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Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. Legacy car makers are Goliaths set in the past. They're stuck to the annual relea

by bko 6y ago

Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. Legacy car makers are Goliaths set in the past. They're stuck to the annual release cycle and can't even over the air updates and a touch screen on par with an iPad from 8 years ago. Legacy automakers have failed to deliver on electric cars for decades. Musk talked about this. There was nothing special about the time he entered the market with Tesla. Any one of the auto makers could (and still theoretically can) develop an appealing electric car. They're simpler, cleaner and more efficient. But not a single one has been able to deliver a reasonable product. They're subsidizing the price of electric and losing 7-10k per [0] and still cannot produce a compelling product. The legacy car companies are basically blackberry, as someone has finally shown there exists a way to create and produce a compelling car outside of the legacy participants. Tesla actually has a path forward on self driving. They have the infrastructure, real driver data, and millions of cars on the road that can accept over the air updates. Waymo has a few Taxis in a few cities. [0] https://insideevs.com/news/336213/moodys-says-automakers-lose-7000-to-10000-per-electric-car-sold/ https://insideevs.com/news/336213/moodys-says-automakers-los...

joshuamorton 6y ago
Tesla has just over a million cars on the road. Waymo has approximately 100,000. 100000 vehicles that have proven the ability to reach L4 autonomy, unlike tesla's. And waymos approach isn't too be a car manufacturer, but an Uber competitor. So fewer vehicles is fine. > They're subsidizing the price of electric and losing 7-10k per [0] To be fair, so is tesla.
uncoder0 6y ago
In my opinion, the problem is Tesla and Elon refuse to acknowledge the value of LIDAR. A fused sensor approach is the only way we're going to get full autonomy. I was in this field in 2007 on the DARPA Urban challenge so maybe the state of the art indicates otherwise now however, from the NHTSA investigations into crashes from Tesla's autopilot all of them would have been fixed with even basic LIDAR.
- bko 6y ago
  Lidar adds complexity and domain that's not available to humans. Humans drive without lidar, so presumably we can train a neural net to drive without it as well. Lidar is almost like adding a hand crafted dimension to the decision making process. It makes the system more explainable, but doesn't necessarily mean it will help achieve better results. I look at ML in games like chess and go. Originally, they had a set of hand crafted features, like the concept of "eyes" in go. But later iterations removed those and the network performed better. I think lidar is the same thing where it'll add unnecessary complexity and ultimately hurt in learning.
- alicorn 6y ago
  This baffles me as well. The technology to solve so many problems hard to approach with other tools is right there, why not use it.
  - agildehaus 6y ago
    LIDAR also provides more accurate data than stereo cameras could ever hope to achieve. Why not use it? Why limit ourselves to what humans have?
  - sagarm 6y ago
    Cost. Tesla has to sell cars to price-sensitive consumers. Adding a LIDAR would likely increase the price significantly. Given their business model, they basically have to argue that LIDAR is not necessary.
    - lars_thomas 6y ago
      I agree that when Tesla made their first promises of delivering FSD HW (just add SW a little bit later) reasonably priced solid state lidars were not available. So a story had to be made 'humans have eyes and they can drive, lidar is not needed'. Super hard to back now when they sold FSD to so many customers still waiting for the SW update.
      - 6y ago
qeternity 6y ago
> Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. You can’t make a statement without qualifying this. You attack legacy automakers but then go on to discuss Waymo. I would bet money you’re long TSLA. You talk about OTA updates as if that’s some huge technological moat? Hell, cars have been receiving very frequent software updates for over a decade.
- bko 6y ago
  > You attack legacy automakers but then go on to discuss Waymo Paragraphs 1-3 discuss legacy automakers. Only paragraph 4 references Waymo. > You talk about OTA updates as if that’s some huge technological moat? Of course they're not a technological moat. These auto makers are hundreds of thousands of employees. They're likely an organizational nightmare and stuck to the way things have been done. The fact that they don't have over the air updates or have to iterate on an annual cadence is evidence of something deeply flawed in their organizational structure. And I'm not confident that they can overcome it.
- Infinitesimus 6y ago
  > You talk about OTA updates as if that’s some huge technological moat? Hell, cars have been receiving very frequent software updates for over a decade. I think OTAs are a moat but highlight an important incentive difference. Traditional automakers want to sell you next year's model of the car. Tesla seems like they want your car to get better over time. Perhaps it is organizational cruft or the dealer network but consider even the simple case of adaptive cruise control systems in cars today that have radar + cameras. Most of those systems bounce between lanes and can't even stay centered well. This is something that could be a software fix but you'll have to wait for the next N models when they redesign the car to see it. Infotainment systems are another example - they are almost universally crappy and it is rare to get updates OTA. Shipping a car with capable hardware and slowly improving software capability imo is a smarter long-term approach. Time will tell though.
rasz 6y ago
>Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. They dont even ship cars with Stereo front facing cameras. Eight cameras, twelve hypersonic sensors, one forward facing radar, GPS, and still no stereo vision resulting in cars plowing full speed into stationary obstacles ....
- godatemydog 6y ago
  U know u can do depth perception from time without stereo cameras?
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    That's true, but Tesla has yet to figure that out.
  - lars_thomas 6y ago
    Things like this are not binary "can do/cannot do". Sure some kind of estimate could be made. But it is challenging when the scene is not static, the speed of the camera varies, lack of texture, motion blur... stereo is not without its problems of course. Lidars seem to be good in lot of the places where visible light cameras are struggling.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  It's possible to extract depth information from a monocular lens. There's several ways to do this, and Tesla has talked publicly that they've implemented at least one approach. One is depth-from-defocus combined with "overlap" hierarchy information that can be used to build a depth-map. This is the technique Tesla talked about. Interestingly, instead of manually coding up this algorithm, they simply trained a neural net to do it! The trick was to use the radar data as the "ground truth", and train the NN to predict it based on the optical input. It works quite well, and there are videos floating about showing how a Tesla can build up an accurate 3D model of the world around it as it drives along. There are other approaches as well. For example, the way birds gather depth information is they move their head. One eye takes two "snapshots" of the scene in rapid succession from slightly different positions, producing a stereo pair. A moving car is constantly shifting the camera positions. Note that you don't have to be moving the cameras side-to-side, moving along the road can be enough, as the shift of the focal plane can be used as an additional channel of information for the depth-from-defocus method mentioned above. This is what some mirror-less cameras do: they shift focus back-and-forth a bit to gain more information about the scene. A moving car has the same effect. Tesla has recently implemented some variant of this latter technique, they also talked about this publicly. Essentially, the first version of the self-driving hardware didn't have the computing power to analyse multiple frames together like this. The current version has the compute power to include the last few frames as well as inputs to the NN, which gives it not just more temporal stability but also the opportunity to extract depth information from motion. (However, I'm not sure if they've actually used motion in this specific way.)
clouddrover 6y ago
> and still cannot produce a compelling product The Renault Zoe was the best selling BEV in Europe in 2020: https://insideevs.com/news/467101/renault-bev-sales-december-2020/ https://insideevs.com/news/467101/renault-bev-sales-december... Tesla has gone from being the top BEV maker in Europe to now being third. Soon Tesla will become fourth in Europe after Hyundai overtakes them. Different markets like different cars. The Audi e-tron was the best selling BEV in Norway in 2020 and is currently the best seller in 2021: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2021/01/norway-december-2020.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2021/01/norway-december-2020.h... https://elbilstatistikk.no/ https://elbilstatistikk.no/

by bko 6y ago

joshuamorton 6y ago

Tesla has just over a million cars on the road. Waymo has approximately 100,000. 100000 vehicles that have proven the ability to reach L4 autonomy, unlike tesla's. And waymos approach isn't too be a car manufacturer, but an Uber competitor. So fewer vehicles is fine. > They're subsidizing the price of electric and losing 7-10k per [0] To be fair, so is tesla.

uncoder0 6y ago

In my opinion, the problem is Tesla and Elon refuse to acknowledge the value of LIDAR. A fused sensor approach is the only way we're going to get full autonomy. I was in this field in 2007 on the DARPA Urban challenge so maybe the state of the art indicates otherwise now however, from the NHTSA investigations into crashes from Tesla's autopilot all of them would have been fixed with even basic LIDAR.

bko 6y ago
Lidar adds complexity and domain that's not available to humans. Humans drive without lidar, so presumably we can train a neural net to drive without it as well. Lidar is almost like adding a hand crafted dimension to the decision making process. It makes the system more explainable, but doesn't necessarily mean it will help achieve better results. I look at ML in games like chess and go. Originally, they had a set of hand crafted features, like the concept of "eyes" in go. But later iterations removed those and the network performed better. I think lidar is the same thing where it'll add unnecessary complexity and ultimately hurt in learning.
alicorn 6y ago
This baffles me as well. The technology to solve so many problems hard to approach with other tools is right there, why not use it.
- agildehaus 6y ago
  LIDAR also provides more accurate data than stereo cameras could ever hope to achieve. Why not use it? Why limit ourselves to what humans have?
- sagarm 6y ago
  Cost. Tesla has to sell cars to price-sensitive consumers. Adding a LIDAR would likely increase the price significantly. Given their business model, they basically have to argue that LIDAR is not necessary.
  - lars_thomas 6y ago
    I agree that when Tesla made their first promises of delivering FSD HW (just add SW a little bit later) reasonably priced solid state lidars were not available. So a story had to be made 'humans have eyes and they can drive, lidar is not needed'. Super hard to back now when they sold FSD to so many customers still waiting for the SW update.
    - 6y ago

qeternity 6y ago

> Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. You can’t make a statement without qualifying this. You attack legacy automakers but then go on to discuss Waymo. I would bet money you’re long TSLA. You talk about OTA updates as if that’s some huge technological moat? Hell, cars have been receiving very frequent software updates for over a decade.

bko 6y ago
> You attack legacy automakers but then go on to discuss Waymo Paragraphs 1-3 discuss legacy automakers. Only paragraph 4 references Waymo. > You talk about OTA updates as if that’s some huge technological moat? Of course they're not a technological moat. These auto makers are hundreds of thousands of employees. They're likely an organizational nightmare and stuck to the way things have been done. The fact that they don't have over the air updates or have to iterate on an annual cadence is evidence of something deeply flawed in their organizational structure. And I'm not confident that they can overcome it.
Infinitesimus 6y ago
> You talk about OTA updates as if that’s some huge technological moat? Hell, cars have been receiving very frequent software updates for over a decade. I think OTAs are a moat but highlight an important incentive difference. Traditional automakers want to sell you next year's model of the car. Tesla seems like they want your car to get better over time. Perhaps it is organizational cruft or the dealer network but consider even the simple case of adaptive cruise control systems in cars today that have radar + cameras. Most of those systems bounce between lanes and can't even stay centered well. This is something that could be a software fix but you'll have to wait for the next N models when they redesign the car to see it. Infotainment systems are another example - they are almost universally crappy and it is rare to get updates OTA. Shipping a car with capable hardware and slowly improving software capability imo is a smarter long-term approach. Time will tell though.

rasz 6y ago

>Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. They dont even ship cars with Stereo front facing cameras. Eight cameras, twelve hypersonic sensors, one forward facing radar, GPS, and still no stereo vision resulting in cars plowing full speed into stationary obstacles ....

godatemydog 6y ago
U know u can do depth perception from time without stereo cameras?
- gamblor956 6y ago
  That's true, but Tesla has yet to figure that out.
- lars_thomas 6y ago
  Things like this are not binary "can do/cannot do". Sure some kind of estimate could be made. But it is challenging when the scene is not static, the speed of the camera varies, lack of texture, motion blur... stereo is not without its problems of course. Lidars seem to be good in lot of the places where visible light cameras are struggling.
jiggawatts 6y ago
It's possible to extract depth information from a monocular lens. There's several ways to do this, and Tesla has talked publicly that they've implemented at least one approach. One is depth-from-defocus combined with "overlap" hierarchy information that can be used to build a depth-map. This is the technique Tesla talked about. Interestingly, instead of manually coding up this algorithm, they simply trained a neural net to do it! The trick was to use the radar data as the "ground truth", and train the NN to predict it based on the optical input. It works quite well, and there are videos floating about showing how a Tesla can build up an accurate 3D model of the world around it as it drives along. There are other approaches as well. For example, the way birds gather depth information is they move their head. One eye takes two "snapshots" of the scene in rapid succession from slightly different positions, producing a stereo pair. A moving car is constantly shifting the camera positions. Note that you don't have to be moving the cameras side-to-side, moving along the road can be enough, as the shift of the focal plane can be used as an additional channel of information for the depth-from-defocus method mentioned above. This is what some mirror-less cameras do: they shift focus back-and-forth a bit to gain more information about the scene. A moving car has the same effect. Tesla has recently implemented some variant of this latter technique, they also talked about this publicly. Essentially, the first version of the self-driving hardware didn't have the computing power to analyse multiple frames together like this. The current version has the compute power to include the last few frames as well as inputs to the NN, which gives it not just more temporal stability but also the opportunity to extract depth information from motion. (However, I'm not sure if they've actually used motion in this specific way.)

clouddrover 6y ago

> and still cannot produce a compelling product The Renault Zoe was the best selling BEV in Europe in 2020: https://insideevs.com/news/467101/renault-bev-sales-december-2020/ https://insideevs.com/news/467101/renault-bev-sales-december... Tesla has gone from being the top BEV maker in Europe to now being third. Soon Tesla will become fourth in Europe after Hyundai overtakes them. Different markets like different cars. The Audi e-tron was the best selling BEV in Norway in 2020 and is currently the best seller in 2021: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2021/01/norway-december-2020.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2021/01/norway-december-2020.h... https://elbilstatistikk.no/ https://elbilstatistikk.no/