Hacker News Reader

Comment by jellojello | Hacker News Reader

Sensor fusion is an issue, one that is solvable over time and investment in the driving model, but sensor-can't-see-anything is a show stopper.

Having a self-driving solution that can be totally turned off with a speck of mud, heavy rain, morning dew, bright sunlight at dawn and dusk.. you can't engineer your way out of sensor-blindness.

I don't want a solution that is available to use 98% of the time, I want a solution that is always-available and can't be blinded by a bad lighting condition.

I think he did it because his solution always used the crutch of "FSD Not Available, Right hand Camera is Blocked" messaging and "Driver Supervision" as the backstop to any failure anywhere in the stack. Waymo had no choice but to solve the expensive problem of "Always Available and Safe" and work backwards on price.

View on HN

> Waymo had no choice but to solve the expensive problem of "Always Available and Safe"

And it's still not clear whether they are using a fallback driving stack for a situation where one of non-essential (i.e. non-camera (1)) sensors is degraded. I haven't seen Waymo clearly stating capabilities of their self-driving stack in this regard. On the other hand, there are such things as washer fluid and high dynamic range cameras.

(1) You can't drive in a city if you can't see the light emitted by traffic lights, which neither lidar nor radar can do.

Hence why both together make the solution waymo chose. The proof is in the pudding, Waymo's have been driving millions of miles without any intervention. Tesla requires safety drivers. I would never trust the FSD on my model 3 to be even nearly perfect all the time.

Lidar also gives you the ability to see through fog and as it scans, see the depth needed to nearly always understand what object is in front of them.

My Model 3 shows "degraded" or "unavailable" about 2% of the time i'm driving around populated areas. Zero chance it will ever be truly FSD capable, no matter the software improvements. It'll still be unavailable because the cameras are blinded/blocked/unable to process the scene because it can't see the scene.

While you're right, washer fluid works usually on the windshield, it doesn't on the side cameras, and yea hdr could improve things, it won't improve depth perception, and this will never be installed on my model 3..

Lidar contributes the data most needed to handle the millions of edge cases that exist. With both camera and lidar contributing the data they are both the best at collecting, the risk of the very worst type of accidents is greatly reduced.

I don't see these stats https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ happening for tesla anytime soon.

> without any intervention

but with occasional remote guidance (Waymo doesn't seem to disclose statistics of that). In some cases remote guidance includes placing waypoints[1].

> Lidar also gives you the ability to see through fog and as it scans

Nah. Lidar isn't much better in fog than cameras. If I'm not mistaken, fog, rain, smoke, snow scatter IR light approximately the same as visible light. The lidar beam needs to travel twice the distance and its power is limited by eye-safety concerns.

> FSD on my model 3 to be even nearly perfect all the time

It doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to not hit things, cars and pedestrians too hard and too often, while mostly obeying traffic rules. Waymo has quite a few complains about their cars' behavior[2], but they manage just fine.

[1] third video in https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

[2] https://www.austintexas.gov/page/autonomous-vehicles

Waymo had safety drivers for a long time. And still have safety drivers to this day when they roll out a new city. You wouldn't have known that because no one was paying attention to this stuff back then.

Waymo also had safety drivers for years.

All you really need is "drive slower if you can't see (because rain, fog, or degraded cameras), or you're in an area where children might run out into the road"

If you have mud on a camera, you can't drive it either way. Lidar or not. The way to actually solve these issues is to have way more cameras for redundancy / self cleaning etc, not other sensors.

LIDAR is notoriously easy to blind, what are you on about? Bonus meme: LIDAR blinds you(r iPhone camera)!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com