Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation information and what the car can see. Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic…
> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads.…
Tesla does have HD ground truth data for verification generated by their own LIDAR-equipped vehicles. However, according to a recent tweet by Elon Musk [1], they don't need LIDAR for that anymore.
[1]: https://nitter.poast.org/elonmusk/status/1788064109633875999