The beta today was without a driver behind the wheel. Granted, the geofence is much smaller than Waymo's in Austin.

No human behind the wheel but there are still people in the passenger seat

Let’s give it a little bit of time to see, but gating the release of self driving taxis to sycophants is not the choice you make when you are confident with a product…

Sounds like there’s actually around 32ish, based on photos from the “war room” where all the engineers have live feed from all the cars and 112 rides ? https://x.com/aelluswamy/status/1936865682810946035

I understand the thinking here, but this is too early to be too negative, IMO. For the first day, I think this looks like a reasonable first step.

If they are still doing this in 3 months, it'd be a bad sign, of course. Their plan is for rapid growth next year.

We'll see if they are able to do that.

"Tesla has self-driven 4B miles in every corner of the USA, Waymo has only self-driven 0.1B miles in select cities, how pathetic! They are so far behind Tesla it isn't even funny!"

- Me, if I wanted to be equally ham-handed in throwing the comparison for Tesla.

In reality, we are seeing two bets on two different approaches. Do you scale up supervised driving to maximize data collection/diversity and then go unsupervised? Or do you go unsupervised and then scale up problem solving as you go? The cool thing is that both of these approaches are being tried so we will find out. If you want to place a bet of your own, you can find the casino in your favorite brokerage app!

In any case, the videos of what is possible with supervised FSD are quite amazing, certainly not "pathetic," and what remains to be seen is if they can successfully navigate the supervised->unsupervised jump, which is certainly not trivial.

Arc de Triomphe: https://youtu.be/o2xKpbKZLVA?t=7

Busy China: https://youtu.be/ybBpRN4Hqbc?t=13

Manhattan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qafr3RrJRfU

It's only day 1.

Here's a human doing the same thing in the same video for the same reason: https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=906

License should be just revoked instantly for the sake of Tesla. At least with not fully autonomous I can override it. They need to get a feedback that they are not ready.

If I was in a car with a human driving that badly, I'd leave ASAP! No-one beyond a learner would traverse in such an uncertain, jerky way. And this is on a day with perfect visibility and no adverse conditions that are visible in the video.

Anyone who owns a Tesla with “full self driving” knows how this is going to go. Teslas using only camera vision just don’t have the sensor package and programming to actually perform self driving. I just don’t see this going well for Tesla as it’s more likely to reveal the weaknesses in their technology than be a showcase.

Waymo has had many such incidents like this, but they're still (correctly) considered much safer than human drivers.

Whilst a wheel wobble & veering somewhere it's not supposed to go looks bad, it's very difficult to do worse than the average human driver in terms of safety.

But there was no traffic. It changed its mind, but it handled it pretty perfectly otherwise.

People have some sort of beef with Elon and thus FSD, but Waymo has made WAY WAY worse mistakes

It's hard to attract and retain key talent when the CEO is going around acting all Nazi-curious. Good people who can leave are likely to do so.

Their decision to entirely rely on computer vision seems unwise

You might not have heard of the biggest one. Apollo Go in China is actually slightly ahead of Waymo in terms of vehicles and miles.

Assuming the Austin robotaxi service continues to go smoothly, I expect Tesla will leapfrog both of them in the next 12 months. Tesla's cost-effective approach (cameras) combined with the fact that they have already scaled vehicle production positions them really well.

Media (and therefore people who trust it too much) will point out places where each of the services goes wrong, but the reality is that likely all of them are already much safer than human drivers if you define "safety" in terms of severe accidents per million miles.

More than a million people die each year from automobile accidents with humans behind the wheel.

> Waymo seems to be the furthest ahead in my complete outsider opinion.

There's a high floor to Waymo's costs though, and therefore a lower ceiling to their profits. Tesla's aim was always to make it (way) more scalable. If they can match Waymo's performance at Tesla's costs, Waymo goes the way of the dodo pretty quick.

I have predicted this for years. I think they will make city cores self-driving cars only, with no other cars, or even bicycles because they are too chaotic. China should have done this with those ghost cities, so that they could have dominated with full self driving before other countries.

Someone will own the platform that coordinate car movement, and then all cars will need to pay to get onto this coordination platform that will tell each car how to drive, which route to take, etc. Each car know what all the other cars in its area will be doing, so that mass coordination is possible. This is how you can get a completely full highway but all traveling at 65 mph 1 feet away from each other.

The shoddy past 10-15 years of self driving improvements has led me to believe that this "inevitable future" is at least 20-30 years away, if not longer given that a huge portion of existing cars would need to be effectively outlawed for that that to happen, people and businesses will basically always have legitimate reasons for wanting a human in the loop (and not remotely), and the tech has been worked on actively for decades and still doesn't work well enough to avoid loss of life (which, similar to a terrorist attack, might not be as devastating in numbers as the current state of affairs with humans driving - but will absolutely cause a deeper psychological impact on the general public as there is something seemingly more cruel and dystopian about a company killing people via "error" or cost-savings than a person killing someone by accident).

A lot of people really like driving and are pretty into cars. Maybe in 100+ years but I think this is sci-fi in the near term.

> Car ownership won't be a thing

Car ownership definitely isn’t going away. Sharing a vehicle with the general public gets old fast if you have the means to avoid it.

There are also many reasons people use cars for more than going from point A to point B on a purely transactional basis. Many professions need to leave things in the car or truck like tools or even your laptop. Having to take everything you own into every building in case the self-driving car gets called back home for service or whatever isn’t going to work.

I think you're partially right... it'll start with insurance companies, they'll charge people that insist on driving it themselves more for the right (due to safer standards (not that I'm saying this is the case, just that THEY will say it is)).

Then local Gov will charge more to allow non robot cars on the road ( less wear and tear on the roads, fewer roads needed due to more reliably predictable drivers and fewer accidents).

Then lastly manufactures will get to a point that they need to simplify their production range and will pretty much only produce self driving.

lastly, culturally the demand will change. the ipad generation dont want to have learn to drive or have to spend their screen time driving. the damand from them alone will push for self driving cars.

It's already a reality in many places around the world. Most of people don't own a car, just participate in the ride sharing economy. In many places they still have a safety driver like Tesla but there are plenty of places with %100 autonomous driving.

Also authorities are getting giddy when a human tries to drive on railways, so it's effectively illegal to drive in certain places where the ride sharing is the default mode of transportation. It's also very privacy focused, even though there are cameras everywhere you can just buy an anonymous travel pass that you top-up every once in a while. It also allows you to hop between rides for free or at discount.

In the larger cities they often use hyperloop, so you never get stuck in the traffic.

We're so many years from that point that it's impossible to make reliable predictions. I was hearing these claims over a decade ago and we're only marginally closer. The vast majority of miles driven still happen in locations and/or conditions that self driving isn't reliable at.

There is a massive long tail of unusual cases that happen outside of major cities that nobody is even really trying to solve at the moment because there isn't much of a profit motive compared to dense cities.

In US, I find it doubtful regardless of how well the tech works, for purely political reasons.

On the right, car ownership is deeply culturally ingrained as a signifier of personal freedom, and the notion of the government requiring that a robot drive you instead would be unpalatable, never mind the notion of no car ownership at all.

On the left, you have a generally hostile attitude towards cars in general as undesirable and to be replaced with public transport. Then there's a growing current of FSD being associated with "big tech" in general and Musk in particular that makes it an even stronger knee-jerk reaction.

Difference between this and Cruise or Uber is that Elon is in charge of regulation. A driverless Tesla could plow through a farmer's market and service wouldn't even stop for the afternoon.

I agree that 'cybercab' and 'robotaxi' are similar names, but what ulterior motive would it serve to intentionally confuse people about the difference? Seems like it's just bad naming. Cybercab isn't late or anything, it was announced for 2026 at its unveiling. And Robotaxi is an accurate and descriptive name for a self-driving Model Y that you can hail.

In the first instance they're asking to see the passenger's app to verify identity. Seems like a necessary precaution considering what happened to the Waymo vehicles recently.

Presumably if there were an incident they would be trying to remedy any situation.

> What good is the safety driver doing in the passenger seat?

The same as a driving instructor. He has a brake pedal, and he can pick up the steering wheel if necessary.

WayMore expensive