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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Robotaxi is a classic case of premature optimisation - with Waymo they decided to deploy whatever technology worked best and did not cost-optimise at the start. Each Waymo vehicle is much more expensive than a Tesla, and has much more expensive sensors and compute.

Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle.

There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)

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FSD itself is not a failed bet as a driver-assist system. When it started Tesla was cash poor and often on the verge of collapse, so cutting costs made sense. They will never do as well as a mature Lidar-based solution, but over the years FSD added some value to some people, and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars.

I also think Tesla and their robotaxis are egregiously overhyped, but cutting Lidar was not a terrible business decision at the time. Though it's a terrible decision to have still stuck to vision-only (and using low-quality cameras apparently) when they could have at least got Radar and cheap Lidars.

I wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot. FSD is amazing and I use it door to door wherever I drive. I got a LOT better about a year ago.

But it still makes some dumb mistakes. It is not ‘full self driving.’ It’s 99% percent Autopilot… but I still need to pay attention to the road. (And it enforces this more/better than it used to via the driver camera camera)

I don’t want to guess how long that last 1% will take to be a low enough level of risk. All I can say is that 4 years ago it would do something hazardous every couple minutes. Now I can go hours without disengaging for a safety issue. Most disengages I have now are because it is more cautious than a human driver, or because a scenario is something that I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to fix IF it did the wrong thing.

> I wish they’d named FSD as Autopilot.

"Student driver" would probably be the most accurate and descriptive name. The system can drive acceptably in many situations, but it needs constant monitoring, and could make a fatal mistake at any time.

>and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars.

Not if openpilot is competitive

I’m not saying autopilot was a bad business decision - autopilot has fuelled sales and no doubt has been a great success and is amazing tech for being in consumers cars at fairly low cost.

I’m saying if the goal is to invent true robotaxis (because that’s the market you are going after) then I think waymo’s approach of following what works and cost-optimising later gets you there faster if you have enough funding.

Tesla approach is so much better financially (leaving aside morality and false promises).

Waymo has sunk billions of dollars with almost 0 return yet.

Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.

> Tesla has developed FSD basically for free, because people pay for software that isn't there yet, and Tesla doesn't waste money on expensive hardware.

In financial terms you could call that a liability, and you might reasonably expect to have to pay off that liability at some point i.e. delivering functionality people have already paid for! In that framing I would be more careful in framing FSD as a financial success.

Tesla is a shrinking company with terrible margins. Now that EV credit sales are worthless I don’t see how they’ll be profitable going forward.

Waymo is Google, and thus has infinite money.

Waymo has a level 4 driving system. FSD is certified as level 2.. so as it currently stands Tesla’s offering is competitive with Mercedes/GM/Ford/BMW’s driver assistance systems. Not really a stunning accomplishment, though certainly it’s a decent showing.

People that think those other systems are anywhere comparable to FSD smell of cognitive disonanace. Just try it at some point and compare yourself. Or watch one of a million videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oWDVJ4FjfU

Huawei is better than Tesla according to 'Out of Spec'. Both are level 2. Waymo is level 4. Completely different animal

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g

If the key unlock for self-driving is maximizing real-world training data, then Tesla’s approach of using cameras make sense since it allows them to utilize their entire fleet to deploy incrementally better FSD to.

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