Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree vs Data Scientist with Python Career Track
Same Bayesian formula, same rubric — so the difference in scores reflects the difference in the courses, not the difference in how we evaluated them.
Udacity · AI & ML Courses
Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree
DataCamp · AI & ML Courses
Data Scientist with Python Career Track
Per-criterion
Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree
Reviewers praise the breadth — CV, sensor fusion, localisation, planning, control, ROS on Carla. The caveat is the curriculum is deep-learning-heavy and some flag this as the wrong architectural bet for real autonomous vehicles.
Sebastian Thrun, David Silver and the rotating industry instructors (Mercedes, BMW, NVIDIA, Uber ATG, Waymo alumni) get steady positive mentions. Reviewers who took the free CS373 first describe the nanodegree as a paid extension.
The biggest drag on the score. Original 2016-2017 price was ~$2,400; current pricing sits around $249-399/month, total ~$1,000-1,500. Flagged against free MIT 6.S094, MIT 6.832 and Stanford CS221/CS231n alternatives.
Original cohorts received mentor-graded project reviews and praised them highly, but later reviewers — including one of the most-cited HN voices — report Udacity "got rid of this feature" for self-paced learners. Slack community partially compensates.
Projects are unusually applied — behavioural cloning, lane finding, sensor fusion, path planning, and a final integration on Udacity's real Carla vehicle via ROS. The gap is that industry has moved past the deep-learning-heavy approach taught.
Data Scientist with Python Career Track
Scoring methodology applies identically to every course on the site — see the formula.