What’s the data Waymo car collects driving around SF all day?
Can’t really understand what are all those sensors (e.g. why Tesla ain’t got them) and what’s the diff from any other self-drivingish company?
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Tesla doesn't have them for two different reasons...
Claimed reason: Humans have eyes and make driving work, so cars won't need more than that.
Real reason: Tesla wants to make money by selling the package to the public today. It needs to be cheap enough to be mass produced today, and sold at an accessible cost.
And it doesn't really matter to them if the current stack will be enough because regardless of what they claim, they're not averse to screwing over current owners and releasing a new stack and abandoning people who paid for an untenable one (note: I've been saying this since before they did exactly this with HW4 a few week ago...)
The sensor stacks alone the actual AV players use are worth more than the average Tesla. That's why they're mostly initially aiming for ridesharing, where the company can own the vehicle.
Not sure about that. LIDAR prices dropped to 1-2k USD.
Even if tomorrow morning a $1 LIDAR came out, it'd be a long time before you saw it in a vehicle and the costs around the integration into their stacks (even when amortized across the number of AVs being produced) would still leave them completely untenable for individual ownership.
And if your thought is "well just increase the number of AVs produced", the designs being used also aren't aiming to be mass producible on the scale of a Tesla because again, they're not artificially hobbling their approaches with that in mind.
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And it's not just LIDAR. Specialized sensors that can't even be sourced in those kinds of numbers, compute resources, infrastructure for those resources (both on and off vehicle).
Profitably producing cars is a game of pennies completely opposed to what AVs require. Trying to integrate solving AVs into that framework is pretty much resigning yourself to not doing either particularly well... unless you're only paying lip service to one side: hence why I use the terminology "real competitors".
And to be clear, I don't think Tesla doesn't know better, or is incapable of actually trying. It's a very intentional choice. Traditional manufacturers would do terrible terrible things to extract $7500 additional dollars for a software switch (they've done that for a lot less!). EVs and AVs are a chance for them to dip into that, and Tesla's most impressive innovation has been getting ahead of the curve on it.
As for why other self driving cars don't have lidar that's... A contentious topic. The argument for lidar is that it captures the environment in 3d unlike cameras that only capture in 2d and thus you can save on computation trying to convert 2d images into a 3d scene. On the other hand lidar is very expensive, has limitations like not being able to see through rain and maybe most importantly is believed to be unnecessary since "humans drive with just their eyes".
My personal belief is its a matter of cost vs time to market - lidar makes locatization and object recognition a little bit easier and if for example it saves 1 year of development time at a cost of 100k per car produced it's worth it if you're only making a small fleet of cars anyway.
Which I always found fascinating reasoning because clearly, humans can't drive with these two eyes alone. There is a lot of assumptions and guesswork going on which regularly ends in crashes. Increasing coverage to help would be great.
I'm recognizing the quotation marks and fully sympathize with the color they add to the statement.
Its not just tesla, George hotz of comma ai also believes this.
My personal take is that more varied sensors are better than less, even if the economics of doing so don't make sense.
Waymo is banking on Lidar being the solution to autonomous vehicles, the reason tesla doesn't use them is that Elon thinks Lidar won't work and that we need Ai for driverless cars (or more accurately a highly advanced AGI).
At first, I thought Elon was being too radical, he's known for overcorrecting for the sunk cost fallacy, but after more time, I share his view.
Personally, I think Waymo is a joke. Just because they came from Google they think they're too big to fail before even having a product for market. They've already lost 170 billion in just a year an a half. The CEO got charged with stealing tech and selling it to tesla, then got sued by tesla when he made a competitor to the stolen tech he sold them.
Take it as you will, personally I'm pretty bias against google these days, Pichai has ruined the company for me. I feel he's turned google into Microsoft, there's nothing wrong with Microsoft, but we already have one of those, it was nice when we also had a google.
All snarkiness aside, I really enjoy riding in the cars because the driving strategy is interesting. Waymo routes appear to vastly prefer more right turns over fewer left ones (at a 3-1 ratio, by my estimates) and also is strategic about avoiding routes with large numbers of parked cars and pedestrians, even if the traffic flow is light.
Wasn't it "selling" to Uber (instead of Tesla), and not the CEO, but the head engineer/founder of Waymo program[0]?
Note: "selling" in quotes, because he didn't sell anything to Uber while working at Waymo. Instead, he downloaded the confidential info before resigning from Waymo, and then took that info with him to start Otto (an autonomous truck company). Otto eventually got acquired by Uber, and Levandowski became the head of Uber's autonomous car division.