Elon Musk has snapped at Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson over his critical comments about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program.
Zoox is an autonomous driving company that is now part of Amazon.
It has made some impressive progress as of late – leading miles per disengagement data by a wide margin:
It looks like this recent success has given confidence in the CTO, Jesse Levinson, to comment on Tesla’s own self-driving effort, which grabs most headlines.
He said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week:
The fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works. And by works, I want to differentiate between a driver assistance system that drives most of the time — except when it doesn’t, and then you have to take over — versus a system that’s so reliable and robust that you don’t need a person in it.
Levinson says that he uses Tesla FSD regularly and he is impressed by what it can do, but he is afraid that it can create complacency:
Usually it does the right thing, and then it sort of lulls you into this false sense of complacency, and then it does the wrong thing. ‘You’re like, Oh, my God!’
That’s fair. Tesla’s FSD has a failure rate nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be operated unsupervised.
Tesla hopes that it can keep improving its software to reach a level of safety better than human on the current hardware.
Levinson disagrees. he believes that Tesla’s hardware is no enough:
Our perspective is you really do need significantly more hardware than Tesla is putting in their vehicles to build a robotaxi that is not just as safe, but as especially safer than a human.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk didn’t like that comment and responded with this:
If he hadn’t gotten bailed out by Amazon, his company would be dead already.
The CEO didn’t actually address Levinson’s specific concerns with Tesla FSD.
Electrek’s Take
It’s strange anti-startup thing to say for Musk, especially considering that Tesla was also bailed out by Daimler back in 2009:
For those not aware, Daimler, better known as the parent company Mercedes-Benz, made a $50 million investment in Tesla as it was about to run out of money in 2009. Elon credited the investment as « saving Tesla ». pic.twitter.com/odcaKEQlGN
— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) October 31, 2024
Tesla also bailed out SolarCity, which was under Musk’s control. It’s a disappointing attack vector for Elon to use.
He should focus on Tesla’s own FSD effort because if it was on this chart:
It would be sitting between Ghost Autonomy and Motional at about 30 miles between disengagement. 150 miles if you only account for “critical disengagement”, which would put them ahead of Apple, but behind Nissan.
There’s still work to do.