It's very different from the approach taken by Waymo and Cruise. Tesla's FSD uses vision only, and it's available everywhere in the US and Canada. The fact that it can complete most drives successfully (~90% of the time) without intervention in any city in the US or Canada is pretty impressive IMO.
The parent poster is right, I've been watching the progress and it's gotten probably 20 to 50 times more reliable in the last year.
Other solutions are geofenced, not because they could not ostensibly function in other environments, but because it is criminally reckless to do so. Allowing a safety-critical system under test to operate in unvalidated situations is stupid. Allowing a safety-critical system in development that is currently unsafe to operate to be operated by untrained customers in unvalidated environments is criminal.
Waymo had a fully driverless test vehicle in 2015, before Tesla Autopilot was even released. That is a superior system in a specific operational domain. They continued improving it for years with multiple order of magnitude improvements before allowing customers to use it in the same, highly constrained operational domain. Only Tesla is reckless enough to look at a product as good as what Waymo had 7 years ago, decide to ship it, and expand the operational domain to untested situations while they are at it.
This is the thing that always baffles me about self driving - while it may be very cool and impressive from a technology perspective, and while of course no technology can start out as completely bug free, when it comes to driving, anything less than 99.9999% success is a worse driving experience.
That is, until I can take a nap in my car, or read a book, or whatever, what's really the point? If I have to keep my hands on the wheel (or yoke) at all times, and have to pay attention 100% of the time, I'd rather be in a mode where I actually really do need to pay attention 100% of the time, instead of one where I really only need to pay attention 5% of the time (oh yeah, and if I miss that 5% I'm in an accident or dead).
In stop an go traffic in a city just having to be aware of whether it’s about to murder you is a blessing compared to screaming and shaking your fist at everyone on the road. There’s a lot of advantage to being able to zone out with highway driving attention vs active driving. I don’t need it to let me sleep, I just need it to do most of the thinking and I just monitor it’s performance - the cognitive load of that is very low vs active driving.
This is what people aren't paying attention to. The rate of progress over only 1 year is astounding.
Driving with FSD supervised by a driver already makes driving far safer and far less stressful. The car has a situational awareness that humans can't match. It's only a matter of time until most drives have 0 disengagements due to human discomfort/awkwardness.
> Driving with FSD supervised by a driver already makes driving far safer
Does it though? Waymo said that their research indicated drivers tend to get complacent and assume the tech will bail them, thus they pay less attention and make more mistakes.
The fact you’re not surprised that a car can drive itself is telling. And not in the positive way you want to make it seem.
It’s magic man. You’re jaded, and have set the goal posts too far and likely increasingly far.
WRT delivery timing, who amongst us had delivered a complex R&D heavy software project on time? I’m not an Elon fan boy but I respect he laid out a vision and worked to execute on it. That he didn’t hit the mark with 100% fidelity doesn’t seem like an issue to me.
> You’re jaded, and have set the goal posts too far and likely increasingly far.
Not the original poster. Tesla has set the goal posts too far, not commenters here. And yet, they are misleading consumers about how far the goal posts are.
People aren't saying Tesla's current features aren't marvelous, but that its not the magic that was promised.
> WRT delivery timing, who amongst us had delivered a complex R&D heavy software project on time.
Probably none of us. However, most of us haven't overpromised on the delivery time when we know that the project will take longer than what we have conveyed.
Why would you be surprised? Google did that with no safety drivers over 7 years ago [1], before Tesla even released Autopilot, after 6 years of development. The gap between that and a proper autonomous vehicle with no geofencing that is safer than even the bottom 10% of human drivers is immense and has not been achieved yet. That Tesla has achieved less in 6 years than what Waymo did in 6 years when they were trailblazing the field over a decade ago is disappointing. That Tesla executives believe their Full Self Driving product is acceptable to sell and ship to untrained customers, when systems that are nearly a decade more advanced and tens to hundreds of time better are unacceptable, is criminal.
No, the question is whether Musk committed fraud by selling _in 2016_ self-driving car software which he is still unable to deliver in 2022, and the answer is YES whether or not you are "jaded".
You are a lawyer? Or is that just your opinion based on what you personally believe fraud should mean (or on how much or little you like Musk)? Thanks for clarifying.
OP is talking about being surprised by steady progress to a major human achievement, one that could save a million lives for starters, but also one that in its mature state (where robots can visually interpret and navigate 3d space) unlocks even more labor saving automation than cars, busses, and trains put together.
It has the dark side of military uses, sure, but given how developed our tools for blind destruction already are, robots that can see the world will make a much bigger dent on the positive side.
Progress on this is genuinely exciting and people should let themselves feel that even if they don't like Elon Musk.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. It is quite sad to see how eager people are to throw stones. It’s always the darkest side of HN that comes out in these threads.
