Tesla’s Self-Driving Beta Test

Tesla released what it calls “full self-drive beta” software to selected Tesla owners last week, and while it does not really make a Tesla into a true driverless car, it works pretty well under most conditions and provides a glimpse of what driverless cars will be like in the near future.

Tesla has taken a different approach to autonomy from other manufacturers. While Waymo, Ford, and GM driverless cars rely heavily on extremely precise maps, which means they can only be used within “geofenced” (i.e., mapped) areas, Elon Musk has criticized this approach. In technical terms, an autonomous car that relies on maps is called a level 4 vehicle while Tesla wants to go straight to level 5, meaning a vehicle that can go anywhere based on the geography that it detects with on-board sensors.

The above video shows that what Tesla has so far isn’t perfect. At one point, the car wants to make a right turn but it can’t distinguish between the right-turn lane and the left-turn lane because they are separated by a bike lane, so it gets in the wrong lane. It eventually fixes the problem, but this and other issues could be annoying at best and lead to accidents at worst.

Tesla knows this and so, despite the “full self-driving” name, it tells users that they need to remain at the wheel and alert. Plus this is a beta test, so no one should expect that it will be perfect.

As far as I know, Tesla isn’t using A.I. software like George Hotz’s comma.ai, which automatically learns something every time a drive overrides the software. Instead, when Teslas return home and hook up to the internet, they upload the day’s driving experience and Tesla engineers add new programs to the system to fix any problems. Problems found in the first couple of days of Tesla’s beta test have already been fixed.

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Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz has stunned the self-driving world by announcing that it is giving up on plans to enter the robotaxi market as Waymo, Ford, and GM are doing. “We don’t compete in any race that we can no longer win,” said a company official.

Mercedes had previously shown a beautiful driverless concept car, but a concept is different from writing all of the software needed to make such a car work. German competitor Volkswagen is still very much in the race, but Mercedes and BMW, which had planned to work together, appear out of it.

This doesn’t mean you will never see a driverless Mercedes. But the company’s new CEO, Ola Källenius, believes that “You can’t make money with offers like car sharing.” Instead, it wants to continue selling cars and will probably buy software from someone like Waymo to make them driverless.

I share Källenius’ skepticism of the ride-hailing model being followed by Waymo and others. Some have predicted that, by 2030, 95 percent of auto travel will be in shared, self-driving cars. But I doubt that it will ever exceed 50 percent, as many people will have different reasons to want to own rather than share vehicles. If Ford and GM ever got into the pure ride-sharing business (which I doubt will happen), that would open the way for companies like Mercedes to increase their share of the car-selling business.

Still, Mercedes’ announcement reveals that some companies are well ahead of the pack. The state of California has issued autonomous vehicle testing licenses to 59 different companies, but only five companies, including Waymo and GM (Cruise), have received permits to test their vehicles without a driver. The others are well behind and I doubt that most of them will ever produce a driverless car using their own software; instead, they will make the hardware and buy the software from someone else such as Waymo or Zoox.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

One Response to Tesla’s Self-Driving Beta Test

  1. prk166 says:


    instead, they will make the hardware and buy the software from someone else such as Waymo or Zoox.

    Good point. I would argue more in line with how the big auto companies work is someone else will make the hardware / software package and the auto company will buy it. Kinda like tires, entertainment systems, etc.

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