My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.
That's a good thing, we shouldn't be lowering the bar for AVs.
There's a straightforward solution to this that doesn't compromise public safety:
Employ paid training drivers who monitor the AV while it is collecting training data in environments where it does not yet meet the safety bar. These drivers are paid to be observant and intervene to avoid accidents. Furthermore, in their interventions, these training drivers provide critical training data used to improve the system.
This is what Waymo does also.
Perhaps Uber should have been more careful whom they hire, or put stronger controls on what they are allowed to do in the car.
Nobody wants to let a minimum viable driver chauffeur them around every day. Accepting the reduced quality of performance and increased risk a short duration cab ride is another story.
The report comes days after Trump named the automaker's CEO, Elon Musk, as a co-head of the incoming administration's government efficiency department. Trump's team is looking for policy leaders for the transport department to develop a federal regulatory framework, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Musk criticized the state-by-state approval process, required for self-driving vehicles, as "incredibly painful", weeks after unveiling a two-seat "Cybercab" robotaxi without a steering wheel and foot pedals, set to go into production in 2026.
If you simply search for things like "tesla direct sunlight", "tesla camera condensation", "tesla camera bad weather", you can see thousands of instances of vehicle cameras not working.
Meanwhile Waymo bets on jamming the car full of sensors to ensure it has superhuman 360 perception in all conditions with multiple sensor redundancy. Waymo takes safety insanely seriously. Tesla doesn’t care if 100s die in their car while on FSD. Waymo doesn’t want to make cars or manage fleets. They want to purely focus on automating the driver end to end.
Unless Tesla has a magical perception algorithm breakthrough, Waymo may expand all US states that allow it, while Tesla won’t even get an operational robotaxi with 100+ rides per year.
Elon has tremendous success in SpaceX with falcon & starlink, that’s a fact. But Tesla FSD is so much hype compared to substance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYlQjINzO_o
Not exactly reliable sources of information.
It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.
I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.