At present, it's _not_ clear that lidar would solve their issues, because from the FSD beta footage that we've seen it doesn't look like the problem is with _perception_. Perception-wise, the car seems pretty solid, but its ability to shoehorn a given world state into something it knows how to react to seems shaky. We can see examples of this where the car gets confused at funky intersections (e.g., multiple sets of lines that look like crosswalks) or challenging left turns (it can resolve cars with enough fidelity it seems, but is missing a policy for turning into the median first).

If it were as simple as "their system would just work if there was lidar" I'd bet there'd be a lidar test fleet of FSD teslas that would train the lidar-blind cars in a sort of shadow-mode, similar to what was done for vision-only replacement of radar.

> from the FSD beta footage that we've seen it doesn't look like the problem is with _perception_. Perception-wise, the car seems pretty solid

Here is "full self driving" perceiving that it would be a great idea to drive directly into a pole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyNg9kYEq4&t=340s

James Douma explains why lidar is a waste of time for FSD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urKMwhzivs8

His argument makes sense and I think he's completely right. However, his argument also includes, "If the depth prediction is arbitrarily close to lidar". So we have to ask ourselves a bunch of questions related to it. Can we get it close enough? How feasible, reasonable, and cheap is that? How can we tell if it's good enough? And I'm sure there's more.

> Tesla CEO Elon Musk has himself even said that he believes the “feature complete” version of the software his company calls “Full Self-Driving” will, at best, only be “likely” to drive someone from their home to work without human intervention and will still require supervision.

Especially given this. Even once it works, “full self driving” won’t do fully autonomous driving?!

There's a big disconnect between people who do not own FSD and those who do.

Those that complain are 100% in the "don't own FSD" bucket. Prove me wrong. Find me one owner of FSD that is so dis-satisfied that he demanded a refund.

Those who do pay for FSD use terms like "my mind is blown", "it's amazing". They do videos, evangelize the product and wait until midnight on Friday (that's when Tesla releases updates) so that they can test it at 2 am in the morning.

You can make what you will out of this.

To me it shows that product is great already and will be very successful when finished.

The complainers that never used the product are noise.

> Those who do pay for FSD use terms like "my mind is blown", "it's amazing"

Absolutely. Then you tell them you heard the car does odd things like randomly coming to a full stop and they say "well, yeah it does and it sucks, but it will totally be perfect one day."

It's funny how people can change their attitudes towards something when they've sunk $10,000 into it.

They paid $10,000 for intelligent cruise control which comes on a Toyota Camry and other cars at no additional cost.

Actually, it's the opposite.

Autopilot comes for free with Tesla.

I don't know of any car that gives Autopilot-like functionality for free. I'm certain BMW doesn't, I'm certain GM's Blue Cruise and Ford's Co-Pilot is a paid add on.

FSD provides functionality that isn't available on any car you can buy.

Specifically the $10k pays for:

- Navigate on Autopilot

- Auto Lane Change

- Autopark

- Summon

- Full Self-Driving Computer

- Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control

Those are FSD feature that are fully released.

The beta adds autosteer on city streets.

The functionality you mention isn't available on the Tesla either, like full self-driving computer, since it's not full self driving.

Navigate on autopilot I dont know what that means.

Self parking is available on other cars, Volkswagen, Audi, and more. Even the base Prius practically parks itself.

Traffic light and stop sign: what's the point of this if you have to maintain awareness anyway since it's not really full self driving?

Navigate on autopilot = FSD for highways. It's actually pretty useful in a new city etc and trying to navigate on highways

And yet no one else is even close, or trying very hard.

That's absolute nonsense.

Lots of other people have various levels of automation working reasonably well. None of them have the absolute hubris to sell it as "full self driving" before it's any of those things.

Waymo is doing a decent job of navigating, slowly but reasonably safely, around an insanely well mapped and limited region.

GM's Cruise products seem reasonable enough, from what I've read. They're limited to limited access highways, have some good driver attention monitoring to make sure the human is paying attention, and seem to limit the regions to "that which they have high confidence they can actually do."

Tesla, if you listen to their own hype, makes things that resemble SAE Level 5 claims, except they deliver remarkably little of it. Having charged obscenely for it in the process.

Your claim has absolutely nothing to do with the reality outside Tesla's bubble of their own making. Except, they've chosen an approach that seems more and more unlikely to actually work.

Let me know how BlueCruise works when the highway changes, because its all pre-mapped and will shit the bed.

Sorry what?

I bought FSD for my Model 3 and my mind is not blown. Amusingly, I prefer the known behavior/bugs of the pre-beta to the totally bananas mistakes that the beta makes by trying to be smart. And that’s a bad state for Tesla to be in, because other manufacturers are catching up.

Automatic lanekeeping on the highway and stoplight stop/go were groundbreaking when Tesla launched them, and these are the features that I get the most value from. The rest of FSD as currently demonstrated is parlor tricks.

> Automatic lanekeeping on the highway and stoplight stop/go were groundbreaking when Tesla launched them

Automatic lanekeeping was originally made by Mobileye and available on Teslas and Nissans. I don't know about stoplight stop/go, but perhaps that is one of the reasons Teslas randomly make unwarranted stops?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering

Your link agrees with me. Tesla provided some of the first commercially available lane centering in the Model S/X.

For the stoplights, no, phantom braking sadly predates that feature. It occurs during normal driving when the car erroneously perceives a phantom object appearing in front of the car and hits the brakes. The stoplight response, in my experience, is actually much more reliable, inclusive of stopping for reds / stopsigns, and automatically proceeding if there is a green light and a car in front of you.

Ok, here's one owner.

https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/4lmsbyy8k/albuquerque-dist...

Also, just check Tesla forums if you want high volume evidence. You are hereby proven wrong.

And the evangelists who never used the product are also noise.