> I’m guessing it works better on some Californian roads that have been carefully hand-tuned by Tesla so they can show the Boss an illusion of progress.
It has nothing to do with “the boss”. It’s just basic bias of where the engineers are and where testing happens.
> So does Tesla, and they’re explicitly mapping and testing areas driven by popular influencers.
This seems like a nonsensical swing at Tesla. They have literally 100000s of people on the road with FSD in all of the US.
Claiming that its a few influences is just outright lying.
You are also totally wrong in your understanding of how Tesla FSD works. They are not mapping those areas, save those maps and make them available to other cars. That is explicitly not what they are doing.
More accurate to say that they are building a training set with the input from 100000s of cars driving around literally all over the US.
>> You're going to have to explain to me how the wealth of a driver has any bearing on their ability to pilot a self-driving car.
It doesn't. But autopilot is only supposed to be used on the highway. Not in New York City. Not on dirt roads. On the highway. That's the easiest place to make a system like that work - adaptive cruise control and a simple lane follower go a long way there (I hope Tesla has something a lot more advanced than that). To compare stats on their limited use autopilot to the whole country is truly disingenuous.
> But right now, I want long distance automation, and I can handle the messy last mile.
Me too, and my Tesla handles daytime good-weather non-construction highway driving pretty well with just the standard autosteer. I finish a long road trip much less fatigued in a Tesla than I have in any other car. (Part of that is the seats. Tesla really sweats the details of making seats comfortable.)
But FSD is kind of a sad joke. Off-highway navigation only works in particular major cities, the car stops at green lights, tries to turn right from the left lane, etc. And Elon thinks that's worth an extra $15k. Nope. It really isn't, at least for me.
>You can't even go 400km/h on the Autobahn, which roads are they building this for?
They're competing against ferrari/lamborghini/mclaren. The top speed is for the track, not the street. That should be quite obvious....
> I call bullshit on this. 1000km range and 400km/h top speed?
The range is clearly not based on going the top speed for the duration. The distance Tesla gives is typically based on a combined city/highway driving profile. They also provide calculators to estimate your range bssed on the mixture as well as a map program that tells you where you'd need to charge getting from point A to point B if you're going on a long-distance trip.
> Maybe if Waymo demonstrates that they can drive on and off all major highways in the world without hd mapping of them. Then i might believe they are ahead.
So, can Tesla do this right now?
Also, why should Waymo not use HD mapping when they clearly have the ability to do it? Seems like a weird criteria.
>with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction
Why do you believe that Tesla vehicles are driving millions of miles a month on autopilot?
I suspect that autopilot accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of Tesla miles-driven. Mostly because it sucks, but also because of how hard it is to not miss a nag on a long road trip, with the result that you are locked out of autopilot until your next stop.
(Yes, even when paying attention to the road, with your hands on the wheel. Hell, autopilot locks you out if you exceed 85 mph for more than a few seconds by pressing the accelerator, such as when passing. This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.)
I love the performance of my Model S Plaid. Autopilot, however, is a joke.
> Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles with (relatively) wealthy drivers who can afford to keep them maintained & will themselves be in better health than the mean US driver.
You're going to have to explain to me how the wealth of a driver has any bearing on their ability to pilot a self-driving car.
> and I wonder if a better one could be imagined + implemented...
There is a ton of data using industry defined conditions and a ton of research has gone into determining the types of conditions that can affect accident rates. The only reason we can't compare is because Tesla only releases what we see in the link above. [1]
Best guess estimates of normalizing autopilot data against the average mix of highway/city driving finds that AP's safety advantage effectively disappears. Of course this is rough and Tesla likely has much better data that they are choosing not to share. [2]
> So, Tesla autopilot stats should be compared to other comparably priced vehicles while driving on the highway ONLY.
I disagree. Autopilot driving on the highway should be compared to all human drivers driving on the highway. Otherwise you wouldn't be comparing against human performance per mile driven apples-to-apples.
> The problem I see is, Tesla is the only one actively testing autonomous driving.
No, they aren't.
They may be the only ones using consumer-operated vehicles as their test platform for the particular degree of automation that they are testing, but there may be very good, safety-related reasons why other people aren't doing that.
> Just because Tesla is profitable and making money by selling vehicles does not mean they are on a better path to engineering a self driving system than Waymo.
That not what I said, what it means it has more staying power.
> doesn't make any sense, and is not even true
What data are you basing this on? Are any of their operations profitable? If they are, why are they not expanding those operations to make more profit?
> I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.
Yeah, but Tesla didn't spend 7 years only focusing on Phoenix, so using that as a comparison is just dishonest.
You are stacking the field in favor of what you want the winner to be.
Here is my proposal for a more fair test on who is actually 'winning' self driving:
"You take a car, and put it on any random road anywhere in the world, how well can it navigate to any other random road in the world"
How well does Waymo do on that test? I would guess worse then Tesla.
That test is much closer to what it actually takes to really claim that self driving is 'solved'.
In my opinion neither are close to this and both will burn many more billions and many more years before getting there. So to just confidently claim Waymo is way ahead is nonsense in my opinion.
> As far as I understand from Tesla's progress, they need to merely cover ever more corner cases to go up the levels.
I think this is the crux of the disagreements here. You say they need to merely cover more corner cases, while I think many (including myself) think that this endless list of corner cases is the primary almost-insurmountable problem.
From what I've seen of Tesla FSD (and competitors), these systems do pretty well in highly structured and orderly environments during clear desert weather. In order to deal with chaos in a blizzard etc, we're going to need far more than just a few tweaks. At this point, none of these companies are even doing any testing in extreme environments. They're still trying to stop their cars from hitting pedestrians in well lit areas on known crossing points. [1]
> It doesn't matter what advanced driving systems you compare
It doesn’t matter? Sorry, but this is absurd. There are no other advanced driving systems on any production vehicles that is comparable to what Tesla is doing.
This kind of unbacked, vague, hand-wavey, arm-chair cynicism holds society back from making real progress. No thanks.
> Can anyone explain me what is fundamentally wrong with Tesla approach emotions aside.
The fundamental problem is testing on public streets technology that can very easily kill innocent bystanders if it doesn't work correctly.
I don't have a Tesla, but I'm still subject to the risk just by driving, biking and walking on public streets that Tesla thinks is their playground to test buggy new code.
> I always drive with the max distance to the next car when on autopilot.
This. Also the Tesla Model 3 max-distance setting is really not big enough for my taste, especially for winter driving. I have a feeling that it does not even satisfy the legal requirement of 1,5 seconds we have here.
It has nothing to do with “the boss”. It’s just basic bias of where the engineers are and where testing happens.
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