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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

#61

Post by CrimsonRain »

carabiner wrote: post #50
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 e…

You know...AIs these days, have that too. Not as good as humans yet, but it will surpass at some point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1u5eetx/hw4_fsd_a...

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

#63

Post by xnx »

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)…

The general approach to pioneering work like self-driving is:

1) Make it work

2) Make it right

3) Make it cheap

For no good reason, Elon tried to solve step 3 before the other two. This is extra strange since SpaceX has done much better at pioneering work.

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

#64

Post by randyrand »

tqi wrote: post #6
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" Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving

If your goal is to make roads safer then making self driving more expensive and harder to afford will have the opposite effect.

* with prerequisite that "safer than the avg human" is the minimum bar for any system.

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

#65

Post by qingcharles »

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.

Sure, cameras (eyes) are mostly all that humans are using, but two points:

1) the vehicles aren't quite matched with the same experience and intelligence (right now) as exists behind a human's two "cameras"

2) we hold self-driving robots to a much higher standard. meatbags are getting smushed in large numbers daily by other humans, but a single robot smushing a human is headline news for days. giving the robot vastly more information about the world around it, in much higher detail will eventually allow it to drive much better than us.

[obviously we should hold them to higher standards, we should create something much better at driving than the best humans]

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

#66

Post by randyrand »

foxyv wrote: post #8
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.

Personally I would rather vote to ban them if they aren't safe enough. If car makers want to cheap out at the expense of public safety they should go to prison for the people they kill.

It's not car makers. It's car buyers. When a car buyer cannot afford self driving they'll just drive themselves.

The bar should be safer than a human and as affordable as possible.

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

#67

Post by gumby »

xnx wrote: post #63
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)…

The general approach to pioneering work like self-driving is: 1) Make it work 2) Make it right 3) Make it cheap For no good reason, Elon tried to solve step 3 before the other two. This is extra strange since SpaceX has done much better at pioneering work.

That’s because SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell.

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

#68

Post by bryanlarsen »

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)…

Lambert became anti-Tesla when Tesla told him that they weren't going to give him the 2 Roadsters he earned through referral fees.

Waymo's Zeekr and Hyundai based next gen platforms cost less than twice as much as the Cybercab and hold more than twice as many people. And have Lidar.

Tesla could add Lidar to their models, but it would cost them an extra couple of years. They're already well behind Waymo, in two years time Waymo will probably be available to the majority of the US population...

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

#69

Post by bryanlarsen »

> 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers

That is a remarkable number. You can avoid 50% of multi-vehicle crashes by being a good driver yourself, but the other 50% are caused by the other driver. To get above 50% you have to drive defensively and do a good job modelling the actions of other drivers.

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

#70

Post by m348e912 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #16
hagbard_c wrote: post #9

Competitor explains why competition's product falls short - film at 11. I'd say the proof is in the pudding, which system shows the best results under different circumstances. I suspect the end result will be that a combination of cameras and some scanning apparatus - lidar, radar, sonar - gives the best results and that self-driving systems will converge on that combination.

We already have those results. It’s why Waymo is doing millions of paid rides per month while Tesla is LARPing a robotaxi service that’s basically doing zero fully autonomous rides, as far as anyone can tell.

Tesla is manufacturing thousands of robotaxis a month. LARP or not, I'd be very surprised if none of the robotaxis are put to use.
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