Whether or not a camera-based solution will work reliably in the future is not the issue at hand here.

The issue is the vast, vast gap between the current capability of Autopilot vs. what it is marketed as, and how this false advertising can literally kill the average consumer.

sort of, but it is the gap that is the issue. Today, tesla seems so far away from that goal that this amounts to false advertising. it's so far that one can actually doubt that they will achieve it in our lifetime.

whether or not you think tesla is close, just drive a tesla on a narrow road in Germany.

As a Tesla owner, and regardless of the presentation, I have serious doubt that Tesla will be able to solve all the edge cases. Machine learning needs data, and with my family in the car, I don't want it to make a decision whether or not to break, while heading in ongoing traffic. I want the car to know.

Right now, 99% reasonable self-driving doesn't bother me because I am always in control, and I already know where the car is going to mess up and get ready to take control ahead of time. It works, and it works really well.

But the different between 100% and the 99% is all the difference that matters, and it's colossal.

I hope they can figure this out, but I don't know how. I hope they do.

1. Yes

2. Some company will succeed at L5 FSD, eventually. Just because it can be done does not mean that Tesla will do it. Tesla has been selling Vaporware for a decade, and they are investing a lot of resources in trying to get FSD to work with the hardware they sold customers 5 years ago to save face, while right now we don't know, and many do not believe, that such hardware suffices. Companies that have not tied themselves to such promises are much more flexible from a technology point-of-view to make quicker progress.

For all we know, next year somebody could ship a smaller, better, and cheaper lidar systems, that might give every manufacturer willing to use them a huge advantage over Tesla. Tesla would be in a very tight spot to incorporate such technology into their existing customer base.

I don't think we will see L5 in the next 10-20 years and a lot of things can happen in such a time-frame technology wise.

What's "the coming years"? 5 years after they first made the claim? 5 years from now? 5 years from 5 years from now?

2024. Cathie Wood's bull case for everything going right for Tesla is 24k/share in 2024. She also breaks out everything else, shows what happens to the share price if autonomy doesn't happen, or if they don't keep building gigafactories, etc.

Everything going right for Tesla would have been Elon's 2015 prediction of "in two years" coming true in 2017/18 ;)

Do you have a link that explains why the predictions now will be better? I haven't seen much to suggest it, but also honestly kinda stopped paying attention.

For one because they said it would be here already but they keep moving the goal post.

Yeah, but that's how every single thing that Elon Musk does is.

I followed all those failures at SpaceX before they landed the first booster, or the Model 3 intro, or fairing catches, or the original Model S. These things all took a lot longer than you'd expect from his comments, but they all happened!

Google has a much larger and better funded team that still doesnt seem close. Karpathy is no doubt smart but google has like 10 karpathys for every one TESLA has.

Did you watch the video? Waymo is stuck using lidar, and the video explains why that's a dead-end.

(Want to keep in touch about this bet? I'm maxharris9 on twitter.)

I skimmed the video. It's doing what I expected, knocking down a goofy strawman of LIDAR-only while ignoring the obvious camera/LIDAR sensor fusion. The depth map Tesla is getting from stereoscopic vision is pretty shoddy; sensor fusion with LIDAR is the obvious solution. The reason Telsa resists this is because they want to market their cars as having all the requisite hardware and acknowledging the usefulness of LIDAR wouldn't let them market their cars that way profitably.

Hmm, looks like Tesla actually does do sensor fusion, just not with lidar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19803817

I also think that being so cynical about Tesla's motives is pretty short-sighted from an investment perspective. In the long-term, they don't win if they don't get this right.

Their radar/ultrasound has awful angular resolution. That's where LIDAR excels.

This is why Telsa cars run into trucks parked across the street. Their stereoscopic depth map is shoddy and the radar or ultrasound has awful angular resolution that can't tell the difference between an object parked next to the street and one parked in the middle of the street.

> "In the long-term, they don't win if they don't get this right."

They've been claiming they're on the cusp of getting it right in the short-term for years. So far, my cynicism has served me well.

I have 110 shares, and I'd love to talk to you about how that's going in 2024. I'm maxharris9 on twitter