Elon Musk Takes Swipe At Rivals' Self-Driving Technology: 'Brittle And Unscalable'

Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk on Sunday criticized the self-driving tech developed by competitors including Alphabet Inc‘s GOOG GOOGL Waymo and General Motors-backed GM Cruise LLC.

What Happened: “Yeah, extremely brittle to local conditions & doesn't scale,” said Musk attesting to a Tesla investor criticizing self-driving tech by Tesla competitors outside of China.

“A Tesla ‘sees’ the world, interprets what it sees in REAL TIME, and acts accordingly. Everyone else has developed extremely narrow, very brittle technology that won’t scale and has potato IQ and is a glorified party trick that requires guard rails and hand holding every step of the way,” the user named Steven Mark Ryan wrote.

The user said that Tesla’s FSD will scale widely as it is intelligent and Tesla has mostly solved vision.

Dubbing Tesla’s competition as ‘Corvidae’ or crows, the user said that Cruise and Waymo’s tech is like training a bird to type on a keyboard. Once the keys are rearranged, they fail to make sense of the commands provided.

The user also shared a video of a Cruise car reportedly stuck in the middle of the road in San Francisco owing to road repair work.

Why It Matters: There have been reports of Waymo and Cruise cars halting mid-road causing traffic disruptions or driving in on crime scenes. In April, Cruise also recalled automatic driving software in 300 vehicles after one of its driverless vehicles crashed into the back of a San Francisco bus.

Meanwhile, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported in late May that customers filed more than 2,400 complaints regarding self-acceleration issues and 1,500 complaints about braking problems between 2015 and March 2022.

While most of these incidents involving FSD features had minor consequences, some resulted in fatal outcomes, the report, based on data leaked from Tesla's IT system, said.

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