Move over Waymo, Tesla is destined to become "King of Autonomy"...
Every Tesla built today is functioning as a data hub for Tesla's Autonomous Vision System. Tesla could have up 500,000 cars on the road within the next year. Each vehicle will be feeding data from 8 sensors placed on the vehicles. Tesla's autopilot is currently not utilizing most of the cars sensors, the car is pre-equpied for the future and is utilizing a fraction of what the car is capable of in preparation for final stages in Tesla's auto-pilot feature. The intent and delay is caused by legal, regulatory and technical hurdles that must be overcame to achieve this goal. Autopilot Firmware 7.1 made the changes that throtted back the system and included remote parking technology known as Summon that can park and "unpark" without the driver in the car.Tesla's plans to demonstrate full self-driving by the end of 2017 and to enable it by 2019... The car sensors aren't currently utilizing the information the car is gathering but the car is however actively collecting street and user data from their customers to fine tune and tweak the system by getting raw input data in quanities that no other car or system is doing as of yet, this is creating a huge gap of catching up that Google and other systems will have to undergo in order to meet the same quality and standards that Tesla potentially could have…
Google’s Weymo system had a head start, the project started in 2009. Google has been collecting GPS data from users using Google’s “Map’s” app since October 2004 and with the acquisition of LYFT driver/taxi service they have gained the collective GPS data of LYFT’s user experiences as well. They are using this data to fine tune their system by looking at driver habits, points of interest, typical miles traveled, weather effects on traffic and so on (The list of data points are endless)… Tesla’s Auto-pilot system is built into every cars and collects similar data points as Weymo, the edge that Tesla has right now is the fact that Tesla already has a car on the road offered to the masses and is collecting even more crucial raw data from the cars on board sensors, this data is thought to be far more important compared to GPS data, the GPS data is speculated to be “limiting” in the data's capabilities to produce a more complete system.
We anticipate Tesla to be the leader in full autonomy because of the quantity of RAW sensor data Tesla is currently collecting. This data should surpass Google’s Weymo efforts by offering a more complete premium product. Tesla Vision will improve year after year as the amount of vehicles collecting data are destined to increase substantially. No other auto manufacturer has approached the level of autonomy and data required to compete against either one of these companies. We anticipate it to stay that way as automakers are years behind compared to the technology companies they are up against.
