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Comment by jamiequint

13 hours ago

Anyone who thinks it is pipe dream given how it works today + rate of change is clueless, and that is putting it kindly.

I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.

  • In practice, Tesla on HW4 drives indistinguishably different from Waymo.

    • It does! A system which drives indistinguishably different from Waymo 99.999% of the time is L2. You might very well never experience that unlucky 1 mile in 100,000, but if there's 1M Teslas on the road driving a daily average of 33 miles, it's going to happen hundreds of times each day. An L4 system must guarantee that it can come safely to a stop before human intervention is required, and I don't think you can achieve that guarantee by pushing the nines on an L2 system.

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