I'm fairly certain every auto manufacturer and many non-auto manufacturers are working on it. I doubt they'll be able to patent anything truly important to the process, since others beat them to the market with most of it. Or am I missing something essential?
Remember how everyone kept saying tesla is doomed because any minute now the old OEMs were going to storm in and kill their EV business? In actuality, those OEMs are getting killed by Tesla and Chinese startups. You are making the same argument for autonomy. Old OEMS cannot compete in this space at all. Waymo cannot compete on price with Tesla.
It's a race between how fast Waymo's COGS can decline and how fast Tesla's FSD can achieve actual self-driving. At this moment, given all the evidence available, my inclination is that Waymo is in a better spot.
I don’t think your inclination is unreasonable. Having taken probably like a hundred rides with about an even Tesla/Waymo split in SF, Teslas feel smoother and less robotic, but of course if they felt safety was where it needs to be, they’d be driverless by now.
It’s a bit of a bet. It feels like Tesla is real close, and if they get there, Waymo has no way to compete with Tesla’s manufacturing prowess and vertical integration.
Sure, they're a bit ahead but Mercedes has level 3 self driving and they didnt celebrate killing a bunch of people (and not lowering the deficit) by prancing around with a chainsaw.[0]
I feel like people will be willing to wait until next year for the Alphabet or Mercedes version, but maybe I'm overestimating the average person's attention span or underestimating how far behind the competition is.
When I looked for videos of the Mercedes L3 in action a while ago all I could find were videos showing it doing stuff the Tesla FSD could do easily 5 years ago. Has it improved a lot recently?
I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I'm certainly not an expert.
I can say though that when my brother bought his first Tesla he paid thousands of dollars for FSD, which was supposed to be released "any day now." It's been many years and as far as I can tell it's still not REALLY here (in the sense that most people would mean it).
I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but... The Tesla that he bought originally all those years ago is actually gone now. He had one of the earlier versions of FSD enabled and passed out behind the wheel. Tesla, in their infinite wisdom, decided that if you let go of the wheel for too long they should just completely disable the self driving (at least in that version). So naturally when the driver became incapacitated it just disengaged self driving completely and let the vehicle drive straight into a tree as "punishment" for daring to let go of the wheel for too long. Nobody was hurt, but the vehicle was totaled. It could have been much worse though.
It's such an obvious design flaw. "Driverless 2000 pound missile hurtling down the highway at 55 mpg" is the one failure mode you would think they'd avoid at all costs, rather than using it as the safety fallback. When people talk about how great Tesla engineering is I just kind of shrug.
This is completely made up and/or your brother lied. Teslas always came to a slow stop if no driver attention was detected. Originally just slowly stopping in lane, now actually pulling over.
Stock valuations are not a democracy of public opinion, they are the product of investors putting their money into the stock.
Musk is a shit human, but to an investor, everything he touches turns to gold. Whether his companies make anything useful doesn't matter, what matters is that the stock price in his companies goes up, so people give him more money. This works until it doesn't.
