Tesla is probably going to fake it using human remote drivers. Tesla has been running ads to hire the drivers.[1]

That has all the costs of the self-driving hardware, plus the costs of the remote drivers, but it maintains the illusion that Tesla is a growth company.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...

Wait... the big insight here is that people live in cities? Brother, this has been talked to death in the "is level 4 good enough" conversation.

> it will probably not be very safe, otherwise nothing would stop Tesla from rolling out “the safe” autopilot to car owners today, unless you think that something will change in one month and we are getting some kind of breakthrough in software, so it seems like taxi will run today’s software.

The last version of FSD to increment the major or minor version number was released last year. There haven't been any big upgrades since then, they've only incremented the patch version number. Before that it had improved extremely rapidly for many months. The June robotaxi launch represents at least 6 months of improvement over the current public version of FSD, not one month. It's clear the team has focused exclusively on the robotaxi launch, and given the incredible pace of improvement of the public version in the year prior to their change in focus, I could easily imagine a huge improvement over the current (pretty good!) release.

Not only that, but I think there's a pretty good chance that the robotaxi version of the Model Y will include updated compute hardware, which I expect will significantly improve the performance of FSD just by virtue of running larger models. The difference between the HW3 and HW4 versions of FSD is quite significant with the only difference being compute, so it seems likely that even more compute could improve things further.

As a Comma 3x owner, Comma is not even in the same league as Tesla despite having better SAE level 2 steering. It jerks too much and they have a fraction of the usable sensors.

Toyota Safety Sense 3.0 is a better experience and no one is taking about it.

Tesla is also basically a non-competitor.

Waymo’s only technological competitors are in China. Anyone closely watching the industry has known this for years.

If Tesla's Robotaxis become Bing to Waymo's Google, that'll be quite an impressive leap from where Tesla is today.

> Waymo was frequently mocked that they are heavily geofenced, and “it cannot drive anywhere”-mentality. I have to say that I was also a subscriber to this camp and it seemed like universal “no map”-approach was to go. I was cheering for Tesla Autopilot team.

I never thought this argument made much sense because that's not really how humans work. If you take someone who's an excellent driver in NYC and plop them in SF they'll need some time to learn the streets before they can be a really good driver in SF.

For sure they'll be able to navigate safely, but perhaps not well, and I don't want my robotaxi making a wrong turn onto a 1-way street or missing a turn.

Can a neural net be trained to drive well in NYC, SF, and elsewhere? Maybe, but why wait until it's perfect everywhere before starting somewhere?

> Another point is that city driving seems to be a safer in general, there is much less chance if things go wrong when you are in a taxi driving 30-40mph, than cruising with Autopilot 60+mph and hitting a truck on a freeway.

Freeways are wide, generally well maintained, have gentle sweeping turns with excellent visibility, have no pedestrians or cyclists, and don't have many junctions.

And there's only 50,000 miles of them in the US. 10 cars, 10 hours a day, 50 miles per hour, and you've driven them all in 10 days.

Much easier than city driving IMHO.

The main downside is not just a cost thing but its waves are blocked by moist in air, rain, and dense fog. So, it will also degrades to just use cameras in this conditions.

Around the time that self-driving cars were said to be imminent, my kids were in preschool, and I realized that school pickup would be damned hard to implement as an automated thing. Cars have to line up and advance to the pickup spot using space that’s normally parking lanes. It’s definitely a 90th percentile challenge if not higher, but the sort of thing that literally happens daily in urban/suburban environments.

one point the author seems to be missing as to why we need full self driving everywhere is in the logistics industry. We are talking about interstate driving, from point A to point B, in this case it might involve industria environments such as a truck stop, weighing, loading/unloading etc, something that requires decision making across different environments (urban, highway, dense residential etc). Tesla FSD has the real potential for this unlock, more than just a ride hailing use case of getting people from point A to point B.

I love how people ignore the fact that Tesla's FSD is no where near good enough to do what Waymo does.