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I have doubts a limited L3 necessarily will drive more adoption than the current wide city L2, nor do the manufacturers necessarily even want wide adoption of L3 (given they shoulder extra liability for it). Right now all the L3 systems out there are in extremely low volume and that is partly by design, but also partly because most people feel the restrictions make it far less attractive.
First, I am not suggesting Tesla will implement L3 just speculating a bit. There is nothing preventing Tesla from enabling Theatre mode on controlled access highways if they believe a low number of disengagements is realistic. Or disable the phone nag so people could use their phone for testing or surfing. I drive hours on the controlled access highways every month and have only disengaged when coming up to an accident scene. In a situation like that FSD could just hand off driving to me. There is a wide variety of L3 implementation options and I would suggest people should consider the possibilities and be a bit more open minded. 2 years ago the suggestion of an L3 option was laughed at. Today more and more people are beginning to revisit L3 since letting their car be used for robotaxis services is of no interest to most. If FSD truly reduces disengagements substantially L3 is going to come up again and again.
 
Think there are two possibilities:

1. Major bugs and/or issues with 12.4, in which case we all better turn on camp mode and chill because it's going to be a minute. Almost a full retrain sounds cool but a lot could've gone sideways.

2. Purely wishful thinking on my part BUT maybe they are syncing 12.4 up with the latest vehicle software and will surprise us with a 2024.15.x release. In that case we'll all lose our collective 💩 in happiness because then 2024.3.25 and 2024.14.x will both have a clear upgrade path for FSD 12.4 at the same time instead of only getting the latest vehicle or FSD version. Based on that Elon tweet I mentioned earlier, it's possible he meant that after the rollout of 12.4 it won't be an issue because the vehicle software and FSD sync will have already happened.

Smart money is on #1, but being optimistic for #2 is more fun.
This aged well from a week ago. Looks like BOTH were right. I'll take it!
 
Yeah those were some weird claims for sure. Especially when it was clear that the potential range of the cameras was sufficient for these specific cases (there are issues of reliability of perception that are TBD of course).

I am just of the opinion that L3 or higher cannot be done with current hardware. I don’t think they will do L3 with current hardware. Even traffic jam assist (though that seems possible, maybe, sometimes (and certainly not with current software), I just don’t think it is worth bothering with (for Tesla - it would be pretty nice for many owners)).
But many of these things are about thinking outside of the box. Let me throw in an example. The car cant see beyond a truck blocking the road ahead causing a backup (and no mix of LIDAR/RADAR is going to give the car X-ray vision). But there IS another Tesla also stopped just beyond the truck, so the car sneaks a peak through the cameras of the car ahead. Far-fetched? There are a LOT of Teslas on the road now, and I can see no technical barriers to such a feature. And why shouldn’t the cars NN “look ahead” by getting recent data on upcoming intersections from other cars that have passed through recently? At this point the delta between the Tesla “self-drive” and the Waymo “HD maps” approach starts to blur, and the cars inherently start to do things humans cannot do simply because they have more data. Sure, this wont happen tomorrow, but I see no barriers to any of this in the future.

This isnt about building a car that can simulate a human, it’s about building a car that bypasses the inherent limitations of a human.