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Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#211

Post by donor20 »

nbardy wrote: post #166
donor20 wrote: post #102

Fantastic. The reality is that good mapping and some level of lidar (which is getting cheaper faster for low res/angle sensors) is somewhat game changing in terms of self driving vehicle reliability. Tesla will miss out I think by not taking advantage of doing even the cheapest possible one sensor lidar to augment their existing system. $500 -> in the future $100 for the data lidar gives you is gold.

In that framing Tesla is already ahead in data collection. Pure numbers of cars dwarfs the advantage of lidar

Tesla does not have the 3D data to go with their imagery - google does. The amount of data google can collect, then integrate into their ground truthed 3D maps (which street view collects) is incredible. If they cared to they could back generate from images only to 3D based on an absolutely amazing training data set.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#212

Post by nickik »

ra7 wrote: post #165
nickik wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payoff to investment and work is not always linear. In something this difficult I going with the approach I believe in. I'm not gone change my opinion on that because of a specific problem of the current version. Maybe if Waymo demonstrates that they can drive on and off all major highways in the world without hd mapping of them. Then i might believe they are ahead.

> Maybe if Waymo demonstrates that they can drive on and off all major highways in the world without hd mapping of them. Then i might believe they are ahead. So, can Tesla do this right now? Also, why should Waymo not use HD mapping when they clearly have the ability to do it? Seems like a weird criteria.

Because you can't map the whole constantly changing world.

And its highly questionable that their mapping can actually deal with all the incredibly complexity of the real world.

I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#213

Post by nickik »

altacc wrote: post #189
nickik wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably Waymo Waymo has spend 10+ years and they can now barley driven in possibly the easiest location in the world, a location where they have logged millions of miles. Waymo focuses on the easiest thing first. The technology on their car is incredibly expensive both now and to scale it to 10k, 100k, 1M vehicles is a huge challenge, both capital and manufacturing. They are like a rocket company who says, we have…

> Waymo has burned money for 10+ years I don't think you can disparage Waymo and cheerlead Tesla on the basis that you think Waymo a money fire whilst ignoring that Tesla is massively in debt and has yet to post a positive annual net income. Tesla has burnt money for 17 years and it's recent profitable quarters are only the beginning of a turnaround that is not yet anywhere near sufficient to recoup it's losses. In t…

Tesla has more cash on hand then they have debt. They don't have a lot of debt for a car manufacturers? Maybe look up the basic facts next time.

The difference is that Tesla had a clear buissness plan to profit that they executed step by step. And the only reason they lost money is because they were expanding production capacity.

The analysis of the cars clearly showed that they had great margin on the cars, by far the best in the industry for BEV.

The same can not be said for Waymo. Its basically burning money and not even a clear plan on how this can eventually be recaptured. Tesla already makes money with teams that work on this stuff.

> In the meantime legacy car manufacturers are catching up with Tesla's offering

Wait, are you somebody from 2014? Because we have been hearing that since then and its still not true. And even if it were, it would not be a thread for Tesla, its a thread for ICE vehicles.

> but Tesla has lost its top spot in markets it led until recently.

Tell that to the 18% global market share in terms of EV sales. Its more if we are talking BEV. And its even more if we are talking revenue. And its even higher in terms of profit.

The facts actually say that Tesla has been expanding its global market share. But of course if you only read media articles that say 'in August Tesla fell to second spot in Lithuania' and BS like that, then you end up being misinformed.

Tesla also a has 3 gigantic new factories coming online next year, plus they easily have the best strategy for battery scale.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#214

Post by ra7 »

nickik wrote: post #212
ra7 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe if Waymo demonstrates that they can drive on and off all major highways in the world without hd mapping of them. Then i might believe they are ahead. So, can Tesla do this right now? Also, why should Waymo not use HD mapping when they clearly have the ability to do it? Seems like a weird criteria.

Because you can't map the whole constantly changing world. And its highly questionable that their mapping can actually deal with all the incredibly complexity of the real world. I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.

> And its highly questionable that their mapping can actually deal with all the incredibly complexity of the real world.

Funny, I have the same the opinion of Tesla’s camera-only approach.

> I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.

A “demo” with 20 million autonomous miles clocked vs 12.2 miles. The “process” that has so far yielded very little in terms of actual autonomous driving if you ignore the FSD marketing speak.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#215

Post by jfoster »

dragonwriter wrote: post #187
jfoster wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill? Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually le…

> I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Yes, they definitely have the lead in outsourcing costs. > Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. Actual deployment, not counting developing the technology, maybe, what, $100 billion or so at the outside, given a gen…

I think Waymo won't have too much trouble actually finding the money to do it, but it's quite wasteful to have a $100 billion cost on something where it's in the vicinity of $100 billion revenue* for your competitor.

*: I don't know the actual number.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#216

Post by jimmydorry »

cloudwalking wrote: post #201
jimmydorry wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine waymo or any of the other groups that are basing their technology around lidar, managing to get to "commodity stage". LIDAR has a fixed range it is useful for, which is greatly shrunk when you also need to factor in vehicle response time. Cameras can see as far as humans can (further actually, as it can see things more reliably at greater distances than humans). Going beyond 25mph is already massively…

This is simply not true, as evidenced by Waymo driving on roads faster than 25 mph

Waymo doing select trial, or perhaps even limited runs above 25mph does not prove they can operate safely at such speeds. My math might be off since I don't use the imperial system, but LIDAR is only good up to 50-100m (closer to 50 than 100).

Slamming the brakes on your vehicle to stop within the sensor distance is more dangerous (to the occupants and cars behidn you) and less effective (less likely to stop in time) the faster you're going.

Can you go significantly faster than you can safely see and stop in time? Sure. Would it still be considered safe when doing so? Hell no.

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