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Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

arstechnica.com

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Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#71

Post by karmakaze »

Not buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them.

> "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance system until one day you can magically leap to a fully autonomous driving system," Krafcik said. "In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers."

Not a good argument, very handwavy. Better sensors is not a moat. What is your software, how is it qualitatively superior? No one suspected that NNs or even DNNs could produce AlphaGo/AlphaZero until it did.

Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#72

Post by xiphias2 »

vletal wrote: post #13
Ericson2314 wrote: post #5

This is really about two different strategies for dealing with cultural and regulator norms more than two different engineering strategies.

They did pick different sensors and approach to world mapping in the first place. How is it just a cultural and regulator thing?

One method is spending money on sensors, the other is on gathering as much data as possible (cheaper sensors, but put in all cars).

In 20 years we'll probably have good enough algorithms that can work with few data and cheap sensors, so it's just a matter of time until the 2 methods converge.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#73

Post by mxschumacher »

rcxdude wrote: post #64
mxschumacher wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's interesting how optimistic long term visions conflict - if you really think autonomous cabs will become widespread then by implication you are also saying that car sales will be drastically lower. Tough to be serious betting on both. The math of "you'll pay more for the car but the car will go out and make money for you as a robotic Uber" sounds like a pyramid scheme to me; if too many people do it, it can no lo…

Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more sp…

I should probably dig a little more into the microeconomics, but for me as a consumer the only difference between an autonomous car and an (human) Uber is price. If we assume that the price of the car stays the same, insurance and fuel still have to be paid and the cab app gets their cut - how much of my ride is really attributable to the cost of the human driver? So how much human labor can be automated away to the benefit of consumers? Not much I think.

Given current hardware prices, it seems like the car itself will be a lot more expensive; so how many trips need to be taken so that the variable cost advantage exceeds the increased fixed cost?

Driving is a ubiquitous human skill and tens of millions are looking for work, I believe it will be difficult to undercut them on price.

Drivers also often do more than merely drive - they help with the luggage, they clean the car, they can talk about their city.

Long-haul trucking is a different story, there is a massive labor shortage and letting big rigs go from one warehouse to another without the need of a driver looks like a huge opportunity.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#74

Post by mxschumacher »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #70
rcxdude wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more sp…

In poorer nations autonomous cars could take much longer for mass adoption due to different, sometimes harsher road conditions, and lack of reliable road-map data. In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.

yes, making autonomous driving work in central Delhi or Agadir will be much different from a US highway.

Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#75

Post by mici »

dehrmann wrote: post #61
granzymes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that second one is terrifying. Particularly since that was only 7 months ago!

That was the article, but the crash was in March 2018.

They meant the YouTube video of the Taiwanese crash from the 1st of June last year.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#76

Post by ra7 »

karmakaze wrote: post #71

Not buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them. > "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance…

> Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR.

What constitutes giving tech to the public? They are in Phoenix and they say they will be rolling out in other cities soon. So you can go to Phoenix and hail an autonomous ride to compare yourself, where you will find that no else is even close to offering truly driverless rides like Waymo is.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#77

Post by Udik »

rcxdude wrote: post #34
spsful wrote: post #24

Is anyone else confused on the merits of Waymo's argument? They differentiate "driver assistance" from "fully autonomous" systems in that Tesla somehow can never achieve the latter because they have developed the former. The only specific reason for this that I could find was a mention of LiDAR and how Waymo sees it as indispensable. > Krafcik says that Waymo has largely completed technical work on its self-driving s…

The core point is you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous. They're just completely different from the point of view of the reliability of the software you need. A huge amount of things with driver assist you can write off as 'the driver will take over'. There's not a specific part of you can point to and say 'that's what will stop them', so much as the entire design of the system needs a differ…

> you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous

Ok. So Waymo has developed a 100% reliable full self driving system that handles every possible situation. It was never put in a situation in which it would have given back control to a human driver, because that would have meant "going smoothly" to driver assist mode, and we have already said that this is impossible.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#78

Post by xiphias2 »

karmakaze wrote: post #71

Not buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them. > "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance…

I expect Tesla and Waymo to be the 2 best driverless solutions in the near future. Tesla is a real competitor to Waymo, as the better sensor has a litmited time advantage until deep learning algorithms improve even more.

Waymo doesn't have too much time to get back the billions of dollars of invested R&D money, while Tesla is already profitable even without self driving.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#79

Post by xiphias2 »

ra7 wrote: post #76
karmakaze wrote: post #71

Not buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them. > "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance…

> Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR. What constitutes giving tech to the public? They are in Phoenix and they say they will be rolling out in other cities soon. So you can go to Phoenix and hail an autonomous ride to compare yourself, where you will find that no else is even close to offering trul…

Waymo is amazing, but it doesn't make the business profitable: it needs to scale up the investment in hardware and keep its advantage until Tesla gets good enough to compete. This PR is mostly aimed at investors in Waymo.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#80

Post by Zhenya »

onion2k wrote: post #57
screye wrote: post #35

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree wit…

Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.

autonomous driving needs to be safer than humans to be adopted (some say way safer).

So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.

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