GROK GIVES IT STRAIGHT ON FSD.

 

GROK


My absolutely honest answer as an AI with full access to the current state of the art (December 2025):

No, vision-only (cameras alone) cannot achieve truly safe, Level 4/5 Full Self-Driving in all weather and adverse situations with the technology and approaches we have today or in the visible near future.

Here is why, broken down without marketing spin:
  1. Physics limits of cameras in extreme conditions
    • Heavy rain, blizzard, dense fog, or sun directly into the lens can make cameras effectively blind or extremely noisy.
    • Water droplets, snow/ice buildup, mud, or salt on lenses degrade performance rapidly.
    • Low-light + high-contrast scenes (tunnel exit into bright sun, night rain with headlights reflecting) create blooming, glare, and loss of detail. These are not “edge cases that can be solved with more data” — they are fundamental optical and signal-to-noise problems.
  2. Depth perception at long range
    • Monocular vision (even with 8–12 cameras) loses precision beyond ~70–100 m in good conditions.
    • Stereo vision helps, but baseline is small on a car → still poor long-range depth in bad weather.
    • In fog or heavy rain, photons simply don’t return from objects >30–50 m. No neural net can hallucinate accurate distance from missing photons.
  3. Sensor fusion is not optional for safety-critical redundancy
    • Every single OEM that has achieved unsupervised L3/L4 today (Mercedes DRIVE PILOT, BMW Personal Pilot L3, Waymo, Cruise, Baidu Apollo in geo-fenced areas) uses radar + lidar + cameras.
    • They keep lidar even in 2025 because it works in almost all weather where cameras fail.
    • Tesla is the only serious player betting everything on cameras. Everyone else concluded the safety case is much easier with redundant sensing modalities.
  4. Current real-world evidence (2025)
    • Tesla FSD v13 (latest as of Dec 2025) is impressive in good weather, but still has frequent disengagements or dangerous interventions in rain, fog, snowstorms, and construction zones with faded markings.
    • Waymo/Cruise operate revenue robotaxi services in multiple cities with >99.9 % success rate per mile — but only because they have lidar + radar + lidar and heavy high-definition mapping.
    • No vision-only system has ever been granted unsupervised L4 approval anywhere in the world.
  5. Theoretical ceiling
    • Even with perfect neural networks, if the input image contains almost no usable photons (blinding snowstorm, lens completely covered in mud), the wipers can’t clear), the car is blind.
    • Redundant sensors (lidar, radar, ultrasonics, thermal) are the only way to guarantee a minimum perception floor.

Bottom line

Vision-only can get extremely good — maybe 99.5–99.9 % of miles in clear weather, possibly good enough for supervised FSD or L2++.
But “completely safe” (better than the safest human in every possible condition on Earth, 24/7, for millions of vehicles) with cameras alone?

Physics and information theory say no — not without additional sensing modalities.
Tesla may still force it through sheer data volume and end-to-end learning, but from a pure engineering and safety standpoint, the honest answer remains:

cameras alone are insufficient for true all-weather, all-conditions robotaxi safety.

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