I wonder how much of their trouble comes from other failures in their plan (avoiding the use of pre-made maps and single city taxi services in favor of a system intended to drive in unseen cities) vs how much comes from vision. There are concerning failure modes from vision alone but it’s not clear that’s actually the reason for the failure. Waymo built an expensive safe system that is a taxi first and can only operate on certain areas, and then they ran reps on those areas for a decade.

Tesla specifically decided not to use the taxi-first approach, which does make sense since they want to sell cars. One of the first major failures of their approach was to start selling pre-orders for self driving. If they hadn’t, they would not have needed to promise it would work everywhere, and could have pivoted to single city taxi services like the other companies, or added lidar.

But certainly it all came from Musk’s hubris, first to set out to solve the self driving in all conditions using only vision, and then to start selling it before it was done, making it difficult to change paths once so much had been promised.