Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
(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.)
https://twitter.com/shannonwoodward/status/13275176940992757...
We really are in the best possible timeline for general lulz and nonsense.
It does remain to be seen how well Tesla will trust the general public with this level of improved autonomy. As you get closer and closer to the uncanny valley where things just appear to work, you get into the more tricky situations that truly befuddle humans and machines alike.
NHTSA scrutinizes crashes that involve anything close to Autopilot and FSD quite heavily. Aside from one or two incidents they've had complaints about, none of them have risen to the point where they had to put their foot down. Admittedly, Tesla were a big bunch of jerks about how they handled the situation, but still, these were isolated incidents with clear misuse from the driver's part.
I agree with you, in that Musk is overly optimistic (no shit, he's been saying this would be ready in 2018, and it's unclear if it will be in 2021). But he's also quite well informed of the facts on the ground, and is clearly aiming for the moonshot-winner-take-all prize by skipping Lidar and high-precision mapping. That might be a gamble, but need not be an inherently dangerous one, depending on how Tesla handles the super-grey areas around the uncanny valley, where the system appears to work, but really isn't worth risking your life upon. To some, it's already there, as you can see from idiots sleeping in their Teslas while on Autopilot. But again, outside of a couple of incidents over years and millions and miles, the rate of catastrophic failure (accidents) has been surprisingly low.
I completely underestimated the role of professional safety drivers for autonomous vehicles. I thought it's "just a guy" sitting in the car for good measure, but it turns out that the majority of drivers is not fit for the job even after lengthy training, see e.g. [1] (a gread podcast in general).
Also all autonomous driving companies employ safety drivers - except one.
> NHTSA scrutinizes crashes that involve anything close to Autopilot and FSD quite heavily.
I wouldn't put too much hope into the NHTSA regulating Autopilot. It took a two year legal battle to get the data driving their analysis of the Autopilot in 2017, turns out it was completely provided by Tesla, but worse, when confounders where removed, it still showed a higher crash rate for Autopilot.
If you take a non-American view of Autopilot, Europeans agencies did scrutinize the crashes more closely and as a result have restricted the use of Autopilot.
If you are interested in the topic of autonomous driving I recommend the Autonocast podcast.
[1] http://www.autonocast.com/blog/2020/10/29/205-why-teslas-ful...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/in-2017-the-feds-said-t...
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pedo-guy-doesnt-mean-p...
(That scene, by the way, is a perfect example of why I hate superhero movies.)
More importantly though, treating someone "as a peer" is kinda a weird criticism? Superheros on TV these days don't seem terribly stuck-up. When other characters in the films seem honest the heroes usually treat them with respect and dignity.
Anyway, thanks for the heads-up that you hate superhero movies, will keep it in mind next time I see one on a plane.
Edit: Since I’m being downvoted, here you go, today you learned: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/true-story-elon-musk-robert-d...
From what I have heard, it was both:
Elon Musk, Larry Ellison Appear In Iron Man 2
https://www.forbes.com/sites/velocity/2010/04/29/elon-musk-l...
Debatable how significant this impacts his decision making but it's pretty hard to argue that doesn't impact it at least a little.
He has been an optimist on this technology of a long time and has made that argument for a long time.
The claim that the FSD testing is to boost the stock price is truly bizard, specially because there is very little evidence of any correlation between FSD and stock price.
Go look at the Wallstreet models, most of them don't have large considerations income from FSD. If you look at FSD testers, their videos don't have millions of views.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook made "move fast and break things" famous, which was Zuckerberg's way of presenting a tradeoff. Everyone company says they want to move fast, but Zuckerberg made it clear that the company should care more about velocity than stability.
I don't believe that's Tesla's attitude. Rather, I think their attitude is more "move fast and ignore regulations". It's not that things won't break, but rather that the tradeoff Tesla is making is around regulation rather than things breaking.
I think it would potentially be a manslaughter charge.
Self-driving cars in the next 10 years have been a serious possibility for the last decade or so, yet governments and insurers don't have a policy ready and won't until a couple of years after the first self-driving cars are available.
Self driving is all about convenience and costs[1] and as such it's not necessary, nor is it advisable, to inflict the bleeding edge on the general public. Waymo's geofenced approach is less bad than Tesla's, and it's something that regulators can readily work with also.
1. But teh safeties!1! No. Just no. ADASes (advanced driver assistance systems), particularly autonomous emergency braking, remove the safety argument for self driving. With ADASes you have 95% or more of the (asserted) safety of self driving, and ADASes are available today, on a large and increasing range of cars. There are even retrofit kits.
So, the culture was "it's okay to break things as long as you're moving fast". I don't think Telsa explicitly would say "it's okay to break things" to their engineers, but I do think they'd say "it's okay to ignore regulations".
In the end, they may have the same results, however it's all about what employees know they're safe getting away with.
The incentives are fundamentally defined in the wrong way, and the system has just optimized itself for the those incentives.
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.
In the long run, for the historical perspective, this is a very plausible outcome. It's happened before (any major construction projects prior to the 1950's, anything involving Thomas Edison, most large damming projects), where a historical event is tied to a bunch of dead innocents, but history books praise the vision and determination of the ones in charge to not give up just because a few measly blue collars kicked the bucket early.
If you fear the pandemic and what to lock yourself up in isolation we should as much as possible allow that. And if you want to work on very dangerous projects for better rewards you spud be able to.
With autonomous cars the choice of risk may not be so easy.
Arguing about what real choice you have is overly pedantic and we should rather concentrate on the principles for the right out come.
I have seen history books that do reflect "but he also killed some people" or are critical. They are however less popular in some circles.
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.
Ehhh, you have not been long in industry, have you? :)
And that's why you get everything in writing and doubly signed off from all parties involved. Even telling people directly, to their face, with witnesses, does not work. Checklists for the departments does however.
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.
The people texting and driving are idiots, distracted idiots, but they have no misconceptions about if their car will save them if they take a nap.
Elon's made comments about "your hands are just there for regulatory reasons" and overpromised for years so now people abuse it until it's just as dangerous if not more dangerous than distracted driving (stuff like intentionally sleeping or using a laptop full time)
Other manufacturers are coming out with features that protect me from texting drivers without generating a new breed of ultra-distracted drivers like those who are falling for Elon's act.
Now a base model Corolla, pretty much the automotive equivalent of a yardstick, will steer people back into their lane and warn drowsy drivers that the car is intervening too much.
A Tesla can't even do the latter.
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One day we're going to look back and wonder why we allowed things like automatic steering without fully fleshed FSD.
I mean the driver is actually safer if you only intervene when something goes wrong. They're forced to be attentive, yet in all situations where they fail to be attentive and AP would have saved them... it does save them. And tells them to get their head out of their backside.
If AP did that every person it has saved would have still been saved, but a few people it got killed would still be here today.
"Each chip makes its own assessment of what the car should do next. The computer compares the two assessments, and if the chips agree, the car takes the action. If the chips disagree, the car just throws away that frame of video data and tries again, Venkataramanan said."
Here is Tesla's:
and a bit more detail here:
https://theorg.com/org/tesla/org-chart
From there on down it takes a bit of work to get more detail, we typically spend a day on this during the run-up to a DD to verify what we receive and use a lot of googling, linked-in, and other sources to figure out who works in the company and in what role.
The GDPR has made this a bit harder. Team pages are a good source of info for lots of companies in the 10-100 people range, they sometimes list all of their employee names + titles.
I'm not aware of a single source of truth for detailed org charts, if it exists we'd be happy to buy it, it would save us a lot of time and effort.
except, apparently, the execution platform. you know, the bit that matters.
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?
When driving the tight streets of old European cities with pedestrians jumping out everywhere, I usually watch for hints like too tall cars parked on the sidewalk and potentially hiding pedestrians planning to cross the street, and move my foot from the gas to hovering above the brake pedal. And a million other things like that, mostly by paying close attention to driving.
Sure, I believe my spatial awareness is also great, but that helps me to parallel park in fewer back-and-forths or to remember a way to a place I've been to once six months ago through a maze of one way streets. But it does not help me reduce the chances of an impactful collision (sure, I might ding a car on the parking lot or not because of it, but nobody is going to get hurt because of that).
You are right that cars are not safe, but for some part, you've got control of the risk yourself. I also watch for hints a car will swerve in front of me, and I am sure I've helped avoid 100s of traffic accidents by being focused on the whole driving task. And other drivers have helped avoid traffic accidents that I would have caused in probably a dozen cases too. I think I am an above average driver simply because of that ratio.
You run similar risks when you board a public bus without knowing how the driver feels that day, and how focused they generally are.
I don't want to be in control of the risk, I'm a bad driver. Haven't owned a car for some years. Still drive on occasion when I need to with a hire car.
I want a computer that is better at driving than I am to do it. It is easy for me to see why perfect is the enemy of good on this issue.
You don't want to share a road with me when you could share it with a Tesla FSD.
I'd rather share a road with you, a human.
Even if you're a self-admitted bad driver, humans have a strong instinct of self preservation which helps.
Software has no such thing, a bug in the code will let it accelerate full throttle into a wall (or whatever) without flinching because it's not alive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration
To be honest, I'd trust software even less if I was a bike rider riding in a European (or Chinese, Phillipine...) city, but that's just me :)
Cars are typically able to brake faster than motorcycles. One of the reasons why tailgating on a bike is extremely dangerous.
This might be irrational, but I'd rather be killed by a human than killed by a computer made by a company that's run by a gung-ho serial bullshitter. That would somehow suck worse.
You need to experience truly bad roads to understand the complexity involved that you would easily navigate and software would be perplexed!
Sure, we need to be building it today to get there some day, but we are so far away!
This is demonstrable by reflecting on new things you learn versus old things. Old things like walking you barely put any conscious effort in, yet once you reach a certain age the daily obstacle course that is life, which is full of tripping hazards becomes effortless to avoid ensnaring ur foot on and succumbing to a sudden tumble. But if you were to try to roller blade for the first time, suddenly you have to put massive conscious strain and focus on every movement just to avoid falling on something so simple as a slight texture change on a surface.
Also interesting thought on (conscious) spatial awareness: Here's a question is your conscious aware of things first or is your subconscious aware first? When you conscious becomes aware how sure are yah that it's not your subconscious first alerting your conscious beforehand? These are rhetorical questions which psychologists and neuroscientists already have insights about :).
Life is dangerous, but many of the dangers are predictable and the brain is adept growing to adjust to that predictability AND at learning to recognize indicators for unpredictable dangers(humans receive anxiety in these moments). In those latter situations Intelligence and consciousness is needed. Dangers that are predictable can be learned to be subconsciously handled without much worry & with much practice + experience.
Tesla autopilot is a computerized subconscious that's consciously trained by all the tesla drivers.
I strongly suspect that we'll never have level 5 autopilot with or without lidar sensors unless the computers get a human adaptable intelligence module OR some convention simplifies the environment such that new unpredictable dangers can be minimized to a miniscule and acceptable failure rate. I think people in this debate are focusing on the wrong issues.
I agree we get subconsciously trained (here, my brain is expecting a perfectly flat sidewalk), but when I say focused driving, I am mostly thinking of *not-doing-anything-else*: to an extemt that I also keep my phone calls short (or reject them) even with the bluetooth handsfree system built into my car with steering wheel commands.
The thing is that a truck's trunk opening in front of you and things starting to fall out on a highway at 130kmph (~80mph) is very hard to train for, but all four of us car drivers that were right behind when it happened did manage to avoid it without much drama or risk to themselves or each other. What self driving tech today would you trust to achieve the same today? Sometimes you don't care about averages, because they are skewed by drunks or stupid people showing off on public roads.
And stats being by miles covered is generally useless: if it was accidents per number-of-performed-manouvres, it'd be useful. Getting on an empty highway and doing 100 miles is pretty simple compared to doing 2 miles in a congested city centre.
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.
So I assume that this is a case of the person in the drivers seat must have a drivers license, but there is no law saying how much of the driving they must do.
> However, as the importance of electronics and software has grown, so has complexity. Take the exploding number of software lines of code (SLOC) contained in modern cars as an example. In 2010, some vehicles had about ten million SLOC; by 2016, this expanded by a factor of 15, to roughly 150 million lines. Snowballing complexity is causing significant software-related quality issues, as evidenced by millions of recent vehicle recalls.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...
Do you have a source for this? Cause it seems to me that they could easily deliver something like summon, seeing as parking-assist/automatic-parking already exists.
When it comes to safety though, I disagree. One of the decent things to come out is the Euro NCAP rating. The manufacturers are not part of the testing process, apart from they need to supply cars. Each car is then given a rating.
For Autonomous driving, from what I can see its still down to individual states.
1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-selfdriving-safety/comma-...
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.
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?
They could in this way become stronger than other nations who are more bound. With FSD they could start testing earlier even if it's not guaranteed to be completely safe, and they could adopt it immediately full scale at the point when it's definitely safer or almost as safe as humans, while in western world it would have to be much more safer than humans driving. Maybe this could mean years of advantage and they can start immediately adopting and optimising their economy.
Maybe ethics is not even the correct word. I'm talking about a trolley problem where they would be allowed to switch tracks while western world maybe not. In this case it might mean more deaths up-front, but fewer later with optimised economy.
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?
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).
> This annex provides initial guidelines on the use of a probabilistic approach to determining > software safety integrity for pre-developed software based on operational experience. This > approach is considered particularly appropriate as part of the qualification of operating > systems, library modules, compilers and other system software.
Tesla, given the size of their fleet, can also follow such an approach for their "application" especially the neural nets and the rule sets.
Congratulations, you've figured out Elon Musk.
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.
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.
In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.
Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.
And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.
Given current hardware prices, it seems like the car itself will be a lot more expensive; so how many trips need to be taken so that the variable cost advantage exceeds the increased fixed cost?
Driving is a ubiquitous human skill and tens of millions are looking for work, I believe it will be difficult to undercut them on price.
Drivers also often do more than merely drive - they help with the luggage, they clean the car, they can talk about their city.
Long-haul trucking is a different story, there is a massive labor shortage and letting big rigs go from one warehouse to another without the need of a driver looks like a huge opportunity.
The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster for people relying on it for a source of income is irrelevant when replacing jobs with technology.
Meanwhile, a 12-minute, 4 mile Uber journey would cost me £2.43/mile
Of course, the big unknown here is one of driver utilisation: How many miles does the driver drive to pick me up, and how many minutes are they waiting for the next ride to come in?
* Well, it was considered generous the last time I asked a car owner about it. I'm sure a Lamborghini costs more.
https://uberdriverlondon.co.uk/is-it-worth-driving-for-uber-...
I think the interesting number there is 23 000 GBP/year, which is effectively the cost to Uber of having a human driver for one car operating 60 hours per week.
If a computer can drive a car for 60 hours a week, it saves money for Uber if the amortized cost is less than 23 000 GBP/yr.
If a computer can drive a car for more than 60 hours a week, it saves money even if it costs more than 23 000 GBP/yr, although i don't think it's linear - demand is concentrated at a few times of day, so one car on the road 24 hours a day is not equivalent o four cars on the road for six hours each.
> Uber drivers typically collect $24.77 per hour
> From that, Uber takes $8.33 in commissions and fees
> Vehicle expenses like gas and maintenance cost drivers about $4.87 per hour
> That leaves drivers with $11.77 per hour
Now, the maintenance and amortization will be higher for autonomous vehicles. Somebody will need to clean these vehicles, scrape the ice off, refuel, monitor them, deal with anomalies and false alarms, etc - all of which is now taken care of by the driver. Autonomous vehicles will likely end up being cheaper, but it's not as clear cut.
They commit sexual assault, submit fraudulent reports of rider damages, ...
The real winners are the automakers that build the part-time robotaxi investment vehicles (literally), and the consumer who now pays way less for a frighteningly AI-driven future.
But that's a normal market effect and the same as Taxis which traditionally (at least in many places) had quotas to stop people not getting enough jobs to fulfill their wage (Taxi 'Tag' or 'Plate' or 'License'); or similar effects on the number of Uber drivers which obviously are not restricted so you have a sort-of imperfect market effect there where it's not worth more drivers joining as they won't get paid enough and some will leave.. or part of why supposedly surge pricing will drive drivers to leave to further away areas to take more jobs, etc.
Not a market expert but just wanted to note that while, in effect, you are right.. it's not really surprising, unexpected or unprecedented and not a pyramid scheme :)
Toyota, Volkswagen or General Motors would maybe have less revenue with shared cars utopia.
After the market for on-demand autonomous taxis is oversaturated, Tesla's plan is actually to stop selling vehicles altogether, or reduce it drastically. Musk has said that FSD vehicles will likely not be for sale after this point, so the "consumer-operated robotaxi" is inherently an intermediate solution.
Vehicle ownership will drastically change in nature after the advent of AVs. Tesla isn't going to be unique to having to adapt to this.
.. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car.
Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time.
Do you rent out your home via Airbnb when you are 2 weeks on vacation? Very few people actually do that.
I agree this whole thing (ie a large percentage giving up ownership) is way more complicated than it sounds.
They estimate covering the cost of the car in 1-2 years, so you won’t be expanding your fleet that fast... there is a lot of discussion about this online, a lot of comments here cover that too. It’s just a step, eventually they won’t sell cars to consumers anymore.
My car sits idle 22 out of 24 hours a day. If someone else handled the insurance issues and found drivers willing to pay to use it outside of the times I utilize it, I'd have no qualms about lending it out for an appropriate price. The low end estimate for an Uber driver after expenses and Uber's cut is $8.55/hr. If my car averages half that it's $35k/yr that I don't need to do anything for.
But really, for $35,000, I would not mind investing in a $300 seat cover.
I’m writing this at midnight on a Sunday... there’s no demand for transportation. Come 7-930AM, demand is 1000x more. There’s no self driving taxi that makes sense as car replacement. We already have busses, which are already really cheap and can get cheaper if cars are too expensive to buy.
Which might be okay if throughput is kept high, and folks can read/eat/sleep while ij traffic.
A taxi, robot or not, will never be able to meet peak demand... they'll be provisioned to meet 60-80% of peak demand and surge peak pricing. That's the key part of the robot car business model -- these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure.
The Musk tunnel thing is totally different, it's an extreme version of Washington Beltway congestion pricing that charges you $3-60 to waste less time in express lanes.
It's enough if just ~20% of those who participate in traffic are doing so with a "self driving car", if they otherwise would have opted not to do so, we'll have even higher peaks.
Surge pricing might not matter much, because it's in the interest of the fleet operator/owner to get maximal utilization, to get maximum profit. After all Uber does surge pricing to motivate more drivers to come online, but if you have a constant supply (constant number of self-driving cars in the fleet), then you can simply use it to maximize profit. (Or to manage perception, ie. to show that yes there are cars available, sure, it comes at a high price, but they are "available".)
---
> these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure
Yep, US cities are so burdened with problems (a nasty set of incentives) that public transit is non-viable, which drives even more subsidization of the sprawl, which then breeds these companies that try to "solve it". (I mean Uber/Lyft successfully increased the supply of taxis, which drove prices down. Yaay, great, but this just meant more congestion, more pollution, more sprawl, nothing fundamentally solved.) And of course at this point properly pricing externalities is an insurmountable political challenge, because people are so wedded to their way of life.
I think this is a difficult problem as you have surge demand at least for commuting. So we can't get around with 1/10th of cars which are driving all day.
Ya, but at least for me, convenience is already there for Uber. Price is the only thing that keeps me from abandoning my car for it.
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.
Waymo is actually operating a driverless paid service in Arizona [0] with point to point pick up and drop off. Does Tesla actually offer this service today?
[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-...
Which works in one small limited area of the earth because of high-def maps, which is not what you would normally call "scalable".
Back to the original goalposts, as far as I know, Waymo is the only company that at this point, does offer a commercial service that's fully driverless. As you point out, they don't cover all of Earth, but neither do any of their competitors. Even Uber and Lyft, with human drivers, don't support all pick up and drop off locations, they only work in certain service areas.
> fully driverless
Don't they have safety drivers that closely monitor through wireless connection and often take over? While it might look driverless, it is not technically. This is also another reason why it doesn't scale.
Maybe if they role out this program to city after city in short intervals and have 10000+ taxi operating I would consider it.
Waymo does some things Tesla doesn't do, Tesla does things Waymo doesn't do. Tesla clearly has no interest in offering a money losing taxi service in one small city. Just as Waymo has no interest in doing all the work to figure out the meaning of obscure signs on roads in China.
The question is, when can I click on an app, get a car and drive basically anywhere. That is 'the solution'.
The analogy is that the electric bulb did not replace candle as such but created entirely new possibilities that were unimaginable when the bulb was invented. This is nearly true for any invention and not just self driving cars. Advancements in self driving will change not just how people go to office or dates but will also change how goods are hauled, how docks are loaded, how agricultural products are transported, how fruits are picked from trees and how law enforcement deals with patrolling and so on.
The candle was a candle and an electric bulb was an electric bulb. One could do things the other was not capable of.
FSD however, is pretty close to what humans do. It's cost that's the difference.
If you want a more apt analogy, this us more like the invention of a household CFL bulb.
It's cheaper, it increases accessibility and quality in some dimensions, but it's not allowing you to do so much that was utterly impossible before.
The comment you replied to wasn't saying FSD enables nothing new but rather that saying stuff like "change how people go to the office" is rather odd when today right now you can pay people for "FSD" and we already did see the shift from it...
2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.
That would bring the capex down below $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash.
Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.
There are only 13k taxi medallions in NYC, which is a good point of reference as the limited supply means they are efficiently utilized.
Extrapolating that out to the general US population yields just over 500k taxis, and that's to completely replace every single taxi in the country.
There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.
So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.
So an advanced enough AI could easily be better at humans than driving w/o LIDAR, simply by driving as well as humans when not distracted, and not getting distracted.
It's not that he hasn't invited a little bit of controversy (eg. comments about the diver, covid, etc.) but I think those are inconsequential when it comes to HN's attitude toward him.
The comment regarding humans not needing LiDAR misses the point, which is that either every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expensive hardware solution or there are valid technical reasons why that might be a better path to L5. Tesla trying to overcome the limitations other companies are deploying LiDAR for is a technical risk they are taking on, and, as the top level post noted, might not be the worst bet given the downside which is that they’ll just have to license the tech.
Given that Tesla are the only company to have put something approaching autonomy into the hands of customers, that does seem to be the case.
What happens next in this thread? Someone points out that Tesla's solution is still far from perfect and claims that they're being highly irresponsible by having shipped it. Then I'd ask how many accidents have happened as a result of FSD beta having shipped to some customers already and they assert that Tesla isn't transparent with the data so we don't know. I'd point out that if we don't know of a single Tesla FSD accident so far, it can't be that irresponsible to have put it in the hands of a few customers and that it's been rapidly improving in the weeks since. It's the same thread, repeated over and over on here, Reddit, etc.
Tesla was the company that made electric vehicles successful. To your point about groups taking different approaches, I think Musk & Tesla do take approaches that will differ from others, and succeed partly because of their approach being better in some important way. I think they had a bit of an unfair advantage when it came to autonomy. They needed hardware that could be shipped on vehicles as soon as possible, which meant that it needed to be cost efficient & energy efficient. LIDAR's energy efficiency doesn't get talked about much, and I don't mean just the LIDAR itself but also the subsequent processing power required to make sense of the resulting point cloud. Each Waymo vehicle is an expensive tech demo. It's a very good tech demo, but over the years it's become evident that they're very hesitant to scale it up right now. I'm sure they'll eventually get there, but they are not a company focused on getting this done ASAP. Tesla are getting autonomy done with urgency.
Well, that’s Waymo (in Phoenix) which has put out anything approaching autonomy, not Tesla. Tesla requires a driver.
Tesla itself uses HD maps for things like intersections, traffic lights and so on. It's just not at the level of detail others use it for.
They’re also offering a commercial service. Which means figuring out operations, customer service, emergency protocols, working with local administration and so on. They’ve said a larger goal in Phoenix is to figure out how to perform and scale operations. The local regulations there are much more favorable. Until recently, Phoenix was one of the only (probably only) places where you could operate a robotaxi program and charge for it. California just recently approved it, so SF is where they’ll likely go next as they are already setting up everything there.
Ultimately, mapping is the not the constraint for them to go to new places. It’s the operations and regulations that they need to figure out every time.
They also have lidar solutions, but they certainly haven't ruled out camera only.
Implementing L5 without Lidar must be possible. Humans are absolute proof of that. That's not to say Lidar isn't useful, or cost effective given the complexity of the problem, or even just a really good idea that will make autonomous cars better drivers than people. It might be all of those things. All my comment says is that Lidar is not a requirement for driving, and we have a very obvious proof of that.
Anyone saying that Lidar is necessary for driving is ignoring the hundreds of millions of examples of driving with just a pair of 2d cameras and a highly specialised organic supercomputer.
EDIT: The point another poster made about weather and bright sunshine is a reasonable one - humans can't drive when they can't see either, so Lidar would potentially make an autonomous car better at driving than people. That would be an example of how Lidar is useful, but still not necessary.
Humans also have a organic supercomputer in their brain. Variety of sensors is probably the best approach. I've grown up and seen technology prices on all sorts of weird technology fall (3d printers, sensors, midi controllers). At some point, we will basically give up on perfection on LIDAR and just do cheap multi-LIDAR arrays where the error rate is overcome by just having multiple units.
We can say that something better than human-level driving ought to be possible without LIDAR, though; take the perception of a human (cameras) and replace the brain with a computer that can make better calculations much faster than a human can.
The arguments used against Tesla are in fact legitimate if we’re talking about a regular company. But Musk has proven to do the “impossible” multiple times and has been right on so many levels, so at this point you have to question whether he’s catastrophically wrong about this, or perhaps the others are about lidar.
Either way, the confidence that Tesla is wrong is way too high in my opinion.
People need to stop fantasizing about 'Elon' being some great guy because they like what he achieved. It's almost like the technorati need their own version of celebrities to fawn over.
I for one am not remotely jealous of him but disappointed that others think his behaviour should be emulated or worshipped just because he has been successful.
I'd rather see someones imperfections and know where I stand than have another generational #metoo
Both unofficially and when law is broken.
The issue people take is the reckless approach to selling nonexistent or immature tech that by its nature puts human life at risk. It is possible to both respect and disagree.
Or maybe unenthusiastic about the fact that all he has is a vision, but has never built anything by himself. When you get kicked out because _Peter Thiel_ is more tolerable than you, that says a tiny bit about his character.
It's not "a little controversy". It's being a sack of shit of a human being.
the only thing he is good at is marketing himself
people think he is innovative because he sold decades old tech to people who didnt pay attention before, because he is a glorified marketing exec and hes not even good at that
consumer satisfaction is a poor way to measure quality
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.
It could very well theoretically be a software issuse.
While there are technical solutions possible with more hardware, it’s not clear that Tesla could correct for some of these things in just software...
And if the car camera is blinded by the sun, that raises questions about whether the car could safely pull over to the side of the road. I suppose with advanced simulation the car could perhaps predict glare from the sun and pull over ahead of time (“it’s approaching sundown and we’re driving west, you need to take over in 5 minutes”)
For example if the car in front did not even slow down while going through some obstacle (the proverbial plastic bag), then it's very likely that we don't have to either. But if something looks like a drunk guy trying to cross the highway, then it's caution time.
That said, without the actual data/studies/access on what Tesla does and how, it's hard to say how good they are at this. (Sure, in theory everything needed to drive a car well can be inferred from regular human vision visuals. But that means their model has to be able to do counterfactual reasoning - I see this thing as a wall, but other cars go through it, so it's not a wall, so maybe it's a marking. Otherwise it'll very hard to just figure out things frame-by-frame and simply by raw object detection.)
We are very, very far from that. And having such a developed visual processing system is a prerequisite for feeding an executive processing system that can do counterfactual reasoning.
That's also just a shot from the hip, weasely sort of argument but it's harder to dismiss outright.
A camera with those features would be around 3000-15000$, and you'd need two.
Also, the human brain can use focus information and stereo phase to deduce 3D structure, which is another ace up its sleeve.
It might very well be the case that reproducing this is more expensive in training, processing and material than LiDAR. In fact, I'd say it's very likely - we're talking loops that need to update hundreds of times a second and data rates in the gigabits, which our brains deal with by doing a lot of processing inside the eye and along the way.
But just to give an example that is very relevant to self-driving, getting a camera with similar low-light video performance as the human eye costs over 2000$.
Current AI tech can do this too, from multiple images. Karpathy even talked about how they do use that in Teslas.
Tesla only does the first.
Can't expect a commercial company operating at the bleeding edge to host a "IP giveaway" day as researchers do.
Some of Telas biggest problems seem to stem from not recognising stationary trucks in their path.
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.
I just set it to a speed on the highway... and the speed stays there until I brake.
Are you talking about adaptive cruise control (ACC) to follow the speed of the car in front?
Funny, I don't feel the same -- my foot rests below the brake (on the floor) instead of on the gas pedal so the time to move it to the brake feels roughly the same, and I'm paying 100% attention while driving since I'm still steering and constantly monitoring distance to the cars in front of me. So I don't notice any less attention -- it's just a rest for the muscles in my right foot.
But really I'd definitely go with your own perception here -- if you feel like you're paying less attention then it's a good thing you're not using it! Everyone's attention habits and patterns are different. And I'm glad to know people vary in this.
I had the power steering drop out going into a turn (fuel pump failure IIRC), and it could have easily caused an accident (I physically couldn't turn the wheel enough to complete the turn).
Or you have very serious muscle weakness, at which point I'm not sure if driving a car is a smart option in any case.
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.
The safety standard that mechanical parts need to abide by are orders of magnitude higher than any Vision/Software product. Additionally, mechanical failures are rarely catastrophic. The part will most likely alert you hours/days in advance that it has begun to fail. Additionally, when catastrophic failure does happen, it often leads to the car stopping and not ramming through a busy intersection.
The problem with ML algorithms, is that they fail without warning and without intuition. It is incredibly hard to design against catastrophe. ML algos are also great at overfitting, so they can often learn to beat narrow tests while being inept at dealing with the exact scenario the test was supposed to evaluate it for. (I know, I know, "Don't tune on the test set!"... but human factors make it near impossible to avoid some level of it)
We are in dire need of a regulatory/evaluation body for AI that consists of top-tier ML researchers. Now that can be a govt. body or a 3rd party contractor that works closely with the Govt. But, we need to start laying the groundwork and debating around it now. So when we do need it, it is ready to be deployed.
I 100% agree on needing to design and regulate the design of safety critical CV (and particularly ML based CV) algorithms so that, if nothing else, the failure mechanisms are quantifiable and limited in their impact.
They have many more cameras than Tesla to support the camera only approach, though.
To save some $2-3k? That feels 'penny wise pound foolish'. This is a premium feature and LIDAR keeps getting cheaper.
With a the limited lane assist in my EV (basically it stays in lane and changes lanes if I turn on the signal), I can drive longer distances and stay alert without getting tired. All I need to do is apply slight torque to the steering wheel and mind the other vehicles on the road.
the average car in germany is 12 years old. from this perspective new-ish cars are a minority .
Finland has 12,2 because all the 10 year old German cars get imported here :D
[1] https://www.aut.fi/en/frontpage_vanha/statistics/internation...
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...
Do you also turn off features like ABS, ESC, traction control etc?
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.
What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive.
Waymo says it cost $75,000 for the lidar in one car a decade ago, and in 2019 they said they got the cost down to $7,500. So at the time Tesla decided to forgo lidar the costs were certainly very high. I'm guessing the range in your vacuum is multiple orders of magnitude less than a car.
Waymo must have been betting costs would drastically fall over time. No idea if it's a lot less than 7500 now.
Object very far away: Laser dot in center of image. Object very close: Laser dot at maximal offset from center of image.
Even though I know nothing about driverless cars, the reasoning from Elon makes sense.
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.
But i'm not an expert in this so take it with a grain of salt please :)
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.
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.
That is not the actual debate in this article though. It's not the debate between Tesla and Waymo's CEOs. That debate is about the path to a technological goal: actually autonomous vehicles.
The lidar question is closer to the core of the debate, but IMO it's a detail. Here the disagreement might have gotten unproductive. As you say, egos (famously big & nerdy ones) have have been dragged into it.
>> Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. It's nothing to do with the maturity of the tech.
I agree with the first and disagree with the second statement. This, IMO, is actually at the core of the debate. In (my assumed version of) Musk's Modus Operandi, technology strategy and business strategy converge much more than in the Waymo/Krafcik MO... They're at opposite ends of the poll.
Business decisions are R&D decisions. Putting things into production is R&D, affects R&D, determines R&D.
In a caricature/model version of the Waymo MO, technology is invented in a research lab. Once it's ready, it can be productized outside of the lab. "Technology" is defined as the core "proof of concept." In the Musk MO, technology is produced in an industry/company. A lab cannot reduce the price of computing by half every 18 months for decades. A lab can't improve the price/weight/performance of batteries to the point of EV viability. It takes an active industry/market to do these things. You need customers. You need commercially scale factories, increasing annual unit production. Etc. Large and increasing numbers of people working on it.
A lot of technology never leaves R&D. Lunar Travel didn't becomes cheaper over time. This confuses people because we expect technology to improve. Doing something people did 50 years ago should be cheap and easy, intuitively. In reality, that momentum is not a guarantee. If no one works on it, it doesn't improve. Software, hardware and such improve at a monstrous pace. But, every year there are way more people working on hardware and software. If the space "industry" had 100X more people working on it compared to 60s, it would have improved to.
I'm not calling Musk's approach superior, but Waymo's is certainly more common. Novelty itself is valuable. It's interesting that we have both approaches at play. n=2, but at least we'll get to see how this plays out.
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.
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.
Edit: It seemed to handle that intersection just fine, but a couple of turns down it ends up on the wrong side of the road, which is quite bad. That said, what proof do you have that Waymo/Cruise would be any better at this?
'that is not ideal'...
We need to legislate this before more people die
first I dont think that's so obvious that the car would obviously not go into the opposite lane, it doesnt even see all the cars as OP pointed out and Teslas have rammed solid objects stationary at full speed.
Not being able to 'see' standard lane markings is such a basic requirement!
The car shouldn't have to correct.
if this was a student driver during a test I'm guessing they would fail - been a while I don't know the points but there are multiple really bad mistakes.
Twice in a row. At two different left turns. Yeah, not ideal.
The traffic passing at the intersection is missed most of the time.
5:22, it drives onto the wrong side of the road into stationary traffic.
That is amateur stuff right there.
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&...
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to disregard this until you see an objective assessment in the field.
But that's a long way from alleging that they've doctored their videos, or that Tesla itself has censored them. There are many many instances of footage showing almost crashes that were only avoided because the driver intervened. If you were the censor, would you allow those?
Compare that to Waymo or Cruise or anyone else. They are obviously heavily censoring and have no independent owners recording footage, nor sharing it like this. It's a huge step up in much needed transparency.
You clearly haven't searched Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/c/JJRicksStudios is one such channel which frequently posts videos of his Waymo rides. There are others if you search, not so much volume as Tesla though.
That Tesla is just now getting to the place where they can get a few miles in moderately complex traffic without fucking up, while still having many other videos of failures and close calls should tell you that Tesla has a long way to go. There are tens of thousands of driving scenarios that all need special attention.
0: https://youtu.be/AkexMo_jdcQ?t=346
1: https://i.judge.sh/enormous/Flim/chrome_RIGtEw3oE3.png (Chuck Cook)
2: https://i.judge.sh/sturdy/Derpy/chrome_NZrYtjHAeP.png (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
> "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.
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.
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.
Ha. Have you ever tried to play Go? When you feel competent, learn that there are still many orders of magnitude that can't even be told because the language is completely foreign to one who doesn't already think in it.
If Tesla revises their Sensor package to include LIDAR, that would be a sign that the “Tesla approach” has failed.
Just because I can ride a bike doesn't mean I shouldn't wear a helmet
Isn't that between Tesla and the customers who paid for it?
I think Karpathy's talks make sense, their bet on vision makes sense.
I think the comments from Waymo are tedious - we'll see who's right in the end. I wouldn't bet on Google.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Also, Autopilot is not essential forced off for anything but highways. That is just factually incorrect. Notably, straight-aways are where Autopilot works best and are the most dangerous by crashes.[1]
I found data suggesting that a lot of accidents happen because people rear-end stopped cars at intersections[2] and issues with navigating intersections[3]. That is an area where Autopilot is pretty great today.
0: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/People/PeopleAllVictims.aspx (see last table)
1: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Vehicles/VehiclesAllVehicles.... (see last table)
2: https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/when-and-where-do-car-acci...
3: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Vehicles/VehiclesLocation.asp...
Based on reviewing the articles linked to the data, only one includes a lawsuit that claims the driver fell asleep before the crash. Doing this would either require a weight on the wheel to simulate constant torque (otherwise, on the highway, you have to apply torque every 30 seconds and it'll lock you out from using autosteer if you ignore it for roughly a minute), or falling asleep within 30-45 seconds of an incident, which is entirely possible.
https://www.carscoops.com/2020/04/tesla-autopilot-blamed-on-...
The original comment said "driver" died after falling asleep on autopilot - there has been no such case of that occurring.
The safety-driver model pursued by Waymo and every other autonomy startup is the only responsible way to train an autonomy network because the drivers are specifically trained to look out for edge cases, versus consumers who will easily be lulled into complacency once the system looks superficially like it's running at level-5 competency.
> 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.
Can you do the same when staring at a wall for two hours?
0: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot-germany/g...
It is an inevitability that people will die because of any autopilot system if it lasts long enough.
I suspect that there’s probably a local minimum for safety, where the autopilot is good enough to lull users into complacency, but not good enough to actually be safe.
We have a Hyundai Palisade with Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Keep assist. Amazing for reducing fatigue (the small little corrections). Not good enough to let you get distracted. I always have to be mentally ready to hop in.
I think it's a perfect solution until we have true FSD that can handle absolutely all conditions and situations.
Basically everyone with a Tesla says the same thing.
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.
"FSD" is creating a 3d-model of the environment based on the camera image. But so far it is only active outside of highways. This should be much better at avoiding static obstacles. In any case, they are different systems so experiences with one cannot always be transferred to the other.
Is is confirmed that this Tesla was using self-driving?
- autopilot was not engaged, only cruise control
- the anti-collision applied brakes but not soon enough
- the driver walked away without a scratch
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.
Humans don't have forward facing radar nor 360 degree always active vision, so in some cases, cars can see hazards that even a perfect human driver cannot.
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".
> automatic driving from highway on-ramp to off-ramp including interchanges and overtaking slower cars
And while it does all of this very well right now, there still is that piece of text at the bottom:
> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.
Honestly Tesla is doing the bare minimum here to have plausible deniability, but the text at the bottom really should be the same size as the text above it.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11803406/apple-engineer-killed-in-...
It's simple plausible deniability for Tesla and the fanboys. Good enough to keep them off the hook, legally.
To this day in 2021, many people still don't wear seat belts. Even though that's a solved problem. Some people will do stupid things. It's human nature.
There's no "impression" being given. Like I mentioned. There will always be a small fraction of irresponsible humans that will do dumb things. No amount of engineering can fix that.
Case in point is this video: https://youtu.be/VS5zQKXHdpM?t=88 Her mom is even helping this kid film this stupid act just for clout and views.
Tesla owners grilled him and said what he's doing is dangerous and irresponsible. He then deleted them all and turned off commenting. But people like to demonize Tesla owners. Which I find bizarre.
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.
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.
What's new, and on top of that risk, and not well understood is the risk due to drivers mis-using a half-baked feature named "autopilot" as if it's actually an autopilot, because Musk insists that it works when it clearly does not always work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most of them will be built by government making huge losses, they will go from nowhere to nowhere and they will not function as intended. The California high speed train is a great example. Not to mention $50K will be put by people but the national rail network will have to built by government (not that they have to but very likely they will grab this opportunity).
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.
Tesla's crowdsourcing strategy might be the winning horse in this race.
Its been a maxim of history that those with the most data generally win, whether that's military intelligence of troop movements from 2000 years ago, or LIDAR scans from a car today.
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.
So Waymo does have the experience to call out Tesla here.
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.
Tesla may make this stuff work eventually but it doesn’t seem safe at the moment and you can count me out.
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.
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.
I get your overall point, but this particular statement is empirically false.
Tesla's warnings to put your hands on the wheel are obviously insufficient based on regular videos of drivers asleep at the wheel on the freeway (https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/18/21445168/tesla-driver-sle... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhObsMnipS8 https://www.businessinsider.com/drivers-sleeping-in-tesla-ca... and many more). At a bare minimum, their code needs to bring the vehicle to a safe half rather than continue on its way forever dinging if the user refuses to interact with it.
And no, there are far worse things that can happen. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51645566 https://apnews.com/article/ca5e62255bb87bf1b151f9bf075aaadf
Every Tesla owner will tell you that those videos where people are "falling asleep" are staged.
Why? because if you don't acknowledge the warnings, it will turn on the hazards stop and disable autopilot for the rest of the drive.
It's an arms race between Tesla being legally on the safe side, and drivers using the car as Tesla advertises it.
Which one?
> drivers using the car as Tesla advertises it.
I'm confused, How exactly is Tesla advertising the car where you don't have to pay attention? It even explicitly tells you to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention.
Or this wonderful paragraph: "Navigate on Autopilot: automatic driving from highway on-ramp to off-ramp including interchanges and overtaking slower cars."
I don't think you understand. "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving Capability" (FSD) are two completely different features. Autopilot comes free as standar. While FSD is an optional feature, that adds things like: Navigate on Autopilot, Summon, Auto Park, Auto Lane Change etc.
FSD Beta can take you from point A to B with minimal to zero interventions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaJCYYiDzQQ
> Navigate on Autopilot: automatic driving from highway on-ramp to off-ramp including interchanges and overtaking slower cars."
But it current does that. I used it everyday on my commute! That feature is called "Navigate on autopilot".
If you can't see how this is massively confusing and misleading to consumers you've been a Tesla user for too long and need to step back for.some objectivity.
The claim of "1000% as dangerous" is sensational, and frankly, should be backed up by facts, or else you are just smearing mud.
Snowy roads, dirt roads etc. are out of scope for those.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's been 546 days since Elon Musk claimed Tesla was increasing production of solar roofs towards one thousand per week by end of 2019
It's been 644 days since Elon Musk said there will be a million fully autonomous Tesla robotaxis in a year
It's been 726 days since Elon Musk said Tesla would likely be cash flow positive in all quarters going forward. Tesla lost $702.1 million in Q1 2019 and $408 million in Q2 2019.
It's been 747 days since Elon Musk said the new Roadster will use rocket technology that will allow it to fly
It's been 761 days since Elon Musk said brake pads on a Tesla would never need to be replaced.
It's been 817 days since Elon Musk said Teslas should be able to read and understand parking signage by end of 2019.
It's been 902 days since Elon Musk tweeted funding was secured to take Tesla private at $420 a share.
It's been 925 days since Elon Musk said he would rescue children stuck in a cave with a custom built mini-sub.
It's been 929 days since Elon Musk pledged to fix Flint's lead water crisis.
It's been 958 days since Elon Musk promised employees that there would be no more layoffs. They laid off 1000 employees 718 days ago.
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Truth doesn't seem like something he's particularly concerned with
that comment took me a minute to write.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Ever wonder why Waymo only have their fleet in a geofenced area of AZ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/c24bcu/i_got_finally...
Videos recorded by the company will always be cherry picked by definition, since they would only post videos that show the technology in its optimal working state. And there's always a driver behind the wheel checking everything goes right.
The reason Waymo is operating the way it does is they realize that they need to be 120% cautious, as ONE accident is all it takes to throw all their work a decade behind, jst like one accident is all it took to completely kill Uber's self driving effort. So again, it's not that they need a fully mapped geofenced area, it's that they choose to use that for now.
Hell, Tesla themselves posted their first "A to B" video back in 2016, yet here we are 5 years later and from a high level, what they showed in that cherry picked video they posted isn't much different to an average viewer, but no one would claim that they haven't improved at all in the past 5 years.
This is basic anecdotal data vs real statistics. A video tells you nothing about where the technology is. Unless we can see real open data about miles driven and number of disengagements, there's no way to tell if Tesla is doing well or not. So far Waymo's numbers are an order of magnitude better than any competition.
Except FSD Beta videos are coming from actual Tesla owners. Like the one I linked above. A pretty glaring difference.
These are just one of many:
> A video tells you nothing about where the technology is. Unless we can see real open data about miles driven and number of disengagements, there's no way to tell if Tesla is doing well or not. So far Waymo's numbers are an order of magnitude better than any competition.
You just contradicted yourself. Tesla actually publishes their data here: [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport and here [2]. https://electrek.co/2020/04/22/tesla-autopilot-data-3-billio...
Unless of course, you have inside knowledge on Waymo's stats/data. If that's the case. Please feel free to share.
Waymo realizes that one accident is all it takes to completely destroy their operation, just like it killed Uber's self driving division. Tesla on the other hand has shown that they are prepared to be far more reckless and release things early just for headlines. To me it's meaningless who puts it out "first" because that's not a metric of how good the technology actually is. I'm interested in miles driven and disengagement statistics, which Tesla hasn't really been openly putting out like Waymo.
All I know is that right now, Waymo is the only company with an actual publicly available L4 driving car out in the streets, that is fully driverless with no one behind the steering wheel. And they have been for over a year. Meanwhile Tesla's latest private beta still requires someone behind the wheel and paying attention, and therefore is only L3.
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.
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.
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.
People will mostly realize that the concept of "general" intelligence is flawed yet we might strive to get to it indefinitely.
(Edited: slight wording tweak.)
Imagine nighttime, having to pass an accident, which means driving on the wrong side of the street with other cars beyond the accident waiting, and someone (quite possibly a civilian) waving you on.
Heck, I've been flagged down by a prostitute who wanted to get away from her John, running down the middle lane of an interstate at 2am. That was, admittedly, not a common scenario for a self-driving vehicle to have to deal with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It reminds me of chip makers arguing over the definitions of 2nm, when they were not producing anything smaller than 20nm...
> To my surprise, Tesla has better AI hardware & software than Waymo (money)
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.
It's interesting to see these two companies butting heads.
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.
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.
You simply do not know what you are talking about.
But on the other hand, even though humans don't need that much training data suddenly vast amounts of data is absolutely required?
It may not impeded Tesla in any way though.
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).
> 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