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

arstechnica.com

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

#341

Post by andi999 »

gkoberger wrote: post #211
threeseed wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance Equally likely is that they do understand but just don't care. From all accounts, Tesla seems to have a culture of move fast and break things.

Hmm I don't want to defend Tesla, but I do want to push back on this a bit! Facebook made "move fast and break things" famous, which was Zuckerberg's way of presenting a tradeoff. Everyone company says they want to move fast, but Zuckerberg made it clear that the company should care more about velocity than stability. I don't believe that's Tesla's attitude. Rather, I think their attitude is more "move fast and ignor…

Also I think it was just to cover the backs of FB engineers. Like you implement a new feature and you are afraid you get scolded because it broke something. You know you are covered. So you dare to change things. Actually was there even a handful of cases where things broke? (And I am sure FB will get rid of the engineer who breaks too many things)

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

#342

Post by dguaraglia »

sixQuarks wrote: post #152
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.

I kind of agree. It may be a weird kind of jealousy, though no one here would admit it or even recognize it for what it is. The arguments used against Tesla are in fact legitimate if we’re talking about a regular company. But Musk has proven to do the “impossible” multiple times and has been right on so many levels, so at this point you have to question whether he’s catastrophically wrong about this, or perhaps the o…

On the other hand, there's a bit of an obsession to equate the success of a company with the respect the founder is supposed to receive. There's plenty of examples of people who became 'successful' and were still not great humans. Larry Ellison and the last president come to mind. Steve Jobs comes to mind.

People need to stop fantasizing about 'Elon' being some great guy because they like what he achieved. It's almost like the technorati need their own version of celebrities to fawn over.

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

#343

Post by tlrobinson »

gundmc wrote: post #125
paulryanrogers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC for humans it's like 1 death per million miles driven. I believe Waymo is closing in on that. Not sure if Waymo handles the variety of conditions though. Musk and Tesla seem very flippant in their marketing.

But Waymo hasn't had any deaths and has over 20 million miles driven?

I don’t think those miles are directly comparable because most of Waymo’s miles are with trained test drivers, I think?

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

#344

Post by root_axis »

URSpider94 wrote: post #308
camjohnson26 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get why it’s not covered under existing laws, clearly every vehicle has to be operated by a driver with a valid license correct? You would think letting a vehicle drive without a licensed operator at the wheel would be negligence.

Nobody is doing that. In the locales where truly autonomous vehicles are being tested, it’s happening under specific legislation and regulations put in place by the states. For Tesla, behind all their bluster, the terms and conditions you accept to use their “self-driving” features make it clear that the human driver is always responsible for safe operation of the car, and all of these features are just to assist the…

Kinda hard to square that with a product called "Full Self Driving". Terms of service are generally worthless as a legal shield against catastrophic harm to customers.

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

#345

Post by xedeon »

ehsankia wrote: post #153
sixQuarks wrote: post #90

Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving? Seems to be a lot of anti-Tesla folks here, put your money where your mouth is.

What Tesla has now, Waymo had back in 2012. They literally had a FSD program they were testing with certain employees, and once they found that that people quickly get distracted and stop paying attention, they gave up on that approach and went for the new strategy of jumping straight to level 4 and skipping level 3. So either they've been doing absolutely nothing for the past 8 years until getting level 4 driverless…

Really. Waymo has this in 2012? https://youtu.be/YJxnVRAX2UA?t=4

Do you have an article/video you can share by any chance?

I've been following Google's self driving efforts for years and must've missed that.

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

#346

Post by creato »

cbozeman wrote: post #282
stingraycharles wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are collecting data on all cars yes, but are training a model in one place. That is not federated machine learning, it’s federated data collection at best.

I think the massive collection of data from more and more Teslas is going to eventually allow them to produce the best self-driving vehicle. Its been a maxim of history that those with the most data generally win, whether that's military intelligence of troop movements from 2000 years ago, or LIDAR scans from a car today.

I think the best evidence for Tesla doing poorly here (or maybe that LIDAR really is necessary) is precisely that they have all this data and still aren't doing as well as others. Tesla has a seriously absurd advantage here: they can observe millions of drivers and see when the human drivers do things differently than their self driving software would have, and capture the data from those events. They've had this advantage for many years, and yet, they still don't seem to be performing that much better (if at all) than competitors.

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

#347

Post by sudosysgen »

aidenn0 wrote: post #275
freeone3000 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Significantly more than half of your ride fare on Uber goes to the driver - between 70 and 130%. Human costs are vastly the most expensive part of hailing a ride, and will remain so as long as minimum wage exists. The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster fo…

But what fraction of the money that goes to the driver is spent on depreciation and maintenance?

Don't forget insurance/liability, gas, security, and cleaning up after passengers, too!

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

#348

Post by gkoberger »

andi999 wrote: post #341
gkoberger wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I don't want to defend Tesla, but I do want to push back on this a bit! Facebook made "move fast and break things" famous, which was Zuckerberg's way of presenting a tradeoff. Everyone company says they want to move fast, but Zuckerberg made it clear that the company should care more about velocity than stability. I don't believe that's Tesla's attitude. Rather, I think their attitude is more "move fast and ignor…

Also I think it was just to cover the backs of FB engineers. Like you implement a new feature and you are afraid you get scolded because it broke something. You know you are covered. So you dare to change things. Actually was there even a handful of cases where things broke? (And I am sure FB will get rid of the engineer who breaks too many things)

Yup, that's exactly it!

So, the culture was "it's okay to break things as long as you're moving fast". I don't think Telsa explicitly would say "it's okay to break things" to their engineers, but I do think they'd say "it's okay to ignore regulations".

In the end, they may have the same results, however it's all about what employees know they're safe getting away with.

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

#349

Post by _ph_ »

granzymes wrote: post #27
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…

Wow that second one is terrifying. Particularly since that was only 7 months ago!

One has to distinguish between "autopilot" and "FSD". The "autopilot" is used for driving on highways and mostly uses radar for obstacle avoidance. It works great with handling traffic, that is cars moving around, but not for static obstactles. The problem is the low spatial resolution of the radar, so nonmoving obstacles are difficult to distinguish from the background reflections.

"FSD" is creating a 3d-model of the environment based on the camera image. But so far it is only active outside of highways. This should be much better at avoiding static obstacles. In any case, they are different systems so experiences with one cannot always be transferred to the other.

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

#350

Post by _ph_ »

speedgoose wrote: post #18

Tesla is quite far from full self driving. They have too much phantom breaking on the simple adaptive cruise control in good conditions.

That is true, but notice that the autopilot you use on the highway is an entirely different software than the FSD beta which recently has been released for off-highway use.
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