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

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

#161

Post by TheDong » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:15 AM UTC

mxschumacher wrote: post #74

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your impression of Delhi and Agadir doesn't seem right to me. By the numbers, Delhi has the highest crime-rate in india, but it has a 5 times lower rate of crime than San Francisco does.

And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.

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

#162

Post by jfoster » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:15 AM UTC

sixQuarks wrote: post #152

jfoster wrote: post #123

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.

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 o…

It's the Musk pattern. For every single company he's started, people are always 100% confident it won't work, and also (somehow) a bit offended that he's trying.

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

#163

Post by _ea1k » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

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…

I'm pretty sure mobileye has demonstrated their FSD solution without lidar as well. It seems like they are treating lidar as optional.

They have many more cameras than Tesla to support the camera only approach, though.

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

#164

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #18

Tesla is quite far from full self driving. They have too much phantom breaking on the simple adaptive cruise control in good conditions.

According to Elon, phantom braking was fixed in October: https://twitter.com/EVHQ2/status/1314287584105779200.

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

#165

Post by _ea1k » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:21 AM UTC

mxschumacher wrote: post #54

rcxdude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This matches my experience of how Tesla is viewed in the autonomous car industry. No-one thinks they are a serious contender when it comes to a driverless vehicle (and their business model basically doesn't match with the technology either: every other company is basically going to operate a taxi service because there's far more value to be captured and it can help pay for the hardware making driverless possible)

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…

Ha, I remember thinking that at Tesla's (very weak, IMO) autonomy day. It seemed like their supposed business model was basically made up on the spot and didn't really make good business sense.

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

#166

Post by georgewfraser » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:21 AM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #124

georgewfraser wrote: post #116

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.

My point is that it doesn’t fail in edge cases. It has very clear limitations, there are no surprises. Even if you were literally asleep at the wheel, the worst thing that would happen is it’d end up stopped in front of a traffic light, waiting for you to take over.

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

#167

Post by threeseed » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:23 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #23

granzymes wrote: post #3

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…

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…

> Autopilot is like on the planes, so only fools think that it is autonomous

Nobody other than pilots, engineers or enthusiasts knows the subtleties of how aircraft autopilot systems work.

Every other person on this planet knows it to mean "fly the plane by itself". And would expect a Tesla car to "drive by itself".

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

#168

Post by Animats » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

jiofih wrote: post #129

Animats wrote: 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.

Yes. Check out this one.[1]

Watch the display for what it sees and isn't seeing. Awareness of oncoming traffic is almost nonexistent. Except when the FedEx truck is reflected in some windows; then it detects the reflection as a vehicle. Although the streets are almost empty, the driver takes over frequently.

This is way below what Waymo and Cruise can do.

[1] https://youtu.be/6G1Z2J3WUSg?t=231

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

#169

Post by _ea1k » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

alextheparrot wrote: post #139

jfoster wrote: post #123

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…

Keep in mind that at least one of those other self-driving car groups has demoed camera only on the streets of Jerusalem: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-ces-intel/intels-mob...

They also have lidar solutions, but they certainly haven't ruled out camera only.

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

#170

Post by YZF » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

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.

I own a model 3. Often it says "the camera is blinded" (e.g. when the sun is shining at it), often there's rain on the lens... So I'd argue Tesla's cameras are much worse for driving under all conditions vs. the human eye. I'm not sure there's enough redundancy for depth perception either. I tend to agree with the argument that humans prove it's possible to drive with just visual sensors but Tesla's sensors, for better or worse, are not equivalent.

Then there's the part about the brain being what gets the sensor data and interprets it. I doubt Tesla's computer has all the capabilities of a human brain.

Driving behind a boat trailer, it's clear to me it's a boat, but Tesla's computer is confused. Bicycles can be a little iffy as well. In general the way the car perceives the world seems subpar to how a human does, by far.

I'm a fan of the car, I'm mostly a fan of Tesla/Elon, but I don't think these cars with this technology are ever gonna be truly autonomous so they can drive with no human intervention... IMHO.