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

arstechnica.com

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

#461

Post by pfsalter »

xiphias2 wrote: post #78
karmakaze wrote: post #71

Not buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them. > "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance…

I expect Tesla and Waymo to be the 2 best driverless solutions in the near future. Tesla is a real competitor to Waymo, as the better sensor has a litmited time advantage until deep learning algorithms improve even more. Waymo doesn't have too much time to get back the billions of dollars of invested R&D money, while Tesla is already profitable even without self driving.

I've never been convinced that deep learning is the correct approach for something so nuanced as driving a car. Deep learning is excellent for generalisations and consolidating data into single metrics. It's not so good at identifying edge-cases and reacting accordingly, those cases are more likely to be merged into other reaction types.

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

#462

Post by KaiserPro »

hobofan wrote: post #389
hjnilsson wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe, most of the Tesla features are disabled because they were deemed hazardous. Only lane assist and adaptive cruise control is enabled. The others are severely limited or disabled (Summon etc.)

While I'm not a big Tesla fan, I don't think legislation is any indication of the actual safety that can be provided. Europe legislation tightly follows what German carmakers can deliver. Once they can offer the same features, it will be legal in no time.

For the pollution aspect of engines, I have some sympathy with this view, even though its not entirely correct.

When it comes to safety though, I disagree. One of the decent things to come out is the Euro NCAP rating. The manufacturers are not part of the testing process, apart from they need to supply cars. Each car is then given a rating.

For Autonomous driving, from what I can see its still down to individual states.

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

#463

Post by mikejb »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #456
jfim wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use. Waymo is actually operating a driverless paid service in Arizona [0] with point to point pick up and drop off. Does Tesla actually offer this service today? [0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-...

> driverless paid service Which works in one small limited area of the earth because of high-def maps, which is not what you would normally call "scalable".

Right, because who would digitalize the entire world and take pictures of every house and store front - that'd be insane!

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

#464

Post by watwut »

hulahoof wrote: post #446
threeseed wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk's immature and petulant behaviour is an embarrassment to entrepreneurs. I for one am not remotely jealous of him but disappointed that others think his behaviour should be emulated or worshipped just because he has been successful.

I am disappointed that people remove humanity from people who are successful. We all make mistakes and any prominent figure that doesn't is presenting a facade. I'd rather see someones imperfections and know where I stand than have another generational #metoo

Common, the rest of us are not getting nearly that level of benefit of doubt. The behavior that gets excused for successful or rich people is regularly punished in normal or unsuccessful people.

Both unofficially and when law is broken.

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

#465

Post by KaiserPro »

dalbasal wrote: post #448
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 agree with your sentiments on driver assist. I'm not comfortable with the ambiguity of responsibility. But that's not really the key point, it's just how we feel. These features act as premium goodies, like old cruise control or whatever. People buy them, use them. They generate data. User-developer feedback loops. That's already a fact. The debate is about the importance of this . The core debate (of this article:…

I think we can reduce this argument further.

Musk thinks that is it acceptable to ship features when there is a safety risk, Waymo doesn't

There is also a bit of ego in there as well. Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. Its nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. Tesla have spent Billions of dollars trying to re-create a lidar like depth sensor using radar and monocular slam.

Its just not going to cut it for a number of years. CNNs are just not fast or robust enough to replace a lidar. Especially with the quality and placement of the sensors in a tesla.

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

#466

Post by bko »

chillfox wrote: post #203
sorenjan wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it's legal. How can it be allowed to send out uncertified software to cars on public roads? Aren't there safety standards that need to be met? I thought that safety critical products where better regulated than this.

Well, software that controls a car is a new thing. So I would imagine that it hasn't really been regulated yet in most jurisdictions. For some reason we have a tendency to write laws so that they are specific to individual things rather than general and future prof laws.

Software in cars is not "a new thing". Safety has increased immeasurably in cars over the last few decades, in no small part due to software. Complexity and opacity are a problem, but cars are much safer and more efficient today due in large part to software. I don't think that would have happened if there was some regulatory committee in place to audit the software for safety. We have liability for that, a much better model than a regulatory one.

> However, as the importance of electronics and software has grown, so has complexity. Take the exploding number of software lines of code (SLOC) contained in modern cars as an example. In 2010, some vehicles had about ten million SLOC; by 2016, this expanded by a factor of 15, to roughly 150 million lines. Snowballing complexity is causing significant software-related quality issues, as evidenced by millions of recent vehicle recalls.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...

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

#467

Post by nemrut »

Judgmentality wrote: post #107
dilap wrote: 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.)

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...

Westerners living in Thailand and elsewhere in SE/E Asia have gained well-known reputation for such questionable behavior among other things.

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

#468

Post by KaiserPro »

_ph_ wrote: post #338
Animats wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Look closer. The oncoming traffic is detected, just the visualization on the dashboard screen in a bright yellow is difficult to mark out in the video.

4:10, the delivery truck isn't seen until its mostly pulled out. On the right at the traffic lights, It can't see humans

The traffic passing at the intersection is missed most of the time.

5:22, it drives onto the wrong side of the road into stationary traffic.

That is amateur stuff right there.

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

#469

Post by me_me_me »

elisharobinson wrote: post #407
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)

Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could exp…

1. You don't need all of that capital in a first year.

2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.

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

#470

Post by detaro »

pmorici wrote: post #367
Judgmentality wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it also tradition in South Africa to then e-mail press to insist that it investigate the target and pay "private investigators"?
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