This article makes no attempt to answer the actual meat of the question.
Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet.
p.s. I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.
Also, contrary to your statement, the article directly addresses the meat if the question:
> The disagreement is whether “good enough to help a human drive” ever becomes “good enough to remove the human,” and his answer is no, because the sensing tops out before you get the last few nines.
> Now, Tesla would point to its active Robotaxi service as an example of “removing the human”, but Dolgov also said that camera-only is also good for a demo, and that’s basically what Tesla’s Robotaxi service is right now.
The short range ones, found at vehicle corners and on the rear, are now around $200 - $1500. The long range car-top unit is still expensive, around $10,000, and that's dropping. The whole sensor suite on a Waymo is probably under US$20,000 right now. If that.
The future direction for automotive seems to be more car-top sensors with narrower fields of view that add up to a full circle. Only the one that looks ahead needs 300m range.
Dolgov also pushed back on the one knock that camera-only fans always reach for: cost. Waymo is on its sixth generation of hardware, and he said each generation has drastically cut the price. Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”
An Ojai costs less than a mid tier luxury vehicle. Is that not cheap enough?
And the price is only coming down.
Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving
But much more importantly, there is all sorts of post-processing happening that is so weird and complex and really a little decoupled from the raw visual information that it's futile to try and compare that to any digital operation you're thinking of in terms of cameras: If you were to look at a still captured from your eyes, you'd see an upside-down image that's only sharp in the very center of the image, blurry and desaturated pretty much everywhere else, grossly so in the corners, with several big black or blurry spots all over.
From that perspective, eyes are awful really. Yet still, your brain manages to turn the stereoscopic vision into a spatial representation, calculate the movement and keep track of other objects relative to you, fill in areas you can't actually see, detect things moving in your peripherals, highlight things of importance, and so much more.
edit: I also want to point out that the fanboys conflate documented evidence in wikipedia of things EM has said with vitriol. It's like when people get banned on social media for hate speech for quoting something the POTUS said.
* with prerequisite that "safer than the avg human" is the minimum bar for any system.
Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only.
1) Both in 2028
2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035
3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving
Why? So long as they're insured and their owners can be held criminally liable for injuries just as a human driver would be, why does the bar have to be higher?
A huge portion of the risk of human drivers is due to confounding human factors like negligence, distraction, medical issues, fatigue, etc. Responsible drivers can take most of these factors into their own hands -- not driving while sleepy, not driving drunk, not using their cell phone. These people don't want a vehicle
A better comparison would be comparing the capability of a self-driving car to the skill of a human driver driving under ideal circumstances of health/responsibility/etc.
Even today, you cannot fully avoid this risk: when you get into a vehicle driven by a stranger, you don't know a priori whether the driver is excellent or average. Ideally customer feedback weeds out poor drivers and reduces accident rates, but I'm not privy to data that would prove or disprove whether that actually happens - especially because new drivers join the pool every day.
But besides that, the people who are in the socioeconomic demographic to buy an expensive self driving car overlap with the demographic that have lower driving risk. For them, the self-driving car is more dangerous than driving themselves.
For a personal standard, it is reasonable that an individual purchaser may use their own risk profile as that standard... as many of the risks involved are not random but can be controlled through choice or are inherently personal. For example, about half of all traffic deaths are due to drowsy or drunk driving.
Accident risk for any given driver is highly distributed. For someone making a marginal choice to purchase a car, the choice they are faced with is choosing between the safety profile of a self-driving car and their own personal risk profile.
2) Politics - loss of jobs and urge to ban them - there needs to be a counterargument
3) Government does mandate a lot of safety features. Just insure it wont fly as this is number one risk for everybody.
The bar should be safer than a human and as affordable as possible.
Of course not!
So, you may be surprised to find that Waymo's sensor package doesn't cost $200k. Whoops!
Elon has already lied, on an investor call, about how such things are not necessary - he referenced how "Tesla cameras can count photons", as a reason why they were not affected by fog, rain, or snow.
Except, no they can't, and they never will be able to. Not the cameras in any Tesla now (and even then). It's a completely different type of camera (and it would do effectively nothing useful from a visualization perspective, let alone functional camera for human viewing). And even if they changed the camera, or added some, well, you can't count photos if you're not in an enclosed space (you know, like the open road).
This is where Elon gets really dangerous, in my mind, he knows enough to be dangerous, he knows what to say that convinces the layperson, or investor, passes the initial sniff test only to dramatically fall over when you investigate.