[Flemlord]

Tesla has been shipping cars with integrated self-driving hardware for years. Every car is transmitting data back to Tesla. They have been turning on additional self-driving features every few months for years.

Tesla is doing a limited beta of full self driving now which will be widely expanded in just a few months. I don’t understand how anybody but Tesla is poised to have self driving cars in the near future.

[wefarrell]

Waymo currently has self driving cars on public roads today, with actual paying customers: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...

Meanwhile Tesla has taken no steps to get approval from regulators (feel free to prove me wrong). Until they start to do so, their self driving program is pure vaporware.

Also, to date they have shipped no features that they are legally allowed to call "self driving" or "autonomous".

[nickik]

Waymo has self driving cars with a tiny amount of paying customers in a tiny are losing 10s of millions of dollars every year.

Tesla on the other-hand is MAKING money with self driving technology already.

What something is called doesn't really matter, I bet on the company that has 100ks to millions of cars with advanced self-driving computers and hardware on the road in daily use over a company that has a couple 100 cars in Arizona any day.

The complexity of self driving is in the complexity of the road network in the real world. The only way to solve it is to have millions of cars learning all the complexity and finding the corner cases.

The real money in self driving is not offering ride-share in small geo-locked areas.

[wefarrell]

Tesla does not have any self-driving cars on the road today:

"Yes. Autopilot is a hands-on driver assistance system that is intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver. It does not turn a Tesla into a self-driving car nor does it make a car autonomous."

https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot

[nickik]

I never claimed they have. I said they are making money with the technology, those are different things.

And you fail to respond to my actual point.

[wefarrell]

They are making money with a technology that is neither self driving nor autonomous. It's driver-assist, which places it in the same category as navigation or cruise control.

If you compare Tesla to the other companies working on self driving, the only meaningful milestone where Tesla leads is the number of fatalities. The reason why Cruise and Waymo have not been as aggressive as Tesla in rolling out features to the general public is caution.

When it comes to gauging self-driving progress the most meaningful metric to look at is progress towards regulatory approval in more markets. It doesn't matter how _capable_ they are, if they can't demonstrate to regulators that they're able to safely operate then they won't be in the market. Tesla needs to step up and start making progress towards legally operating actual self-driving vehicles.

[nickik]

The point is that Tesla is making money, with the people they have heir to do the work and have a path towards self-driving that is not inherently money losing.

Saying that having a single car that is approved for self driving in a single geographic are is far more advanced then millions of cars that can drive with incredibly advanced driver assists literally all over the world is just an incredibly terrible way to measure progress towards the eventual full solution.

Its simply not a way of measuring progress that I is reasonable.

> aggressive as Tesla in rolling out features to the general public is caution

Its because they have a technology platform that simply can't be sold commercially as they are specialized vehicles. Plus these are not system that have been developed to work with a driver, its simply a totally different process of development.

[Gustomaximus]

I think the position is then;

- Waymo seems to be ahead in some targeted ring fenced areas given active service.

- Tesla seems to be more ready for nationwide rollout due to already collecting nationwide driver data + cars.

The question is which one is more likely to result in a broad scale market first, or other significant market revenue generating position.

It seems likely Tesla could roll out taxis to a ringfenced area in Phoenix (or similar ideal area) relatively easily. While Waymo is a long way from offering a nationwide service compared to Tesla. This in my mind puts Tesla ahead but there probably a bunch of other factors known and unknown too.

[wefarrell]

"It seems likely Tesla could roll out taxis to a ringfenced area in Phoenix (or similar ideal area) relatively easily"

Not legally.

[rcxdude]

Tesla 'self-driving' (even 'full self driving') is a rebranded driver assist (although an advanced one). Not only is Tesla behind the others, they're basically in completely different worlds. No-one I've talked to in the self-driving car industry considers their approach to have merit if you're looking for an actually autonomous car. This is an excellent example of how marketing can decieve.