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by xnx 275 days ago
It would be great if Tesla figured out how to do safe autonomous driving with their very limited sensor suite, but there's a lot of reason to be skeptical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

I wouldn't not be surprised if they figure out some very narrow way to have no safety driver in the car (1:1 remote ops?) by the end of the year.

2 comments

1:1 is going to be ruinously expensive. You need three shifts of remote operators. Even in the Philippines or Vietnam, if you can make the latency work, that's prohibitive.
> 1:1 is going to be ruinously expensive.

I agree, but this is how taxis/Ubers work.

How do Elon Musk's predictions relate to Tesla achieving a robotaxi service or not?

Ignore his predictions and just... look at whether or not the Tesla FSD team is making progress.

> How do Elon Musk's predictions relate to Tesla achieving a robotaxi service or not? > > Ignore his predictions and just... look at whether or not the Tesla FSD team is making progress.

I'm seriously baffled by this comment. How can Elons comments not be relevant? How are you proposing we assess the progress of the FSD team? And why should the assessment be different to the last 5 years where FSD was supposedly ready (according to someone with intimate insight into the work of the FSD team) by the end of the year?

> How are you proposing we assess the progress of the FSD team?

...any metric you want? Miles driven under FSD. Miles driven without intervention. Miles driven without accident. Anecdata from friends of yours who own a Tesla. Whether or not a partially supervised pilot program has been launched in some cities.

If Elon Musk said in 1999 "I think we will achieve self-driving next year", that also has no bearing on whether or not self-driving is achieved in 2025 (in either the positive or negative direction). It only means that Elon Musk's "predictions" can't be trusted as an accurate harbinger of success. Which is precisely why you look beyond his words and at the reality on the ground, which strongly indicates Tesla has made a huge amount of progress in the last 10 years, and could be very close to having unsupervised robotaxi service in various jurisdictions.

If we use kilometers driven with drive assist as a metric then nearly car manufacturers will have robotaxis by the end of the year.

If we talk about anecdotal evidence then I know people who are deeply familiar with the topic (working of self driving technology at other manufacturers) and they say fully self driving is still many years away for all manufacturers. Moreover the general industry sentiment is that Tesla is behind now and that more sensors then just cameras are needed.

But instead I should believe the Tesla fan boys who just like Musk have been raving about the amazing progress and telling me that FSD is just around the corner for years.

> If we use kilometers driven with drive assist as a metric then nearly car manufacturers will have robotaxis by the end of the year.

Sure, if you pretend that highway lane-keeping and universal A-to-B navigation are the same thing.

"What competitors say" is quite possibly the worst anecdata you could find as a broad rule, no? There is a wide gap between that and "Tesla fan boys".

Never heard of "universal A-to-B navigation", that sounds like google maps.

Is it fully self-driving, like Waymo? If not, then I'd lump it in with anything else that isn't fully self-driving. Either I can safely and legally nap while commuting or I cannot. Something that requires me to actively supervise the car and intervene as necessary is not self-driving, it is drive assist.

> "What competitors say" is quite possibly the worst anecdata you could find as a broad rule, no?

The post you're responding to is not simply repeating what competitors say, it is speaking of using data to avoid trusting what anybody says. Thus, this isn't a fair comparison. It should also be noted that you yourself suggested that the poster use anecdata.

That said, what tesla says about themselves is even worse than what tesla competitors say, if only because tesla is infamously untrustworthy, and their competitors are not.

But again: don't listen to what tesla et al say they will someday do, compare the data for tesla's drive assist vs tesla competitors' drive assist.