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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

waymo.com

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#261

Post by roryirvine »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #206
vortegne wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any evidence for this claim?

I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

Are there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar?

Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it.

You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#262

Post by ewuhic »

There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#263

Post by gf000 »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #204
xnx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.

Unsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying. Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input. But the real point is that cameras ar…

That assumes that hardware was/is/will be more expensive than.. simply scaling up data collection and training?

Which seems like a very bad assumption, I'm not even sure it was ever true and is getting less and less true.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#264

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #226
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.

You can. It’s called a secondary offering. The SEC has a whole process.

You can sell more stock to raise money regardless of market cap.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#265

Post by gf000 »

catigula wrote: post #60
SoftTalker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.

To be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely.

Humans are not good drivers when it comes to long, monotonous rides (because we get tired)

But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#266

Post by cucumber3732842 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #195

When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws? Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo. I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.

>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?

When the general public does.

Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.

As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#268

Post by [deleted] »

WarmWash wrote: post #156
DerekL wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver? https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...

It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?). However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.

[deleted]

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#269

Post by gf000 »

Rohansi wrote: post #40
azinman2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?

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…

"works fine" as in can follow a wide asphalt roads' white lines. That is absolutely trivial thing, Lego mind storms could follow a line just fine with a black/white sensor.

This vision clearly doesn't scale to more complex scenarios.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#270

Post by gf000 »

weirdmantis69 wrote: post #97
netsharc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?". Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they'…

I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.

The guy quite clearly couldn't put a html page up (see his tweets around Twitter's acquisition), and that's a field where he supposedly "worked".

At all the other topics he couldn't even name the field. The only thing he is good at is scamming people dumb enough to fall for this.

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