than that, not having to pay drivers. Hence 20% is not unreasonable.
Then, even in the long term, the economies of scale they develop and network effects will continue to give them a significant advantage. Not 20% margins, but way more than 1%. Especially as they start to vertically integrate the hardware at some point.
Waymo is currently charging substantially more than Lyft/Uber and is not profitable. Human drivers can taxi in anything with 4 wheels and a hood, and its 100% their responsibility to take care of their vehicle, fuel it, clean it, and so on. Each Waymo currently costs ~$200,000 and is going to have a proportionally higher maintenance costs, and all of those costs must be covered by Google. So their costs are far higher than you're ballparking.
As for competition - Tesla has already launched a live robotaxi trial in Austin, so it's already here.
In any case, the overall point is the same -- it's a vastly larger market than Search. And what Waymo currently charges, and the current cost of their cars, is irrelevant. Waymo's business model isn't based on the economics this year or next year. It's based on the economics ten and twenty years from now, when costs have fallen dramatically as they switch to cheaper models and gain massive economies of scale.
As for Tesla, it's hard to take seriously given all the promises it's made and completely failed to deliver on. Their trial currently has a safety human in a front seat and is limited to a tiny group of testers. It's so many years behind Waymo already, and it's unclear if the technological approach it's taking will ever be able to catch up or meet minimal safety requirements.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
Does autonomy make so much difference? Uber drivers are not well paid, and the Waymo sensor suite is very expensive today.
How many people would pay for such a luxury car? With the US population aging and public transit non-existent in most places, Waymo probably has a market for cars.
That’s probably $1000-2000 per car, or about a penny a mile.
I’m not sure how much a few lidars will cost at scale. The compute board is a few hundred. Modern cars already have plenty of cameras.
All that matters at this point is how much money they'll lose/earn in the future. There are no shortage of investors willing to put money into this effort, and they're growing exponentially, so there won't be any pressure for them to turn overall profitable for several more years.
If Waymo is at breakeven including capex, opex, and overhead, operations logistics becomes the limiting factor. While Alphabet is capable of investing more money into Waymo, I think they've reached the tipping point. If you see Waymo expansion accelerate, bet on that tipping point having been reached.
Waymo's older than Uber, but they hold many key patents by this point. Now that they've started running a taxi service, it seems straightforwards to scale up, assuming that is the business they want to be in. Then it's just a matter of charging more than it costs to run the service, and wait.
Growth tells you the eventual profits will be bigger. Leadership and moat gives certainty that the company will actually get the profits for the market they grew.
In the Netherlands this is already sometimes possible if your work is close to a train station while your house is too and you don’t need to switch trains. It’s a boon to be honest.
My favorite is the train from Amsterdam to Berlin.
Of course, if you carpool then you can do this too. One time I rode in a car as a passenger from Berlin to Prague while working the whole time. When we were there, we went to a DnB festival and we got back on the weekend.
Hybrid working is awesome :)
And self-driving cars could make it more awesome
So its not even about willingness to pay more
Gig drivers are cooked
If Waymo can drop its price by 50%, it could steal a lot of demand from normal cars and transit, but that doesn't seem like it's even on the conversation right now.
PS nice name.
They don't need to "catch up" to Waymo, because of the niche.
https://bigrigs.com.au/2024/04/18/driverless-trucks-trial-be...
2 trucks?! I suppose that's the minimum number required to make your pluralization correct.
I will stand on my earlier statement regarding this particular outfit: they'll need to catch up because Waymo started class 8 variants in 2021 https://waymo.com/blog/search/?t=Waymo%20Via
And Volvo rolled a class 8 as well.
One promising self driving truck startup, Aurora, was forced to put a safety driver back in the driver's seat after testing in May.
Lo and behold:
>A six-month trial of driverless trucks on public Victorian roads has been put on hold just hours before it was meant to begin after the transport union labelled it “shambolic” and “sneaky”
> "the futures of our truck drivers are jeopardised due to this poorly executed plan."
> “It’s unacceptable that these trials are being pushed by corporations that continue to disadvantage our hard-working mums and dads that work day in, day out to carry Victorians.”
Now this sounds far more like the Australia I know.
Looks like the entire trial was scrapped due to union pressure and never resumed. Same reason we can't even have Driver-Only Operation on NSW trains, despite specifically purchasing DOO trains that operate safely worldwide.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/-shambolic---victorian-dr...
Cruise was nixed by GM execs, whom I believe were looking for whatever excuse they could find to shut the operation down. They simply couldn't afford to stay in the game for the long haul. Cruise was under pressure to appear more capable than they were, and they took risks.
Waymo is distinguished in that it doesn't need to pander to nervous investors to keep getting money. The company is Sergei and Larry's baby. Google's founders will ensure that Waymo is patronized until it can stand on it's own.
Cruise's self driving license was suspended because humans displayed poor judgement by omitting from the official report details of their stopped car dragging a knocked-down accident victim under the car for dozens of feet. They took "risks" alright, and their harebrained cover-up was discovered by chance by the oversight body.
I believe any driver who covers up the details of injuries in an accident permanently lose their license, because they'll definitely do it again. What good is a self-driving subsidiary that can't operate on public roads?
Comma.ai is probably the purchase I'm most happy with this year (to be fair though, I buy a lot of crap off Temu). Drives are now just "get on the freeway, and just chill." Pay enough attention because it's not collected to GPS and just in case something goes wrong. So to be clear, Comma.ai is not autonomous driving, it's classified as an ADAS, advanced driving assistance program. It just makes driving suck that much less, especially in stop and go traffic, for $1,000, and compatible with recent vehicles that have built-in lane guidance features. Waymo's got to be light years ahead of them, given how much money they've spent, so it's my belief that Waymo's taking it very slow and cautious, and that their technology is much more advanced than we've been told.
But to be serious, there may be a way of doing it, it just seems very far off unless you're talking about Amazon hub or something like that, where it would be more feasible (but still difficult to achieve).
Short range drones are being used in Australia.
And I heard of at least one company working with apartment architects to standardize a “port” on the building exterior to which a truck/robot would connect to “inject” packages to the inside.
Last I read (late 2023 IIRC) these were being cancelled in various areas, if not everywhere? People in neighborhoods were getting annoyed by the noise of drones buzzing overhead.
Sadly, this would still be an improvement on many smaller delivery services that especially Amazon is fond of using.
There is no downside to having someone drive you Uber has homogenised the experience.
Quoting: "Perhaps even more striking is how people answered a question about whether they would be willing to pay more for a Waymo. Nearly 40% said they’d pay “the same or less.” But 16.3% said they’d pay less than $5 more per ride. Another 10.1% said they’d pay up to $5 more per ride. And 16.3% said they’d pay up to $10 more per ride."
There are going to be lots of causal factors: number of rider(s), time of day, safety, gender, wait time, price estimate, predictable arrival. Let's see an apples-to-apples comparison/regression breaking out each.
But in the long term I think the point of waymo is that it'll be cheaper: no need to pay the driver if there isn't one!
I had one rapidly cycle their prius between 50 and 70 on the freeway because regenerative brakes save gas (I felt carsick for hours after arriving at my destination), and another actually get an angry mob to tap on the windows and berate their driving. (The mob was justified.)
Since then, I’ve given up on using them whenever possible.
Weird take to me, unless you were on a lot of hills; at least in my Maverick [0] 55-65 is 'ideal' MPG range for long trips, going between speeds tends to trip things up and actually -avoid- the weird 'battery has enough juice where we just kinda lug the engine' mode.
Doing regenerative 'braking' compared to using physical brakes, absolutely can give energy for momentum/acceleration and save on the physical brakes wear and tear, OTOH any normal cyclist would say it's better to 'maintain' a given output power vs allowing deceleration and then going back up to speed.
As for why, well I'm not a physics person, but in general it's that you are having to overcome the rotational mass/etc of the wheels (i.e. tires, axles, etc), and no regenerative braking within the current laws of physics will make slowing down and speeding back up more efficient, at least on a flat road.
[0] - OK It ain't quite a prius but it works fairly close aside from overall drag...
Regenerative braking has < 100% round trip efficiency, so repeatedly speeding up and slowing down hurts gas mileage.
The driver thought it had > 100% efficiency. If that were the case, then the car would be a perpetual motion machine, and they’d save a ton on gas.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2025/02/aaa-fear-in-self-driving-ve...
I would need to see Waymo be able to handle something like Southeast Michigan before I could even get comfortable with trusting it to get me ubered t/o from home for maintaining the vehicle I need to commute when I can take a remote day or two...
And then also delivering that for a good cost.
I put it that way because, I do tip Uber drivers well (unless they cray cray) and they would need to properly 'undercut' uber with whatever model they serve up in more complex areas.
Waymo works in SF Chinatown btw, which is probably the most complicated locality in its driving zone.
but the companies that own them will or their insurance carriers.
Waymo may end up being great business. But it is unlikely to exceed what search is/was. For that reason, press X to doubt GP's claim that Alphabet is undervalued. "IT'S PRICED IN" [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/ever...
Not having to pay drivers is an enormous source of profit.
It could be a big business. In fact, I hope it is. Lives will be saved. But there is still a lot to be worked out, and the margins will never be as sweet as those of search.
If Waymo is a rounding error to GOOG, it's basically a rounding error to Tesla's implied valuation.
So what is Tesla valued in then?
Clearly not car sales, profit, and especially growth in either of those segments.
xAI is supposed to be where all the AI is.
Where is it?
Meanwhile, for Waymo, a good chunk of it is profit (after the fixed cost of the vehicle, of course).
The most important thing for Waymo is scaling up production of LIDAR and maintaining them efficiently. They will have a massive fleet running very sophisticated radar+computers. That's a huge logistical investment when it's a million cars. Those sensors will break or be damaged.
Uber's CEO compared it to Marriot, people come in to run the hotels in the local region, but they actually don't own the hotels. It's like hired managers who take a cut.
It also makes sense to have people with local experience run them in each local region. But those businesses still involve margins and expenses that have to make sense.
Most very rich people just sit and roll in their money in the finance markets like scrooge mcduck.
But… I think the performance in the whitehouse was performative nonesense.
What a waste of everyone’s time for the sake of appearances.
More building things, less dancing please Elon.
Perhaps that's simply the price of achievement, but Showman is apt
There are large swaths of people that accept headlines as fact and/or cannot or will not grapple with nuance and complexity (“I think Elon’s a jerk and he is a formidable engineer.”) Perhaps it’s a sign of these polarized times, or, as I believe, people have always been like this. We just have more time and resources to dedicate to outrage and flamewarring than we did in the past.
But since romantism we have built this image of the genius as necessarily abusive.
I’m sure abusive genius are very visible (by definition?) and that abusive people tend to monopolize more ressources too. (Like these tenured professors that use their students to advance their own career)
The forcing function is having so much responsibility and stress from running so many companies. You have no extra bandwidth for anything. All your time is spent.
So maybe look at comparable people with insane schedules/workloads/very high pressure situations.
The Boring Company is an obvious bust. So is the Hyperloop. Neuralink is another likely bust. Tesla solar is going nowhere. The Cybertruck is a millstone around Tesla's neck. Etc, etc.
Says who? I've tried it and the capabilities are amazing. If you told me 10 years ago that I would be able to buy this in 2025 I wouldn't have believed you.
But when I bought it, Elon was promoting hiring out your car as a FSD level 5 taxi when you weren't using it. If I regularly took my hands off the steering wheel and went for a snooze (if that was possible, which it isn't because they would be sued within an inch of their life), I'd be dead by now.
I think it was an engineer with found wealth starting to do stuff with it.
but nowadays I think he has evolved into something different, maybe some of it from the wild public feedback loop, some of it because some of the things he cares about are going wildly wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...
Furthermore, Elon Musk doesn't say that the Hyperloop "was a conspiracy designed to sabotage high speed rail." He is quoted in his biography as saying that he hates high speed rail, doesn't want them to build it, and thinks it's a waste of money. He also says that he had no intention of leading the effort to build Hyperloop himself, where he's directly quoted as saying, "Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can't take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla." The biographer speculates that this means it was a cynical ploy to get HSR cancelled, and I don't think it's unreasonable to infer this, but one could just as easily infer that Elon really did want the California legislature to build something akin to a Hyperloop instead.
There's no debating that Elon hates public transit, he'll tell you himself[1]. You don't have to spread misinformation to make that point
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
And the tweet below makes me question a lot about him. Doesn't sound like a genius to me.
"Lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention. If lidars/radars disagree with cameras, which one wins?
This sensor ambiguity causes increased, not decreased, risk. That’s why Waymos can’t drive on highways.
We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety. Cameras ftw."
More info on autopilot deaths (59 including 2 FSD):
Waymo’s had one fatality (other driver was at fault), but that’s not normalized by miles driven.
^^^ (they are)
> SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX 2nd paragraph
If the answer is no, then clearly the catalyst was Elon taking over
On topic, Waymo is clearly a first mover in self-driving, having the first legal commercial services.
But, being the first mover is usually more of a disadvantage than an advantage, IMHO.
Its a real and verifiable threat to their core business. Much larger rev than waymo (current and future).
If you get a great deal on your house and then massively overpay for some avocados, the latter's going to barely move your overall wealth.
And only last week did they even open up the waitlist to non-influencers.
The day this news was released, Elon released the video of him talking to the Optimus bot to overshadow the news. Showman gonna showman.
If I create a shuttle bus service for my neighborhood and call it the "Space Shuttle", I am not operating a space shuttle.
That’s the optimistic bull case. It’s not impossible.
Tesla will be able to scale Robotaxi much quicker than Waymo can scale.
https://abc.xyz/investor/sec-filings/quarterly-filings/2025/
Tesla still has no autonomous vehicle that customers can actually buy, let alone rent back for taxi service. So any "strategy" remains entirely hypothetical.
Not only that, but also they could probably raise 10 times that much by creating new shares and selling them (if they had a plausible story to tell investors as to why the money would be well spent).
But instead they made an ideological stand on cameras only, and they’re helmed by an unhinged drug addict who lies constantly, to the point many who once would have loved to buy an actual self-driving Tesla now won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, even if they do someday deliver an L4 experience.
I really, really hope Waymo licenses their tech. I think that would stomp Tesla into the ground once and for all.
SpaceX has landed orbital boosters 500 times, and STILL no one else has done it.
Teslas drive millions of miles autonomously (yes supervised, but still) every day.
You can't even type a response without containig your political/social bias on anything related to Musk.
It doesn't appear Tesla can achieve level 3 autonomy given Musk's ideological opposition to lidar. Without lidar, the AI has to be 100% accurate, and it's not and won't be for the foreseeable future.
As they say in Maine, "You can't get there from here."
I trust Karpathy when it comes to lidar vs vision. Do you shoot lasers out of your head to drive?
Anyway, time will tell. I think in 2 years or less, Tesla will be absolutely dominant in autonomous ridesharing in the US.
That's a 34x divide. At full scale that's something like 30% of Teslas having an intervention every day.
Teslas is also much cheaper, and easier to scale. Tesla has better growth potential even if their tech is less impressive.
Even worse (for Tesla) is that if they do try an make their non-FSD tech do FSD, and it decks little jimmy because the flashlight in his hand looked like a far off street light, Tesla is liable to face a knee-jerk federal law mandating lidar. And just like that the dream is dead.
This forces Tesla to be extremely paranoid, as it's one visual mistake away from being told to use lidar.
I’m not even sure that Waymo number is still correct. They’re doing hundreds of thousands of paid rides per week, with no one in the front seat, so not sure what an “intervention” even means at that point. Maybe where the passenger needed help and called support? That’s 1000x better than needing to grab the wheel because your Tesla was about to drive into oncoming traffic or run over a kid in a wheelchair.
Also philosophically I don’t see how a big neural network will create such evasive maneuvers, unless you try to create such scenarios in a simulator and collect evasive data. Seems prohibitively expensive to do so in the real world.
You don't live in a Waymo city, so I understand. A lot of people who don't live in a Waymo city don't really get it.
Waymo is a completely different product than FSD. It's a robot that comes and drives you from point A to point B. You can do whatever you want while it's driving, such as take a nap or work on your laptop.
That is false. No Tesla is capable of full self-driving.
Mandatory supervision by a human on the driver’s seat is not full self-driving, no matter how much Elon insists on calling it that.
This is a huge jump, possibly still 5+ years away.
Ummm.
I wouldn't not be surprised if they figure out some very narrow way to have no safety driver in the car (1:1 remote ops?) by the end of the year.
Ignore his predictions and just... look at whether or not the Tesla FSD team is making progress.
I'm seriously baffled by this comment. How can Elons comments not be relevant? How are you proposing we assess the progress of the FSD team? And why should the assessment be different to the last 5 years where FSD was supposedly ready (according to someone with intimate insight into the work of the FSD team) by the end of the year?
...any metric you want? Miles driven under FSD. Miles driven without intervention. Miles driven without accident. Anecdata from friends of yours who own a Tesla. Whether or not a partially supervised pilot program has been launched in some cities.
If Elon Musk said in 1999 "I think we will achieve self-driving next year", that also has no bearing on whether or not self-driving is achieved in 2025 (in either the positive or negative direction). It only means that Elon Musk's "predictions" can't be trusted as an accurate harbinger of success. Which is precisely why you look beyond his words and at the reality on the ground, which strongly indicates Tesla has made a huge amount of progress in the last 10 years, and could be very close to having unsupervised robotaxi service in various jurisdictions.
If we talk about anecdotal evidence then I know people who are deeply familiar with the topic (working of self driving technology at other manufacturers) and they say fully self driving is still many years away for all manufacturers. Moreover the general industry sentiment is that Tesla is behind now and that more sensors then just cameras are needed.
But instead I should believe the Tesla fan boys who just like Musk have been raving about the amazing progress and telling me that FSD is just around the corner for years.
Sure, if you pretend that highway lane-keeping and universal A-to-B navigation are the same thing.
"What competitors say" is quite possibly the worst anecdata you could find as a broad rule, no? There is a wide gap between that and "Tesla fan boys".
Is it fully self-driving, like Waymo? If not, then I'd lump it in with anything else that isn't fully self-driving. Either I can safely and legally nap while commuting or I cannot. Something that requires me to actively supervise the car and intervene as necessary is not self-driving, it is drive assist.
> "What competitors say" is quite possibly the worst anecdata you could find as a broad rule, no?
The post you're responding to is not simply repeating what competitors say, it is speaking of using data to avoid trusting what anybody says. Thus, this isn't a fair comparison. It should also be noted that you yourself suggested that the poster use anecdata.
That said, what tesla says about themselves is even worse than what tesla competitors say, if only because tesla is infamously untrustworthy, and their competitors are not.
But again: don't listen to what tesla et al say they will someday do, compare the data for tesla's drive assist vs tesla competitors' drive assist.
- No, Teslas are not fully self-driving like Waymo. Alas, Waymo isn't the only competitor. The parent comment I replied to was lumping all driving assist together, as if Ford BlueCruise, which is highway-only driving, is comparable to current iterations of Tesla FSD, which has the capability to take you from point A to point B without a geofence ("universal A-to-B navigation") and with zero driver intervention required. That includes the ability to handle traffic lights, stop signs, roundabouts, pedestrians and cyclists, etc. Basically none of the other driver assists claim that capability (besides Waymo), and Waymo very notably has not allowed their cars to drive on highways in the majority of jurisdictions in which they operate (I believe LA is the only highway driving being done at the moment for Waymo). Tesla FSD however remains unreliable, which is why they haven't launched a full driverless service like Waymo, but Tesla FSD has more (unreliable) capabilities than any of their competitors, Waymo included. Reliability is super important though, which is why I'd say Waymo is clearly ahead.
- Not all anecdotal evidence is created equal. I suggested a specific type of anecdata – asking a friend (read: someone you trust who you think has broadly good judgement) who actually has a Tesla with the FSD package a question like "have you seen significant improvement in the self-driving capabilities of this car?" or "have you had any drives where your Tesla took your from home to where you needed to go, with zero interventions on your part?". Asking a GM employee "is your competitor doing a better job than you" is a very different type of anecdata and not something I personally would rely on. Mind you, I think asking a friend about their personal experience isn't great either, and that the other measures I suggested are much better, but it is still much better than "competitors say".
You're saying "as if X is comparable" as if it is not comparable, but I and the other poster are saying it is comparable.
> ...which has the capability to take you from point A to point B without a geofence ("universal A-to-B navigation") and with zero driver intervention required.
Tesla "FSD" can absolutely, categorically, not do that. It requires the driver to constantly pay attention, to supervise, to mind the car, and importantly, to intervene when "FSD" fails. As I understand it, tesla will literally ban you from the "FSD" feature if you actually use it as FSD (hands off wheel, etc).
> Tesla FSD has more (unreliable) capabilities than any of their competitors
Unless it can actually fully self-drive (read: not require anything from the passenger), that just makes it a slightly more glorified lane assist, in my eyes.
> I suggested a specific type of anecdata
The request was over-specified: A tesla owner is far less likely to provide accurate, unbiased anecdata than an employee of a competitor, so I can see why the other poster volunteered the latter -- it is much better than "tesla owner says".
Tesla FSD absolutely, categorically, can do that, assuming we agree that "intervention" means "take over for the car". Teslas are driving people from their starting point to their destination without any driver intervention, every single day. Are you being willfully obtuse when it comes to the distinction I am making between capability and consistency? Yes, you need to have both for a robotaxi service or to call the vehicle truly "driverless". If you don't have that reliability/consistency, it is indeed reckless to not have someone in the driver's seat.
If you really can't see the distinction, your eyes are blind. It's the difference between being driven by a toddler and by your alcoholic uncle. Your uncle has the capability, but he is frequently drunk so you wouldn't trust him to be your chauffeur. A toddler doesn't have the capability in the first place. Sober up your uncle though and the world is your oyster. But the toddler needs to do a lot of growing before it'll get you anywhere.
> A tesla owner is far less likely to provide accurate, unbiased anecdata than an employee of a competitor, so I can see why the other poster volunteered the latter
This is silly. I wouldn't apply that standard to anything else, and I doubt you would either. Who would you trust more to give you honest feedback about a Vitamix blender – your friend with good judgement who owns one, or an employee at KitchenAid?
> assuming we agree that "intervention" means "take over for the car"
I don't think that's a safe assumption. If something requires my full attention and body movement for the entire drive, I would not consider that FSD.
> This is silly. I wouldn't apply that standard to anything else, and I doubt you would either. Who would you trust more to give you honest feedback about a Vitamix blender – your friend with good judgement who owns one, or an employee at KitchenAid?
Assuming good faith here, that you genuinely aren't aware of this, but I regret to inform you that the biased fanaticism of tesla owners is unmatched by nearly any other car company (maybe ferrari is a rival there), or indeed nearly any company at all. Thus, given 2 people, one a tesla owner, the other an owner of a tesla competitor, the latter is more likely to be an unbiased source on teslas or vehicles in general than the former. I thought the last paragraph of my previous post explained this, but here we are, so I'll explain better next time.
- Saying "these are not comparable" is not colloquially the same as saying "these things are literally incomparable". Everything is of course comparable. But you should actually compare them if you want to play this game. Explain to me how the systems are in the same league – you have yet to do so. Instead, you keep repeating they are comparable as if that is all you need to do. If it helps, I will rephrase to say "these things are not equivalent", so that you can stop making what is apparently just a semantic argument. In fact, I did do that in a previous comment, when I said "X and Y are not the same", and that is clearly the point I have been making this whole time (clear to anyone not acting in bad faith).
- "one other commenter agrees with me, therefore you are clearly wrong, not because I've made a coherent argument, or because you are factually wrong, but because one person (might) agree with me". Hahaha, nice one. I needed a good chuckle.
- being ready and paying attention are not what it means to intervene. That is why there are phrases like "be ready to intervene". Once again you seem to be trying to make a pointless semantic argument (and the semantics aren't even on your side). I'm happy to use whatever word you want to describe the behavior of "not moving the wheel or pressing the brake/accelerator pedal". Intervene is a great word to use here and what everyone else uses, but if you are struggling with it we can use whatever word you want, because word choice is besides the point.
- Tesla FSD is a product name. You continuing to put it in scare quotes serves little purpose besides making you type more characters and apparently confusing yourself. I've already agreed that a system which requires you to pay attention and be ready to intervene is not driverless. That was never a point I was making. Me using the name of the product is not some sneaky attempt to pretend they have achieved autonomy. It is just a product name.
- As far as I can remember, I didn't say "some random Tesla owner". I also didn't say "ask someone holding a bunch of TSLA calls". You can just say you don't have any friends who own a Tesla – no need to go around in circles and/or pretend I was saying something that I wasn't.
In short, your opinions have been heard, and so have the opinions of the other person you were responding to, and having heard both, I judge that the other poster's are more convincing than yours. You are, of course, free to re-re-re-assert your opinions even more assertively, but that tactic is, to say the least, unconvincing, and asserting that everyone who disagrees with you must have no friends with a tesla does not help your case either.
I agree, but this is how taxis/Ubers work.
It's like what 6-7 years since the goal was "end of the year".
- You're uncritically parroting the notoriously untrustworthy talking points of a notoriously untrustworthy company, and HN posters expect more critical thought in comments.
- You're redirecting to some rumored "goal" rather than a realistic prediction, which was the topic, and HN posters liked the topic.
- HN posters may think that your vested interest in tesla behooves you to think more critically than the average person on matters involving tesla, rather than less, to overcome any implicit bias you might have.
- I have a goal of end-of-month, so that means I'll have it even sooner than tesla, right? This is how many view the claim by tesla, except I, a random person, literally have less of a reputation for dissembling and failure to deliver than tesla does.
They literally moved that monitor to the driver's seat! Progress, indeed.