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Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

The advantage is that it works.

So does Tesla’s. I use it daily. From home going through a busy city, onto a major highway with rush hour traffic, into a downtown area to work. It can do this without me touching the wheel or pedal for the entire length of the drive. I have a hw4 S plaid and it’s made dramatic improvements over this last year. I’m blown away at how good it is (also blown away by waymo).

The difference is you are in the driver's seat paying attention at all times and ready to intervene. That's the expectation set by the system.

It's the fundamental difference between partial autonomy and full autonomy.

Waymo also has drivers. They are just remote and they intervene when needed. Waymois is also bound to highly mapped roads in a few cities.

Don’t get me wrong waymo is impressive, I use it as much as possible. The future looks amazing. Do you also agree Tesla’s self driving is impressive?

Well, we know exactly how Waymo's remote operators help out: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/. They can't prevent accidents in real time like the Tesla drivers do and can't "control" or "drive" the vehicles.

Tesla FSD is impressive for a driver assist system. But that's all it is — a driver assist. They need orders of magnitude improvement to match Waymo's performance and go driverless.

Is it reliable enough that you don't need to supervise it? What's your estimate of the miles per intervention?

It still needs to be supervised for the edge cases, but the standard city roads and highways are a solved problem. I think some of the complex roads where you have to quickly cross two way traffic that doesn’t stop can be difficult, I don’t use fsd in that situation, it’s even hard for a human. Sometimes I’ll give it a nudge when it’s being too safe. There’s a construction area that I hit which would have caused the car to take a non optimal path, so I take over there on a regular basis, those issues do get fixed though. That’s about the only issues I have. It can now do things like drive down my long private unmapped driveway without issues.

My work is about 10 miles way in the Seattle area. I can go to and from with zero interventions until I get to my works parking garage

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