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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”

#421

Post by Pyramus »

snoshy wrote: post #103
dilap wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I don't get that feeling. What makes you think that? I don't know much about Elon, but I listened to one of his interviews with Rogan, and he struck me as extremely optimistic, but also grounded and not arrogant. (I do agree partial-self-driving just seems like a terrible idea. I guess crash stats can reveal if this is true or not, but are perhaps not available.)

Autopilot and FSD beta are not the same. The latter is currently available to maybe a couple dozen testers that are clearly very well informed about the capabilities of the system, as well as the changes in each update. If you really don't believe it, watch their hours and hours of (frankly boring) videos of analyzing the behavior of the system in complex situations while still staying on top of safety. It does remai…

> clearly very well informed

I completely underestimated the role of professional safety drivers for autonomous vehicles. I thought it's "just a guy" sitting in the car for good measure, but it turns out that the majority of drivers is not fit for the job even after lengthy training, see e.g. [1] (a gread podcast in general).

Also all autonomous driving companies employ safety drivers - except one.

> NHTSA scrutinizes crashes that involve anything close to Autopilot and FSD quite heavily.

I wouldn't put too much hope into the NHTSA regulating Autopilot. It took a two year legal battle to get the data driving their analysis of the Autopilot in 2017, turns out it was completely provided by Tesla, but worse, when confounders where removed, it still showed a higher crash rate for Autopilot.

If you take a non-American view of Autopilot, Europeans agencies did scrutinize the crashes more closely and as a result have restricted the use of Autopilot.

If you are interested in the topic of autonomous driving I recommend the Autonocast podcast.

[1] http://www.autonocast.com/blog/2020/10/29/205-why-teslas-ful...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/in-2017-the-feds-said-t...

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

#422

Post by mewpmewp2 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #337
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wonder is would countries like China be able to reach FSD faster since they would possibly be less ethically bound? And similarly with other tech which otherwise would be limited ethically?

IIRC so far China doesn't seem to be doing anything like Tesla, most things I've seen were testing in a closed zone with an engineer, Waymo-style. They also don't have any self-driving deaths for now, unless I missed something. I thus don't think they will have this advantage. They might have the advantage of more chaotic traffic?

So this makes me wonder, why not. What's stopping them from advancing quicker in this particular field if they could cut more corners faster? And could they cut more?

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

#423

Post by andi999 »

pmorici wrote: post #358
meekrohprocess wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one question for Tesla customers who trust the company to deliver full FSD. How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance? The NHTSA opened an investigation into premature HUD failures because they prevented the backup cameras from working. But the fact of the matter is, the company used a small partition of in…

The hud as you call it is not a safety critical part of the car in Teslas. You can reboot it while driving without effecting the car. The self driving computer is separate and has full redundancy to the point of having two processors running redundant code. There is a reason Tesla’s are consistently rated as the safest cars on the road with low probability of being involved in an accident and lowest probability of in…

2 Processors? What happens with majority vote if they disagree? (or maybe they wanted to avoid a 'minority report' situation :-)). But honestly do you know what they do? Although since it is not flying, probably some red indicator will light up. And maybe a stopping maneuver.

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

#424

Post by jjav »

roenxi wrote: post #417
necovek wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While spatial awareness is important during driving,I believe being focused on driving is even more so. When driving the tight streets of old European cities with pedestrians jumping out everywhere, I usually watch for hints like too tall cars parked on the sidewalk and potentially hiding pedestrians planning to cross the street, and move my foot from the gas to hovering above the brake pedal. And a million other thi…

> You are right that cars are not safe, but for some part, you've got control of the risk yourself. I don't want to be in control of the risk, I'm a bad driver. Haven't owned a car for some years. Still drive on occasion when I need to with a hire car. I want a computer that is better at driving than I am to do it. It is easy for me to see why perfect is the enemy of good on this issue. You don't want to share a road…

> You don't want to share a road with me when you could share it with a Tesla FSD.

I'd rather share a road with you, a human.

Even if you're a self-admitted bad driver, humans have a strong instinct of self preservation which helps.

Software has no such thing, a bug in the code will let it accelerate full throttle into a wall (or whatever) without flinching because it's not alive.

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

#425

Post by La1n »

JonathanFly wrote: post #410
screye wrote: post #35

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree wit…

>However, in the unlikely scenario that 2D videos are sufficient for L5 self-driving, Tesla wins BIG. No one will be even close, especially due to the scale of 2D data that they have gathered. Potentially Tesla's 2D data lead means they will still be the leader even if the compute resources in the current cars isn't up to the task, and maybe even if they have to add additional sensors like lidar. They can probably re…

>costs a fraction of the cost of lidar

What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive.

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

#426

Post by dmix »

ganafagol wrote: post #403
snoshy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, largely because you've cherry-picked parts of the overall strategy. The world is obviously not going to go from purely human driven to 100% autonomous overnight. There will be an intermediate phase where initially some few cars will be autonomous and privately owned, and for those owners making use of the car's full lifetime to serve as a taxi would be a no-brainer. It could pay off your (very expensive)…

> It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two. .. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car. Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time. Do you rent…

There would have to be a cleaning service after every (n?) ride and ideally some form of (expensive) insurance. Unless there is some high level of surveillance of the driver with a rating system which in itself is a huge drawback.

I agree this whole thing (ie a large percentage giving up ownership) is way more complicated than it sounds.

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

#427

Post by jiofih »

ganafagol wrote: post #403
snoshy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, largely because you've cherry-picked parts of the overall strategy. The world is obviously not going to go from purely human driven to 100% autonomous overnight. There will be an intermediate phase where initially some few cars will be autonomous and privately owned, and for those owners making use of the car's full lifetime to serve as a taxi would be a no-brainer. It could pay off your (very expensive)…

> It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two. .. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car. Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time. Do you rent…

At that point it will be just another smart investment and not a “shiny toy”.

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

#428

Post by twic »

ganafagol wrote: post #403
snoshy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, largely because you've cherry-picked parts of the overall strategy. The world is obviously not going to go from purely human driven to 100% autonomous overnight. There will be an intermediate phase where initially some few cars will be autonomous and privately owned, and for those owners making use of the car's full lifetime to serve as a taxi would be a no-brainer. It could pay off your (very expensive)…

> It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two. .. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car. Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time. Do you rent…

I could just about believe that this could be a novel kind of finance - someone who couldn't afford to buy a fancy car for themselves could afford it if they offset the cost by renting it out. You accept the butts as part of the cost.

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

#429

Post by moonbug »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #359
meekrohprocess wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one question for Tesla customers who trust the company to deliver full FSD. How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance? The NHTSA opened an investigation into premature HUD failures because they prevented the backup cameras from working. But the fact of the matter is, the company used a small partition of in…

Tesla is organized functionally. The Infotainment Group did the Console electronics. The SW people there did GUIs and such. So yes between the electronics folks and the app folks 'somebody' didn't consider write cycles. In other Tesla groups, such as Body Controls, and Propulsion -- I can assure you those geeks know such things and plan to deal with funky hardware. The Autopilot group is again separate. There really…

> There really isn't much crossover

except, apparently, the execution platform. you know, the bit that matters.

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

#430

Post by LatteLazy »

One of the reasons I doubt self driving will happen any time soon (beyond Lane assist and similar minor changes) is that everyone is desperate to talk about why they're the expert and how it will work and no one seems to have a product ready to sell.

It reminds me of chip makers arguing over the definitions of 2nm, when they were not producing anything smaller than 20nm...

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