Fundamentally different - people will flock to LiDAR vs Vision when debating this, but the more fundamental difference is that Waymo uses HD mapping + remote support.
edit : also, are there differences in the core algorithms ? Tesla seems to be full AI / ML. Is waymo the same ? ( as the company is older i wonder if they haven't built more things manually)
This is a good read: https://www.understandingai.org/p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominat...
This talk by Waymo co-CEO is even better (especially from 33:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U
Contrary to what other people in this thread are saying, the remote support isn’t remote direct driving of the car - essentially what will happen is that if the car finds itself in a situation where it’s unsure of how to proceed and it’s safe to stop, it will pause for a few seconds and wait for a remote operator to clarify a situation for it.
A good example might be road construction - if the car detects new road construction work that doesn’t match its map of the area, and its onboard systems determine that it’s not sure how to proceed through the construction with confidence, it will send what it thinks the top five likeliest ways to proceed to a remote operator. The operator then selects the proper path (or says that none of them are proper). The car will then follow the path presented by the operator, but actual driving behavior /collision detection / pathfinding is still determined locally. Think of it like ordering a unit around in StarCraft.
How are they doing this on the software stack? Any references?
In one case, greentheonly realized some fraction of Tesla’s cars are shipped out of the factory still in dev mode, with debug mode enabled and increased privileges. He found someone with a car like this who was down to helped and swapped part of his cars hardware with their car, and from then on was able to get a much better view of what was running on his car.
Unfortunately twitter is awful to search and a lot of his info is buried deep in old threads, but a few (old) examples to illustrate that he regularly does this.
Visualizing the outputs of the models running in the car: https://x.com/greentheonly/status/1404164587927314435
Tesla’s dev debug menus circa 2020: https://x.com/greentheonly/status/1336467014727110656
It’s been a while since I’ve worked in the space so I haven’t followed green as closely.
I also made the mistake of assuming the remote operator drives the car but if you watch Waymo's technical videos, it's clear that the AI is in control of the car all all times and the remote operator is just doing near real time labelling of what the car is seeing.
Driverless miles: Waymo 20M, Tesla 0
Self-driving miles: Waymo 20M, Tesla 2000M
Only metric that counts is driverless miles. That's the true test of autonomy.
If you want to play the "ultimate goal" game, the ultimate goal is to do it all profitably at scale -- and Tesla is way ahead on that front, which is why their fleet self-drives almost as much per day as Waymo's fleet has ever driven.
Time will tell, but anyone who can't make a case for both "Tesla wins" and "Waymo wins" scenarios is a fanboy with deeply compromised thought processes.
Tesla may be profitable, but nowhere close to a working solution. So how far ahead are they really?
I don't think Tesla will ever operate a self-driving car with no driver where they are legally liable for crashes.
Google maps is famous for their human driven cars that drive around with sensors. Is there overlap here?
tesla uses cameras + local support (safety driver)
I imagine they'll try to switch to remote support at some point.