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Comment by agnosticmantis | Hacker News Reader

Really love what waymo have been achieving with a relatively small team, but more importantly, they’ve had their heads down working and solving hard problems instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises (e.g. delivering robotaxies that make you $30k/yr by next year!), getting into ideological (sensor) wars, etc. (How many people know the name of their CEO? And yet they’re slowly and steadily marching along, hitting one milestone after another.)

Kudos to the hardworking waymonauts!

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> relatively small team

2,800 employees on Linkedin

> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises

Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]

Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-p...

2,800 employees is small, when you consider what they are trying to accomplish.

Tesla has 130k.

You do realize Tesla makes cars too, or are these 130K people working just on autonomous driving?

Waymo is the autonomous driving division of Alphabet. Alphabet has 190k employees

Tesla’s autopilot team has ~300 people.

Both teams have done incredible work.

I didn’t realize Tesla’s team was so small. Both companies have truly done incredible work!

It’s funny watching HN comments trying to tear down Musk and Tesla while their software—which has driven billions of miles—continues to just get better and better.

I love that we have these companies all investing billions of dollars on trying to solve this problem in very different ways. Truly a beautiful example of capitalism at work pushing technology forward in a way that (sooner than you think) will be saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

Is it funny? I empathize, but maybe I'm too soft?

A lot of people bought cars based on bad, lying, PR. Appreciating assets, $30K/year robotaxi service next year, we'll rent out your car for you. Coast to coast in 9 months, again, again, again, and again.

It's sort of the opposite of what OP praised: loud, not quiet, scrambling in public, not head's down.

Not sure what the last paragraph is saying, but it is regrettable how consumers were led to believe that this problem would be quickly solved.

In their defense, the whole AI industry was convinced of this. It’s known as the long tail. An absurdly huge number of small edge cases to fix before it’s a solved problem.

I see it completely differently. Up until Tesla made it possible, no one would ever even imagine buying a car based on functionality that would be added later. It was simply never done.

Tesla pioneered the model of a unified fleet software with constant updates and new features. And with that architecture they consistently deliver incremental value to every Tesla owner on a regular basis.

I’ve been an M3 owner since 2018 running software that had barebones visualization, basic lane keeping, TACC, and not even a dash cam or sentry mode, or the ability to automatically change lanes on the highway.

Today I drive FSD beta 11.3.6 on the same car which regularly brings me door to door, drives impeccably on and off the highway, handles lane changes, off-ramps, unprotected left turns, etc.

Truly hands off, unsupervised, self-driving is the target. Owners see Tesla’s relentless drive towards this goal, and FSD Beta gets better with each release.

Elon did think he would get there sooner. He did say at the 2019 Autonomy Day he thought it would be feature complete by 2020. But Tesla never promised it would be done then, and Elon even said his biggest criticism - and he said it’s a fair one - is he gets the time wrong. “Sometimes I’m not on time. But I get it done.”

Honestly it remains to be seen if they will pull it off. The level of improvement in the last year has me more optimistic than I have been previously. In the meantime a Tesla is still the best car and by far the best value on the market.

I appreciate the scale of the challenge; what Tesla is trying to do with FSD, and what it will mean for the world if they succeed. Turing awards and Nobel prizes alike.

I personally don’t begrudge that it’s taken longer than Elon hoped to achieve one of humanity’s most ambitious and meaningful technological breakthroughs. I love being part of the process and contributing to its success.

Frankly it’s the people who would never by a Tesla who complain about the timeline. The fact is that the vast majority of actual owners are extremely satisfied with their purchase. Consumer Reports surveys found Tesla was the #1 brand for customer satisfaction several years now.

Exactly this. You can find so many videos of various self driving vehicles safely traversing the roads, highlighting the truly incredible work they’re all doing.

It’s gross how many people ride the bandwagon of anti-Tesla or anti-self driving because it’s not coming out as fast as the next iPhone revision. It’s a damn hard problem that’s going to take a bit of time and deliver serious rewards to our society.

This must be what it felt like in the early days of automobiles or other highly disruptive, society changing innovations.

Sadly I think it’s just human nature. Problems always look easy from the outside. Underdogs which are at first rooted for, if they succeed enough, become reviled. New things that challenge the status quo are scary and vilified.

In the end… if the day comes that I install a new update on my Model 3 and it boots up with full-release FSD with an Enable Robotaxi button, fact is people will still hate on them.

I recognize it as hugely advanced, world changing technology. If they truly nail it, every other passenger car is obsolete.

The idea that such powerful technology would be locked up and controlled by Google of all companies… on highly customized vehicles that only they own… you would think HN in particular would realize how badly that future turns out.

What Tesla is doing in entirely laudable, and they’re doing it in a way that democratizes rather than monopolizes the technology. And this fits with Elon’s entire ethos of tackling challenges he sees as necessary as a way to protect humanity.

> Cheap shots, I know

Definitely. The big picture is that they are very careful and conservative with their statements about the future, but if you look hard enough you can always find something. With Tesla it's the polar opposite.

Yup, I very much liked the broader approach of solving the general problem, but this actually seems to be doing better.

The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.

Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?

Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.

Google has a strong foundation for estimating this effort because they already do it at lower fidelity with streetview. I would assume they are considering these questions regularly as part of whatever long term planning goes into the rollout.

> The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?

That's certainly the intent with Waymo Via for trucking, and we drive multiple routes today including say Dallas <=> Houston for beer [1]. The video at [2] includes some footage of the trucks on a highway.

[1] https://www.ttnews.com/articles/waymo-ch-robinson-driverless...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lon1vRv2wQ8

Very cool - thx!

Interesting question. I'm guessing the information density of 100 miles of standard American interstate is less than that of 1 city block in Manhattan.

> How many people know the name of their CEO?

CEOs (plural)

Well, my point exactly ;)

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