Also, remember that self-driving cars were all the rage then too. Hype was at its peak then, I think.
A large fleet of networked cars that were built from the ground up to provide real-world data (including cameras and human driver inputs) for AI training.
Honestly I kind of wonder if Tesla's software team (or overall technical approach) wasn't very badly mismanaged since they seem to have thrown away a huge head start. Or maybe autonomous car AI is just really hard.
Keep in mind they are likely spending 10x or less than Waymo on FSD, so a lot less employees/researchers, have been around a lot less time and have decided not to use the sensors and ground truth data that Waymo relies on.
Just having lots of data isn't necessarily very useful, or we'd see the pure FSD trying to get their sensors on everybody's cars.
genuine question but , were you not the tiniest bit skeptical when only Tesla were able to promise FSD?
like what secret sauce have they got that no one else has?