I spent a few years in self driving, I have immense respect for Waymo, and very little for Tesla. I think ultimately they will win the space.
My impression of Tesla is mostly shaped from (1) nonparticipation in the research community, (2) a very early "mission accomplished" declaration by calling their cars fully self driving, and (3) a longterm refusal to use LIDAR.
I don't consider Tesla a player in self-driving (edit: self-driving research), but I don't think Tesla does either. There's no reason for them to try to "win" the space.
From Tesla's side, it makes more sense to continue on their current tack: Applying results from existing research. I think Tesla's strategy is to be the highest bidder when it comes time for Waymo (or Didi, etc) to sell their tech.
> I don't consider Tesla a player in self-driving, but I don't think Tesla does either
I think that's the distinction driving the confusion here.
EDIT: Sorry, and to clarify, I meant "not a player in self-driving research. I also do not think anyone has any vehicles we should call "self driving".
(I'll keep the rest of my pre-edit clarification below.)
To clarify further:
Tesla's offerings come from applying and engineering existing published research. That takes work, and they're making some money from that.
To the extent that "fully self driving" is an achievable goal, it makes no sense to expect Tesla to make the advances that get us there, when (1) they aren't doing that, and (2) they don't need to do that to make money.
To make this even more clear, let's make it concrete with one plausible future: In 2032, Waymo (or Didi, whoever) achieves true 'level 4' fully-self driving with proprietary technology. Their tech is seen in trucks, busses, taxis, as well as being equipped to a few thousand private vehicles. The safety stats are superhuman, and insuring such a vehicle is cheap.
In this future, Tesla Motors would like to enter into an exclusive partnership to integrate this technology into the cars they manufacture.
Google has tried and failed at commercializing similar technology in other verticals (like building environmental automation from their DC tech). The reason is actual incumbents (rightly) see the value of their position while Google comes at it as “our AI is the value, you just make dumb things”.
I expect the automakers to ship mediocre stacks that are put together by existing players like Bosch.
As an ex-Googler I would be floored if Waymo actually lands a sell-into deal with an automaker. A fully vertical taxi service is their path today because they tried and failed to sign any partnerships.
august 2020, tesla friendly blog: "Waymo Has Partnerships With Fiat Chrysler, Jaguar, Nissan, Renault, Volvo, & Magna"
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/10/waymo-has-partnerships-...
I see no possibility where existing large automakers will let Google (Waymo) own the FSD stack (and thus own the data and huge piece of value chain) and be relegated to a mere maker of a dumb car.
And if GM is not going to buy Waymo tech, Tesla will definitely not.
So, I still have difficulty reading your comment and extracting a meaningful point from it. Any reply to you would be regurgitating things that have already been said.
More importantly, I've been trying to interpret your comments as made in good faith, but I don't think you're arguing with the contiguity of the thread in mind. It really seems like you're here to defend Tesla, and that "Tesla might buy Waymo tech" might sound like an insult to Tesla? (To this extent, I'm worried this might actually be another proxy Musk argument, which I really have no interest in.)
With all this, out of courtesy, I don't get HN notifications and I won't be navigating back to this comment thread to check for further replies.
R&D for commercialization is a very difficult and very profitable task! But one would not expect this to advance the field of autonomous vehicles, nor would it require participating in the research.
(Also, I thought Waymo had partnerships, but I'm not close to Google. I don't know a lot about Waymo as a business, only as a research entity.)
A huge amount of R&D is never published. Eg: lithography tech at ASML.
Technically speaking: yes, they were the first ones, back in 2017.
Their car might've been more likely to crash then actually end up at the desired destination, but they did release first with a pretty hilariously bad product.
They doesn't necessarily mean that they themselves believe their own marketing.
AFAIK, they aren't working on self-driving or trying to advance research there, so it doesn't make sense to compare them to Waymo either.
But an open-source driver-assist upgrade package is interesting, but doesn't overlap with my experience. Sorry I don't have anything more meaningful to say!
I do appreciate that my car can do full distance control and assist if I am drifting, but it doesn't control itself, so I can never disengage. Personally I feel that this is wonderful and should be the limit. Anything past that should just be fully autonomous. Otherwise you're asking for trouble.
I can't imagine trying to focus on supervising an AI pilot without that kind of feedback.
An airplane autopilot is a dumb device, in that it does execute _exactly_ the plan you tell it to, and it is up to the pilot to at all times decide whether the current plan still makes sense or needs to be altered. So the pilot makes the strategic decisions, and leaves most of the physical tasks of flying to the autopilot.
I find myself using my M3 w/FSD in exactly the same way, as that I put on autosteer pretty much immediately when I'm out of the driveway, but I constantly nudge it into the lane that I want it to be in (by using the turn signal) or push the accelerator when I think it is taking too long pondering a turn. So i leave the physical driving (keep lane and distance) to the car but manage the car to always go exactly where I want it.
I have no trouble staying alert this way when doing medium long drives. Long highway drives where autopilot is so good that it requires no manual interaction is where the trouble starts and I find it hard to keep paying attention.
This is where in an airplane you have a copilot and can discuss strategic things like overnight stops, fuel stops, etc... Maybe Tesla needs a built-in chatbot to make me do that :)
I get what you're saying about the physical/strategic split, but my perception is that automobile autopilots are simply not good enough to be trusted with the "physical" stuff in a hands-off way like an airplane's can. And that's mostly because driving a car in a straight line down a highway is way harder than flying a plane in a straight line in an empty sky.
Exactly!!!!!!
The trouble is when your attention wanes and you don't know exactly when you should be paying attention. What I found is the small amount of automation my car does is wonderful to keep my exhaustion down. When I drove for 4 hours in my 2012 prius, it was a chore, i had to do ALL the mental math myself. When I drive my 2023 CX-50 I have to pay attention at least 30% less, and that 30% is a massive difference, it feels like 90%. And any time my attention wanes, the car starts complaining because I am drifting or not putting enough immediate response to the road. It becomes a "pay attention quickly" wake-up call that happens within seconds of attention waning.
The worry is when the car doesn't snap you back into that attention mode, and you just trust it, right up to the problem.
These augmented systems will probably reduce the risk of accidents so greatly that the value proposition for Level 5 driving systems just won't be there.
I've driven a lot for decades and frankly enjoy driving. I drove from TPA to SLC via PHX and back for fun. But I will pay $500/mo level-5 subscription for a comfortable car that drives itself.
Volvo was talking about level 3 back in 2017, but they gave up.[1] Level 3 means that the system may ask the driver to take over, but if the driver does not do so, the system must get the vehicle to a safe condition. Preferably pulled over out of traffic, but as least stopped without hitting anything. The driver is not required to watch the road.
The serious players are trying to get to level 4, where the driver is not expected to take over but the set of roads you can use is limited.
e.g. let's say you have a level 2 system which starts auto-evading, suddenly steering without user input, the user is likely to reflexively try counter-steering in response.
The value proposition of L5 systems is also the not driving part.
Intuitively I would have agreed with you, except Tesla has been doing it for years and their cars are statistically safer by every metric (fatalities, indicents, etc.).
Compared to what population? Older, tech-savvy people buying 60k-120k usd vehicles? And do you mean in full self-driving mode Beta, which Tesla won't allow you to use unless you have a track record of save driving?
Even if a hypothetical, future Tesla FSD sometimes crashes in ways that could be prevented had the driver payed attention, it could still be statistically safer than a fully human driver (ie the number of FSD crashes even if left unattended < the number of crashes by humans driving).
To clarify, I'm not talking about the current state of FSD, I'm talking about a hypothetical, future Level 3.
You're free to not use it. But if Tesla FSD is safer than the average driver (even if that's because the average driver is on their phone) then, going back to your statement, it is more useful than dangerous for the average driver.
They already have robotaxis in SF and are expanding into Arizona and Texas by the end of this year.
- only after 10pm - used such an odd slice of the city I not only can't get picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go.
I would love to use either of these programs both for the novelty and because I think Autonomous driving is great, but I literally can't use the program I do have access to.
Totally agree w/ you rn thou right now it's basically a neat party trick I have to go out of my way to show off instead of a super useful service.
It's been a month and a half since they've covered almost the entire city except FiDi/Union Square (and Twin Peaks)[1]. That's not a trivial omission, but do you really never take rides that start or end in any other area? In particular, that entire area is a fairly close walk from the only dense transit line in the city.
Only if they don't change they name. They can call it an upgraded RealDrive™ QuantumSense™ feature that no longer requires having your hands on the wheel.
LIDR isnt an option.
This is a strong claim. I thought there was a decent body of evidence that suggested most drivers make much less money than they think, when you take depreciation/repairs/etc. into account?
Do self-driving cars model, learn from, or both, from other cars? Say there's a new obstruction (traffic cones around maintenance crew). When deciding what to do, eg left or right, does the self-driver observe what the proceeding cars did?
Do self-drivers remember prior decisions? On the daily commute, there's a speed bump, pot hole, or whatever. Does the car anticipate the remembered road feature? Like maybe "Oh, last time I saw this pot hole, I had to swerve right. So this time I'm going tack right a little earlier."
Sorry for noob questions. Imagining a ubiquitous self-driving future, I keep thinking of boids and uncoordinated collective action, like flocking and murmurings. Wouldn't it be cool if cars did similar stuff?
[1]https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-data-...
If you were to let FSD beta just drive by itself enough time, and intentionally never intervene, it would eventually crash, no doubt about it. Before v10.69 it was hard to get a 20 minute drive with no interventions (unless it was mostly straight roads).
Comparing disengagement and driver intervention data might be useful to compare Tesla FSD vs others.
"In its first report on its autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona, Waymo said that it was involved in 18 crashes" (in 6.1 million miles).
For comparison, in the latest Tesla safety report:
"we recorded one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven", which is roughly what they had 2 years ago.
So Tesla is objectively safer. And Teslas are diven anywhere, whereas Waymo only drove in Phoenix, which is extremely sunny and dry.
Plus the Tesla owner will save the his/her $80k Tesla rather than prove FSD can actually handle or fail a situation.
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/193018/number-of-us-cras...
I also think that the mapping and routing component matters a lot less than how good your collision and realtime avoidance systems are. And in that arena, Tesla is an unmitigated disaster.
Yet, I follow DirtyTesla's YouTube channel and I think FSD is quite impressive compared to any other self driving software I've seen.
Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for example in similar situations? I can't find anything even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.
I'm not a fanboy nor do I possess any TSLA actions (or even a car for that matter), I'm just interested in the field and until now I thought Tesla was the most promising tech (it seems I'm wrong, but I really like to see it!).
These are easily searchable which leads me to question your sincerity in feinting ignorance.
As I understand it, Waymo can’t drive on unmapped roads, and therefore there are no comparable videos of Waymo actually doing that.
You chose a Waymo video from their marketing channel, and a newspaper hit piece. And then questioned sincerity of OP…
>I see a lot of bad things on Tesla FSD and I totally get the critics...I think FSD is quite impressive compared to any other self driving software I've seen. > >Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for example in similar situations? I can't find anything even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.
I can't believe one can make an honest argument that Tesla is ahead of Waymo on FSD
I agree that Waymo could well be far ahead of Tesla, but there isn't enough information in the public domain to say this with confidence. We don't have the ability to make a proper comparative assessment.
Tesla has not proven any reliable driverless operation, anywhere. They have removed hardware from their cars (radar, uss) and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years nor any willingness to change from their “vision only, big data” strategy.
If things continue on the current trajectory Waymo will likely be operating in all major US cities and metros in a few years while Tesla’s self driving offering will probably be forcibly renamed by regulation and end in a class action lawsuit.
Basically, Waymo has proven N and N+1 capability, meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N, and has lied to consumers and actually reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting measures.
I guess they did now that they can make their own cheap lidars and adding them back in 2023.
It sounds like they might actually be including a new radar system in January. Nothing official yet though from what I've seen.
https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-se...
Really? I’ve had some casual interest in the progress of FSD beta and the past six months alone has seen dramatic improvements to numerous adversarial situations.
FSD beta is currently able to drive with confidence on unmarked roads at night in the rain, with only basic maps for wayfinding. This has been demonstrated by customers in their own cars, driving roads which haven’t been vetted by the developers.
I’m sure Waymo and other systems can do this too, but I haven’t seen it demonstrated.
And how many years did that take. Are they adding profitable operations in new cities year after year, with every year adding new cities?
As far as I can see they simply lose billion and billions of $ for no real success in actually having a product.
Tesla is actually using the technology to improve its Level 2 systems and make money with it.
> meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N
First of all, Waymo has not proven N, because they don't make money on any of these things.
Tesla at least try to drive in N+10000000 other cases and navigate many of them without seeing them first.
If you have to go one by one threw every single city in the world its not clear to me that this is a better approach then solving a more general problem.
> reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting measures
Tesla just made 3 billion $ of profit in a quarter. What cost cutting? They are currently doing major investments in upgraded sensors suits, upgraded data-centers and overall their team is still growing.
How much did Waymo make again?
The opposite is also true, just because Waymo does not make money does not reflect the capability of their self driving systems. Saying "Waymo has not proven N, because they don't make money on any of these things." doesn't make any sense, and is not even true.
I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.
We are discussing who is closer to realizing a fully self-driving system, not who runs a better business.
That not what I said, what it means it has more staying power.
> doesn't make any sense, and is not even true
What data are you basing this on? Are any of their operations profitable? If they are, why are they not expanding those operations to make more profit?
> I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.
Yeah, but Tesla didn't spend 7 years only focusing on Phoenix, so using that as a comparison is just dishonest.
You are stacking the field in favor of what you want the winner to be.
Here is my proposal for a more fair test on who is actually 'winning' self driving:
"You take a car, and put it on any random road anywhere in the world, how well can it navigate to any other random road in the world"
How well does Waymo do on that test? I would guess worse then Tesla.
That test is much closer to what it actually takes to really claim that self driving is 'solved'.
In my opinion neither are close to this and both will burn many more billions and many more years before getting there. So to just confidently claim Waymo is way ahead is nonsense in my opinion.
Tesla currently works not at all.
It's not valid to compare Waymo's current capability unfavorably to a version of Tesla's capability that only exists in someone's head.
I would bet on Waymo working on a dirt road before Tesla does.
Literally a Tesla with FSD working well on a dirt road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv1l6aTnB_I
I do find it mildly disturbing that in that video, the driver points out the car making fully blind turns where it cannot see that there's nothing it would hit.
Think about a section of lightly used suburban road. The amount of work that went into making it involved was immense. A crew of road workers using expensive machines and large amounts of material were required to make it, and are required in it's maintenance. Don't forget the surveyors and engineers who made a highly detailed map and plans in the first place! (Though that map format isn't useful to self driving cars).
Also consider the sheer number of cars that drive that patch in a day. One car every few minutes adds up over hours, days, months, years.
So, yeah they have to drive a mapping car down the street a bunch of times to expand their coverage area. However this is insignificant compared to the effort that goes into our transportation infrastructure already.
Besides, most miles driven are spent on highways and other town-connecting roads. To the average consumer, self-driving cars are way more interesting for commuting or long-distance travel than they are for a 5-minute drive to the supermarket.
That means that Tesla could make an HD map covering 95% of miles driven in the USA within a week with their fleet of users. And next week they could make an updated version of the same map.
So, making and updating an HD map isn't an issue.
I then hired a dude with a LIDAR scanner and did it properly. The difference in quality/accuracy is like 120x80 ASF video files in 1996 compared to 4K footage today.
Anyone who thinks you can build "HD" virtual worlds using the crappy cameras on a Tesla needs their heads examining. Maybe with thousands of passes and some epic compute and signal processing, but why bother? Just LIDAR it.
My Tesla can't even decide if a traffic light is a single traffic light or not on a sunny summer's day from a distance of twenty feet. Almost every time it is either dark or humid or winter (road grime) it tells me one or more cameras are obscured. But only after I've already started driving, obviously. This supposedly cutting edge AI driving machine frequently thinks I'm leaving the carriageway on UK B-roads (it's almost dangerous) and is significantly less reliable at distance cruise control and lane-assist than my Skodă. (I presume VW just quietly bought a black box from Bosch or whoever to do this.)
Tesla are barking up the wrong tree IMO. At this point the camera-only stance feels like a religious thing, not based on sanity or the real practical world. I imagine that someone came to Elon and said "reconciling conflicting radar and camera signals is hard" and he applied his considerable genius and issued an edict to "let's not do that then!" like it would magically make all the actual hard problems go away.
Heck, Teslas can't even seem to reliably parallel park themselves, frequently getting stuck halfway, or hitting kerbs. If they can't solve that highly constrained problem, I'm hardly going to trust taking my eyes off it at 70mph.
That may be a smokescreen. Tesla collects a lot of data from their cars. What they do not have are these supposedly superfluous high resolution maps. If Tesla's camera-sourced data proves to be insufficient, that will have been a very bad gamble, in addition to whether camera data is sufficient for real time decisions.
When they pay off, bold gambles make businessmen look smart. That's why nearly all business hagiographies are the product of survivorship bias. Just like your buddy who won in Vegas.
We will see this risk-taking play out in Starship and Starlink, too.