[ajross]

Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.

It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.

They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.

[breve]

> But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.

Tesla is a car company. Every car company is a competitor to Tesla.

As a legacy EV manufacturer, Tesla is struggling to compete in the current car market. Tesla's sales have declined for the last two years.

It's why they're having to squeeze fewer customers for more revenue.

[ajross]

Clearly I needed to be more precise: Tesla's vehicle autonomy features have no meaningful competition in the consumer auto space, period. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise is flogging some kind of angle, generally a political one. And I say this as someone who despises Musk's politics. But the cars his company makes are way, way, way ahead on this particular feature.

[nradov]

Is that a joke? Tesla's consumer vehicle autonomy features are ahead in some ways but way behind GM and Mercedes-Benz in others. In particular the Mercedes Drive Pilot system is true SAE level 3 where the manufacturer assumes legal liability for vehicle operation. Tesla has nothing like that available to consumers.

[ajross]

Drive Pilot cannot perform a single one of the maneuvers I listed above.

It's just a stunt. They took a machete to the feature set to find Just One Thing that would meet the requirements. All it does is use radar to follow another car on a selection of fixed, geofenced limited access highways. It can't handle the leader changing lanes, or going too fast (won't even get to the speed limit). It won't navigate, it won't change lanes. It can't even operate on an open road.

But it's "L3V31 THr333", so otherwise rational nerds get to yell about it on the internet. No one actually shows this thing off in their cars, it's not useful for real driving. FSD drives me around literally every day.

[Eggpants]

And yet Tesla won’t take responsibility for FSD mistakes. I had one and it’s amazing when it works but it did try to kill me a number of times.

[sizzle]

GM supercruise is pretty sweet and hands free on my lyriq

[breve]

And it's just a shame that it's not helping them sell cars and it has never lived up to what Tesla claimed they would deliver?

[thebigman433]

> Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.

The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area

[ajross]

> If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area

It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several.

I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers.

I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it costs money. FSD is in fact market leading.

[digitalPhonix]

> It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee

Eh? Insurance? Registration? Not a fee but ok, ongoing cost. That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.

> FSD is in fact market leading.

The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.

[ajross]

> That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.

It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".

> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.

The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.

[1718627440]

I'm not repaying for the same fuel, I am paying for new fuel. I'm not rebuying for the same insurance, I pay for the potential accidents in a time frame. With registration I am paying for the wear I am inflicting on the public roads for a time frame. I expect to own the car and it is staying the same. Paying for it again is called renting.

[Mawr]

> and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.

Waymos have been driving around autonomously for years; meanwhile Tesla taxis have a human in the car ready to activate a kill switch at all times. Therefore, your statement is objectively false.

EDIT: Oops, this isn't quite correct anymore — as of two days ago, in a geofenced area of Austin, Tesla has moved the safety person to a follower car: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....

[lern_too_spel]

It's a stunt. If they believed it worked, they wouldn't need somebody dedicated to monitoring it for the entire time it's on the road. Having nobody in the car looks cool, but there is nothing different about the car's self driving capability, and the economics are even worse than having the safety driver in the car.

[ajross]

It's no different on a technical level than Waymo using remote operators. Presumably Tesla just hasn't wired that up, or doesn't plan to.

FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.

And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.

[lern_too_spel]

> It's no different....

Waymo doesn't have one or more operators dedicated to each vehicle for the entire time it is on the road. That is massively different. The latest disengagement data for FSD 14 shows that Tesla is still behind where Waymo was more than a decade ago.

[array_key_first]

No it's entirely different on a technical level, because waymos always drive themselves. The human operators don't drive, and in fact can't, they can only make decisions that the car then executes.

Waymos are autonomous vehicles, Tesla has some vehicles which may operate autonomously in certain circumstances. There's a big difference.

[ajross]

Waymo's operators can absolutely control the vehicles directly. I'm not sure what you're trying to cite here. The only effective difference in architecture here is where, physically, the backup operator sits.

I know it's upsetting to think that someone you hate has a good product, but... they do. Arguing on the internet isn't rolling back the launch.

[array_key_first]

They can't, they don't have a steering wheel or remote controller or anything. And this is supported by the fact that waymos are actually level 4 autonomous, and Tesla's are not.

This has nothing to do with Elon musk. From a purely technical standpoint, no - Tesla DOES NOT have autonomous vehicles to the level of their competitors. It's not a matter of opinion.