I think the important part is that the remote person doesn't need to be alert, and make real time decisions within seconds. As I understand it, the remote driver is usually making decisions with the car stationary. I'd imagine that any future FSD car with no steering wheel would probably have a screen for the driver to make those kind of decisions.

There's a simple test I find useful to determine who's driving:

If the vehicle has a collision, who's ultimately responsible? That person (or computer) is the driver.

If a Waymo hits a pole for example, the software has a bug. It wasn't the responsibility of a remote assistant to monitor the environment in real time and prevent the accident, so we call the computer the driver.

If we put a safety driver in the seat and run the same software that hits the same pole, it was the human who didn't meet their responsibility to prevent the accident. Therefore, they're the driver.

Agreed!

Which is why an autonomous car company that is responsible and prioritizes safety would never call their SAE Level 4 vehicle "full self-driving".

And that's why it's so irresponsible and dangerous for Tesla to continue using that marketing hype term for their SAE Level 2 system.

In that case, it sounds like "full self driving" is more of an academic concept that is probably past it's due date. Waymo and Apollo Go are determining what the actual requirements are for an ultra-low labor automated taxi service by running them successfully.

> or, depending on who's doing the defining: every road a human could take a car on.

That's a distinction without a difference. Forest service and BLM roads are "roads" but can be completely impassable or 100% erased by nature (and I say this as a former Jeep Wrangler owner), they aren't always located where a map thinks they are, and sometimes absolutely nothing differentiates them from the surrounding nature -- for example, left turn into a desert dry wash can be a "road" and right not.

Actual "full" autonomous driving is crazy hard. Like, by definition you get into territory where some vehicles and some drivers just can't make it through, but it's still a road(/"environment"). And some people will live at the end of those roads.

These definitions appear to be largely academic and now outdated.

No, you can't go driving off into an area with no charging options, which would be much of the world.

As I said above, "full self driving" is clearly an outdated concept.

We once had no gas stations, now we have 150,000 (in the US). If the commercial need is there, building out connectivity is an unlikely impediment. Starlink et al. can solve this everywhere except when there's severe weather, a problem Waymo shares, which is starting to make me think the Upper Midwest might be waiting a very long time for self-driving cars.

Oh gosh sorry, I do try to contribute positively to HN and write quality comments. I'll expand: I've been in circumstances where I've been rented a company car in a foreign country, felt that I was a good driver, but struggled. The road signs are different and can be confusing, the local patterns and habits of drivers can be totally different from what you're accustomed to. I don't doubt that lots of humans could drive most roads - but I think the average driver would struggle, and have a much higher rate of accidents than a local.

Germany, Italy, India all stand out as examples to me. The roads and driving culture is very different, and can be dangerous to someone who is used to driving on American suburban streets.

I really do stand by my comment, and apologize for the 'low quality' nature of it. I meant to suggest that we set the bar far higher for AI than we do for people, which is in general a good thing. But still - I would say that by this definition of 'full self driving', it wouldn't be met very well by many or most human drivers.

> Most humans that claim they could could.

I don't agree.

My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.

My last dozen ridesharing experiences only had a single driver that wasn't actively hazardous on the road. One of them was so bad that I actually flagged him on the service.

My Waymo experiences, by contrast, have all been uniformly excellent.

I suspect that Waymo is already better than the median human driver (anecdata suggests that's a really low bar)--and it just keeps getting better.