391–400 of 582 posts
I really wish that companies would just sell their products instead of doing the business relationship 2-step. It is an unnecessary waste of time to sell product. It looks like these sensors have just enough range to be effective for lidar terrain scanning. I would have bought a Movia S right now just to try it out.
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Why sell cars to everyone? People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us still do), most now rent via cloud. Why should transportation be different?
>>Why should transportation be different? Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are acceptable. But also for many, renting a car has a huge ICK factor. It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left wrappers and fo…
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> how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. It is pretty incredible but people will (rightly so?) hold automated drivers to an ultra high standard. If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
> If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly. This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory agency to outlaw them! https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-cras...
Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.
It's not complicated. LIDAR hardware was in short supply during COVID. Elon obviously couldn't slow down production and sink the inflated stock price.
There are probably even earlier statements from him against lidar...
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> but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support. Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse. For one, people actually need to trust your brand…
> For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically stupid. Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits…
Well... just look at Tesla. A lot of their parts don't come from the classic supplier-OEM delivery chain model, but Tesla makes as much as they can on their own. It saves them a bunch of money, both when it comes to the profit margin of the supplier, and being at the whims of their supplier, but it is nasty for the customers when there simply is no parts OEM that one could go to when the vehicle manufacturer goes out of business or refuses to support the car any further.
> Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits
Oh hell yes. New EU law is particularly to blame here. OBD diagnosis always was nasty enough, you virtually always need to buy expensive diagnosis software and hardware (e.g. Mercedes XENTRY, VW ODIS, BMW ICOM)... but the newest requirements enforce live digital signatures and anti-tamper checks. Nasty as hell. And the buses itself... it's no longer just one CAN bus doing everything, not since the Kia Boys, it's multiple buses of different speeds, some using encryption on the wire, all making diagnosis, troubleshoots and repairs much more difficult than it used to be.
And that is before getting into the replacement parts issue itself that you wrote up.
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Tesla does not handle rain well either. This is not a LIDAR problem, it is a problem with self driving cars in general.
My Tesla can't even tell if it should turn the wipers on consistently or correctly. Let alone drive in the rain.
I really wish that companies would just sell their products instead of doing the business relationship 2-step. It is an unnecessary waste of time to sell product. It looks like these sensors have just enough range to be effective for lidar terrain scanning. I would have bought a Movia S right now just to try it out.
Isn't LIDAR a high powered laser? How could they just go selling it to consumers like you?
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I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsof…
Why sell cars to everyone? People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us still do), most now rent via cloud. Why should transportation be different?
A lot of folks are relearning lessons on this front in Cloud right now.
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In a saner world Teslas would be running Waymo's self-driving stack instead of the half-baked "might kill you at any time" not quite-FSD.
They are not the same. I don't think Tesla or its consumers are interested in geofenced self driving, they want to be able to use it on road trips and driving around suburbs.
Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a…
How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not as wide as it seems.
If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.