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Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

electrek.co

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Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#41

Post by xnx »

swingandamiss wrote: post #34
xnx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Teslas could self drive you could sit in the back seat, or sleep, or send the car somewhere without being in it. Elon really wants them to, but Tesla's do not self drive.

If Rivian was completely equal with Tesla at FSD, your tone would be completely different about Rivian. We understand.

Elon's an ass, but the world needs self driving in as many places, from as many providers, as soon as possible.

I wish Elon wasn't so stubborn about admitting he was wrong.

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#42

Post by otterley »

ed_balls wrote: post #10
randyrand wrote: post #2

Right. But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it or are 10+ cameras already safe enough? This article makes no attempt to answer the actual meat of the question. Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet. p.s. I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.

> Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet. Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only. 1) Both in 2028 2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035 3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving

> Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver.

Why? So long as they're insured and their owners can be held criminally liable for injuries just as a human driver would be, why does the bar have to be higher?

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#44

Post by ls612 »

site-packages1 wrote: post #40
ls612 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 2x Mk 1 eyeballs are good enough then I figure cameras can get there too. Or are we going to outlaw that as well because of competitive incentives of Waymo?

Hi, Elon! Big fan of the Wiki page about your list of predictions for autonomous driving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

I wish I were as rich as Elon but alas I'm just an ordinary person who appreciates more than one company competing to deploy autonomous driving technology. Appreciate the vitriol though, it tells me a lot about you as a person.

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#45

Post by site-packages1 »

ls612 wrote: post #44
site-packages1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Elon! Big fan of the Wiki page about your list of predictions for autonomous driving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

I wish I were as rich as Elon but alas I'm just an ordinary person who appreciates more than one company competing to deploy autonomous driving technology. Appreciate the vitriol though, it tells me a lot about you as a person.

Excuse me did you just call me a highly corrosive acid made from sulfur dioxide? Reported.

edit: I also want to point out that the fanboys conflate documented evidence in wikipedia of things EM has said with vitriol. It's like when people get banned on social media for hate speech for quoting something the POTUS said.

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#46

Post by [deleted] »

HiJon89 wrote: post #33

> “Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” It feels like there's a lot of assumptions baked in here. For example, do humans get in accidents because eyes are insufficient driving sensors? Or because human drivers get tired, distracted, mak…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#47

Post by devy »

I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti-Telsa/Musk when Musk got into politics.

Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it.

Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable).

Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology.

Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd!

So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#48

Post by marlow_congdon »

Personal experience, but my Tesla Model 3 drives most trips from start to finish. If I have to intervene, it's usually because other drivers aren't letting it into a lane and I have to get aggressive. Friends I know in Dallas and Austin (simpler, friendlier streets than where I live) say they don't drive at all anymore. Maybe it's not good enough for a robotaxi service yet, but the rate of progress since my first Tesla in 2022 has been crazy to watch, especially in the last year.

Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked.

Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#49

Post by thebruce87m »

theshrike79 wrote: post #7

Lidar will give you XYZ (z = distance) on a single datapoint, cameras give you XY and you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras. Lidar is ugly and expensive, but requires way fewer cycles to calculate distances. And it works through fog and even some obstacles, nor does it care about glare or get "scared" of shadows. If we had infinite compute in the car, cameras would be the obvious solution ...but we don't.…

> you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras.

You can get 3D depth estimation from a single 2D image but I don’t know how good it is for automotive.

https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation

Re: Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

#50

Post by carabiner »

HiJon89 wrote: post #33

> “Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” It feels like there's a lot of assumptions baked in here. For example, do humans get in accidents because eyes are insufficient driving sensors? Or because human drivers get tired, distracted, mak…

Humans also have prior world domain knowledge. A human driver seeing a guy running across the road behind an obstacle can infer that the human will probably pop out on the other side (and prepare accordingly). A human can see the silhouette of an object with 1 eye and still infer that it has depth because they know what objects are, which is why one-eyed people can drive legally everywhere in the US. This inference extends to everything, not just shapes but behaviors of anything in the road, animate and inanimate objects.
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