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levocardia 3 days ago

There are about 1,500 Waymo cars in existence, versus about 7,000,000 Teslas in the last seven years.

aqme28 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

But there are 0 Teslas that are as effective at self-driving as Waymo, so they're still ahead.

LanceJones 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

My Model Y in Vancouver drives me to and from work daily. I cannot get a Waymo here -- and I certainly cannot purchase one privately. Which is more effective where I live?

Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Teslas have a ~about 500 miles between interventions (they don't release actual data, no surprise), whereas Waymo is at around 17,000 miles.

That's a 34x divide. At full scale that's something like 30% of Teslas having an intervention every day.

signatoremo 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t doubt that Waymo car is more advanced than FSD, but that comparison isn’t as impressive as it sounds. The numbers of FSD equipped Teslas dwarfs that of Waymos, and they are available everywhere, not just selective cities. You have to take that into account.

Teslas is also much cheaper, and easier to scale. Tesla has better growth potential even if their tech is less impressive.

Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not that their FSD tech isn't less impressive, it's that it's not FSD tech.

Even worse (for Tesla) is that if they do try an make their non-FSD tech do FSD, and it decks little jimmy because the flashlight in his hand looked like a far off street light, Tesla is liable to face a knee-jerk federal law mandating lidar. And just like that the dream is dead.

This forces Tesla to be extremely paranoid, as it's one visual mistake away from being told to use lidar.

senordevnyc 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is a 34x improvement in the rate of interventions not as impressive as it sounds?

I’m not even sure that Waymo number is still correct. They’re doing hundreds of thousands of paid rides per week, with no one in the front seat, so not sure what an “intervention” even means at that point. Maybe where the passenger needed help and called support? That’s 1000x better than needing to grab the wheel because your Tesla was about to drive into oncoming traffic or run over a kid in a wheelchair.

dagenix 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are supposed to supervise Tesla FSD. Waymo doesn't require someone in the driver's seat at all. They aren't the same thing.

sashank_1509 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We’ve also not seen how capable Tesla is at evasive maneuvers. We have plenty of videos (hundreds now) of Waymo making instant swerves to avoid children running onto the road, cars running red lights, a person falling from a Scooty etc. These are not maneuvers you would expect from a human, which shows how Waymo has pretty successfully crossed the human bar in safety. If Tesla does not demonstrate this, on top of driving normally, I don’t think they have a product. The barrier to give control to a computer is super human not human like driving.

Also philosophically I don’t see how a big neural network will create such evasive maneuvers, unless you try to create such scenarios in a simulator and collect evasive data. Seems prohibitively expensive to do so in the real world.

dzhiurgis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Market says “as effective” doesn’t matter. Needs to be “good enough”.

wilg 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean FSD is pretty good and useful. But yes, not unsupervised.

Fricken 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Coca-Cola company sells even more units than Tesla, but if those units don't drive themselves they're moot to this discussion.

giveita 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Same could be said about Tesla when it started.