[christianqchung]

Tesla? I don't love the company or the owner, but it seems silly to completely dismiss them so early on, relatively speaking. Self driving has been a decades long effort; even though I am heavily in favor of Waymo, some speculation towards Tesla's path seems fair. At the same time, I agree with the article here:

> Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.

[porphyra]

Given that fully driverless Model Ys and Cybercabs have been spotted going around Austin, I find that the "they are not on a path to becoming a real service" is a little too strongly worded.

[lbourdages]

Given Tesla's abysmal track record on keeping their promises I feel like it is justified to dismiss them, at the risk of being surprised if they do make it.

[porphyra]

Both of these can be true at the same time:

* Elon has been making wildly exaggerated and over-optimistic claims for a decade and continues to do so

* Tesla has recently made huge strides in capability and has a clear path to full autonomy

And to be fair, many other car companies also promised self driving cars, e.g. Audi in 2014 promising driverless cars by 2016 [1]. It's just that Tesla is still executing on the promise whereas many other carmakers have fizzled out on their ambitions. As the Rodney Brooks article itself mentions,

> As a reminder of how strong the hype was and the certainty of promises that it was just around the corner here is a snapshot of a whole bunch of predictions by major executives from 2017.

[1] https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/a610930/audi-promises-to-del...

[denkmoon]

Tesla's commitment to no lidar means they aren't even in the race.