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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”

#541

Post by smaryjerry »

Barrin92 wrote: post #94
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.)

his covid comments last year were beyond the pale. The low point for me was when Shannon Woodward, who played a scientist on TV and to my knowledge isn't one, had to explain to him that tests are indeed not a big pharma conspiracy https://twitter.com/shannonwoodward/status/13275176940992757...

“Had to” and she just replied on Twitter with some odd assumptions are very different. I think anyone would agree that a test that is wrong half the time is not a good test.

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

#542

Post by stingraycharles »

mikejb wrote: post #460
cbozeman wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a curious point: How much data does Tesla actually collect? I can imagine users not being too happy if their car clogs the upload for hours every time you park it in your garage?

More than you think. There are sensors everywhere and pretty much all of them are regularly uploading telemetry to the cloud. This goes much further than self driving cars, the entire CAN bus is constantly synced with the cloud, all sensors, vibration, tire pressure, etc. All in the name of predictive maintenance and whatnot.

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

#543

Post by necovek »

BingoAhoy wrote: post #514
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 mention focused driving, but here's a cool idea. Your subconscious which actually handles most of ur behavior and decision making and nuanced calculations gradually learns from your conscious. When you focus on things, you gradually train your subconscious to mirror that behavior and do it autonomously. This is demonstrable by reflecting on new things you learn versus old things. Old things like walking you barel…

You say how we subconsciously handle things like obstacles during walking, but here I am at my 38 years of age, tripping on uneven sidewalk where there's a sudden unnoticeable drop in the level of a couple cm (an inch): the same feeling when you go down the stairs in dark, and forget that there is one extra step.

I agree we get subconsciously trained (here, my brain is expecting a perfectly flat sidewalk), but when I say focused driving, I am mostly thinking of *not-doing-anything-else*: to an extemt that I also keep my phone calls short (or reject them) even with the bluetooth handsfree system built into my car with steering wheel commands.

The thing is that a truck's trunk opening in front of you and things starting to fall out on a highway at 130kmph (~80mph) is very hard to train for, but all four of us car drivers that were right behind when it happened did manage to avoid it without much drama or risk to themselves or each other. What self driving tech today would you trust to achieve the same today? Sometimes you don't care about averages, because they are skewed by drunks or stupid people showing off on public roads.

And stats being by miles covered is generally useless: if it was accidents per number-of-performed-manouvres, it'd be useful. Getting on an empty highway and doing 100 miles is pretty simple compared to doing 2 miles in a congested city centre.

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

#544

Post by kerng »

mikejb wrote: post #459
kerng wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else would you describe Waymo's message? Trying to "educate" or talk down to a competitor with words like "this is not how this works" when Tesla has significant resources, expertise (actual cars on the road!) and knowledge in this area seems defensive to me.

To be fair, Waymo (back then Chauffeur) have solid experience with Tesla's approach. They started with the same strategy of gradual improvements. They found out (and shard) the same issues Tesla is running into in the past years: Users don't pay attention when monitoring a system doing a boring task - even when failures carry a high price. Waymo switched the approach from a gradual L2/3/4 improvements straight to dev…

I recommend watching Lex Friedman's interview with George Hotz - its has some good points that one might should consider around the different approaches on reaching L5.

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

#545

Post by missedthecue »

leesec wrote: post #509
missedthecue wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been 311 days since Elon Musk promised to produce ventilators at the SpaceX factory. It's been 546 days since Elon Musk claimed Tesla was increasing production of solar roofs towards one thousand per week by end of 2019 It's been 644 days since Elon Musk said there will be a million fully autonomous Tesla robotaxis in a year It's been 726 days since Elon Musk said Tesla would likely be cash flow positive in all…

Please do something else with your time.

https://elonmusk.today/

that comment took me a minute to write.

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

#546

Post by vletal »

xiphias2 wrote: post #72
vletal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did pick different sensors and approach to world mapping in the first place. How is it just a cultural and regulator thing?

One method is spending money on sensors, the other is on gathering as much data as possible (cheaper sensors, but put in all cars). In 20 years we'll probably have good enough algorithms that can work with few data and cheap sensors, so it's just a matter of time until the 2 methods converge.

Has it ever been in the history like that? It's more like the hardware will get both more sophisticated and cheeper.

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

#547

Post by [deleted] »

mung wrote: post #537
jiofih wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are at a much higher risk from all kinds of humans, with varying levels of skill, in different states of mind manually driving these vehicles.

You've always been at risk of other road users, but that is well understood when you get in a car and drive somewhere. What's new, and on top of that risk, and not well understood is the risk due to drivers mis-using a half-baked feature named "autopilot" as if it's actually an autopilot, because Musk insists that it works when it clearly does not always work.

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by jiofih »

dillondoyle wrote: post #526
jiofih wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing scary happens in the next 60 seconds. The car would obviously not go into the opposite lane if there was traffic, and given a few more seconds it would return to the right shoulder. The driver is jumpy and taking over before it has time to correct anything.

what?! first I dont think that's so obvious that the car would obviously not go into the opposite lane, it doesnt even see all the cars as OP pointed out and Teslas have rammed solid objects stationary at full speed. Not being able to 'see' standard lane markings is such a basic requirement! The car shouldn't have to correct. if this was a student driver during a test I'm guessing they would fail - been a while I don…

Teslas have been on the road for years and there is zero occurrences of one turning into live traffic. You’re underestimating the state of its self-driving abilities, there are no visible lane markings at that point in the video, it’s a error you might see a human make.

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

#549

Post by reitzensteinm »

elisharobinson wrote: post #496
reitzensteinm wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes i think i over inflated the number of cars required . https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 going through the data there are about 5 million drivers in Uber in 2019 . i will admit 100B$ in capex is a reasonable assumption But I cant imagine for practical reasons google , apple , Amazon putting a large % of their savings into still unproven tech with regulatory risk. Keep in mind that they would s…

I don't think $100bn is reasonable - that's a million cars!

There are only 13k taxi medallions in NYC, which is a good point of reference as the limited supply means they are efficiently utilized.

Extrapolating that out to the general US population yields just over 500k taxis, and that's to completely replace every single taxi in the country.

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

#550

Post by AshWolfy »

rlt wrote: post #316
AshWolfy wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon musk is everything wrong with the tech industry as a whole, overpriced, over engineered, and QA lacking products, hes arrogant when he shouldnt be, and his "disruptions" are mostly stupid, what accomplishments he does have are largely the result of engineers he pays that he takes credit for the only thing he is good at is marketing himself

Sorry, you are clueless. Yes, some aspects of his personality are obnoxious, but he’s built multiple companies that have delivered real innovation, his customers are largely happy, and I’m sure his engineers don’t care how much credit he takes.

His companies have few innovations, at best they are iterative, and often actively worse. and he did none of it himself, he deserves zero credit

people think he is innovative because he sold decades old tech to people who didnt pay attention before, because he is a glorified marketing exec and hes not even good at that

consumer satisfaction is a poor way to measure quality

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