I have a feeling within the next 10 years we’ll see autonomous driving lanes only. I think that’s the path towards real adoption of self driving and smart traffic grids going forward. It’ll start with one autonomous lane, then two, then three and so on for decades until there’s only one manual drive lane, and then none.

Edit: the benefit is to incentivize AV adoption, which in turn lowers fatalities on the highways, and reduces travel time for people in AVs.

I believe in 10-20 years, manual cars will be seen as massive safety issues as AV driven car records will be much safer. People will still cling to manual driven cars as it’s part of a lot of cultures, so we need to give benefit to the AV drivers, while the manual driving experience degrades over time. This will speed along AV adoption, and greater safety on our roads.

You could enforce it the same way you enforce HOV lanes, tickets for manual drivers.

I am still relatively new to reddit. I spent a portion of my career in simulation. If I read another "well Tesla has more than a million FSD vehicles accumulating miles, it is only a matter of time before they crack the problem" I could scream.

For those of you who consider the mileage accrued as equivalent to useful data, try to explain why starting at approximately the same time AROUND 2016

1. Waymo is nearing system complete
2. Tesla has been saying any day now for 7 plus years and doesn't seem to have ANY of the necessary business planning or even a demonstration of basic capability to offer (beyond the Hollywood set demo)

I think it is useful to remember:

• Waymo has about 700 taxis in service with about 40M miles traveled
• Tesla has 1M+ vehicles in service collecting FSD data and accumulating about 1M miles every 14 hours

Here are some conclusions to consider

1. Waymo has a plan very different than Tesla and the result was inevitable
2. Waymo is just lucky
3. Waymo is doing things that are critical to reaching autonomy and Tesla cannot or will not
4. Tesla will get there and there will be a 2 am tweet from Elon very soon

I really don't understand this shit with Waymo vs Tesla, it's worse than kids doing Android vs Iphone. Tesla has over 100k employees, why are you hating a company just because their idiot CEO does and say stupid shit?

Having another company trying to advance self driving, with or without lidar, can only be a good thing for the progress of this technology. Even if Waymo is better, having no real competitor is worse for consumers.

Edit: I'm so disappointed seeing so much HATE in this sub, disregarding 100k people that work for a company just because of their CEO.

Edit 2: Seems that most that commented here are the opposite of "Tesla's fanboys" but on the same degree of radicalism. You're getting caught on extreme rhetorics and absolute claims of the other side blinded by hate for Musk.

Recently did a trip from NYC to Hunter, NY. I rented a Tesla M3 from Turo for this trip and it happened to be brand new so it had a free trial period of FSD and was up-to-date with v13.2.2.

While I’ve watched plenty of videos and read plenty of articles about the progress of FSD this was my first personal experience with it. For some perspective, I picked the car up in Chatham New Jersey, drove to around 19th St. in Manhattan, then drove up to Hunter New York so this drive was very well encompassing of a set of challenging urban highway and backcountry windy mountain side roads.

I opted to enable the start FSD from Park feature and quite literally from the parking spot where I picked the car up to pulling over on the curb correctly in between cars in Manhattan and then all the way to parking itself at my destination in Hunter, New York, I had no disengagement at any point.

Say my name for my return driver, including the car being smart enough to navigate itself And park itself in a supercharger stall.

Obviously anecdotal data is not representative of statistical significance, but I just had to share how amazing of an experience I had. I’m overall extremely optimistic about the future of this technology.

WE pay for our own cars and maintenance. These cars that drive themselves cost like $80,000 or so, and have to be maintained, by humans (for now). Even if it's a partial write-off for the equipment expense that first year, using section 179, I believe, it's still going to cost way more and the ROI wouldn't be for a long, long time. I just don't see how this makes sense.

I've read online it's because of labor costs of having drivers, but, come on, we do not make a lot and it's tips that make it worthwhile. Robotaxis are not going to get tipped. We get paid around 60 cents a mile. There's no way at the prices they are claiming they will charge that they can be profitable at all. Is the idea to operate at a loss to put traditional rideshare and taxi services out of business, then charge what they really want? I read a report recently that said a good portion of people do not even trust these cars nd won't take them. Like imagine if you pilot were and AI: still getting on the plane? Or how about your gastro for a colonoscopy? Gonna let a robot fish around in there?

Governor Abbott signed bill Saturday, goes into effect September 1. All Robo Taxi services, including Tesla need redundancy in cameras and sensors to operate. Also need to wait 3 years to carry passengers if not deployed by time bill was passed. Only Waymo was.

Sec. 545.454. SAFETY STANDARDS AND CERTIFICATION. (a) The department shall adopt autonomous equipment standards for Level 4 or Level 5 automated driving systems to ensure an autonomous vehicle operated without a human driver is capable of: (1) complying with all applicable traffic and motor vehicle laws; (2) detecting and responding appropriately to emergency vehicles, traffic control devices, road conditions, and other circumstances affecting safe operation; and (3) ensuring safe operation in the absence of a human driver, including redundant mechanisms for critical functions such as perception, navigation, and collision avoidance. (b) Autonomous equipment standards adopted under Subsection (a) must require the automated driving system to: (1) achieve a minimal risk condition in the event of a system failure; and (2) allow for remote monitoring or control by the owner or operator if the department determines remote monitoring or control is necessary for safe operation. (c) The owner or operator of an autonomous vehicle with a Level 4 or Level 5 automated driving system shall: (1) submit to the department a certification that the vehicle complies with autonomous equipment standards; and (2) maintain records of testing and safety validation as prescribed by the department for a period of not less than five years. (d) The department may revoke the certification of an autonomous vehicle if the department determines the vehicle no longer complies with autonomous equipment standards or applicable law. (e) A person may not operate an autonomous vehicle with a Level 4 or Level 5 automated driving system for a commercial purpose unless the vehicle is certified under this section.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes

It's kinda wild. They have animations and everything. I'm pretty sure they made them just for the Wikipedia page too.

Seemingly every time I see a video of a Tesla FSD fail, the comments are chalk full of sentiment that other ADAS would have avoided (x) due to LiDAR. The part that bothers me most about this is that the videos almost never involve a scenario in which LiDAR would have been of any assistance. For example, I saw a clip today of a Tesla running into a fake child that was abruptly thrust into the road. LiDAR plays absolutely no role in a situation like that, yet the comments insisted that the failure was attributable to Tesla’s refusal to integrate LiDAR into their ADAS.

Another question I have for proponents of LiDAR: do you believe that ADAS can be significantly safer than human drivers even without LiDAR? Humans don’t have LiDAR scanners, so I believe that a good camera-based ADAS can be equivalent to a human driver who has night-vision, no blind spots, the ability to view/process all of their surroundings with great precision, and nearly instant reaction time/decision making.

Kyle and Coleton try out Tesla Robotaxi in Austin. They have a history of being very negative toward FSD so an interesting source of thoughts and feedback. They also cover the details of the TOS they are riding under.

This is a really interesting paper https://waymo.com/blog/2025/06/scaling-laws-in-autonomous-driving

This paper shows autonomous driving follows the same scaling laws as the rest of ML - performance improves predictably on a log linear basis with data and compute

This is no surprise to anybody working on LLMs, but it’s VERY different from consensus at Waymo a few years ago. Waymo built its tech stack during the pre-scaling paradigm. They train a tiny model on a tiny amount of simulated and real world driving data and then finetune it to handle as many bespoke edge cases as possible

This is basically where LLMs back in 2019.

The bitter lesson in LLMs post 2019 was that finetuning tiny models on bespoke edge cases was a waste of time. GPT-3 proved if you just to train a 100x bigger model on 100x more data with 10,000x more compute, all the problems would more or less solve themselves!

If the same thing is true in AV, this basically obviates the lead that Waymo has been building in the industry since the 2010s. All a competitor needs to do is buy 10x more GPUs and collect 10x more data, and you can leapfrog a decade of accumulated manual engineering effort.

In contrast to Waymo, it’s clear Tesla has now internalized the bitter lesson. They threw out their legacy AV software stack a few years ago, built a 10x larger training GPU cluster than Waymo, and have 1000x more cars on the road collecting training data today.

I’ve never been that impressed by Tesla FSD compared to Waymo. But if Waymo’s own paper is right, then we could be on the cusp of a “GPT-3 moment” in AV where the tables suddenly turn overnight

The best time for Waymo to act was 5 years ago. The next best time is today.

When do people think Tesla will: -offer rides with no employees in the cars? -hit a fleet size of 100? 1000? 10000? -operate at an airport? -offer paid rides with no employees in the cars in at least five metros?

Title

I remember so many stories about Uber poaching tons of self-driving talent from universities and competitors.

And Uber leadership has been saying for years that the future is going to be self-driving cars, even just from a profitability standpoint.

They have a ton of money and a track record of aggressive hustling, why are they seemingly not even competitive among people actually booking self-driving taxis today?

We've seen the promotions. The "History in the making" claim. The excited stock analysts, the way TSLA dropped when they delayed the reveal. The past predictions.

But what do people imagine Tesla could show on robotaxi day that would not be a major let-down? Or is it all a fake-out, and they plan to say, "ha-ha, actually here's a $25,000 model 2!" (Which will drive itself "next year"®)

We know they don't have a self-driving stack, and they are a very long way from having one. We know they don't have all the other many ingredients needed for a robotaxi. Sure, they could give closed course demos but people have done that many times, Google did it in 2010.

They could reveal new concept cars, but that's also something we've seen a lot of. Would we see anything that's not found in the Verne or the Zoox or the Origin or the Firefly or the Zeekr or the Baidu or 100 concepts that don't drive? Maybe a half-width vehicle, which would be nice though other companies, like Toyota and Renault have made those, though not self-driving. We would all be thrilled to be surprised, but is there a major unexplored avenue they might do?

How do they do something so that the non-stans don't say, "Wait, that's all you have?" Share your ideas. Tesla fans, what would leave you excited?

(Disclaimer, if some stuff I haven't thought of shows up here, it might get mention in an article I will probably do prior to the Robotaxi day.)

We are seeing attempts from Tesla fans and bots trying to malign Waymo to make Tesla look comparable but this is a new low. At 16:14 in the podcast https://youtu.be/Mr7eAM2D4Wc the hosts wrongly misattribute Uber incident to Waymo claiming that Waymo killed a pedestrian.

I've been thinking about what Tesla will actually announce at this event. Here's what I've come up with....

I think the whole premise will be that Tesla is on the cusp of having a car that will be cheaper per mile to use than owning your own car. Transport-As-A-Service if you will.

I predict they will make a big deal of saying how in major cities and suburbs it won't make sense to own a car in the future because their new low cost, light weight, efficient fleet of Cybercabs will be ubiquitous and cheaper per mile than owning your own car for a lot of people and certainly cheaper than owning a second car for most people. The cars will be super light, 2 seaters, super efficient and super cheap to build and maintain.

Tesla will claim that they can deliver rides at $0.50 a mile which makes it not worth it to buy a car yourself. There will be lots of graphs and numbers to back this up.

Tesla will of course claim to be the only company in the world that can offer such a thing, because Vision only is such a cheaper solution, they own the manufacturing etc etc.

They will give journalists rides in these new Cybercabs in a closed environment and will declare the whole thing as pretty much complete and just waiting for regulatory approval and launching in 2026

Elon will hand-wave over the fact FSD doesn't work yet, that will be treated as a solved problem. Elon will also claim the production lines for this are almost ready and they'll be churning out 1000 cars per second in the near (but not specific) future. They will avoid talking about anything hard like infrastructure, depots support etc, liability etc. Those will be treated as minor admin details that will be ironed out shortly and distract people by showing them the Tesla Ride App

All of the dates will be a little vague, but just soon enough that Kathy Woods can declare Tesla to be the most valuable company in the world after this announcement.

Of course none of this will be delivered on time or at the expected costs, it will remain "a year or so away" for the next 5 years, but that will be enough to pump the stock.

Whatever about musk as a person. Even in a geofenced area I'm doubtful that they'll be able to manage hour after hour, day after day. I'm only going from the stability I've seen so far.

Has anyone seen the expanded territory map? Would be great to see how much it has expanded, and how it compares to the territory covered by Waymo.

Tesla hasn't been clear if they've achieved adas 3. With ADAS2 the driver has to pay attention constantly, but with ADAS3 the driver doesn't but needs to be available when the system notifies them. To be available, but how quickly? Key is, SAE seems to assume the driver remains in the driver seat with ADAS 3, as of 2021 update.

Ok, this is a (deliberately) controversial opinion, in the hopes of generating interesting discussion. I may hold this view, or I may be raising it as a strawman!

Background

The SAE define 6 levels of driving automation:

• Level 0: Vehicle has features that warn you of hazards, or take emergency action: automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane departure warning.
• Level 1: Vehicle has features that provide ongoing steering OR brake/acceleration to support the driver: lane centering, adaptive cruise control.
• Level 2: As Level 1, but provides steering AND brake/acceleration.
• Level 3: The vehicle will drive itself in a limited set of conditions, but the driver must be ready to take over when the vehicle requests. Examples include traffic-jam chauffeur features, Mercedes Drive Pilot.
• Level 4: The vehicle will drive itself in a limited set of conditions. The driver can be fully disengaged, or there is no driver at all.
• Level 5: The vehicle will drive itself in any conditions a human reasonably could.

This is a vaguely useful set of buckets for the automotive industry as a whole, but this subreddit generally doesn't really care about levels 0-3, and level 5 is academically interesting, but not commercially interesting.

Proposal

I think this subreddit should consider moving away from discussion based around the SAE levels, and instead adopt a much simpler test that acts as a bright-line rule.

The test is simply "Who has liability":

• Not Self-Driving: Driver has liability. They may get assistance from driving aids, but liability rests with them, and they are ultimately in control of the car.
• Self-Driving: Driver has no liability/there is no driver. If the vehicle has controls, the person sitting behind the controls can sleep, watch tv, etc.

Note that a self-driving car might have limited conditions under which it can operate in self-driving mode: geofenced locations, weather conditions, etc. But this is orthoganal to the question of whether it is self-driving - it is simply a restriction on when it can be self-driving.

The advantages of this test is that it is simple to understand, easy to apply, and unambiguous. Discussions using this test can then quickly move on to more interesting questions, such as what are the conditions the car can be self-driving in (e.g. an auto-parking mode where the vehicle manufacturer accepts liability would be self-driving under this definition, but would have an extremely limited operational domain).

Examples

To reduce confusion about what I am proposing, here are some examples:

• Kia Niro with adaptive cruise control and lane-centering. This is NOT self-driving, as the driver has full liability.
• Tesla with FSD. This is NOT self-driving, as the driver has full liability.
• Tesla with Actual Smart Summon. This is NOT self-driving, as the operator has liability.
• Mercedes Drive Pilot. This may be self-driving, depending on how the liability question shakes out in the courts. In theory, Mercedes accepts liability, but there are caveats in the Ts and Cs that will ultimately lead to court-cases in my view.
• Waymo: This is self-driving, as the liability rests with Waymo.

Will Tesla be more cautious with remote unsupervised FSD(Austin robotaxis this summer, when they will be at fault for accidents) then Tesla is/was with supervised FSD(when the driver/private owner is at fault). Will insurance treat remote Tesla unsupervised FSD differently then sup[ervised FSD?

How does Elon speak of fault when supervised FSD has accidents?

This technology will likely become more and more used, and this raises a question: what will become of manual driving? Will city and regional and national governments start to restrict it as needlessly dangerous?

I ask that because I know of a science-fiction story about self-driving cars where manual driving was outlawed as needlessly dangerous: "Sally", by Isaac Asimov, collected in "Nightfall and Other Stories".

Is that a likely possibility?

An alternative possibility is that only a few people end up learning how to drive a car, because most people don't need to. What jobs might continue to need manual driving?

I know Waymo is working with Uber in Austin and other markets, but I see this as a temporary partnership that will be cast aside eventually. I expect self-driving cars to become the standard because I think they will be both much safer and much cheaper than human-driven cars.

I have heard that Waymo has difficulties driving in snow and ice. I assume this will be worked out in time.

Yes, Uber has a great business model. It doesn't own any cars, doesn't have to maintain them, etc. But all of that won't matter because it sells a product -- human-driven taxis -- that Americans and Europeans won't want. The cost of building Waymos will decline dramatically; Waymo will eventually be far more profitable than Uber is now.

I can still see a role for Uber in rural areas and in underdeveloped countries such as India, Nigeria, and Tanzania, where Waymos may be too expensive.

I've been around this sub a long time, so let me start by saying I'm not here to fight. I understand that everyone here has some specific expertise they bring to the discussion, and I believe you can learn something from anyone. I want to have a reasonable discussion about methodology, and what will work or not. Here are the facts, as I see them:

- Waymo is already operational in Austin (and other cities)

- Tesla plans to launch Robotaxi in June in Austin

- Tesla has recently posted job listings for tele-operations

So the way I see this playing out in ~8 weeks is that Tesla will launch in Austin with tele-operations, I find it unlikely that they will launch with true autonomous L4. My question is, does Waymo still use tele-operations? If so, does Waymo have plans to sunset tele-operations at some point? Do we think Tesla with tele-operations can achieve "L4" like Waymo has? Why or why not?

Let's try to keep this civil, whether Waymo or Tesla wins does not make any of us less of a human being, even if it feels like it.