The justification for why they don't need an auto industry CEO makes sense. But do co-CEOs make any more sense? I never get a good vibe from that arrangement.
Larry and Sergei realized they weren't very good judges of character, and so they went in the opposite direction and put the milquetoast John Krafcik in charge. Their hope was that Krafcik would be better at forging auto industry partnerships.
I'm not sure what Waymo would look like today if a tech exec had been in charge, but I doubt the CEO would have had much of an impact one way or the other on the hard problems associated with self-driving.
A brief read over his career seems to show he was pretty successful. I guess you could argue "right place/time", but his time at Hyundai and TrueCar looks like it went well.
The biggest hazard Waymo faced the past 5 years was some kind of Media witch hunt based on a sensational accident of some sort, and that didn't happen on Krafcik's watch.
His job was to do a political highwire act and manage the interests of his team, Larry and Sergei and Ruth, regulators and politicians across multiple levels of government, partners across several industries, competitors as well as the media and public expectations. Somehow nothing catastrophically shitty happened.
Self driving cars are still a science experiment, and that's not on Krafcik. He killed it. At the front end Waymo is as ready to scale and commercialize as it can be at this stage.
Tesla ... Tesla is nowhere near that, and is just doing stuff that scares me.
I also just don't think the Tesla cameras have enough angular resolution to perform a lot of scenarios safely, like detecting a much faster vehicle in a short merge.
(Note Tesla relies upon the front-facing radars quite a bit, too, so it's not really pure vision).
But who knows, it seems like they’ve made good progress as is so well see. I don’t understand the people that think they’re never going to upgrade the camera suite though, cybertruck and the semi already have a new camera layout.
Well, they've committed an awful lot to current FSD customers that I think will be difficult to deliver upon with the current camera suite.
I think LIDAR is a huge advantage. There's the direct benefit: you really know exactly where things are. But secondarily, you have ground truth near-perfect range data to use in training your vision system.
We don’t yet know the limits of the pure vision approach. Elon is very confident in it and I want to see where it goes. Your comments about resolution may or may not matter.
I'll believe it when I see it, no matter what recent statements have been.
> Fewer sensors is much better for Tesla since they need aerodynamics and less power consumption for more vehicle range.
Automotive radars use like 10W. The least your car is using while driving is like 5000W. This may not be the best place to save power-- getting heat pumps on more vehicles and better ones than the present one would make a far bigger difference.
> Your comments about resolution may or may not matter.
If you can't see a car that will hit you when you commit to merging on a short merge, it is a slight problem.
Waymo is going to get canned or pivot to a new concept, like bus rapid transit on closed loop systems.
This tech has to execute in the six nines or more safety margin, and it won't. You have to solve AGI first.
You can tell by the exits that this org isn't doing well.
Tesla won't solve this problem either, but they've got a product that sells.
That's a completely safe bet. US fleet turnover is >15 years. If it were 100% capable and relatively cheap today, you'd barely hit that milestone.
> Waymo is going to get canned or pivot to a new concept, like bus rapid transit on closed loop systems.
I don't think so.
If driverless cars are as revolutionary as proponents claim, fleet turnover would happen much faster.
Waymo hasn't been able to expand their drivable area in years. This is their coverage map: https://i.redd.it/yc80awv2o3z51.png
Tesla would kill you half the time making this unprotected left turn. Waymo can make unprotected left turns and have never killed or injured anyone or even bent metal in this situation. :P It's not a particularly challenging left turn.
And the goal is to kill you less than .0001% of the time making left turns.
Yes, Waymo tries to avoid them in route planning, but it still takes them if necessary.
Because Tesla's are able to drive everywhere, there's way more ways for it to fail.
Seriously?
At this point, the total revenue they've collected so far still hasn't covered Levandowski's $125M bonus, not to mention anything else.
Yes, profitability isn't here yet, nor have they recovered development costs to date. But that is not what was asserted. Instead, they are to (limited) market, which is a milestone.
It's that their revenues are negligible compare to their expenses. Their "revenue-generating service" is a PR stunt.