Elon Musk Can't See Second Place With a Telescope

Not Even a Second Place

Elon Musk states on Tesla's latest earnings call that he cannot see second place to Tesla's autopilot and FSD, even with a telescope. If you look into what this means, it means that Elon Musk sees Tesla being so far ahead of everyone else in software that there isn't even a distant second place.

When he said this, he was referring to a general solution for self-driving. Waymo's cars can't drive 5 minutes in LA traffic, whereas a Tesla Model 3 or Model Y or any other Tesla vehicle with self-driving software can do the drive with minimal assistance.

There were reports of multiple Waymo vehicles driving around in Los Angeles, and they use a combination of Lidar and geofencing for the locations they are able to drive around.

There are about 400,000 FSD Beta testers now, which is a lot more than any other car company has. These Beta testers are in the vehicles and Tesla is getting feedback on when they intervene as well as gathering data to improve their neural net.

Elon Musk says Tesla Autopilot team "can't see a second place" self-driving tech developer "with a telescope." But... there is not a Tesla driverless car on the road today, and there are driverless cars from Waymo, Cruise and other players in China.— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) January 25, 2023

Nothing is Perfect, However

No self-driving is perfect, however, and nobody has developed software that doesn't require any intervention. I look at Tesla's solution as the clear winner, even though it is ranked 7th by Consumer Reports, because it is designed to be able to drive anywhere using a neural net and software without relying on a specific map.

That means if the terrain changes or something happens that causes a change, Tesla vehicles will eventually be able to navigate by making decisions similar to how a human would while driving.

There were some statistics about driverless car crashes in California that say the following:

* Waymo: 71 crashes
* Cruise: 33 crashes
* Zoox: 30 crashes
* Apple: 7 crashes
* Mercedes: 3 crashes
* Pony.ai: 3 crashes
* Ghost: 1 crash
* Argo: 1 crash
* Woven: 1 crash
* Motional: 1 crash

Some might say - where is Tesla in this list, but there haven't been any reported crashes that were the fault of Tesla and not the user while using FSD that I'm aware of.

I look at Tesla's generalized solution for autonomy as the eventual long-term winner. Other companies will probably solve autonomy at some point, but by that time, Tesla will have already solved it for a long time and taken a staggering lead.

No other company has the billions of miles of driving data that Tesla has, and that is really what will determine the winner in self-driving technology. How many miles of data do you have, and can you use that data to train a neural net?

What do you think of Tesla's solution to self-driving vehicles - are they in the lead?

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Jeremy Johnson is a Tesla investor and supporter. He first invested in Tesla in 2017 after years of following Elon Musk and admiring his work ethic and intelligence. Since then, he's become a Tesla bull, covering anything about Tesla he can find, while also dabbling in other electric vehicle companies. Jeremy covers Tesla developments at Torque News. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow his Tesla news coverage on Torque News.

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