We've lost our sense making ability in our coverage of AV progress. Setting aside Elon's polarizing behavior (which is a big thing to set aside) all of these things seem true:
- Elon bullshits wildly and sometimes delivers
- FSD is far ahead of other available personally owned autonomy - no other system even attempts to drive on surface level streets. FSD works better than you would think - I've been in several flawless rides across town in conditions I didn't expect it to handle.
- FSD doesn't work well enough to rely on it yet, so what's the point for real consumers who don't want to sit there nervously hovering their hands over the wheel even if it is impressive and you might have to ride several hours before anything goes awry.
- We can't really know how close FSD is to being reliable enough because all we have is marketing claims from Tesla, fan boy clips on YouTube, and haters who can't seem to discern where FSD really is ahead, even as it falls far short of hype
What I wish we had was a common metric audited by a third party reliably published in terms of hours until disengagement or something like that across all systems in various conditions.
- Elon bullshits wildly and sometimes delivers
- FSD is far ahead of other available personally owned autonomy - no other system even attempts to drive on surface level streets. FSD works better than you would think - I've been in several flawless rides across town in conditions I didn't expect it to handle.
- FSD doesn't work well enough to rely on it yet, so what's the point for real consumers who don't want to sit there nervously hovering their hands over the wheel even if it is impressive and you might have to ride several hours before anything goes awry.
- We can't really know how close FSD is to being reliable enough because all we have is marketing claims from Tesla, fan boy clips on YouTube, and haters who can't seem to discern where FSD really is ahead, even as it falls far short of hype
What I wish we had was a common metric audited by a third party reliably published in terms of hours until disengagement or something like that across all systems in various conditions.