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TL;DR:
While this can be exciting on its own for some, those who have followed Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) effort for years are a little more skeptical.
Tesla’s Supervised FSD has fallen short of even short-term goals stated by the CEO with the system still being at only about 120 miles between critical disengagement 3 years into the program:
It makes its long-term goal, which is for the system to work unsupervised as a robotaxi, even less believable.
Tesla ~~is at~~ may soon be at level 4 autonomous driving. It seems to me a taxi business could easily be made out of cars that can do that. Level 4 means they can drive fixed routes, that they know well and have mapped. When you think of a city and it's top 100 destinations, most taxi journeys are some combination of going between those. Going from the airport to downtown, and so on. Am I missing something? It seems if level 4 driving could handle those journeys, then perhaps it can handle most urban taxi journeys.
Even a taxi service that could just go to the top 50 destinations in a city from the airport, if rolled out across the world, could make serious money.
Tesla is at level 4 autonomous driving.
Are they? FSD Supervised still requires a human behind the wheel at all times, who must take over if there is a problem. I think that's level 3, not level 4. I don't think they're ready for a taxi business quite yet, and mapping fixed routes is somewhat antithetical to Tesla's entire approach to autonomy.
I've corrected that. I assume their soon to be announcement about robo taxis will involve some upgrade to what can be considered level 4. Then again, it could just be some bullshit from the eternal bullshitter that is Elon Musk.
I guess we'll find out in a few hours.
