Kind of. Waymo is around which is much better. Mercedes Benz is German with some manufacturing here in the states but got approval for Autonomous level 3. Ford and GM have BlueCruise and SuperCruise which they were keeping at level 2, and testing level 3 without showing much info to the public from what I have seen. They are old established companies, when they launch level 3, id expect it to work way better than Teslas current performance. I imagine they want to work out the few kinks Waymo has and ensure the don’t end up with mass recalls/lawsuits. Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep has announced their level 3 but is also not sending it to market yet. Once again an established company that knows the pitfalls of almost going bankrupt if I remember. I’d say Waymo sits between level 4 & 5. It can and does drive without a driver through cities/highways all day long, but there have been incidents where they have trouble “settling down” for the night if you will. Like a portion should return to a remote parking area ideally (the lots are to close now in my opinion) when business is slower and all park in spots and just sit until demand starts to increase again, slowly feeding more vehicles to taxi the people only when needed. BUTT there have been incidents where 10 of them pull into the parking lot and they all get cautious about hitting each other when attempting to park anf they were originally designed to wait for the other vehicle to park assuming it has a person driving, yet they are all autonomous so they wait on each other and in a notable incident in the past they were all honking at each other trying to get the others to just pull in first which as you can imagine cars honking at each other in the middle of the night will piss people off. That said I’m sure theybe fixed that by now, but Id want proof it could go on ANY road and park anywhere before calling it a full level 5.
I’ve only been in 2, both in Tempe, AZ last March/April and all was fine. Once because I got drunk the night before I was going to fly out, so I called one to pick me up and see what it was like, and once the next morning to go get my rental car so I could return to the airport and fly home. The ride to get the car was flawless. The ride home from the bar was near flawless. 9/10 I’d say. The only complaint I would have had is when it pulled into the hotel there are cars in the drop off covered area by the front doors and the car decided to take it carefully at about 4 mph for the last 150 feet do to foot traffic and unpredictable cars pulling out and loading baggage. So if I was driving I would have went a bit quicker, but it being extra safe around pedestrians isn’t a big flaw in my book.
protist@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Waymo is already live in 5 US cities. Waymo has been operating in Austin for over a year city-wide while Tesla kept moving back their rollout and still only operates in a sliver of the city, and only during the day in good weather. Zoox has been heavily testing in Austin and is likely to go live at some point soon.