Why YSK: Some car manufacturers, such as Tesla, will lie about the capabilities of their autonomous vehicles. Misplaced trust in self-driving technology leads drivers into making unsafe decisions while on the road, endangering the lives of themselves and drivers around them. Understanding what your car is capable of, in comparison to what the salesman told you it was capable of, is important to keep in mind when purchasing or operating such a product.
Currently, no Tesla product - including the inappropriately-named “Full Self Driving” mode - has surpassed Level 2 autonomy, falling behind competitors such as Waymo, NAVYA, and Volvo, who all have Level 4 cars in production.
This is a helpful article, but this part of the post seems a bit misleading:
[…] falling behind competitors such as Waymo, NAVYA, and Volvo, who all have Level 4 cars in production.
The article explains that Level 4 cars are only allowed in geofenced areas with low speed limits, which limits the use case to urban robo-taxis. The article also says:
While the future of autonomous vehicles is promising and exciting, mainstream production in the U.S. is still a few years away from anything higher than Level 2.
I don’t say this to defend Tesla. Setting aside the obvious political issues, you are right that Tesla’s FSD claim is dangerously misleading, and Tesla has been consistently failing to keep its promised timelines for improving.
I say this because I am really excited by the idea of fully self driving cars (though I hope they don’t remove the steering controls like the article suggests), and for a second I thought other commercial vehicle options had made significantly improved self-driving available. Unfortunately, the improvements seem to be limited to ride-sharing applications for now.
I think it’s misleading to even say that any car company is producing Level 4 autonomous vehicles. If you need to geofence a Level 4 car, then it’s not really Level 4.
Aren’t the robo taxis remotely supervised as well? Not really level 4 if somebody is having to do that.
Was going to say the same thing. They’re all lying to make things look better then they are. If you have to quantify the scenarios where it reaches level 4, it’s probably not really at level 4.
Also, why did anyone ever allow the name “Full Self Driving”, that name is steeped in false advertising.
Because marketing.
Haha yeah, definitely done to sell cars, but I meant the government.
