The math of "you'll pay more for the car but the car will go out and make money for you as a robotic Uber" sounds like a pyramid scheme to me; if too many people do it, it can no longer work.

After the market for on-demand autonomous taxis is oversaturated, Tesla's plan is actually to stop selling vehicles altogether, or reduce it drastically. Musk has said that FSD vehicles will likely not be for sale after this point, so the "consumer-operated robotaxi" is inherently an intermediate solution.

Vehicle ownership will drastically change in nature after the advent of AVs. Tesla isn't going to be unique to having to adapt to this.

.. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car.

Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time.

Do you rent out your home via Airbnb when you are 2 weeks on vacation? Very few people actually do that.

My car sits idle 22 out of 24 hours a day. If someone else handled the insurance issues and found drivers willing to pay to use it outside of the times I utilize it, I'd have no qualms about lending it out for an appropriate price. The low end estimate for an Uber driver after expenses and Uber's cut is $8.55/hr. If my car averages half that it's $35k/yr that I don't need to do anything for.

But really, for $35,000, I would not mind investing in a $300 seat cover.

I agree this whole thing (ie a large percentage giving up ownership) is way more complicated than it sounds.

They estimate covering the cost of the car in 1-2 years, so you won’t be expanding your fleet that fast... there is a lot of discussion about this online, a lot of comments here cover that too. It’s just a step, eventually they won’t sell cars to consumers anymore.

Given current hardware prices, it seems like the car itself will be a lot more expensive; so how many trips need to be taken so that the variable cost advantage exceeds the increased fixed cost?

Driving is a ubiquitous human skill and tens of millions are looking for work, I believe it will be difficult to undercut them on price.

Drivers also often do more than merely drive - they help with the luggage, they clean the car, they can talk about their city.

Long-haul trucking is a different story, there is a massive labor shortage and letting big rigs go from one warehouse to another without the need of a driver looks like a huge opportunity.

The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster for people relying on it for a source of income is irrelevant when replacing jobs with technology.

> Uber drivers typically collect $24.77 per hour

> From that, Uber takes $8.33 in commissions and fees

> Vehicle expenses like gas and maintenance cost drivers about $4.87 per hour

> That leaves drivers with $11.77 per hour

Now, the maintenance and amortization will be higher for autonomous vehicles. Somebody will need to clean these vehicles, scrape the ice off, refuel, monitor them, deal with anomalies and false alarms, etc - all of which is now taken care of by the driver. Autonomous vehicles will likely end up being cheaper, but it's not as clear cut.

https://uberdriverlondon.co.uk/is-it-worth-driving-for-uber-...

I think the interesting number there is 23 000 GBP/year, which is effectively the cost to Uber of having a human driver for one car operating 60 hours per week.

If a computer can drive a car for 60 hours a week, it saves money for Uber if the amortized cost is less than 23 000 GBP/yr.

If a computer can drive a car for more than 60 hours a week, it saves money even if it costs more than 23 000 GBP/yr, although i don't think it's linear - demand is concentrated at a few times of day, so one car on the road 24 hours a day is not equivalent o four cars on the road for six hours each.

Meanwhile, a 12-minute, 4 mile Uber journey would cost me £2.43/mile

Of course, the big unknown here is one of driver utilisation: How many miles does the driver drive to pick me up, and how many minutes are they waiting for the next ride to come in?

* Well, it was considered generous the last time I asked a car owner about it. I'm sure a Lamborghini costs more.

They commit sexual assault, submit fraudulent reports of rider damages, ...

In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.

Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.

And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.

But that's a normal market effect and the same as Taxis which traditionally (at least in many places) had quotas to stop people not getting enough jobs to fulfill their wage (Taxi 'Tag' or 'Plate' or 'License'); or similar effects on the number of Uber drivers which obviously are not restricted so you have a sort-of imperfect market effect there where it's not worth more drivers joining as they won't get paid enough and some will leave.. or part of why supposedly surge pricing will drive drivers to leave to further away areas to take more jobs, etc.

Not a market expert but just wanted to note that while, in effect, you are right.. it's not really surprising, unexpected or unprecedented and not a pyramid scheme :)

Toyota, Volkswagen or General Motors would maybe have less revenue with shared cars utopia.

I’m writing this at midnight on a Sunday... there’s no demand for transportation. Come 7-930AM, demand is 1000x more. There’s no self driving taxi that makes sense as car replacement. We already have busses, which are already really cheap and can get cheaper if cars are too expensive to buy.

Which might be okay if throughput is kept high, and folks can read/eat/sleep while ij traffic.

A taxi, robot or not, will never be able to meet peak demand... they'll be provisioned to meet 60-80% of peak demand and surge peak pricing. That's the key part of the robot car business model -- these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure.

The Musk tunnel thing is totally different, it's an extreme version of Washington Beltway congestion pricing that charges you $3-60 to waste less time in express lanes.

It's enough if just ~20% of those who participate in traffic are doing so with a "self driving car", if they otherwise would have opted not to do so, we'll have even higher peaks.

Surge pricing might not matter much, because it's in the interest of the fleet operator/owner to get maximal utilization, to get maximum profit. After all Uber does surge pricing to motivate more drivers to come online, but if you have a constant supply (constant number of self-driving cars in the fleet), then you can simply use it to maximize profit. (Or to manage perception, ie. to show that yes there are cars available, sure, it comes at a high price, but they are "available".)

---

> these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure

Yep, US cities are so burdened with problems (a nasty set of incentives) that public transit is non-viable, which drives even more subsidization of the sprawl, which then breeds these companies that try to "solve it". (I mean Uber/Lyft successfully increased the supply of taxis, which drove prices down. Yaay, great, but this just meant more congestion, more pollution, more sprawl, nothing fundamentally solved.) And of course at this point properly pricing externalities is an insurmountable political challenge, because people are so wedded to their way of life.

I think this is a difficult problem as you have surge demand at least for commuting. So we can't get around with 1/10th of cars which are driving all day.

Ya, but at least for me, convenience is already there for Uber. Price is the only thing that keeps me from abandoning my car for it.

The real winners are the automakers that build the part-time robotaxi investment vehicles (literally), and the consumer who now pays way less for a frighteningly AI-driven future.

That would bring the capex down below $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash.

Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.

There are only 13k taxi medallions in NYC, which is a good point of reference as the limited supply means they are efficiently utilized.

Extrapolating that out to the general US population yields just over 500k taxis, and that's to completely replace every single taxi in the country.

2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.

The analogy is that the electric bulb did not replace candle as such but created entirely new possibilities that were unimaginable when the bulb was invented. This is nearly true for any invention and not just self driving cars. Advancements in self driving will change not just how people go to office or dates but will also change how goods are hauled, how docks are loaded, how agricultural products are transported, how fruits are picked from trees and how law enforcement deals with patrolling and so on.

The candle was a candle and an electric bulb was an electric bulb. One could do things the other was not capable of.

FSD however, is pretty close to what humans do. It's cost that's the difference.

If you want a more apt analogy, this us more like the invention of a household CFL bulb.

It's cheaper, it increases accessibility and quality in some dimensions, but it's not allowing you to do so much that was utterly impossible before.

The comment you replied to wasn't saying FSD enables nothing new but rather that saying stuff like "change how people go to the office" is rather odd when today right now you can pay people for "FSD" and we already did see the shift from it...

Their arrogance is about as convincing as that of the rocket companies or car companies that didn't think EV were gone happen.

Saying 'in my industry they are joke' is kind of a joke by itself by now.

Also Tesla wants to operate a taxi services too so I don't understand your argument.

Waymo is actually operating a driverless paid service in Arizona [0] with point to point pick up and drop off. Does Tesla actually offer this service today?

[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-...

Maybe if they role out this program to city after city in short intervals and have 10000+ taxi operating I would consider it.

Waymo does some things Tesla doesn't do, Tesla does things Waymo doesn't do. Tesla clearly has no interest in offering a money losing taxi service in one small city. Just as Waymo has no interest in doing all the work to figure out the meaning of obscure signs on roads in China.

The question is, when can I click on an app, get a car and drive basically anywhere. That is 'the solution'.

Which works in one small limited area of the earth because of high-def maps, which is not what you would normally call "scalable".

Back to the original goalposts, as far as I know, Waymo is the only company that at this point, does offer a commercial service that's fully driverless. As you point out, they don't cover all of Earth, but neither do any of their competitors. Even Uber and Lyft, with human drivers, don't support all pick up and drop off locations, they only work in certain service areas.

> fully driverless

Don't they have safety drivers that closely monitor through wireless connection and often take over? While it might look driverless, it is not technically. This is also another reason why it doesn't scale.

There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.

Then there's the part about the brain being what gets the sensor data and interprets it. I doubt Tesla's computer has all the capabilities of a human brain.

Driving behind a boat trailer, it's clear to me it's a boat, but Tesla's computer is confused. Bicycles can be a little iffy as well. In general the way the car perceives the world seems subpar to how a human does, by far.

I'm a fan of the car, I'm mostly a fan of Tesla/Elon, but I don't think these cars with this technology are ever gonna be truly autonomous so they can drive with no human intervention... IMHO.

It could very well theoretically be a software issuse.

While there are technical solutions possible with more hardware, it’s not clear that Tesla could correct for some of these things in just software...

And if the car camera is blinded by the sun, that raises questions about whether the car could safely pull over to the side of the road. I suppose with advanced simulation the car could perhaps predict glare from the sun and pull over ahead of time (“it’s approaching sundown and we’re driving west, you need to take over in 5 minutes”)

For example if the car in front did not even slow down while going through some obstacle (the proverbial plastic bag), then it's very likely that we don't have to either. But if something looks like a drunk guy trying to cross the highway, then it's caution time.

That said, without the actual data/studies/access on what Tesla does and how, it's hard to say how good they are at this. (Sure, in theory everything needed to drive a car well can be inferred from regular human vision visuals. But that means their model has to be able to do counterfactual reasoning - I see this thing as a wall, but other cars go through it, so it's not a wall, so maybe it's a marking. Otherwise it'll very hard to just figure out things frame-by-frame and simply by raw object detection.)

We are very, very far from that. And having such a developed visual processing system is a prerequisite for feeding an executive processing system that can do counterfactual reasoning.

That's also just a shot from the hip, weasely sort of argument but it's harder to dismiss outright.

A camera with those features would be around 3000-15000$, and you'd need two.

Also, the human brain can use focus information and stereo phase to deduce 3D structure, which is another ace up its sleeve.

It might very well be the case that reproducing this is more expensive in training, processing and material than LiDAR. In fact, I'd say it's very likely - we're talking loops that need to update hundreds of times a second and data rates in the gigabits, which our brains deal with by doing a lot of processing inside the eye and along the way.

Current AI tech can do this too, from multiple images. Karpathy even talked about how they do use that in Teslas.

Tesla only does the first.

But just to give an example that is very relevant to self-driving, getting a camera with similar low-light video performance as the human eye costs over 2000$.

So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.

So an advanced enough AI could easily be better at humans than driving w/o LIDAR, simply by driving as well as humans when not distracted, and not getting distracted.

It's not that he hasn't invited a little bit of controversy (eg. comments about the diver, covid, etc.) but I think those are inconsequential when it comes to HN's attitude toward him.

The comment regarding humans not needing LiDAR misses the point, which is that either every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expensive hardware solution or there are valid technical reasons why that might be a better path to L5. Tesla trying to overcome the limitations other companies are deploying LiDAR for is a technical risk they are taking on, and, as the top level post noted, might not be the worst bet given the downside which is that they’ll just have to license the tech.

Implementing L5 without Lidar must be possible. Humans are absolute proof of that. That's not to say Lidar isn't useful, or cost effective given the complexity of the problem, or even just a really good idea that will make autonomous cars better drivers than people. It might be all of those things. All my comment says is that Lidar is not a requirement for driving, and we have a very obvious proof of that.

Anyone saying that Lidar is necessary for driving is ignoring the hundreds of millions of examples of driving with just a pair of 2d cameras and a highly specialised organic supercomputer.

EDIT: The point another poster made about weather and bright sunshine is a reasonable one - humans can't drive when they can't see either, so Lidar would potentially make an autonomous car better at driving than people. That would be an example of how Lidar is useful, but still not necessary.

Humans also have a organic supercomputer in their brain. Variety of sensors is probably the best approach. I've grown up and seen technology prices on all sorts of weird technology fall (3d printers, sensors, midi controllers). At some point, we will basically give up on perfection on LIDAR and just do cheap multi-LIDAR arrays where the error rate is overcome by just having multiple units.

We can say that something better than human-level driving ought to be possible without LIDAR, though; take the perception of a human (cameras) and replace the brain with a computer that can make better calculations much faster than a human can.

Given that Tesla are the only company to have put something approaching autonomy into the hands of customers, that does seem to be the case.

What happens next in this thread? Someone points out that Tesla's solution is still far from perfect and claims that they're being highly irresponsible by having shipped it. Then I'd ask how many accidents have happened as a result of FSD beta having shipped to some customers already and they assert that Tesla isn't transparent with the data so we don't know. I'd point out that if we don't know of a single Tesla FSD accident so far, it can't be that irresponsible to have put it in the hands of a few customers and that it's been rapidly improving in the weeks since. It's the same thread, repeated over and over on here, Reddit, etc.

Tesla was the company that made electric vehicles successful. To your point about groups taking different approaches, I think Musk & Tesla do take approaches that will differ from others, and succeed partly because of their approach being better in some important way. I think they had a bit of an unfair advantage when it came to autonomy. They needed hardware that could be shipped on vehicles as soon as possible, which meant that it needed to be cost efficient & energy efficient. LIDAR's energy efficiency doesn't get talked about much, and I don't mean just the LIDAR itself but also the subsequent processing power required to make sense of the resulting point cloud. Each Waymo vehicle is an expensive tech demo. It's a very good tech demo, but over the years it's become evident that they're very hesitant to scale it up right now. I'm sure they'll eventually get there, but they are not a company focused on getting this done ASAP. Tesla are getting autonomy done with urgency.

Well, that’s Waymo (in Phoenix) which has put out anything approaching autonomy, not Tesla. Tesla requires a driver.

Tesla itself uses HD maps for things like intersections, traffic lights and so on. It's just not at the level of detail others use it for.

They’re also offering a commercial service. Which means figuring out operations, customer service, emergency protocols, working with local administration and so on. They’ve said a larger goal in Phoenix is to figure out how to perform and scale operations. The local regulations there are much more favorable. Until recently, Phoenix was one of the only (probably only) places where you could operate a robotaxi program and charge for it. California just recently approved it, so SF is where they’ll likely go next as they are already setting up everything there.

Ultimately, mapping is the not the constraint for them to go to new places. It’s the operations and regulations that they need to figure out every time.

They also have lidar solutions, but they certainly haven't ruled out camera only.

The issue people take is the reckless approach to selling nonexistent or immature tech that by its nature puts human life at risk. It is possible to both respect and disagree.

The arguments used against Tesla are in fact legitimate if we’re talking about a regular company. But Musk has proven to do the “impossible” multiple times and has been right on so many levels, so at this point you have to question whether he’s catastrophically wrong about this, or perhaps the others are about lidar.

Either way, the confidence that Tesla is wrong is way too high in my opinion.

People need to stop fantasizing about 'Elon' being some great guy because they like what he achieved. It's almost like the technorati need their own version of celebrities to fawn over.

I for one am not remotely jealous of him but disappointed that others think his behaviour should be emulated or worshipped just because he has been successful.

I'd rather see someones imperfections and know where I stand than have another generational #metoo

Both unofficially and when law is broken.

Or maybe unenthusiastic about the fact that all he has is a vision, but has never built anything by himself. When you get kicked out because _Peter Thiel_ is more tolerable than you, that says a tiny bit about his character.

It's not "a little controversy". It's being a sack of shit of a human being.

the only thing he is good at is marketing himself

people think he is innovative because he sold decades old tech to people who didnt pay attention before, because he is a glorified marketing exec and hes not even good at that

consumer satisfaction is a poor way to measure quality

the average car in germany is 12 years old. from this perspective new-ish cars are a minority .

Finland has 12,2 because all the 10 year old German cars get imported here :D

[1] https://www.aut.fi/en/frontpage_vanha/statistics/internation...

Some of Telas biggest problems seem to stem from not recognising stationary trucks in their path.

Can't expect a commercial company operating at the bleeding edge to host a "IP giveaway" day as researchers do.

Even though I know nothing about driverless cars, the reasoning from Elon makes sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q

Elon has a high incentive to talk down Lidar in cars: He/Tesla placed the bet initially on cameras because Lidar is/was too expensive, and promised these cars will be able to drive themselves ("regulatory approval pending"). Retrofitting Lidar is not an option (price, sensor&cable placement), so a lot of his (and Tesla's) promises ride on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary. A lot of Tesla's (Car's and Car company's) value rely on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary.

But i'm not an expert in this so take it with a grain of salt please :)

Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them.

Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.

I just set it to a speed on the highway... and the speed stays there until I brake.

Are you talking about adaptive cruise control (ACC) to follow the speed of the car in front?

Funny, I don't feel the same -- my foot rests below the brake (on the floor) instead of on the gas pedal so the time to move it to the brake feels roughly the same, and I'm paying 100% attention while driving since I'm still steering and constantly monitoring distance to the cars in front of me. So I don't notice any less attention -- it's just a rest for the muscles in my right foot.

But really I'd definitely go with your own perception here -- if you feel like you're paying less attention then it's a good thing you're not using it! Everyone's attention habits and patterns are different. And I'm glad to know people vary in this.

I had the power steering drop out going into a turn (fuel pump failure IIRC), and it could have easily caused an accident (I physically couldn't turn the wheel enough to complete the turn).

Or you have very serious muscle weakness, at which point I'm not sure if driving a car is a smart option in any case.

I do not know about dbw pedals but power steering and anti-lock breaking operate 100% deterministically and the only true unknown is controlled by the driver.

The safety standard that mechanical parts need to abide by are orders of magnitude higher than any Vision/Software product. Additionally, mechanical failures are rarely catastrophic. The part will most likely alert you hours/days in advance that it has begun to fail. Additionally, when catastrophic failure does happen, it often leads to the car stopping and not ramming through a busy intersection.

The problem with ML algorithms, is that they fail without warning and without intuition. It is incredibly hard to design against catastrophe. ML algos are also great at overfitting, so they can often learn to beat narrow tests while being inept at dealing with the exact scenario the test was supposed to evaluate it for. (I know, I know, "Don't tune on the test set!"... but human factors make it near impossible to avoid some level of it)

We are in dire need of a regulatory/evaluation body for AI that consists of top-tier ML researchers. Now that can be a govt. body or a 3rd party contractor that works closely with the Govt. But, we need to start laying the groundwork and debating around it now. So when we do need it, it is ready to be deployed.

I 100% agree on needing to design and regulate the design of safety critical CV (and particularly ML based CV) algorithms so that, if nothing else, the failure mechanisms are quantifiable and limited in their impact.

The core debate (of this article: waymo_v_tesla), is about technology paths. Do you start with driver assist and move up the Ls gradually as units are produced, KMs are accumulated and dollars come in? Alternatively, do you get as close as possible with a prototype and then closer with the next one..? worry about financial/product viability once you have a working archetype.

This dovetails with the lidar question.

Ultimately, I find the disagreement fascinating. There's probably value in having these two throwing their weight into opposing camps. IDK which approach will win in self driving. Every technology is its own example.

That said, I like Elon's approach as a generality. To me, it's about thinking of technology and invention as an industrial/societal effort rather than a lab effort... even if reduced to a lab at a company. Learning curves exist. Feedback loops exist. A technology with products and customer and usage progresses, often.

You could not have "produced" Moore's law the Waymo way, most likely.

Musk thinks that is it acceptable to ship features when there is a safety risk, Waymo doesn't

There is also a bit of ego in there as well. Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. Its nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. Tesla have spent Billions of dollars trying to re-create a lidar like depth sensor using radar and monocular slam.

Its just not going to cut it for a number of years. CNNs are just not fast or robust enough to replace a lidar. Especially with the quality and placement of the sensors in a tesla.

That is not the actual debate in this article though. It's not the debate between Tesla and Waymo's CEOs. That debate is about the path to a technological goal: actually autonomous vehicles.

The lidar question is closer to the core of the debate, but IMO it's a detail. Here the disagreement might have gotten unproductive. As you say, egos (famously big & nerdy ones) have have been dragged into it.

>> Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. It's nothing to do with the maturity of the tech.

I agree with the first and disagree with the second statement. This, IMO, is actually at the core of the debate. In (my assumed version of) Musk's Modus Operandi, technology strategy and business strategy converge much more than in the Waymo/Krafcik MO... They're at opposite ends of the poll.

Business decisions are R&D decisions. Putting things into production is R&D, affects R&D, determines R&D.

In a caricature/model version of the Waymo MO, technology is invented in a research lab. Once it's ready, it can be productized outside of the lab. "Technology" is defined as the core "proof of concept." In the Musk MO, technology is produced in an industry/company. A lab cannot reduce the price of computing by half every 18 months for decades. A lab can't improve the price/weight/performance of batteries to the point of EV viability. It takes an active industry/market to do these things. You need customers. You need commercially scale factories, increasing annual unit production. Etc. Large and increasing numbers of people working on it.

A lot of technology never leaves R&D. Lunar Travel didn't becomes cheaper over time. This confuses people because we expect technology to improve. Doing something people did 50 years ago should be cheap and easy, intuitively. In reality, that momentum is not a guarantee. If no one works on it, it doesn't improve. Software, hardware and such improve at a monstrous pace. But, every year there are way more people working on hardware and software. If the space "industry" had 100X more people working on it compared to 60s, it would have improved to.

I'm not calling Musk's approach superior, but Waymo's is certainly more common. Novelty itself is valuable. It's interesting that we have both approaches at play. n=2, but at least we'll get to see how this plays out.

Potentially Tesla's 2D data lead means they will still be the leader even if the compute resources in the current cars isn't up to the task, and maybe even if they have to add additional sensors like lidar. They can probably retrain their models and still get a lot of out of it.

My personal guess is that full 3D lidar isn't needed, but some additional cameras and other cheap sensors probably are. There's a ton of stuff that costs a fraction of the cost of lidar that might fill in the gaps.

What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive.

Waymo says it cost $75,000 for the lidar in one car a decade ago, and in 2019 they said they got the cost down to $7,500. So at the time Tesla decided to forgo lidar the costs were certainly very high. I'm guessing the range in your vacuum is multiple orders of magnitude less than a car.

Waymo must have been betting costs would drastically fall over time. No idea if it's a lot less than 7500 now.

Object very far away: Laser dot in center of image. Object very close: Laser dot at maximal offset from center of image.

They have many more cameras than Tesla to support the camera only approach, though.

To save some $2-3k? That feels 'penny wise pound foolish'. This is a premium feature and LIDAR keeps getting cheaper.

With a the limited lane assist in my EV (basically it stays in lane and changes lanes if I turn on the signal), I can drive longer distances and stay alert without getting tired. All I need to do is apply slight torque to the steering wheel and mind the other vehicles on the road.

The sorts of assistive technologies that would actually help are not really being worked on, assistive has been misunderstood as meaning "allowing the driver to be lazier".

Sure - if Tesla pulls it off, it's great. But it's a gamble with more than just Teslas stock, that is what makes Elon an unethical sociopath here...

Waymo's approach is assuredly safer, there is still the possibility of technical glitches but it the approach doesn't create more problems with humans than it solves.

Yes, sure, humans can be dangerous, but if that's the problem then it's safest to just not get on the road period, kinda negates the whole point of an FSD though...

Do you also turn off features like ABS, ESC, traction control etc?

Convenience features that always work are good. Cruise control and lane keep assist frequently fail, and take control away from you in a way that disallows you from maneuvering to safety.

I can't think of a single instance where Automatic transmissions or ABS misbehave. If my transmission or braking failed in 1/100 instances, then I'd stop using them too.