Comment by lotsofpulp
17 hours ago
>FSD drives much better than my Dad in every way you can possibly measure. Can my Dad fully self drive or not?
Your Dad cannot fully self drive (I am a huge fan of Tesla FSD given that no other equivalent option exists in the market at that price point, but I have had to take over and drive it, at least as of the most recent free demo last Christmas season).
A more objective definition is any entity that is not willing to take on the financial liabilities of driving is not capable of full self driving. The minute Tesla says they agree to take on full liability is the minute I buy and use FSD for all of my trips.
You just said my Dad cannot fully self drive, but then proposed an "objective" definition which my Dad unquestionably satisfies.
Are you conceding that FSD is in fact correctly named in terms of its technical capabilities, and only falls short in terms of legal liability?
I should note that my Dad is a perfectly competent driver who has not been in any car accident in the last 30 years (at least, I'm not aware of any). But he drives in a way that makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable as a passenger. It's hard to explain.
>You just said my Dad cannot fully self drive
Assuming your evaluation that FSD is better in every way, which I suspect is wrong because FSD is lacking at edge cases, such as parking. It’s good, but I suspect your dad is more competent at figuring out many edge case scenarios.
>but then proposed an "objective" definition which my Dad unquestionably satisfies.
Right, which is that if Tesla was so confident, they would take on the liability, like Waymo does. It’s possible your dad is so bad at driving he shouldn’t be taking on that liability (like Tesla has decided to). But apparently he’s good enough for an insurance underwriter to trust him.
> FSD is lacking at edge cases, such as parking
From videos I've seen FSD is perfectly capable of parking. It doesn't yet have the ability to reliably discern which spaces will reliably avoid parking fines, but it can park just fine.
This really gets to the question of what qualifies as driving. A robotaxi can't top up its own wiper fluid either, but keeping that topped up is, IMHO, a critical part of being a responsible driver.
> if Tesla was so confident, they would take on the liability, like Waymo does
This is a non sequitur. Both operators accept the same liability under the same conditions. Both Waymo and Tesla accept liability for vehicles in their own autonomous taxi fleets. Neither Tesla nor Waymo have proposed any mechanism to accept liability for customer-owned vehicles.
IMHO transferring liability for customer-owned vehicles is a deeply non-trivial matter, and I doubt it will ever occur in any absolute sense. For example, how does liability shift if an autonomously operated vehicle crashes into a pedestrian because it was raining and the tires were overdue for replacement? What if the crash occurred because of prior damage to the suspension which the owner knew about and chose to ignore?