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Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

bloomberg.com

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Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#451

Post by panick21_ »

pcurve wrote: post #373
nichochar wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

With cost of lidar plummeting, I wonder how long it will be before Musk changes his mind.

Musk over and over again has shown that if something that he wants is expensive he will invest as much money as required in it to develop and to build it in large quantities. If Musk had thought lidar cost was the big problem, they would be building a lidar giga-factory right now. But they don't because not using lidar wasn't about cost.

He might be right or wrong about that, but he wouldn't just ignore lidar because its currently on on the market cheaply.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#452

Post by janef0421 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #244
oblio wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current trains? Not directly. But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.

We're not going to stop maintaining roads. They exist for military defense as much as they do for road trips and trucks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...

Road maintenance isn't a fixed cost; The level of use, particularly by heavy vehicles like trucks, affects the amount of maintenance required.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#453

Post by panick21_ »

Veserv wrote: post #245
cs702 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see how Waymo and other self-driving systems perform in open-ended testing, outside tightly restricted, geofenced environments. Otherwise, I agree that Tesla FSD Beta has been progressing nicely. I don't know if it will take 1, 2, or 5 years to get FSD Beta to an acceptable rate of graceful failures, but I agree it looks likely to get there before the end of the decade!

I've yet to see Tesla FSD Beta perform in any meaningful operational environment, no matter how restricted, within a factor of 100x of Waymo or Cruise, and Waymo and Cruise are still at least a factor of 10x off of "equal to human drivers". Superiority can not be claimed if a system is unacceptably bad in all circumstances (i.e. 1,000x worse than the minimum acceptable standard for real commercial usage) and worse in…

Tesla has not focused on any individual area to any large extent so why would you measure them on that? That not the problem they are trying to solve and its not the problem that worth investing 30 billion for.

> within a factor of 100x of Waymo

What's your evidence for this? Is there anybody who has done a systematic comparison of Tesla performance in Arizon zone of Waymo?

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#454

Post by janef0421 »

Keyframe wrote: post #48
batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive) - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24) just to name a few off top of my head

Those are all problems dependent on the existing auto-mobile centric transport landscape, and would be better solved by moving away from that landscape.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#455

Post by panick21_ »

itsoktocry wrote: post #417
Salgat wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Waymo and Cruise constrained to specially tailored cities? Autonomous driving that can be activated literally anywhere in the country is far more impressive, even if it has cases where it doesn't perform as well.

To me actual driverless cars are more impressive than FSD which doesn't allow me to take my hands off the wheel, yes.

They are driverless but have a remote operator that can jump in at any time. Strictly speaking driverless cars are not actually hard to make. As long as you have a good data connection you can remote drive a car just fine.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#456

Post by panick21_ »

oblio wrote: post #148
viscanti wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what value would a city get after, what seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way? It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area that's optimized t…

A very small benefit for society but potentially a very large benefit for a select few stakeholders. Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promis…

> off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do)

That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.

And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.

> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)

Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.

Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.

As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.

And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.

> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption

Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.

SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.

The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#457

Post by panick21_ »

ehnto wrote: post #142
brutusborn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.

Then someone spray paints the sign, a taxi parks in the bike lane just behind a box truck blocking half the entrance to where you're going, meanwhile a cyclist rides the other direction directly toward you because human agents are chaotic and cities are full of them. Oh, a racoon! Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them…

Cars should just be blocked from cities unless very special situations. Removing cars from cities has huge health and economic benefits. Car free city centers are universally better then car invested cities.

Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.

Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#458

Post by panick21_ »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #137
Fricken wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.

> Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousa…

Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.

> Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube

This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes.

And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#459

Post by panick21_ »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #135
criley2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time. That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for sure.

Earth size? When was the last time you drove in Madagascar? Most driven miles are the same commute in the same city 10 times a week.

People in Madagascar would answer differently.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#460

Post by panick21_ »

_0w8t wrote: post #139
Fricken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away. The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do. (However yo…

I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times. And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.

In Norway you are not getting Tesla FSD.
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