Ali Hasan
Elon Musk responded in a pretty raw manner when the CEO of Waymo, John Krafcik claimed that Tesla will never be true self driving. While we all know that Tesla is a front runner when it comes to EV segment or autonomous driving segment.
But according to John “It is a misconception that you can simply develop a driver-assistance system further until one day you can magically jump to a fully autonomous driving system,”. He also said that In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers”.
While acknowledging that “Tesla is developing a really good driver assistance system,” Krafcik said Waymo “manufactures a completely autonomous driving system. For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all.”
The race to produce the world’s 1st truly level 5 autonomous car get even more heated than before.
As anyone would expect from Elon who is pretty active on social media especially on Twitter to react on this callout and so he did by tweeting this “To my surprise, Tesla has better AI hardware and software than Waymo (money)”.
In this tweet, Musk also referenced the high cost of Waymo cars. Krafcik told that the autonomous cars would cost about the same amount as a Mercedes S-Class – a $100,000 plus vehicle meanwhile Musk made it his mission to make Tesla vehicles as affordable for the masses as possible, with current models starting at $38,000.
Though it all started when Musk shared his own experience with the software and tweeted that it safely drove him to “an unfamiliar location in Los Angeles and back” with no human interventions at all. Last October, Tesla rolled out a beta version of the Autopilot FSD (Full Self Driving) to a small group of Tesla owners in the U.S.
However, as per its user instruction, the current FSD version still requires an attentive driver behind the wheel at all times. Tesla’s goal is to roll out level 5 autonomy, the highest level of vehicle automation that doesn’t require any human engagement in 2021.
