Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge.
Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to the supermarket. Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today... and that's amazing.
That's exactly what Tesla is marketing and working on with their new self-driving features, and you can buy cars that will allegedly be capable of this today.
"All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed. When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."
It should be obvious that Tesla is going to win this race. Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November. And they build real, production cars. "Real artists ship", as Steve Jobs said.
If you a manufacturing ace, would you join the company with a long list of failed projects and no actual production cars, or would you join the company that is building 500,000 of the most advanced autos right now?
If I was a hardware expert, would I join Google who shies at giving a fraction of it's cash to hard tech, or Tesla who buys german automation companies?
Or plain old software. Tesla has magnitudes more data and can update neural networks to hundreds of thousands of cars at a whim. Soon millions.
That video, for reference, is: https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
I'm not super convinced by that video. That drive had almost no challenges/obstacles. No bicycles, no construction, basically no pedestrians, no other vehicles behaving erratically.
Google has cars that can respond to everything from a cyclist making hand signals, to a school bus (which must not be passed), to a police car pulling it over, to a woman chasing a duck across the road: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=8m49s
I'm also not sure this is a simple case of "throw data and hardware at the problem." If it were that easy, it wouldn't have taken Google so long to get to where they are today.
https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3DbrYx-SN4
The issue is Google is doing it with (prohibitively) expensive hardware, so we don't know yet if Google's self-driving system works with cheaper Autopilot 2.0-level hardware that the other car makers are going to use as well.
Tesla had the luxury of running test drives until they had a success. This is a different thing than putting a car on the road with no steering wheel and saying bon voyage. The first is a demonstration of a single successful instance (which is probably repeatable on average); the second is a much stronger demonstration of a > 99% success rate.
https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
