Tesla has minted a fortune on broken promises and vaporware. As someone who purchased FSD, would be glad to see them lose their shirts on this one.

The funny thing is that I've owned Gen 3 FSD for five years now and only in the last few months has it gotten noticeably better. It's actually respectable at driving around my city now, can handle roundabouts, make turns, etc.

I have noticed the same - Tesla FSD has improved remarkably in the last couple of versions, to the point where it almost never requires interventions.

That said, I still don't "trust" FSD to the point where I could comfortably be in the backseat taking a nap just yet. 99% is not "good enough" for something as critical as driving.

I actually started to trust V12. V11 was a complete joke vaporware. V12 is a complete game changer that actually drives on par if not better than human. Not a tesla stock holder(all of it is a scam per my retarded opinion), but I am now more than confident that they will start doing self driving this year. Maybe isolated and with some remote interventions here and there, but it feels on par with Waymo. My friend was just testing Waymo and by his words it is not as aggressive (human like) like Tesla on the road where you need to assert yourself to merge.

I’ve been reading this comment for years, just with version numbers changed. I expect in two years I’ll be hearing that V14 sucked, but now with v15, actual level 4 FSD is just around the bend!

Probably, but what they are saying is true. It recently went from uncomfortable verging on unsafe, to moderately comfortable.

> That said, I still don't "trust" FSD to the point where I could comfortably be in the backseat taking a nap just yet. 99% is not "good enough" for something as critical as driving.

You should only trust it after Tesla accepts full liability when FSD is enabled.

The funny thing is that a nearly perfect template of your comment appears on nearly every post which includes a criticism of FSD. It's always magically "just recently got better!" As well as "being able to do some selected basic driving despite being called FULL self drive."

Maybe because it is true?

If it's true now then it means it was false before. Unless the claim is that every few months there's a noticeable spike in capabilities however the grandparent commenter seems to claim otherwise (ie, that only recently did it improve).

> Maybe because it is true?

It reeks of manual fitting. Tesla surveys an area and makes manual adjustments that keep the system from misbehaving for a while until something changes and then it’s back to shit.

There is definitely some amount of that. On each training run it gets better at some things, worse at others (this is mostly limited to its lane handling more recently).

And in the 12 months I've had the car, it has gotten noticeably better maybe 2 times. Once last year, and then once in February. After the iteration last year, it drove fairly well, but I still had to intervene once or twice per trip. Now I make it through half of my trips without intervening, and when I do intervene it tends to be to avoid embarrassment vs safety (not committing, wrong lane for an upcoming turn, etc).

Given how ai is advancing, I am pretty confident they will get this working fully autonomously with just vision, it's just a question of when.

Well that’s what people pay for when they buy a Tesla. The holistic experience of self driving. Somebody who pays for self driving alone pays Waymos.

I have no 'recently' to compare to, as I'd never been in a Tesla before. I was dubious because of all the "this year for sure" history, but after test driving one, I bought the new Model Y, and it now pretty much drives me to work and back every day with little to no intervention.

Knowing how prone to exaggeration Elon is, my bar was low. But it blew me away honestly. After nearly 30 years working in software and with some background in machine learning and computer vision and generally just trying to make software that works reliably, it's a pretty jaw dropping experience.

Would I take a nap in the back seat and let it drive? No. But does it allow me to sit there focused on a technical podcast or an audiobook so I feel like I'm getting back an hour or two a day instead of worrying about driving? Absolutely.

Look, everyone on the planet agrees that calling it FSD was over-promising. You are not adding anything to the conversation by pointing that out, or by confusing technology with "magic". The fact remains that software developed by a competent team can actually improve over time, despite the insanity of corporate leadership, and that's what is happening here.

The fact also remains that fraud (even if it's not prosecuted) is fraud. You promise X and deliver... not X, for years? You're a fraud. Even if you are getting better at delivering Y, for some value of Y which is Far, Far less than X.

> It's actually respectable at driving around my city now, can handle roundabouts, make turns, etc.

This year for sure, guys, for real this time!

-- Elon

lol the bar is so low

The funny thing is that just this weekend FSD was in the news for a crash that put a young man in a coma.

But when the usual outcome is death, i suppose a coma is an improvement.

As someone who also purchased FSD, I was able to drive hundreds of kilometers without any disengagements even though my car is an older HW3 with 12.6. I fully believe that with some Waymo-like conservative route planning and teleoperator backup, they will be able to achieve their robotaxi goals this year.

Tesla is going nowhere without LiDAR.

I strongly disagree. Go look at the videos of the current iteration of FSD.

Yes, then read this article: https://www.jalopnik.com/teslas-fsd-is-biased-towards-influe...

Go and actually test drive one and let it FSD you around. Videos don’t do justice. There is always MKBHD kind of biased videos.

O3 can now play geoguessr better than master level human players. It can also beat master level Codeforces competitive programmers. I wouldn't discount the ability of AI to make sense of images far better than humans possibly could, all the while beating them at logical thinking, especially in a restricted domain like driving.

AI isn’t magic. If there isn’t enough information in the inputs, you can’t expect reliable results. It’s the same principle in all of software: garbage in, garbage out.

If there simply isn’t enough visual information, vision-only will fail.

https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ

Theoretically, if there's not enough visual information for AI drivers, then there's not enough visual information for human drivers, and that's a problem with the road. (Which, to be sure, occasionally there are roads like this: e.g. merging onto a higher-speed thoroughfare from a lower level, with a very short distance between "where you're in a position to see the merging traffic (and not that much of it)" and "where the roads have fully merged (and there's no shoulder)".)

This Mark Rober video has been debunked several times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cxTO8g47_k

That is not a debunking... That's someone running a similar experiment and getting a different result. That would debunk the claim that Teslas can never detect a painted wall. It does not debunk the claim that Teslas will sometimes fail to detect a painted wall.

And in a safety-critical system, the distinction is not mere pedantry.

I mean he didn't even use FSD.

[delayed]

headlights can make cameras see in the dark

Left and right of the car? What about behind it?

Waymo has 360-degree LIDAR and, not coincidentally, is the state of the art.

It also has the help of being able to do web searches and when o3 fails, it doesn’t kill people.

Spinning lidar is not a panacea.

Sadly the US is quite corrupt, so I wouldn't bet against the car company whose CEO has a close personal relationship with the US president.

Unlike China, right?

Toyota is Chinese now?

I'm just saying that out of two American companies, Waymo and Tesla, Tesla is more likely to benefit from government favors.

I still can't believe they were taking one-time purchases for FSD like... 6 years ago.

Isn't waymo already partnering with Uber on offering rideshares in different markets?

Sure. Can you describe what leverage Uber actually has in those partnerships? That's a deal of convenience for Waymo, trading a bit of margin for some velocity. It (or similar deals) are downright existential to Uber.

Uber probably has legal framework of operation, ability to quickly obtain permits for autonomous testing, local political connections, special ability to gather roads, traffic, mapping data and overall support with rapid deployment. For waymo to get into a new location/country, establish their presence, navigate the political and regulatory landscape etc will take very long and many difficult hurdles.

Waymo has papa Google, Google Maps already has location and traffic data in excess of Uber. They don't just randomly color traffic lines in Google maps.

I doubt it. Uber is a 1000x more toxic brand to regulators than Waymo is. And I don't think Uber's maps mean anything to Waymo, though would be curious if someone else has direct insight into why they would.

Uber is acting as an aggregator for all types of rides. Customers have the direct relationship with Uber. Unless Waymo completely runs away with autonomous driving then I think Uber has a lot of leverage.

Waymo has shown itself more than capable of going D2C [1].

It’s actually the one case where Google’s customer service beats the competition’s. Waymo customer service is still somewhat trash. But you need it so infrequently compared with Uber, and Uber and Lyft somehow manage to make Google look like a people company, that I find myself almost exclusively taking Waymo when I’m in a city where it is an option. (Via the Waymo app.)

[1] https://x.com/aleximm/status/1867257473671082356

Wow one whole city of tech bros? I was able to get an Uber in Manuel Antonio Costa Rica coming from an airport whose terminal is literally a hut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport).

There is a reason even taxi companies are now partnering with Uber in places like DC.

I travel a lot between business (not as much now) and personally. I know I can land in any airport domestically and most airports internationally and can get a ride on Uber and with surge pricing someone will usually pick me up.

It isn’t financially viable to have enough Waymo cars on the road that will be able to handle peak demand and just sit there during low demand.

> It isn’t financially viable to have enough Waymo cars on the road that will be able to handle peak demand and just sit there during low demand

Sure. Waymo can absorb the usual base load. Uber and Lyft can be peakers. This is how it works in Phoenix, LA and Miami, cities one can’t dismiss as cities “of tech bros,” I assume, given during peak hours the wait time surges to 30+ minutes.

I would bet it takes literally one ride in a Waymo for 90%+ of users to be ready to download a different app to access that service again, if Waymo and Uber were to part ways.

Uber is buying time, Waymo is buying velocity

I think it is likely that people order Waymo's through Uber in the future

That's exactly what we're talking about... that's already happening and probably will continue to happen for as long as it's convenient for Waymo.

Margin will never accrue to Uber in that relationship because they have no leverage.

It's been a few years and so far no one but waymo is offering public rides. If there are fast followers they need to launch soon.

Waymo already has an app.

Customers???

Its just an advertising relationship.

Pretty sure they already worked but its a nice sentiment.

When full self-driving actually goes mainstream, today's "it worked" will look pretty identical to not working at all.

Granted, plenty of douchebags will have made their money and scrammed, but founders would prefer to emulate the biggest winners which is what matters.

Nobody is out here emulating the business practices of John Studebaker though I'm sure he died plenty rich.

Hear hear

Seems like a mixed bag. Parents, eldest sister and eldest all have Teslas and have done cross-country road trips with no problems, and use FSD very regularly. Brother, also the most cynical (and probably on HN), swears it's out to kill him and claims it nearly put him under a truck had he not taken over.

“A mixed bag” for a safety critical system is a synonym for “dangerous” or “dogshit”

No it's not.

I've heard both "This has done things more intelligently than me and prevented errors I would've made" and also "This made errors"

Statistically, it's better than human drivers. But of course, if a machine makes an error - it's going to get more headlines.

> Statistically, it's better than human drivers.

Tesla has never published the data required to substantiate this claim.

Next what you'll post is Tesla's press release where they look at accidents per mile with no segregation by driving type (city, freeway, age of car, weather conditions, etc)

Then the next step after that should be for you to say, "huh, it actually is odd that they publish something that purports to show it's safer than human drivers, but they consistently decline to publish the data necessary to actually evaluate whether it's safer than human drivers."

That should make you raise your eyebrows a bit.

Fair play - I'll check.

I am now convinced that Uber/ride-sharing is responsible for the deterioration in our high-trust societies.

Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.

> Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.

It was probably because cops stopped enforcing traffic laws during COVID and never started again:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...

> Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.

Can you say more about this?

My conjecture is that when people started to see non-taxi branded cars just idle on streets without parking, forcing people to cross over lanes around them, it broke a social barrier.

It was actually Vietnam according to historians.