Tesla Autopilot Updates & Notes from Elon Musk
A few days ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to provide some updates on the status of coming Tesla Autopilot and Full Self Driving updates. Well, actually, it’s not clear if he got on Twitter with the intention of sharing some news on this topic or if a few tweets just popped in front of him and stimulated the responses. In any case, though, we have some new tidbits to share.
First of all, in response to a thread from ARK Invest analyst Tasha Keeney about Waymo’s progress, Musk responded with some praise for Waymo, but they also indicating that its approach doesn’t match Tesla’s approach. “Waymo is impressive, but a highly specialized solution. The Tesla approach is a general solution. The latest build is capable of zero intervention drives. Will release limited beta in a few weeks,” he tweeted.
Someone, Ankit Gupta, then asked, “Why is Waymo a specialized solution? The more important thing in FSD is going to be decision making, which only depends on sensor input — which Waymo has. They do use ICE cars but migrating controls to other cars (EV) shouldn’t be a show stopper — I could be wrong.” Before Musk came back to the topic, another commenter, Frank Tinsley, provided this response: “It only works where they have high resolution maps and only so long as nothing changes to outdate or disagree with the maps. It’s fragile.”
Musk agreed with Tinsley’s response, writing, “Exactly. We barked up that tree for way too long (sigh). Gives a false sense of victory being close — a tantalizing local maximum — but reality is just too messy & weird. Our new system is capable of driving in locations we never seen even once.”
One of our writers with a deep history in robotics, Mike Barnard, wrote about these matters and his assessment of Tesla’s versus Waymo’s approach to self-driving vehicles in 2015. I reposted that piece in 2019. It is still relevant today and further explains the points in the discussion above, so I recommend reading it for more insight on this matter.