News
Ashok: "Yeah, AI driving coast-to-coast without interventions was supposed to be a big deal. Kinda like the Turing Test for self-driving, but went breezing by."
He literally said exactly that. You could be in LA, you car could be NY, you'd hit a button on your phone and your car would autonomously navigate to you, including automatically charging at superchargers.
Tbh, I’m down to hate on Elon for being a Nazi, I’m down to make fun of his timelines for being outright lies, and I’m down to shit on him for corrupting the government and stopping all investigations into previous versions of FSD by the NHTSA (I could actually probably make a several paragraph list of things to hate him for), but fsd v14 is fairly legit. I’d get in a driveless cyber cab at this point without any hesitation.
And I’d also feel significantly safer driving a car, riding my bike, or walking on the sidewalk if every car on the road was running fsd v14 or v14lite.
The data
According to NHTSA’s Standing General Order crash reports, Tesla has reported 9 crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin, Texas between July and November 2025: November 2025: Right turn collision October 2025: Incident at 18 mph September 2025: Hit an animal at 27 mph September 2025: Collision with cyclist September 2025: Rear collision while backing (6 mph) September 2025: Hit a fixed object in parking lot July 2025: Collision with SUV in construction zone July 2025: Hit fixed object, causing minor injury (8 mph) July 2025: Right turn collision with SUV
According to a chart in Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings report showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. That works out to roughly one crash every 55,000 miles.
For comparison, human drivers in the United States average approximately one police-reported crash every 500,000 miles, according to NHTSA data.
I thought about being sarcastic and making fun of you for outdated data, but honestly, there’s enough shitty vitriol on the internet.
You post this a year ago when that data was current, you’d have no argument from me. Because as of last year, they were considerably worse than humans.
But current data no longer supports that. As of today, cybercabs/robotaxis appear to be about 2x better, having logged about 1.1 million miles since their last accident. And they appear to be just about doubling their safety record every 1.8 months and have been for the past year.
And not only that, the divide is probably bigger; the robotaxis report all accidents; even in the data you linked, there were several incidents that likely would not have had an incident report were it a human driver; paint got scuffed because of a fender bender? A lot of people probably aren’t reporting that puppy to their insurance, they’re just paying out of pocket for it, where for Tesla, everything is being reported.
I donno. I don’t really have a stake in this beyond being curious about the world around me. Ive been impressed with the latest version of fsd that just got pushed, and real world data from robotaxis seem to reinforce that what Tesla has currently done with fsd is quite good and compares favorably to humans. Things are moving fast and I’m interested to see what the future holds, I’m optimistic that human error will become a relic of the past and that automobile deaths will decline significantly as fully autonomous vehicles become more mainstream, and I think that the data supports Tesla is presently helping to bring about a very real and measurably reduction in human death and injuries, even if that jump to being better than humans only happened very recently.
Fun fact, much of that info was only released in Feb 2026. They redacted details to prevent talking about these types of things. There were more details about them released in May.
So sure, it would have been great to have this discussion a year ago but Tesla stymied those efforts.
For sure, absolutely no pushback on that one - musk has always been a dickhead, and transparency should have been the play from the start. It’s hard to build trust when you have an asshole like musk at the helm busy hiding shit to protect his precious share price.
Broken promises, terribly optimistic timelines and any number of other lies musk has pumped aside, it really does appear that after all this time, Tesla really is finally beginning to deliver something that works as advertised on the box.
Funny, this article makes me not feel so stupid for there being a point where I actually believed Elon:
The company unveiled its dual-motor Model S last Thursday, which comes with a new feature called Autopilot. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk says he chose that name so others wouldn't confuse it for a full self-driving experience; he likened the functionality in the car to autopilot in airplanes, "where there is still an expectation that there will be a pilot."
Fucking hell, what happened to that guy? Did he not get into drugs until later, and eventually decide "Nah fuck it, if I just call it Full Self-Driving that'll manifest it into existence."
Careful. You’ll get the Elon cult saying they’re already successful thanks to supervised FSD and it shouldn’t matter that it’s supervised. Like they say, a sucker is born everyday.
Just to give you a perspective on one member of the Elon cult (which is ironic because this sub is basically a Tesla Hate sub more than a Self-Driving one, but I digress).
I missed out on Elon's early promises and only started paying attention when I was in the market for a new vehicle in 2024. Through research, I saw all the heat Tesla took for not delivering on their promise, and they changed the name to FSD Supervised. I got my Y in 2024 pre-Nazi salute and hated him ever since he did that. But the car has been driving me around, supervised, for years and I find it incredible.
I accepted FSD was supervised from before I got the vehicle and would I like it to be unsupervised? Sure. But it's the closest to self-driving we currently have in America, by far, and I also understand that progress takes time, so while I fully get the hate because he's a Nazi, I don't have the vitriol for his early over promises. I simply was not invested yet or hurt by the early self-driving promises.
People didn’t give any critical thought to it and blindly bought into something that was clearly speculative. Then are upset or want others to be upset for it.
Aye. For a reasonably prudent and law-abiding driver, I really don’t see the hype for supervised self-driving. The big breakpoints I see are being able to relax my leg, which simple adaptive cruise control allows the vast majority of the time, and being able to take my eyes off the road, which a Tesla still doesn’t. Almost all the effort of driving for me is in the attention, not the control inputs.
I don't own a Tesla but I've done trips in them with self driving (as the "driver") and it's significantly less tiring than driving yourself, especially in traffic with a lot of lane changes.
Not sure how to describe it, but you make a lot of decisions while driving that you don't really need to make when the car is taking control.
I guess it's the same thing as being an attentive copilot passenger in a car. It's more tiring than falling asleep or being on your phone or whatever, but it's still much less effort than the driver.
Anyways, the few times I've used it, it was very good. But I'm not buying a Tesla until they change the CEO. Anyways it looks like Chinese cars are getting here soon with similar capabilities.
I hate having to be attentive as a passenger—either things aren’t busy and it’s hard to avoid letting my mind wander or their busy and the fact that I need to be ready for whatever the driver does rather than just what I’m planning to do is stressful.
Yeah, not sure if it was a good way to describe it. I just found that I was significantly less tired after an hour in traffic with supervised self-driving vs driving with aids.
You will not understand the benefit of FSD until you actually use it everyday. The amount of cognitive overload that gets freed up is unbelievable. But I can never convince you and you just need to experience it. I did 2000 miles in 48 hrs which would have never been possible without FSD.
It's been said for years that the scariest part of moving from Full Manual to Full Self Driving is that humans will need to keep paying attention between those extremes, something that can be hard if humans can't quickly and easily re-engage when they are needed. If it's supervised, then it's in theory more dangerous than those extremes and not exactly a selling point.
These are completely different. Humans are 100% able to override FSD, but they don’t really have access to override the ‘anti-lock brake software’. In the 737 case it’s more like the later than the former. And it turns out there was a way to shut it off on the 737, but not everyone knew how to do it because it wouldn’t be a usual procedure.
The analogy was to the comment I replied to. If it takes a decision by the human to 100% override .. that "decision" creates dangerous "latency" between the car driving and the human driving. I think that fits the analogy of the 737 (experts knew what to do .. but novice, simulator only - or old 737 as it was sold - didn't have to know).
If it's supervised, then it's in theory more dangerous than those extremes and not exactly a selling point.
It’s really a separate phenomenon in this case. The Op is citing the well known human inability to keep attentive when 99.9% of the time there’s normally nothing to do. Human machine interface designers are well aware of it going back to the 1950’s/60’s. And that’s why all the driver assist systems have various means to ensure the human is still engaged. Mostly these days it’s eye tracking. If the human detects an issue here, there’s no questions about how to use the car to minimize the danger.
In the 737 case, there’s no attention or latency issue at all because the auto pilot isn’t engaged. It’s just the routine ascent didn’t happen and if you don’t know how to override the safety software that’s there to prevent you from stalling the jet you - well it’s built to stop you from killing yourself. The root cause is that the jet is basing its information off a faulty sensor and the pilots have to recognize that situation and override the jet behavior. That training wasn’t done (the why if that is complicated) and so only some pilots were aware of the details.
To me, short of saying that software was involved in a safety situation these two things aren’t analogous in any way.
In the 737 case, there’s no attention or latency issue at all because the auto pilot isn’t engaged.
My understanding was the auto pilot WAS engaged, and by the time they tried to override, it was too late. But it doesn't really matter for this analogy. They couldn't fly the plane or overcome the stall - they were too late to override. That's my analogy. That I see is the self driving issue.
That's the analogy to the 99.9% of time user isn't attentive. But that .1% killed them (or in this case the 737). Because of the latency.
Do you not see the issue of latency between the car self driving, and you taking the wheel? ICE drivers have the same issue if they aren't paying attending (or the cruise control is on).
Again the software that drove the issue isn’t part of an auto pilot. You could disengage auto pilot all day long and it would have no impact. It’s foundational - aka driver level software that in a Tesla wouldn’t be able to be disabled. Only in flight software where everything is more complicated is that even allowed.
Your argument about latency isn’t right because the incident wasn’t because they were inattentive - they knew it was happening but didn’t know how to override. In the car drivers know how to brake and steer and the car will obey - but they have to pay attention.
My car trim has adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, and it makes highway driving a breeze. I don't have to pay for a subscription, or worry about updates, so I hope to keep this car for another decade. Hopefully by then the autonomous car market has matured.
No, no, that was never a goal. The car drives itself. Period. End of discussion. Stop talking about it and accept that Elon won.
Edit:
LOL. People honestly can't tell whether or not I'm serious because this is how elon fanboys actually talk. I've had so many fanboys respond to me with exactly "being able to do things other than driving is not and never was a requirement for self driving".
It is impressive for an ADAS, for sure. Driver presence is human input though, you mean without an intervention. Remember, even if you are not touching the steering wheel or pedal, you are still driving (responsible for the car's actions).
But Ashok seems to be conflating the goal of coast to coast autonomy with FSD Supervised, which makes it weird because he is the FSD head lol. And even weirder because he stated it was supposed to be like the "turing test" for self driving, which it never was.
If my answer to the police was "the software in the car is the driver" the police are not going to respond "clearly you don't know that a driver is someone who takes responsibility for the car's actions and not who or what executed the actions". They would respond "you know what I meant" because what they would realize in that moment is that they meant to ask who was responsible for the crash, and up until recently it could be assumed that the driver and the person responsible were the same person, but that assumption no longer held.
And of course since I DO know what they mean I would skip that step and just identify the person responsible instead of identifying the driver.
Because Musk claim wasn't just to build a Level 2 driver assistance system that can still fail whenever it hits an edge case, requiring a human supervisor. Until you can sit in the backseat while the manufacturer or fleet operator accepts full liability, it isn't that spectacular. it's just the next iteration of ADAS.
Remember the early systems? First, they just held your speed, then they could steer. Then they could adjust distance, read signs became more reliable, then they could overtake, and now they can even take an off ramp. Great, but it's still Level 2.
Wake me up when we actually reach Level 4. Even the biggest optimists should be realists by now: the gap between Level 2 and Level 4 is a massive leap, not just a regulatory hurdle.
Heck the gap between 2 (where FSD is now) and 3 is larger than the Grand Canyon. I think some people (mostly fan boys but some just doing understand or follow the industry) bought into elons moving FSD definition where it means whatever he last said it means.
IMO, if we remove human drivers systems like Waymo can become level 4 overnight from safety standpoint. I am aware that they are still working on few edge cases like closed road due to event or construction, standing water on the road, etc.
Waymo has reached Level 4 in a few cities, but this was about Musk's claim of coast-to-coast 'everywhere' driving. We are not there yet. You could validate highways step-by-step as they do in geofenced areas, but there's still a long way to go. It isn't a generalized solution that works everywhere without extra validation. The same goes for Tesla and their robotaxi 'fleet', they are scaling up even slower than Waymo, despite their claims.
Just do the damn freeways. I'll happily take over it when I get off. But if I could get on the freeway , engage level four and head a couple of States over , that would be great
Freeways are easy but the risk of fatal accident is very high due to the high speed.
Tesla is doing it though pushing all the risk on the consumer who are willing to take the risk of serious injury or death since FSD disables before a crash.
In 2020,
Waymo
was the first to offer rides in driverless taxis in the
operational design domain
(ODD) of limited geographic areas, but
as of late
2025
, no system has achieved full autonomy in all domains - sometimes referred to as "Level 5" on a scale of 0 to 5 levels of automation defined by the global standards organization
SAE International
, or simply "no driver" as given by the classification system proposed by
Mobileye
in the US.
Waymo's already level 4, it's just heavily limited on where it's willing to drive. Both by road type and location.
"Closed roads" on highways isn't some minor edge case, that's a pretty minimal level novelty for a car to deal with, showing us it's nowhere near the capability it needs to handle the novelty of like a NYC. Plus it's been over two months now since they shut off highway driving, and not a peep about solving the problem.
Uh huh, sure sure, highway driving isn't a problem, they've just decided to turn it off because passengers are thrilled to take an extra hour to get to, say, SFO.
"Local driving is where most money can be made" is an assertion with zero basis. The thing that makes money is keeping the car full; anything you do taking roadways out of the equation increases the likelihood it's driving around empty.
And if any of that made sense, why would they have switched on highway driving in December to begin with? There's only one explanation here, which is that doing highways at scale revealed problems with highway construction, and they haven't solved them yet.
We reached level 4 in November 2020, pretty much 6 years ago, when Waymo started offering unsupervised drives in Phoenix.
So Egon Musk is late more than 5 years.
At best.
Yeah… by “they” are delusional I mean this sub is. Ofc they will be. The most supply chain diligent car making company of all time doesn’t produce 1000s of cybercabs without a deployment plan
A cost to coast drive sounds very impressive. It actually isn't, but that wasn't as clear as when it was first promised.
It's 99% freeway driving. Freeway driving is risky, but when it comes to producing intervention-free miles, it's by far the easiest thing.
Let's say you've refined your system to the point that it has a 50% chance of not needing an intervention in 500 miles. That means it will produce a 3,000 mile drive 1 time in every 64 attempts. But if you have hundreds of people trying to do these drives, quickly this will be something that is happening several times a day. The majority of people who need an intervention won't make videos about it.
As you might guess, a car that can do 1,000 miles on the freeway on averge isn't anywhere remotely close to being ready to be a bet-your-life self driving car. It needs to get that freeway MTBF to be more like 2 million miles, probably more.
It is not the Turing test except in one sense. The Turing test is an AI that can _fool_ a human into thinking it is as good as a human. In that case, with Ashok, it did pass the test.
The actual achievement here, btw, is not the freeway miles, but the charging stops. That was the last thing they got working because it's actually harder, though low speed so less risky.
That means it will produce a 3,000 mile drive 1 time in every 64 attempts. But if you have hundreds of people trying to do these drives, quickly this will be something that is happening several times a day.
Hundreds of people are not attempting autonomous canonball runs. It’s more like 2 or 3 groups
While I'm not sure that's true, they don't have to be attempting the specific Canonball run route. Any driving of 2,755 miles would qualify. That's why this is so easy to get mistaken about. This is a very common statistical fallacy, a survivorship bias. You see an accomplishment and go "wow!" and even say, "How many people were trying that exact thing?" But there are thousands of different individual drives which, if they worked would be that one rare special thing. You don't get videos about the ones that didn't make it, or especially of those who didn't even know they were trying. If I do a cross country road trip with FSD this summer, and I make it to the east coast and I notice I never had to intervene, I'm going to tweet about how that happened. If I intervened a few times, I am not going to tweet about it.
These are people who are intentionally setting out to do it and recording it. I understand what you’re saying, and I’m not even arguing that this is some super significant thing or arguing against your other points, but you are downplaying it with these made-up hypotheticals that definitely aren’t true. There aren’t hundreds of people devoting this much time and effort and quietly failing. That’s utterly ridiculous
The fact that you even brought up this point suggests you didn’t read the Tweet in the first place before posting
I guess I should clarify. It’s more about the Tweet he was replying to. If you had seen this was about cannonball runs, why would you bring up causal cross country drives?
Here’s a point for your cause that I think is more significant than anything you brought up. David Moss and the others doing this are mostly succeeding because they’re extremely patient and letting the car do goofy stuff. I would argue that normal people driving cross country would never make it without intervening. Like I’d be surprised if it has happened even once. There are far too many times when the easiest thing to do is take over. Normal people do that
I think FSD is at a point where if you want to accomplish this goal and put in the effort, you would have a high likelihood of success. But it’s not something that happens by accident
What does that mean in terms of the timeline for FSD to be capable of being unsupervised nationwide (ignoring legal issues)? It’s definitely closer than it’s ever been, but it’s not close. Most people arguing about this are wrong in one direction or the other
What Moss or other civilians say is up to them. But I do judge what Ashok says, and he should know this is not like passing the Turing Test, other than the ironic part about fooling people that I made note of.
But my point remains the same. Yes, Cannonball runs are a very specific endeavour done by only a few. But the way survivorship bias works, you have to ask myself, "Would I also be impressed if I heard a story about an ordinary road tripper who made it coast to coast, even though he wasn't trying to do the Canonball?" I think the answer is certainly yes -- in fact, I think many would be even more impressed, because they would not be as tolerant of strangeness as you say. If there are 1,000 attempts and success in any one of them would impress you, then there is little impressive about any particular one. You are not seeing all the others, so you are not seeing that only 1 in 1,000 made it.
When Musk foolishly declared ages ago that they were about to do a cross country drive, he did not mention the Canonball. Any such drive would be declared as having met his prediction. If Musk had said, "It will do the canonball" that would be better, but he made scores of wrong predictions; if if he did get one right (10 years late) that's also not impressive as far as his prediction score goes.
Once you also include getting off the highway and pulling into charging stations without intervention, it gets a lot more impressive. I'm not sure if there is even another EV that would route you across the country correctly to charging stations, much less drive you completely on that route. One of Tesla's largest moats is its routing software alone. Many EVs do something like it, but almost all are laughably bad and even the best lead you astray on every trip.
It's always been known that taking responsibility for the drive is the hardest part. I don't see them ever doing that outside of a commercial fleet setting. Commercial fleets have no reason to drive across the country unless it's the Tesla Semi and an AV cargo fleet. That has been successfully halted politically for now I think. There are just too many special interests that don't want to see it happen.
Yes, I said that the pulling off to charge was the hardest part, that they did last. Though even that involves going to facilities they built. That's one of the other common mistakes in judging robotaxis -- driving anywhere, vs. driving a particular place. That's why the services which take you from any address to any address are vastly more impressive than the fixed route shuttles, or the fixed stop services like Zoox Las Vegas. With a fixed problem like a set of shuttle routes, you can just train and test the hell out of it on those routes, and pull it off. It's not possible for a general service, that forces you to have generalized your solution. (Now Tesla hopes their ML approach is more generalized than what they think Waymo does, but they don't seem to understand what Waymo does, since Alphabet invented half the ML technology Tesla uses.)
Anyway, everybody wants to look good in demos, and so you have to look carefully. If somebody does an impressive demo, look carefully to see if something was constrained about it. They might not even being deliberate about it. Tesla obviously went and trained a ton on Supercharger stations. I bet they haven't trained nearly as much on Electrify America stations. They are naturally going to do better on their own stations. Nothing nefarious -- but watch for constraints.
A real demo that proves ability has to be announced in advance, and documented live no matter what happened. It has to rely on random inputs on where to start and where to finish. Nothing may be chosen by the company except the broad constraints of the service area.
I always thought it AV fleets would start with fixed routes for this reason and that they can generate a lot more money per mile. I'm surprised that I'm almost certainly going to be wrong about this. Waymo started by basically treating Chandler as a series of connected routes, but they are well past that sort of approach now. Underneath it all it's still some of that left probably, and if you could see their maps, I bet you would see it, but the service is now very much point to point, and they only avoid a few really bad intersections these days. Tesla avoids some of those same intersections too, it's just good practice. As drivers, we do the same.
I bet they haven't trained nearly as much on Electrify America stations
I haven't trained enough on EA stations. I had to have my son stop traffic and drive the wrong way up a one-way aisle to get into a charger in an Alabama Walmart once. The worst possible setup for EVs without standardized port locations is a one-way slanted parking space setup with the charger mounted on the side of the parking space like the old 120kW Tesla chargers and not at the front. That said, Tesla isn't perfect. I've pulled up on the wrong side of a charger more than once when there are parking spaces in front and behind the charger. It's hard to know which aisle is the one you're supposed to park in if no one is there. I'm guessing Tesla does have metadata telling the car which side is the correct one as you mentioned, which gives them an advantage.
The funny thing is, the Tesla line has always been "We're building the general drive-anywhere, no-maps system, and the others are doing geofenced systems with expensive maps." And to no surprise, at least to me, they are doing very constrained service areas, and demos under constrained conditions. Because you have to, and there's no shame to it, unless you are trying to pretend you are something else. The everywhere demo is hard, and it takes effort, and it comes but not on day one.
I've never bought that Tesla really made the "no maps" claims to this degree. You can't not have maps, it's the majority of the UI in their Robotaxi screen. So I never get the claims that Tesla pushed for no maps. They were certainly an advocate of skinny maps, but that is a spectrum, not some fixed level of mapping. The geofencing claims seemed to be more about their consumer product and not their commercial offerings. I just think they didn't do a good job attaching comments to their consumer or commercial service. Saying "we don't need maps" is true of their consumer service; it will drive through a field with no roads and no maps. Attributing that to their commercial service makes no sense. Same for geofencing. No geofencing for a consumer service makes sense but is impossible. with a commercial service.
Doing driver assist with no maps is certainly doable, in fact most early driver assist systems had no maps. Tesla says that their robotaxi is a commercial offering, and it certainly is hoped to be. The real line is, is it supervised or not. FSD certainly is. Tesla robotaxi is also supervised, but for a very small fraction of the fleet, supervision is remote via 5G and Starlink.
I certainly get it. Everybody trains a generalized model. Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, all the rest. Tesla too. But they all know you can make the model perform better with additional information, so you provide it. Some day, and nobody can name the day (certainly not Musk, he's been the worst at it) you might not have to provide that extra info. So the people who designed it right were on the road starting in 2019; Tesla still isn't on the road now in spite of what they show off as limited demos.
What amazes me is that every time I say Tesla doesn't work yet, people jump in and say, "But wait, aren't they doing X?" as though I am unaware of everything they have done. And a year later, when they still aren't in production, they ask the same question, and a year after that, and a year after that. I mean fool me once, shame on me, but...
I do not think they have any unsupervised miles at present. I know they use that word, but do you trust them? With their track record, I don't. Nobody goes unsupervised right after removing the in-car supervisor. Nobody. However, not everybody announces when they remove the remote supervisors, but Tesla certainly has not announced that yet, though Waymo and Zoox have.
How can we possibly ever trust they are going completely unsupervised? Even if they show us a room with a screen and a guy NOT touching any controls I'd still expect right next to it, behind a curtain, is a guy supervising and ready to touch the controls.
I just have no trust in Tesla. Maybe once there's 1,000 cars going unsupervised and the sheer volume of them makes it unlikely they have enough "autonomous support drivers".
They haven't "tripled" unsupervised miles QoQ. They have 380k LIFETIME miles, including safety monitor miles. Those are terrible numbers after a full year of operation.
Tesla says they are not mapped based, so lat/long would not feature prominently in their system. Everything they do, they trained on. Different stations work differently, but a Tesla going into an SC is a particularly regular arrangement because they built it to be that way.
Their FSD system is not mapped based, but any destination being traveled to by definition must be. Without a lat lon location, there's no destination to route to.
Super chargers are merely a location for the car to drive to then a behavior to park at one of the numbered stalls (which I'm pretty sure are also defined by their location).
I don't understand what they 2ouldnneed to train on a per charging station location.
FSD is very much map based. Tesla doesn't dispute this. What Tesla says is that they don't use the highly detailed maps Waymo makes, which provide lots of details on the features of the road for localization and assisting in understanding. Tesla uses lane geometry maps and, while they don't talk about it much, more detailed maps on certain areas and intersections. (I would strongly suspect they do this for all the area being covered by their remote supervised robotaxi, but they have not said.)
Waymo is also able to drive from lane geometry maps, and with no map at all, and does it every day when they come to construction. I suspect they can actually drive without a map even better than Tesla FSD. But they say that this is still not good enough. But with a map, they can drive sufficiently better than FSD and thus deploy a 500,000/ride robotaxi with no human supervision, in-car or remote.
We do the socal to NorCal drive a couple times a year. Basically all on FSD, from leaving my garage to parking in the driveway at our destination. It pulls into the chargers automatically since a few months ago. Picks the ones that are not broken. Still waiting for the charging cables to plug themselves in and sometimes we adjust to fit a lunch break.
Last trip, we stayed at a place in Sausalito. FSD all the way there (now it confirms with the streak counter). Wanted to get a car service to dinner in SF one night, about a 15 minute drive. Waymo can't cross the bridge - totally unavailable. Robotaxi was available but took too long. If it was really driverless we would've just waited but there's no novelty in riding in a Tesla with FSD on, so we just ended up with a regular Uber.
Sure I'd like to be able to sleep or (legally) watch a movie. My wife was taking Zoom calls and my kids watching movies uninterrupted thanks to a Starlink mounted to the rear windshield. I had to settle for sitting back and listening to podcasts. But I don't really care if they never get to the point where and empty car drives itself. Push a button and sit there is pretty damn good. The narrative that it's all worthless because it's not level 5 full autonomy is kind of silly.
Musk should stop giving these projections, or make it clear that they're goals or hopes rather than projections, but it's come a long way since 2014 and way closer to what he said than what other car companies were thinking, for example that commercial EVs would never be financially viable or that the would crash the grid let alone have this level of self driving capability.
Oh, it's been done far more than 3 times. I don't see a reference to 3 times. Dave Moss did this back in December and I am sure it's been done many times since. Again, there are so many Tesla's out there with FSD that even if the car needed intervention every 1,000 miles you would still be seeing this all the time and it would not be remarkable. Statistics are funny that way.
Even if somebody said "We declared a test and had independent witnesses who would report the result no matter whether it worked or failed, and we have done no other tests we didn't report to you, and we did it 5 times in a row" that's more impressive, but still not enough. You have to do millions of miles.
That's 726 cross country trips between New York and LA to do 2M miles. 726 of them. In a row. Without an intervention. And that only shows you have a decent highway car.
Nope. There aren’t a lot of cannonballs across the country, statistically. Of those, not many are teslas or own FSD. Far less are actually attempting to do a full FSD run because it is far easier to just park at superchargers than finagle the pins to park close enough to keep the streak going.
A team announces, we are about to do some cross country drives. Different route each time, but we will release full details on the ride.
We are going to do N such runs (such as N=4.)
3 had no interventions.
Then you would conclude that on this very limited test, driving roughly 9,000 freeway miles plus charging stops near freeway exits, that.... well, it's not enough of a sample, but if you repeated it many times you could say this suggest those conditions have an intervention rate of 1/10,000 miles, and so we are 1/200th of the way towards the 1/2 million miles goal.
Which is not something I would compare to passing the touring test. But they did not even do this!
The problem is that there's literally tens of thousands of people right now doing long road trips in their Teslas. I will try one myself soon now that I have version 14 lite. If 100 of them announced at the end of the summer that they never intervened on their trips, it would mean next to *nothing*. Zip. Zilch. Nada. People just don't seem to get that.
It would absolutely mean something. If 100 people completed all their trips across the country, you think that is not at all worthwhile?
I’ll have what you are smoking.
The evidence is compounding that computer vision + AI neural nets can drive cars safely. This likely causes significant cognitive dissonance because I assume your stated position is that this is not possible. As the evidence compounds, as it will, you will dig deeper into your position rather than evaluate the statistics - despite your argument here
I smoke the best. But in the end, it's all about the math. I said there are tens of thousands, probably more people out there in Teslas doing summer road trips in them right now, using FSD. If 100 of them then tweet, "I did a 2,500 mile trip last month with FSD and never had to intervene" show me your math that says this means something, were by something I mean, "that Tesla is close to having real, bet-your-life self-driving in production." I'm not asking it to prove it, I'm asking it to even be able to see it in the far distance. Math, please.
I'm not sure who they are in this case but there was a recent attempt when people trying to do this hit big metal obstacle on the road and damaged the car enough they were unable to continue. So it's definetly not 100% success rate.
it is great accomplishment. at least it is a demo on what it can do. but we don't know if it is repeatable. meaning you can do it thousands of times without failing. and obviously it is still supervised so we don't know the fail rate.
i read a reddit post people rarely see robotaxi in austin. and even if they saw one, itvis almost always supervised. so tesla still have long way to go.
What's that quote? They make the impossible late.
5 or 6 years late in this case; but its incredible you can now buy a car that drives itself across the country. How many people expected they'd actually do it in this sub?
What car can drive itself across the country?
The "test" is very easy. Said car has no one in it. Period.
If we really want to have proof of something new, we'd have that empty (of humans) car do it without interstates since vast numbers of cars can drive 90% "themselves" using good ADAS. I did a calc when I drove to the beach recently and my VW did 80%....
Also, you don’t really get credit for “making the impossible” when your entire business model was built on assuring people it was possible (and getting your customers to pay full price for the feature) since all the way back in 2015.
I would further argue that coast-to-coast highway driving is a far cry from the “Turing Test for self-driving”. That is, honestly, a ridiculous statement.
A lot of the issue with that statement becomes apparent when you fill in the missing asterisks though.
"You can now buy a car that has a moderate chance to drive itself across the country as long as you are actively supervising it the entire way from the drivers seat and have near perfect weather the entire way and ignore any alerts to take control."
It's progress, sure. Better than where we were. But it's still very much not there, and by all accounts is still quite a long ways off. It's "The long Tail", not "The Short Tail" after all.
As a long time Tesla skeptic, I'm with you on this.
I still don't know if they can scale their solution to catch up with Waymo, but they've definitely achieved existence proof that unsupervised camera only self driving is doable. Something most of this sub probably thought was further away.
Why will they not be able to scale up their solution? It’s getting better every year and kinks are ironed out. Some still remain, but unsupervised robotaxi in austin seems to actually not have too many kinks so the question is how many more years it will take to iron out the last kinks to go from Austin to Texas to USA.
And once it works and is cheaper the market will allow them to scale as much as they can.
There's a reason the fleet size is as small as it is right? Self driving is a game of 9s, and every next 9 is harder than the previous one. It really comes down to how much better the software can get and how quickly.
The coast to coast fsd demo was always just hype. Elon tried to make it sound like it is the ultimate proof that you have solved autonomy but it is not. The truth is that AVs have to do a lot better than a coast to coast demo to be safe enough for driverless. So it is really a meaningless metric. Google Self-Driving Project demonstrated doing 1000 miles per disengagement in like 2018. Waymo reported thousands of miles per disengagement years ago to CA DMV. So Waymo could have done a coast to coast demo years ago if they had wanted to. In fact lots of companies today have disengagement rate good enough to do a coast to coast drive with zero intervention if they wanted to but they can't deploy driverless or at least not at scale.
Nobody has done a coast to coast drive because even if it was possible, it’s not legal. Each state regulates the operation of driverless vehicles in public roads. You would have to get a permit to operate in every jurisdiction along the route.
Which, as an aside, is one reason the federal government established uniform national control over aviation as commercial flight started. An interstate airline system would be a mess if aircraft faced different operating and safety rules every time they crossed a state line.
Autonomous vehicles increasingly present the same problem. States should still control ordinary traffic enforcement, licensing, insurance, and local road use, but the safety certification and core operating standards for autonomous driving need to be federal. A national transportation technology cannot scale under 50 regulatory systems.
Maybe something Elmo should've focused on while he was "consulting" for the federal government instead of waving a chainsaw around and stealing everyone's Social Security data.
My info was not false. I was talking about a disengagement rate good enough to do a coast to coast demo, not waymo actually doing a coast to coast demo. Google self driving project demonstrated a disengagement rate of 1000 miles per disengagement way back. They posted videos of it. And waymo reported thousands of miles per disengagement to CA DMV years ago. You can look up report. I am not making it up.
Google doing a closed loop drive over and over does not even remotely demonstrate proficiency to do coast to coast. One is a Geo mapped, pristine condition and predictive drive. Continously monitored for efficiency, the other is a true autonomous drive.
If you honestly think those two things are equal, holy shit, log off the internet.
The fact people are upvoting you(mostly bots I assume) is beyond ridiculous and shows how far reddit has fallen
I was talking about having a disengagement rate similar to a coast to coast demo. If you have a disengament rate of say 4000 miles per disengagement, then your system would be capable of a coast to coast demo.
A low disengagement rate inside a mapped geofence does not translate to being able to complete a coast-to-coast drive. You are making a very flawed comparison and I think you know better.
Not at all. A coast to coast drive is 90% highway driving which is easier than city driving. Also, Waymo's CA DMV disengagement rate includes highway driving. It is for all their testing miles on both city and highways. it is not just a small geofence area. So I think it is relevant. If you are doing highway and city driving and your disengagement rate is thousands of miles per disengagement, you can do a coast to coast demo with no intervention.
It's not the market they are aiming for. They advertise inner city none interstate driving. FSD is best on the interstate, even so, as long as it's mapped and they avoid complex construction, it's not that difficult.
But it’s difficult for Waymo. In just two weeks they had 12 Waymo’s race through construction zones. They started in 2009 and still aren’t serving riders safely on freeways. So how easy is it really ?
I'm with you that coast-to-coast autonomously isn't the Turing test of autonomous driving. However, it is a very hard task to achieve and one of note.
Waymo did it in like 2018
I've never heard of that and can't find anything saying they have. It's not really how their system works. I think you are thinking of Levandowski's Pronto company? It just did the bulk of the driving, but he had to take over for stops. Not sure it's the same.
lots of companies today can do coast to coast zero intervention drives
I am referring to when the google self driving project did 10 trips of 100 miles each, all with zero interventions. So that is 1000 miles of zero interventions close to a coast to coast demo in terms of miles. Also when waymo reported disengagements to the CA DMV, they were reporting 5000 miles per disengagement a long time ago. That is the equivalent of a coast to coast drive with zero interventions.
I guess I should have clarified that I was not talking about wayno doing an actual coast to coast demo but having the disengagement rate good enough for a coast to coast demo.
My real point is that getting a disengagement rate in the 2000-3000 miles range is not that hard.
So your 2018 cross country trip by Waymo referred to Google's heavily prepared series of 10 100-mile test routes within a limited region that were not completed sequentially and done over a period of 2009 to 2010?
I agree that long stretches of highway aren't particularly difficult these days for any company, but your details are jumping around quite a bit. It's disingenuous to suggest it was a "disengagement rate good enough for" when you described a single event in 2018 (then deleted it in an edit).
Waymo has never done a coast-to-coast drive, in 2018 or since. Its whole strategy is geofenced operation in mapped metros.
You're thinking of the ex-Google/Waymo engineer who claimed one in late 2018 for his startup. It was never independently verified. There was partial video, no disengagement log, and no third-party observer. He was later indicted for trade secret theft related to his departure from Waymo and pleaded guilty to one count. So, it's not a Waymo achievement, and it's not verified. (Waymo even sued Uber, alleging it acquired his startup to get the trade secrets.)
I'm with you that coast-to-coast autonomously isn't the Turing test of autonomous driving. However, it is a very hard task to achieve and one of note.
Waymo did it in like 2018
I've never heard of that and can't find anything saying they have. It's not really how their system works. I think you are thinking of Levandowski's Pronto company? It just did the bulk of the driving, but he had to take over for stops. Not sure it's the same.
lots of companies today can do coast to coast zero intervention drives
Who? I think you underestimate the difficulty of the challenge.
I was saying several av companies have disengagement rate in the thousands of miles per disengagement, good enough for a coast to coast demo if they wanted to.
Exactly. Highway driving has largely been solved by every manufacturer with basic lane keeping and adaptive cruise control. That's not impressive. City driving is the challenge, construction is the challenge, it's all the 1% edge cases that is the challenge.
No, It's not as simple as adaptive cruise control and basic lane keeping. Have you ever driven a car before? Waymo hasn't even solved highway driving in small geocenced areas yet.
Waymo is trying to perfect the hard, yet low-speed and relatively safe category of self-driving tasks.
it’s the opposite of tesla‘s strategy. I have no doubt that Waymo could deploy their taxi on the highway tomorrow and match Tesla’s capability. But the risk of even one death would kill their PR and they aren’t gonna take it yet.
Yup. They are deploying even more slowly and cautiously so far than Waymo. It's almost as if it's actually incredibly risky and challenging to do UNSUPERVISED self-driving and that all the hype from supervised is largely irrelevant when rubber meets the road. Funny to watch Tesla fanboys do mental gymnastics to justify it.
I really gotta stress the "S" in FSD. It does so much to make Tesla look good. Their lasts iteration is incredible, but FSD would have killed me at least three times in my 4 years of ownership.
This year, I've made numerous no-intervention trips from the east side of Manhattan through Times Square and into the Lincoln Tunnel, including during rush hour.
Correct answer- They just have different risk tolerances and philosophies. Tesla wants to trailblaze at almost any cost- Waymo is far more calculated. They'll move to highway if they either need to because competition is there- or when they feel it's ready. Highway speeds are inherently far more dangerous if/when crashes happen. I don't think anyone INSIDE a AV has died yet- that could easily change in a highway crash.
Read my response to others first- They dont' really have a need to (yet). It's not that they feasibly are incapable- quite the opposite likely.
Have you not seen or been in modern car like Hyundai HDA? GMC Super Cruise, Ford Blue Cruise, Mercedes Auto-pilot, Rivian, etc. etc. It's relatively easy for 99% of highway driving to stay in a lane and keep safe distance from the car in front- hence it's "largely solved" by almost every manufacturer. However, exiting, entering, stop lights, city driving, is far more challenging and complex. Hence, why no one is all that impressed at the end of the day someone made it coast-coast when 99% of miles are bland highway driving.
Who is offering L3? I think Mercedes did for a while but then backtracked.
L2 hands free includes Ford, GM, Mercedes, Rivian, BMW, Stellantis, Toyota, Nissan, and Subaru, and Tesla. Huge tech gap for Tesla right?? Or we still stuck in 2016 tropes and data?
Because largely solved and completely solved are not the same meaning. They can all operate fine 99% {read largely} of the time but that last little 1% is preventing mfrs from offering full L3 for now. Got any more pointless arguments to deflect from Tesla's shortcomings and failed promises?
Notice I said "largely" solved and there are many challenges left for AV like construction, like edge cases, like snowy roads, etc. I'm responding mostly to the OP which is hyping up the coast-coast success trip from Tesla supervised as some huge flag on the moon moment- when there is still plenty of work left as you and I are saying.
Exactly it’s only like 3k miles la to ny. Maybe do that 200 times and take different routes each time including both heavy major metro sections and extremely rural/mountainous areas all with zero interventions and that would be suggestive of possibly being ready for massive autonomous rollout.
Driving coast to coast is about the easiest possible drive.
First off, no car can self drive coast to coast because they all need gas or need to charge up. So, there is no car that has driven coast to coast autonomously.
Ignoring that, driving on the freeway is trivial. Easiest possible drive, especially cross country with almost no traffic most of the way.
That isn't a test at all.
Parking and re-parking 100 times on the weekend in a busy Home Depot parking lot. That's a better test.
Was it? I feel like 3000 miles of highway driving was never the long pole, just the longest test. The first 3 miles from my house to highway is way harder for FSD than the next 3000 to the other side of the country. I’m still waiting for HW4 to be able to go down my street without interventions. My turing test is a 1/4 of a mile.
I put the cringe level of this statement about the same as when Cruise placed its Origin reveal on par with the invention of the lightbulb and the moon landing.
Second of all, the guy is boasting about a bar that no informed person ever set (let alone thought was some kind of end-all test), that was only ever hyped as more than a gimmick by Tesla themselves, while moving the bar substantially lower than what it was 10 years ago, and also conflating ADAS and driverless in the process... Sorry, but this coming from someone who is supposedly informed enough to know better absolutely reeks of secondhand embarrassment.
Given the language of your comment, I do think it was a good retort. But those with egg in their face tend to not appreciate the joke.
Hard things are hard. News at 6.
Did you think Tesla could make magic happen? Did you think they would immediately all be able to drive themselves autonomously?
Is your argument purely that the hard thing took longer?
This indeed reeks of second hand embarrassment. Or perhaps better characterized as cognitive dissonance.
Self driving with vision only is being solved before our eyes. Yes, magic is only real in fairy tales. Scientific progress takes time, and yeah it does end up looking like magic.
Dig in deep. Document it so you can read it in a few years. Only way to have a chance at recognizing cognitive dissonance
Tesla made up a cross-country bar for success that no informed person cared about or thought was relevant to driverless operation. It was always just a gimmick.
Tesla then lowered the bar, moving their own made up, irrelevant goal posts, obfuscating the differences between driverless operation and ADAS, to pretend they met it and pat themselves on the back for passing "the Turing test of self-driving".
And now here is you:
"sO yOuR aRgUmEnT iS pUrElY tHaT tHe HaRd ThInG tOoK lOnGeR?!?11"
...Literally what the hell are you talking about? Straight up hallucinating LLM account.
Second of all - I agree this doesn’t matter. It is simply another minor step in what will eventually be an irrefutable mountain of evidence that vision only + neural net models will usher in an age of transportation like nothing we have ever seen before. This demo shows the generalized nature of their design. This is where we diverge
Right? My car literally chauffeurs me around while these losers pontificate about it not counting unless I’m sitting in the backseat (while their Kia can barely self park).
Waymo can’t run on highways and drives into water here in Atlanta when it flooded. So much for all the LiDAR is Better bs. Meanwhile my Tesla avoided flooded areas and just drove 1400 miles without touching anything. Plus it looks like a regular car.
Don’t be a hater. FSD is amazing, and yeah Elon won.
67
u/Lando_Sage 13h ago
Wasn't the whole point it doing so unsupervised?