Fredrik Ahlström

I realize more and more that there is such a thing as dumb person in life. “Turn off the lights and vision fails, LiDAR keeps working” may sound logical in theory, but the Waymo SF power outage really just disproved it. During the recent San Francisco power outage, Waymo’s entire LiDAR-heavy robotaxi fleet went offline. Literally the entire fleet just stopped operating. Meanwhile, all Tesla Robotaxis kept running! Tesla’s vision-based system is trained on billions of miles, neural nets, and, most importantly, doesn’t require a city to be perfectly powered to function. An alien UFO could land in the middle of nowhere with the entire city blacked out and it will still work. Humans don’t drive with lasers. We drive with our eyes, we process what we see with our brain, and then we react with our body. Tesla does the same thing, except the brain is AI, trained on billions of real-world miles. Tesla’s Vision system learns the world as it is, adapts in real time, and improves continuously and is NOT dependent on special maps, perfect lighting, or city-by-city infrastructure like LiDAR. That’s why it scales. With a simple software update, Tesla’s Vision AI can operate anywhere instead of just where the environment was pre-approved or carefully controlled like LiDAR. This is how generalized real-world autonomy gets solved. I believe this will be obvious in hindsight.

It’s going to come to a point very soon where people will refuse to be driven around by a human because it’ll be less safe, and will only prefer being driven by a fully autonomous vehicle.