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

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

#151
post #26

I think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package. This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodo…

I have one question for Tesla customers who trust the company to deliver full FSD.

How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance?

The NHTSA opened an investigation into premature HUD failures because they prevented the backup cameras from working. But the fact of the matter is, the company used a small partition of internal Tegra Flash to store rapidly-refreshing log data. And you are trusting these devs with your life when you enable autopilot.

You're also entrusting my life, and those of my family, to them. But we'll gloss over that, because it's expensive not to.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I kind of agree. It may be a weird kind of jealousy, though no one here would admit it or even recognize it for what it is.

The arguments used against Tesla are in fact legitimate if we’re talking about a regular company. But Musk has proven to do the “impossible” multiple times and has been right on so many levels, so at this point you have to question whether he’s catastrophically wrong about this, or perhaps the others are about lidar.

Either way, the confidence that Tesla is wrong is way too high in my opinion.

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

#153

Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving? Seems to be a lot of anti-Tesla folks here, put your money where your mouth is.

What Tesla has now, Waymo had back in 2012. They literally had a FSD program they were testing with certain employees, and once they found that that people quickly get distracted and stop paying attention, they gave up on that approach and went for the new strategy of jumping straight to level 4 and skipping level 3.

So either they've been doing absolutely nothing for the past 8 years until getting level 4 driverless car in Phoenix. It's only a level 4 right now, since it does not work in all conditions, but it's still far ahead of Tesla's level 3 which requires the driver's attention.

So far Tesla hasn't shown anything that Waymo did not have at least 5+ years ago.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proposition that is being discussed is not whether Tesla as a company will get to autonomous driving, it’s whether Tesla’s current suite of sensors and its “HW 3” inference engine will get there. Keep in mind, Tesla has taken thousands of dollars from customers with the promise that they will deliver them “full self driving” in the near future (or actually in the past, as it was promised by 2018). If Tesla revise…

> Tesla has taken thousands of dollars from customers with the promise that they will deliver them “full self driving” in the near future Isn't that between Tesla and the customers who paid for it?

Yes - I'm a customer who paid for it and I'm happy with it, I know it's a bet on a future capability.

I think Karpathy's talks make sense, their bet on vision makes sense.

I think the comments from Waymo are tedious - we'll see who's right in the end. I wouldn't bet on Google.

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

#156
post #14

He seems so obviously correct that I can’t fathom how any engineer could see things otherwise.

There are other engineers in the same field with more technical expertise in this specific field of robotics than Elon, and they think that Tesla's path is not accurate enough. Maybe they're right. Maybe Elon is.

The problem is when you hold someone up on a pedestal and a cult of personality forms. That clouds your judgement and you lose your objectivity. It's great if Elon is right, but if he isn't I hope the fatalities, injuries, and property damages can be kept to a minimum and it doesn't hamper better technologies from being implemented.

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

#157
post #26

I think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package. This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodo…

I have one question for Tesla customers who trust the company to deliver full FSD. How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance? The NHTSA opened an investigation into premature HUD failures because they prevented the backup cameras from working. But the fact of the matter is, the company used a small partition of in…

> Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance

Equally likely is that they do understand but just don't care.

From all accounts, Tesla seems to have a culture of move fast and break things.

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

#158
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean people have already died sleeping with it on. But it’s also likely saved lives based on their deaths per mile number.

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.

> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.45 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.27 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you all talking about, the original top-level post has a reasonably presented assessment of Tesla’s strategy and the ramifications of such a strategy. Sure, that assessment might be flawed, but I don’t see how any of that is “anti-Musk bias” or “jealousy”. The comment regarding humans not needing LiDAR misses the point, which is that either every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expen…

> every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expensive hardware solution

Given that Tesla are the only company to have put something approaching autonomy into the hands of customers, that does seem to be the case.

What happens next in this thread? Someone points out that Tesla's solution is still far from perfect and claims that they're being highly irresponsible by having shipped it. Then I'd ask how many accidents have happened as a result of FSD beta having shipped to some customers already and they assert that Tesla isn't transparent with the data so we don't know. I'd point out that if we don't know of a single Tesla FSD accident so far, it can't be that irresponsible to have put it in the hands of a few customers and that it's been rapidly improving in the weeks since. It's the same thread, repeated over and over on here, Reddit, etc.

Tesla was the company that made electric vehicles successful. To your point about groups taking different approaches, I think Musk & Tesla do take approaches that will differ from others, and succeed partly because of their approach being better in some important way. I think they had a bit of an unfair advantage when it came to autonomy. They needed hardware that could be shipped on vehicles as soon as possible, which meant that it needed to be cost efficient & energy efficient. LIDAR's energy efficiency doesn't get talked about much, and I don't mean just the LIDAR itself but also the subsequent processing power required to make sense of the resulting point cloud. Each Waymo vehicle is an expensive tech demo. It's a very good tech demo, but over the years it's become evident that they're very hesitant to scale it up right now. I'm sure they'll eventually get there, but they are not a company focused on getting this done ASAP. Tesla are getting autonomy done with urgency.

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

#160

Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving? Seems to be a lot of anti-Tesla folks here, put your money where your mouth is.

Absolutely. I'll even go one further: we won't actually know the exact moment that Level 5 arrives.

Cars with level 4 + remote assistance will be driving people around for a decade or more, phoning home less and less over time until one day someone notes that no car has phoned home for an entire year. Then maybe a car will phone home and the clock will start again. Decades from then, people will shut down the last remote assistance center.

But at that point, nobody will care about declaring Level 5 because we will have been riding around for decades in cars without steering wheels that we don't have to drive.

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