Waymo and Cruise make a car autonomous allowing it to drive with no driver in the seat for tens of thousands of miles on average between incidents.
Tesla FSD requires a driver in the seat to be operated safely, and explicitly does not make the car autonomous as stated on their website [1]. Tesla FSD is explicitly not labeled as a Autonomous Driving System (ADS) by Tesla to avoid mandatory NHTSA [2] and CA DMV [3][4] incident reporting requirements and Tesla does not and has not ever had a driverless testing permit. For that matter, although Tesla does have a permit for ADS testing with a safety driver, they have not done any in years.
In addition, Tesla FSD is lucky to go a few tens to low hundreds of miles between safety-critical interventions (hard to get reliable numbers since Tesla does not report official numbers). Waymo and Cruise with a safety driver average tens of thousands [5]; literally 100x-1000x better.
This analysis also ignores qualitative differences in ability, like how Tesla FSD still can not recognize basic signs such as “Do Not Enter” and “One Way”. It is lacking even basic functionality.
Cruise/Waymo precisely map out their driving areas and if anything changes too much, the cars shut down. A TV news crew took a ride in one, and the car parked diagonally in the road, where they had to wait 20 minutes for the company to send out a human driver.
Tesla is attempting something different: driving anywhere, just like a human can drive anywhere. It's a more difficult problem so it takes longer.
Tesla FSD is not autonomous anywhere. It operates 100x-1000x worse than Waymo and Cruise which are themselves still inadequate by a factor of 10x-100x for safe general commercial deployment.
Saying that Tesla is trying to solve a harder problem when they are a factor of 10,000x from solving the “easier” ones is the height of wishful thinking.
Besides, Waymo and Cruise are solving the general problem. The baseless assertion that driving the breadth of a city like San Francisco or Phoenix is somehow not representative of general driving is ludicrous on its face. Humans who learn in one city generally have the ability to drive in most other cities. The skills are largely transferable.
Waymo and Cruise take a slow and measured approach, validating in a well defined and constrained domain not because they could not operate everywhere 1,000x better than Tesla FSD, but because allowing a system only 1,000x better than Tesla FSD on the road without careful supervision is fucking criminal.
Tesla FSD requires a driver in the seat to be operated safely, and explicitly does not make the car autonomous as stated on their website [1]. Tesla FSD is explicitly not labeled as a Autonomous Driving System (ADS) by Tesla to avoid mandatory NHTSA [2] and CA DMV [3][4] incident reporting requirements and Tesla does not and has not ever had a driverless testing permit. For that matter, although Tesla does have a permit for ADS testing with a safety driver, they have not done any in years.
In addition, Tesla FSD is lucky to go a few tens to low hundreds of miles between safety-critical interventions (hard to get reliable numbers since Tesla does not report official numbers). Waymo and Cruise with a safety driver average tens of thousands [5]; literally 100x-1000x better.
This analysis also ignores qualitative differences in ability, like how Tesla FSD still can not recognize basic signs such as “Do Not Enter” and “One Way”. It is lacking even basic functionality.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
[3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
[4] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
[5] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/02/17/2022-disen...