I've got to retract some shade I've thrown at Waymo when discussing Tesla FSD in the past.

Like others, my biggest objection with it was their approach to scaling. Tesla aimed for the vision-only general solution with FSD, while Waymo held strong to its LIDAR-first geofence strategy. I held this opinion before using Waymo, as it wasn't available in my city (Houston, TX).

I've used it several times after being invited into their Early Access earlier this month...and, wow, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Waymo drives incredibly well. Like, INCREDIBLY well. Tesla FSD v14 drives well too, but Waymo feels more confident in edge case situations (of which there are many in the city driving space) and, well, I can be on my laptop or whatever during the trip.

Ironically, Waymo pushed me towards using public transit in Houston, so it's incredibly sad to read that this expansion is happening as Portland's public transit system is getting defunded. The time and mental sanity I've gotten back from not driving has been immense and undeniable. (It's weird how "bus-pilled" I became after my first few Waymo trips given that I grew up in NYC taking the bus and subway all of the time.)

All that said, based on how slowly Tesla is scaling their (inexcusably much more nascent) Robotaxi offering, I don't think ANY of our cars are going to get "unsupervised" FSD with the hardware they were shipped with.

This type of mea culpa is exceedingly rare. Credit to you for updating your opinion when presented with evidence, and publically admitting so.

It's good to hear that more people are realizing that Tesla is nowhere near where they claim to be.

For anobody observing it from the sidelines, it was obvious for the past 3 years at least, that Tesla will not achieve real unsupervised FSD with HW3, and now it's also obvious it will not be wiht HW4. It's also obvious they are very well aware of those facts, despite lying to investors and customers for the past 10 years.