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Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.
Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....
Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it.
Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.
Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.
And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver?
https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?).
However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.
> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have.
> didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware
A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.
I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but
> If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion.
That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)
You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T
Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.
> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.
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Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.
What you envision might happen in 2100+
Google was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching”
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap...
https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
And the HN discussion
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the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that
Have you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want.
Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.
It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.
You might want to look up the price of lidar in 2026 before talking about affordability.
Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.
Most cars don't have a paid driver. Uber, taxis, and trucking is a tiny minority of drivers.
I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible.
(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
It seems tough culturally.
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down.
At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements.
Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter.
There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there.
What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work.
Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day).
This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
>The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
Were there even reliable metrics for this? They only seem small like car dealerships seem small - not of consolidation.
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
(Also former Cruise employee)
Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary.
(Another former employee)
I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways.
(Another former).
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
For national security reasons, several other countries won't allow Waymo (or Tesla or any other US company) to "win" in their territory. This will ensure that at least a couple other competitors remain worldwide regardless of whether it makes sense in purely economic terms.
What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.
1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world.
2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero.
That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?
People who drive their own cars are larger than all. You can find single markets where those people are more than all combined world wide.
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]
One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior)
He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs"
Nice abbreviation.
You can tell they're enjoying their job.
I loved it.
The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...
Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself:
Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week".
They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car
2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs some technician to come to get a drink unstuck does it make sense to get up and arms about how it's not "fully automated" or whatever? In all contexts why people would care (eg. unit economics, safety, customer experience), there's no meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous.
They don’t have remote drivers. Your own link says that.
> The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.
…
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
> They have been fully autonomous for many years.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this (https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...) new vehicle design?
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.
I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?
The latter.
They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.
The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.
This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.
From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
Nice dig at Tesla.
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour?
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
You mean double parking waiting for passengers? Its a taxi, so I doubt it.
Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?
In some cases, yes. This morning, though, I was stuck behind one that just decided to stop and turn on the hazards in the middle of a two-lane, bidirectional street with no parking. This has happened more than once.
I believe they are waiting for passengers - they usually have some kind of LED display with what looks like initials on the topmost sensor when they're doing this.
Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.
Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them.
Maybe the menace is the drivers. That's indisputable when you look at injuries per mile.
This is a lie:
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. 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. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
From: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) without some extra guidance. Whether Waymo's business model makes sense primarily depends on how often these agents need to intervene (unlike safety drivers where you need one safety driver per vehicle and you're just running an expensive taxi).
Elon in shambles
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength.
No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up.
This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.
Even if it doesn't allow you to resolve the ambiguity, knowing that there is an ambiguity is extremely valuable. Say the lidar detects a pedestrian but the camera doesn't. Which one do you believe? Well, you propagate the ambiguity and take appropriate action, i.e. slow down, change lanes, etc. Don't drive through an area where there's a decent chance that you're going to kill someone by doing it.
Yes, absolutely. Knowledge about the fact that a conflict between sensors exists is valuable in its own right, it means you are seeing something that needs more work than simple reinforcement.
Fail safe, always. That's what I tried to get at with 'absence of quorum', it means you are in uncharted territory.
Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius
More importantly you can detect a failed sensor.
Agreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages.
Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.
Because they bought a Tesla with only cameras on it.
Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving.
I bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes.
Add a tow hitch to Waymos and any car can be autonomous!
Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.
To be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely.
Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
Incorrect. Humans are fairly good engineers, so cars are pretty safe nowadays.
If you include minor fender-benders and unreported incidents, estimates drop to around 100,000–200,000 miles between any collision event.
This is cataclysmically bad for a designed system, which is why targets are super-human, not human.
Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
> humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well
In May 2016, Tesla Model S driver Joshua Brown died in Williston, Florida, when his vehicle on Autopilot collided with a white tractor-trailer that turned across the highway. The Autopilot system and driver failed to detect the truck's white side against a brightly lit sky, causing the car to pass underneath the trailer.
Our eyes are supported by our brain's AGI which can evaluate the input from our eyes in context. All Tesla had is a camera, and it didn't perform as well as eyes + AGI would have.
When you don't have AGI, additional sensors can provide backup. LiDAR would have saved Joshua Brown's life.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?
Especially the part where the cameras do not meet minimum vision requirements [1] in many states where it operates such as California and Texas.
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me.
The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty.
FSD doesn't "work fine" driving directly into the sun. There are loads of YT videos that demonstrate this.
For which car? The older the car (hardware) version the worse it is. I've never had any front camera blinding issues with a 2022 car (HW3).
The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data.
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.
There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.
I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
Nuanced point: Even if vision alone were sufficient to drive, adding sensors to the cars today could speed up development. Tesla‘s world model could be improved, speeding up development of the vision only model that is truly autonomous.
The other day I slammed the brakes at a green light, because I could hear sirens approaching -- even though the buildings on the corner prevented any view of the approaching fire trucks or their flashing lights. Do Teslas not have this ability?
I don‘t know whether Tesla‘s self-driving mode could do that.
However, notice that deaf people are allowed to drive, ie. you are not expected to be able to have full hearing to be allowed on the road.
> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
I would firmly disagree with that.
What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc.
The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips.
The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors.
If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now.
SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.
You say that you disagree with my point, but then your first paragraph just restates my argument. And your subsequent paragraphs don‘t refer to my comment at all.
I never claimed he‘s a good engineer, nor that he has high EQ, nor that he is honest, nor that he has sole responsibility for the success of his companies.
Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).
I think his companies succeeded despite Elon. Tesla should be a $5T company and he fucked it up.
Stongly disagree. I don‘t like the fella but thinking that he founds and successfully manages SpaceX and Tesla to their market value _by chance_ is ridiculous.
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His autopilot has killed several people, sometimes the owner of the car, sometimes other drivers sharing the road. It is hard to root for this guy.
I certainly don't trust anything he says 100%.
This is - to me - entirely separate from the fact that his companies routinely revolutionize industries.
> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?".
Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents.
I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.
And what fraction Elon-Intelligence is needed to believe he actually invented/solved all that by himself?
Or did I miss the sarcasm?
Well, given that Elon openly lies on investor calls...
One of his latest, on the topic of rain/snow/mist/fog and handling with cameras:
"Well, we have made that a non-issue as we actually do photon counting in the cameras, which solves that problem."
No, Elon, you don't. For two reasons: reason one, part A, the types of cameras that do photon counting don't work well for normal 'vision'/imagery associated with cameras, and part B, are not actually present in your cars at all. And reason two, photon counting requires the camera being in an enclosed space to work, which cars on the road ... aren't.
What Elon has mastered the art of is making statements that sound informed, pass the BS detector of laypeople, and optionally are also plausibly deniable if actually called out by an SME.
If only there was a filter so we could fuse different sensor measurements into a better whole..
I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.
It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.
I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too.
I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I don't think they're that far behind Waymo where it really matters, which is the thing actually working.
I suspect they have a long tail problem with FSD. It might work fine 99% but that's simply not good enough.
The terms of service probably require you to sue Tesla in that Texas district with his corrupt judge pal.
Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
> humans only use vision to drive
I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving?
As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
> hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved
Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections.
Human inner ear is worse than a $3 IMU in your average smartphone in literally every way. And that IMU also has a magnetometer in it.
Beating human sensors wasn't hard for over a decade now. The problem is that sensors are worthless. Self-driving lives and dies by AI - all the sensors need to be is "good enough".
Human hearing is excellent. Good directional perception and sensitivity. Eyesight is the weakest sense. Poor color sensitivity, low light sensitivity, blindspot. The terrible natural design flaws are compensated by natural nystagmas and the brain filling in the blanks.
> The problem is that sensors are worthless
Well, in TFA the far more successful manufacturer of self driving cars is saying you're wrong. I think they're in much better position to know than you :)
1. in US you can get a driver's license if you're deaf so as a society we think you can drive without hearing
2. since this is in context of Tesla: tesla cars do have microphones and FSD does use it for responding to sirens etc.
(1) is true, but actually driving is definitely harder without hearing or with diminished hearing. And Several US states, including CA, prohibit inhibiting hearing while driving, e.g., by wearing a headset, earbuds, or earplugs.
Involved? Yes. Necessary? Pretty sure no.
If it makes you happy, you can read "only vision" as "no lidar or radar." Cars already have microphones and IMUs.
I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
Waymo has posted videos of accidents they've avoided purely because their lidar picked up on a pedestrian before their cameras saw anything.
A favorite of mine: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1900219562437861685
They're very public about the data that makes them look good, but they went to court to keep their safety data from the public. (https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/waymo-to-keep-robotaxi-saf...)
That lawsuit was about trade secrets shared with DMV. And DMV advised them to file a restraining order against a third party seeking redacted info.
It was actually about all kinds of information about the safety of their cars, how the company handles collisions, how they decide to make human drivers take over, details of injuries caused by their cars, etc.
The DMV required them to submit their safety data before allowing the vehicles on the road. Waymo claims that the data the DMV needed about the public safety of their cars, and the emails they exchanged about it with regulators, were entirely "trade secrets" to keep them hidden from the public who understandably felt like they should be able to access that information since those cars are going to be on their streets.
I think past experience shows that the US prefers a wait and see approach - owning in part I think to it federal structure, where states compete for companies good graces and money, so if State A bans something, State B will allow it and gain an advantage in that area.
Moreover, why draw a hard line on vision only when there is existing technology is available to augment it? It's not like they have to develop 3 novel technologies.
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There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing:
https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit.
I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.
I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.
It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.
I think this thread conflating between walkable and having good transit. A walkable city means almost everything you need is within walking distance. That doesn’t mean there are buses or trains to take you out of this area. I live in a walkable part of the city. Within a 15-minute walk, there are three supermarkets, perhaps twenty restaurants with different cuisines, four pharmacies, one each of USPS/UPS/FedEx for shipping, four different banks, three dry cleaners… you get the idea. The only transportation tool I need is my two legs.
Now of course sometimes I’m not content staying within this 15-minute circle. Then I simply choose the fastest method of transport to get there. Is BART or Muni faster than the Waymo trip? Then yes I’ll take pubic transportation. That’s what good transit is for.
You exemplify the defeatism that the auto makers are counting on.
I literally have never owned a vehicle in my life. If you feel I exemplify defeatism then I think you need to look inward.
If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.
Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?
No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.
Why are you trying to make people on a text-based site watch a dumb video.
Just say what you want to say ... with words!
That video is 54 minutes long. Maybe, if it's the basis for your argument, you could post a summary?
Yeah, sort of.
Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be.
Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.
But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested.
In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
>In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
All the incentives you described exists today. On any given road any space devoted to sidewalks or bike lanes means less space for cars, and you already need separation between car lanes and sidewalks. You also have the same incentive to "restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space", because any controlled access roadway increases speed and throughput. Finally if you restrict pedestrians to certain areas (we all live in megatowers?), that actually makes taxis (including robotaxis) less attractive relative to public transit, because their whole value proposition is that they take you exactly where you want to go. Therefore it's unclear how automated cars would make things worse.
I hate how much space in cities is devoted to cars, and I wish we had much better transit of all sorts.
But - I'm just not sure your analysis is right. Someone who drives a self-owned car will park it in a downtown area for hours. Someone who takes a taxi of any sort will use much, much less amortized parking spot space. New York is a pretty good example of this.
Good public transit beats the snot out of cars, but a dense taxi deployment seems to get more people moved per total car-dedicated-space than private car drivership does.
And if we can reduce the amount of space dedicated to parking, we can increase density, which reduces the need for driving.
So the problem will be if we have self-driving whatevers at the expense of public transit, but perhaps not if it's at the expense of private car drivership.
Crafted by Rajat
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