| I use FSD in my Model S daily to commute from SF to Palo Alto along with most of my other Bay Area driving. It does a better job currently than most people and it drives me 95% of the time now I haven't had the phantom braking. I'm in a 2025 with HW4, but it's dramatic improvement over the last couple of years (previously had a 2018 Model 3) increased my confidence that Elon was right to focus on vision. It wasn't until late last year where I found myself using it more than not, now I use it almost every drive point to point (Cupertino to SF) and it does it. I think people are generally sleeping on how good it is and the politicization means people are under valuing it for stupid reasons. I wouldn't consider a non Tesla because of this (unless it was a stick shift sports car, but that's for different reasons). Their lead is so crazy far ahead it's weird to see this reality and then see the comments on hn that are so wrong. Though I guess it's been that way for years. The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case. I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem. If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off. I'd really encourage people to here with a bias to dismiss to ignore the comments and just go in real life to try it out for yourself. |
This is not a general solution, it is an SF one... at best.
Most humans also don't get in accidents or have problems with phantom breaking within the timeframe that you mentioned.