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I think 6 or 7 years ago, many people thought we would at least have something like Waymo's self-driving taxis in Phoenix in several cities, more publicly avail
by onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I think 6 or 7 years ago, many people thought we would at least have something like Waymo's self-driving taxis in Phoenix in several cities, more publicly available, really starting to change transportation.
We're not too far behind on that estimate. My guess is in less than 3 years - Waymo will be publicly available in large parts of Phoenix and probably another major metro - and within 10 years most of the south west.
But a lot of uninformed people thought we might have FSD everywhere by now. I think there's just less uninformed people now.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoMy guess is Tesla won't have anything resembling FSD to cover the entire US within 15 years. Though Musk and Tesla fans have shown that FSD is subjective, and they seem to think they already have it now, so I guarantee in 15 years they'll be arguing even louder... If they change everything about their approach, and/or lease tech from Cruise or Waymo - then maybe they'll have something resembling FSD in large parts of the southwest. Predicting 5 years into the future is tough - 15 years is almost impossible. Anyway, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way now. Since FSD is so far behind Elon the marketing-hype-stock-pump-Charlatan / the louder voice in the room - now the mainstream idea is - we're never going to have FSD. This is ironic, since we basically already have it in a few large metros. It seems like the newspapers famously publishing that we might have manned space flight within 10,000,000 years - literally the day before the Wright brothers first flight... People thought the car would never catch on, because cities were designed for people and bikes and horses. The car was so useful, we redesigned cities. Self-driving will be the same way. Once it takes off in some places and the value is realized, cities will redesign to make it work more broadly. It might take a long time, but it will happen... Unless the nature of transit changes and individual vehicles are phased out for whatever reason first - though I don't see that happening without FSD busses / street cars.
- bushbaba 4y agoSelf driving isn’t nearly as evolutionary as going from horse to car, or boat to flight. We aren’t likely to redesign entire cities for self driving. We might see self driving only highway lanes with faster speeds but that’s all I’d envision over next few decades.
- throwaway894345 4y agoToday we have roads that aren’t good for self-driving cars and we think “how can self-driving cars be allowed?! They’re so dangerous!” but after self-driving reaches some critical threshold, people will look at the situation and think “why do we tolerate roads that are hazardous for self-driving cars?! That’s so dangerous!”.
- LightG 4y agoDecades is the correct context in which to be talking about this.
- marvin 4y agoTesla FSD and Waymo FSD are trying to solve two completely different problems.
- cactusplant7374 4y agoI have a feeling that I know this argument. The argument is that FSD is general purpose and Waymo is geofenced?
- marvin 4y agoTesla attempts to solve self-driving by generating a sufficiently-accurate world model in the moment, relying very heavily on vision. Waymo solves self-driving with a centimeter-level precision pre-scanned map of all the places it can drive, relying very heavily on point clouds and LIDAR. The latter model doesn’t scale, and can’t handle surprises. Or who knows, maybe it could scale if you had a global fleet of specialized vehicles and gigabit/s full-duplex internet connections in all cars. But that’s a different approach even to Waymo’s.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoThat's not how Waymo works, and it handles surprises far better than Tesla.
- kube-system 4y agoI don’t think Tesla wants to release a “FSD” that only works in part of one single city. Phoenix is easy-mode for self driving vehicles which is why Waymo is able to do what they do.