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I’d advise you to ignore lay explanations of the space - outside of the industry most of the discourse about self driving cars is poisoned by Elon’s deceptive presentations and his followers who parrot what he says.

If you want a grounded explanation of how Tesla’s stack works, follow @greentheonly on twitter. He’s a Tesla reverse engineer who regularly posts about the software that’s actually running on the car.

If you want an explanation about how real AV companies stacks work, I’d read Sebastian Thrun’s robotics textbook - then imagine what’s outlined in that book but with ML plugged in to a ton of spaces throughout the stack. This is also similar to how Tesla’s stack works, btw - greens just good to follow because a lot of people refuse to believe Tesla isn’t running some kind of “LLM but for driving” fully end to end black box model.

Tesla won’t launch a robotaxi anytime soon because they can’t use remote support or HD maps - although I think they’ve been stepping up their mapping efforts. Even the demo at Universal studios a few weeks ago was HD mapped - per @greentheonlys twitter.

I worked in the space for years and have seen the internal of both a traditional robotaxi company’s stack and Tesla’s.




For reference, Sebastian Thrun led the Stanford team that won the Darpa (self driving car) Grand Challenge in 2005, and then joined Google to lead Waymo (then called the Google Self-Driving Car Project), among other accomplishments.



Unfortunately the industry like many others are poisoned on many ends. I would caution taking anyone's opinion too strongly including this one.




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