Comment by n_u | Hacker News Reader

Comment by n_u | Hacker News Reader

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I think the author is significantly underestimating the technical difficulty of achieving full self-driving cars that are at least as safe and reliable as Waymo. The author claims there will be "26 of the basically identical [self-driving car] companies".

If you recall, there was an explosion of self-driving car efforts from startups and incumbents alike 7ish years ago. Many of them failed to deliver or were shut down. [1][2][3]

Article about the difficulty of self-driving from the perspective of a failed startup[3].

Waymo came out of the Google-self driving car project which came from Sebastian Thrun's entry in 2005 Darpa challenge, so they've been working on this for more than 20 years. [4][5]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/business/ford-argo-ai-vw-shut...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

[3] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...

[4] https://stanford.edu/~cpiech/cs221/apps/driverlessCar.html

[5] https://semiwiki.com/eda/synopsys/3322-sebastian-thrun-self-...

But that is the author's point. I don't see many of the same alternatives years later.

They have either shut down, got acquired or were sold off and then shutdown. Even Uber and Lyft had their own self-driving programs and both of them shut theirs down. Cruise was recently taken off the streets and not much has been done with them.

The only ones that have been around from more than 7 years are Comma.ai (which the author geohot still owns), Waymo and Tesla and Zoox, but they ran out of money and is now owned by Amazon.

He funded Comma.ai, so he does understand the problem domain & complexity.

As I understand, Comma.ai is focused on driver-assistance and not fully autonomous self-driving.

The features listed on the wikipedia are lane-centering, cruise-control, driver monitoring, and assisted lane change.[1]

The article I linked to from Starsky addresses how the first 90% is much easier than the last 10% and even cites "The S-Curve here is why Comma.ai, with 5–15 engineers, sees performance not wholly different than Tesla’s 100+ person autonomy team."

To give an example of the difficulty of the last 10%: I saw an engineer from Waymo give a talk about how they had a whole team dedicated to detecting emergency vehicle sirens and acting appropriately. Both false positives and false negatives could be catastrophic so they didn't have a lot of margin for error.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openpilot#Features

Speaking as a user of Openpilot / Comma device, it is exactly what the Wikipedia article described. In other words, it's a level 2 ADAS.

My point was, he had more than naive / "pedestrian level" (pun?) understanding of the problem domain as he worked on Comma.ai project for quite some time; even the device is only capable of solving maybe about 40% of the autonomous driving problem.

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