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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

#51

Post by gamblor956 »

devy wrote: post #47

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)…

Tesla did not make Lidar affordable. They don't even use lidar.

They also did not make lithium batteries affordable. Panasonic and CATL did that. Tesla was simply the first to exploit that bew affordability.

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

#52

Post by parl_match »

marlow_congdon wrote: post #48

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 Tes…

Because Waymo is largely unsupervised, they take a much more conservative route than Tesla does. Their route planner includes avoiding high-incident rate stretches of road.

If there is a stretch of surface road with a complex intersection and aggressive drivers, you are there to step in. The Waymo Driver instead will try to avoid that area.

Also, Tesla's hardware is not nearly complex or powerful enough to approach the low level of intervention or incident rate that Waymo has - but HW5 will be a massive step forward for them.

That's going to be the make or break for me, personally. If Tesla can't make their solution work well on HW5, then they have serious structural issues in their program.

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

#53

Post by kube-system »

otterley wrote: post #42
ed_balls wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Because driving risk is far from evenly distributed. If a self-driving car drives like an average human driver, for responsible drivers, this would mean incurring more risk by getting into one.

A huge portion of the risk of human drivers is due to confounding human factors like negligence, distraction, medical issues, fatigue, etc. Responsible drivers can take most of these factors into their own hands -- not driving while sleepy, not driving drunk, not using their cell phone. These people don't want a vehicle

A better comparison would be comparing the capability of a self-driving car to the skill of a human driver driving under ideal circumstances of health/responsibility/etc.

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

#54

Post by questionableans »

marlow_congdon wrote: post #48

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 Tes…

Tried FSD once. It was very confused about a traffic circle, cruised up to it & slammed on the brakes. Got rear ended (at low speed).

The incomplete, miscategorizing and glitching display of other vehicles and obstacles does not give me confidence that the car is able to correctly identify what’s around it, let alone drive accordingly.

Even the lane departure warnings are 90% false positives (but I’d rather be warned than not).

Just driving normally is much less stressful and more fun than supervising the car’s attempt at driving like a teenager.

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

#55

Post by parl_match »

thebruce87m wrote: post #49
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

"depth estimation" precision matters! and it's still prone to optical illusions and other issues (many solutions struggle with road shadows, for example. sound familiar?)

I think the natural solution is a 360 lidar as a source of truth, followed by optical for everything else

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

#56

Post by cosmotic »

I thought the pitch for just-cameras was that the hardware was cheaper and that it's what humans are "using", evidence that it should be sufficient. Just-cameras was to take more engineering to build upnfront but pay off in lower costs in the end. That argument disagrees with the graph that's presented.

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

#57

Post by parl_match »

cosmotic wrote: post #56

I thought the pitch for just-cameras was that the hardware was cheaper and that it's what humans are "using", evidence that it should be sufficient. Just-cameras was to take more engineering to build upnfront but pay off in lower costs in the end. That argument disagrees with the graph that's presented.

The argument made more sense 5+ years ago, but the hardware costs of sensors such as LIDAR has plummeted.

In addition, a certain CEO of a certain car company has made very aggressive sales pitches about how LIDAR isn't necessary and even going so far as to sell unfinished self driving solutions as being completely capable of doing so.

So hypothetically, if that car company were to adopt LIDAR, they would have been selling their solution under false claims in a sales capacity.

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

#58

Post by ed_balls »

otterley wrote: post #42
ed_balls wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

1) Marketing and PR - people fear self driving cars

2) Politics - loss of jobs and urge to ban them - there needs to be a counterargument

3) Government does mandate a lot of safety features. Just insure it wont fly as this is number one risk for everybody.

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

#59

Post by tqi »

ls612 wrote: post #14
tqi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet" Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving

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?

Well yeah, have you seen how badly some of you people drive?

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

#60

Post by ls612 »

tqi wrote: post #59
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?

Well yeah, have you seen how badly some of you people drive?

Even the average human ends up with about 1 fatality every 100 million miles and 1 serious injury every 10 million miles. The typical person will drive somewhere in the six figures of miles in their lifetime.
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