4 ms·

Tesla is not even considered in the top half of the contenders. They are the best at hyping it up though.

ericmay 6y ago
It blows my mind to see people write things like this. We have two companies, Cruise and Waymo, who have built nothing but toy cars, but they are in the lead while Tesla has years of real-world driving data in cars that are in a manufacturing production operation, receive over the air updates, recognize real world objects, can change lanes automatically, but Waymo is ahead? I’m open to being convinced that I’m not correct here, but it’s really difficult for me to see how Tesla is anything but 1000x ahead of everybody else. It reminds me of people who build great models on Jupyter Notebook, but have no clue how about the data engineering that goes into serving those models (90% of the work).
- typon 6y ago
  You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Solving Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) on highway traffic are much easier tasks than what Waymo and Cruise are solving. You can buy a device from comma.ai that gives you 90% of Tesla's functionality for a few hundred dollars.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    I can’t drive a Waymo or Cruise car at all. So they may as well not exist. But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. And let’s make sure we are clear here, you don’t need to be on a highway to use Autopilot. Do you own a Tesla? We previously had a car with ACC/ALC and I don’t find it to be even close to the same thing, but that’s me. Comma.Ai’s device is great. It’s better than anything anybody else (Waymo/Cruise included) has put out there.
    - piva00 6y ago
      > But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. Soon as it was in 2016 [1], 2018 [2] in Feb 2019 [3], Mar 2020 [4], or July 2020 [5]? They have been hyping this up for years, why should I still believe those claims that it will soon be here™? Not only that but they have already advertised and sold "full self-driving" for people that can't use it yet, no beta, no alpha, just doesn't exist and is a paid feature. How far is this from fraud? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving-tesla-navigate-intersections-and-city-streets/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-announcements-tesla-full-self-driving-just-a-couple-of-steps-away/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-anno... [3] https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-signs/ https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-s... [4] https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-march-city-street-autopilot/ https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-m... [5] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313
      - berryjerry 6y ago
        I think this is regulatory. I have seen multiple articles like the attached which have caused Tesla to basically handicap it's own autopilot. As another said I have no idea how a company with a car is not ahead of a company without one. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-autopilot-europe-regulations/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-aut...
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Yes you can. At least my ap1.5 s70d does a fair job on quite a lot of roads and I expect that ap2 is better.
- Hypx 6y ago
  I’m more willing to believe that Tesla is just committing fraud here before believing they have any kind of lead.
  - sidibe 6y ago
    This seems pretty accurate, $8k for something that was called "Full self driving" that was supposed to be close to ready years ago and instead won't be ready for the lifetime of the car. This would have been a class-action lawsuit if Tesla customers weren't so spectacularly loyal.
- wmf 6y ago
  Tesla didn't support stop signs or traffic lights until a few months ago but Waymo did that years ago. And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    Waymo hasn’t produce a single production car. I doubt their software works on random stop signs in Cleveland. Until I see them on the road, I’m ok watching incremental improvement happen. Being first doesn’t matter. > And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it comes to a complete stop when cars in front of me stop on the highway.
    - wmf 6y ago
      I guess the question is how you rank a prototype that's actually autonomous against a production car that's far from autonomous. IMO manufacturing cars sounds a lot easier than autonomy. There's also the fact that Waymo's goal is only autonomy within areas that have been mapped in hyper-detail while Tesla apparently wants to drive anywhere. How do you rank more progress towards a smaller goal vs. less progress towards a more ambitious goal? One example of a stopped vehicle: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-on-autopilot-when-it-hit-culver-city-fire-truck-ntsb-finds https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-... https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
      - ericmay 6y ago
        I don’t give it much rank because it doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have good, incremental progress toward a larger goal for sure. In my day-to-day I can use a Tesla. I have no use for Waymo so the progress isn’t relevant. Will Waymo map every street in hyper detail, or just Mountain View and New York? If I don’t care about the underlying goal, what reason do I have to care about progress toward that goal? > “ Just before the crash, a large vehicle — a sport utility vehicle or pickup truck — changed lanes in front of him, the driver told the NTSB.” And how does Waymo handle these scenarios?
brianwawok 6y ago
Can you buy better on the market today? Hoping the AP rewrite closes some of the gap... we will see!

It blows my mind to see people write things like this. We have two companies, Cruise and Waymo, who have built nothing but toy cars, but they are in the lead while Tesla has years of real-world driving data in cars that are in a manufacturing production operation, receive over the air updates, recognize real world objects, can change lanes automatically, but Waymo is ahead? I’m open to being convinced that I’m not correct here, but it’s really difficult for me to see how Tesla is anything but 1000x ahead of everybody else. It reminds me of people who build great models on Jupyter Notebook, but have no clue how about the data engineering that goes into serving those models (90% of the work).

typon 6y ago
You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Solving Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) on highway traffic are much easier tasks than what Waymo and Cruise are solving. You can buy a device from comma.ai that gives you 90% of Tesla's functionality for a few hundred dollars.
- ericmay 6y ago
  I can’t drive a Waymo or Cruise car at all. So they may as well not exist. But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. And let’s make sure we are clear here, you don’t need to be on a highway to use Autopilot. Do you own a Tesla? We previously had a car with ACC/ALC and I don’t find it to be even close to the same thing, but that’s me. Comma.Ai’s device is great. It’s better than anything anybody else (Waymo/Cruise included) has put out there.
  - piva00 6y ago
    > But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. Soon as it was in 2016 [1], 2018 [2] in Feb 2019 [3], Mar 2020 [4], or July 2020 [5]? They have been hyping this up for years, why should I still believe those claims that it will soon be here™? Not only that but they have already advertised and sold "full self-driving" for people that can't use it yet, no beta, no alpha, just doesn't exist and is a paid feature. How far is this from fraud? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving-tesla-navigate-intersections-and-city-streets/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-announcements-tesla-full-self-driving-just-a-couple-of-steps-away/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-anno... [3] https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-signs/ https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-s... [4] https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-march-city-street-autopilot/ https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-m... [5] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313
    - berryjerry 6y ago
      I think this is regulatory. I have seen multiple articles like the attached which have caused Tesla to basically handicap it's own autopilot. As another said I have no idea how a company with a car is not ahead of a company without one. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-autopilot-europe-regulations/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-aut...
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  > You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Yes you can. At least my ap1.5 s70d does a fair job on quite a lot of roads and I expect that ap2 is better.
Hypx 6y ago
I’m more willing to believe that Tesla is just committing fraud here before believing they have any kind of lead.
- sidibe 6y ago
  This seems pretty accurate, $8k for something that was called "Full self driving" that was supposed to be close to ready years ago and instead won't be ready for the lifetime of the car. This would have been a class-action lawsuit if Tesla customers weren't so spectacularly loyal.
wmf 6y ago
Tesla didn't support stop signs or traffic lights until a few months ago but Waymo did that years ago. And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.
- ericmay 6y ago
  Waymo hasn’t produce a single production car. I doubt their software works on random stop signs in Cleveland. Until I see them on the road, I’m ok watching incremental improvement happen. Being first doesn’t matter. > And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it comes to a complete stop when cars in front of me stop on the highway.
  - wmf 6y ago
    I guess the question is how you rank a prototype that's actually autonomous against a production car that's far from autonomous. IMO manufacturing cars sounds a lot easier than autonomy. There's also the fact that Waymo's goal is only autonomy within areas that have been mapped in hyper-detail while Tesla apparently wants to drive anywhere. How do you rank more progress towards a smaller goal vs. less progress towards a more ambitious goal? One example of a stopped vehicle: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-on-autopilot-when-it-hit-culver-city-fire-truck-ntsb-finds https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-... https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
    - ericmay 6y ago
      I don’t give it much rank because it doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have good, incremental progress toward a larger goal for sure. In my day-to-day I can use a Tesla. I have no use for Waymo so the progress isn’t relevant. Will Waymo map every street in hyper detail, or just Mountain View and New York? If I don’t care about the underlying goal, what reason do I have to care about progress toward that goal? > “ Just before the crash, a large vehicle — a sport utility vehicle or pickup truck — changed lanes in front of him, the driver told the NTSB.” And how does Waymo handle these scenarios?

brianwawok 6y ago

Can you buy better on the market today? Hoping the AP rewrite closes some of the gap... we will see!