Quote from: DoomSwitch on December 03, 2025, 16:52:06Honestly, what cracks me up about a lot of the anti-Tesla replies here is that they're arguing against a future that's... already in the rear-view mirror.
Waymo is proving that a high-cost, lidar + HD map stack can be made very safe (but not very comfortable or efficient) in tightly geo-fenced zones. Cool. That doesn't scale to millions of cheap robotaxis in hundreds of cities unless you're fine with "robotaxis as a boutique product." Tesla's entire bet is the opposite: minimal hardware cost, vision-only, and a massive real-world training set from a fleet that already exists. Just look at the recent videos of FSD driving confidently on snowy, unplowed roads with no HD map crutch — Waymo is nowhere near doing that. They'd have to ditch lidar and HD maps to even try to get there... HMMM. Funny.
This article literally shows why the Cybercab design choice is correct: if 90% of Waymo rides are 1–2 passengers and almost nobody sits in the front, then a small, steering-wheel-less 2-seater is exactly what the data says you should build. Complaining that it's "fantasy" while simultaneously waving around Waymo stats that justify Tesla's layout is kind of wild.
Yeah, Tesla's timelines have been garbage. That's a fair criticism. But "Elon is bad at dates" ≠ "lidar wins forever." Humans drive with vision only. There's nothing in physics that says a large end-to-end vision model can't eventually outperform a Frankenstein sensor stack that costs as much as the rest of the car.
In a few years, these "Tesla will crawl back to lidar" comments are going to read like the people who swore phones needed physical keyboards forever.
And there are also plenty of videos showing Tesla FSD to be massively unsafe driving in those same roads. Ask most people that have tried FSD. Unless they drive in a city with no curved roads, train tracks, weirdly paved lane markers, etc, they have certainly had to intervene. The stats Tesla is selling you is a lie.
So this future that's in the "rear view" you're talking about is the equivalent of alternate facts.
Saying Tesla can scale this is a pipe dream when they don't even have the most advanced self driving tech anymore. In fact, nobody is close to level 4. We're still 15+ years away and yet somehow Tesla is supposed to convince us that it's already time to scale up FSD and cybercabs? Laughable.
Lidar is needed because FSD will need to be safer at a minimum than human driving intuition to be safe.
Unlimited training data means nothing if there is no real thinking intuition and it's just statistics with *some* backend reasoning capabilities. It's why LLMs in the broader AI field are a dead end too.