101–110 of 425 posts
I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Waymo has posted videos of accidents they've avoided purely because their lidar picked up on a pedestrian before their cameras saw anything. A favorite of mine: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1900219562437861685
They're very public about the data that makes them look good, but they went to court to keep their safety data from the public. ( https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/waymo-to-keep-robotaxi-saf... )
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor) The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450
Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me. The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-clean…
FSD doesn't "work fine" driving directly into the sun. There are loads of YT videos that demonstrate this.
The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely.
Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
If you include minor fender-benders and unreported incidents, estimates drop to around 100,000–200,000 miles between any collision event.
This is cataclysmically bad for a designed system, which is why targets are super-human, not human.
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?
No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.