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

arstechnica.com

361–370 of 581 posts

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

#361
post #340

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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…

>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. This is my biggest concern. I'm going to get killed by some jackass' tesla while he's texting, because Elon Musk is a megalomaniac.

Same here. However, I am assuming you have decent sight, so you can at least protect yourself in certain situation. Me is blind, and I am getting increasingly weary about the future as a pedestrian. As a kid, one of my biggest fears were automatic doors. I sort of imagined they would close on me and try to kill me. I am afraid this horror is going to be true at some point of my life. Automation is going to kill me one day.

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

#362

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But people also shouldn't waste so much time of their life stuff in traffic driving vehicles either. I mean, the ideal city would probably be self-driving trains, people movers, and free scooters, segways, or wheelchairs everywhere. No AI vision systems needed. If you live in urban Japan, do you ever need a car? To replace all 273 million vehicles in the US with self-driving EVs would cost around $10 trillion @ $50k…

> You could built a national network of self-driving lanes for a fraction of that. You could build rail lines and subways in every major metro area. Most of them will be built by government making huge losses, they will go from nowhere to nowhere and they will not function as intended. The California high speed train is a great example. Not to mention $50K will be put by people but the national rail network will have…

Clearly, other governments can do it, so there must be a way for the US to do it too.

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

#363
post #127
post #85

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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.

Humans are much, much better drivers than autopilot.

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

#364
post #345

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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…

Really. Waymo has this in 2012? https://youtu.be/YJxnVRAX2UA?t=4 Do you have an article/video you can share by any chance? I've been following Google's self driving efforts for years and must've missed that.

If we're cherry-picking examples this comparison of 2009 Waymo vs 2020 FSD Beta is pretty funny

https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1324122869702389761

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

#365

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Hmm I don't want to defend Tesla, but I do want to push back on this a bit! Facebook made "move fast and break things" famous, which was Zuckerberg's way of presenting a tradeoff. Everyone company says they want to move fast, but Zuckerberg made it clear that the company should care more about velocity than stability. I don't believe that's Tesla's attitude. Rather, I think their attitude is more "move fast and ignor…

Regulations are all we have to keep things from breaking...ignoring them about something like a self driving car should be a criminal offense.

>all we have to keep things from breaking...ignoring them about something like a self driving car should be a criminal offense.

I think it would potentially be a manslaughter charge.

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

#366
post #346

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I think the massive collection of data from more and more Teslas is going to eventually allow them to produce the best self-driving vehicle. Its been a maxim of history that those with the most data generally win, whether that's military intelligence of troop movements from 2000 years ago, or LIDAR scans from a car today.

I think the best evidence for Tesla doing poorly here (or maybe that LIDAR really is necessary) is precisely that they have all this data and still aren't doing as well as others. Tesla has a seriously absurd advantage here: they can observe millions of drivers and see when the human drivers do things differently than their self driving software would have, and capture the data from those events. They've had this adv…

I agree with this concern. They collect a lot of data, sure, but they are also the only one who thinks that video is enough. It's a bold bet; intuitively, one would expect that video-only is good enough for gimmicks and fares worse when it comes to covering the millions of edge cases that still need to be addressed.

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

#367
post #88

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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.)

Elon will get into some pretty bizarre bouts on twitter. I realize this is common for celebrities, but that whole "diver is a pedophile" thing was truly wtf. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pedo-guy-doesnt-mean-p...

If you go read the court testimony it isn’t as strange as it seems on the face. The diver started the tiff and the insult Musk sent in return was said to be common vernacular in South Africa where he grew up.

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I think it was just to cover the backs of FB engineers. Like you implement a new feature and you are afraid you get scolded because it broke something. You know you are covered. So you dare to change things. Actually was there even a handful of cases where things broke? (And I am sure FB will get rid of the engineer who breaks too many things)

Yup, that's exactly it! So, the culture was "it's okay to break things as long as you're moving fast". I don't think Telsa explicitly would say "it's okay to break things" to their engineers, but I do think they'd say "it's okay to ignore regulations". In the end, they may have the same results, however it's all about what employees know they're safe getting away with.

Tesla might actually say: "Everybody, we need to push end of quarter sales. You gotta release the FSD as it is. App team, you gotta implement some butt purchase button for FSD that has no undo. Thanks."

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

#369
post #353
post #332

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That "Apple Engineer" was playing a video game on this cellphone according to NHTSA. But it's "rabid Tesla fans" you say? https://www.kqed.org/news/11803406/apple-engineer-killed-in-...

Yes, that's captured by the defences I listed above. You say that this is an autopilot, you make them purchase self driving capability package, you say that the car comes with all the hardware necessary for self driving, you fans post videos online about cars driving themselves and in the small print you say that it's not autopilot but Autopilot and the drivers must pay attention all the time and you put very weak sa…

That's such a hard reach and a bunch of word mincing.

To this day in 2021, many people still don't wear seat belts. Even though that's a solved problem. Some people will do stupid things. It's human nature.

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

#370
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…

There is no challenge reconciling imperfect FSD with high trust of that FSD.

When I decided to play the game of risk minimisation, I sold my car. Minimising risk isn't the most important goal of drivers, almost by definition. Cars are not safe in any objective sense. They are tools of convenience.

A fun hypothetical, you and a good friend get tested for spatial intelligence and it turns out there was a big difference in your favour - how big does the difference need to be before you tell your friend you are no longer comfortable letting them drive when you are in the car?

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