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"Traditional" self-driving stacks use a ton of pre-built maps, lidar and other range sensors, and has teams of people keeping those maps registered and up to date. Tesla's plan is (or has become) to do an end-run around all that, and just train a giant network on camera-only sensor stacks, so that it can navigate without large 3D representations of the environment / city in which it works, without expensive lidar/radar sensor suites, and to skip the "partner" phase that Waymo and others do with particular cities. This allowed them to bring me, a MN customer, something like lvl 3 autonomy before any other company did. But it might not have the same upper-bound as other, more fine-tuned approaches do, and having ridden in Waymo, Nuro, etc vs my own Tesla, I can tell you the Tesla is wonkier for it. Time will tell. |
I'm quite sure Mercedes-Benz was the first to bring lvl 3 autonomy on the market.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/mercedes-benzs-level-3-...
It is also the only carmaker confident enough in the system that it takes full liability over it
> Confidence in Drive Pilot is high within Mercedes-Benz, as the system has been active in Germany for over a year without incident. That confidence is demonstrated by Mercedes’ decision to assume liability for the vehicle while Drive Pilot is in use. That’s a particularly bold move since no other manufacturer offers that kind of assurance.