the hurdle to full autonomous driving was basically jumped by Tesla this year.
Tesla doesn't have driverless operations anywhere, and their Austin fleet consists of <30 vehicles with full time safety drivers that have a far worse safety record than Waymo vehicles.
It's not nothing, but it's a long way from being a complete system (let alone the obviously superior one).
I really do not understand comments like this. Waymo cars are actually autonomous. They can drive around empty for thousands of miles with no issues. No Tesla has ever driven empty for any significant length of time.
IIRC, Tesla's safety record is about 30% worse than Waymo. The gap has been closing rapidly. It's not that long time ago Tesla made an order of magnitude more mistakes than Waymo.
That's with safety drivers, a small fleet, and literally only the most recent data (since it wasn't broken out before). My experience with AV deployments is that your incident rate is significantly different once you remove humans, and small fleet sizes/deployment areas hide a lot of long tail issues.
Waymo is operating at a much larger scale across a huge range of conditions with hardware that's generations behind their latest and still performing better.
No need to wait. It's got the same reliability as FSD. If people were sitting in the backseat while FSD is driving and taking a nap, I'd believe it's comparable to Waymo.
It's not nothing, but it's a long way from being a complete system (let alone the obviously superior one).