TL;dr - Apple team wanted iPhone to be plastic because it will drop often and break if made of glass. But plastic got micro scratches over time. Steve Jobs said “if it’s plastic and gets scratches it’s our fault. If it’s glass and breaks it’s their fault. They will accept that more.”
Now imagine where “fault” can mean someone dies.
Elon talks about how FSD is x times safer than a human driver. Even if you take away all of the controversy surrounding the context of what constitutes those miles, that fundamentally doesn’t matter at the end. What matters is “will Tesla feel confident enough to take responsibility?” When you drive a car and get into a crash, whether you’re distracted or drunk or something, that’s your fault. If you die because of something wrong with a driverless car, that’s the car’s fault. It takes control and culpability away from the customer, which brings a whole different level of scrutiny.
For comparison, you have a higher statistical chance of dying from walking on a sidewalk than an airplane.
Tesla for years has talked about vision as being the core problem. Now it’s openly admitted to moving toward decision making through neural nets. Then eventually the talk will be about the March of 9s. But at the end of the road, there’s “is tesla willing to take legal liability for a robotaxi?”
It’s hard to imagine someone surrendering their car to a robotaxi if a crash can occur every 50,000 miles, let alone the 50 or so today (without an intervention). Imagine if someone had to take legal liability for a crash? I wouldn’t sign my model 3 up for that. So Tesla has to assume it.
The day Tesla has that discussion, I will know there’s a serious timetable we can put on FSD. Until then, at least 3 years in perpetuity.
Counter argument: people die in Ubers every year. True, and I’m sure there’s legal preparations around those scenarios, but fundamentally those are still attributable to human beings at direct fault to paint as a villain. With an AI machine owned by a polarizing CEO, the media will have a much different view.
Just throwing this out there because it’s not mentioned enough here but on any non-Tesla self driving group it’s one of the most important milestones.