Elon and Nextbigfuture Agree that All that Matters is More Self Driving Miles Between Interventions

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Elon has said that :

All that matters is improving Tesla self-driving AI such that miles between interventions is >> human

Elon and Nextbigfuture agree that all that matters is more self driving miles between interventions. FSD 12.4.3 is showing more intervention free drives and thus more miles between interventions. Freda Duan of Altimeter Capital has just tested all of the main robotaxi and self driving systems in the US and China. She confirms that Tesla is leading the way to a complete self driving solution and that China lidar systems are ahead of US competition other than Tesla. China robotaxi operators and car companies will adopt Tesla FSD if the miles per intervention leap ahead as Elon has said will happen with 12.4.X and 12.5. China will then push ahead with rapid mass approvals and mass adoption. Tesla and China robotaxi companies will jointly reach million robotaxi scale in 2025-2026 in over 600 chinese cities. #tesla #FSD $TSLA

Elon’s statement supports my analysis and video that Tesla FSD reaching each major new level on miles between interventions makes each radically improved FSD an entirely different product. Every 3-10X leap in miles between interventions is like leaping from a bad student driver to an average driver or an average driver to a good professional driver.

Tripling miles between interventions is like improving from a teenage newly licensed driver to an experienced driver.

Whole Mars says Tesla FSD 12.4.3 drives like a professional chauffeur. It executes many maneuvers more smoothly than a human could, and can often react to road hazards before the human driver even notices them

First Hand Experience Report- Tesla FSD is better than China L2 Self Driving Competition

Highlight and Nextbigfuture inferred conclusion: China companies using Lidar and hypermapping can get good experience and safety on main roads and major cities but have issues outside of those situations. Tesla FSD getting to a full solution will greatly speed the expansion of robotaxi in China and the world.

Freda Duane of Altimeter capital reports on all of the robotaxi and self driving systems. She just finished a one-week trip to China. She summarizes all the major (~20) L2 self-driving and robotaxi vehicles in both the US and China.

▶️L2 self-driving

I [Freda] tested major brands like $Huawei, $Li, $NIO, $Xpeng, and $Xiaomi. Overall, they exceeded my expectations. The rides were not overly cautious and handled complex situations (yes, road conditions in China are very challenging!) quite well.

Nothing compares to $Tsla’s approach. I see imitation learning/end-to-end as the only effective approach for self-driving. While Chinese peers perform well on main roads, they struggle on frontage roads due to reliance on high-precision maps and rule-based methods (e.g. cars stopped in the middle of the road where there was no clear white lining).

Chinese EVs’ self-driving capabilities are far ahead of those from US and EU brands.

I doubt any Chinese players can profit from L2 self-driving, not because it’s not useful, but because it’s hard to differentiate, and price wars dominate the market in China.

Chinese consumers and regulators seem much more receptive to self-driving. Even with a 5/10 self-driving capability, cars are practically *hands-free(!)*

Insurance-wise, for L3+ cars, OEMs bear responsibility for incidents, so OEMs avoid labeling cars as L3+.

▶️Robotaxi

I tested major brands like http://Pony.ai, $Didi, and $Bidu. I’d rate http://Pony.ai equal to $Waymo, and it’s ahead of other peers.

However, the same issue applies here: user experience is nearly perfect (in Yizhuang, Beijing), but expansion is the real question.

Chinese robotaxi companies are very sophisticated. While the rest of the world focuses on technology, Chinese peers treat it as a product, considering unit economics, operations, mass production, etc.

Interestingly, most companies expressed a preference NOT to operate fleets themselves. They aim to be asset-light and let fleet managers handle operations.

Policy Support: China has a very clear approval process, driven by data (autonomous driving distance, fully driverless distance, intervention rate, passenger ratings, etc.).

▶️Chinese EVs

In major cities like Beijing or Shanghai, EV adoption (green license plates vs. gas cars with blue license plates) seems to be 40%+. If 40% of cars on the road are EVs, then EV penetration (defined as the % of new car sales) must already be over 50%.

In shopping malls, the ground floor is filled with EV showrooms—easily 10+ brands, many of which are unfamiliar Chinese brands. It appears almost too easy to make an electric car, which is a stark contrast to the US. $Xiaomi, for example, can achieve a 10% gross profit margin in its first year of operation, compared to $RIVN’s -45%. Additionally, $Xiaomi cars are priced at 30% of $RIVN’s price.

It’s fascinating to see how China transitioned from “couldn’t make their own gas cars at all (only JVs)” to “dominating EVs globally.” The government deserves credit for setting the direction and executing effectively. China now controls the entire supply chain, with $CATL holding 40% of the global market share.

🔹How did it happen? The success of the industry

Incentives were set just right: the government provided incentives early on to make EVs and gas cars have comparable MSRPs, allowing consumers to choose based on functionality. This approach differs from how the IRA offers incentives…

Perfectly competitive market: $TSLA was brought in, and competition was welcomed, unlike the US, which has a 100% import tax on Chinese EVs.

Strategic regulations: License plate restrictions were used effectively; for example, taxis and minivans are required to be EVs.

🔹The challenges

Despite the success, the industry faces challenges with low-margin companies and struggling stocks.

The intense competition shows no sign of ending. Well-funded global OEMs and Chinese state-owned car companies continue to subsidize, leading to new EV brands emerging annually.

The natural tendency in China is to race to the bottom. I think this ties back to China’s history as the “world’s factory,” where manufacturers price products at “cost plus” versus the US and developing countries, which price based on “affordability/value creation.”

🔹The wow EV feature

>Software features that surprised me the most:

– Everything in the car can be voice-controlled. Not just simple tasks like playing music; users can adjust the height of the steering wheel and set the temperature easily.

– Self-parking, which $Tsla has yet to release to all FSD users, is already a table stake in China (I’d rate the quality as 10/10).

10 thoughts on “Elon and Nextbigfuture Agree that All that Matters is More Self Driving Miles Between Interventions”

  1. I’m disappointed in your censorship of alternate viewpoints regarding autonomous vehicles testing in cherry picked regions, Brian. I’ve been reading your website, having discussions with you over email, and commenting since the early 2000s and you’ve never acted like this before. What is your motivation for this atypical censorship?

    • I am using the straight wordpress comment system. It is time consuming to manage and there is a LOT more spam. I have to glance at comments and I am erring on the side of killing any spam or spam like comments. This involves creating a new whitelist of approved commenters. This also means commenters need to be on better behavior because if commenters start becoming high maintenance then I do not have the time or patience to babysit the comments and commenters.

  2. “…How did it happen? The success of the industry…”

    It’s a systemic problem that can not be solved without huge change. The Chinese own their central banks and focus lending on enterprises that build things and meet their growth goals (imperfectly, yes). Our central banks lend to insiders who try to monopolize and loot every last dime they can from the consumer and the economy as a whole.

    Everyone is all up and arms about the bad loans in China. I’m not saying there is not some level at which they don’t have a big problem, but in a LOT of cases since the Chinese State owns the creation of capital and their central bank, they can quietly bankrupt the companies, cancel the loans at the banking level and nullify any bank loans. The money has already been spent on the buildings or whatever, so any inflation is already done. Deflation is not a problem because the canceling of the loan means that capital is not pouring out of the company to cover the loans. So there is still liquidity that does not exist in our system, where you can lose everything.

    They got this from the Japanese, who got it from the Germans. The Japanese have been doing this for decades. There’s always a constant refrain of how Japans debt is 200% of GDP but, they don’t care. They have been quietly canceling government bond debt, that they have in their banks, for decades now. Us, we are screwed. They will squeeze every last ounce of flesh out of us. It’s already happening, and the rate is increasing.

  3. I enjoy these conversations. People have their biases challenged, and good (salient) points are often made on NextBigFuture. Thanks for bringing in different perspectives, Brian.

    Many people in the US assumed China would become like Japan and South Korea – partners with the US, not adversaries. As of now, this appears to be a bad assumption.

    Does that mean in the future, the US and China will become less confrontational? Or more confrontational? What happens when India, Malaysia, and Indonesia begin to assert themselves? What happens if South America and Africa get their acts together? What happens if Europe continues to decline and becomes more irrelevant?

    The world isn’t binary. It’s multifactorial…

  4. Like Brett said, it’s not really SD until we can sleep, drink or read in the car, paying attention all the time is as tiring as driving myself, in each case I can’t relax.

    Removing steering wheels from production version of robotaxis would be a sign that proper SD tech was developed.

  6. Until the intervention rate is low enough that I can sleep on the drive, it’s not “self driving”, it’s just really smart cruise control. You can’t, IMO, call it self-driving if somebody has to be behind the wheel paying attention the whole time.

    Heck, I don’t even use cruise control, personally; It’s not worth it if I’ve got to be actively engaged with the car the whole while anyway. Still less would I like to be sitting behind the wheel, obligated to monitor everything going on, and not actually DOING anything. That’s a nightmare scenario so far as I’m concerned.

    So, wake me when they’re good enough to go to sleep. Anything short of that I’m not going to use outside of a medical emergency.

    Now, “How did it happen?”

    It happened because China is a command economy, and command economies have always been able to accomplish a few things they set their minds to, at the cost of the stuff they forget about going to ruin. It happened because the West mistakenly thought that a modernized China would give up on being an aggressive totalitarian state, and mellow out, and so gave China absurdly favorable trade deals while turning a blind eye to massive industrial espionage, to speed the process along.

    Hitler reindustrialized Germany, too, but it wasn’t long before people figured out that wasn’t anything to celebrate. I get that you like tech, Brian, but China advancing in tech isn’t something to celebrate, it’s terrifying, because their government is run by monsters, and that tech will eventually be put to monstrous ends.

    And our being entangled with their economy is just as terrifying, because they use that as a weapon. I hate the idea that Musk’s enterprises could end up dependent on a Chinese oligarch’s whims; You looking forward to social credit scores on X, and Telsas refusing to drive for you if they get too low?

  7. The liability issues are different in the U.S. with its very high litigious rate vs. the ROW, especially China. Who’s liable for L3 accidents?
    Number of miles is NOT the best criteria. Evaluations strictly by miles makes the Apollo program seem like the safest mode of transportation. No one died in Apollo spaceflights, if you ignore the very early test of Apollo 1. No one even died or was even injured during Apollo 13. No problem, right? Well, in reality, human intervention including by Houston, was constant & deep.
    I live in NYC where test FSD was approved recently. It’s getting mixed results, with the 12.3.2.1 software release: https://insideevs.com/news/718113/tesla-fsd-v12-nyc-video/ and it’s not a question of miles, it’s a question of challenges/miles.

    • You are contradicting yourself. Apollo 13 would be the best in terms of miles per intervention, and the you state that there were constant and deep interventions. Well, if the interventions were constant, then I guess there was 0 miles between interventions, right?

    • I think you misread the article. The metric is number of miles between interventions, not number of miles between injuries/deaths.

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