Comment by boshalfoshal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boshalfoshal | Hacker News Reader

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I think it will be Tesla. Regulatory pressures for them just lifted, and they move faster than all the other driverless companies, courtesy of Elon's fairly hardcore mode of operation.

It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.

I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.

Tesla is a veeeeery distant second. Elon is full gung ho on vision only. They even removed ultrasonic sensors for parking. Tesla even removed radar. Vision only is Tesla’s bet.

Meanwhile Waymo bets on jamming the car full of sensors to ensure it has superhuman 360 perception in all conditions with multiple sensor redundancy. Waymo takes safety insanely seriously. Tesla doesn’t care if 100s die in their car while on FSD. Waymo doesn’t want to make cars or manage fleets. They want to purely focus on automating the driver end to end.

Unless Tesla has a magical perception algorithm breakthrough, Waymo may expand all US states that allow it, while Tesla won’t even get an operational robotaxi with 100+ rides per year.

Elon has tremendous success in SpaceX with falcon & starlink, that’s a fact. But Tesla FSD is so much hype compared to substance.

Karpathy said in a recent podcast that they pre-train on LIDAR data so no, Tesla is not gung ho on no LIDAR. They "just" do transfer learning with inference on vision-only, which might be a great idea in the end.

Tesla is a distant first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYlQjINzO_o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoZhER_-nhg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeNKYRWGgBc

We’re talking about robotaxis.

All those are channels that claimed that FSD was great 3+ years ago.

Not exactly reliable sources of information.

Having been in a Tesla in FSD mode recently, it felt quite a lot like Waymo's car did about a decade ago. That's a purely subjective opinion taken off the cuff.

Omar is a fanboy yes, but AIDRIVR and DirtyTesla have been openly criticizing FSD for years and show all the problems openly, now waxing lyric over the latest version. Omar, while sometimes cherrypicking videos, has reportedly had 1 safety critical intervention in over 1000 miles of driving in SF and LA.

I can’t wait to see how badly this comment ages

Maybe I'm missing something but are there any current regulations that make it difficult to operate?

My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.

Most states and communities aren't ok with unproven AVs on their streets causing accidents and injuries, even if they are superficially politically aligned with the AV manufacturer's CEO.

That's a good thing, we shouldn't be lowering the bar for AVs.

There’s a chicken and egg issue with this in that to become proven the AV needs to drive somewhere for a while.

> to become proven the AV needs to drive somewhere for a while.

There's a straightforward solution to this that doesn't compromise public safety:

Employ paid training drivers who monitor the AV while it is collecting training data in environments where it does not yet meet the safety bar. These drivers are paid to be observant and intervene to avoid accidents. Furthermore, in their interventions, these training drivers provide critical training data used to improve the system.

Uber did exactly that and got excoriated when the paid driver was on her phone and the car killed someone on the freeway. I think many people raising are concern trolling this because they either don’t want private cars in favor of public transportation or because they are luddites towards automation of driving jobs.

> Uber did exactly that and got excoriated when the paid driver was on her phone and the car killed someone on the freeway.

This is what Waymo does also.

Perhaps Uber should have been more careful whom they hire, or put stronger controls on what they are allowed to do in the car.

AVs already exceed the quite low bar for humans. The real crux is liability when they screw up.

They exceed the minimum viable human driver. They're some combination of a teenager and grandma. They generally get where they're going safely but anyone who's not a minimum viable driver is cringing pretty often.

Nobody wants to let a minimum viable driver chauffeur them around every day. Accepting the reduced quality of performance and increased risk a short duration cab ride is another story.

The only federal requirements are FMVSS, which have nothing to say on the subject of AVs. Some states have their own testing programs with paperwork requirements.

Nov 18 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab shares rose more than 5% on Monday after Bloomberg News reported that President-elect Donald Trump's transition team was planning to set up federal regulations for autonomous vehicles.

The report comes days after Trump named the automaker's CEO, Elon Musk, as a co-head of the incoming administration's government efficiency department. Trump's team is looking for policy leaders for the transport department to develop a federal regulatory framework, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Last month, Musk criticized the state-by-state approval process, required for self-driving vehicles, as "incredibly painful", weeks after unveiling a two-seat "Cybercab" robotaxi without a steering wheel and foot pedals, set to go into production in 2026.

Interesting... so Musk may be angling to get a federal law passed that would force all states to accept autonomous vehicles with less testing or data sharing than say, California currently requires.

If each car has someone piloting it because the tech can't do it, maybe the tech is the problem? I don't see how cameras can succeed. Sunlight and fog are constant and not practical to work around with visual data. I'm glad there's regulation keeping those lithium incendiaries piloted by people. People are bad enough at driving.

Evs catch on fire less than ICE. Sunlight is not a problem. High dynamic range cams

Let's pretend EV fires aren't exceptional. Sunlight certainly is a problem and you can see that in Tesla's own data.

Can you link said data please

I'm not sure what you want. The NHTSA investigated using Tesla's data and found 956 crashes caused by these types of system failures: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf

If you simply search for things like "tesla direct sunlight", "tesla camera condensation", "tesla camera bad weather", you can see thousands of instances of vehicle cameras not working.

zero instances of sunlight in that pdf or “tesla’s data”

The entire investigation was based on Tesla's data if you're unfamiliar. I don't care what you believe. Seems like you're one who consumes the marketing rather than data.

Tesla’s data talking about sunlight? No please do link a single data point

Tesla will likely kill lots of people, but the regulatory environment will be so loose no one will care.

As a Tesla customer I’m inclined to agree. I paid in full for FSD six years ago, but never received anything even remotely usable in my region. They just took my money and kept lying. The feature is actively dangerous.

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