The big risk that Waymo/Mercedes is taking with this approach is that they do not know what blocking issues they will run into when adding new functionality to these systems.

What if driving in rain or snow is incompatible with their architecture and they have to do a major rewrite to expand into that functionality?

With the Tesla Approach they already know where the system fails and where the system isn't making any progress when trying to fix those failures. So Tesla can do major rewrites and major architecture changes much earlier in the development process.

"We killed a few people but we got a bitchin' architecture going from the start."

You should be a construction site manager in Qatar.

"It is better to play it as safe as possible safe when rolling out a technology that could save tens of thousands of lives a year"

The antivax people agree with that approach. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine therefore we shouldn't use it.

Vaccines still had to go 3 stages of trials and vaccine side effects are immediately obvious in the vast majority of cases.

And pharma companies are far less irresponsible and far more regulated than vested and biased commenter darling Tesla.

Tesla has done something worse than this?

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20220304/sackler-fa...

Yeah and they certainly have a lot of data because of their approach. I just wonder how (or if) they’ll make the shift to level 3 without angering customers. Or, if they’ll choose to stay at level 2 so they can have more features.

Maybe they don't design their roadmap around arbitrary level numbers but instead around marketable features.

SAE levels are based on the features of the system… and the conditions it operates in, and the responsibility of the driver.

I said marketable features. Outside of HN's demographic, the number of people who even know what an SAE level is would round off to zero.

Which criteria of J3016 wouldn’t be marketable?

Few may know what “level 3” means, but they certainly know what “you don’t have to pay attention” means.

Right, but earlier you said:

> I just wonder how (or if) they’ll make the shift to level 3 without angering customers. Or, if they’ll choose to stay at level 2 so they can have more features.

I don't know whether it would be a meaningful business goal to "make the shift to level 3". The business goals would be more nuanced than that, since approximately zero actual customers know or care what level 3 is. And the line between "you must watch what the car is doing and be prepared to take over" and "you must be prepared to take over if the car asks you to" is going to get blurred by manufacturers (and the distinction isn't that obvious to an average user in the first place).

Level 3 is absolutely not "you don't have to pay attention". SAE defines it as "when the feature requests, you must drive". Characterising that as "you don't have to pay attention" is what makes this potentially the riskiest level.