Just two weeks before Tesla’s highly anticipated Robotaxi unveiling, a wave of skepticism has hit the company’s self-driving ambitions. Gordon Johnson, an analyst at GLJ Research, has slammed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology, calling it a ‘safety disaster’ and far behind its competitors like Waymo (Alphabet), Cruise (General Motors), and Baidu’s Apollo Go. This assessment comes as Tesla aims to launch its FSD in China, a market already competitive with domestic players.
Johnson’s concerns are rooted in two key sources. Independent lab AMCI Testing, which rigorously evaluated Tesla’s camera-based autonomous driving system, concluded that its performance is ‘suspect.’ The lab’s report, released on Tuesday, highlighted the frequent need for human intervention to ensure safe operation. AMCI reported that its drivers had to intervene over 75 times during their evaluation, an average of once every 13 miles. This intervention rate points to a system that struggles to handle even straightforward driving scenarios.
Further adding to the concerns, data from Teslafsdtracker.com, which aggregates real-time user experiences with Tesla FSD, reveals a critical disengagement rate of every 130 miles on highways and every 72 miles in city driving. This means the system requires significant human intervention to prevent potentially hazardous situations.
Contrast this with the disengagement data reported by Tesla’s competitors to the California DMV. Waymo boasts an impressive 17,311 miles, Amazon’s Zoox achieves 177,602 miles, and other startups like Pony.Ai and WeRide report disengagement distances of over 17,000 and 21,000 miles respectively. These figures highlight the significant gap in performance between Tesla’s FSD and its rivals.
While Tesla’s FSD is promoted as ‘fully supervised,’ its true capabilities are coming under scrutiny. Johnson argues that the technology is still at a Level 2, meaning that the driver must remain fully engaged and ready to intervene at any moment. However, some investors have placed a hefty valuation of $300 to $600 billion on Tesla’s FSD technology. Johnson believes this valuation is inflated, given the safety concerns and the technology’s current state of development. He suggests that the actual value might be close to zero or even negative due to the potential legal liability associated with deploying such a system.
Ark Invest, a renowned investment firm, projects that robotaxis powered by FSD will be a major revenue driver for Tesla in the future. However, Gary Black, a Tesla bull and managing partner at Future Fund LLC, acknowledges that Tesla’s FSD is far from achieving the 99.99% efficacy needed for truly unsupervised autonomy. This ongoing debate about Tesla’s FSD highlights the critical need for robust testing and transparency as the company pushes forward with its ambitious self-driving goals.
