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Comment by breve | Hacker News Reader

> It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it?

Because Tesla keeps claiming they'll have full autonomy "next year", year after year.

In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". That was a lie: https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...

By the end of 2020 there were supposed to be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road. That was also a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

Tesla sets its own benchmark and consistently fails to achieve it.

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Yes, I've heard this time and time again. It has nothing to do with the point I'm making. This is just stoking the flamewar.

If you want to compare Waymo and Tesla FSD from a technology standpoint and claim superiority of one over the other you can't use simple values like interventions per mile. It says very little. The solutions were designed for different purposes under different constraints. That's what engineers do. If Waymo was attempting to make consumer viable self driving vehicles they would have made very different decisions and likewise for Tesla if their only goal was taxi. That should be obvious to any technologist.

You started with "Why is anyone..." and you got your answer - the founder and promoter of the technology has been on record lying about it multiple times. There's lawsuits about it. Steelmanning Tesla's position makes no sense here.

I did not get a rational answer.

If you're building a cheap mass market self driving vehicle that has to work everywhere you'll make completely different design decisions than a geo restricted taxi. Would you care to acknowledge that simple fact? The amount of hypotheticals you'd have to go through to compare these technologies in superiority up to this point is extensive. Go ahead, do the thought experiment. It would be a lot more interesting than a blanket interventions per mile with zero context.

Otherwise it's a false equivalence dog pile in search of Internet points. We don't need repeating of exhaustingly well known qualities of Tesla's CEO. That's not interesting, the Internet is already overrun with that.

I can acknowledge many facts, but since you seem to dodge that really big one I don't think we can have a productive discussion here. Talking about rationality in that context of what appears to be motivated thinking is ... interesting.

Do you think that you're sharing new information? That arguably the most hated man in America has consistently over promised and under delivered? It would be a little difficult to miss that over the last ten years.

I find it rather sad that the work of so many talented engineers is simply dismissed because they'd rather talk about that clown. You'd think HN could at least separate the two. There's a whole lot of people here working for a billionaire shit head.

The work of many talented engineers at Tesla is dismissed by Musk: https://archive.md/QJQ3r

Some engineers have become so corrupted by the culture of lying of Tesla that they're willing to lie about things that there's no need to lie about, like quarter mile times of the Cybertruck:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE

The lead engineer on the Cybertruck sadly tried to defend the lie, while admitting that they never even ran that quarter mile:

https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1746266437088645551

And yet you and many others can't step back from the controversy for one second and discuss the engineering. Every single discussion around autonomous vehicles is poisoned by it.

The engineering is compromised by Tesla's culture of lying:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45062614

Tesla engineers will be best off moving to another company.

By definition if you aim to get autonomous that means you aim for zero or at least a very low intervention per mile. Tesla boast about that but doesn't provide.

The context clearly matters.

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