It blows my mind to see people write things like this. We have two companies, Cruise and Waymo, who have built nothing but toy cars, but they are in the lead while Tesla has years of real-world driving data in cars that are in a manufacturing production operation, receive over the air updates, recognize real world objects, can change lanes automatically, but Waymo is ahead?

I’m open to being convinced that I’m not correct here, but it’s really difficult for me to see how Tesla is anything but 1000x ahead of everybody else.

It reminds me of people who build great models on Jupyter Notebook, but have no clue how about the data engineering that goes into serving those models (90% of the work).

You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Solving Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) on highway traffic are much easier tasks than what Waymo and Cruise are solving. You can buy a device from comma.ai that gives you 90% of Tesla's functionality for a few hundred dollars.

I can’t drive a Waymo or Cruise car at all. So they may as well not exist. But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. And let’s make sure we are clear here, you don’t need to be on a highway to use Autopilot.

Do you own a Tesla? We previously had a car with ACC/ALC and I don’t find it to be even close to the same thing, but that’s me.

Comma.Ai’s device is great. It’s better than anything anybody else (Waymo/Cruise included) has put out there.

> But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon.

Soon as it was in 2016 [1], 2018 [2] in Feb 2019 [3], Mar 2020 [4], or July 2020 [5]?

They have been hyping this up for years, why should I still believe those claims that it will soon be here™? Not only that but they have already advertised and sold "full self-driving" for people that can't use it yet, no beta, no alpha, just doesn't exist and is a paid feature. How far is this from fraud?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-anno...

[3] https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-s...

[4] https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-m...

[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313

I think this is regulatory. I have seen multiple articles like the attached which have caused Tesla to basically handicap it's own autopilot. As another said I have no idea how a company with a car is not ahead of a company without one.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-aut...

> You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic.

Yes you can. At least my ap1.5 s70d does a fair job on quite a lot of roads and I expect that ap2 is better.

Tesla didn't support stop signs or traffic lights until a few months ago but Waymo did that years ago. And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.

Waymo hasn’t produce a single production car. I doubt their software works on random stop signs in Cleveland. Until I see them on the road, I’m ok watching incremental improvement happen. Being first doesn’t matter.

> And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it comes to a complete stop when cars in front of me stop on the highway.

I guess the question is how you rank a prototype that's actually autonomous against a production car that's far from autonomous. IMO manufacturing cars sounds a lot easier than autonomy. There's also the fact that Waymo's goal is only autonomy within areas that have been mapped in hyper-detail while Tesla apparently wants to drive anywhere. How do you rank more progress towards a smaller goal vs. less progress towards a more ambitious goal?

One example of a stopped vehicle: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-...

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

I don’t give it much rank because it doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have good, incremental progress toward a larger goal for sure. In my day-to-day I can use a Tesla. I have no use for Waymo so the progress isn’t relevant. Will Waymo map every street in hyper detail, or just Mountain View and New York? If I don’t care about the underlying goal, what reason do I have to care about progress toward that goal?

> “ Just before the crash, a large vehicle — a sport utility vehicle or pickup truck — changed lanes in front of him, the driver told the NTSB.”

And how does Waymo handle these scenarios?

Cars in motion → stationary are different from completely stationary objects, which are ignored due to high false positives.

If there is a stationary car and I turn on autopilot as I approach my car doesn’t ram into it. If I turn autopilot on when I’m stationary and the car in front of me is stationary it does not drive into the other car. If autopilot is on and a car is stopped at a red light in front of me my car does not slam into that car. I do this on a daily basis. Do you?

I don't drive a Tesla, but I’m guessing that’s done via image classifiers which recognize car rear ends, which have failed Tesla drivers on stopped fire trucks, police SUVs, Chinese garbage trucks, trailers crossing the freeway, etc.

The radar returns on stationary objects are discarded AFAIK because of poor radar resolution leading to inability to precisely locate objects both horizontally and vertically, leading to roadside and overhead signs being mistaken for cars.

Common auto radars have limited vertical discrimination, and this is partly intrinsic due to radar wavelengths.

I can't say I've come across these cases (stopped Firetruck for example on a highway) where AutoPilot has driven me straight into something. I'm also paying attention, as you should.

To throw you a bone, I do think that the names of the software lead people to believe that it's something more than what it is. Full self-driving is going to do things like swerve to avoid an obstacle in the middle of the road and it probably doesn't do that right now. But if we go back to the original post, the discussion was about comparisons to Waymo and Cruise. I'm not sure I trust their "more advanced systems" to do that either, and on top of that they haven't made a single production car that works in Erie, Pennsylvania and drives in the snow, changes lanes automatically, and navigates on and off ramps.

Tesla is making progress toward general self-driving, which is far and away more valuable in my opinion. Even if that progress is incremental. I look at it as more of a safety feature and something to make driving on the highway much easier.

If we want to take this a step further, I'm actually not a fan of self-driving cars because it makes it too easy to drive everywhere, and I view driving as a problem. We should be walking.

I’m more willing to believe that Tesla is just committing fraud here before believing they have any kind of lead.

This seems pretty accurate, $8k for something that was called "Full self driving" that was supposed to be close to ready years ago and instead won't be ready for the lifetime of the car. This would have been a class-action lawsuit if Tesla customers weren't so spectacularly loyal.

Can you buy better on the market today?

Hoping the AP rewrite closes some of the gap... we will see!