The Waymo cars drive themselves without (in person) supervision. As best as I can tell from three rides, they do it perfectly. However the range is limited to city streets in a few cities, no interstates at all (they are adding this soon.) The Tesla FSD even at v12 can go about five minutes before I have to intervene. If you’re extremely tolerant and don’t care what other drivers think (eg weird slow behavior at stop signs, sudden rapid bursts of acceleration in inappropriate places, turn signal decisions that a human driver wouldn’t make) I bet you could push it up to 10 or 15 minutes without intervention. I don’t have enough courage to genuinely let FSD loose on city streets without intervening.
More generally, Waymo’s approach is to own the hardware and heavily supervise it with remote workers who can instruct it how to deal with complicated situations (eg lane blocked by emergency vehicle.) Tesla has none of that infrastructure yet. It’s sort of hard for me to see a business model where (1) the user owns the hardware, (2) there are necessary remote human beings monitoring and advising the car in sticky situations (that costs money), and (3) a third party company takes on the liability risk. The idea that you’re going to “rent out” your personal car during the day runs into the question of who pays when someone gets killed/hurt, and that immediately runs into the question of how a remote operator deals with the problem of malfunctioning hardware it doesn’t own (and why it needs to borrow other folks’ personal hardware at all.)
Waymo operates a business that offers hundreds or thousands of rides every day under regulatory supervision, and we have public data about accidents (there have been a few.) My anecdotal observations aren’t a replacement for data, but there is data. For the Tesla I’ve had FSD on my personal car since it became available in beta and have way more than three rides. My observations are sufficient to tell me it’s not reliable enough to run unsupervised, at least as long as I’m liable or in the same city as an unsupervised one.
More generally, Waymo’s approach is to own the hardware and heavily supervise it with remote workers who can instruct it how to deal with complicated situations (eg lane blocked by emergency vehicle.) Tesla has none of that infrastructure yet. It’s sort of hard for me to see a business model where (1) the user owns the hardware, (2) there are necessary remote human beings monitoring and advising the car in sticky situations (that costs money), and (3) a third party company takes on the liability risk. The idea that you’re going to “rent out” your personal car during the day runs into the question of who pays when someone gets killed/hurt, and that immediately runs into the question of how a remote operator deals with the problem of malfunctioning hardware it doesn’t own (and why it needs to borrow other folks’ personal hardware at all.)