One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
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One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
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Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#2If Tesla's Robotaxis become Bing to Waymo's Google, that'll be quite an impressive leap from where Tesla is today.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#3> it will probably not be very safe, otherwise nothing would stop Tesla from rolling out “the safe” autopilot to car owners today, unless you think that something will change in one month and we are getting some kind of breakthrough in software, so it seems like taxi will run today’s software.
The last version of FSD to increment the major or minor version number was released last year. There haven't been any big upgrades since then, they've only incremented the patch version number. Before that it had improved extremely rapidly for many months. The June robotaxi launch represents at least 6 months of improvement over the current public version of FSD, not one month. It's clear the team has focused exclusively on the robotaxi launch, and given the incredible pace of improvement of the public version in the year prior to their change in focus, I could easily imagine a huge improvement over the current (pretty good!) release.
Not only that, but I think there's a pretty good chance that the robotaxi version of the Model Y will include updated compute hardware, which I expect will significantly improve the performance of FSD just by virtue of running larger models. The difference between the HW3 and HW4 versions of FSD is quite significant with the only difference being compute, so it seems likely that even more compute could improve things further.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#4Wait... the big insight here is that people live in cities? Brother, this has been talked to death in the "is level 4 good enough" conversation.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#5The main downside is not just a cost thing but its waves are blocked by moist in air, rain, and dense fog. So, it will also degrades to just use cameras in this conditions.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#6one point the author seems to be missing as to why we need full self driving everywhere is in the logistics industry. We are talking about interstate driving, from point A to point B, in this case it might involve industria environments such as a truck stop, weighing, loading/unloading etc, something that requires decision making across different environments (urban, highway, dense residential etc). Tesla FSD has the real potential for this unlock, more than just a ride hailing use case of getting people from point A to point B.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#7Tesla is probably going to fake it using human remote drivers. Tesla has been running ads to hire the drivers.[1]
That has all the costs of the self-driving hardware, plus the costs of the remote drivers, but it maintains the illusion that Tesla is a growth company.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#8The main downside is not just a cost thing but its waves are blocked by moist in air, rain, and dense fog. So, it will also degrades to just use cameras in this conditions.
From the recent tesla acme test, where the tesla runs into a wall containing a picture of a road, they also tested rain and water blocking two mannequins. The lidar equipped vehicle managed to stop before hitting the mannequins while tesla's autopilot did not. The distance before automatic braking triggered was reduced iirc.
Sure lidar is degraded by rain, but I think the conclusion that when it rains the whole system will degrade to just cameras seems incorrect. It may reduce its effective range but it seems likely to still have some advantage in a wide range of conditions.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#9Tesla is probably going to fake it using human remote drivers. Tesla has been running ads to hire the drivers.[1] That has all the costs of the self-driving hardware, plus the costs of the remote drivers, but it maintains the illusion that Tesla is a growth company. [1] https://insideevs.com/news/760863/tesla-hiring-humans-to-con...
No way I get into a car that has a human driver who literally has no skin in the game.
Re: One thing Tesla and Comma.ai overlooked in self-driving
#10Wait... the big insight here is that people live in cities? Brother, this has been talked to death in the "is level 4 good enough" conversation.
Right. In the US, once the top 12 taxi markets have been served, Waymo will have most of the industry.[1] That's all the cities with more than 1000 taxis.
Serve the next 10 cities, and it's down to Saginaw, MI, with 41 taxis.
In San Francisco, Waymo has passed Lyft and is gaining on Uber.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxis_of_the_United_States