But a mirage ...

Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images

Finally, the truth. Safe, self driving Teslas are but a mirage. Why? Because Tesla only uses cameras to detect the real world while Waymo uses radar, lidar AND cameras to do the same thing and even that is iffy given the inherent complexities of the real world bombarding Waymo at rates boggling the mind.

After over a decade of promising that fully autonomous driving is right around the corner,
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has yet to bring his ambitious vision to fruition.

In early 2019, Tesla started installing a system called Hardware 3 (HW3) in its cars, which according to Musk would enable what the company continues to misleadingly refer to as “Full Self-Driving” (FSD). (As it currently exists, the feature still requires owners to be ready to take over the wheel at any point.)

Over the next four years, Tesla sold millions of vehicles with the hardware, only for Musk to finally admit in January 2025 that HW3 actually wasn’t good enough after all, and that a retrofit would be required to enable fully autonomous driving.

The news came to the dismay of countless owners who shelled out thousands of additional dollars to access FSD, and who claim Musk had lied to them all these years, triggering numerous class action lawsuits.

During Wednesday’s earnings call, the mercurial CEO put it as bluntly as ever.

“Unfortunately, Hardware 3 — I wish it were otherwise — but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” he said, saying that its “memory bandwidth” is the “chokepoint.” Tesla introduced a confusingly-named version of the software, called “FSD (Supervised)” in April 2024, while an “unsupervised” version would seemingly refer to actual, autonomous driving.

Despite Musk first making the concession well over a year ago, Tesla has yet to make good on its promise of providing millions of owners with the necessary hardware upgrade — a process that will be long and painful.

As an aside, Think Anonymous gives an in-depth analysis as to why the Waymo take rings true.

Just a tiny tidbit here, go to TA to get the complete skinny.

Waymo's sensor stack Waymo: 29 Cameras, 6 RADARs, 5 LiDARs

Just in terms of calibration, it must be an absolute nightmare for engineers. Calibrating a camera with a LiDAR is already a long task, but 29 cameras with 5 LiDARs? Then there is the fusion of all of these sensors together, and this is ONLY the "robotaxi" version, because if you look at their Zeekr shuttles, they also have their own types of sensors, with different generation codes. Their stack is therefore always evolving, and depends on the vehicle they drive on. 

Tesla's sensor stack used 8 cameras (red) and 12 ultrasonics (orange)

On this illustration, you can see a very simple design that almost never changed. In red, you can count 8 outside cameras, and in orange, you can see 12 ultrasonic sensors used to detect static objects when parking. Among the 8 cameras, there 2 on the windshield, used for stereo vision, one on the front bumper, one on the rear bumper, 2 on the doors, and 2 on the wheels. See the difference? I can't even begin to count Waymo's cameras, but I can easily show you Tesla's sensor stack.

The cost of doing it right is $, compute and research, the cost of cutting corners, let's not go there.

Said approach to solving a difficult problem reminds your truly of this ...

Department of Government Efficiency

And we all know well how that initiative went, right?