Comment by ChuckNorris89
3 years ago
> "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless"
There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping that by the time people wise up about the false promises, Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.
The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the other manufacturers are catching up.
Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock, basically putting their life savings into it, and when I asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete". Now they're pissed at him.
> they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete".
Always thought this was a pretty odd belief, because this, generally, is not how things work. It's very unusual for a company to sustain a monopoly on _innovation_; where it happens it's usually down to the market being too small to justify the investment to catch up by others.
What company has as good of an autopilot? The luxury car makers don’t seem to have one.
Independent reviews indicate that GM SuperCruise is superior in most respects.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/test-driving-gm-ford-and-tes...
Mercedes-Benz is about to launch true level 3 autonomous driving technology, but it's not quite available for purchase yet.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/mercedes-benz-gets-approval-to...
Isn't SuperCruise limited to a subset of highways still, though?
Super curious about Mercedes, though. If nothing else, they will take on liability and thus likely delve more deeply into some of the challenges around L3.
Autopilot (not FSD) is glorified lane centering + traffic aware cruise control. Most cars have this nowadays. Tesla's is among the best but others are up there too. Out of spec reviews has compared these systems among many brands.
This Autopilot is pretty old Tesla technology, basically abandoned, to be replaced by their FSD stack which also handles cities.
FSD does way more than glorified lane centering. It legitimately drives the car through city streets. It doesn't do it reliably enough that you can just set it and forget it but it's still a legit accomplishment.
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They even have certified Level 3 already, which Tesla is still beta testing.
Seems VW and Mercedes have highly rated systems today[1] [1]https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-driving...
Mercedes Benz