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.