Illustration by Ryan OlbryshCar and Driver
From the April 2021 issue of Car and Driver.
Here is the number of self-driving cars for sale today: zero. And here is the number of privately owned self-driving cars that will be on the road if Tesla meets its goal to make its Full Self-Driving Capability operational sometime this year: still zero.
Don’t get sucked into arguments with Tesla fans. They’re already online explaining why Tesla’s model—real-world drivers teaching computer algorithms to do a job that Tesla’s marketing department says the car is doing—is the same as self-driving tech. It is not. Self-driving means the car can make every decision a human can. When a car is in self-driving mode, the driver should be able to climb into the back seat and take a nice long nap. Anything less than that is driver assistance.
That’s why Waymo, the Google offshoot that handles the company’s self-driving operations, announced earlier this year that it’s abandoning use of the term “self-driving” and will instead say “fully autonomous driving.”
“It may seem like a small change, but it’s an important one, because precision in language matters and could save lives,” Waymo said when announcing the move. The company wants to differentiate its technology from the driver-assist systems that other automakers are developing and mislabeling. If a car needs a licensed driver behind the wheel, that doesn’t count as self-driving, Waymo argued. Without mentioning Tesla by name, Waymo was definitely taking a shot at a Silicon Valley rival for which “full self-driving” is always just a day (or a tweet) away.
It’s worth noting that not even as Elon Musk teases a wider release of the tech, not even Tesla really thinks “full self-driving” is full self-driving, and one of its lawyers recently said so in a letter to the California DMV.
In 2019, we leased a Model 3 with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Capability package in large part to test this technology when it’s released to the public. The $6000 option (now $10,000) was supposed to go live in 2020, but it didn’t. We’ve played with the Model 3’s fart sounds, had it towed to a service center on Christmas, and run it through as many tests as we could dream up, but much to the dismay of our finance folks, we are still waiting for what Tesla calls full self-driving.
When—or if—the tech does arrive, you may see us refer to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Capability feature, but as long as it requires a driver at the wheel, we won’t describe it as self-driving technology.
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