McLovin covered it above, I see now, but this is written, so call it redundancy.
Well, to be fair and clear-eyed, an “understanding” is just a guess and a hope.
The actual reality and history is that Tesla is
- doing very detailed mapping/validation with lidar in every city with a meaningful robotaxi presence (Austin, Bay area, Dallas, Houston)
- and they are very much geo-fenced.
Further, even with all of that detailed effort, they still haven’t delivered L4 autonomy, so I find it difficult to ignore that history (and Waymo’s experience and other firms’ experiences) and say “oh yeah, that’s just now, soon they won’t need to do all that and can just scale nationwide.”
You can choose to believe that at some point this detailed validation and geo-fencing all goes away, and they “solve autonomy and scale everywhere”, but there is zero data to support that.
A recent Reuters article discussed how much hyper-local and manual effort went into Tesla’s Austin rollout.
(which again resulted in a small demonstration/test project, at best)
Reuters