Former Waymo CEO Slams Tesla's Vision-Only Approach as "Severely Nearsighted," Falling Short of Safety Standards

John Krafcik, former CEO of Waymo, recently launched a sharp critique against Tesla's vision-only Full Self-Driving (FSD) approach, calling its perception capabilities severely inadequate—comparing it to "severe nearsightedness" that wouldn't even pass a standard DMV vision test. He pointed out that Tesla vehicles are equipped with only seven 5-megapixel cameras, six of which are wide-angle lenses, resulting in an effective visual acuity of merely 20/60 to 20/80 (compared to normal 20/20 vision), making it difficult to recognize distant objects. Krafcik criticized Tesla’s decision to remove radar and reject lidar as effectively "handcuffing the AI," leading to even worse performance in adverse weather, low-light conditions, or complex driving scenarios. Although Tesla emphasizes leveraging the world’s largest autonomous driving data pool to refine its algorithms, Krafcik argued that the lack of multi-sensor fusion would severely limit the system’s safety and reliability.