Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs
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Uber and Cruise both tried to cut corners and mistakes caused their operations massive set backs.
Tesla's efforts have killed the most people, but seem relatively resilient.
The future isn't in cars or autonomous cars, it's in sidewalks, trains, bike lanes, and other forms of transit. The best ride in a car isn't one in which I'm driving or not driving, it's one in which I don't get in the car in the first place.
The future absent radical change of cultural heart clearly is personal EVs. You don't have to like it, but it's the direction 99% of countries are moving and clearly normal people do want it.
A large percentage of the world's population commutes on mopeds/scooters.
That is due to lack of money not lack of desire.
If you asked the moped/scooter riders if they would rather have a car, they would choose a car.
As countries become more developed and wealthier, more people will be able to afford cars and car use will increase.
cities should be pushing for alternatives because they're better in literally every possible way, except convenience.
better for our safety, for our health, for the environment, for less noise, for the cost, for a sense of community, for the saved space, and so on.
Most are, but a massive number of Americans live in sprawling suburbs and small-to-medium sized towns, not cities. Most of those places are ill-suited (to the extreme) for mass transit and other non-car options - yet they are perfectly designed to handle cars.
Even so, some 2/3 of Americans live in areas that would benefit from pursuing alternatives.
However great is key. This means you need great operations: including worse case waiting time everyone should be 15 minutes or less from a place where they can find plenty things to do in the community (stores, parks, schools); and a transfer to express service to elsewhere. If you don't have great transit: people in the suburbs can afford a car, and traffic isn't a problem so they will just drive. Note that this is a higher level of service than many downtowns get.
The above is very very expensive. However cars are very very very expensive.
Denying this or misunderstanding human nature will not get you closer to mass transit, you have to first understand what motivates people before trying to convince them of another path.
Building cities and infrastructure that precludes anything other than personal vehicles - that what forces people to use them primarily.
Human nature wants convenience. A personal vehicle is not always the most convenient transport method.
I used to cycle down Peachtree Street from Buckhead to Piedmont Park...it was a harrowing experience.
Busses can run on existing highways and throughout cities. City streets can already accommodate trams and bike lanes.
I agree that self-driving cars are "going to be a thing" but their proliferation I doubt. They're not really a category change from Uber, it's just "more efficient" as an additive solution, but we need subtractive solutions. You can think of the car and self-driving cars in particular in the same way you can think of personal digital cameras, alarm clocks, and smiliar devices before the advent of the iPhone. The iPhone (and other smart phones) was a subtractive product and eliminated the need for those devices.
Similarly a sidewalk and building well (among other things) eliminate much of the need for a personal car and so Ford, GM, Toyota, Tesla, etc. can't effectively compete because they don't build sidewalks or have anything to do with this category of transit. If I can just walk over to the grocery store like I could in London or Osaka then no amount of self-driving will matter.
Small vehicles that use the road to take you on the short journeys, where mass transit is not an option.
The biggest issue with busses, for me is the timetable. Imagine having a truly 24/7 on time transit network? You'd only need a vehicle to haul something, which is not a daily operation.
Autonomous cars will result in an explosion of cars on the road and a severe increase in traffic. It'll be a disaster.
Alright so what we're going to do is extract limited resources from the earth, pump out a bunch of C02, have a lot of people or machines get together in a big factory and assemble a car, someone is going to take out a loan for $40,000 or something, pay interest on that loan, pay for insurance, pay for maintenance, pay for energy/fuel, we're going to build highways and roads, and then we're going to have the car drive itself and the passenger (of course just them because nobody is sharing their car) to their computer at work, the car is then going to circle the block for 8 hours while you work (i.e. sit on Zoom calls), and then once you are ready to head home the car will stop circling the block and come and get you.
Right. All to avoid walking, riding a bike, or god forbid being near other humans on a tram.
But seriously, privately owned cars are the problem here. If, instead, taxi service is normalized, then we don't have this problem, and my car doesn't need to circle the block because it isn't my car. As long as I can get home at the end of the day, a self driving taxi seems like the way for the system to be organized, to avoid precisely the stupidity you described.
Of course you need to avoid all the issues of NYC where they can't do anything, but both Atlanta and Dallas are not as corrupt (which isn't saying much) around transit.
Something like 40% of trips in Amsterdam are still made by car. It’s a useful tool, just not the ultimate solution to every transportation issue.
Although it may have become a problem with all this sunken cost.
All that to say I hope I am wrong in the biggest way possible.
But I feel the pandemic has upended any momentum for public transit for a generation. Less frequent commmutes make long drives more tolerable and parking more affordable and available, and transit now seems like a disease vector as well as rolling homeless shelter.
For me personally, I hate the smell of weed and it is EVERY where in many downtown areas and transit hubs.
Bikes? So weather dependent, little cargo space, hard to secure, and no way to carry a family readily.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Autonomous cars will be a travesty as everyone starts sending them on non stop errands or run double commutes to save on parking…
I can't stand cars driving into buildings and businesses in my downtown area.
Whenever it snows it seems like there's a huge multi-car pileup on the highway causing a complete stop and I can't get to where I was trying to go.
The highways and roads are really really loud.
Someone drove into my family in their truck and killed us all.
Etc.
It's not fair to point out the problems with bikes like you are, like the smell of weed (what about drunk drivers??) without also at least acknowledging the gigantic list of problems associated with car-only transit.
Admittedly some of the problems you mention like a rolling homeless shelter or the smell of weed share a solution which is more, and better policing and as a society us having higher standards for ourselves and others, but they are problems that can be solved much more easily in my opinion than the problems associated with car-only infrastructure.
Also I do want to point out that the disease vector comment seems really weird to me. Like the population density at Costco is a lot less than a train ride therefore you won't get sick as often? I don't get it.
I can't imagine equating things like the smell of weed and having to share a train with a homeless person, with death, death, accident clean up, new barriers added, and then more death anyways
They seem pretty equally hopeless to solve. How are we going to "change society's standards?" This isn't even a public transit problem--it's a "dealing with other human beings" problem.
Ever since the pandemic, going out in public and trying to do basically anything is like entering a probabilistic mental facility, where some non-trivial percentage of the time, some member of the public is going to enter your life as an obstacle, aggressor, or at least as an irritant. It's always been kind of the case, but the percentage chance just seems much larger today.
Road ragers are out in equal number to smokers on the train, sidewalk poopers while you're trying to walk, and coal rollers while you're trying to bicycle. It's not the mode of transportation, it's the growing belligerence of the general public.
Weed smell is going to be a problem simply from the fact that users stink ALL THE TIME, even if they aren't smoking in the actual metro. It like an epidemic of BO.
What Costco do you shop where you are pressed up against people for half an hour? A loaded train is a sealed environment with poor ventilation and way more density than almost any other scenario in modern life. Regardless it's also people's perception, and a huge warehouse feels better ventilated than a subway car.
Speak for yourself. More metros around the world are pushing for better mass transit. Even in the US, even mild expansion of light rail makes it possible for my kids to bike+rail to school and for me to use light rail to commute to work. US needs to handle its homeless problem - agreed - but that's a bigger societal issue.
Pandemic lockdowns are not going to happen again. People are finding out that lockdowns did not help all that much (even when implemented near-perfectly like in China).
Have you seen the sidewalks and trains in American cities? Lol
Maybe if our streets and subways looked like Tokyo I’d agree with you, but getting to that point is a coup-complete problem
Take a look at Amsterdam in the 1970s. https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-...
Car infra takes next to nothing to plan and build. Trains, trams, metro, anything big at all really, takes decades, riddled with corruption, environment destruction, landscape change. State actors, maybe society, is just plain bad at organising this. Maintaining and switching cars is easy, maintaining public infra, keeping timetables (!!!), organising upgrades and extensions, keeping workforce happy and not striking is the same as above. And I live in a fat rich western country.
I get that cars don't scale, and ok, downtown of 1m+ cities should be park & ride. But maybe we should just spread out our living area more, and outside of megapolises just admit defeat and improve car infra.
As opposed to building highways, parking lots, massive car sized neighbourhoods etc...?
Car infrastructure is the same, you just haven’t seen it, and those are often related: most “pedestrian” or “bike” projects end up being about car management and almost all of the cost is usually spent there.
This has ripple effects: for example, Boston’s rail service is underfunded in large part because of the massive debt taken on to build the Big Dig. That was promised to reduce commuting times for suburbanites substantially but within a couple years of opening, they were worse than before due to the extra trips incentivized.
Admittedly we can build highways quicker, but I wonder why? Certainly it has nothing to do with corrupt state transportation agencies whose jobs depend on big highway construction jobs, auto lobbies, or highway and road construction companies that rely on big government contracts for their livelihoods... right?
Only if you pay up for that. Suburban areas are notoriously underfunding themselves.
Wait wait wait. A single double-tracked rail line that's 50 feet wide carries more passengers an hour than a 10-lane wide highway that's pure asphalt. In what world is the train a greater destruction of our environment?
And in what world is that a greater destroyer of our natural landscapes?
I understand the convenience. I also went from taking public transit exclusively to driving a lot more - and I get the appeal. I also understand the appeal is not scalable, considerably less environmentally friendly, and contributes a ton of carbon output and environment destruction.
We don't need to bend over backwards to pretend that the things that are convenient and enjoyable for us must necessarily be virtuous. We should be fully capable of owning the dissonance that our desires do not necessarily align with public benefit.
If we have any hopes of restricting climate change, reducing CO2 emissions, preventing mass extinction via habitat loss, we can't be doing this and going down this path.
It would only make any sense to create new green field cities if they were compact walkable cities built on a foundation of frequent and high speed rail access. Everything else is a regression of massive amounts of highway construction, habitat loss, CO2 emissions and strangulation by increased capture by the requirements of structurally inefficient automobile oriented infrastructure.
I have no interest living in a city and the older I get the more and more I want to move away from things.
How do I take a train or a bike 80 miles away to go hiking, boating (imagine carrying a boat or a canoe onto a train!), golfing, etc? Or the other way to the beach? Or to drop kids off at different places with a variety of things they have with them?
I would seriously limit my freedom of movement and ability to do things.
There's a tendency here for a I assume young person who lives in a city and doesn't have a family or hobbies that require going to far away places with things, etc.
> The best ride in a car isn't one in which I'm driving or not driving, it's one in which I don't get in the car in the first place.
As saying you don't see any need for cars at all. That the future is these other things. I'm just saying that cars are extremely useful and that if I had to choose between having a car or all the other things then I'd pick a car. I enjoy the other things too and am grateful to have a train nearby I can take into the city. But I can't imagine life without a car.
1. Not building car-only infrastructure. I.e. build sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, and trams/street cars. While I can afford a car, many can't or struggle to, or even if they can it is a poor financial choice. By giving people additional options we can increase entrepreneurship, reduce barriers to things like physically getting to a job, etc.
2. Reducing the need to use a car for things like buying a loaf of bread, short trips, going out to a restaurant, heading to a local sporting event, etc. There's no world in which you will forever be able to drive a large truck or SUV 15 miles to a grocery store to buy a few trivial items. We can do that now because we hit an energy jackpot with fossil fuels (which are necessary and useful), but economic physics dictate that this can't last. So instead of driving to do common tasks, you can instead just walk (exercise is good for you) and then walk back. If it's raining, umbrella. Etc. There are a lot of additional benefits here like obesity reduction which will save us money.
Today what we have is incredibly expensive infrastructure and transportation. We don't need to. We need more options.
When I grew up in Buenos Aires Argentina we used to take the train to our small boat, that train ran every 15 minutes. The boat was kept at a "dry" marina stored on bunks in stacks of other boats. We would call them about 15 minutes ahead of time, and they would forklift the boat into the water. I used to ride the train myself to school so my parents didn't have to drop me off with my variety of things. On the way home I would get off the train at a beach for after school sailing lessons. They had Canoes, kayaks, windsurfers, small boats, etc. so you didn't have to own your own or bring it on a train.
When I lived in Seattle, and Vancouver, there were busses that regularly went to trailheads. They would add express routes on the weekends from downtown directly to trailheads in Seattle.
If I were a golfer, I can't imagine being willing to walk my clubs a few miles over 18 holes, but not be willing to walk them a block or two to the bus stop. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some people leave their clubs in a locker at the course so they don't have to load them into and out of their car.
All of the "problems" that you solve with your car have already been solved in other places without using cars. It seems like a distinct lack of imagination to think that everything you own has to be at your home, and that you have to use a car to use it.
How about no cars at all (or significantly fewer cars)? Adoption of mass transportation like trams, trains and buses is better for pedestrians and cyclists.
Buses are terrible to bike around: obstruct visibility, hard to pass, block traffic when they stop, and are louder and more polluting than electric cars.
Trains don't yield to pedestrians and only serve a very limited number of locations.
There are many places where they just aren't practical—where sidewalks are useless, because the nearest thing to walk or bike to is miles away, the weather gets too inhospitable to walk or bike safely for much of the year, and the places people want to go are just too spread out for trains to be at all viable.
For those of us who choose not to live in dense urban areas, I would dearly love to see full self-driving cars someday...but given the challenges we've observed in the last few years, I'm now skeptical as to whether we'll realistically see them arrive.
Waymo pioneered self driving and has been quietly in the lead since. Companies like Tesla and Cruise are all smoke, no fire riding on Waymo's coattails in public perception.
They have achieved great things, and kept a steady pace, but my point was there is no urgency to "deliver" -- it doesn't really reflect in any way on core business, is not necessary for their survival, but is a moonshot that could really pay off. For Tesla and Cruise, it is much more existential that they are not left behind in self driving.
Remember the Firefly? Totally unacceptable to have a low-speed vehicle with no controls. But Cruise? Sure, fuck it, why not have a giant EV Bolt with no controls? Or a giant box-on-wheels?
They also have a huge fan base (investors) who are happy to babysit FSD in order to provide more “training data” and they’ve rationalized themselves whatever little benefit it offers is worthy of the product name.
If you're right it'll be a relatively great payday for you.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a45326503/mercedes-benz...
DRIVE PILOT is ready to chauffeur you under conditions that help ensure a secure ride. Conditions include:
Clear lane markings on approved freeways
Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH
Daytime lighting and clear weather
Driver visible by camera located above driver's display
There is no construction zone present.
The distance [to the vehicle in front] is neither too small nor too large
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
Now everyone is acting like it's do or die, as if everyone bought Tesla's just so they won't have to ever touch a steering wheel at some point in the future. Only 19% opted for it and plenty of those are probably wealthy people who can afford novelties and all that matters at the end of the day is if you're competitive with the alternative options on the market (holistically not just feature to feature). Ultimately it's still just a car people bought instead of a BMW or whatever. They're not making car purchasing decisions comparing it to some beta project only running via taxis in silicon valley and some random small cities.
Tesla is very well positioned even if they did zero on FSD (which they won't). The Model Y was the best selling car on earth across all categories (including ICE and EVs!) - not sure what more you could want for car company success.
If you look back, 10 years ago HN loved him (see convo about first time 2 falcon 9s landed), but now that he is the richest man in the world the tides have turned.
I'm stunned that I need to explain that to you. Is it actually news to you? If so, welcome out from under your rock. Or are you just pretending not to know, in order to troll?
I don't care that he called someone a pedophile. He apologized for that: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/elon-musk-apologizes-for-....
You've got a lot of catching up to do from your 10 year absence from reality. I'm not going to lead you to water because you'll refuse to drink. Go google it for yourself, and stop trolling.
Have a nice day.
I don't owe you any examples, because you know very well but are pretending not to know what I'm referring to, you're not a serious person, you're intellectually dishonest, and you're trolling, so your bad faith arguments don't matter, and you don't deserve a response, troll.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
Let me ChatGPT that for you:
This quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre's work "Anti-Semite and Jew" (originally "Réflexions sur la question juive"), written in 1946. In this passage, Sartre analyzes the behavior and motives of anti-Semites. He argues that anti-Semites are aware of the absurdity and frivolity of their arguments. According to Sartre, they engage in such discourse not to persuade through rational debate but to amuse themselves and to disconcert their opponents. They do this by undermining the seriousness of any conversation, thus avoiding genuine discussion. When pressed, they may cease the discussion, indicating that they are above argumentation. This approach, Sartre suggests, is a form of bad faith, a concept he discusses in his existentialist philosophy, referring to acts of self-deception or dishonesty in one's dealings with oneself and others.
Robert Hurtado, a supervisor at Tesla, called Diaz the N-word over 30 times, including by saying “[N-word], hurry up,” “[N-words] are lazy,” and “I wish I can get all you [N-words] fired.” Tr. 3:604:23-606:8. Ramon Martinez, another Tesla supervisor, called Diaz the N-word over thirty times, said “I hate you, [N-word],” and told him “to go back to Africa.” Tr. 3-603:11604:20. Diaz's supervisor, Tamotsu “Tom” Kawasaki, testified that Martinez often used the words “mayate” and “chongo,” both racial slurs in Spanish. Tr. 2-281:9-12. Wayne Jackson, a Black program manager at Tesla, confirmed that Martinez used the word “mayate.” Tr. 2-381:17382:7. Martinez denied all of this. Tr. 3-584:18-585:1.
Diaz also testified that he complained to Romero several times about being called the N-word. Tr. 3-613:5-14. Romero agreed that he learned Diaz had been complaining about racist conduct, see Tr. 3-542:22-24, 543:13-14, though Romero said Diaz did not complain directly to Romero at least until the Timbreza incident, Tr. 3:561:1-4. Romero testified that he did not personally investigate Diaz's complaints and was specifically told by Tesla to not personally investigate the Timbreza incident. Tr. 3-541:22-542:1, 544:21-545:2, 549:13-550:16. Diaz and Romero both testified that Tesla never fired anyone for using the N-word. Tr. 3-552:10-19, 615:13-15.
Jackson testified that the use of the N-word was “[r]ampant,” as in it was used “[e]very day,” “[m]ore than several times a day.” Tr. 2-381:3-15. He found the N-word “[e]xtremely” offensive and “very derogatory” when it was used, regardless of how it was said. Tr. 2-383:15384:2. He said that these words should not be used in a workplace, but that there was “nothing” he could do to stop their use “[b]ecause Tesla allowed it. They didn't stop it.” Tr. 2-384:12-22.
and don't forget all of the anti-union causes he donates to
The same types of people (inaccurately) labeling Musk an antisemite are often simultaneously pushing/defending DEI offices and ideology at universities that cause actual direct threats against Jewish students.
But my mind still fails to comprehend this. It's a $80k cad luxury idiosyncratic vehicle. How's this out-selling civic and corolla, kia and hyundai base models? Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide? I just don't understand that number if it's talking by units sold (and not revenue or profit). My entire world-view fails to make sense of that factoid.
I share your scepticism.
That's not bad for a new car, especially when the general buyer I think mostly considers it a luxury brand.
Also the floor for car prices has gone up. The days of the near $10k new car are over.
> Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide?
I'm far from a millionaire and a $40-50k car is not unreasonable, my wife's car is in the low $50s. But I have a Kia Forte that was like $25k. A small Kia for $25k! But it was the cheapest car I could find on shortish notice that had lance centering and whatnot.
the media salary in the US is like 55k is a lot, esp. given the prices of everything going up, and given the alternatives.
Toyota RAV4, according to website, starts at 36K CAD.
So that's plus or minus twice the price :-/
Other way of looking at it - even if it were "Only $15k USD difference" in USA, that is an entire car worth of difference (not only in pre-COVID times, when you could buy a new car for $10k! We just bought a $17k Kia Rio 5. Tesla Y is four time the price, and ~2.5 times the price of Corolla or Civic, which again I wouldn't think of as "marginally more expensive". (Edit: And this does not include the money one would presumably need to spend to install chargers etc at home).
Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's a somewhat Hacker-News specific perspective that Tesla isn't luxury, or that $15k USD difference isn't much. Acura RDX starts at $57K CAD, which is 12K CAD less than the Tesla Y, and I'd certainly consider that a luxury car. Other people might not! But that underscores my point that for high earners, "luxury" and "rich" creeps up. (same for me too! I used to think $100k a year was "rich" until I got there and then I conveniently moved up my own personal definition. I don't consider our Honda Odyssey a luxury internally - I consider it a "necessity" or a "practical choice" until I have a "whoa" moment and remember that my parents took five people around in a little Citroen AX and Zastava 101, and that vast majority of people cannot afford a $55k CAD family car - and even we got it used from a 2 year lease because $55k CAD for a car is just a lot lot lot of money)
The price is comparable, the costs of ownership are way lower, and the product is at least twice as good.
There's basically no downside which is why they're selling so well.
Tesla has sold about 5 million vehicles in its entire history. The last time Toyota sold less that 5 million vehicles in a single year was 20 years ago (they do close to a million vehicles a month now [1]). VW Group is not far behind Toyota.
----
1 - https://www.investopedia.com/toyota-global-output-hits-recor...
Officially announcing that FSD is a dead end takes allnof that away, and Tesla might very well be valuated as car company (which it is). And that share price adjustment could, or will, be a very serious problem Musk and his enterprises.
Energy. Batteries. Charging network. Top selling vehicles (Model Y is best selling car worldwide)…
So no, having the best selling car is by no means a reason Tesla share prices are where they are.
You could make the argument a few years ago that Tesla was only electric car maker and would capture the market as it grew. But now lots of companies make electric cars. Electric cars are booming, Tesla is growing fast, but they are losing market share.
Most of Tesla's valuation is easily attributable to the fact they sell a ton of cars, with very high profit margins, and are on track to sell even more in the future.
If a company consistently lies to its customers and the market as a whole, shouldn't there be consequences?
The Supercharger Network is nice as well but Electrify America and evGo have been scaling hard as well and they work for the most part. Not like that matters because the Supercharger Network is being opened up.
2 million miles per day of FSD driving is impressive. The resulting training data from every corner of the USA is a bonkers advantage.
All models that we train today have edge cases where the model produces wildly inaccurate output. As far as I'm aware, nobody yet has managed to squeeze this problem out.
ChatGPT is still an overall useful tool with the occasional hallucination. Those types of edge cases in software driving a car are unacceptable.
In FSD, as you point out, the stakes are higher. It makes a different design decision: it slows down in low-confidence situations. Just like a person. If you watch a FSD video, you'll see that most of the human interventions happen because FSD lost confidence in a tricky scenario and halted the car even though the pathing ultimately wound up being correct. This won't solve every edge case, but neither do humans -- the bar is (or should be) "better than human," not "perfect," otherwise we are sacrificing lives on principle.
I have no idea if training will stall out half way through the march of 9s. It might, but if it does, it won't be because there is no high level strategy to control hallucinations. That already exists.
Customers are willing to tolerate the latter right now because they believe the former is still in development.
I'm not here to argue that the overly enthusiastic timetables weren't cringe. They definitely were. I'm just here because there seems to be consensus that FSD is doomed and it doesn't remotely seem that way to me.
My point is that in the long run, Tesla cannot solve the ML edge cases by having a human available to take over at a split second notice.
I dunno. I personally think the Tesla approach is fundamentally better because it obtains more data, faster. Millions of miles per day rather than millions of miles per year, with better macrodiversity to boot. However, that's just a heuristic: we've got a Tortoise and Hare scenario and as the parable teaches us, it's not so difficult to imagine a scenario where slow and steady wins the race. Even though I favor the Tesla approach, I could see this going either way.
That said, I do think it's uncharitable to read failure into Tesla's high level decisions. They could have chosen the Waymo path and dumped all their effort into maximizing reliability on a small scenario subset. They chose not to. There are Andrej Karpathy interviews about it. They wanted to data-max. They data-maxed. Now they have 300x the data collection rate of Waymo. That's not failure, and it may even be a killer advantage. We'll see.
Citation needed.
What Tesla lacks is quality data, which Waymo has due to their high fidelity sensors. Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for. They still have embarrassing failures so basic in nature [1], you know they're going nowhere. If all it took was data, they would have something meaningful by now.
[1] https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1727889381309239731
Anyway, you asked for citations. Here they are.
Waymo:
> Waymo was the clear leader in 2022 with 2.9 million miles with safety drivers
https://www.eetimes.com/waymo-cruise-dominate-av-testing/#:~....
Tesla:
> FSD Now Drives 1 Million Miles Per Day
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1327/tesla-fsd-milestone-1....
> Graph showing 2M miles per day
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
> Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for.
Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
> Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
And what exactly have they got to show for it? All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco. You don't need nationwide data not to run stop signs or swerve onto oncoming traffic.
> All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco
Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade. Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere. You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope. Time will tell.
Waymo does most of its training in simulation. They do 20+ million miles of simulation every single day with 25,000 "virtual" vehicles. They don't even have to put out many cars for training.
> Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think driving in SF is easy or that Waymo is only doing it in the easiest situations. They cover the entire city 24/7, and in rain and fog.
> Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere.
And they won't because maps are clearly a big part of their tech stack and they've found a way to efficiently maintain them. That's what gives them the confidence a.k.a reliability to remove the driver.
> You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope.
So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today. Community trackers (absence of Tesla sharing data) show Tesla's intervention rate hasn't really improved much at all and they still seem to make extremely basic mistakes. So the formula clearly isn't working as of today.
> if you think driving in SF is easy
I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring. Google and Waymo are used to having a scale advantage, but Tesla's fleet utterly dwarfs them.
> Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today.
That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
> So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla.
FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time. They don't even use freeways, last I checked. Slow and steady is a fine strategy, I wish them luck in the marathon, but it's a bit early to call this one for Waymo.
I'm used to holding back the enthusiasm in Tesla circles where we are naturally predisposed to call the race early for Tesla, so this is a fun change of pace.
Then explain to me why it can’t stop for stop signs in SF or can’t drive in a straight line without swerving onto oncoming traffic. Surely, they have a lot of data from the city with their large fleet? Either the data is helping or it’s not.
> That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
Yes, with a driver. And still with poor intervention rates after years of development. What’s Tesla’s timetable for getting their reliability up and removing the driver? That’s really the ballgame in self driving.
> FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time.
“Works everywhere” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when you rely on a driver to prevent crashes. Literally does not pass the true test of self driving.
It took Waymo 10 years to completely remove the driver. Now they’re announcing new cities and capabilities constantly, with freeways coming soon. Let’s see how many “rewrites” it takes for Tesla to tell drivers not to pay attention, let alone completely removing them. I wish them luck (as a Model 3 owner), but they’re working with their hands tied behind their backs on this one.
I'll take a ride in a self driving taxi through residential streets that might hit a dog.
I will not pay for a vehicle that will hard brake on a highway or drive under a tractor trailer.
Maybe after more deaths and data Tesla will pull ahead in that risk calculation but I will not pay to be part of that.
Any other move causes a precipitous drop in stock price as investors see that they won't be taking over the entire transportation industry.
Oh wait, thats exactly what we see.
Tesla’s full self driving system is the only one on the consumer market that will drive on city streets for you in the form of beta software. Yes, it’s going to make you touch the wheel and prove you are alert. Which competitor doesn’t? Yes, it’s a beta that isn’t done. Yes, it will disengage at some point. Are there any other car makers with software that is further along?
A Waymo driverless cab has a roof rack and all four corners of the vehicle covered with equipment that might cost up to five figures to produce and install. It isn’t a consumer product. The whole reason consumer automakers like Tesla don’t want to bother with that equipment is that it isn’t something that will ever make financial sense. Consumer personal vehicles are cost control exercises where every dollar and cent counts. When you buy a base model Tacoma and it has an 8” screen instead of a 12” screen, that’s a change that saved Toyota $5-10 at most, and that $5 or $10 matters.
Your comment makes it sound like Tesla is in some kind of financial or competitive danger because of its autopilot/FSD feature, but I think that just isn’t true from a dollars and cents standpoint. If anything Tesla’s strategy has much higher profit margin potential due to its reliance on consumer grade equipment.
That matters, but what almost surely matters more is providing a differentiation among the trim levels to justify the four-figure difference in prices.
When questioned on their own promises, you can't turn around and say "It's a beta; no other car maker is further along".
Of course, it's a successful business already because many consumers believed Tesla's (false) promises. If that's your bar, then very well. But they still haven't met their original stated goal and it doesn't look like they're going to anytime soon.
Mercedes's Drive Pilot (L3), which you can buy in a production car today, is explicitly advertised as allowing drivers to take their attention off the road and do other things in specific situations.
It's not L5, but it'll absolutely tolerate inattention and let you e.g. pull out your iPad to wage an HN comment battle while it drives you from Berlin to Potsdam.
This is maybe technically true but in practice not really correct. Some conditions to use it are (per https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot):
Clear lane markings on approved freeways Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH Daytime lighting and clear weather
So if it's night or raining or foggy, you can't use it for that drive. If there's no or little traffic, you can't use it for that drive. In circumstances in which you can use it, you're gonna be doing 40MPH in the right lane.
So it needs other vehicles to orient itself?
Can we stop pretending that other manufacturers have better self-driving capabilities when they have such SEVERE restrictions?
I can use Autopilot at night with light rain at 80 mph. It's actually amazing how well it can read lines.
https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovation/product-innovatio...
Very specific situations.
So Mercedes is going to take 100% liability if their system causes a crash, right?
Baloney. I, and many others (and as you point out, many Tesla owners already have) would pay considerably for true self driving that actually worked. That is, if I could get true self driving (meaning I could take a nap or read a book), I would easily pay for lidar and other advanced sensors.
The reason I'd never trust Tesla's FSD claims is that I believe (like many of their own engineers) that their (really Musk's) "camera only" approach is foolhardy and unsafe.
If Tesla gets their solution across the finish line, Waymo’s solution is instantly uncompetitive just from a hardware cost standpoint. The fact that they’re first to get higher level self driving working would become instantly irrelevant.
I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced.
Elon is an idiot but he wasn’t wrong about the general idea of having a very low hardware cost. There’s almost no point in getting something working with exotic equipment.
The stakes are a tad different. I can accept the slightly lower visual quality of VHS compared to Beta. For self driving, if the lower technological level results in a slightly higher chance of "you're dead", I'm not going to be cavalier about what I choose.
What I mean here is that if Tesla and other automakers are developing cheap-to-mass-produce autonomous driving that ends up being 5 years behind Waymo, their lack of first-mover status is moot. The moment that the cheaper technology it catches up in capability well enough to be reasonably safe and equivalent, Waymo is stuck with a more complex and costly solution.
Waymo will be making the hand-crafted mechanical watch while the automakers will be making cheap Quartz watches. Both tell time equally well.
I know it's not the right analogy, that's why I used it as an example of what you proposed, i.e. "I think of it like a format war. The winner isn’t usually the one that is the most technologically advanced."
The point being, in normal "format wars", people are willing to take certain tradeoffs because the stakes are low - I'm willing to be cheap because the difference in video or audio quality or whatever is negligible to me.
That dynamic doesn't exist with self-driving cars. If one system is able to drive just .5% better, I'd pay a ton more for that because my life is on the line. And it's not at all like Waymo is building a "hand-crafted mechanical watch" - they're building a system with better sensors to provide a better experience. I sincerely doubt leaving out these sensors will ever lead to a safer experience.
"Full Self-Driving Capability: $12,000"
Source: tesla.com
Why do people ignore comma.ai? They call it ADAS instead of FSD? Their marketing is confusing because they just provide hardware for MIT license OSS?
This seems maybe technically true but extremely misleading. There is of course always a driver in the car, but they have absolutely clocked many miles with a driver in the car not needing to intervene.
You could start me in goal for the Leafs and I bet I could clock many hours of scoreless game time in a season.
I would describe it as a system for rapid reaction and lane assist. It's very... very poor at self driving, outside of an empty interstate.
"Always a driver in the car" != driverless
You often see waymos cruising around sans driver. That's real driverless.
Very cool. Where? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it anywhere in LA.
https://waymo.com/tour/#schedule
Join the waitlist asap so you can get access when they launch in socal.
It's the 0.01% of miles where an empty carrier bag blows across the road, or a fire truck is stopped in your lane, or a kid crosses the road without looking, that makes self driving hard.
FSD doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be consistently better than the typical/average driver and cause or get into less accidents than real people do.
That day is coming - it may be TSLA, it might be someone else, but sooner or later you won't even be able to afford the insurance for a car that is powered by a human if FSD provably is safer in agrregate.
Would I definitely react in the optimal way if a person hit my windshield? I wouldn't bet on it, and I would say there is a nontrivial likelihood that I would accidentally step on the gas and run over the person. That's just the nature of dealing with a truly one in a million situation that I'm totally unprepared for (just as the autonomous car was totally unprepared for it).
Sure, they have hobbled themselves with lack of LIDAR - but it seems that planning and decision making is the stumbling block for most systems, not object recognition.
But still, I think there must be some poor management or a lot of bad luck in that team not to see more success.
Hardware and HD maps makes a lot of difference too. Planning and decision making always becomes easier when you have a perfect estimate of the environment and good predictions of other agents behaviors. Intent matters a lot more than just recognition/detection in this setting.
To be fair I'd say Autopilot team is doing pretty good for the team of their size. They are no where close to Waymo, that's super clear, but if they focused all of their stack on making driver assistive tech rather than trying to push towards FSD they'd probably be better off.
Sure, but in every independent test, Tesla's smart driving capabilities get completely trounced by Subaru EyeSight. Does Subaru also have vastly more PhD researchers than Tesla?
I mean that's what literally all of the data shows, e.g.:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
1. the AEB may run on a different codepath than FSD
2. AEB needs to decide when it is appropriate to override the driver, e.g. if the driver is behaving as though they are paying attention, e.g. by repeatedly stepping on the accelerator, it is undesirable to override the driver's deliberate actions even if it appears that the driver is about to run into something. On the other hand, when the car is driving autonomously, it has full control to avoid running into anything at all.
Also, instead of trusting unscientific tabloid news with inconsistent methodologies, why not use the standard assisted driving scores from official government tests, such as the Euro NCAP? Teslas score by far the highest. https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-driving...
Your link shows Tesla scores 36/100 in assistance competence, the lowest score by far. The second lowest is 52/100 and the average over all models (excluding Tesla) being ~67/100.
* https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model+y/46618
* https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model+s/47760
which is by far the highest out of all models tested.
What you just linked is the AEB (and other collision avoidance/warning) rating and “AEB has nothing to do with self driving or Autopilot” as you said, so is totally irrelevant.
So, I stand by your position that we should trust Euro NCAP which means concluding Tesla Autopilot is by far the worst system.
For what it's worth, I have lots of experience with both Autopilot (both legacy and FSD) and various cruise control implementations. Tesla is honestly just vastly better.
If you're aiming for end-to-end neural networks, you shouldn't have hard overlay facts like this. Ideally you get all the behaviour you need from curating training data, but if you can't do that the most you should have location specific info-vectors that nudge the network into making the right decision if needed. Such info-vectors can be used for all kinds of things, like "this city has aggressive drivers", "this street has a blind corner", "there's a dog at this house who loves to run under wheels", "this country drives on the other side of the road", etc.
The hardcoding approach says "This is a sign. 100% sure.".
The vector approach says "There's a hard to see stop sign around here, boost up the probability of anything stop-sign-ish a bunch".
The difference functionally is that nothing in the real world is ever 100% certain. So you should never tell any bayesian machine (which a neural network effectively is) that anything is 100% true.
The vector approach I outlined is far more general than the above though - it allows any behaviour of the car to be tweaked automatically or manually. location-specific vectors can be learned from data, and/or put in by operatives. The way the neural net trains, the meaning of a vector could 'evolve' too - for example, whenever a human puts in that there is a hidden stop sign, the neural net might learn that that means other human drivers might occasionally fail to see the sign and stop in those locations. Even though it had never witnessed a human failing to stop in this specific location, it has learnt that is part of the meaning of this vector.
After "resolving" the issue, then they can resume tolerating the normal probabilities.
In the US, it might be more of a precaution. In Europe, it could be more of a legal obligation. Either way, I doubt engineering has a say in the matter.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
That is quite backwards.
When they first launched, the steering wheel checks were every fifteen minutes. They reduced it to five minutes, and slowly had to be dragged kicking and screaming due to threats from the NHTSA to get to where it is now. Even now, most of their attitude to it has been very nudge nudge wink wink, "yeah, they make us tell you to pay attention but you don't have to" (until you do get in a collision, and they throw you under the bus, of course).
You made my point for me. It's less about steering wheel checks and more about taking liability. They can remove the driver and take liability only if they are confident in their system. They are not.
1. I could understand firing a few top executives, but is laying off a quarter of the staff likely to make the cars safer? Shouldn't they be adding people focused on safety if they intend to continue to pursue it?
2. Far more people each day die in GM's not-self-driving vehicles. Why are they not firing people over that?
I guess the generous perspective is that maybe they are trying to change an internal culture? Or maybe reduce their cost base so they have a longer runway in which to emphasize safety?
But a concerning perspective, for me, is that they are irrationally prioritizing the negative publicity associated with a single rare/newsworthy incident over the unpublicized/not-newsworthy daily drumbeat of human-caused auto deaths. And that doesn't seem to be good for safety in the long term.
Should there be a comma after 'standardisation'. Maybe after 'launch', too?
(2) is an age-old question. Why are people upset over Fukishima but not air pollution deaths from oil & gas?
It reflects the fact that they can no longer legally operate in their main market.
First, you need to consider accidents per mile driven.
Second, you need to consider accidents attributable to the manufacturer as opposed to user error. In driverless, every accident is manufacturer error to some degree. Recalls are a decent proxy for manufacturer error in non-driverless. I'm sure that heads do roll at GM when a recall occurs.
Though as bad as it is (or isn't, I'm not super informed on the very latest version of FSD), it seems like Tesla has improved a lot recently. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's good at all, just that it was pretty bad when they started the beta. So I'm not sure which approach will end up winning. As weird as it sounds, going about it so slowly just makes you a lot more vulnerable when stuff goes wrong like with the Cruise car accident. Tesla on the other hand is a car manufacturer, so they won't really ever "quit" unless they shut down.
That's the only heuristic that matters for the public and lawmakers. Like it or not.
That and they do higher speed roads, offer service during the daytime, service the airport (in Phoenix), use more direct routes, handle more complex maneuvers, have driven a lot more miles and served more trips, and so forth and so on.
Comparing Tesla Autopilot to other quasi-Autopilots makes more sense.
The real difference is that Tesla sells cars, makes money and can use this as a feature in their cars. For basic autopilot of course, but also for other things. So its worth doing for them even if they don't reach Level 5. They have not stacked their financial viability on that. Arguably they have stacked part of their credibility on that, but they have lost most of that.
Waymo and Cruise basically don't have a relevant product and wont have one for quite a while.
Getting to FSD is probably moving a lot slower than they hoped and it's looking more and more like it will be another decade (or multiple) until a self driving company can turn a dime of profit. GM doesn't strike me as a particularly innovative company so the idea of a decades long moonshot probably isn't very appealing to them.
The dragging / lying to regulators incident was bad but axing the founders / CEO seems like it would have been enough if GM were excited about the company long term.
> The departures include leaders from Cruise’s legal, government affairs, commercial operations and safety and systems teams, according to the company-wide message, which GM and Cruise spokespeople confirmed was authentic.
So who exactly is in charge at Cruise right now? I'm lost.
Most of the layoffs are within the operations side that assumed broader immediate rollout, and engineering is "largely not impacted."
Waymo is looking more and more reliable.
by far the most toxic place I have ever worked, I look forward to dancing on its grave