According to Waymo CEO John Krafcik, Tesla has taken the wrong approach in developing fully autonomous vehicles, adding his company doesn’t see Tesla as a competitor.
The comments were made in an interview with the German publication Manager Magazin last week. In a back-handed compliment, Krafcik said Tesla’s is developing a “really good” driver-assistance system, but it won’t live up to the hype surrounding it.
“It is a misconception that you can simply develop a driver-assistance system further until one day you can magically jump to a fully autonomous driving system.”
Krafcik also had a lot to say about their choice of hardware, LiDAR, which has been criticized by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as being “a fool’s errand.”
“In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers.”
Never one to shy away from critics, Musk took to Twitter to respond to his counterpart’s criticism. In a tweet late Sunday, Musk defended his company’s path to full autonomy.
Tesla is currently beta testing their Full Self-Driving (FSD) software with testers across the US, and hopefully soon in Canada. Since its release in October 2020, the software has undergone a number of updates that have improved the capabilities and the bahaviours of the self-driving software.
