>If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone.

The reality distortion field in action. "Hey no big deal they're straight up lying to consumers and putting their lives in danger!"

> Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo.

They are nowhere near Waymo, who is doing actually driverless rides for the public. Tesla's confidence level is still at "you need to keep your hands on the wheel at all times".

I have questions about Waymo's taxi service. I'm certain that they occasionally run into situations that require human intervention, or at least need to be prepared for such an eventuality (see examples below). In such scenarios, what happens? The passenger operates the car? A remote operator takes controls? The car refuses to move and becomes a hazard or causes congestion?

For example, you come up to a 4-way intersection and a traffic cop there signals you to stop and says you can't go through because all the man-hole covers are off, but since you want to turn left you can go through the parking lot of the corner gas station to get onto the other road.

For another example, right after the st-patrick's day parade is over or right after the college town's team has just won the NCAA championship, the street is full of people and the car has to inch forward at a rate of half of a mile per hour and the pedestrians don't get out of the way until the car is about to touch them.

In the scenarios you described, a remote operator would "help" the car. They've specifically said remote operators can't control or joystick the car, but can "answer questions" which I take it to mean plot a different course. It can also pull over at a safe spot and not get stuck in the middle of an intersection, though nobody has run into this issue to test it from the videos I've watched.

The examples you gave sound like scenarios where remote operator would instruct "don't go there, go here" and the car does it by itself. But specifically about the traffic cop, it can actually detect hand signals from them (can't find the video though).

> since you want to turn left you can go through the parking lot

In my state this is explicitly illegal. You may not use a parking lot as a thoroughfare, regardless of convenience.

Though geofenced, Waymo actually does have fully autonomous driving working already.

Waymo also has the sum total of CAPTCHA learning for them.

Tesla is trying to solve a much more difficult problem. It’s unclear if they will.

Waymo also has LiDAR which is infinitely better for bounding box detection than images.

I beg to differ. It seems pretty clear whether they will.

I agree, betting against progress after what has happened with gtp3 and alphaGO seems unwise.

Waymo is a joke outside a trained, geofenced area. It is fascinating to me how a company went from gee we can index search results and sell ads to we can solve one of the hardest general automation problems in the world.

It's not designed to work without the map/geofence, so why is this your critique? Do you also judge fish for their crappy tree climbing?

It’s not the same people there doing search and doing self-driving.

I think Google are basically just the funders, the actual leaders on the project seem to be engineers with strong AI backgrounds.

AI does not exist.

AI exists, but not necessarily Artificial Intelligence.

As a marketing term yeah.

They definitely are not. Anyone working in this industry overwhelmingly agrees that Tesla is far behind the well established self-driving car companies (Waymo, Cruise, ...) mainly because they continue to rely on cameras only (and not lidars)

What are you talking about? Autonomity with vision only is way more advanced. Lidars are useless when vision is solved.

Solving vision is an incredibly difficult problem that is made harder by the lack of stereoscopic cameras. There is fundamentally no need to rely on vision alone other than bragging rights. It provides almost no practical benefit.

I think (and hope?) that the parent comment was sarcastic.

It’s a common talking point, I doubt that comment was sarcastic. Musk has said that he thinks Lidar is useless because humans operate vehicles with just vision, which of course is an unfair comparison since humans have intelligence to help them.

This has always been a ridiculous argument. Human eyes have a much higher contrast ratio than commercial cameras, and have built-in stereoscopic capabilities with some degree of rangefinding thanks to the fact that they are quickly adjustable. Normal cameras have none of that.

It was not sarcastic. I'm not really sure what you're arguing. It's obvious that vision-only would be more advanced than using lidars. Lidars are expensive and take space, so that's why they're trying to use cameras only.

And it's quite obvious that there are at least some situations in which vision will not work whatsoever - e.g. dense fog. I personally would quite like my autonomous vehicle to operate happily through dense fog. If you're happy to pull over to the side of the road and wait it out, be my guest.

Having multiple orthogonal subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum at your disposal provides redundancy and diversity - two features that simply CANNOT be accommodated with a single class of sensor, not matter how advanced it may be.

Yeah, that's true. Teslas have a front-facing long range radar and multiple ultrasonic sensors around the car for close range detection. Like most modern cars. But they are there just to avoid hitting anything, but can't be used alone for driving autonomously.

How can they be at the forefront of this field? A driverless Waymo will come and pick you up from in front of the Costco in Scottsdale AZ, right now. This Tesla can't do anything unsupervised.

Of all the self-driving companies it is likely that Tesla is dead last, behind Waymo, Cruise, Aurora, and Zoox.

It is outright scary how many Tesla fanboys think that Tesla are at the front of the pack. How much Koolaid can you drink without even checking what the experts in those industries are saying?

Haha I know. So many people think it is fully autonomous too.

Why can't the same Waymo come and pick me up on 5th Avenue in Manhattan?

Not sure if serious, but it is against New York law. That might not be the only reason, or even the main reason, but it remains a reason.

There is some data suggesting that Waymo cars might avoid collisions better than humans https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22315361/waymo-autonomous-...

Meanwhile, Tesla autopilot accelerates towards the walls or parked vehicles. Tell me again how Tesla is "at the forefront in the field".

> If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone.

And possibly a few deaths, yeah.