The data is just not there for us outsiders to make any kind of case, and thats the skimping out crucial baseline we need.
Every time when he has the choice to do something conservative or bold, he goes for the latter, and so long as he has a bit of luck, that is very much a winning strategy. To most people, I guess the stress of always betting everything on red would be unbearable. I mean, the guy got a $300m cash payout in 1999! Hands up who would keep working 100 hour weeks for 26 years after that.
I'm not saying it is either bad or good. He clearly did well out of it for himself financially. But I guess the whole cameras/lidar thing is similar. Because it's big, bold, from the outset unlikely to work, and it's a massive "fake it till you make it" thing.
But if he can crack it, again I guess he hits the jackpot. Never mind cars, they are expensive enough that Lidar cost is a rounding error. But if he can then stick 3d vision into any old cheap cameras, surely that is worth a lot. In fact wasn't this part of Tesla's great vision - to diversify away from cars and into robots etc. I'm sure the military would order thousands and millions of cheapo cameras that work 90% as well as a fancy Lidar - while being fully solid state etc.
That he is using his clients as lab rats for it is yet another reason why I'm not buying one. But to me this is totally in character for Musk.
How could the richest man in the world give so little back.
Effective altruism and other New Age garbage pseudo philosophy can't hold a candle to that.
To reveal my own bias / worldview, I loathe and detest Bill Gates in nearly every way and have done so for over three decades. I think he has had a massively negative impact on humanity, mainly by making the computer industry so shitty for 4+ decades but in other more controversial areas as well.
With Elon Musk, while perceiving a number of big faults in the man, I also acknowledge that he has helped advance some very beneficial technologies (like electric vehicles and battery storage). So I have a mixed opinion on him, while with Gates, he is almost all evil and has had a massive negative impact on the planet.
I guess what I'm saying is that when people only fixate on one oligarch, which one they mostly focus on can be quite telling.
And he's retired, so the money is no longer useful to him for maintaining control over the company he runs or expanding it, which is when it traditionally starts going to charities.
The way I see it, he converted his cars' greenness into other people's fumes. So not a net win after all.
They've been seen doing this at crime scenes and in the middle of police traffic stops. That speaks volumes too.
> presented with a set of options and they choose one
> they send a physical human to drive the car.
Those all sound like "controls" to me.
"Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. "
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
So they built new controls that typical vehicles don't have. Then they use them. I fail to see how any of this is "incorrect." It is, in fact, _built in_ to the system from the ground up.
Semantic games aside, it is obviously more incorrect to call them "completely self driving" especially when they "ask for help." Do human drivers do this while driving?
The only real test will be who creates the best product, and while waymo seems to have the lead it's arguably too soon to tell.
Actually, we know that vision alone doesn't work.
Sun glare. Fog. Whiteouts. Intense downpours. All of them cause humans to get into accidents, and electronic cameras aren't even as good as human eyes due to dynamic range limitations.
Dead reckoning with GPS and maps are a huge advantage that autonomous cars have over humans. No matter what the conditions are, autonomous cars know where the car is and where the road is. No sliding off the road because you missed a turn.
Being able to control and sense the electric motors at each wheel is a big advantage over "driving feel" from the steering wheel and your inbuilt sense of acceleration.
Radar/lidar is just all upside above and beyond what humans can do.
But also, if you didn’t get the right result, I don’t care how quickly you didn’t get it.
It's analogous to communications latency. High latencies are very annoying to humans, but below a threshold they stop mattering.
I will also add in my personal experience, while some filters work best together (like imu/gnss), we usually either used lidar or camera, not both. Part of the reason was combining them started requiring a lot more overhead and cross-sensor experts, and it took away from the actual problems we were trying to solve. While I suppose one could argue this is a cost issue (just hire more engineers!) I do think there's value in simplifying your tech stack whenever possible. The fewer independent parts you have the faster you can move and the more people can become an expert on one thing
Again Waymo's lead suggests this logic might be wrong but I think there is a solid engineering defense for moving towards just computer vision. Cameras are by far the best sensor, and there are tangible benefits other than just cost.
It's not that we ran into problems, it's that the tech didn't deliver what we hoped when we could have used the time to build something better.
> solid engineering defense for moving towards just computer vision
COUNTERPOINT: WAYMO
Second of all, they’re using cameras to detect things like signs and trash cans! I don’t know where this misconception came from that Waymo only uses lidar, but it demonstrates a lack of familiarity with the problem space and the solutions
this allows them to tag things that their cars are not recognizing, but then are fed back into the training set and validated. it allows them to "live patch" troublesome sections of road but it's not intended for long term use.
they also use this to close sections of road, such as for car accidents, flooding, etc.
> Again Waymo's lead suggests this logic might be wrong but I think there is a solid engineering defense for moving towards just computer vision. Cameras are by far the best sensor, and there are tangible benefits other than just cost.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/06/nx-s1-5635614/waymo-school-bu...
Engineering problems aren't limited to a single solution anyhow. Anyone ruling out a camera based solution has very little imagination.
If that's your definition of solved, be my guest, but it's a pretty silly one.
Detroit, Denver, Philadelphia and DC this year.
Price is a factor. I’ve been using the free self driving promo month on my model Y (hardware version 4), and it’s pretty nice 99% of the time.
I wouldn’t pay for it, but I can see a person with more limited faculties, perhaps due to age, finding it worthwhile. And it is available now in a $40k vehicle.
It’s not full self driving, and Waymo is obviously technologically better, but I don’t think anyone is beating Tesla’s utility to price ratio right now.
The radar they had really couldn't detect stationary objects. It relied on the doppler effect to look for moving objects. That would work most of the time, but sometimes there would be a stationary object in the road, and then the computer vision system would have to make a decision, and unfortunately in unusual situations like a firetruck parked at an angle to block off a crash site, the Tesla would plow into the firetruck.
Given that the radar couldn't really ever be reliable enough to create a self driving vehicle, after he hired Karpathy, Elon became convinced that the only way to meet the promise was to just ignore the radar and get the computer vision up to enough reliability to do FSD. By Tesla's own admission now, the hardware on those 2016+ vehicles is not adequate to do the job.
All of that is to say that IMO Elon's primary reason for his opinions about Lidar are simply because those older cars didn't have one, and he had promised to deliver FSD on that hardware, and therefore it couldn't be necessary, or he'd go broke paying out lawsuits. We will see what happens with the lawsuits.
He "painted himself into a corner" is the more accurate expression when one is the cause of their own problem
It didn't work out though and now multi sensor systems are eating their lunch.
Simplifying things doesn't always make things easier.