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

arstechnica.com

271–280 of 581 posts

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

#271

Watching this video of regular folk (not tech journalists or other "reviewers", or paid PR) riding in FSD Waymo has done a lot to reduce my "but it'll never happen" feeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4 It may very well be that future FSD modes will require highly detailed maps, manual curation, limited areas where things can work, but even that would be valuable. e.g. if self driving trucks only work…

I like that Waymo is confident enough in their system to put it out there for people to use. But honestly, I think that their reasoning for releasing it is exactly to reduce worries in people, that 'it'll never happen feeling'. I think they needed to put something (before it was even 99% ready) out, otherwise people would lose hope and investors balk at the progress. I really do think that it'll never happen, at least in the ecosystems current form. There needs to be special lanes or routes that self driving cars can take, special pick-up points, etc. Humans take risks while driving every day, the problem is, that we have an incredibly good picture of the risks involved in everyday things. Machines don't have this sense perfectly attenuated yet, and I have yet to see evidence that they ever will. With us, there is no variability in our senses. Our eyes mostly work the same every day, our perception skills doesn't change. Machines cannot even trust their senses, and their code has to reflect that.

Obviously, this is all speculation on my part, but when I see videos of waymo sitting in roadways and parking lots, blocking traffic, pedestrians, and just the overall flow of life, the more that I get the feeling that machines should not be allowed to participate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5SeVxYAZzk

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

#272

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.

When has someone died while sleeping in an autopiloted Tesla? I've kept a close eye on this space and never heard of this.

There are six cases of death where autopilot was confirmed to be engaged at the time of the incident, with 15 total that claim AP was engaged but had not been proven (via post-crash analysis or otherwise).

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

Based on reviewing the articles linked to the data, only one includes a lawsuit that claims the driver fell asleep before the crash. Doing this would either require a weight on the wheel to simulate constant torque (otherwise, on the highway, you have to apply torque every 30 seconds and it'll lock you out from using autosteer if you ignore it for roughly a minute), or falling asleep within 30-45 seconds of an incident, which is entirely possible.

https://www.carscoops.com/2020/04/tesla-autopilot-blamed-on-...

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

#273
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…

Waymo had one of their employees not properly monitoring their car and they killed someone. I dont believe anyone had been killed by the Tesla development team? Couple of customers did die but that was their fault for not monitoring the car? One was watching harry potter I remember.

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

#274
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I don't get that feeling. What makes you think that? I don't know much about Elon, but I listened to one of his interviews with Rogan, and he struck me as extremely optimistic, but also grounded and not arrogant. (I do agree partial-self-driving just seems like a terrible idea. I guess crash stats can reveal if this is true or not, but are perhaps not available.)

his covid comments last year were beyond the pale. The low point for me was when Shannon Woodward, who played a scientist on TV and to my knowledge isn't one, had to explain to him that tests are indeed not a big pharma conspiracy https://twitter.com/shannonwoodward/status/13275176940992757...

LOL, I love it... an actress with no higher education has to explain antigen tests to the world's richest man.

We really are in the best possible timeline for general lulz and nonsense.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Significantly more than half of your ride fare on Uber goes to the driver - between 70 and 130%. Human costs are vastly the most expensive part of hailing a ride, and will remain so as long as minimum wage exists. The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster fo…

But what fraction of the money that goes to the driver is spent on depreciation and maintenance?

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

#276
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Well, that’s Waymo (in Phoenix) which has put out anything approaching autonomy, not Tesla. Tesla requires a driver.

Yes, Waymo seem good in Phoenix for the people who have access to it. Looking forward to their expansion.

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

#277
post #259

FSD is all about collecting insane amount of data about edge cases that happen in the real world. Tesla has built the infrastructure for this, and will win the FSD race by a wide margin.

Is snow an edge case? My cameras don't function when it's snowing or there's snow in the ground. Or there's snow banks around the road. My dash is lit with the "some cameras are blocked" 24/7 for the whole winter time. And proximity readings are blinking those yellow / red lights all the time from the right side as it thinks the snow bank next to the road is too close. Or the system thinks the camera is blocked because the light reflexes from the snow.

Seriously, if they can't solve even simple problems, how are they going to solve something more complex? I'd be happy for even a implementation of a removal of these warnings when the system doesn't understand what it's doing, but I don't think they know when it doesn't function correctly.

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

#278
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…

Waymo had one of their employees not properly monitoring their car and they killed someone. I dont believe anyone had been killed by the Tesla development team? Couple of customers did die but that was their fault for not monitoring the car? One was watching harry potter I remember.

You're probably thinking of Uber which killed someone in Arizona, not Waymo.

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

#279
post #46
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…

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)

How much value is there really? The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. Don’t forget that you also need to buy brand new vehicles and compete with Uber/taxis.

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

#280

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 .

It isn't, it still does it with all the other weird braking incidents also, like snowy road, truck comes from another direction in the corner - the car will alert and brake even when both are on their correct sides of the road. Not to mention any of those mid-road poles that are meant for the pedestrians. If they have snow then the car will again brake thinking I'm going to hit something. Impossible to use the cruise control on many roads.
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