One of the difficulties in determining where Tesla falls in the autonomous vehicle space is that Tesla provides essentially no data to the public, especially its FSD Beta program.
Using the limited data we do have, let's compare.
2/ I've put into perspective where Tesla sits relative to the others attempting Level 4-5 in the past:
Here:
But now there is a dataset the Tesla crowd is beginning to (contribute to and) cite.
3/ If you haven't seen it already, there is a data collective where select Tesla FSD Beta testers can manually input milage and disengagements from their drives to track the rate of improvement from version to version.
4/ Now, the average disengagement rates as submitted by the 75 Tesla owners in this are nowhere close to my experience with FSD Beta.
Like, 9.1 miles driven autonomously before a disengagement on urban driving? Or 1,087 miles on the highway before a disengagement? Yeah right.
5/ Regardless, let's use the inflated Tesla numbers and see how they stack up to the disengagement rates of other companies, all of whom submit data to the @CA_DMV annually.
Keep in mind, most of the other companies' data are for their alpha prototypes; Tesla is already on beta.
6/ First, let's chart the "FSDBeta Community Tracker" and convert out of "disengagements per mile"—a metric only used by Tesla (like "FSD")—and flip it around to a metric the big boys use: miles per disengagement.
7/ Let's expand the y-axis. The first milestone under which $TSLA FSD Beta is sitting is @Cruise's CA disengagement rate from 2016. That means in the 2016 reporting period, on avg, Cruise's AVs traveled 54mi autonomously before a test driver or the AV system had to take control.
8/ Zooming out a bit more, we see @autoxtech's 2018 rate of 191 mi/disengagement, which was very impressive for the 1.5-year-old Chinese startup, at the time.
For perspective, Tesla had been selling "FSD-capable" vehicles for longer than AutoX had even existed.
9/ As we zoom out further, Tesla's preposterous 1,087 miles driven autonomously before the driver needs to disengage stat is in full view, but for the sake of argument, we will keep it (in blue) as we...
10/ ...zoom out further.
11/ Now we see the gap between the 2,000 to 5,000 mi/DE, which @Waymo first hurdled in 2016.
12/ Let's more-than-double the y-axis scale to 15,000. @PonyAI_tech nearly notched the 15,000 mi-mark last year. Check out the neck-and-neck Waymo/Cruise race a few years ago.
13/ We need to double the scale again to see the 2020 leaders' disengagement rates in CA.
14/ Now nearly double the y-axis AGAIN to see @Cruise and the current leader, @autoxtech's disengagement rates last year.
You need a magnifying glass (or helpful red arrow) to see where @Tesla currently is in comparison.
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Here's a typical drive on Tesla FSD Beta, and why it's the opposite of useful. It's most certainly not even close to being "safer than a human", by any factor.
22-minute drive, 4.5 miles, and WAY too many interventions.
Here's the route we drove. Nothing crazy. We didn't even film all of the interventions. I have drives like this every time I use it, regardless of what x.x version it's on. THIS is what Elon is saying will be Level 4 this year. THIS was supposed to be robotaxi in 2020.
As more and more companies are deploying actual robotaxis with no driver to cities, the Tesla FSD project looks increasingly further behind, both iteratively and functionally.
Elon is looking more desperate wrt FSD as the competition reveals genuine autonomous vehicles.
If you are still failing to see this, godspeed. Over the past year, Tesla/TSLA owners have privately reached out to me, admitting they were too blinded by the obsession with “FSD sucks now, but version x.x will blow your mind.” Tesla is nowhere close to robotaxis.
The frequency of people in the Tesla community reaching out to me went from a few per month this time last year, to multiple per day in the last two months. Almost all these days are FSD beta testers. They are fed up and can’t believe how many believers there still are out there.
2/ So Toyota unveiled 15 BEV models today (finally) that it plans to sell before 2030. Toyota wasted too much time and money on FCEV technology over the years, so the world's largest automaker has been scrambling to get on board with BEVs in the last 2.5 years.
3/ Here's what I think happened. The timing is important.
Toyota was pursuing a "side project", of sorts, to develop its first BEV in 2018-2019. Subaru, equally clueless on EV tech, wanted in, so it threw Toyota some $ to help with ongoing R&D...
Every day, more & more Tesla fans realize what I’ve been saying for years: Teslas lack the hardware to be robotaxis. There’s a reason no one in the (actual) autonomous driving industry thought TSLA would pull off what was promised at Autonomy Day. Here’s why we need more of this
2/ There seems to be a misconception among the most extreme $TSLA bulls that those of us who are critical of aspects of Tesla are unable to see everything Tesla has accomplished and how disruptive Tesla will be. And I actually understand why. Let me explain.
3/ I’ve followed Tesla closer and longer than probably anyone reading this. Back in Tesla’s early days, we fans would meet at L2 EV chargers (only a few Superchargers per state) and nerd out about EVs, Tesla, Elon, compare Wh/mi, exchange 3D printed accessories for our cars, etc.
Far too many people think Tesla is much closer to being able to take the human out of the driver's seat than it really is. Here's why it is nowhere close.
2/ Let's go way back to Waymo's 2016 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Report. By the end of the 2016 reporting period, Google/Waymo had operated in autonomous mode for 2.3 million miles, 636k of which occurred on public roads. (Mostly in Mountain View & neighboring communities)
3/ In 2016, 60 Waymo vehicles drove 636k miles autonomously on public roads in California. During those, there were 124 disengagements reported while the vehicles were in autonomous mode. In other words, 5,128 miles driven autonomously between reported disengagements.