It’s funny that you’ve got several teams of thousands of engineers working on this and you label the one as “snake-oil” that has deployed their beta to hundreds of thousands of cars. Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
Do you think Tesla's approach to FSD is similarly difficult as their peers' approach, and they are just lazy and incompetent, or do you think their approach is fundamentally easier or harder? Have you thought about it at all?
Who cares about approach? Consumers only care if the product works or not. They haven't made it work and don't look like they will make it work.
You don't get brownie points if you deliberately hamstring yourselves (no sensors, no maps) and make the problem harder than it already is. It's like trying to jump higher and higher to fly to moon instead of using rockets. It doesn't mean you're tackling a fundamentally harder problem.
Consumers don't care, but observers who are trying to understand the nature of what's being developed do. Tesla's approach is not strictly about cars, just like their entire company isn't strictly about cars. They're reaching for something bigger than self-driving with FSD, and if they weren't doing it the way they're doing it, those additional wins wouldn't be in scope.
He repeatedly claimed that having contradictory radar and camera data means the system won't know what data to trust. Anybody who has worked with data in any capacity can tell you that is complete nonsense. In the past, people would call combining this data "sensor fusion." These days, even high school kids know you just throw all your features into a model. You don't discard red channel data from your cameras because it might conflict with green channel data. Tesla Insurance doesn't throw away all features except driver age when calculating premiums.
Tesla Self Drive seems to have peaked? I follow the forums and subreddits on this topic, and no one has been talking about major improvements for a while now.
That's true, it's still unclear if the method Tesla is taking will eventually work. That's not the definition of snake oil. They're approaching the problem differently, because they think if they solve it this way it will be a better outcome for a variety of reasons, and are working extremely hard on it.
What makes people call it snake oil is the salesperson (Musk) repeatedly making false claims about both the capability (summon your car from across the country...) and availability (... by 2018!) of the technology.
