Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/01/waymo-ceo-tesla-is-not-a-competitor-at-all/

by sytelus • 5 years ago

260 561 5 years ago

granzymes3• 5 years ago

drivers came to trust it way too quickly. Drivers who were supposed to be closely monitoring the system instead spent their time looking at their phones, putting on makeup, and other distractions.

Really hope no one dies because of Tesla's autopilot. This is a real risk.

Quoting from below: if the car does it right 99% of the time it's just human nature to stop paying attention. The article makes a great point that slowly improving the autopilot with a person behind the wheel is super dangerous because we get lulled into a false sense of security.

brianwawok2• 5 years ago

I mean people have already died sleeping with it on. But it’s also likely saved lives based on their deaths per mile number.

ameen• 5 years ago

I’m not sure if I feel easy about this “statistic” - deaths per mile?? These are humans, and more importantly to the business - paying customers.

If my product has the possibility of killing my customer, I’d probably not be comfortable with making it market ready (without massively improving its safety features).

petters2• 5 years ago

Are you aware how low the deaths per mile is for humans?

I don't think we know if Waymo has a lower rate than a human yet. Tesla I don't know, but wouldn't be surprised if it is higher.

sixQuarks9• 5 years ago

When has someone died while sleeping in an autopiloted Tesla? I've kept a close eye on this space and never heard of this.

breakfastduck2• 5 years ago

It's bound to happen, but also likely to be the result of the driver not paying attention.

granzymes3• 5 years ago

Right, but if the car does it right 99% of the time it's just human nature to stop paying attention. The article makes a great point that slowly improving the autopilot with a person behind the wheel is super dangerous because we get lulled into a false sense of security. I hope Tesla just keeps it to highway lane keeping until they're ready to roll out better sensors.

ra713• 5 years ago

Krafcik talks about this very issue in the article on how driver assistance systems give false sense of security to the driver.

The Waymo team believes its own early experience—when it was the Google self-driving car project—bears that out. In the early 2010s, Google developed a driver-assistance system similar to today's Autopilot and considered selling it to automakers. But when they let Google employees test the software on public roads, they found that drivers came to trust it way too quickly. Drivers who were supposed to be closely monitoring the system instead spent their time looking at their phones, putting on makeup, and other distractions.
The fundamental challenge here is that the better a driver-assistance system gets, the harder it is to get drivers to pay attention, and the less likely they are to be prepared if the software makes a mistake. The Google team didn't see a good solution to this problem, so they completely changed their strategy. They focused on building a self-driving taxi service that would never have customers in the driver's seat, relying on trained, professional safety drivers to oversee the software during testing.

nightcracker• 5 years ago

Can you pay attention to a video game for two hours, and during that time react to some important event within 1 second reaction time? I bet you can.

Can you do the same when staring at a wall for two hours?

mxschumacher6• 5 years ago

coffee cups say "be careful this is hot", but the regulator allows a product called "Full Self Driving" to be sold - I think ultimately consumer protection will step in here like it has in Germany [0]

0: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot-germany/g...

mminer237• 5 years ago

People already have died because of Autopilot years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/tesla-crash-auto...

It is an inevitability that people will die because of any autopilot system if it lasts long enough.

judge20207• 5 years ago

Better source, also linked elsewhere in this thread https://www.tesladeaths.com/

cwhiz• 5 years ago

People will die. It will also save lives. It’s probably already prevented thousands of accidents, some of which would have been fatal. It just doesn’t make national news when your car moves you out of the way of danger.

smnrchrds• 5 years ago

I am not so sure about this. Modern cars come with a lot of safety features, like automatic braking and adaptive cruise control. Sure, if you replace all 1995 Honda Civics with Teslas, you will save many lives. I don't think you could save any lives by replacing all modern 2020 cars from other manufacturers with Teslas.

mrtksn3• 5 years ago

People die all the time, there are even higher profile cases like the Apple Engineer who slammed in the barriers at full speed: https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-...

There are some spectacular failures that are very scary because the car does something that a person would never do, unless unconscious, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmAG4dk-rU

You don't hear much about it probably because Tesla fanboys are plenty and rabid, so people avoid talking about it online.

The defence is usually stats about human drivers crashing more often and it makes sense until you dive deeper into the numbers because these stats are usually oranges v.s. Apples. It feels like they have some playbook with statistics to slap when someone says something negative. If that doesn't cut, they say that the victim should have followed the manual that says "your attention should always be on the road" then proceed posting a video about how thanks to the latest update they can sleep drive to work and attach a banana to the driving wheel to disable the attention safeguards.

If someone asks how is this an autopilot, there are usually two ways to handle it:

1) Autopilot is just a brand name, the self driving software is in beta, so the victim should pay attention all the times.

2) Autopilot is like on the planes, so only fools think that it is autonomous, therefore it was working as intended but they should have been using it like an airline autopilot. Crash due to user error.

I'm actually a fan of Musk and Tesla but I feel like the community engagement is very unhealthy and lacks scrutiny due to the "online army" of his.

granzymes3• 5 years ago

Wow that second one is terrifying. Particularly since that was only 7 months ago!

petters2• 5 years ago

A lidar would have discovered that truck immediately.

Is is confirmed that this Tesla was using self-driving?

hooloovoo_zoo• 5 years ago

I'm not so sure the second one is something a person would never do. The second car also brakes very late, for instance. Did autopilot break at the last second for the Tesla, or the driver? I'm also bearish on autopilot and am not saying the Tesla performed well, but I bet human highway drivers run into stationary traffic all the time too.

Judgmentality2• 5 years ago

I'm surprised you don't just link to the source that regularly updates itself on all Tesla deaths, and makes a point to cite its sources. Note this is not just for Autopilot, but all deaths occuring from Tesla vehicles (including people not in the vehicles). There are tags for various things like "Autopilot" and "Pedestrian/cyclist"

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

brownbat• 5 years ago

I'm optimistic for this area of tech and research in general, but agree we need to stop benchmarking against average human crash rates.

Although anyone can be hit at any time, the distribution of human crashes is not purely random. People who drive compromised, for example, are way overrepresented in those events.

So, theoretically, the tech could get to a point with a lower than expected crash rate for humans generally, but still increase your personal crash likelihood.

threeseed4• 5 years ago

Autopilot is like on the planes, so only fools think that it is autonomous

Nobody other than pilots, engineers or enthusiasts knows the subtleties of how aircraft autopilot systems work.

Every other person on this planet knows it to mean "fly the plane by itself". And would expect a Tesla car to "drive by itself".

xedeon13• 5 years ago

That "Apple Engineer" was playing a video game on this cellphone according to NHTSA. But it's "rabid Tesla fans" you say?

https://www.kqed.org/news/11803406/apple-engineer-killed-in-...

qeternity• 5 years ago

I think the scrutiny should be whether fewer people die than otherwise would have.

trianglem• 5 years ago

People can die. Honestly in my opinion it’s worth it. Will it happen to me? No, because I’m extra cautious and won’t slack off but to make progress quickly these things must be done. If you really want to be hyper cautious, you can always make the case that it’s saving lives that would otherwise be lost.

perryizgr83• 5 years ago

No, because I’m extra cautious and won’t slack off

A big issue is that some random guy in the Tesla behind you may not be so careful. So you cold still get into an accident because of Tesla's recklessness.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

This is a real risk

It's even a risk to Waymo because, despite being responsible about it, Tesla made people either scared of autonomous cars or forced out legislation restricting it.

mung3• 5 years ago

There's two levels of risk, Tesla owners taking themselves out, and then there is innocent bystanders being taken out. It's pretty infuriating if you consider that we're all put at risk.

jiofih15• 5 years ago

You are at a much higher risk from all kinds of humans, with varying levels of skill, in different states of mind manually driving these vehicles.

Ericson2314• 5 years ago

This is really about two different strategies for dealing with cultural and regulator norms more than two different engineering strategies.

vletal3• 5 years ago

They did pick different sensors and approach to world mapping in the first place. How is it just a cultural and regulator thing?

xiphias23• 5 years ago

One method is spending money on sensors, the other is on gathering as much data as possible (cheaper sensors, but put in all cars).

In 20 years we'll probably have good enough algorithms that can work with few data and cheap sensors, so it's just a matter of time until the 2 methods converge.

philosopher1234• 5 years ago

This seems like agile vs waterfall to me, which are two very different engineering strategies.

jcfrei• 5 years ago

I have a feeling that AGI is a requirement for FSD. There are enough tail events while driving where you can only make "the right decision" if you actually understand what's going on.

majewsky• 5 years ago

There are enough tail events while driving where you can only make "the right decision" if you actually understand what's going on.

I have the feeling this bar disqualifies most human drivers, too.

codebolt• 5 years ago

Human drivers fail reliably, in ways that are understandable. Non-AGI artificial intelligence based on a mix of heuristics and dumb statistics (aka 'deep learning') will fail in highly unpredictable and to a human eye completely foolish ways. The day these cars are let on the road in my area is the day I start taking the train.

benlivengood2• 5 years ago

I have the feeling this bar disqualifies most human drivers, too.

There are plenty of people who wait for road-side assistance for a flat tire. It's arguable that a FSD system may be totally viable without having to solve every eventuality on the road. If it can stop someplace safe and call for help that's the most a lot of humans can manage.

vletal3• 5 years ago

I feel like AI vs AGI is going to be the next P vs NP kind of issue.

People will mostly realize that the concept of "general" intelligence is flawed yet we might strive to get to it indefinitely.

macintux2• 5 years ago

To my mind there are certainly a lot of unknowns around interactions with people outside the vehicle. A simple scenario like someone directing traffic around an accident seems like a nightmare for FSD.

(Edited: slight wording tweak.)

benlivengood2• 5 years ago

Waymo following police hand signals: https://youtu.be/OopTOjnD3qY

raldi2• 5 years ago

He seems so obviously correct that I can’t fathom how any engineer could see things otherwise.

missedthecue3• 5 years ago

Musk seems more of a marketer than an engineer to me, even though he's always characterized as one.

killjoywashere• 5 years ago

Musk has degrees in economics and physics. My undergrad is in physics and my dad is an engineer. They are definitely different skillsets.

When I decided to build a treehouse for my kids, I came up with a clean sheet design. My dad saw my drift and walked me through a redesign the preserved the core idea. And then my neighbor, a general contractor, supervised the build (and pretty much doubled every safety margin along the way). My other neighbor (a self-employed roofer) did the crazy bits.

I would be inclined to credit Musk with broad outlines and I would give him credit for being able to participate in the engineering process by asking some sensible questions. I would not be inclined to credit him with imposing tried-and-true design methods and constraints. Similarly, I would give him credit for broad outline path-to-profitability. I would not give him credit for day-to-day diligence of double-entry accounting that the CFO worries about or the contract negotiations his PMs answer to the CFO's staff for.

kergonath• 5 years ago

He never got any engineering training. The closest he got was a BA in Physics. But yes, he’s a good marketer and his first product is himself.

xirbeosbwo12345• 5 years ago

Musk has no engineering training whatsoever.

jiofih15• 5 years ago

Not only he sold two tech companies where he worked as a software engineer early in his career, but he has been the chief engineer for SpaceX for almost twenty years, and the results of that kind of speak for themselves?

plutonorm3• 5 years ago

Have you even listened to him talk? Every word that comes out of his mouth is poured over to make sure that it contains truth.

TheGrim-999• 5 years ago

An engineer that's being logical and thinking from first principles should come to the same solution, but the vast majority of the population base their viewpoints on what's "true" based on what the internet / mass media has told them for years is true, not by what actually makes logical sense in objective reality.

The news has been spamming PR pieces for years about self-driving cars, with absolutely no technical merit to them. Twitter/Reddit/Etc have been absolutely spammed by echo chambers that all assure themselves that self-driving cars have been invented and will be released soon.

The population is awash with the viral idea that they're possible, exist, and are on the way, because that's just what they've been told for years. The average person repeats the idea because that's what the internet told them is true, which makes it even more "true", since now there's another person repeating it.

What percentage of the population that goes online and talks about how self-driving cars are coming soon actually have the engineering background / technical knowledge to come to that conclusion?

Spinnaker_• 5 years ago

As an engineer you should care about cost and other tradeoffs. At this point Waymo is not much more than an exorbitantly expensive tech demo. I sure hope that one day it is more than that.

Tesla has a million cars on the road. It is a technology people can use and afford and it is working.

comma.ai sells a device for $1000 that can be installed on the majority of cars sold in America.

It's still too early to say much about Waymo.

rcxdude7• 5 years ago

The whole point is they aren't actually doing what waymo is setting out to do, and it doesn't matter how many cars tesla has with driver assist it won't really help them get to full autonomy.

Udik2• 5 years ago

I had to go back and re-read the article because I thought I had missed something. The whole content seems to consist of only three points:

1- that their sensors are better and lidar is indispensable.

2- that there is no continuum between assisted driving and fsd.

3- that they have already achieved full self driving.

That's it. Neither 1 or 2 are supported by any argument, and 3 contradicts the widespread opinion here that fsd is impossible (at least without agi).

Note: I'm not defending Tesla, I'm just saying that this article is very light on actual content.

jiofih15• 5 years ago

Humans, surprisingly, don’t have LiDar, yet they can drive.

minwcnt5• 5 years ago

Humans have general intelligence and understand what their eyes are perceiving at a far deeper level than any CV system.

raldi2• 5 years ago

I’m not sure what that has to do with my comment. Neither I nor the Waymo CEO said you need lidar to drive.

RoyTyrell• 5 years ago

There are other engineers in the same field with more technical expertise in this specific field of robotics than Elon, and they think that Tesla's path is not accurate enough. Maybe they're right. Maybe Elon is.

The problem is when you hold someone up on a pedestal and a cult of personality forms. That clouds your judgement and you lose your objectivity. It's great if Elon is right, but if he isn't I hope the fatalities, injuries, and property damages can be kept to a minimum and it doesn't hamper better technologies from being implemented.

nickik4• 5 years ago

To me its obvious that he is wrong. Great, now we can all just claim we are so incredibly smart and know anything based on feeling.

Waymo is wasting tons of money driving around one city, that is literally the easiest city to driver around arguably in the world. They did this for years and years and years.

Tesla has a much, much, much larger fleet driving around in literally all conditions, in almost every single country in the world. Their software already handles things that Waymo has not even bigging to solve, like special street signs in Korea and China.

Will Waymo be the first to offer a Taxi service in geofenced? Yes. Will Tesla be the first where I can go anywhere at any time? Yes.

speedgoose• 5 years ago

Tesla is quite far from full self driving. They have too much phantom breaking on the simple adaptive cruise control in good conditions.

api2• 5 years ago

Phantom braking and similar issues are a full stop for me, no pun intended. That just seems fantastically dangerous given that so many drivers don’t pay much attention when they don’t expect you to brake. Seems like a recipe for full speed rear end collisions.

Tesla may make this stuff work eventually but it doesn’t seem safe at the moment and you can count me out.

saetaes• 5 years ago

As a Model X owner who rarely engages Autopilot for this exact reason, I concur. The number of times the car has suddenly started braking for no good reason (clear weather and good road conditions, few cars around) is way too high.

KKKKkkkk1• 5 years ago

According to Elon, phantom braking was fixed in October: https://twitter.com/EVHQ2/status/1314287584105779200.

freewilly1040• 5 years ago

“It should be”.... not exactly the lost reassuring response on a common failure mode of a safety critical system

burmanm3• 5 years ago

It isn't, it still does it with all the other weird braking incidents also, like snowy road, truck comes from another direction in the corner - the car will alert and brake even when both are on their correct sides of the road. Not to mention any of those mid-road poles that are meant for the pedestrians. If they have snow then the car will again brake thinking I'm going to hit something. Impossible to use the cruise control on many roads.

_ph_3• 5 years ago

That is true, but notice that the autopilot you use on the highway is an entirely different software than the FSD beta which recently has been released for off-highway use.

albertTJames2• 5 years ago

another baseless musk bashing. Waymo doesn't have nearly as much data as Tesla. They're not playing in the same category.

ra713• 5 years ago

Ah yes, the "more data will magically solve self driving" argument.

api2• 5 years ago

More data makes it easier to train and evaluate systems but will not fix an inadequate approach.

Humans can drive with vision alone because humans are way way smarter than glorified regression models. We have a higher order model of what is happening. I am skeptical that you can replicate this with current AI. The approach of using LIDAR to compensate for dumber AI with more and better data seems more sound.

mxschumacher6• 5 years ago

also Google being short on data given they've been working on this problem for 12 years is a pretty poor argument. If anything, it should tell us how are the problem of self-driving really is.

rio517• 5 years ago

He didn't say that. You're putting words in his "mouth."

mupuff1234• 5 years ago

So on one hand, since humans can drive using only vision - lidar isn't needed.

But on the other hand, even though humans don't need that much training data suddenly vast amounts of data is absolutely required?

spsful• 5 years ago

Is anyone else confused on the merits of Waymo's argument? They differentiate "driver assistance" from "fully autonomous" systems in that Tesla somehow can never achieve the latter because they have developed the former. The only specific reason for this that I could find was a mention of LiDAR and how Waymo sees it as indispensable.

Krafcik says that Waymo has largely completed technical work on its self-driving software and is now focused on scaling the technology up.

...cool? Again, no mention of a SPECIFIC reason Tesla cannot do the same work as Waymo outside of not having LiDAR sensors. They attack Tesla for not developing a fully autonomous vehicle from the get-go, but don't seem to explain why this makes it any harder for them to make the finished product.

rcxdude7• 5 years ago

The core point is you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous. They're just completely different from the point of view of the reliability of the software you need. A huge amount of things with driver assist you can write off as 'the driver will take over'. There's not a specific part of you can point to and say 'that's what will stop them', so much as the entire design of the system needs a different level of consideration because it becomes so safety critical, as opposed to safety-enhancing (autonomous driving is probably the most complex safety critical design ever attempted, by at least an order of magnitude. Driver assist is way easier by comparison). It affects the attributes of the sensors, the design of the neural networks interpreting those sensors, the high level design of the decision making of the whole vehicle, the low-level design of the electronics, basically everything.

Tesla hasn't put forward a plan which indicates their full autonomous development is going to be anything other than a continuation of their driver assist work (and it's certainly frequently and incorrectly stated that the state of their driver assist puts them ahead in the race to full autonomy), and if they want to be credible to those familiar with the challenges involved, they need to actually show something more than that.

Udik2• 5 years ago

you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous

Ok. So Waymo has developed a 100% reliable full self driving system that handles every possible situation. It was never put in a situation in which it would have given back control to a human driver, because that would have meant "going smoothly" to driver assist mode, and we have already said that this is impossible.

jariel2• 5 years ago

The argument is that they are not even in the same category of technology complexity.

Which is very reasonable.

Tesla's real-world deployment of autopilot is frankly probably an advantage of sorts. And maybe starting with those realities is 'good path'.

But it doesn't change the nature of the fact the gap is quite big.

mdorazio• 5 years ago

A full discussion on this would require an article several times as long as this one as well as some understanding of how vehicle control systems work. I do a fair amount of work with OEMs in this space and to summarize it in a horribly short way:

1) A system that relies primarily on cameras is necessarily limited by camera constraints. No, just because humans primarily rely on vision does not mean an ML model with cameras can do the same and achieve the same results in situations as complex as urban driving.

2) Every major player other than Tesla in this space spends a huge amount of time architecting an entire computing, data exchange, and control platform for autonomous vehicles that is bulky by necessity, but far more robust both in terms of sensor capabilities and ability to cross-check between data inputs to decide what control signals to send. Tesla basically added some cameras and low-resolution radar (they're improving the radar now, but it sure as hell wasn't in the platform they originally promised was FSD-ready) and is hoping it will be enough when everyone else studied the capabilities years ago and decided it wasn't.

To summarize, what Tesla has built is a platform with capabilities that very strongly seem to be limited to Level 3 automation, while engineers working on Level 4 long ago concluded that the Tesla approach is insufficient, and then adjusted their own hardware and software strategies accordingly.

ra713• 5 years ago

I think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package.

This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodologies (Tesla's quarterly safety report is a grand total of a single paragraph). Compare this to how transparent Waymo is [1], the difference in safety culture between Tesla and its competitors is stark. Not to mention how Tesla skirts around the rules by refusing to report autonomous miles with the excuse of classifying it as a driver assist system, while naming the technology "Full Self Driving" and Elon Musk hyping it up every chance he gets on how it will be Level 5-ready by end of the year.

[1] https://waymo.com/safety/

justapassenger2• 5 years ago

FSD rollout is purely driven by Elon’s ego. He’s addicted to fame and power, and that comes from image he created of himself being an Iron Man. I’m pretty sure he got to a point where he believes in it, and thinks he’s invincible and can solve any problem, because he’s so much smarter than everyone. Stock bubble making wealthiest man only helped to solidify that.

dilap2• 5 years ago

I don't know, I don't get that feeling. What makes you think that? I don't know much about Elon, but I listened to one of his interviews with Rogan, and he struck me as extremely optimistic, but also grounded and not arrogant.

(I do agree partial-self-driving just seems like a terrible idea. I guess crash stats can reveal if this is true or not, but are perhaps not available.)

xirbeosbwo12345• 5 years ago

He didn't create that image on his own. He had a lot of help. He had a cameo in Iron Man 2 where Iron Man treated him as a peer!

(That scene, by the way, is a perfect example of why I hate superhero movies.)

threeseed4• 5 years ago

He also personally received an obscenely large windfall as a result of this strategy.

Debatable how significant this impacts his decision making but it's pretty hard to argue that doesn't impact it at least a little.

scythe• 5 years ago

I don't think FSD rollout is the central goal. The goal is to build hype and thus market cap that Tesla can use to build factories. Ten years ago, Tesla had no factories (at high capacity). They've had absolutely ridiculous velocity since then precisely because of their ridiculous valuation. Even if this FSD thing doesn't work out, it might have been necessary for Tesla to get this far. If Tesla's stock crashes, they still have the factories. All they need is to make sure nobody can prove Elon knows he's full of it (securities fraud). His Twitter persona suits this strategy to a T.

rendall• 5 years ago

FSD rollout is purely driven by Elon’s ego. He’s addicted to fame and power...

Whoa. You have strong feelings.

One of my Life Rules that has served me enduringly well is to avoid believing that I can confidently have real insight into what motives drive someone. That rule is not for their benefit, but for my own: to putatively "know" something is to invite an incorrect model of reality and thereby incorrect action. It doesn't actually matter what drives Musk or anyone else: ego, pure business interests, a desire to take humanity to the stars, boredom, pathology, space ghosts, whatever. What matters is behavior and its effects.

If you criticize Musk's ego, ambition, pride, there's nothing actionable for anyone, neither Musk himself nor Tesla's potential customers. If you criticize the Tesla FSD rollout, now there's something people can do.

meekrohprocess• 5 years ago

I have one question for Tesla customers who trust the company to deliver full FSD.

How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance?

The NHTSA opened an investigation into premature HUD failures because they prevented the backup cameras from working. But the fact of the matter is, the company used a small partition of internal Tegra Flash to store rapidly-refreshing log data. And you are trusting these devs with your life when you enable autopilot.

You're also entrusting my life, and those of my family, to them. But we'll gloss over that, because it's expensive not to.

threeseed4• 5 years ago

Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance

Equally likely is that they do understand but just don't care.

From all accounts, Tesla seems to have a culture of move fast and break things.

nemothekid• 5 years ago

Please note that you are asking this question at the tail end of pandemic where a significant portion of the country decided it was preferable to "just let some old people die" than to lockdown or even wear masks.

Those people will twist themselves into giving you a PC answer but the truth is they're willing to crack a few eggs in order get FSD today. They'll tell you no one else is even trying and in the long run FSD will save more lives and Musk should be praised for having the gumption to get the ball rolling.

jfim3• 5 years ago

How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance?

That sounds more like the kind of situation where the software department said "we need to have a system that has X amount of storage" and the hardware department made the hardware for it, but there was some missing communication about endurance. It's likely not the same people writing the autopilot software.

That being said, I'm not a Tesla customer, and the way autopilot is deployed and marketed makes me very uneasy.

na85• 5 years ago

You're also entrusting my life, and those of my family, to them. But we'll gloss over that, because it's expensive not to.

This is my biggest concern. I'm going to get killed by some jackass' tesla while he's texting, because Elon Musk is a megalomaniac.

pmorici3• 5 years ago

The hud as you call it is not a safety critical part of the car in Teslas. You can reboot it while driving without effecting the car. The self driving computer is separate and has full redundancy to the point of having two processors running redundant code. There is a reason Tesla’s are consistently rated as the safest cars on the road with low probability of being involved in an accident and lowest probability of injury when an accident does happen.

GeorgeTirebiter• 5 years ago

Tesla is organized functionally. The Infotainment Group did the Console electronics. The SW people there did GUIs and such. So yes between the electronics folks and the app folks 'somebody' didn't consider write cycles. In other Tesla groups, such as Body Controls, and Propulsion -- I can assure you those geeks know such things and plan to deal with funky hardware. The Autopilot group is again separate. There really isn't much crossover. "Systems" is unfortunately an unknown word at Tesla. You know, parts is parts.

roenxi2• 5 years ago

There is no challenge reconciling imperfect FSD with high trust of that FSD.

When I decided to play the game of risk minimisation, I sold my car. Minimising risk isn't the most important goal of drivers, almost by definition. Cars are not safe in any objective sense. They are tools of convenience.

A fun hypothetical, you and a good friend get tested for spatial intelligence and it turns out there was a big difference in your favour - how big does the difference need to be before you tell your friend you are no longer comfortable letting them drive when you are in the car?

mschuster91• 5 years ago

How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance?

Easy: compartmentalization of knowledge. Most software developers I have met have no idea about the storage stuff under their application, they trust the OS and the hardware people to deal with it. I mean, who can blame them in the age of AWS or actual servers where companies simply throw money at any problem and hardware is rotated for something new before write endurance ever becomes an issue And the hardware people probably knew that the OS people would run Linux, but didn't expect logfile spam.

sorenjan• 5 years ago

I don't understand why it's legal. How can it be allowed to send out uncertified software to cars on public roads? Aren't there safety standards that need to be met? I thought that safety critical products where better regulated than this.

chillfox2• 5 years ago

Well, software that controls a car is a new thing. So I would imagine that it hasn't really been regulated yet in most jurisdictions. For some reason we have a tendency to write laws so that they are specific to individual things rather than general and future prof laws.

hjnilsson• 5 years ago

In Europe, most of the Tesla features are disabled because they were deemed hazardous. Only lane assist and adaptive cruise control is enabled. The others are severely limited or disabled (Summon etc.)

kevingadd• 5 years ago

It's heavily regulated, just ask geohot [1]. Most of the players in this space do their self-driving vehicle testing carefully under controlled circumstances with some approval from local agencies. Tesla seems to be cheating by punting all the responsibility onto their customers, because instead of testing Self-Driving Cars they're just shipping software to customers and letting people run that on their cars.

1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-selfdriving-safety/comma-...

3pt141592• 5 years ago

Welcome to being me three or four years ago. I've literally met with MPs and ministers trying to get regulations and other things. They're coming. But they don't happen without civic engagement. Write to your elected representative and call for legislation. It works. It takes time, but it works.

hartator• 5 years ago

Waymo had one of their employees not properly monitoring their car and they killed someone. I dont believe anyone had been killed by the Tesla development team? Couple of customers did die but that was their fault for not monitoring the car? One was watching harry potter I remember.

ra713• 5 years ago

You're probably thinking of Uber which killed someone in Arizona, not Waymo.

KorematsuFred4• 5 years ago

while naming the technology "Full Self Driving" and Elon Musk hyping it up every chance he gets on how it will be Level 5-ready by end of the year.

I am an anti-goverment anti-regulation Libertarian and even I think the government has a very legitimate role to play here in regulating this fraud. This is a bit like Humpty Dumpty where the words do not mean what they mean.

mewpmewp24• 5 years ago

What I wonder is would countries like China be able to reach FSD faster since they would possibly be less ethically bound? And similarly with other tech which otherwise would be limited ethically?

sudosysgen10• 5 years ago

IIRC so far China doesn't seem to be doing anything like Tesla, most things I've seen were testing in a closed zone with an engineer, Waymo-style.

They also don't have any self-driving deaths for now, unless I missed something.

I thus don't think they will have this advantage. They might have the advantage of more chaotic traffic?

ganafagol4• 5 years ago

Having an ethical framework that differs from yours is not the same as the absence of ethics.

01100011• 5 years ago

Telsa will be very transparent when the first round of lawsuits begins and they're facing multi-billion dollar lawsuits.

Toyota lost billions from simply not following accepted safety design practices. Does anyone really think Tesla's self-driving tech is ISO26262 or MISRA compliant?

froh2• 5 years ago

No it's is IEC61508 compliant.

IEC61508-7 F is giving an example how to come from test hours to a quality and safety statement, in terms of failure in time rates.

With how many, 700.000 morning and evening commutes, tesla is gathering evidence pretty quickly that their vehicles save more lives than they kill due to those rare FSD faults which lead to fatal failures.

Air bags kill people. Always have, always will. Fully misra and 26262 compliant. And air bags save many more people.

Tesla FSD will come, fully validated and fully standard compliant, so will Waymo (I doubt they go with misra).

thereare5lights• 5 years ago

nothing but a tactic to generate hype

Congratulations, you've figured out Elon Musk.

elisharobinson3• 5 years ago

WOW 1 paragraph of data > 48 page pdf of "look at me i did this first so i know what im doing" . Honestly this is quite dumb , waymo will NEVER i REPEAT NEVER make it to market let alone with any amount of volume ... And it has nothing to autonomy or tech ... just by virtue of having bulky expensive sensor's (which need to be serviced regularly) and power draw of the compute and tech .... other than having a very niche proof of concept like project loon i think waymo will also fold like all of its fellow google x brother-in.

mgoetzke2• 5 years ago

That safety 'Report' from Waymo isn't a report at all though. It is a general overview on their approach how they say they will handle it and a direction. Basically a primer for regulators and customers that don't know anything yet about it. It is extremely light on numbers over time.

ra713• 5 years ago

There are a couple more PDFs linked in the same page. What did you find lacking in the safety performance data whitepaper?

dalbasal3• 5 years ago

Safety culture is an important topic too, but this article is about something else: technology paths.

jariel2• 5 years ago

Musk's propensity for risk tolerance, projected into the consumer market, with some weird hubris about this, might just end up killing a few people and a few lawsuits.

It may not impeded Tesla in any way though.

screye4• 5 years ago

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked.

Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving.

I completely agree with this article. I avoid using cruise control and auto-lane-keep for the same reasons. Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster.

On the other hand, I can see Tesla's strategy paying off as a low probability win but no lose situation. If 3d lidar is necessary, then I think Waymo (Alphabet) is closest to self-driving success. If they 'win', I see them licensing their tech to every other manufacturer. In such an outcome, Tesla ends up no worse than all of its competitors. It is a no-lose scenario. However, in the unlikely scenario that 2D videos are sufficient for L5 self-driving, Tesla wins BIG. No one will be even close, especially due to the scale of 2D data that they have gathered.

rcxdude7• 5 years ago

This matches my experience of how Tesla is viewed in the autonomous car industry. No-one thinks they are a serious contender when it comes to a driverless vehicle (and their business model basically doesn't match with the technology either: every other company is basically going to operate a taxi service because there's far more value to be captured and it can help pay for the hardware making driverless possible)

mxschumacher6• 5 years ago

it's interesting how optimistic long term visions conflict - if you really think autonomous cabs will become widespread then by implication you are also saying that car sales will be drastically lower. Tough to be serious betting on both.

The math of "you'll pay more for the car but the car will go out and make money for you as a robotic Uber" sounds like a pyramid scheme to me; if too many people do it, it can no longer work.

nickik4• 5 years ago

Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use.

Their arrogance is about as convincing as that of the rocket companies or car companies that didn't think EV were gone happen.

Saying 'in my industry they are joke' is kind of a joke by itself by now.

Also Tesla wants to operate a taxi services too so I don't understand your argument.

another_kel• 5 years ago

How much value is there really? The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. Don’t forget that you also need to buy brand new vehicles and compete with Uber/taxis.

0x10c0fe11ce• 5 years ago

I’m one of those who will still buy my cars for one simple reason, I’m unable to live in other people’s filth. I’ve rented lost of shared electric cars and sometimes you just want to drive it into the sea.

elisharobinson3• 5 years ago

Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could expect to be cashflow positive in 7~8 years (assuming exponential ramp up of production and 0 competition) ... all of these thing need to happen for this taxi service X to succeed ,i think to get all these things right is highly unlikely and i feel Elon knows this aswell so he took the path of simpler tech and trying a software service model which is infinitely more scale-able .

onion2k2• 5 years ago

Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving.

There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.

Zhenya• 5 years ago

autonomous driving needs to be safer than humans to be adopted (some say way safer).

So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.

sixQuarks9• 5 years ago

wow, getting downvoted for stating this fact. I can't believe the anti-Musk bias here on HN. You would think HN would actually appreciate one of the more innovative entrepreneurs on the planet.

YZF2• 5 years ago

I own a model 3. Often it says "the camera is blinded" (e.g. when the sun is shining at it), often there's rain on the lens... So I'd argue Tesla's cameras are much worse for driving under all conditions vs. the human eye. I'm not sure there's enough redundancy for depth perception either. I tend to agree with the argument that humans prove it's possible to drive with just visual sensors but Tesla's sensors, for better or worse, are not equivalent.

Then there's the part about the brain being what gets the sensor data and interprets it. I doubt Tesla's computer has all the capabilities of a human brain.

Driving behind a boat trailer, it's clear to me it's a boat, but Tesla's computer is confused. Bicycles can be a little iffy as well. In general the way the car perceives the world seems subpar to how a human does, by far.

I'm a fan of the car, I'm mostly a fan of Tesla/Elon, but I don't think these cars with this technology are ever gonna be truly autonomous so they can drive with no human intervention... IMHO.

ashtonkem3• 5 years ago

Sure. But that’s a moot point if it turns out you need to basically replicate large parts of the human brain in order to drive with cameras alone.

jayd16• 5 years ago

Yep. It's clear that lidar isn't literally needed. That said, I think the argument just shifts to "the cameras on a Tesla aren't good enough either."

That's also just a shot from the hip, weasely sort of argument but it's harder to dismiss outright.

apengwin• 5 years ago

Yes, but in fact, imagine how much better at driving we'd be if we had LIDAR lasers shooting out of our heads.

justapassenger2• 5 years ago

You can see in all public talks how Karpathy focuses almost exclusively on image recognition. Yeah, that’s great and important, but that’s a step one in making any autonomous vehicle. And the easiest one.

DisjointedHunt2• 5 years ago

He's also spoken at length about deriving point clouds from images alone at the Teslas autonomy day for investors.

Can't expect a commercial company operating at the bleeding edge to host a "IP giveaway" day as researchers do.

tim333• 5 years ago

And the easiest one

Some of Telas biggest problems seem to stem from not recognising stationary trucks in their path.

NationalPark• 5 years ago

Surely you use power steering, drive-by-wire pedals, and anti-lock breaks though, right? Or even an automatic transmission? Is it so different to use lane assist or cruise control?

screye4• 5 years ago

The key difference being they are reliable 100% of the time.

Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them.

Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.

KorematsuFred4• 5 years ago

None of them have to deal with fat tail risks. (to quote nissim ntaleb).

I do not know about dbw pedals but power steering and anti-lock breaking operate 100% deterministically and the only true unknown is controlled by the driver.

_ea1k6• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure mobileye has demonstrated their FSD solution without lidar as well. It seems like they are treating lidar as optional.

They have many more cameras than Tesla to support the camera only approach, though.

screye4• 5 years ago

At some point, you have enough cameras that you are probably (implicitly or explicitly) doing 3D reconstructions that Lidar does anyways. At that point, why not just use LIDAR ?

To save some $2-3k? That feels 'penny wise pound foolish'. This is a premium feature and LIDAR keeps getting cheaper.

anonytrary4• 5 years ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. There is no such thing as "sort of self driving". It's either completely autonomous or I'm going to have to be paying some attention and I might as well be doing all of the driving at that point.

JohnJamesRambo2• 5 years ago

This is how I feel. My brain is pretty damn autonomous while driving. If I have to still pay attention to my “self-driving” car, that seems both more dangerous and taxing than just letting my brain do all the driving.

somedude895• 5 years ago

I treat Tesla's Autopilot basically like it's a very new driver or sonebody learning to drive. You're constantly paying attention to what it's doing but you can rely on it to keep its lane and distance from other cars. I appreciate it immensely on longer drives since I don't get as tired / exhausted from constantly having to be giving micro-inputs. It allows me to drive for hours and keep my head feeling fresh for much longer than when I drive other cars with no asststance features.

jfoster16• 5 years ago

How about automatic vs manual, or simple cruise control?

cyrux004• 5 years ago

So you don't use adaptive cruise control or lane centering features which are available in almost all new cars today. Clearly you are in the tiny minority, because almost every car manufacturer is adding basic AP like functionality even in base versions of cars. A lot of users feel this helps with long drives to which I agree

samoa42• 5 years ago

Clearly you are in the tiny minority, because almost every car manufacturer is adding basic AP like functionality even in base versions of cars

the average car in germany is 12 years old. from this perspective new-ish cars are a minority .

WrtCdEvrydy2• 5 years ago

Be aware that Comma.ai doesn't bill itself as self-driving, it is just driver assist.

smaudet• 5 years ago

The only times I have ever had accidents or close calls in a car (where another driver was not at fault for e.g. reckless driving behavior) has been with cruise control or with auto keep lane - the former I spun out, the later it tried to drive me off of a highway at 70 mph repeatedly.

The sorts of assistive technologies that would actually help are not really being worked on, assistive has been misunderstood as meaning "allowing the driver to be lazier".

Sure - if Tesla pulls it off, it's great. But it's a gamble with more than just Teslas stock, that is what makes Elon an unethical sociopath here...

Waymo's approach is assuredly safer, there is still the possibility of technical glitches but it the approach doesn't create more problems with humans than it solves.

Yes, sure, humans can be dangerous, but if that's the problem then it's safest to just not get on the road period, kinda negates the whole point of an FSD though...

perryizgr83• 5 years ago

I avoid using cruise control and auto-lane-keep for the same reasons. Either I am in control or I am not.

Do you also turn off features like ABS, ESC, traction control etc?

ilaksh• 5 years ago

I think your derogatory comments about Karparthy are ludicrous. Considering the scale of deployment, complexity of the application, and the life-and-death stakes, what he and his team have achieved so far is probably the greatest engineering achievement in the history of AI.

JonathanFly2• 5 years ago

However, in the unlikely scenario that 2D videos are sufficient for L5 self-driving, Tesla wins BIG. No one will be even close, especially due to the scale of 2D data that they have gathered.

Potentially Tesla's 2D data lead means they will still be the leader even if the compute resources in the current cars isn't up to the task, and maybe even if they have to add additional sensors like lidar. They can probably retrain their models and still get a lot of out of it.

My personal guess is that full 3D lidar isn't needed, but some additional cameras and other cheap sensors probably are. There's a ton of stuff that costs a fraction of the cost of lidar that might fill in the gaps.

La1n2• 5 years ago

costs a fraction of the cost of lidar

What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive.

neillyons• 5 years ago

Elon talked about LIDAR at the autonomy investor day. Basically he said that the Dragon spacecraft has LIDAR and he spearheaded that effort. He also said that LIDAR and cameras both use the same wavelength, if you are going to add a sensor it makes more sense to add one which is outside of the visible wavelength.

Even though I know nothing about driverless cars, the reasoning from Elon makes sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q

mikejb6• 5 years ago

Whilst Lidar and cameras may have similar wavelengths, they have very different information outputs. Cameras give you a 2D colored image from which you essentially guesstimate the distance of objects. Lidar gives you a 2D depth map with much higher confidence in the data that comes out of the stream.

Elon has a high incentive to talk down Lidar in cars: He/Tesla placed the bet initially on cameras because Lidar is/was too expensive, and promised these cars will be able to drive themselves ("regulatory approval pending"). Retrofitting Lidar is not an option (price, sensor&cable placement), so a lot of his (and Tesla's) promises ride on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary. A lot of Tesla's (Car's and Car company's) value rely on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary.

dalbasal3• 5 years ago

I agree with your sentiments on driver assist. I'm not comfortable with the ambiguity of responsibility. But that's not really the key point, it's just how we feel. These features act as premium goodies, like old cruise control or whatever. People buy them, use them. They generate data. User-developer feedback loops. That's already a fact. The debate is about the importance of this .

The core debate (of this article: waymo_v_tesla), is about technology paths. Do you start with driver assist and move up the Ls gradually as units are produced, KMs are accumulated and dollars come in? Alternatively, do you get as close as possible with a prototype and then closer with the next one..? worry about financial/product viability once you have a working archetype.

This dovetails with the lidar question.

Ultimately, I find the disagreement fascinating. There's probably value in having these two throwing their weight into opposing camps. IDK which approach will win in self driving. Every technology is its own example.

That said, I like Elon's approach as a generality. To me, it's about thinking of technology and invention as an industrial/societal effort rather than a lab effort... even if reduced to a lab at a company. Learning curves exist. Feedback loops exist. A technology with products and customer and usage progresses, often.

You could not have "produced" Moore's law the Waymo way, most likely.

KaiserPro3• 5 years ago

I think we can reduce this argument further.

Musk thinks that is it acceptable to ship features when there is a safety risk, Waymo doesn't

There is also a bit of ego in there as well. Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. Its nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. Tesla have spent Billions of dollars trying to re-create a lidar like depth sensor using radar and monocular slam.

Its just not going to cut it for a number of years. CNNs are just not fast or robust enough to replace a lidar. Especially with the quality and placement of the sensors in a tesla.

fogof• 5 years ago

They believe that lidar sensors will be indispensable to get early self-driving vehicles on the road.

I agree with this assessment. It seems to me that lidar has a consistency in its ability to detect objects that computer vision based techniques just don't have. While cameras may eventually be able to achieve the same thing, I would argue that lidar will always be as safe or safer, and for that reason I think it will be the only acceptable version if self driving breaks out in the next few years.

Animats4• 5 years ago

"I watched a few hours of early unedited footage posted by Tesla owners who received the new software. The software made a number of mistakes, including two incidents where a Tesla seemed to be on the verge of colliding with another vehicle before the driver intervened."

What, Tesla still can't detect big, obvious obstacles reliably? That's pathetic. A half-dozen cases of running into stationary obstacles at full speed should have taught them something.

Running into obstacles at full speed, with no braking, is quite rare for human drivers. Usually, there's braking, but too late. Mercedes once did a study showing that over half of accidents would not have occurred if braking started about 100ms earlier.

Tesla's approach means the driver has nothing to do until something goes wrong. Then they have to react in under a second. That just doesn't work. That's been known for decades.

Great video on cockpit automation: "Children of the Magenta" (1997).[1] It's an American Airlines chief pilot talking to his pilots about automation-induced accidents. The aviation industry started dealing with over-reliance on imperfect automation a long time ago.

[1] https://vimeo.com/159496346

snoshy7• 5 years ago

What you're saying is not a capability that even most commercially available automatic braking systems can do well. Several studies have pitted the half-dozen or so cars available with automatic emergency braking systems on them, and they've all been just about the same. Apologies for a lack of citations on this since I have to run, but we at least have to compare Tesla to the rest of the industry, or compare their actual AV solution (FSD, which is in limited beta and only has been for just a month or two).

jiofih15• 5 years ago

Instead of trusting this anecdote, why don’t you jump over to YouTube and search for “Tesla FSD” to see what it really looks like? Lots of very instructive videos available from people on the beta program.

Animats4• 5 years ago

Yes. Check out this one.[1]

Watch the display for what it sees and isn't seeing. Awareness of oncoming traffic is almost nonexistent. Except when the FedEx truck is reflected in some windows; then it detects the reflection as a vehicle. Although the streets are almost empty, the driver takes over frequently.

This is way below what Waymo and Cruise can do.

[1] https://youtu.be/6G1Z2J3WUSg?t=231

snoshy7• 5 years ago

Exactly. There's real world video footage showing the vehicle behavior that includes Tesla animations showing the vehicle's current understanding of the environment.

It's rather cheap to take trivial shots at Tesla (no matter how bad their product might be) while comparing it to 23 year old understanding of human-machine automation in an entirely different context such as aviation.

Quite unfortunate you're downvoted, but literally asking people to watch some videos of real world usage [1] to make up their minds appears to be too much.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tesla+fsd+beta&...

paul79863• 5 years ago

Im anti-robot car ... so many ppl will die for progress with this.

I'm even more after my friend's Jeep Compass's AI system decided to lock up her brakes and steering wheel as she was turning into the bathroom area after the Golden Gate Bridge. The AI said nope im taking over your going to crash and thus you cant maneuver your way out of hitting the highway wall which she did and total that piece of junk; all bruised up too!

I will avoid getting any AI features in any new cars I buy or just buy older ones. Unfortunately, those around me will be driving these cars where their brakes and steering wheel just might lock up too and boom they and or we are in accident. An accident that the driver who could had control didnt because algorithms can never guess the millions of different driving scenarios & execute the right one!

jiofih15• 5 years ago

I would bet quite confidently that your friend would not have been able to avoid a crash, and the “AI” is just a convenient third party to blame. You need to be at a speed way above recommended for an exit, to trigger the anti-collision system, and actually sustain injuries. Humans tend to overestimate their abilities quite strongly, especially in hindsight.

paul79863• 5 years ago

Sure, I hear what your saying, but her insurance company said oh no worries we will pay for it all. It's not your fault... do you not think they have data about these things and why would they pay for it carte blanche?

staticman22• 5 years ago

My Dad avoided a crash where he was nearly killed with children in the car and believes he did it because an angel took over the steering wheel and corrected his driving error faster than he could.

How is this relevant to you friend's story, you may ask? It's relevant to show humans are not necessarily reliable narrators of why a crash occurred.

paul79863• 5 years ago

Whether your Dad thinks "Jesus, Took the Wheel," your Dad still had control of the wheel himself (he may think a spirit helped him but his physical self still had control) vs. AI saying I'm locking your brakes and steering wheel & you or Jesus can't do anything about it!

anonytrary4• 5 years ago

Your dad was in control of the wheel and made a subconscious/reflexive decision and avoided the crash. Whether he chalks it up to an angel or not is completely irrelevant. It is not about human narrative or beliefs, it is about whether or not a human was controlling the wheel.

karmakaze2• 5 years ago

Not buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them.

"It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance system until one day you can magically leap to a fully autonomous driving system," Krafcik said. "In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers."

Not a good argument, very handwavy. Better sensors is not a moat. What is your software, how is it qualitatively superior? No one suspected that NNs or even DNNs could produce AlphaGo/AlphaZero until it did.

Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR.

ra713• 5 years ago

Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR.

What constitutes giving tech to the public? They are in Phoenix and they say they will be rolling out in other cities soon. So you can go to Phoenix and hail an autonomous ride to compare yourself, where you will find that no else is even close to offering truly driverless rides like Waymo is.

xiphias23• 5 years ago

Waymo is amazing, but it doesn't make the business profitable: it needs to scale up the investment in hardware and keep its advantage until Tesla gets good enough to compete. This PR is mostly aimed at investors in Waymo.

xiphias23• 5 years ago

I expect Tesla and Waymo to be the 2 best driverless solutions in the near future. Tesla is a real competitor to Waymo, as the better sensor has a litmited time advantage until deep learning algorithms improve even more.

Waymo doesn't have too much time to get back the billions of dollars of invested R&D money, while Tesla is already profitable even without self driving.

pfsalter• 5 years ago

I've never been convinced that deep learning is the correct approach for something so nuanced as driving a car. Deep learning is excellent for generalisations and consolidating data into single metrics. It's not so good at identifying edge-cases and reacting accordingly, those cases are more likely to be merged into other reaction types.

guiomie• 5 years ago

"What they have is cars on the road collecting data" ... what do the ToS say about this? Is this really true they are gathering data from all their customers? I havent seen uptick in my internet bandwidth as Tesla owner.

jfoster16• 5 years ago

If you are using AP or FSD and you take control suddenly, that will sometimes send data to Tesla so that they can improve the autonomy. I don't know what the ToS say, but Tesla are pretty open about the fact that the cars do that.

URSpider943• 5 years ago

The proposition that is being discussed is not whether Tesla as a company will get to autonomous driving, it’s whether Tesla’s current suite of sensors and its “HW 3” inference engine will get there. Keep in mind, Tesla has taken thousands of dollars from customers with the promise that they will deliver them “full self driving” in the near future (or actually in the past, as it was promised by 2018).

If Tesla revises their Sensor package to include LIDAR, that would be a sign that the “Tesla approach” has failed.

probe2• 5 years ago

Why? You can argue that CV is enough for SDC AND add extra LIDAR sensors to make it even better/safer (esp if the cost curve of the sensors make sense for consumers).

Just because I can ride a bike doesn't mean I shouldn't wear a helmet

jfoster16• 5 years ago

Tesla has taken thousands of dollars from customers with the promise that they will deliver them “full self driving” in the near future

Isn't that between Tesla and the customers who paid for it?

snoshy7• 5 years ago

I agree. The entire Tesla gamble really hinges on whether the HW3 + current sensor suite is sufficient for them to achieve a safe enough degree of autonomy. It's about as minimal as it gets from the hardware front, and is entirely dependent on the machine learning side to evolve rapidly along with rapid software update deployments.

I feels there's a broad misconception across many of these types of discussions, where people assume that just because Tesla has not chosen to widely deploy LIDAR across their vehicle fleet, that they do not understand it's benefits nor value them. This is entirely false. For several years now, Tesla has driven test vehicles with very high end Lidar units to basically generate "ground truth" understanding of the world that can be then used to test and improve their camera-only FSD inference. They heavily relied upon it to build ML models to generate depth maps across frames, and that capability is already widely deployed via Autopilot (poor man's FSD). That it works in itself is somewhat shocking to me.

Lastly, if there's any indication of a mea culpa coming from Musk on this front, those ideas should be easily put to rest. Recent FSD footage shows rapid and drastic improvements to the capabilities of the FSD-beta system, and Musk himself is still repeatedly bellowing about how his personal vehicle with the latest software is able to handle more and more challenging scenarios. If anything, Tesla is doubling down, and expects to win. Given their history, if I was a competitor, I would be troubled at least.

sixQuarks9• 5 years ago

Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving? Seems to be a lot of anti-Tesla folks here, put your money where your mouth is.

DisjointedHunt2• 5 years ago

Agreed. The only company with actual autonomous driving hardware at a scale of a Million+ cars on the road right now.

xirbeosbwo12345• 5 years ago

The "autonomous driving hardware" they have is about the same as anyone else. It's just that those other companies advertise it truthfully as a safety feature rather than pretending you have R2D2 as a chauffeur.

plutonorm3• 5 years ago

Agree. The key to solving the problem is data and they have it, by the bucket load. The HN crowd is pretty conservative when it comes to tech it seems.

vegannet• 5 years ago

I’ll take that bet. How much? I’m not anti-Tesla but I do see Tesla as a brand more than a technology company: good for business but not good good for breaking new ground with technology — I’d put a lot against Tesla on that bet (I don’t think it matters for the business much though).

sixQuarks9• 5 years ago

I say we do $1,000, but what did you have in mind? We will have to put the bets in escrow

We need to agree to what constitutes full level 5 self driving.

My interpretation of it is a car that can drive itself anywhere in the world, has been approved for commercial use in at least one country, AND recognized as the first to full self driving in at least 2 major publications.

We can put a 5 year time limit on the bet.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving?

Well, no, because (independent of opinion on the subject of the proposed bet), counterparty risk.

There's a lot better places to bet against (or for) Tesla where that problem is much better controlled.

xirbeosbwo12345• 5 years ago

The way we bet on companies is the stock market. I am neither smart enough nor stupid enough to sell short.

ehsankia3• 5 years ago

What Tesla has now, Waymo had back in 2012. They literally had a FSD program they were testing with certain employees, and once they found that that people quickly get distracted and stop paying attention, they gave up on that approach and went for the new strategy of jumping straight to level 4 and skipping level 3.

So either they've been doing absolutely nothing for the past 8 years until getting level 4 driverless car in Phoenix. It's only a level 4 right now, since it does not work in all conditions, but it's still far ahead of Tesla's level 3 which requires the driver's attention.

So far Tesla hasn't shown anything that Waymo did not have at least 5+ years ago.

unwoundmouse2• 5 years ago

lol nice way of not betting

xedeon13• 5 years ago

Really. Waymo has this in 2012? https://youtu.be/YJxnVRAX2UA?t=4

Do you have an article/video you can share by any chance?

I've been following Google's self driving efforts for years and must've missed that.

sixQuarks9• 5 years ago

..and so does this mean you want to bet or not?

kgin• 5 years ago

Absolutely. I'll even go one further: we won't actually know the exact moment that Level 5 arrives.

Cars with level 4 + remote assistance will be driving people around for a decade or more, phoning home less and less over time until one day someone notes that no car has phoned home for an entire year. Then maybe a car will phone home and the clock will start again. Decades from then, people will shut down the last remote assistance center.

But at that point, nobody will care about declaring Level 5 because we will have been riding around for decades in cars without steering wheels that we don't have to drive.

georgewfraser2• 5 years ago

I have a model Y and what it has today is 80% as useful as a completely self driving car. It’s mostly self driving on the highway, and the situations it can’t handle are very predictable: toll booths, stopped cars in the middle of the road, things like that. You need to available to drive but you always have plenty of warning before you need to take over.

Arainach4• 5 years ago

80% as good is 1000% as dangerous. Tesla's vehicles perform just well enough to convince many users they're good enough to "self drive" and ignore while failing catastrophically in edge cases and absolutely not being ready to completely ignore. Tesla's reckless "autopilot" branding contributes to this.

georgewfraser2• 5 years ago

My point is that it doesn’t fail in edge cases. It has very clear limitations, there are no surprises. Even if you were literally asleep at the wheel, the worst thing that would happen is it’d end up stopped in front of a traffic light, waiting for you to take over.

_ea1k6• 5 years ago

This argument without data is just as useless as Tesla's pro-AP argument without data.

bigphishy• 5 years ago

Reality is not black and white. You need to strike a balance.

The claim of "1000% as dangerous" is sensational, and frankly, should be backed up by facts, or else you are just smearing mud.

rainyMammoth• 5 years ago

Sounds like lane steering and adaptative cruise control on my 19k$ Toyota Corolla.

_ea1k6• 5 years ago

How well does that handle poorly marked sections of road? I have a similar system on a non-Tesla and that was one of its main weaknesses relative to AP.

xedeon13• 5 years ago

Love the snarkiness. But no. The cruise control in your Toyota Corolla can't quite do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWS9jjhLYSM

mikejb6• 5 years ago

you always have plenty of warning before you need to take over

This only has to be false once.

I'd also like to highlight that sometimes AP has frightening regressions. One case was labeled "barrier lust", where - on a divider - AP would follow the wrong white line, and steer the car towards a barrier. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil...

It was fixed, after Walter Huang died through such a case.

Until the behavior returned some months later: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_bac...

So please be careful. Regardless of the value you put on your own life, car accidents impact more than just yourself.

probe2• 5 years ago

TSLA and Comma.Ai aren't only ones. Ghost (https://driveghost.com/) is funded by top VCs (incubated at sutter hill ventures, same firm that incubated Snowflake) with a highly technical second time founder in John Hayes (first company is the public company Pure Storage).

They're taking the same bet (i.e. CV + ML advances on a large and high quality enough data set are enough). After listening to Hoetz on podcasts, I wouldn't underestimate this approach. People trying orthogonal technical approaches win surprisingly often.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh• 5 years ago

The misanthropic, cynical view: Crashes are excellent training input.

jfoster16• 5 years ago

You're not too far off; all SDC systems (including Tesla & Waymo) use disengagements to train on. So it's not accidents themselves, but human takeovers prior to what might otherwise have been an accident.

travisoneill1• 5 years ago

Self driving is an unsolved problem, so I don't see how Waymo's CEO is qualified to say whether or not Tesla's plan is "how it works."

m463• 5 years ago

From other technologies such as speech recognition, "how it works" seems to be - collect a lot of data and develop and train better and better models.

So tesla is collecting data, lots of it.

Additionally, there's the capitalism side of things - make sure you have a revenue stream to continue "develop and train"

So tesla has a revenue stream matched with the data collection.

So... Tesla is head and shoulders above Waymo in this.

julienreszka• 5 years ago

If anything, technology should make people more responsible, not less. Everything that puts your life on autopilot is garbage.

darepublic2• 5 years ago

Why not develop roads that act like tracks and can be guided by an algorithm. Seems like a simpler problem albeit less robust than autonomous vehicle

anonytrary4• 5 years ago

What happens when a deer crosses the road?

What happens when there's a fire along the highway (e.g California)?

What happens when there's debris and objects in the road?

What happens if a car needs to make an emergency stop?

Where do you place these new roads?

Do they require roads to be re-built or can they be added to existing roads?

What is the cost of replacing the entire highway and city infrastructure?

The AV companies decided that the simpler problem is to have AI that works on highways, then incrementally teach it how to handle more complex situations. This is the most additive solution, whereas your solution is not necessarily additive and does not necessarily preclude the need for AI.

darepublic2• 5 years ago

Simpler doesn't mean cheaper. Also simpler doesn't preclude AI either

cromwellian2• 5 years ago

Watching this video of regular folk (not tech journalists or other "reviewers", or paid PR) riding in FSD Waymo has done a lot to reduce my "but it'll never happen" feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4

It may very well be that future FSD modes will require highly detailed maps, manual curation, limited areas where things can work, but even that would be valuable. e.g. if self driving trucks only work on long haul highway-only, that's still a win. If FSD taxis are mostly rolled out in medium to big cities in the beginning, it's still be a win.

Trying to boil the ocean all at once, and launching an enduser consumer FSD program that can handle wherever the driver takes it, may be the wrong way to do it, top-down instead of bottom up. Start with small geographic areas, and expand as you go.

epistasis• 5 years ago

Huh, I'm surprised you find those videos convincing about the future of self driving cars. To me, they don't seem much better than the demos people were giving ten years ago, in academic competitions, etc.

The Tesla videos scare the hell out of me. My own auto pilot purchase scares me whenever I use it. I can't even use cruise control in my Tesla without it randomly slamming on the brakes.

It's pretty straightforward to make batteries and an electric car. To make a computer vision product work? Based on everything I've seen of the field over the past 20 years, I am not impressed by Tesla's efforts in the least. They seem crazy, not competent.

username90• 5 years ago

You don't think that driving actual customers is different from showing a demo that worked in a few cases?

jfoster16• 5 years ago

Why do you choose to drive a car where you think the people created it are more crazy than competent?

Fricken4• 5 years ago

Waymo is quite a bit better than they were 10 years ago. It would be harder for a casual observer to note how much Waymo has improved in the past 4 or 5 years because the gains have been made largely at the statistical margins of performance.

It's easy to build a robot that can do one thing right, and that's all you need to get a cool demo. It's hard to build a robot that can deal with the many 1000s of things that can go wrong while attempting to do one thing right.

hobofan2• 5 years ago

To me, they don't seem much better than the demos people were giving ten years ago, in academic competitions, etc.

From what I remember from ~10 years ago (and a quick glance at Youtube videos from then confirms it) the state back then was roughly:

- DARPA challenges where cars were driving on dirt roads at about walking speed

- High speed driving on completely closed of racing tracks (with no other cars present), e.g. BMW i330

- Simulated real world conditions on closed of tracks with the system significantly slowing down at intersections and pretty reliably producing slow speed crashes

Compared to what that video is showing, that's night and day.

kart23• 5 years ago

I like that Waymo is confident enough in their system to put it out there for people to use. But honestly, I think that their reasoning for releasing it is exactly to reduce worries in people, that 'it'll never happen feeling'. I think they needed to put something (before it was even 99% ready) out, otherwise people would lose hope and investors balk at the progress. I really do think that it'll never happen, at least in the ecosystems current form. There needs to be special lanes or routes that self driving cars can take, special pick-up points, etc. Humans take risks while driving every day, the problem is, that we have an incredibly good picture of the risks involved in everyday things. Machines don't have this sense perfectly attenuated yet, and I have yet to see evidence that they ever will. With us, there is no variability in our senses. Our eyes mostly work the same every day, our perception skills doesn't change. Machines cannot even trust their senses, and their code has to reflect that.

Obviously, this is all speculation on my part, but when I see videos of waymo sitting in roadways and parking lots, blocking traffic, pedestrians, and just the overall flow of life, the more that I get the feeling that machines should not be allowed to participate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5SeVxYAZzk

cromwellian2• 5 years ago

But people also shouldn't waste so much time of their life stuff in traffic driving vehicles either. I mean, the ideal city would probably be self-driving trains, people movers, and free scooters, segways, or wheelchairs everywhere. No AI vision systems needed.

If you live in urban Japan, do you ever need a car?

To replace all 273 million vehicles in the US with self-driving EVs would cost around $10 trillion @ $50k per car. You could built a national network of self-driving lanes for a fraction of that. You could build rail lines and subways in every major metro area.

The major upside of a car vs train though is privacy. You may not mind taking the train in Japan, but in SF, it can be disgusting, and so private vehicles and American culture may be inseparable.

But that still leaves many other solutions, like we have bike lanes, and HOV lanes, we could build AV-only lanes, and prohibit AVs from working (requiring manual takeover) when you depart them.

On long drives to work, you'd just stay in the AV lane and chill, and when you got close to an exit, you'd have to take over. It would still be a win if on a 1hr commute you only did 15 minutes of actual driving.

robgibbons• 5 years ago

Human senses may be fairly consistent day to day, but variability across humans is quite significant. Even a single person's faculties (vision, cognition, focus) change drastically over longer periods of time, or when they're tired, sick, or worse (drunk). Machines at least have standardized hardware with self-test protocols and onboard diagnostics. There are innumerable scenarios in which machines have no good solution yet, but I suspect over time the heuristics will reach a threshold of "good enough for public use."

theshrike795• 5 years ago

It may very well be that future FSD modes will require highly detailed maps, manual curation, limited areas where things can work

This is the way.

We need a common standard of machine-readable markers along roads to make long-distance FSD viable. We have the technology, what we need is to agree on a single standard and get it installed.

For cities it's a similar thing, but there are a bunch of additional variables (called humans) to take care of.

vadym909• 5 years ago

Its so frustrating when smart people can't speak plainly enough. Most people will see this video with a tile like "Watch Tesla's Full Self-Driving navigate from SF to LA with (almost) no help" and assume Tesla is FSD capable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQG2IynmRf8&feature=emb_logo

How then can Waymo say its not? Why can't they instead release a video comparing the Pros and Cons of Tesla FSD vs theirs.

dreamcompiler• 5 years ago

I really wish Tesla would abandon this quixotic quest for self-driving and focus on what they do best: Building the world's best cars.

If they could fix their build quality and repair issues I'd buy one tomorrow without any fancy driver assistance software because the Tesla Model S is the most fun car I've ever driven (manually).

judge20207• 5 years ago

Part of having a good car is abstracting away the biggest downside to driving: actually paying attention to the road for over an hour to and from work until you retire at 62 or later.

If they could fix their build quality and repair issues I'd buy one tomorrow without any fancy driver assistance software because the Tesla Model S is the most fun car I've ever driven (manually).

While I'm not sure about the S, you might still be able to buy a "standard range" Model 3 which doesn't have any autopilot functionality, although is only marginally cheaper at $35k vs $38k - https://redd.it/eumoyl

ranman• 5 years ago

While I’m all for being critical of TSLA’s FSD rollout I do think a bit of perspective is warranted: in the USA drivers are routinely drunk, distracted, or just plain stupid.

Everyday day I get on the road and I’m forced to drive defensively because I cannot trust any car on the road to behave logically.

How is that situation changed at all by having computers that don’t behave logically?

There’s a huge confirmation bias at play where you all seem to think human drivers are good... they’re not. They’re absolutely 100% not. The average driver is a complete moron. Go spend 10 minutes scrolling the /r/IdiotsInCars subreddit to get a feel for what I’m talking about.

So no, I don’t think TSLA is being irresponsible in their FSD rollout. At worst it’s equivalent to the average human driver.

anonytrary4• 5 years ago

Go spend 10 minutes scrolling the /r/IdiotsInCars subreddit to get a feel for what I’m talking about.

I don't think that is enough to form a conclusion. I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles and have yet to see an /r/IdiotsInCars moment. I think drivers are better than you think they are. If there are even just 10 recorded idiots a day, then that sub can be active and interesting every single day, but that doesn't reflect the fact that there may be 10,000,000 responsible drivers for each of those idiots.

At worst it’s equivalent to the average human driver.

So I think this needs to be backed up with actual data and not some anecdotes from Reddit.

sidibe2• 5 years ago

Oh they've got the data. I see it everywhere, Tesla has way less accidents per mile than us horrible human drivers. I don't know what it's based on because every few minutes of footage there's a scary moment on FSD beta videos which are produced by Tesla enthusiasts who have signed some form of NDA (no live stream allowed).

kerng4• 5 years ago

So much hate towards Tesla here. I'm more neutral - dont have a strong opinion on this. But from Google's messaging it seems that the Waymo CEO is maybe a bit defensive (scared?). Tesla has probably the long term better strategy which leads to more accurate up to date data to constantly improve their system.

Tesla's crowdsourcing strategy might be the winning horse in this race.

joeblau2• 5 years ago

The term you’re looking for is “Federated Machine Learning.” The more cars Tesla has, the faster they can train the neural networks edge cases.

cycrutchfield• 5 years ago

That’s not really what federated ml means, unless they are doing the gradient updates from the cars directly.

f5e4• 5 years ago

Tesla does not use federated ML. Federated ML is specifically about training models on device, and is mainly a technique for preserving data privacy.

stingraycharles2• 5 years ago

They are collecting data on all cars yes, but are training a model in one place. That is not federated machine learning, it’s federated data collection at best.

kerng4• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I actually hadnt heard of "federated machine learning" before- need to read up on that.

newbie789• 5 years ago

That’s a very interesting neutral take that “Tesla’s strategy might be the winning horse in this race” and that the Waymo CEO may be defensive or scared. I personally don’t know enough about either company or their tech or how people react to self driving cars to call a winner when it comes to a something (in this case, fully self driving cars at scale) that literally don’t exist yet with enough certainty to predict winners or establish the emotions of either company’s leadership.

kerng4• 5 years ago

How else would you describe Waymo's message?

Trying to "educate" or talk down to a competitor with words like "this is not how this works" when Tesla has significant resources, expertise (actual cars on the road!) and knowledge in this area seems defensive to me.

blueblisters2• 5 years ago

I think Tesla has a distinct advantage over Waymo because of their ability to control the entire vehicle stack from low-level ECUs to the batteries, motors and high-level autonomous stack.

Waymo has to partner with automobile OEMs who are still figuring out how to build electric vehicles, and build them in a way that can integrate with Waymo's technology.

perryizgr83• 5 years ago

I don't think there is any reason for Waymo not to pair up their system with a regular petrol car. Electric vehicle capability is orthogonal to self driving.

blueblisters2• 5 years ago

Depends, if they are planning to run a taxi fleet or restrict themselves to new personal vehicles, integration and operational costs for ICE vehicles is likely going to be higher than EVs in a couple of years. There is little common between the vehicle dynamics and control for ICE and Electric vehicles, and it might be more practical to focus on one platform.

Sprbdg• 5 years ago

I doubt that regulators will just sign off on self driving tech across the board. I imagine that it will be transitioned in starting with freeways / motorways - in which case, the question is probably a technicality.

Geee3• 5 years ago

FSD is all about collecting insane amount of data about edge cases that happen in the real world. Tesla has built the infrastructure for this, and will win the FSD race by a wide margin.

burmanm3• 5 years ago

Is snow an edge case? My cameras don't function when it's snowing or there's snow in the ground. Or there's snow banks around the road. My dash is lit with the "some cameras are blocked" 24/7 for the whole winter time. And proximity readings are blinking those yellow / red lights all the time from the right side as it thinks the snow bank next to the road is too close. Or the system thinks the camera is blocked because the light reflexes from the snow.

Seriously, if they can't solve even simple problems, how are they going to solve something more complex? I'd be happy for even a implementation of a removal of these warnings when the system doesn't understand what it's doing, but I don't think they know when it doesn't function correctly.

Geee3• 5 years ago

It doesn't work perfectly yet, but they're on their way making it work. Give it some time.

theshrike795• 5 years ago

Snow is a difficult problem even for humans.

In worst cases the road turns from a 2 lane road to a 1.5-1.8 lane road when there's enough snow on the banks. Multi-lane motorways turn from 4 lanes to 2-8-3.5 lanes. Humans have trouble navigating that, dunno how any FSD system would manage it in our lifetime.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 5 years ago

If camera don't function in snow, then Waymo is in a worst position because they rely on Lidar -- which simply cannot work in snow, at all.

deegles• 5 years ago

Can someone please describe a scenario where an alert driver in a FSD Tesla would be allowed to blame the vehicle for the accident? Every Tesla + Autopilot accident I’ve read about has been blamed on driver error. This “heads I win, tails you lose” approach is disingenuous at best.

giorgis• 5 years ago

Is anyone here working in the self-driving industry? I have a background in Mechanical Engineering so that means knowledge in controls/motion planning stuff.

Is this still something that's being worked on in companies like Waymo? Or is it in less demand compared to computer vision/object detection problems? I like the idea of working on both technologies however I feel the knowledge gap between them is big.

3pt141592• 5 years ago

What I think most people miss with FSD is that it's going to have a higher crash rate than average while the kinks are still being ironed out. That is ok because we're seeking to reduce the crash rate overall as fast as possible. I've been in many, many accidents in my life. Usually as the person not at fault or in the passenger seat or on the bicycle. I love the idea of self-driving cars. They will save many lives.

The critical part to get right, however, is to test FSD on people that are more prone to get in car accidents in the first place. The elderly, recovering alcoholics, etc. That way we have the best of both worlds. Real world data to improve algorithms on, but also not raising the overall crash rate.

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

One of the reasons I doubt self driving will happen any time soon (beyond Lane assist and similar minor changes) is that everyone is desperate to talk about why they're the expert and how it will work and no one seems to have a product ready to sell.

It reminds me of chip makers arguing over the definitions of 2nm, when they were not producing anything smaller than 20nm...

amelius• 5 years ago

Why are it now the car companies who decide "how it works"?

macspoofing• 5 years ago

On the one end, you have a company that is going head-first and releasing things which aren't ready into the market. On the other end you have a company that is terrified of releasing anything to the market.

It's interesting to see these two companies butting heads.

ajnin• 5 years ago

Musk has stated that since humans manage to get all info from the road using only 2 cameras, then Tesla cars can do the same and don't need lidar. Which makes sense, but also humans cause thousands of deadly accidents per year using those 2 cameras. So there is no certainty Tesla will be able to do better, it is a gamble.

ralfd2• 5 years ago

Elon Musks reply on twitter:

To my surprise, Tesla has better AI hardware & software than Waymo (money)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1353564655088619520

alisonkisk• 5 years ago

"I'm rubber, your glue". A completely void reply.

leesec2• 5 years ago

"For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all," Krafcik said. "We manufacture a completely autonomous driving system. Tesla is an automaker that is developing a really good driver assistance system."

This is absolutely hilarious to me. What an amazing cope. To downplay Tesla's approach is something you'd expect from a competing CEO. To straight up declare they are not even a competitor is delusional. They are clearly competitors.

onaboat• 5 years ago

Tesla has been regressing with so many easy-to-fix bugs like Spotify playlists being cut off at 100 songs (broken for two months now). I don't ever see myself trusting their FSD when their developer and QA teams are causing or missing so many obvious regressions.

mchusma• 5 years ago

It's a long road ahead, but right now Tesla has orders of magnitudes of more real driverless miles driven, in more areas and conditions. All done safer than humans statistically. It's possible for someone else to win, but right now Waymo is certainly the underdog under any metric you could come up with EXCEPT that lidar is required in the short term. So it's makes sense that is his public stance.

morpheos137• 5 years ago

Self-driving doesn't work until we develop AGI with a self preservation drive akin to that of human beings.

Doesn't matter how good your sensors are if you can not efficiently integrate sensor inputs into a model of the world that is useful for driving including so called "edge-cases." (Edge-cases are the whole problem by the way...)

Lets use this analogy. Imagine a person with severe mental retardation or a person zonked out of their mind on a dissociative drug. Their eyes (sensors) may work just as good as anybody else...but would you trust them to drive a car?

Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

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