Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

121–130 of 581 posts

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

#121
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…

Surely you use power steering, drive-by-wire pedals, and anti-lock breaks though, right? Or even an automatic transmission? Is it so different to use lane assist or cruise control?

The key difference being they are reliable 100% of the time.

Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them.

Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.

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

#123
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

wow, getting downvoted for stating this fact. I can't believe the anti-Musk bias here on HN. You would think HN would actually appreciate one of the more innovative entrepreneurs on the planet.

I think it might be due to a form of jealousy. Sad to see HN so unenthusiastic about a guy who is probably the most amazing entrepreneur of our time.

It's not that he hasn't invited a little bit of controversy (eg. comments about the diver, covid, etc.) but I think those are inconsequential when it comes to HN's attitude toward him.

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

#124

I have a model Y and what it has today is 80% as useful as a completely self driving car. It’s mostly self driving on the highway, and the situations it can’t handle are very predictable: toll booths, stopped cars in the middle of the road, things like that. You need to available to drive but you always have plenty of warning before you need to take over.

80% as good is 1000% as dangerous. Tesla's vehicles perform just well enough to convince many users they're good enough to "self drive" and ignore while failing catastrophically in edge cases and absolutely not being ready to completely ignore. Tesla's reckless "autopilot" branding contributes to this.

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

#125
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware how low the deaths per mile is for humans? I don't think we know if Waymo has a lower rate than a human yet. Tesla I don't know, but wouldn't be surprised if it is higher.

IIRC for humans it's like 1 death per million miles driven. I believe Waymo is closing in on that. Not sure if Waymo handles the variety of conditions though. Musk and Tesla seem very flippant in their marketing.

But Waymo hasn't had any deaths and has over 20 million miles driven?

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

#126
post #45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People die all the time, there are even higher profile cases like the Apple Engineer who slammed in the barriers at full speed: https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-... There are some spectacular failures that are very scary because the car does something that a person would never do, unless unconscious, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmAG4dk-rU You don't hear much about it pro…

A lidar would have discovered that truck immediately. Is is confirmed that this Tesla was using self-driving?

From the article:

- autopilot was not engaged, only cruise control

- the anti-collision applied brakes but not soon enough

- the driver walked away without a scratch

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

#127
post #85

drivers came to trust it way too quickly. Drivers who were supposed to be closely monitoring the system instead spent their time looking at their phones, putting on makeup, and other distractions. Really hope no one dies because of Tesla's autopilot. This is a real risk. Quoting from below: if the car does it right 99% of the time it's just human nature to stop paying attention. The article makes a great point that s…

There's two levels of risk, Tesla owners taking themselves out, and then there is innocent bystanders being taken out. It's pretty infuriating if you consider that we're all put at risk.

You are at a much higher risk from all kinds of humans, with varying levels of skill, in different states of mind manually driving these vehicles.

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

#128

The misanthropic, cynical view: Crashes are excellent training input.

You're not too far off; all SDC systems (including Tesla & Waymo) use disengagements to train on. So it's not accidents themselves, but human takeovers prior to what might otherwise have been an accident.

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

#129
post #51

"I watched a few hours of early unedited footage posted by Tesla owners who received the new software. The software made a number of mistakes, including two incidents where a Tesla seemed to be on the verge of colliding with another vehicle before the driver intervened." What, Tesla still can't detect big, obvious obstacles reliably? That's pathetic. A half-dozen cases of running into stationary obstacles at full spe…

Instead of trusting this anecdote, why don’t you jump over to YouTube and search for “Tesla FSD” to see what it really looks like? Lots of very instructive videos available from people on the beta program.
Post reply on HN