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Comment by n0tth3dro1ds | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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"?

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