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Comment by n0tth3dro1ds | Hacker News Reader

I told you so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018

> This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.

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You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but they're pretty orthogonal to each other.

You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill).

You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).

It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud.

Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.

Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it (in parallel with all the other cities). Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.

> you’re committing fraud.

Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars. They are selling only the rides which they have the ability to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like investors are deceived.

> Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it

No they won’t. That’s the entire point. It doesn’t scale from a cost perspective. The entire thing is funded by their search ads monopoly right now. They can’t pull in the revenue they need to maintain the map from ride fares alone.

> Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.

LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”

> so it's not like investors are deceived

Investors (and consumers) are absolutely deceived. I don’t really care: being a VC is risky. But these types of videos are intentionally deceiving. Only the best of many runs is shown. Editing is often used. The routes have HD mapping that won’t be collected universally (due to cost problems). How is that not deception in your mind?

You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how much it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with nothing to back it up.

> LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”

"We can do it" = closest thing to solved. No one can say without a doubt we can do it for the other parts.

> How is that not deception in your mind?

You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party. All the VCs have asked these questions and were given answers satisfactory enough to invest.

Here's a basic one they can tell investors: the top 10 cities for ride-sharing comprise 70% of the total market. It will cost $X to map and permanently have access to the vast majority of the market. We believe in addition, we can induce demand so this 70% of the market becomes a massive multiple of the current market.

If you're going to be this snarky, at least do some basic research.

>You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how much it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with nothing to back it up.

I literally work at an automotive OEM that maintains its own AV team and map infra. I have seen the balance sheets. It’s not going to scale.

Also, you make the inverse claim without evidence or any purported industry expertise. Where’s your evidence that Waymo can just walk into a new city without ballooning costs? If they can do it, why don’t they? That which has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

> You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party

Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”. You are illiterate if you don’t consider that product name tantamount to fraud if the car can’t drive itself.

Investors were clearly lied to. Once again, I don’t care about VC money. Part of the game to lose it.

> I literally work at an automotive OEM

An automotive OEM would probably have a hell of a time scaling a video streaming website or a search engine as well. Yet it scaled when a tech company did it.

> Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”.

Can you point out where I used the word "Tesla"?

This person just has no idea how AVs work and thinks an openly shared approach to AVs is a conspiracy

https://medium.com/cruise/hd-maps-self-driving-cars-b6444720...

https://blog.waymo.com/2019/09/building-maps-for-self-drivin...

https://zoox.com/journal/putting-our-robots-on-the-map/

When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as discovering some well-hidden secret.

I literally work for an automotive OEM and have worked in computer vision for over a decade. Nice links to engineering blogs written by my colleagues.

You are a moron and I seem to have struck a nerve. Hello, salty Tesla owner or engineer.

I work at one of the companies linked.

Meanwhile working at an automotive OEM speaks to your qualifications on the subject about as much as being a mechanic at a car dealer: it doesn't.

The only person who sounds like they've had a nerve struck is the one who immediately devolved into name calling the moment they were called out.

You work at a company committing fraud with a dead end product that will never scale. You’re mad that I’m exposing your fraudulent demo tactics. Go tweak those hyper parameters one more time —- cross your fingers your model converges this decade before your funding gets pulled and your resume has a half-decade block filled with “I bought the hype, committed fraud, got caught, and failed.”

I don't know what's fueling your vitriol but this ranting would be a lot more relevant if you couldn't hail rides in our vehicles.

I think we're seeing what happens when FOMO meets "missed out". It'd just be more humorous if you weren't projecting your anger onto me.

> this ranting would be a lot more relevant if you couldn't hail rides in our vehicles

Where? A narrow area in which you can create ultra-HD maps that are in no way indicative of the general case?

If you’re at Cruise, I can only grab a ride between 10 pm and 5:30 am (lol, lmao). If you’re at Waymo, your beta is still closed (though I have several invites from former colleagues) and you only serve a tiny fraction of realistic destinations in the city. Do you think this proves your point? Let me restate my position: you can’t scale to the general case. You never will. You will be stuck in Phoenix and specific part of SF forever. Your business will never be viable. Your vehicles will never be able to navigate roads without a prohibitively costly mapping effort in that region that doesn’t scale. Your valuation will continue to decline. What part of offering unsafe rides to friends and family right now changes that?

If all this is what helps you cope with your choices so be it.

You're already behind on which cities are being mapped by the way.

> You're already behind on which cities are being mapped by the way.

Funded by investors or search ads, not ride fares. And in a $200k vehicle that will never be economically viable. Your resume will be embarrassing in a few years if you stick around. Do yourself a favor and get out before you go to zero.

Ah, the old binary tree con: https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html

I agree with you that these videos are extremely cherry picked, if not outright faked.

In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others) claimed were absolutely bullshit.

Where to start...

First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see runs that were repeated when almost all runs are repeated by design.

Second, what Tesla did is nothing like you described. Tesla lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal reasons. No one else has done that.

Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.

> for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.

I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.

When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud. If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud. If you think otherwise you’re drinking somebody’s Koolaid.

> When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud

Right. Just like Steve Jobs holding an iPhone that crashed before the keynote is fraud.

Fraud is saying it's driving itself when a human is driving.

> If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud.

This is so utterly nonsensical I don't even know where to start. Driving scenarios are not fungible. Navigating around a stopped car in downtown SF is not the same as being able to navigate around a stopped car in Mumbai rush hour, or navigating around a stopped car in the middle of a California wildfire with 0 visibility and a fire roaring 10 feet away.

So when a video shows that the vehicle can handle a given situation and the vehicle handles it on video, the implication is not "we've now solved every variation of this situation to ever exist", the implication is "we were able to handle the situation you just witnessed".

I thought it ended at you not understanding EVs, but it's even worse: you don't even know what "fraud" means, and you clearly don't understand how bleeding edge technology is presented. That mentality is definitely more at home in the fossilized environment of an automotive OEM, but it must certainly be interesting to watch all that "fraud" translate into hundreds of thousands of miles on public roads and open betas with real riders... sour grapes much?

"The vehicle 'handles it' using technology, equipment, input and data that is not now, and will not, be used in your vehicle in any way shape or form. In fact our CEO will spend countless hours mocking our competitors for using it and strongly implying that we did no such thing."

Apple planned for the iPhone to do all those things. Tesla has never planned for their cars to do those things, and to "advertise" what their cars could and would do, they used a car that was not and is not one that you or I could ever acquire.

I am not talking about Tesla there, read before commenting.

I specifically call out Tesla as being completely fraudulent (and we're literally replying to their director of Autopilot say the same). They are not even in the same game as actual AV companies when our sensor stacks are worth more than the entire vehicle they claim as "FSD"

One difference is Tesla runs on all roads basically (subject to weather view on cameras). It's gm super cruise and google that only work on road that have been imaged. It does seem that super cruise and google waymo is ahead of tesla. Tesla is trying to solve a harder problem, random roads and conditions. I think that tesla won't succeed very soon, and as the "pre-scan the road" groups get better and better tesla's approach will be seen as unacceptable risky. I have only driven the new versions a few time, it was interesting to see all the things they could see but it just wasn't safe. Waymo has their weird stuff but did seem much safer in theory. But who knows if there is a hole, like happened in Arizona to that poor woman who got run over in the night while crossing the dark road.

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