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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”

#481

Post by sixQuarks »

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…

..and so does this mean you want to bet or not?

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

#482

Post by tuatoru »

dtech wrote: post #377
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulations are all we have to keep things from breaking...ignoring them about something like a self driving car should be a criminal offense.

The other side of the coin as that they hobble 5-20 years behind tech possibilities. If you want to push boundaries, you sometimes have little choice. Self-driving cars in the next 10 years have been a serious possibility for the last decade or so, yet governments and insurers don't have a policy ready and won't until a couple of years after the first self-driving cars are available.

Pushing boundaries is fine when there are no life-threatening implications.

Self driving is all about convenience and costs[1] and as such it's not necessary, nor is it advisable, to inflict the bleeding edge on the general public. Waymo's geofenced approach is less bad than Tesla's, and it's something that regulators can readily work with also.

1. But teh safeties!1! No. Just no. ADASes (advanced driver assistance systems), particularly autonomous emergency braking, remove the safety argument for self driving. With ADASes you have 95% or more of the (asserted) safety of self driving, and ADASes are available today, on a large and increasing range of cars. There are even retrofit kits.

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

#483

Post by sixQuarks »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #287
sixQuarks wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say we do $1,000, but what did you have in mind? We will have to put the bets in escrow We need to agree to what constitutes full level 5 self driving. My interpretation of it is a car that can drive itself anywhere in the world, has been approved for commercial use in at least one country, AND recognized as the first to full self driving in at least 2 major publications. We can put a 5 year time limit on the bet.

L5 under those conditions won’t be achieved in 5 years. Might as well not make the bet.

We can make a different bet on this.

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

#484

Post by mikejb »

xedeon wrote: post #351
Arainach wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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 Every Tesla owner will tell you that those videos where people are "falling asleep" are staged. Why? because if you don't acknowledge the warnings, it will turn on the hazards stop and disable autopilot for the rest of the drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uw97Gx1lYw

That particular attack had been fixed, but I remember people disabling those warnings with oranges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYZrehVQouc

It's an arms race between Tesla being legally on the safe side, and drivers using the car as Tesla advertises it.

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

#485

Post by sixQuarks »

ra7 wrote: post #229
jfoster wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

yes, but Waymo uses high resolution mapping for that particular city. That does not scale.

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

#486

Post by Seanambers »

mikejb wrote: post #453
neillyons wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon talked about LIDAR at the autonomy investor day. Basically he said that the Dragon spacecraft has LIDAR and he spearheaded that effort. He also said that LIDAR and cameras both use the same wavelength, if you are going to add a sensor it makes more sense to add one which is outside of the visible wavelength. Even though I know nothing about driverless cars, the reasoning from Elon makes sense. https://www.youtub…

Whilst Lidar and cameras may have similar wavelengths, they have very different information outputs. Cameras give you a 2D colored image from which you essentially guesstimate the distance of objects. Lidar gives you a 2D depth map with much higher confidence in the data that comes out of the stream. Elon has a high incentive to talk down Lidar in cars: He/Tesla placed the bet initially on cameras because Lidar is/wa…

From what I understand Teslas have a front facing radar giving them accurate range measurement forward and they incorporate that in and use nets to do SLAM for other angels where the radar isn't.

But i'm not an expert in this so take it with a grain of salt please :)

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

#487

Post by reitzensteinm »

elisharobinson wrote: post #407
rcxdude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This matches my experience of how Tesla is viewed in the autonomous car industry. No-one thinks they are a serious contender when it comes to a driverless vehicle (and their business model basically doesn't match with the technology either: every other company is basically going to operate a taxi service because there's far more value to be captured and it can help pay for the hardware making driverless possible)

Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could exp…

Uber 2019 revenue $14.15 billion, divided by your estimate of 10 million cars is $1415 per car per year. I would suggest you're estimating at least an order of magnitude too high for the car count, since they can more or less operate 24x7.

That would bring the capex down below $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash.

Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.

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

#488

Post by froh »

froh wrote: post #334
01100011 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telsa will be very transparent when the first round of lawsuits begins and they're facing multi-billion dollar lawsuits. Toyota lost billions from simply not following accepted safety design practices. Does anyone really think Tesla's self-driving tech is ISO26262 or MISRA compliant?

No it's is IEC61508 compliant. IEC61508-7 F is giving an example how to come from test hours to a quality and safety statement, in terms of failure in time rates. With how many, 700.000 morning and evening commutes, tesla is gathering evidence pretty quickly that their vehicles save more lives than they kill due to those rare FSD faults which lead to fatal failures. Air bags kill people. Always have, always will. Ful…

I need to apologize, it's iec61508-7 Annex D, not F

> This annex provides initial guidelines on the use of a probabilistic approach to determining > software safety integrity for pre-developed software based on operational experience. This > approach is considered particularly appropriate as part of the qualification of operating > systems, library modules, compilers and other system software.

Tesla, given the size of their fleet, can also follow such an approach for their "application" especially the neural nets and the rule sets.

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

#489

Post by brianwawok »

ameen wrote: post #40
brianwawok wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean people have already died sleeping with it on. But it’s also likely saved lives based on their deaths per mile number.

I’m not sure if I feel easy about this “statistic” - deaths per mile?? These are humans, and more importantly to the business - paying customers. If my product has the possibility of killing my customer, I’d probably not be comfortable with making it market ready (without massively improving its safety features).

Most products can kill someone. Entire lines of products routinely kill its user. Society deems them worth the risk. A no risk life is sitting alone in a room, where you will die to obesity.

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

#490

Post by necovek »

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…

Being a software engineer,I do want to share a road with you more than any self-driving tech out there today.

You need to experience truly bad roads to understand the complexity involved that you would easily navigate and software would be perplexed!

Sure, we need to be building it today to get there some day, but we are so far away!

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