This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were.
Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation, and will be able to claim full self driving, but like fusion power and post-singularity AI, it seems to be one of those things where the closer we get to it, the further away it is.
dreamcompiler · 4h ago
Not gonna happen as long as Musk is CEO. He's hard over on a vision-only approach without lidar or radar, and it won't work. Companies like Waymo that use these sensors and understand sensor fusion are already eating Tesla's lunch. Tesla will never catch up with vision alone.
Rohansi · 3h ago
While I don't think vision-only is hopeless (it works for human drivers) the cameras on Teslas are not at all reliable enough for FSD. They have little to no redundancy and only the forward facing camera can (barely) clean itself. Even if they got their vision-only FSD to work nicely it'll need another hardware revision to resolve this.
moogly · 3h ago
> While I don't think vision-only is hopeless (it works for human drivers)
I guess you don't drive? You use more senses than just vision when driving a car.
Rohansi · 3h ago
And which ones can't be replicated with hardware?
ndesaulniers · 3h ago
...taste?
moogly · 3h ago
Ask Musk; he's the one who claims that sensor fusion does not work.
renewiltord · 3h ago
But we allow deaf people to drive but not people who are entirely blind. This means vision is necessary and sufficient.
The problem is clearly a question of the fidelity of the vision and our ability to slave a decision maker and mapper to it.
SalmoShalazar · 59m ago
Such utter drivel. A camera is not the equivalent of human eyes and sensory processing, let alone an entire human being engaging with the physical world.
formercoder · 3h ago
Humans drive without LIDAR. Why can’t robots?
cannonpr · 3h ago
Because human vision has very little in common with camera vision and is a far more advanced sensor, on a far more advanced platform (ability to scan and pivot etc), with a lot more compute available to it.
lstodd · 3h ago
yeah, try matching a human eye on dynamic range and then on angular speed and then on refocus. okay forget that.
try matching a cat's eye on those metrics. and it is much simpler that human one.
phire · 3h ago
Why tie your hands behind your back?
LIDAR based self-driving cars will always massively exceed the safety and performance of vision-only self driving cars.
Current Tesla cameras+computer vision is nowhere near as good as humans. But LIDAR based self-driving cars already have way better situational awareness in many scenarios. They are way closer to actually delivering.
kimixa · 2h ago
And what driver wouldn't want extra senses, if they could actually meaningfully be used? The goal is to drive well on public roads, not some "Hands Tied Behind My Back" competition.
No comments yet
systemswizard · 3h ago
Because our eyes work better than the cheap cameras Tesla uses?
lstodd · 3h ago
problem is, expensive cameras that Tesla doesn't use don't work either.
systemswizard · 3h ago
They cost 20-60$ to make per camera depending on the vehicle year and model. They also charge $3000 per camera to replace them…
MegaButts · 3h ago
I think his point was even if you bought insanely expensive cameras for tens of thousands of dollars, they would still be worse than the human eye.
dzhiurgis · 2h ago
Fender camera is like $50 and requires 0 skill to replace. Next.
apparent · 3h ago
The human processing unit understands semantics much better than the Tesla's processing unit. This helps avoid what humans would consider stupid mistakes, but which might be very tricky for Teslas to reliably avoid.
dreamcompiler · 1h ago
Chimpanzees have binocular color vision with similar acuity to humans. Yet we don't let them drive taxis. Why?
randerson · 3h ago
Even if they could: Why settle for a car that is only as good as a human when the competitors are making cars that are better than a human?
Waterluvian · 3h ago
They can. One day. But nobody can just will it to be today.
nkrisc · 3h ago
Well these robots can’t.
dzhiurgis · 2h ago
So robotaxi trial thats happening already is some sort of rendering, ai slop and rides we see aren’t real?
crooked-v · 4h ago
So does anyone who previously bought it on claims that actual full self-driving would be "coming soon" get refunds?
garbagewoman · 3h ago
Hopefully not. They might learn a lesson from the experience.
blackoil · 3h ago
Hmm, you want to penalize company and teach a lesson to customers,so give the money to Ford shareholders.
jeffbee · 4h ago
> Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation
There is little to suggest that Tesla is any closer to level 4 automation than Nabisco is. The Dojo supercomputer that was going to get them there? Never existed.
standardUser · 4h ago
What does Waymo lack in your opinion to not be considered "full self driving"?
The persistent problem seems to be severe weather, but the gap between the weather a human shouldn't drive in and weather a robot can't drive in will only get smaller. In the end, the reason to own a self-driven vehicle may come down to how many severe weather days you have to endure in your locale.
mkl · 4h ago
Waymo is very restricted on the locations it drives (limit parts of limited cities, I think no freeways still), and uses remote operators to make decisions in unusual situations and when it gets stuck. This article from last year has quite a bit of information: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...
panarky · 4h ago
Waymo never allows a remote human to drive the car. If it gets stuck, a remote operator can assess the situation and tell the car where it should go, but all driving is always handled locally by the onboard system in the vehicle.
Interesting that Waymo now operates just fine in SF fog, and is expanding to Seattle (rain) and Denver (snow and ice).
epcoa · 4h ago
The person you're replying to never claimed otherwise. However, while decision support is not directly steering and accelerating/braking the car, I am just going to assert it is still driving the car, at least for how it actually matters in this discussion.
And the best estimate is that these interventions are "uncommon" on the order of 10ks miles, but that isn't rare.
A system that requires a "higher level" handler is not full self driving.
standardUser · 8m ago
In that case, it sounds like "full self driving" is more of an academic concept that is probably past it's due date. Waymo and Apollo Go are determining what the actual requirements are for an ultra-low labor automated taxi service by running them successfully.
AlotOfReading · 2h ago
There's a simple test I find useful to determine who's driving:
If the vehicle has a collision, who's ultimately responsible? That person (or computer) is the driver.
If a Waymo hits a pole for example, the software has a bug. It wasn't the responsibility of a remote assistant to monitor the environment in real time and prevent the accident, so we call the computer the driver.
If we put a safety driver in the seat and run the same software that hits the same pole, it was the human who didn't meet their responsibility to prevent the accident. Therefore, they're the driver.
panarky · 3h ago
Agreed!
Which is why an autonomous car company that is responsible and prioritizes safety would never call their SAE Level 4 vehicle "full self-driving".
And that's why it's so irresponsible and dangerous for Tesla to continue using that marketing hype term for their SAE Level 2 system.
phire · 2h ago
Geofencing and occasional human override meets the definition of "Level 4 self driving". Especially when it's a remote human override.
But is Level 4 enough to count as "Full Self Driving"? I'd argue it really depends on how big the geofence area is, and how rare interventions are. A car that can drive on 95% of public roads might as well be FSD from the perspective of the average drive, even if it falls short of being Level 5 (which requires zero geofencing and zero human intervention).
> and uses remote operators to make decisions in unusual situations and when it gets stuck.
This is why its limited markets and areas of service: connectivity for this sort of thing matters. Your robotaxi crashing cause the human backup lost 5g connectivity is gonna be a real real bad look. NO one is talking about their intervention stats. IF they were good I would assume that someone would publish them for marketing reasons.
decimalenough · 3h ago
> Your robotaxi crashing cause the human backup lost 5g connectivity is gonna be a real real bad look.
Waymo navigates autonomously 100% of the time. The human backup's role is limited to selecting the best option if the car has stopped due to an obstacle it's not sure how to navigate.
refulgentis · 3h ago
> NO one is talking about their intervention stats.
Interventions are a term of art, i.e. it has a specific technical meaning in self-driving. A human taking timely action to prevent a bad outcome the system was creating, not taking action to get unstuck.
> IF they were good I would assume that someone would publish them for marketing reasons.
I think there's an interesting lens to look at it in: remote interventions are massively disruptive, the car goes into a specific mode and support calls in to check in with the passenger.
It's baked into UX judgement, it's not really something a specific number would shed more light on.
If there was a significant problem with this, it would be well-known given the scale they operate at now.
standardUser · 4h ago
All cars were once restricted in the locations they could drive. EVs are restricted today. I don't see why universal access is a requirement for a commercially viable autonomous taxi service, which is what Waymo is currently. And the need for human operators seems obvious for any business, no matter how autonomous, let alone a business operating in a cutting edge and frankly dangerous space.
pavel_lishin · 3h ago
> EVs are restricted today.
Are they? Did you mean Autonomous Vehicles?
standardUser · 12m ago
No, you can't go driving off into an area with no charging options, which would be much of the world.
shadowgovt · 4h ago
It's by definition in terms of how these things are counted.
L4 is "full autonomy, but in a constrained environment."
L5 is the holy grail: as good as or better than human in every environment a human could take a car (or, depending on who's doing the defining: every road a human could take a car on. Most people don't say L5 and mean "full Canyonero").
gerdesj · 3h ago
No one does FSD yet - properly.
It initially seems mad that a human, inside the box can outperform the "finest" efforts of a multi zillion dollar company. The human has all their sensors inside the box and most of them stymied by the non transparent parts. Bad weather makes it worse.
However, look at the sensors and compute being deployed on cars. Its all minimums and cost focused - basically MVP, with deaths as a costed variable in an equation.
A car could have cameras with views everywhere for optical, LIDAR, RADAR, even a form of SONAR if it can be useful, microwave and way more. Accellerometers and all sorts too, all feeding into a model.
As a driver, I've come up with strategies such as "look left, listen right". I'm British so drive on the left and sit on the right side of my car. When turning right and I have the window wound down, I can watch the left for a gap and listen for cars to the right. I use it as a negative and never a positive - so if I see a gap on the left and I hear a car to my right, I stay put. If I see a gap to the left but hear no sound on my right, I turn my head to confirm that there is a space and do a final quick go/no go (which involves another check left and right). This strategy saves quite a lot of head swings and if done properly is safe.
I now drive an EV: One year so far - a Seic MG4, with cameras on all four sides, that I can't record from but can use. It has lane assist (so lateral control, which craps out on many A road sections but is fine on motorway class roads) and cruise control that will keep a safe distance from other vehicles (that works well on most roads and very well on motorways, there are restrictions).
Recently I was driving and a really heavy rain shower hit as I was overtaking a lorry. I immediately dived back into lane one, behind the lorry and put cruise on. I could just see the edge white line, so I dealt with left/right and the car sorted out forward/backward. I can easily deal with both but its quite nice to be able carefully abrogate responsibilities.
panick21_ · 4h ago
Put a Waymo on random road in the world, can it drive it?
Kye · 4h ago
That's the real issue. If "can navigate roads" is enough then we've had full self-driving for a while. There needs to be some base level of general purpose capability or it's just a neat regional curiosity.
standardUser · 4h ago
For a couple decades you couldn't even bring your cell phone anywhere in the world and use it. Transformational technologies don't have to be available universally and simultaneously to be viable. Even when the gas car was created you couldn't use it anywhere that didn't have gasoline and paved roads, plus a mechanic and access to parts.
jazzyjackson · 4h ago
A significant portion of US highways and backroads are uncovered by cell signal. I suppose a self driving car would have starlink these days.
standardUser · 3h ago
We once had no gas stations, now we have 150,000 (in the US). If the commercial need is there, building out connectivity is an unlikely impediment. Starlink et al. can solve this everywhere except when there's severe weather, a problem Waymo shares, which is starting to make me think the Upper Midwest might be waiting a very long time for self-driving cars.
cryptoz · 4h ago
Many humans couldn't.
jacquesm · 4h ago
Most humans that claim they could could. Anyway, this seems like a pretty low quality comment, you got perfectly well what the OP meant.
cryptoz · 4h ago
Oh gosh sorry, I do try to contribute positively to HN and write quality comments. I'll expand: I've been in circumstances where I've been rented a company car in a foreign country, felt that I was a good driver, but struggled. The road signs are different and can be confusing, the local patterns and habits of drivers can be totally different from what you're accustomed to. I don't doubt that lots of humans could drive most roads - but I think the average driver would struggle, and have a much higher rate of accidents than a local.
Germany, Italy, India all stand out as examples to me. The roads and driving culture is very different, and can be dangerous to someone who is used to driving on American suburban streets.
I really do stand by my comment, and apologize for the 'low quality' nature of it. I meant to suggest that we set the bar far higher for AI than we do for people, which is in general a good thing. But still - I would say that by this definition of 'full self driving', it wouldn't be met very well by many or most human drivers.
jacquesm · 3h ago
I've driven all over the planet except for Asia and Africa. So far, no real problem and I think most drivers would adapt within a day or two. Greece, Panama and Colombia stand out as somewhat more exciting. Switching to left hand driving in the UK also wasn't a big problem but you do have to pay more attention.
Of course I may have simply been lucky, but given that my driving license is valid in many countries it seems as though humanity has determined this is mostly a solved problem. When someone says "Put a Waymo on random road in the world, can it drive it?" they mean: I would expect a human to be able to drive on a random road in the world. And they likely could. Can a Waymo do the same?
I don't know the answer to that one. But if there is one thing that humans are pretty good at it is adaptation to circumstances previously unseen. I am not sure if a Waymo could do the same but it would be a very interesting experiment to find out.
American suburban streets are not representative of driving in most parts of the world. I don't think the bar of 'should be able to drive most places where humans can drive' is all that high and even your average American would adapt pretty quickly to driving in different places. Source: I know plenty of Americans and have seen them drive in lots of countries. Usually it works quite well, though, admittedly, seeing them in Germany was kind of funny.
"Am I hallucinating or did we just get passed by an old lady? And we're doing 85 Mph?"
gerdesj · 3h ago
"Germany, Italy, India "
That's experience and you learned and survived to tell the tale. Its almost as though you are capable of learning how to deal with an unfamiliar environment, and fail safe!
I'm a Brit and have driven across most of Europe, US/CA and a few other places.
Southern Italy eg around Napoli is pretty fraught - around there I find that you need to treat your entire car as an indicator: if you can wedge your car into a traffic stream, you will be let in, mostly without horns blaring. If you sit and wait, you will go grey haired eventually.
In Germania, speed is king. I lived there in the 70s-90s as well as being a visitor recently. The autobahns are insane if you stray out of lane one, the rest of the road system is civilised.
France - mostly like driving around the UK apart from their weird right hand side of the road thing! La Perifique is just as funky as the M25 and La Place du Concorde is a right old laugh. The rest of the country that I have driven is very civilised.
Europe to the right of Italy is pretty safe too. I have to say that across the entirety of Europe, that road signage is very good. The one sign that might confuse any non-European is the white and yellow diamond (we don't have them in the UK). It means that you have priority over an implied "priority to the right". See https://driveeurope.co.uk/2013/02/27/priority-to-the-right/ for a decent explanation.
Roundabouts were invented in the US. In the UK when you are actually on a roundabout you have right of way. However, everyone will behave as though "priorite a la doite" and there will often be a stand off - its hilarious!
In the UK, when someone flashes their headlights at you it generally means "I have seen you and will let you in". That generally surprises foreigners (I once gave a lift to a prospective employee candidate from Poland and he was absolutely aghast at how polite our roads seemed to be). Don't always assume that you will be given space but we are pretty good at "after you".
jacquesm · 3h ago
That reminds me. I was in the UK on some trip and watched two very polite English people crash into each other when after multiple such 'after you' exchanges they both simultaneously thought screw it and accelerated into each other. Fortunately only some bent metal.
bsder · 3h ago
> Most humans that claim they could could.
I don't agree.
My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.
My last dozen ridesharing experiences only had a single driver that wasn't actively hazardous on the road. One of them was so bad that I actually flagged him on the service.
My Waymo experiences, by contrast, have all been uniformly excellent.
I suspect that Waymo is already better than the median human driver (anecdata suggests that's a really low bar)--and it just keeps getting better.
jacquesm · 3h ago
> Most humans that claim they could could.
> My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.
Those two aren't really related are they? That's one locality and a specific kind of driver. If you picked a random road there is a pretty small chance that road would be one like the one where Waymo is currently rolled out, and where your ridesharing drivers are representative of the general public, they likely are not.
an0malous · 4h ago
How have they gotten away with such obvious misadvertising for this long? It’s undeniably misled customers and inflated their stock value
dreamcompiler · 4h ago
Normally the Board of Directors would fire any CEO that destroyed as much of the company's value as Musk has. But Tesla's board is full of Musk syncophants and family members who refuse to stand up to him.
SEC and FTC would be obvious candidates who historically would do this. States also have the ability to prosecute this via UDAP (unfair and deceptive practices) laws.
Probably Tesla being the only major domestic EV manufacturer + historically Musk not wading into politics + Musk/Tesla being widely popular for a time is probably why no one has gone after him. Not sure how this changes going forward with Musk being a very polarizing figure now.
1over137 · 3h ago
>SEC and FTC would be obvious candidates who historically would do this.
Yeah, historically, as in: before many people here were born. It's been so long since SEC and FTC did such things.
randallsquared · 2h ago
The previous two administrations (Trump I and Biden) being somewhat anti-Tesla or anti-Musk was some part of what prompted Musk to get into politics in the first place. Given the Biden admin's hostility, I would have expected the SEC and FTC to have been directed to do all they could against him within bounds, and so my first guess would be that they did, in fact, do everything justifiable.
barbazoo · 3h ago
Maybe that’s what happens in late stage capitalism. The billionaires get so powerful that they become untouchable. He’s already shown that he uses his fortune to steer political outcomes.
SequoiaHope · 4h ago
SEC is one possibility
greekrich92 · 4h ago
2007 called...
ciconia · 20m ago
War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. FSD is... whatever Elon says it is.
jesenpaul · 3h ago
They made tons of money on the Scam of the Decade™ from Oct 2016 (See their "Driver is just there for legal reasons" video) to Apr 2024 (when they officially changed it to Supervised FSD) and now its not even that.
pm90 · 4h ago
> Since 2016, Tesla has claimed that all its vehicles in production would be capable of achieving unsupervised self-driving capability.
> CEO Elon Musk has claimed that it would happen by the end of every year since 2018.
Even as a Tesla owner, it baffles me how rational adults can take this conman seriously.
lotsofpulp · 3h ago
It’s a winning strategy. See who won the presidential election recently.
RyanShook · 4h ago
Looking forward to the class action on this one…
greyface- · 3h ago
Tesla has binding arbitration that prohibits class actions.
ares623 · 4h ago
Most Honest Company (Sarcasm)
jacquesm · 4h ago
Fish rots from the head.
asdff · 4h ago
What I don't understand about this is that to my experience being driven around in friends teslas, its already there. It really seems like legalese vs technical capability. The damn thing can drive with no input and even find a parking spot and park itself. I mean where are we even moving the goalpost at this point? Because there's been some accidents its not valid? The question is how that compares to the accident rate of human drivers not that there should be an expectation of zero accidents ever.
AlotOfReading · 2h ago
The word "driving" has multiple, partially overlapping meanings. You're using it in a very informal sense to mean "I don't have to touch the controls much". Power to you for using whatever definitions you feel like.
Other people, most importantly your local driving laws, use driving as a technical term to refer to tasks done by the entity that's ultimately responsible for the safety of the entire system. The human remains the driver in this definition, even if they've engaged FSD. They are not in a Waymo. If you're interested in specific technical verbiage, you should look at SAE J3016 (the infamous "levels" standard), which many vehicle codes incorporate.
One of the critical differences between your informal definition is whether you can stop paying attention to the road and remain safe. With your definition, it's possible have a system where you're not "driving", but you still have a responsibility to react instantaneously to dangerous road events after hours of of inaction. Very few humans can reliably do that. It's not a great way to communicate the responsibilities people have in a safety-critical task they do every day.
One problem might be that American driving is not exactly... well great, is it? Roads are generally too straight and driving tests too soft. And for some weird reason, many US drivers seem to have a poor sense of situational awareness.
The result is it looks like many drivers are unaware of the benefits of defensive driving. Take that all into account and safe 'full self driving' may be tricky to achieve?
ChrisArchitect · 2h ago
Earlier:
Tesla’s autonomous driving claims might be coming to an end [video]
Feels like Musk should step down from the CEO role. The company hasn’t really delivered on its big promises: no real self-driving, Cybertruck turned into a flop, the affordable Tesla never materialized. Model S was revolutionary, but Model 3 is basically a cheaper version of that design, and in the last decade there hasn’t been a comparable breakthrough. Innovation seems stalled.
At this point, Tesla looks less like a disruptive startup and more like a large-cap company struggling to find its next act. Musk still runs it like a scrappy startup, but you can’t operate a trillion-dollar business with the same playbook. He’d probably be better off going back to building something new from scratch and letting someone else run Tesla like the large company it already is.
xpe · 3h ago
This is not a heavily researched comment, but it seems to me that the Model 3 is relatively affordable, at least compared to available options at the time. It depends on your point of comparison: there is a lot of competition for sure. The M3 was successful to a good degree, don’t you think? I mean, we should put a number on it so we’re not just comparing feels. The Model Y sells well too, doesn’t at least until the DOGE insanity.
starchild3001 · 3h ago
Here's some heavy research for you -- Model 3 is competing with the likes of BMW, Audi etc. That's not considered the "affordable" tier. It's called luxury. Here's a comparison:
Daily reminder that Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company. Given Tesla's fundamentals (the types of assets they own, the logistics they've built out), the Powerwall and Megapack are closer to Tesla's core product than the cars are. (And they also make a bunch of other battery-ish things that have no consumer names, just MIL-SPEC procurement codes.)
Yes, right now car sales make up 78% of Tesla's revenue. But cars have 17% margins. The energy-storage division, currently at 10% of revenue, has more like 30% margins. And the car sales are falling as the battery sales ramp up.
The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries (and things like military UAV batteries) under large enterprise B2B contracts. Which is why Tesla is pushing the "car narrative" less and less over time, seeming to fade into B2C irrelevancy — all their marketing and sales is gradually pivoting to B2B outreach.
JimDabell · 2h ago
> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company.
> The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries
This seems like revisionist history. They called their company Tesla Motors, not Tesla Energy, after all.
This is a blog post from the founder and CEO about their first energy play. It seems clear that their first energy product was an unintended byproduct of the Roadster, they worried about it being a distraction from their core car business, but they decided to go ahead with it because they saw it as a way to strengthen their car business.
Nope. Don't even own a car. Military-industrial-complexes are just my special interest. And apparently Musk's, too. (What do grid-scale batteries, rockets, data-satellite constellations, and tunnel boring machines have in common? They're all products/services that can be — and already are being — sold to multiple allied nations' militaries. AFAICT, this is 90% of the reason Trump can't fully cut ties with the guy.)
DoesntMatter22 · 4h ago
They went from no revenue to the 9th most valuable company in the world under him. No vehicle sales to having the best selling vehicles in the world.
They are still profitable, have very little debt and a ton of money into the bank.
Every company has hits and misses. Bezos started before Musk and still hasn't gotten his rockets into orbit.
I was a fool's game from the start, with only negative aspects = what could possibly go wrong?
utyop22 · 3h ago
Tesla's share price is all based on the Greater Fool Theory in the short run.
In the long run some of those promises might materialise. But who cares! Portfolio managers and retail investors want some juicy returns - share price volatility is welcomed.
yieldcrv · 4h ago
The lesson here is to wait for a chill SEC and friendly DOJ before you recant your fraudulent claims, because then they won’t be found to be fraudulent
comice · 4h ago
Wait for them? or buy them?
yieldcrv · 3h ago
You’re right, still an exercise of patience
shadowgovt · 4h ago
"Full Self Driving (Supervised)." In other words: you can take your mind off the road as long as you keep your mind on the road. Classic.
Tesla is kind of a joke in the FSD community these days. People working on this problem a lot longer than Musk's folk have been saying for years that their approach is fundamentally ignoring decades of research on the topic. Sounds like Tesla finally got the memo. I mostly feel sorry for their engineers (both the ones who bought the hype and thought they'd discover the secret sauce that a quarter-century-plus of full-time academic research couldn't find and the old salts who knew this was doomed but soldiered on anyway... but only so sorry, since I'm sure the checks kept clearing).
arijun · 3h ago
Until very recently I worked in the FSD community, and I wouldn’t say I viewed it as a joke. I don’t know if I believed they would get to level 5 without any lidar, it’s pretty good for what’s available in the consumer market.
freerobby · 4h ago
This is clickbait from a publication that's had it out for Tesla for nearly a decade.
Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises.
The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
qwerpy · 4h ago
Marketing choice of words aside, it's already really good now to the point that it probably does 95% of my driving. Once in a while it chooses the wrong lane and very rarely I will have to intervene, but it's always getting better. If they just called it "Advanced Driver Assist" or something, and politics weren't such an emotional trigger, it would be hailed as a huge achievement.
freerobby · 3h ago
Yeah, Tesla did themselves no favors with how they initially marketed FSD, and all the missed timelines amplified the brand cost of that. I'm glad to see them focus on what it can do today. Better to underpromise and overdeliver etc.
As an aside, it's wild how different the perspective is between the masses and the people who experience the bleeding edge here. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed," indeed.
utyop22 · 3h ago
Surely you're joking? You really believe those timelines were set in good faith?
Lol it has been strategic manipulation right the way through. Right out of an Industrial Organisation textbook.
freerobby · 3h ago
Yeah I think their early success with Tesla Vision was faster than expected, it went to their heads, and they underestimated the iteration and fine tuning needed to solve the edge cases. It's difficult to predict how many reps it will take to solve an intricate problem. That's not to excuse their public timeline -- their guidance was naive and IMO irresponsible -- but I don't think it was in bad faith.
panarky · 4h ago
Can you find any statement in the article that is false?
freerobby · 4h ago
The first one.
> Tesla has changed the meaning of “Full Self-Driving”, also known as “FSD”, to give up on its original promise of delivering unsupervised autonomy.
They have not given up on unsupervised autonomy. They are operating unsupervised autonomy in Austin TX as I type this!
No comments yet
an0malous · 4h ago
Great spin job. They didn’t lie, they’re just “pivoting their messaging”
Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation, and will be able to claim full self driving, but like fusion power and post-singularity AI, it seems to be one of those things where the closer we get to it, the further away it is.
I guess you don't drive? You use more senses than just vision when driving a car.
The problem is clearly a question of the fidelity of the vision and our ability to slave a decision maker and mapper to it.
try matching a cat's eye on those metrics. and it is much simpler that human one.
LIDAR based self-driving cars will always massively exceed the safety and performance of vision-only self driving cars.
Current Tesla cameras+computer vision is nowhere near as good as humans. But LIDAR based self-driving cars already have way better situational awareness in many scenarios. They are way closer to actually delivering.
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There is little to suggest that Tesla is any closer to level 4 automation than Nabisco is. The Dojo supercomputer that was going to get them there? Never existed.
The persistent problem seems to be severe weather, but the gap between the weather a human shouldn't drive in and weather a robot can't drive in will only get smaller. In the end, the reason to own a self-driven vehicle may come down to how many severe weather days you have to endure in your locale.
Interesting that Waymo now operates just fine in SF fog, and is expanding to Seattle (rain) and Denver (snow and ice).
A system that requires a "higher level" handler is not full self driving.
If the vehicle has a collision, who's ultimately responsible? That person (or computer) is the driver.
If a Waymo hits a pole for example, the software has a bug. It wasn't the responsibility of a remote assistant to monitor the environment in real time and prevent the accident, so we call the computer the driver.
If we put a safety driver in the seat and run the same software that hits the same pole, it was the human who didn't meet their responsibility to prevent the accident. Therefore, they're the driver.
Which is why an autonomous car company that is responsible and prioritizes safety would never call their SAE Level 4 vehicle "full self-driving".
And that's why it's so irresponsible and dangerous for Tesla to continue using that marketing hype term for their SAE Level 2 system.
But is Level 4 enough to count as "Full Self Driving"? I'd argue it really depends on how big the geofence area is, and how rare interventions are. A car that can drive on 95% of public roads might as well be FSD from the perspective of the average drive, even if it falls short of being Level 5 (which requires zero geofencing and zero human intervention).
https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1gsv4d7/waymo_spotte...
> and uses remote operators to make decisions in unusual situations and when it gets stuck.
This is why its limited markets and areas of service: connectivity for this sort of thing matters. Your robotaxi crashing cause the human backup lost 5g connectivity is gonna be a real real bad look. NO one is talking about their intervention stats. IF they were good I would assume that someone would publish them for marketing reasons.
Waymo navigates autonomously 100% of the time. The human backup's role is limited to selecting the best option if the car has stopped due to an obstacle it's not sure how to navigate.
Interventions are a term of art, i.e. it has a specific technical meaning in self-driving. A human taking timely action to prevent a bad outcome the system was creating, not taking action to get unstuck.
> IF they were good I would assume that someone would publish them for marketing reasons.
I think there's an interesting lens to look at it in: remote interventions are massively disruptive, the car goes into a specific mode and support calls in to check in with the passenger.
It's baked into UX judgement, it's not really something a specific number would shed more light on.
If there was a significant problem with this, it would be well-known given the scale they operate at now.
Are they? Did you mean Autonomous Vehicles?
L4 is "full autonomy, but in a constrained environment." L5 is the holy grail: as good as or better than human in every environment a human could take a car (or, depending on who's doing the defining: every road a human could take a car on. Most people don't say L5 and mean "full Canyonero").
It initially seems mad that a human, inside the box can outperform the "finest" efforts of a multi zillion dollar company. The human has all their sensors inside the box and most of them stymied by the non transparent parts. Bad weather makes it worse.
However, look at the sensors and compute being deployed on cars. Its all minimums and cost focused - basically MVP, with deaths as a costed variable in an equation.
A car could have cameras with views everywhere for optical, LIDAR, RADAR, even a form of SONAR if it can be useful, microwave and way more. Accellerometers and all sorts too, all feeding into a model.
As a driver, I've come up with strategies such as "look left, listen right". I'm British so drive on the left and sit on the right side of my car. When turning right and I have the window wound down, I can watch the left for a gap and listen for cars to the right. I use it as a negative and never a positive - so if I see a gap on the left and I hear a car to my right, I stay put. If I see a gap to the left but hear no sound on my right, I turn my head to confirm that there is a space and do a final quick go/no go (which involves another check left and right). This strategy saves quite a lot of head swings and if done properly is safe.
I now drive an EV: One year so far - a Seic MG4, with cameras on all four sides, that I can't record from but can use. It has lane assist (so lateral control, which craps out on many A road sections but is fine on motorway class roads) and cruise control that will keep a safe distance from other vehicles (that works well on most roads and very well on motorways, there are restrictions).
Recently I was driving and a really heavy rain shower hit as I was overtaking a lorry. I immediately dived back into lane one, behind the lorry and put cruise on. I could just see the edge white line, so I dealt with left/right and the car sorted out forward/backward. I can easily deal with both but its quite nice to be able carefully abrogate responsibilities.
Germany, Italy, India all stand out as examples to me. The roads and driving culture is very different, and can be dangerous to someone who is used to driving on American suburban streets.
I really do stand by my comment, and apologize for the 'low quality' nature of it. I meant to suggest that we set the bar far higher for AI than we do for people, which is in general a good thing. But still - I would say that by this definition of 'full self driving', it wouldn't be met very well by many or most human drivers.
Of course I may have simply been lucky, but given that my driving license is valid in many countries it seems as though humanity has determined this is mostly a solved problem. When someone says "Put a Waymo on random road in the world, can it drive it?" they mean: I would expect a human to be able to drive on a random road in the world. And they likely could. Can a Waymo do the same?
I don't know the answer to that one. But if there is one thing that humans are pretty good at it is adaptation to circumstances previously unseen. I am not sure if a Waymo could do the same but it would be a very interesting experiment to find out.
American suburban streets are not representative of driving in most parts of the world. I don't think the bar of 'should be able to drive most places where humans can drive' is all that high and even your average American would adapt pretty quickly to driving in different places. Source: I know plenty of Americans and have seen them drive in lots of countries. Usually it works quite well, though, admittedly, seeing them in Germany was kind of funny.
"Am I hallucinating or did we just get passed by an old lady? And we're doing 85 Mph?"
That's experience and you learned and survived to tell the tale. Its almost as though you are capable of learning how to deal with an unfamiliar environment, and fail safe!
I'm a Brit and have driven across most of Europe, US/CA and a few other places.
Southern Italy eg around Napoli is pretty fraught - around there I find that you need to treat your entire car as an indicator: if you can wedge your car into a traffic stream, you will be let in, mostly without horns blaring. If you sit and wait, you will go grey haired eventually.
In Germania, speed is king. I lived there in the 70s-90s as well as being a visitor recently. The autobahns are insane if you stray out of lane one, the rest of the road system is civilised.
France - mostly like driving around the UK apart from their weird right hand side of the road thing! La Perifique is just as funky as the M25 and La Place du Concorde is a right old laugh. The rest of the country that I have driven is very civilised.
Europe to the right of Italy is pretty safe too. I have to say that across the entirety of Europe, that road signage is very good. The one sign that might confuse any non-European is the white and yellow diamond (we don't have them in the UK). It means that you have priority over an implied "priority to the right". See https://driveeurope.co.uk/2013/02/27/priority-to-the-right/ for a decent explanation.
Roundabouts were invented in the US. In the UK when you are actually on a roundabout you have right of way. However, everyone will behave as though "priorite a la doite" and there will often be a stand off - its hilarious!
In the UK, when someone flashes their headlights at you it generally means "I have seen you and will let you in". That generally surprises foreigners (I once gave a lift to a prospective employee candidate from Poland and he was absolutely aghast at how polite our roads seemed to be). Don't always assume that you will be given space but we are pretty good at "after you".
I don't agree.
My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.
My last dozen ridesharing experiences only had a single driver that wasn't actively hazardous on the road. One of them was so bad that I actually flagged him on the service.
My Waymo experiences, by contrast, have all been uniformly excellent.
I suspect that Waymo is already better than the median human driver (anecdata suggests that's a really low bar)--and it just keeps getting better.
> My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.
Those two aren't really related are they? That's one locality and a specific kind of driver. If you picked a random road there is a pretty small chance that road would be one like the one where Waymo is currently rolled out, and where your ridesharing drivers are representative of the general public, they likely are not.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/business/tesla-stock-sale...
https://www.afr.com/technology/life-changing-wealth-stopped-...
Probably Tesla being the only major domestic EV manufacturer + historically Musk not wading into politics + Musk/Tesla being widely popular for a time is probably why no one has gone after him. Not sure how this changes going forward with Musk being a very polarizing figure now.
Yeah, historically, as in: before many people here were born. It's been so long since SEC and FTC did such things.
> CEO Elon Musk has claimed that it would happen by the end of every year since 2018.
Even as a Tesla owner, it baffles me how rational adults can take this conman seriously.
Other people, most importantly your local driving laws, use driving as a technical term to refer to tasks done by the entity that's ultimately responsible for the safety of the entire system. The human remains the driver in this definition, even if they've engaged FSD. They are not in a Waymo. If you're interested in specific technical verbiage, you should look at SAE J3016 (the infamous "levels" standard), which many vehicle codes incorporate.
One of the critical differences between your informal definition is whether you can stop paying attention to the road and remain safe. With your definition, it's possible have a system where you're not "driving", but you still have a responsibility to react instantaneously to dangerous road events after hours of of inaction. Very few humans can reliably do that. It's not a great way to communicate the responsibilities people have in a safety-critical task they do every day.
In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver": https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...
It was a lie then and remains a lie now.
The result is it looks like many drivers are unaware of the benefits of defensive driving. Take that all into account and safe 'full self driving' may be tricky to achieve?
Tesla’s autonomous driving claims might be coming to an end [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133607
At this point, Tesla looks less like a disruptive startup and more like a large-cap company struggling to find its next act. Musk still runs it like a scrappy startup, but you can’t operate a trillion-dollar business with the same playbook. He’d probably be better off going back to building something new from scratch and letting someone else run Tesla like the large company it already is.
https://www.truecar.com/compare/bmw-3-series-vs-tesla-model-...
Yes, right now car sales make up 78% of Tesla's revenue. But cars have 17% margins. The energy-storage division, currently at 10% of revenue, has more like 30% margins. And the car sales are falling as the battery sales ramp up.
The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries (and things like military UAV batteries) under large enterprise B2B contracts. Which is why Tesla is pushing the "car narrative" less and less over time, seeming to fade into B2C irrelevancy — all their marketing and sales is gradually pivoting to B2B outreach.
> The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries
This seems like revisionist history. They called their company Tesla Motors, not Tesla Energy, after all.
This is a blog post from the founder and CEO about their first energy play. It seems clear that their first energy product was an unintended byproduct of the Roadster, they worried about it being a distraction from their core car business, but they decided to go ahead with it because they saw it as a way to strengthen their car business.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090814225814/http://www.teslam...
They are still profitable, have very little debt and a ton of money into the bank.
Every company has hits and misses. Bezos started before Musk and still hasn't gotten his rockets into orbit.
In the long run some of those promises might materialise. But who cares! Portfolio managers and retail investors want some juicy returns - share price volatility is welcomed.
Tesla is kind of a joke in the FSD community these days. People working on this problem a lot longer than Musk's folk have been saying for years that their approach is fundamentally ignoring decades of research on the topic. Sounds like Tesla finally got the memo. I mostly feel sorry for their engineers (both the ones who bought the hype and thought they'd discover the secret sauce that a quarter-century-plus of full-time academic research couldn't find and the old salts who knew this was doomed but soldiered on anyway... but only so sorry, since I'm sure the checks kept clearing).
Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises.
The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
As an aside, it's wild how different the perspective is between the masses and the people who experience the bleeding edge here. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed," indeed.
Lol it has been strategic manipulation right the way through. Right out of an Industrial Organisation textbook.
> Tesla has changed the meaning of “Full Self-Driving”, also known as “FSD”, to give up on its original promise of delivering unsupervised autonomy.
They have not given up on unsupervised autonomy. They are operating unsupervised autonomy in Austin TX as I type this!
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