Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation, and will be able to claim full self driving, but like fusion power and post-singularity AI, it seems to be one of those things where the closer we get to it, the further away it is.
Others are in prison for far less.
The first time could be an honest mistake, but after a certain point we have to assume that it’s just a lie to boost the stock price.
Just like politicians, it seems there's no repercussions for CEO's lying as long as it's fleecing the peons and not the elite.
It's a big club, and we ain't in it.
try matching a cat's eye on those metrics. and it is much simpler that human one.
a cursory glance did not find studies on cat peripheral vision, but would assume it's worse than human if only because they rely more on audio
But the human brain can process the semantics of what the eye sees much better than current computers can process the semantics of the camera data. The camera may be able to see more than the eye, but unless it understands what it sees, it'll be inferior.
Thus Tesla spontaneously activating its windshield wipers to "remove something obstructing the view" (happens to my Tesla 3 as well), whereas the human brain knows that there's no need to do that.
Same for Tesla braking hard when it encountered an island in the road between lanes without clear road markings, whereas the human driver (me) could easily determine what it was and navigate around it.
No part costs less, it also doesn't break, it also doesn't need to be installed, nor stocked in every crisis dealership's shelf, nor can a supplier hold up production. It doesn't add wires (complexity and size) to the wiring harness, or clog up the CAN bus message queue (LIDAR is a lot of data). It also does not need another dedicated place engineered for it, further constraining other systems and crash safety. Not to mention the electricity used, a premium resource in an electric vehicle of limited range.
That's all off the top of my head. I'm sure there's even better reasons out there.
> Lidar can be added for hundreds of dollars per car.
But LIDAR would probably be wired more directly to the computer then use a packet protocol.
LIDAR based self-driving cars will always massively exceed the safety and performance of vision-only self driving cars.
Current Tesla cameras+computer vision is nowhere near as good as humans. But LIDAR based self-driving cars already have way better situational awareness in many scenarios. They are way closer to actually delivering.
it has to do with the processing of information and decision-making, not data capture
Wake me up when the tech reaches Level 6: Ghost Ride the Whip [0].
I guess you don't drive? You use more senses than just vision when driving a car.
You also do use your ears when driving.
> That something magical is happening because the eyes are close topographically to the brain?
It sounds to me like you have to study what eyes actually are. It's not about proximity or magic, they are a part of your brain, and we're only beginning to understand their complexities. Eyes are not just sensory organs, so the analogy to cameras is way off. They are able to discern edges, motion, color, and shapes, as well as correct errors before your brain even is even aware.
In robotics, we only get this kind of information after the camera image has been sent through a perception pipeline, often incurring a round trip through some sort of AI and a GPU at this point.
> Sounds implausible.
Musk just spent billions of dollars and the better part of a decade trying to prove the conjecture that "cameras are sufficient", and now he's waving the white flag. So however implausible it sounds, it's now more implausible than ever that cameras alone are sufficient.
No. I live in snow country. Folks with vestibular issues are advised to pull over in snowstorms because sometimes the only indication that you have perpendicular velocity and are approaching a slide off the road or spin is that sense. My Subaru has on more than one occasion noticed a car before I did based on radar.
Vision only was a neat bet. But it will cost Tesla first to market status generally and especially in cities, where regulators should have fair scepticism about a company openly trying to do self driving on the cheap.
I'm consistently surprised by how immune to sun-blindness my car is. It regularly reads traffic lights that have the sun right next to them; I've never seen any discernible degradation due to too much light, too little light, or bad contrast of any kind.
You're just bringing up a never-ending stream of but-what-abouts, so I'm done refuting them after this. It's not a good use of my time.
> You're just bringing up a never-ending stream of but-what-abouts
By "what abouts" you of course mean "shortcomings of camera-only systems that make them unsuitable for full autonomy."
> It's not a good use of my time.
No it's not, it's a losing battle, and Musk has admitted it. Camera-only systems will not enable full self driving. Y'all got scammed.
What is up with hn today? Was there a mass stroke?
Provable by one-eyed people being able to drive just fine, as could you with one eye covered.
The problem is clearly a question of the fidelity of the vision and our ability to slave a decision maker and mapper to it.
Deaf drivers (may include drivers playing loud music too) don't, unless they're somehow tasting the other vehicles.
Nature's accelerometers.
I've had mine go bad, and it wasn't fun.
Just sayin'...
I was unable to stand up.
It all came out OK, in the end, but it was touch-and-go for a while.
Not quite a Lotus Position, but I used the Epley Maneuver on her which immediately lessened her symptoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver
Even driving with mild vertigo could be difficult because you want to restrict your head movement.
Source: my dad gets Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV)
He's mentally sharp, and has a science background, but nope!
I am not saying that you couldn’t do this with hardware, I am quite confident you could actually, but I am just saying that there are senses other than sight and sound at play here.
But that's sort of besides the point: why would you not use additional data when the price of the sensors are baked into the feature that you're selling?
While it doesn't often snow or ice up here (it does sometimes), it does rain a good bit from time to time. You can usually feel your car start to hydroplane and lose traction well before anything else goes wrong. It's an important thing to feel but you wouldn't know it's happening if you're going purely on vision.
You can often feel when there's something wrong with your car. Vibrations due to alignment or balance issues. Things like that.
Those are quick examples off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.
Of course, all these things can be tracked with extra sensors, I'm not arguing humans are entirely unique in being able to sense these things. But they are important bits of feedback to operate your car safely in a wide range of conditions that you probably will encounter, and should be accounted for in the model.
As for auditory feedback, while some drivers don't have sound input available to them (whether they're deaf or their music is too loud or whatever) sound is absolutely a useful input to have. You may hear emergency vehicles you cannot see. You may hear honking alerting you to something weird going on in a particular direction. You may hear issues with your car. Those rumble strips are also tuned to be loud when cars run over them as well. You can hear the big wind gusts and understand those are the source of weird forces pushing the car around as opposed to other things making your car behave strangely. So sure, one can drive a car without sound, but its not better without it.
Sensory processing is not matched, sure, but IMO how a human drives is more involved than it needs to be. We only have two eyes and they both look in the same direction. We need to continuously look around to track what's around us. It demands a lot of attention from us that we may not always have to spare, especially if we're distracted.
Not on all metrics, especially not simultaneously. The dynamic range of human eyes, for example, is extremely high.
AFAIK there is also more than one front camera. Why would anyone try to do it all with one or two camera sensors like humans do it?
It's important to remember that the cameras Tesla are using are optimized for everything but picture quality. They are not just taking flagship phone camera sensors and sticking them into cars. That's why their dashcam recordings look so bad (to us) if you've ever seen them.
Sure, for some definition of "works"...
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
Compare Boston Dynamics and cat. They are on the absolutely different levels for their bodies and their ability to manipulate their bodies.
I have no doubts, that using cameras-only would absolutely work for AI cars, but at the same time I'm feel that this kind of AI is not there. And if we want autonomous cars, it might be possible, but we need to equip them with as much sensors as necessary, not setting any artificial boundaries.
Check out what the Tesla park assist visualization shows now. It's vision based and shows a 3D recreation of the world around the car. You can pan around to see what's there and how far away it is. It's fun to play around with in drive thrus, garages, etc. just to see what it sees.
He said consumers, just buy the car and it will come with an updated. It didn't.
This is a scam, end of story.
7 years of it.
I think you mean "securities fraud", at gargantuan scale at that. Theranos and Nikola were nowhere near that scale.
Perhaps it's that cars are more sacred than healthcare.
There is little to suggest that Tesla is any closer to level 4 automation than Nabisco is. The Dojo supercomputer that was going to get them there? Never existed.
The persistent problem seems to be severe weather, but the gap between the weather a human shouldn't drive in and weather a robot can't drive in will only get smaller. In the end, the reason to own a self-driven vehicle may come down to how many severe weather days you have to endure in your locale.
Germany, Italy, India all stand out as examples to me. The roads and driving culture is very different, and can be dangerous to someone who is used to driving on American suburban streets.
I really do stand by my comment, and apologize for the 'low quality' nature of it. I meant to suggest that we set the bar far higher for AI than we do for people, which is in general a good thing. But still - I would say that by this definition of 'full self driving', it wouldn't be met very well by many or most human drivers.
Of course I may have simply been lucky, but given that my driving license is valid in many countries it seems as though humanity has determined this is mostly a solved problem. When someone says "Put a Waymo on random road in the world, can it drive it?" they mean: I would expect a human to be able to drive on a random road in the world. And they likely could. Can a Waymo do the same?
I don't know the answer to that one. But if there is one thing that humans are pretty good at it is adaptation to circumstances previously unseen. I am not sure if a Waymo could do the same but it would be a very interesting experiment to find out.
American suburban streets are not representative of driving in most parts of the world. I don't think the bar of 'should be able to drive most places where humans can drive' is all that high and even your average American would adapt pretty quickly to driving in different places. Source: I know plenty of Americans and have seen them drive in lots of countries. Usually it works quite well, though, admittedly, seeing them in Germany was kind of funny.
"Am I hallucinating or did we just get passed by an old lady? And we're doing 85 Mph?"
That's experience and you learned and survived to tell the tale. Its almost as though you are capable of learning how to deal with an unfamiliar environment, and fail safe!
I'm a Brit and have driven across most of Europe, US/CA and a few other places.
Southern Italy eg around Napoli is pretty fraught - around there I find that you need to treat your entire car as an indicator: if you can wedge your car into a traffic stream, you will be let in, mostly without horns blaring. If you sit and wait, you will go grey haired eventually.
In Germania, speed is king. I lived there in the 70s-90s as well as being a visitor recently. The autobahns are insane if you stray out of lane one, the rest of the road system is civilised.
France - mostly like driving around the UK apart from their weird right hand side of the road thing! La Perifique is just as funky as the M25 and La Place du Concorde is a right old laugh. The rest of the country that I have driven is very civilised.
Europe to the right of Italy is pretty safe too. I have to say that across the entirety of Europe, that road signage is very good. The one sign that might confuse any non-European is the white and yellow diamond (we don't have them in the UK). It means that you have priority over an implied "priority to the right". See https://driveeurope.co.uk/2013/02/27/priority-to-the-right/ for a decent explanation.
Roundabouts were invented in the US. In the UK when you are actually on a roundabout you have right of way. However, everyone will behave as though "priorite a la doite" and there will often be a stand off - its hilarious!
In the UK, when someone flashes their headlights at you it generally means "I have seen you and will let you in". That generally surprises foreigners (I once gave a lift to a prospective employee candidate from Poland and he was absolutely aghast at how polite our roads seemed to be). Don't always assume that you will be given space but we are pretty good at "after you".
I don't agree.
My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.
My last dozen ridesharing experiences only had a single driver that wasn't actively hazardous on the road. One of them was so bad that I actually flagged him on the service.
My Waymo experiences, by contrast, have all been uniformly excellent.
I suspect that Waymo is already better than the median human driver (anecdata suggests that's a really low bar)--and it just keeps getting better.
> My anecdata suggests that Waymo is significantly better than random ridesharing drivers in the US, nowadays.
Those two aren't really related are they? That's one locality and a specific kind of driver. If you picked a random road there is a pretty small chance that road would be one like the one where Waymo is currently rolled out, and where your ridesharing drivers are representative of the general public, they likely are not.
I answered the question 'What does Waymo lack in your opinion to not be considered "full self driving"?'. And clearly its not if it can't drive on literally 99.99% of roads in the world. Any argument to the contrary is just ridiculous.
Interesting that Waymo now operates just fine in SF fog, and is expanding to Seattle (rain) and Denver (snow and ice).
A system that requires a "higher level" handler is not full self driving.
Which is why an autonomous car company that is responsible and prioritizes safety would never call their SAE Level 4 vehicle "full self-driving".
And that's why it's so irresponsible and dangerous for Tesla to continue using that marketing hype term for their SAE Level 2 system.
If the vehicle has a collision, who's ultimately responsible? That person (or computer) is the driver.
If a Waymo hits a pole for example, the software has a bug. It wasn't the responsibility of a remote assistant to monitor the environment in real time and prevent the accident, so we call the computer the driver.
If we put a safety driver in the seat and run the same software that hits the same pole, it was the human who didn't meet their responsibility to prevent the accident. Therefore, they're the driver.
L4 is "full autonomy, but in a constrained environment." L5 is the holy grail: as good as or better than human in every environment a human could take a car (or, depending on who's doing the defining: every road a human could take a car on. Most people don't say L5 and mean "full Canyonero").
That's a distinction without a difference. Forest service and BLM roads are "roads" but can be completely impassable or 100% erased by nature (and I say this as a former Jeep Wrangler owner), they aren't always located where a map thinks they are, and sometimes absolutely nothing differentiates them from the surrounding nature -- for example, left turn into a desert dry wash can be a "road" and right not.
Actual "full" autonomous driving is crazy hard. Like, by definition you get into territory where some vehicles and some drivers just can't make it through, but it's still a road(/"environment"). And some people will live at the end of those roads.
Are they? Did you mean Autonomous Vehicles?
https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1gsv4d7/waymo_spotte...
> and uses remote operators to make decisions in unusual situations and when it gets stuck.
This is why its limited markets and areas of service: connectivity for this sort of thing matters. Your robotaxi crashing cause the human backup lost 5g connectivity is gonna be a real real bad look. NO one is talking about their intervention stats. IF they were good I would assume that someone would publish them for marketing reasons.
Interventions are a term of art, i.e. it has a specific technical meaning in self-driving. A human taking timely action to prevent a bad outcome the system was creating, not taking action to get unstuck.
> IF they were good I would assume that someone would publish them for marketing reasons.
I think there's an interesting lens to look at it in: remote interventions are massively disruptive, the car goes into a specific mode and support calls in to check in with the passenger.
It's baked into UX judgement, it's not really something a specific number would shed more light on.
If there was a significant problem with this, it would be well-known given the scale they operate at now.
Waymo navigates autonomously 100% of the time. The human backup's role is limited to selecting the best option if the car has stopped due to an obstacle it's not sure how to navigate.
But is Level 4 enough to count as "Full Self Driving"? I'd argue it really depends on how big the geofence area is, and how rare interventions are. A car that can drive on 95% of public roads might as well be FSD from the perspective of the average drive, even if it falls short of being Level 5 (which requires zero geofencing and zero human intervention).
California granted Waymo the right to operate on highways and freeways in March 2024.
It initially seems mad that a human, inside the box can outperform the "finest" efforts of a multi zillion dollar company. The human has all their sensors inside the box and most of them stymied by the non transparent parts. Bad weather makes it worse.
However, look at the sensors and compute being deployed on cars. Its all minimums and cost focused - basically MVP, with deaths as a costed variable in an equation.
A car could have cameras with views everywhere for optical, LIDAR, RADAR, even a form of SONAR if it can be useful, microwave and way more. Accellerometers and all sorts too, all feeding into a model.
As a driver, I've come up with strategies such as "look left, listen right". I'm British so drive on the left and sit on the right side of my car. When turning right and I have the window wound down, I can watch the left for a gap and listen for cars to the right. I use it as a negative and never a positive - so if I see a gap on the left and I hear a car to my right, I stay put. If I see a gap to the left but hear no sound on my right, I turn my head to confirm that there is a space and do a final quick go/no go (which involves another check left and right). This strategy saves quite a lot of head swings and if done properly is safe.
I now drive an EV: One year so far - a Seic MG4, with cameras on all four sides, that I can't record from but can use. It has lane assist (so lateral control, which craps out on many A road sections but is fine on motorway class roads) and cruise control that will keep a safe distance from other vehicles (that works well on most roads and very well on motorways, there are restrictions).
Recently I was driving and a really heavy rain shower hit as I was overtaking a lorry. I immediately dived back into lane one, behind the lorry and put cruise on. I could just see the edge white line, so I dealt with left/right and the car sorted out forward/backward. I can easily deal with both but its quite nice to be able carefully abrogate responsibilities.
Delusionaly generous take. Perhaps even zealotry.