| Waymo and Cruise make a car autonomous allowing it to drive with no driver in the seat for tens of thousands of miles on average between incidents. Tesla FSD requires a driver in the seat to be operated safely, and explicitly does not make the car autonomous as stated on their website [1]. Tesla FSD is explicitly not labeled as a Autonomous Driving System (ADS) by Tesla to avoid mandatory NHTSA [2] and CA DMV [3][4] incident reporting requirements and Tesla does not and has not ever had a driverless testing permit. For that matter, although Tesla does have a permit for ADS testing with a safety driver, they have not done any in years. In addition, Tesla FSD is lucky to go a few tens to low hundreds of miles between safety-critical interventions (hard to get reliable numbers since Tesla does not report official numbers). Waymo and Cruise with a safety driver average tens of thousands [5]; literally 100x-1000x better. This analysis also ignores qualitative differences in ability, like how Tesla FSD still can not recognize basic signs such as “Do Not Enter” and “One Way”. It is lacking even basic functionality. [1] https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde... [3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto... [4] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto... [5] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/02/17/2022-disen... |
Tesla is attempting something different: driving anywhere, just like a human can drive anywhere. It's a more difficult problem so it takes longer.