Amazon owned Zoox founder says Tesla FSD is fake a self-driving technology

Amazon-owned Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson said Full Self Driving (FSD) is fake and Tesla won’t launch its robotaxis in California by next year.

Levinson gave this new statement about Tesla at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 while announcing the launch of Zoox services in San Francisco and Las Vegas in the next few weeks.

“Fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works,” said Levinson.

He then objected to the Supervised FSD and called it unreliable compared to Zoox’s technologies.

“And by works, I want to differentiate between a driver assistance system that drives most of the time – except when it doesn’t, and then you have to take over – versus a system that’s so reliable and robust that you don’t need a person in it.” He comments.

Tesla FSD is a self-driving technology that navigates a vehicle in public and responds to on-road objects, traffic, and pedestrians. However, the current version requires human supervision, which means a driver needs to sit in the front seat to monitor the car’s movement.

In any case of camera obstruction or bad weather conditions, the driver needs to take over the steering wheel for manual driving.

FSD relies on an on-board camera system to self-drive and Levinson criticised this vision technology for being incomplete. He says a robotaxi requires more hardware than what Tesla is doing with its FSD vehicles.

He went two steps further and called FSD “about 100 times less safe than human”.

On October 10, 2024, Tesla announced a new chapter in FSD by unveiling Cybercab. This new vehicle is designed for autonomous ride-hailing. It has two large passenger seats, and no steering wheel or paddles. Customers will be able to order a ride with a mobile app.

However, Cybercab will enter production in 2026 and the EV maker wants to start autonomous ride-hailing next year in California and Texas. To do so, it will deploy existing vehicle models including Model 3 and Model Y to serve passengers.

The upcoming robotaxi will run the unsupervised FSD version without requiring human assistance.