> By which metrics has Tesla been left in the dust wrt autonomous driving

By the fact that they don't have autonomous driving. And this very judgement demonstrates that.

If you have to keep your full attention on the road at all times and constantly look out for the 10% case where the autopilot may spectacularly fail, it instantly turns off the vast majority of prospective users.

Funny enough the tech that Musk's tweets and the Tesla hype machine has been promising for the last decade is actually on the streets today. It's just being rolled out by Waymo.

It's not free, is it? You buy the car, subscribe to their arbitrarily-priced subscription service, and then it does 90% of your driving.

That's like paying for a "self-juicing juicer" that only works with proprietary juice packages sold through an overpriced subscription.

Edit: Mostly a criticism. I have no bone to pick with Elon, but subscription slopware is the reason why Chinese EVs are more desirable to average Joes like me.

Tesla has a level 3 system that it's willing to gamble on not needing intervention for a handful of miles for a handful of Tesla fanboys. It's very telling that their "level 4" robotaxis are basically unicorns and only exist (existed? it's not clear they are even available anymore) in a single neighborhood subsection of the level 3 robotaxis full area in Austin.

Waymo on the other hand has a level 4 system, and has for many years, in many cities, with large service areas.

Tesla is unquestionably in the dust here, and the delusional, er, faithful are holding out for this mythical switch flip where Elon snaps his fingers and every Tesla turns into a level 4 robotaxi (despite the compute power in these cars being on the level of a GTX 5090, and the robotaxis having custom hardware loadouts)