Tesla is ahead where it counts, sales. it feels like waymo was already 'successful' in small regions with good weather not requiring complex thought situations in 2018. meanwhile tesla is improving designs, expanding capabilities, and selling cars.
I'm not a tesla fan boy, but I definitely prefer their approach in terms of iteration (not sure if I agree with the tech choices).
Where it counts for what? Tesla has demonstrated it can sell non-autonomous cars, Waymo has not, but the GP's point is it's not clear what bearing that has on making an autonomous car work.
I'll give you a hint, the technology doesn't define the product.
Product here is "L4 self-driving technology", not "car" as you seem to be implying. Yes, Tesla is shipping cars, but they are nowhere close to L4 self-driving (aka no one at the steering wheel).
> they actually have a product in the market
No they don't. They have a car on the market, and an L2 driving assistant. As I was implying above and again repeated by the post you replied to, there's no indication that you can transition from L2 to L4 in a gradual manner, so "L2 product in the market" means absolutely nothing.
Here's an analogy for you, I'm saying that Google is ahead of Intel in making a Quantum chip, and you tell me that Intel is right now shipping millions of classical chips, therefore they are closer to making quantum chips. My argument is that the jump from L2 to L4 is similar to classical vs quantum chips, and shipping millions of L2 cars does not mean you're any closer to L4 technology.
Why is this where it counts? And if it were, wouldn't this mean that Ford/GM are way ahead of Tesla?
Source?
I suspect we will see a replay here of the ULA versus SpaceX history of the last ten years, and at the end, Google is going to look up and wonder "what happened" while Tesla continues to dominate the actual market.
My expectation is that Tesla gets better and better but doesn't move beyond a driver assistance package for a very long time. None of the hardware sold today ends up being FSD.
Waymo remains limited in scope by its business model. It rolls out driverless taxis to more and more cities, but you can't buy a Waymo FSD car, and it remains geofenced for a decade or more.
Which company wins the race to being able to buy a car without a steering wheel that will take you anywhere? I could see Tesla winning that.
But Waymo is in a position to capture significant economic benefit by being an Uber competitor and providing logistics in the meantime, if they can scale up quickly enough.
Regardless of how it goes, it's going to be fun to watch.
Waymo started with the iterative approach, and threw it out of the window after they observed what Tesla is observing now: Humans suck at monitoring. Their testers started doing all kinds of crap while the car they were supposed to be supervising was driving, including texting, make-up and taking a nap.
Waymo identified the risks, and had the luxury to take a step back, and re-aim the moonshot. Tesla made the same discovery, but can't (or at least didn't) go back and say "we need to re-evaluate our approach to FSD" - and instead keep trying to get people to stay attentive at the monotone task of monitoring the vehicle, while continue to keep the blame on the human when they crash and die.
Now Waymo is in the position of being not only the current leader in self-driving tech (having cars without drivers on the road), but also having the perception of being the responsible player in the field, putting safety over profit&sales. Having the first cars without drivers on the road allows them to help inform legislation in that space, while Tesla is still struggling to convince their test drivers (=customers) to pay attention and not crash.
Yes, Tesla may be getting more data in the field, but Waymo is still much further ahead with actual fully self-driving car without anyone at the wheel (within a small region + good weather). Also worth pointing out that the quality of the data also matters, not only the quantity.