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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it might be a bit difficult to have user videos on YouTube if you can't legally have users. Getting the permits issued is a good first step.

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Tesla has tons of videos on YouTube from users showcasing similar technology, including in San Francisco.

While FSD beta may still have issues, I see no reason to believe that this doesn't also have similar issues.

I wasn't aware that Tesla was operating commercial autonomous rideshare in SF. Can you link something? I've seen the FSD beta, but that's neither "L4" (whatever you think of the SAE levels) nor commercial. This announcement is specifically about safety drivers and commercial operation, because both Cruise and Waymo have been operating non-commercial fleets with safety drivers for awhile now.

Tesla is currently in beta everywhere, not just SF. Tesla is taking the path of improving the technology with driver monitoring, rather than focusing on getting a single city to label them as 'L4'

Tesla FSD can't operate without a driver and isn't doing commercial rideshare, so it's not relevant in this discussion of a permit to operate a driverless commercial fleet in SF.

George brought it up in the thread and you responded to him. Tesla and Comma.AI are building the exact same technology. Are you saying that we shouldn't discuss these other companies until they have a permit for SF driving?

George asked why this announcement of the first permit to operate a driverless, commercial fleet is progress, citing Tesla. Unless Tesla has a commercial, driverless fleet somewhere, I'm not sure I understand the objection here. Having the permits to do those things in SF is literally the progress.

There isn't an objection. There is a question. Can the public see videos of this? If not, why not?

Waymo has been doing commercial driverless ops in Chandler for 4-5 years now, so you can absolutely see videos of that. You just can't see it in SF because until this announcement no one has had the permit to do it commercially, Tesla included.

There must have been some sort of testing period and approval process that involved showing the cars are safe? Why can't you see that until after this official announcement?

I'm sure there are still issues, but I'd bet they're dramatically more rare than what we see with the FSD beta.

Why would you think that? If they have much better technology, that they are deploying on public roads, why wouldn't they let the public know with easily accessible proof?

https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8

Obviously this is cherry picked, but you don’t think a car equipped with LIDAR, imaging radar, more cameras, more compute, and temporally dense HD maps that has focused on the same area for its entire existence would perform better than a Tesla?

I would expect a strictly mapped system would perform significantly worse in an area like SF, where roads and obstacles frequently change. Human drivers are not rigid, they are adaptable, so building rigid AV systems is doomed to fail outside perfect conditions.

They're not rigid - they use the map and fall back to onboard system when it's not accurate. That happens plenty of times in the video I linked.

That's like saying the old motorola razr and an iphone 6 are similar technology. While true, it's hiding a huge difference in that "similar".

> Tesla has tons of videos on YouTube from users showcasing similar technology

As you know, Tesla's technology 1) lacks lidar and 2) is not targeted towards driverless operation (yet).

The AV industry isn't in a place where it's building light AGI that elegantly handles the driving task through a sophisticated understanding of the world. The systems out there are still fit to their fairly near-term objectives; it's ridiculous to assume that Tesla's camera-only, hands-on-the-wheel system tells you which issues (if any) are faced by systems with different objectives built on dramatically different hardware.

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