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by beastman82 28 days ago
...except self driving, where Tesla and Waymo have enormous leads
5 comments

Holding tesla to the same standard as waymo is a wild take.
I've done 234 Waymo rides and ~5k miles driven FSD in a Model Y (HW4), all in and around the bay area.

The gap isn't that big. Tesla still needs supervision (most around navigation honestly). Waymo's have definitely done some really dumb things.

Waymo's certainly feel safer but if I had to choose which was the better "human driver" I'd put it on Tesla.

What worries me is that FSD in Tesla does seems to sometimes introduce problems in the driving behavior with new updates. I have not experienced this first hand ( don't own one ) but I am following the r/TeslaFSD and it looks like new versions are sometimes regressing on situations that were handled correctly on older versions.

This leads me to believe that FSD is not yet solved to the level we thought and training to handle a certain new thing correcty can degrade handling of other situations

I'm curious what is in your rubric to determine that a self driving car that doesn't need supervision is a worse driver than a car that does, by your own admission, need supervision.
99% of my FSD disengagements are navigation related: leaving it too late to merge into an exit lane (or CA drivers speeding up to not let me merge), not being aggressive enough at going into the opposing lane to overtake a stationary truck (though, it's a lot better at this in recent versions).

I can only recall one "oh shit" moment on an older FSD version when it carrier too much speed down a steep hill in SF and went through a 4-way stop and I had to slam the brakes. A lot of the strangeness / hesitance of previous FSD version is gone in the latest updates.

I don't expect self driving to be 100% perfect. I feel like FSD today is a 90th percentile human driver with super human reaction speed + visibility. Holding a "never gets into an accident" it too high of a bar. FSD consistently drives better than me (with the caveat of navigation: I know the city, I know which unprotected left turns are easy vs. hard, I know which routes tend to be faster due to local conditions, etc).

FSD is excellent in how reactive it is to thing you don't even see: e.g. car on the 101 at slightly drifts into my lane, I didn't notice it, FSD reacted. I feel WAY more unsafe now riding in an Uber vs. hands off FSD'ing in a Tesla.

This is all about problems with FSD.

Why is a car where you don't have disengagements a worse driver?

I said a better “human driver.”

Waymo is probably safer, but safety comes at the risk of not behaving like a human, and hence causing confusion for other human drivers.

Tesla drives more like humans drive.

Do you think Tesla could do 20 million truly unsupervised rides without killing someone?
I have an iX, the predecessor for these. The freeway automatic mode works well, that’s all I really want.
Yeah, BMW's self driving is the level of self driving I want. In my X7 I drove across North Dakota and barely touched the wheel.
In endless LA stop and go it’s a miracle
Only had a handful of Waymo experiences but a lot more with Tesla. Tesla may be leading but is still not great. Driven over 100k miles in autopilot and roughly 30k in FSD miles, you still need manual intervention about 5-10 percent of the time for various reasons.
It really bums me out that Mercedes still only offers self-driving on the S class sedan.
Waymo has a lead. Tesla's lead is about the same as a Roomba's.

Seriously though, if you're considering an EV, please give the traditional US/EU/JP/KR automakers a chance. Don't try to help the planet in one way while staking its heart in another.

>Tesla's lead is about the same as a Roomba's.

What is this supposed to mean? Tesla and Roomba are in separate industries.

People often think that Tesla is neck-and-neck with Waymo, but Waymo does 500,000 unsupervised rides/week and Tesla has done 0 ... ever.
That's completely false to say Tesla has done 0 ever. They have a fleet, admittedly small, of unsupervised robotaxis operating.
Unsupervised means no one in the car or remotely monitoring in real time. Last I heard, Tesla always had one or the other.
I am all for progress but this alpha testing on public roads scares me.