Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 581 posts

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

#561

Post by javagram »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #558
javagram wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human driver has a number of options to adjust their “cameras” (eyes) that the Tesla doesn’t. E.g., flipping down the sun shield, adjusting head position to reduce glare, or even putting on a pair of polarized sunglasses. While there are technical solutions possible with more hardware, it’s not clear that Tesla could correct for some of these things in just software...

If these are uncommon enough, a Tesla could just stop on the side of the road and alert the driver. There will be a driver inside anyway. And there is a huge difference between "no L5, you have to keep an eye of the road every 10 seconds all the time", and "drives itself, but once every 2 hours, or in extreme weather conditions safely warns you and makes you take over and force you to drive yourself". This could very…

That is not L5. That’s L3.

And if the car camera is blinded by the sun, that raises questions about whether the car could safely pull over to the side of the road. I suppose with advanced simulation the car could perhaps predict glare from the sun and pull over ahead of time (“it’s approaching sundown and we’re driving west, you need to take over in 5 minutes”)

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

#562

Post by jjk166 »

ganafagol wrote: post #403
snoshy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, largely because you've cherry-picked parts of the overall strategy. The world is obviously not going to go from purely human driven to 100% autonomous overnight. There will be an intermediate phase where initially some few cars will be autonomous and privately owned, and for those owners making use of the car's full lifetime to serve as a taxi would be a no-brainer. It could pay off your (very expensive)…

> It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two. .. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car. Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time. Do you rent…

The entire point of Airbnb was to let people rent out their spare housing capacity - it just became so wildly successful that people used the system to become pseudo-landlords.

My car sits idle 22 out of 24 hours a day. If someone else handled the insurance issues and found drivers willing to pay to use it outside of the times I utilize it, I'd have no qualms about lending it out for an appropriate price. The low end estimate for an Uber driver after expenses and Uber's cut is $8.55/hr. If my car averages half that it's $35k/yr that I don't need to do anything for.

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

#563

Post by sudosysgen »

jfoster wrote: post #551
sudosysgen wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be the case, you might not have to reproduce everything. But just to give an example that is very relevant to self-driving, getting a camera with similar low-light video performance as the human eye costs over 2000$.

My dash cam cost under $200 and seems to have extremely good low light performance.

In well lit areas, sure. Let's see if your dascham can see an unlit deer at night from a moving, vibrating car (it can't).

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

#564

Post by kaba0 »

roenxi wrote: post #417
necovek wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While spatial awareness is important during driving,I believe being focused on driving is even more so. When driving the tight streets of old European cities with pedestrians jumping out everywhere, I usually watch for hints like too tall cars parked on the sidewalk and potentially hiding pedestrians planning to cross the street, and move my foot from the gas to hovering above the brake pedal. And a million other thi…

> You are right that cars are not safe, but for some part, you've got control of the risk yourself. I don't want to be in control of the risk, I'm a bad driver. Haven't owned a car for some years. Still drive on occasion when I need to with a hire car. I want a computer that is better at driving than I am to do it. It is easy for me to see why perfect is the enemy of good on this issue. You don't want to share a road…

There is no need for FSD, just a simpler AI/sensors that detects collision and breaks before the driver does (which is already a feature in some cars)

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

#565

Post by kaba0 »

pmorici wrote: post #358
meekrohprocess wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The hud as you call it is not a safety critical part of the car in Teslas. You can reboot it while driving without effecting the car. The self driving computer is separate and has full redundancy to the point of having two processors running redundant code. There is a reason Tesla’s are consistently rated as the safest cars on the road with low probability of being involved in an accident and lowest probability of in…

Fail safety doesn’t mean anything, if the decisions it makes is bad, like thinking a plastic bag is a solid object on the road, or simply forgetting where the lane is over a distance and swerving into oncoming traffic..

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

#566

Post by Animats »

_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.

I did look closer. If you bring the image into a Photoshop-like program and adjust the levels, you can see a yellow square where one oncoming car is. You can also see yellow squares elsewhere. It's a compression artifact.

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

#567

Post by kaba0 »

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.

Wouldn’t it make sense that “hardware” gets tested before it can go on the roads, why is it not the case with software? And if they find a bug, than disable the software whole-sale until it is tested by regulators again (since it can introduce new bugs as well)

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

#568

Post by kaba0 »

jfoster wrote: post #551
sudosysgen wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be the case, you might not have to reproduce everything. But just to give an example that is very relevant to self-driving, getting a camera with similar low-light video performance as the human eye costs over 2000$.

My dash cam cost under $200 and seems to have extremely good low light performance.

Try (don’t) to drive by looking only at the display of it than..

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

#569

Post by kaba0 »

dilap wrote: post #101
Zhenya wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

autonomous driving needs to be safer than humans to be adopted (some say way safer). So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.

Humans drive great when they're not distracted, with just two 2d cameras. But we get distracted a lot. So an advanced enough AI could easily be better at humans than driving w/o LIDAR, simply by driving as well as humans when not distracted, and not getting distracted.

An advanced enough AI, and we are really far from it. Current AIs are really good at isolated problem solving, but driving is not in that domain.

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

#570

Post by ra7 »

jfoster wrote: post #552
ra7 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not scale because Elon Musk said so? That HD mapping doesn't scale is the biggest trope in autonomous driving that I see Tesla fans repeating everywhere. Google, for example, has large scale mapping experience and their street view cars have been carrying Lidar sensors for years now. They've already mapped a bunch of cities in the US. Tesla itself uses HD maps for things like intersections, traffic lights and…

Your argument seems to make sense. If it's the case, though, why are Waymo only in a small part of Phoenix?

They’re rolling out a revolutionary new technology that people aren’t used to or don’t trust yet. Phoenix provides that easy testing ground in terms of good roads and great weather year round. Last thing Waymo wants is to tackle too many things at once and cause a disaster. Remember how a single death effectively ended Uber’s self driving efforts?

They’re also offering a commercial service. Which means figuring out operations, customer service, emergency protocols, working with local administration and so on. They’ve said a larger goal in Phoenix is to figure out how to perform and scale operations. The local regulations there are much more favorable. Until recently, Phoenix was one of the only (probably only) places where you could operate a robotaxi program and charge for it. California just recently approved it, so SF is where they’ll likely go next as they are already setting up everything there.

Ultimately, mapping is the not the constraint for them to go to new places. It’s the operations and regulations that they need to figure out every time.

Post reply on HN