Or regular public (non technical people). A few weeks ago I attended a meeting in a top 20 university where the head of a inter-disciplinary research department was discussing autonomous vehicles and funding. The first and only name he said was Tesla.

Marketing affects anyone not knowledge in machine learning field.

Waymo is largely unknown by the general public. Tesla and Uber are well known, largely because of negative incidents and marketing.

Google's self driving car's are quite well known. The "Waymo" name is not.

You know what they say, there is no such thing as bad press.

This is unusual. Almost everyone I have talked to in the field thinks Tesla is barking up the wrong tree entirely.

Talking about progress of various players in self-driving industry is like talking about Schrödinger's cat.

They might or might not have made progress but we won't know until we open the box (i.e. until they launch commercially).

No one has any real data about how Cruise compares to Uber compares to Ford compares to Audi compares to ...

The only comparative data we have are yearly reports mandated by California.

Tesla is not there because in 2017, the last year for which we have the data, Tesla did not test on public roads in California in fully autonomous mode so they didn't have to release those stats (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/f965670d-6c03-46a9...).

At the same time Tesla is taking this as seriously as one can and are working on making it work. From the DMV report:

"As described above, Tesla analyzes data from billions of miles of driving received from our customer fleet via over-the-air (“OTA”) transmissions. We supplement this with data collected from testing of our engineering fleet in non-autonomous mode, and from autonomous testing that is done in other settings, including on public roads in various other locations around the world.

Through all of this data, we are able to develop our self-driving system more efficiently than only by accumulating data from a limited number of autonomous vehicles tested in limited locations."

Karpathy recently gave a talk about Tesla's progress: https://www.figure-eight.com/building-the-software-2-0-stack...