Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works” • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#221

Post by epistasis » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #194

Watching this video of regular folk (not tech journalists or other "reviewers", or paid PR) riding in FSD Waymo has done a lot to reduce my "but it'll never happen" feeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4 It may very well be that future FSD modes will require highly detailed maps, manual curation, limited areas where things can work, but even that would be valuable. e.g. if self driving trucks only work…

Huh, I'm surprised you find those videos convincing about the future of self driving cars. To me, they don't seem much better than the demos people were giving ten years ago, in academic competitions, etc.

The Tesla videos scare the hell out of me. My own auto pilot purchase scares me whenever I use it. I can't even use cruise control in my Tesla without it randomly slamming on the brakes.

It's pretty straightforward to make batteries and an electric car. To make a computer vision product work? Based on everything I've seen of the field over the past 20 years, I am not impressed by Tesla's efforts in the least. They seem crazy, not competent.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#222

Post by nickik » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:27 AM UTC

raldi wrote: post #14

He seems so obviously correct that I can’t fathom how any engineer could see things otherwise.

To me its obvious that he is wrong. Great, now we can all just claim we are so incredibly smart and know anything based on feeling.

Waymo is wasting tons of money driving around one city, that is literally the easiest city to driver around arguably in the world. They did this for years and years and years.

Tesla has a much, much, much larger fleet driving around in literally all conditions, in almost every single country in the world. Their software already handles things that Waymo has not even bigging to solve, like special street signs in Korea and China.

Will Waymo be the first to offer a Taxi service in geofenced? Yes. Will Tesla be the first where I can go anywhere at any time? Yes.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#223

Post by judge2020 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #205

I really wish Tesla would abandon this quixotic quest for self-driving and focus on what they do best: Building the world's best cars . If they could fix their build quality and repair issues I'd buy one tomorrow without any fancy driver assistance software because the Tesla Model S is the most fun car I've ever driven (manually).

Part of having a good car is abstracting away the biggest downside to driving: actually paying attention to the road for over an hour to and from work until you retire at 62 or later.

> If they could fix their build quality and repair issues I'd buy one tomorrow without any fancy driver assistance software because the Tesla Model S is the most fun car I've ever driven (manually).

While I'm not sure about the S, you might still be able to buy a "standard range" Model 3 which doesn't have any autopilot functionality, although is only marginally cheaper at $35k vs $38k - https://redd.it/eumoyl

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#224

Post by stordoff » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

screye wrote: post #121

NationalPark wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you use power steering, drive-by-wire pedals, and anti-lock breaks though, right? Or even an automatic transmission? Is it so different to use lane assist or cruise control?

The key difference being they are reliable 100% of the time. Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them. Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.

Nitpick: 99.(many 9s)% of the time.

I had the power steering drop out going into a turn (fuel pump failure IIRC), and it could have easily caused an accident (I physically couldn't turn the wheel enough to complete the turn).

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#225

Post by onion2k » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:35 AM UTC

alextheparrot wrote: post #139

jfoster wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be due to a form of jealousy. Sad to see HN so unenthusiastic about a guy who is probably the most amazing entrepreneur of our time. It's not that he hasn't invited a little bit of controversy (eg. comments about the diver, covid, etc.) but I think those are inconsequential when it comes to HN's attitude toward him.

What are you all talking about, the original top-level post has a reasonably presented assessment of Tesla’s strategy and the ramifications of such a strategy. Sure, that assessment might be flawed, but I don’t see how any of that is “anti-Musk bias” or “jealousy”. The comment regarding humans not needing LiDAR misses the point, which is that either every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expen…

The comment regarding humans not needing LiDAR misses the point, which is that either every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expensive hardware solution or there are valid technical reasons why that might be a better path to L5.

Implementing L5 without Lidar must be possible. Humans are absolute proof of that. That's not to say Lidar isn't useful, or cost effective given the complexity of the problem, or even just a really good idea that will make autonomous cars better drivers than people. It might be all of those things. All my comment says is that Lidar is not a requirement for driving, and we have a very obvious proof of that.

Anyone saying that Lidar is necessary for driving is ignoring the hundreds of millions of examples of driving with just a pair of 2d cameras and a highly specialised organic supercomputer.

EDIT: The point another poster made about weather and bright sunshine is a reasonable one - humans can't drive when they can't see either, so Lidar would potentially make an autonomous car better at driving than people. That would be an example of how Lidar is useful, but still not necessary.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#226

Post by mhh__ » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:39 AM UTC

jiofih wrote: post #137

missedthecue wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk seems more of a marketer than an engineer to me, even though he's always characterized as one.

Not only he sold two tech companies where he worked as a software engineer early in his career, but he has been the chief engineer for SpaceX for almost twenty years, and the results of that kind of speak for themselves?

Is his role at SpaceX for his ego or is he actually signing off on engine designs?

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#227

Post by aeternum » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:40 AM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #149

mrtksn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People die all the time, there are even higher profile cases like the Apple Engineer who slammed in the barriers at full speed: https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-... There are some spectacular failures that are very scary because the car does something that a person would never do, unless unconscious, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmAG4dk-rU You don't hear much about it pro…

I'm optimistic for this area of tech and research in general, but agree we need to stop benchmarking against average human crash rates. Although anyone can be hit at any time, the distribution of human crashes is not purely random. People who drive compromised, for example, are way overrepresented in those events. So, theoretically, the tech could get to a point with a lower than expected crash rate for humans genera…

If you believe you are a better than average driver when manually driving, why couldn't you also be better than average at intervening when autopilot is driving?

Humans don't have forward facing radar nor 360 degree always active vision, so in some cases, cars can see hazards that even a perfect human driver cannot.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#228

Post by snoshy » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

afavour wrote: post #195

snoshy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There's real world video footage showing the vehicle behavior that includes Tesla animations showing the vehicle's current understanding of the environment. It's rather cheap to take trivial shots at Tesla (no matter how bad their product might be) while comparing it to 23 year old understanding of human-machine automation in an entirely different context such as aviation. Quite unfortunate you're downvoted,…

Can the footage be trusted? From my understanding Tesla has only rolled this out to a small number of users, browsing the YT search results you’ve provided I see that almost all the results are Tesla super fan accounts. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to disregard this until you see an objective assessment in the field.

It's fair to question the motivations of the FSD beta testers. They were obviously hand picked to ensure maximum safety, adequate public profile, having committed large sums of money to prove their allegiance, as well as being existing fans of the company. So they're likely to be biased.

But that's a long way from alleging that they've doctored their videos, or that Tesla itself has censored them. There are many many instances of footage showing almost crashes that were only avoided because the driver intervened. If you were the censor, would you allow those?

Compare that to Waymo or Cruise or anyone else. They are obviously heavily censoring and have no independent owners recording footage, nor sharing it like this. It's a huge step up in much needed transparency.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#229

Post by ra7 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #159

alextheparrot wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you all talking about, the original top-level post has a reasonably presented assessment of Tesla’s strategy and the ramifications of such a strategy. Sure, that assessment might be flawed, but I don’t see how any of that is “anti-Musk bias” or “jealousy”. The comment regarding humans not needing LiDAR misses the point, which is that either every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expen…

> every other self-driving car group is incorrectly deploying an expensive hardware solution Given that Tesla are the only company to have put something approaching autonomy into the hands of customers, that does seem to be the case. What happens next in this thread? Someone points out that Tesla's solution is still far from perfect and claims that they're being highly irresponsible by having shipped it. Then I'd ask…

> Given that Tesla are the only company to have put something approaching autonomy into the hands of customers, that does seem to be the case.

Well, that’s Waymo (in Phoenix) which has put out anything approaching autonomy, not Tesla. Tesla requires a driver.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#230

Post by Arainach » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:42 AM UTC

georgewfraser wrote: post #166

Arainach wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% as good is 1000% as dangerous. Tesla's vehicles perform just well enough to convince many users they're good enough to "self drive" and ignore while failing catastrophically in edge cases and absolutely not being ready to completely ignore. Tesla's reckless "autopilot" branding contributes to this.

My point is that it doesn’t fail in edge cases. It has very clear limitations, there are no surprises. Even if you were literally asleep at the wheel, the worst thing that would happen is it’d end up stopped in front of a traffic light, waiting for you to take over.

"very clear limitations" that users continue to ignore. Some of that is stupid users, some of that is users assuming that "autopilot" means more than it does because that term has already meant something for the last 40 years in our society - something that Tesla doesn't deliver on.

Tesla's warnings to put your hands on the wheel are obviously insufficient based on regular videos of drivers asleep at the wheel on the freeway (https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/18/21445168/tesla-driver-sle... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhObsMnipS8 https://www.businessinsider.com/drivers-sleeping-in-tesla-ca... and many more). At a bare minimum, their code needs to bring the vehicle to a safe half rather than continue on its way forever dinging if the user refuses to interact with it.

And no, there are far worse things that can happen. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51645566 https://apnews.com/article/ca5e62255bb87bf1b151f9bf075aaadf