On Self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The core problem is they'll need to go through years of hurdles to get regulatory approval, building up through the same steps that Waymo are going through. It's not a technological problem, it's a regulatory and political problem.
From a public acceptance view, I think after the first wave gets deployed by any company the companies that come after it will have significantly more leeway and the public will more easily accept them.
Here in the UK, they recently passed this law, which could allow self driving cars from 2026 - https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/uk_law_gives_green_li...
For example, say Waymo does all of the hard work of establishing regulations and making all the big mistakes. Tesla then comes in later and is able to benefit from Waymo's public lessons. Because Tesla can set a direction more clearly, they might leapfrog Waymo.
On regulation, I believe regulators are prone to bending to the will of local constituents. Uber was very effective at galvanizing voters when local markets were threatening legislation via the app. I imagine the many millions of people that will own a Tesla in 2 years will have no problem clicking a “message your local congressman” button on the screen to get this approved in most markets. It won’t matter if NYC, Portland, San Fran and LA ban it.
Of course, the data will have to fully support the safety of Tesla FSD. I’m curious to watch it play out.
"Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar (theverge.com)" [1]
And to be clear, my sense is the same: FSD microdriving at this point is better than mine, interventions are about planning and intersection recognition. It'll be slow to take turns sometimes, it'll be in the wrong lane to prepare for a turn, stuff like that.
Teslas are not "self driving", they don't allow you in any way to rely on the car alone, for any length of time, to drive itself: it's the drivers who are preventing accidents, not Tesla's FSD. When drivers of these vehicles lose attention, accidents do happen and people have died.
This is in contrast to Waymo and Mercedes, where the car actually drives itself, using both vision and other sensors, and the driver can actually disengage.
What I'm saying is the official line from Tesla: they don't even claim to have achieved level 3, nevermind the level 4 driving you seem to think they have.
More realistically, if Tesla believed their car is safe without human intervention, they could, you know, put them out on the streets without drivers, like Waymo did. Or at least tell their customers that it's actually safe to not pay full attention and that Tesla would accept liability if accidents happen, like Mercedes did. Or something in between. Since they are not doing any of these things, I think your opinion that is just obviously wrong.
This is disingenuous. And the reason is you clearly refuse to take testimony from those of us who do this every day. I'll tell you right now that it's been well over a year since I had any kind of safety-related disengagement. So, you'll change your mind?
Of course not. You're going to say that that's not enough data, and then go and cherry pick a single accident or testimony to the contrary to invalidate the data that you just said was a valid test.
Like I said, non-falsifiable.
It's remarkable how many comments on "hacker news" are basically "I like it, trust me it works great". Line noise.
I don't get why people cheer on it and even compare it with Tesla, which goes for ... actual self driving
In contrast, Tesla only has promises. In practice, you can't do anything with FSD that you couldn't do without it, because you have to pay exactly as much attention when it's engaged as when it's disengaged, and you can't take your hands off the wheel or it full-on disengages.
Mercedes has an excellent base to build up from. Tesla has next to nothing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/tesla-must-provide-nhtsa-wit...
Maybe it’s better in terms of customer satisfaction or reliability, but in terms of the SAR J3016 standard, it hasn’t improved at all.
If I were to argue about manual driving from my personal driving, I'd be way off. I haven't had an accident in decades. Not even any close calls. If I extrapolating my accident rate out to the world, I would assume that human-driven cars are a perfectly safe technology.
In the real world, all accidents are a long-tail phenomenon. They happen pretty rarely, often under conditions that are unusual or unexpected. So somebody saying "in these last few months I hardly ever have to intervene anymore to not die", a standard that would cause a driving instructor to fail a teen driver, not only doesn't give me confidence that this technology is a-ok for road use, but suggests to me they haven't really thought about what is required for safety at global scale.
Accidents might be long-tail phenomenon but driving habits are observable. Autopilot has a consistent, safe, alert demeanor on the road. It reacts to vehicles I as a driver can't as quickly see, changing situations that it would take me an extra half second or more to react to.
Compare that to the average human driver on the road - a third or more of whom you can expect to see holding a phone - and I think it's a reasonable conclusion to say it's already at least marginally better. And if we are talking about accidents, you can't deny that people are generally terrible at choosing the best possible reaction to an emergency situation that happens in the space of a few seconds.
For example, I might note that a couple weeks ago a Tesla almost crashed into a train: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ap-fsd-related-crash...
The dashcam vids are sobering: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vxlz4vk3rck114145nbp8/AAukGDt...
By “very effective”, you mean just throwing around millions [1] of dollars to spam the local population to “galvanize” them to vote for/against certain laws?
Didn’t work in Austin, TX [2].
You are overestimating the power of what FSD can do. The unfortunate mistake most TSLA drivers do in the first place.
TSLA is playing catch up and burning massive amounts of cash. Laying off people left and right. The market and interest for TSLA is shrinking.
[1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-04-30/money-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-austin-texa...
It seems to be an unnecessary anthropomorphization to me. One of the greatest weaknesses of human drivers is the limited information available to act on. And there’s no possible scenario in which computer vision overcomes information unavailability issues. Fog or obstructions will always defeat it.
Never trust a charlatan.
In May 2019, Kai-Fu Lee said, "If there are a million Tesla robo-taxis functioning on the road in 2020, I will eat them.": https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
Experts at the time knew what Musk was saying was nonsense, so I think "charlatan" is exactly the right word here.
The traditional car brands are losing money on EV's and/or can't scale the production up enough. BYD is probably the only other manufacturer that can compete with Tesla on scale and cost.
And, barring a corporate reorg, it never will except by buying from Google, since Google is its corporate sibling, not parent.
I believe that million-mile electric cars are quite possible, but 2021 Tesla's certainly weren't that.
That charlatan? If that's how you define charlatan, I wish we could all accomplish that much.
(what other accomplishments did I miss; tbh I don't even like electric cars from a practical or even environmental perspective, and yet even I can admit that what he did was simply incredible.)
My question is what happens to all other car markers if it turns out Elon and Andrej Karpathy's strategy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q) is the correct one?
Or just the entire ride.
Declining to provide the information on how much humans were driving to a journalist writing an article about the experience just makes it look like Waymo decided that there would be zero errors.
Meanwhile, Tesla just said go for it, and then the author wrote a review disparaging Tesla, who gave "full" access without human help. Instead of Waymo, who declined to say whether humans drove the car.
Waymo could offer a Mechanical Turk to play chess with and this author wouldn't even blink.
This is an information-free article with a click-bait title.
Does Waymo dispatch a physical person to the scene (like their old competitor, Cruise)?
The cars have obviously done well for them, but their solar and charging are the real innovations. I’ve been waiting for the day there’s pressure to split the car business away from Tesla
Didn’t they just cut their supercharger team though?
Musk has this ability to put the right people in the right places so that when he’s not around things run well.
It’s when he starts getting involved that weird stuff happens.
Sure, that's also true of every tech company. Tesla's P/E ratio is around 47, which isn't great, but also isn't terrible.
But I agree that taking on the robotaxi market does move them further towards the stock end. In financial terms, deep integration is awesome until it isn't. Eventually most, perhaps all, layers will rely too much on the rest of the stack propping them up and then it all falls down. Mid-term investors will happily bet on abandoning ship right before that happens.
Putting it in the best possible light, Tesla represented a bet on developing both a new carmaker and the dominant car of the future: electric and fully automated. That was a big gamble, and it required gobs of money. Existing carmakers could try to-self fund that, Tesla couldn't. So Musk, marketer extraordinaire, built up a Jobsian reality distortion field around Tesla. He made his cost of capital incredibly low by hyping the stock to the moon.
If the bet pays off, Musk will historically be seen as a genius. But if it doesn't, he'll be seen as a fraud who milked credulous investors for a project that was never going to work out. And I think that's true even if he ends up with a modestly successful niche carmaker. Many others would see that as a huge accomplishment, but it'll be so far short of what investors thought they were paying for that even visions of an automated future won't make up for their large losses.
We had government programs doing exactly this until republicans gutted them.
Would have been more stable, cost-efficient, safer, and it'd actually exist today.
The reality is that there are fundamental, unsolvable problems with the current "self-driving" stack. From the cameras to signal processing.
Everyone involved in this space has been repeating the same thing since basically the early 2010's.
Just stop pouring needless amounts of money into these projects that have offered very little fruit. Build the standardized, simpler infra with the money and fund trains while we're at it.
Stop this non-sense.
Even in factories, within intense control, autonomous robots can struggle and it takes a lot of effort to keep them functioning.
So? You're missing the point. It'd still be miles and miles ahead of where we are today.
AND it'd still cost less money than we've spent today AND it'd keep money in the right places AND it'd provide plenty of useful jobs for people that need it.
This wasn't some hypothetical either. We had working standards and working prototypes for all of this. Congress was actually gearing up to make this a reality back around 2010. But Republicans.
It's what we in the business call a "no brainer."
Saying "it just doesn't work" when it CLEARLY did is wild.
That's nice dear.
>That would take trillions.
You know a lot of this was again, already figured out. Instead of making up numbers you could just go read the ITSPAC reports.
* be completely autonomous from day 1, and progressively increase the number of situations you can drive through;
* or drive through every legal situation from day 1, and increase the % of them handled autonomously.
I believe the 2nd approach, Tesla's, has one key advantage: it collects data about freak situations much faster and more exhaustively. Given how data has become the key resource in AI, that's probably a very strategic asset they've accumulated here.
Also, Waymo's joker (remote operation by humans when the software bails out) is totally replicable by Tesla robotaxis.
While considering other foot and vehicle traffic, I swerved into the Waymo's direction to test the reaction. The car swerved a bit, honked, and slowed. I then cut the vehicle off knowing it would submit to my position and continued to drive to my destination.
The fastest way to get adoption is to isolate the lanes between driverless and human driver vehicles. Unexpected threats and bad actors like myself would not be able to cross that line, limiting the impact of foot traffic and outside interference.
So basically Waymo are remote controlled taxis
Remote control like this requires cars to safely deal with hazards on their own. But, it doesn’t require software to be able to solve every problem.
If I were in their shoes, especially given the Cruise debacle, I'd have continuous remote human monitoring of every vehicle. They're already burning billions on this; if having one minimum-wage worker per vehicle just hovering over a big red stop button prevents a gruesome accident and a multi-month pause, it'd be money well spent.
It's the perfect way to integrate RLHF until they've trained out all the kinks.
(my favorite go proverb)
Self driving only has to be better than people drivers, statistically, to be a benefit to society. This probably isn't a very high bar.
Further, I think a variety of factors, including politics and liability structures, mean self-driving cars will have to be radically better than the average human driver. For example, each car-caused death is seen as the responsibility of some human. But every Waymo death will be seen as the responsibility of Waymo. Responsibility for the current 100 deaths per day is diffuse, and so accepted. But if it's 40 deaths per day for Waymo and 60 for Musk, nobody's going to shrug at that.