[petilon]

But they just delivered "Smart Summon" feature where the car drives itself to you in a parking lot. The rollout of this feature has been glitchy. But it gives them a lot of data which they will learn from and improve. Once they fix all the bugs in Smart Summon they will have made a major step forward. Self-driving safely in a parking lot is very hard--there may be kids walking about randomly, other cars moving in unpredictable ways, and so on. In fact, my guess is that self-driving in a parking lot is harder than self-driving in city streets, because there are more rules, more room and more predictability in city streets.

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla delivers city-street self-driving in a year or two.

[jcranmer]

That reminds me of the canard I haven't seen in quite some time: "Tesla is going to win the self-driving race because they've got the most data!" Has this died because people have started to finally understand that the logic doesn't actually hold, or is it because Musk/Tesla have stopped promising that full self-driving is actually imminent?

[petilon]

It hasn't died, the logic holds, and Tesla is still promising self-driving is actually imminent.

In addition to the most data, Tesla also has the best self-driving computing hardware you can buy today. (See autonomy day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE ) They also have top software people. I think Tesla may very well release full self-driving in the next couple of years.

[bluGill]

Parking lots are hard for the reasons you mention, but they are also easier because the speeds are slow. Hit a kid at 5mph and it is probably not harmful, and even if it would be you get a lot more cycles to recognize the problem and need to react vs if you were driving at high speed.