Because lying about having "full self driving" is easy if you have no shame. Making a product that works and can pass regulatory muster to create a no-driver robotaxi is hard.
Tesla's FSD has different approach / tradeoffs compared to dedicated robotaxi services. FSD has to be cheap and energy efficient, run completely on-board, and it must work everywhere. They're trying to do more with less, which has so far been impossible. Their cybercab and robotaxi service will probably work more like Waymo, with a slightly relaxed set of limitations.
Some differences compared to Waymo:
- Waymo has / can use more on-board compute, from [0] "It has also been revealed that Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements."
- Waymo uses remote operators. This includes humans but can also have remote compute.
- Waymo's neural network model can be trained / overfit on specific route or area. FSD uses the same model everywhere.
- Waymo's on-board hardware can use more energy, because it's possible to charge the battery between trips.
- Robotaxi services charge customers per mile, so it makes sense to run longer routes which are also easier to drive, i.e. the routing algorithm can be tuned to avoid challenging routes. This would be possible to implement on FSD too, but it seems that FSD drives fastest route.
You'd think the biggest win would be in the middle:
We have an interstate highway system that's fairly well-maintained and understood, and is a finite space to map. Hypertrain on that, and you can offer an experience of 10 minutes hands-on-wheel at the start and end of the journey, and 3 hours of doomscrolling in the driver's seat. The highway miles are the most boring, both from a surprise-hazard standpoint and from a driver's-attention standpoint (there's nothing cool or interesting to see except the trunk lid of the car in front of you)
It offers a nationwide level of service that Waymo's city-by-city rollout lacks, and the chance for route-specific hueristics that Tesla's cameras-and-local-compute might miss.
Waymo specifically claims they never do remote human piloting. The car will present a remote human operator a choice of routes to get out of a situation, and the human will pick one. Remote piloting is way too risky.
Yes, definitely. "remote operator" is a human or an LLM which is able to make high-level decisions (i.e. what to do in a novel weird situation), but doesn't directly pilot the vehicle. Generally speaking, on-board compute is fast and stupid, and remote compute or a human is slow and smart.
I don't think that cars will have SOTA level LLMs running locally for a long time, and it seems that they actually need that kind of intelligence for full autonomy. However, it might also be totally fine if the passenger makes the difficult high-level decisions through a voice interface.
All decisions are made by the Waymo vehicle itself.
The vehicle can ask human remote operators for recommendations or clarification, but the vehicle itself decides whether to use them. Most of the time, the vehicle doesn't end up needing it.
The system though provides a way to let humans create training data for edge cases.
Well, I'd understand why it's difficult to extend to nationwide or even statewide just because of all the variations in road/driving conditions. So I can get how FSD never got certified at either scale. However, given their experience and plethora of data collected, I would have expected they'd be among the first get robotaxis in select cities. Idk, just struck me as odd is all. I figured I'd tee off this comment because someone might have an more informed insight into the why of it.
Tesla has been working on improving a level 2 system that works everywhere while Waynlmo has been working on expanding the capabilities and coverage of their level 4 system that works in limited areas and requires detailed mapping.
Tesla has yet to get good enough to achieve level 4 so they can't actually run a robotaxi yet. Tesla's bet is that if they can reach level 4 with their approach, they'll be able to roll out robotaxis much more widely than Waymo can.
So far, the bet has not paid off and Tesla needs it to pay off before Waymo's slower rollout gets too far ahead.
You left out the key word in that phrase, “full”. Tesla cars have autonomous driving features that require a human in the driver seat to take over in case the autonomous features shut off. That’s not “full self driving”.
There's a word in GP's post that you elided. "Full" means a human doesn't need to be supervising, and it works outside of the heavily mapped and stable conditions of LA.
Four lanes, left to right: straight+left, right turn only, concrete divider, right turn only, right turn only. Note that there are only two lanes when you turn right, so you can turn into the rightmost lane from lane 2, the leftmost lane from lane 3, rightmost from lane 4.
Traffic lights (four signals) on the far end of the intersection work thus:
1. Left two lane lights turn green (Right two lanes are red). You can have traffic going straight, left or right. Traffic in lane 2 can turn right, but lanes 3 and 4 cannot.
2. Right two lane lights turn green, left red. Lane 2 cannot turn right but lanes 3 and 4 can.
All the lights are circles, no arrows. The only indication of weirdness is that there's a "No turn on red".
Tesla is also the leader in terms of crashes, injuries, and fatalities. On a per-mile basis, they're the most dangerous advanced driving system in the world and it's not even close.
And they all do it better than Tesla. 0 fatalities. 0 injuries. 0 crashes where the self-driving was at fault (but a few where the car behind them crashed into them).
Glorified cruise control does not equal self driving. I know everyone has to hate on Tesla, but FSD in its current form is a decade ahead of these. It doesn't take long looking at videos of actual people using these systems to understand the massive capability gap between Teslas FSD and everyone elses driver assistance system.
Because calling a feature “Full Self Driving” is a lot easier than making a car that is capable of fully driving itself without a human at the wheel to immediately take over in situations that regularly occur.
There are advertised features of Teslas that are vaporware, but it’s a stretch to call them vaporware. xAI is also very real. Others have mentioned SpaceX. He bought Twitter/X but that’s not vaporware either. Neuralink is also real. The Boring Company has only dug 2 short tunnels so far, so the case can be made for calling that vaporware.
He owned a company that merged with Confinity, which had already built a prototype of PayPal, registered trademarks, etc. at the time of merger.
He was made CEO. For four months. Which he spent trying to throw out the prototype written in Java because he only knew ASP.
Then the board fired him in absentia, the morning he left for his honeymoon. Not asked him to resign, not "focus on his family", but the moment he's gone, fired his ass.
Musk's contribution to the non-vaporware PayPal is "cashing the dividend checks".
I certainly hope they won't be the last. For a healthy market, we need at least 3 viable competitors. Waymo is viable, Cruise has pulled out, and Tesla is questionable.
Idk, every competitors system at this point is basically glorified lane keep adaptive cruise control. Similar to the standard Tesla Autopilot but far from Tesla's FSD.