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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

It's very different from the approach taken by Waymo and Cruise. Tesla's FSD uses vision only, and it's available everywhere in the US and Canada. The fact that it can complete most drives successfully (~90% of the time) without intervention in any city in the US or Canada is pretty impressive IMO.

The parent poster is right, I've been watching the progress and it's gotten probably 20 to 50 times more reliable in the last year.

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Other solutions are geofenced, not because they could not ostensibly function in other environments, but because it is criminally reckless to do so. Allowing a safety-critical system under test to operate in unvalidated situations is stupid. Allowing a safety-critical system in development that is currently unsafe to operate to be operated by untrained customers in unvalidated environments is criminal.

Waymo had a fully driverless test vehicle in 2015, before Tesla Autopilot was even released. That is a superior system in a specific operational domain. They continued improving it for years with multiple order of magnitude improvements before allowing customers to use it in the same, highly constrained operational domain. Only Tesla is reckless enough to look at a product as good as what Waymo had 7 years ago, decide to ship it, and expand the operational domain to untested situations while they are at it.

> ~90% of the time

This is the thing that always baffles me about self driving - while it may be very cool and impressive from a technology perspective, and while of course no technology can start out as completely bug free, when it comes to driving, anything less than 99.9999% success is a worse driving experience.

That is, until I can take a nap in my car, or read a book, or whatever, what's really the point? If I have to keep my hands on the wheel (or yoke) at all times, and have to pay attention 100% of the time, I'd rather be in a mode where I actually really do need to pay attention 100% of the time, instead of one where I really only need to pay attention 5% of the time (oh yeah, and if I miss that 5% I'm in an accident or dead).

In stop an go traffic in a city just having to be aware of whether it’s about to murder you is a blessing compared to screaming and shaking your fist at everyone on the road. There’s a lot of advantage to being able to zone out with highway driving attention vs active driving. I don’t need it to let me sleep, I just need it to do most of the thinking and I just monitor it’s performance - the cognitive load of that is very low vs active driving.

This is what people aren't paying attention to. The rate of progress over only 1 year is astounding.

Driving with FSD supervised by a driver already makes driving far safer and far less stressful. The car has a situational awareness that humans can't match. It's only a matter of time until most drives have 0 disengagements due to human discomfort/awkwardness.

> Driving with FSD supervised by a driver already makes driving far safer

Does it though? Waymo said that their research indicated drivers tend to get complacent and assume the tech will bail them, thus they pay less attention and make more mistakes.

> The car has a situational awareness that humans can't match.

Weird that there are so many videos of Teslas randomly breaking or turning haphazardly then.

Also, the self driving is in the dangerous zone, where it's good enough so the driver will zone out, but bad enough that it's very dangerous to do so.

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