I'm confused...how is capping the number of FSD cars allowed to 25k accelerate anything? Am I missing something?
To elaborate: "Current federal rules bar self-driving cars without human controls on U.S. roads. States have issued a variety of different rules in the absence of clear federal guidance, and automakers have complained that California’s rules are too restrictive."
You serious? It's Google's self-driving car company.
Say Tesla has recorded video of some dude driving down his street in LA and their system detects a car door opening in his data stream. How can Tesla find out whether or not there actually was a car door opening? Human labelers (for billions of miles of data)? Multiple instruments?
If I were designing a system, I'd want a car with extra instruments on it that would help me validate what the primary instruments detected. The idea of just recording a bunch of live traffic seems pretty lame. (You have no way to validate any of the conclusions you draw from the data and hence no way to improve your ability to draw conclusions from the data.)
Did you see the article about Waymos test environment at Castle? That, along with a boatload of simulation, is exactly the kind of testing you need to do to develop this kind of a system.
Has Tesla ever demo'ed their simulation environment or other tests?
From "real world" recorded data you have none of these things.
This is the difference between observational and experimental data and it's a huge difference.
Dedicated test vehicles are collecting many terabytes a day. Google mentioned years ago that they're gathering over a gig per second of data from their test vehicles, and it's likely more than that now. Tesla is gathering a gig or 2 of data at a time from it's hw2 equipped cars here and there. I'm optimistic that Tesla can, by the end of the year, get to about where Google was at in 2011.
That's bull. Every other company working on fully autonomous driving is using Lidar for obstacle detection, but Tesla's cars have none (only radar and cameras). I see no reason to think their software is any better than anyone else's (in fact I would say Waymo almost certainly ahead of them there).
Why should I have any confidence that they will be able to get better results than anybody else using cheaper hardware?
Waymo has 3 million miles of self driving data. Tesla has 3 BILLION. Perhaps that can be a reason?
Benedict Evans, at A16Z, says that some of the smartest people in the automated driving field say that L5 autonomy is 15-20 years out at the earliest.
Let's just say that Elon Musk has been known to be a little "enthusiastic" when setting goals and objectives for his team.