How does Tesla FSD fair against the Waymo self driving taxis?
I'm curious about whether self driving is still an impossible task right now, or if it's just a matter of quality between companies - in which case it's possibly a fair bet being made by Telsa execs that they'll bridge the gap given time and money.
The Waymo cars drive themselves without (in person) supervision. As best as I can tell from three rides, they do it perfectly. However the range is limited to city streets in a few cities, no interstates at all (they are adding this soon.) The Tesla FSD even at v12 can go about five minutes before I have to intervene. If you’re extremely tolerant and don’t care what other drivers think (eg weird slow behavior at stop signs, sudden rapid bursts of acceleration in inappropriate places, turn signal decisions that a human driver wouldn’t make) I bet you could push it up to 10 or 15 minutes without intervention. I don’t have enough courage to genuinely let FSD loose on city streets without intervening.
More generally, Waymo’s approach is to own the hardware and heavily supervise it with remote workers who can instruct it how to deal with complicated situations (eg lane blocked by emergency vehicle.) Tesla has none of that infrastructure yet. It’s sort of hard for me to see a business model where (1) the user owns the hardware, (2) there are necessary remote human beings monitoring and advising the car in sticky situations (that costs money), and (3) a third party company takes on the liability risk. The idea that you’re going to “rent out” your personal car during the day runs into the question of who pays when someone gets killed/hurt, and that immediately runs into the question of how a remote operator deals with the problem of malfunctioning hardware it doesn’t own (and why it needs to borrow other folks’ personal hardware at all.)
Waymo operates a business that offers hundreds or thousands of rides every day under regulatory supervision, and we have public data about accidents (there have been a few.) My anecdotal observations aren’t a replacement for data, but there is data. For the Tesla I’ve had FSD on my personal car since it became available in beta and have way more than three rides. My observations are sufficient to tell me it’s not reliable enough to run unsupervised, at least as long as I’m liable or in the same city as an unsupervised one.
And Tesla is selling FSD for thousands of dollars per activation.
Waymo technology is awesome, but I'm pretty sure, right now it's a money-losing business for its owner, Google.
Currently, it's definitely less reliable than Waymo, but is available anywhere in the US or Canada, and is coming to more countries soon.
The other factor is the trajectory of each endeavour. Waymo are gradually adding more cities, and Tesla FSD is gradually getting more reliable.
Both of them are going to be perfectly fine self-driving systems at some point in the future. It's an open question as to when Waymo will be able to scale up substantially, and when Tesla FSD will be reliable enough to operate as a robotaxi service.
You can see lots of videos of both on YouTube to gauge where they're up to. If you find accounts that are focused on each, you can search by oldest videos to see the progress that's been made and extrapolate from there.
Tangentially, but I'm wondering how the calculations really go with the robo-taxis. Taxidrivers here are probably getting $5/h or so and it's a job you can get without any skills at all, you don't need to speak the language and you don't need any tests, you just need to be able to sit down, input stuff on a GPS and drive. So there's an infinity of people to employ if you're a cab company. Neither Waymo nor Tesla want to give the tech away for free. Is there a market (without corporate subsidies from Waymo etc)?
It works out pretty well in theory. Even at minimum wage the cost of the driver is a lot of the cost of the taxi ride. It does all hinge on the cost of the vehicles + the cost of monitoring + the cost of maintenance being low enough to offset this though. Cost of vehicle is higher in the case of waymo but even 3x the cost is still useful, cost of monitoring is probably still a bit high at the moment but is the main thrust of improving the tech, and maintenance is not necessarily much worse than a normal taxi.
I'm curious about whether self driving is still an impossible task right now, or if it's just a matter of quality between companies - in which case it's possibly a fair bet being made by Telsa execs that they'll bridge the gap given time and money.