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Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- granzymes 6y agodrivers came to trust it way too quickly. Drivers who were supposed to be closely monitoring the system instead spent their time looking at their phones, putting on makeup, and other distractions. Really hope no one dies because of Tesla's autopilot. This is a real risk. Quoting from below: if the car does it right 99% of the time it's just human nature to stop paying attention. The article makes a great point that slowly improving the autopilot with a person behind the wheel is super dangerous because we get lulled into a false sense of security.
- breakfastduck 6y agoIt's bound to happen, but also likely to be the result of the driver not paying attention.
- granzymes 6y agoRight, but if the car does it right 99% of the time it's just human nature to stop paying attention. The article makes a great point that slowly improving the autopilot with a person behind the wheel is super dangerous because we get lulled into a false sense of security. I hope Tesla just keeps it to highway lane keeping until they're ready to roll out better sensors.
- mortenjorck 6y agoThis principle is glaringly obvious in retrospect, and seeing it put so succinctly actually changed my mind. I previously thought Tesla's approach was an achievable long shot, but I'm now convinced it's fundamentally wrong. The safety-driver model pursued by Waymo and every other autonomy startup is the only responsible way to train an autonomy network because the drivers are specifically trained to look out for edge cases, versus consumers who will easily be lulled into complacency once the system looks superficially like it's running at level-5 competency.
- dragonwriter 6y agoWhile I agree that the Waymo, et al., way is the only responsible way, that is not an argument against Tesla’s way being workable, just that it is grossly unethical.
- ra7 6y agoKrafcik talks about this very issue in the article on how driver assistance systems give false sense of security to the driver. > The Waymo team believes its own early experience—when it was the Google self-driving car project—bears that out. In the early 2010s, Google developed a driver-assistance system similar to today's Autopilot and considered selling it to automakers. But when they let Google employees test the software on public roads, they found that drivers came to trust it way too quickly. Drivers who were supposed to be closely monitoring the system instead spent their time looking at their phones, putting on makeup, and other distractions. > The fundamental challenge here is that the better a driver-assistance system gets, the harder it is to get drivers to pay attention, and the less likely they are to be prepared if the software makes a mistake. The Google team didn't see a good solution to this problem, so they completely changed their strategy. They focused on building a self-driving taxi service that would never have customers in the driver's seat, relying on trained, professional safety drivers to oversee the software during testing.
- nightcracker 6y agoCan you pay attention to a video game for two hours, and during that time react to some important event within 1 second reaction time? I bet you can. Can you do the same when staring at a wall for two hours?
- mxschumacher 6y agocoffee cups say "be careful this is hot", but the regulator allows a product called "Full Self Driving" to be sold - I think ultimately consumer protection will step in here like it has in Germany [0] 0: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot-germany/german-court-bans-tesla-ads-claiming-its-cars-are-capable-of-autonomous-driving-idUSKCN24F1T5 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot-germany/g...
- breakfastduck 6y agoYeah it's a fantastic example of technological developments far outpacing legislation
- brianwawok 6y agoI mean people have already died sleeping with it on. But it’s also likely saved lives based on their deaths per mile number.
- ameen 6y agoI’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).
- paulryanrogers 6y agoAgreed. Where to draw that line is the debate. For kitchen knives there is a similar problem. As cold as it is the data is the best measure.
- URSpider94 6y agoHere’s the thing, every car system will fail at some point and potentially cause a death. There is no such thing as perfect safety. It’s really important to quantify things like fatalities per million miles driven. At some point, you push your system into production because, even though at some point the system will fail and kill someone, it will in the mean time save dozens or hundreds of people from dying in preventable accidents. What is critically important is being confident that your system is safer than the alternatives that your customers would use if your product doesn’t ship.
- brianwawok 6y agoMost 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.
- petters 6y agoAre you aware how low the deaths per mile is for humans? I don't think we know if Waymo has a lower rate than a human yet. Tesla I don't know, but wouldn't be surprised if it is higher.
- mminer237 6y agoPeople already have died because of Autopilot years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/tesla-crash-autopilot-musk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/tesla-crash-auto... It is an inevitability that people will die because of any autopilot system if it lasts long enough.
- judge2020 6y agoBetter source, also linked elsewhere in this thread https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cwhiz 6y agoPeople will die. It will also save lives. It’s probably already prevented thousands of accidents, some of which would have been fatal. It just doesn’t make national news when your car moves you out of the way of danger.
- smnrchrds 6y agoI am not so sure about this. Modern cars come with a lot of safety features, like automatic braking and adaptive cruise control. Sure, if you replace all 1995 Honda Civics with Teslas, you will save many lives. I don't think you could save any lives by replacing all modern 2020 cars from other manufacturers with Teslas.
- diebeforei485 6y agoAll of the systems in other vehicles have the same pitfalls as any driver-assistance system and have the same driver behavior risks as Tesla's system.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThey’re also designed and marketed very differently. The lane keeping in my Subaru isn’t good enough for me to fully trust it, so I monitor it carefully. I suspect that there’s probably a local minimum for safety, where the autopilot is good enough to lull users into complacency, but not good enough to actually be safe.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago> The lane keeping in my Subaru isn’t good enough for me to fully trust it, so I monitor it carefully. We have a Hyundai Palisade with Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Keep assist. Amazing for reducing fatigue (the small little corrections). Not good enough to let you get distracted. I always have to be mentally ready to hop in. I think it's a perfect solution until we have true FSD that can handle absolutely all conditions and situations.
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- mrtksn 6y agoPeople die all the time, there are even higher profile cases like the Apple Engineer who slammed in the barriers at full speed: https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-tesla-crash-had-previously-complained-about-autopilot https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-... There are some spectacular failures that are very scary because the car does something that a person would never do, unless unconscious, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmAG4dk-rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmAG4dk-rU You don't hear much about it probably because Tesla fanboys are plenty and rabid, so people avoid talking about it online. The defence is usually stats about human drivers crashing more often and it makes sense until you dive deeper into the numbers because these stats are usually oranges v.s. Apples. It feels like they have some playbook with statistics to slap when someone says something negative. If that doesn't cut, they say that the victim should have followed the manual that says "your attention should always be on the road" then proceed posting a video about how thanks to the latest update they can sleep drive to work and attach a banana to the driving wheel to disable the attention safeguards. If someone asks how is this an autopilot, there are usually two ways to handle it: 1) Autopilot is just a brand name, the self driving software is in beta, so the victim should pay attention all the times. 2) Autopilot is like on the planes, so only fools think that it is autonomous, therefore it was working as intended but they should have been using it like an airline autopilot. Crash due to user error. I'm actually a fan of Musk and Tesla but I feel like the community engagement is very unhealthy and lacks scrutiny due to the "online army" of his.
- qeternity 6y agoI think the scrutiny should be whether fewer people die than otherwise would have.
- trianglem 6y agoPeople can die. Honestly in my opinion it’s worth it. Will it happen to me? No, because I’m extra cautious and won’t slack off but to make progress quickly these things must be done. If you really want to be hyper cautious, you can always make the case that it’s saving lives that would otherwise be lost.
- perryizgr8 6y ago> No, because I’m extra cautious and won’t slack off A big issue is that some random guy in the Tesla behind you may not be so careful. So you cold still get into an accident because of Tesla's recklessness.
- dehrmann 6y ago> This is a real risk It's even a risk to Waymo because, despite being responsible about it, Tesla made people either scared of autonomous cars or forced out legislation restricting it.
- mung 6y agoThere's two levels of risk, Tesla owners taking themselves out, and then there is innocent bystanders being taken out. It's pretty infuriating if you consider that we're all put at risk.
- jiofih 6y agoYou 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.
- s17n 6y agoHumans are much, much better drivers than autopilot.
- mung 6y agoYou'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 6y ago[deleted]
- Ericson2314 6y agoThis is really about two different strategies for dealing with cultural and regulator norms more than two different engineering strategies.
- vletal 6y agoThey did pick different sensors and approach to world mapping in the first place. How is it just a cultural and regulator thing?
- xiphias2 6y agoOne 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.
- vletal 6y agoHas it ever been in the history like that? It's more like the hardware will get both more sophisticated and cheeper.
- philosopher1234 6y agoThis seems like agile vs waterfall to me, which are two very different engineering strategies.
- jcfrei 6y agoI have a feeling that AGI is a requirement for FSD. There are enough tail events while driving where you can only make "the right decision" if you actually understand what's going on.
- majewsky 6y ago> There are enough tail events while driving where you can only make "the right decision" if you actually understand what's going on. I have the feeling this bar disqualifies most human drivers, too.
- codebolt 6y agoHuman drivers fail reliably, in ways that are understandable. Non-AGI artificial intelligence based on a mix of heuristics and dumb statistics (aka 'deep learning') will fail in highly unpredictable and to a human eye completely foolish ways. The day these cars are let on the road in my area is the day I start taking the train.
- benlivengood 6y ago> I have the feeling this bar disqualifies most human drivers, too. There are plenty of people who wait for road-side assistance for a flat tire. It's arguable that a FSD system may be totally viable without having to solve every eventuality on the road. If it can stop someplace safe and call for help that's the most a lot of humans can manage.
- 6y ago
- raldi 6y agoHe seems so obviously correct that I can’t fathom how any engineer could see things otherwise.
- missedthecue 6y agoMusk seems more of a marketer than an engineer to me, even though he's always characterized as one.
- killjoywashere 6y agoMusk has degrees in economics and physics. My undergrad is in physics and my dad is an engineer. They are definitely different skillsets. When I decided to build a treehouse for my kids, I came up with a clean sheet design. My dad saw my drift and walked me through a redesign the preserved the core idea. And then my neighbor, a general contractor, supervised the build (and pretty much doubled every safety margin along the way). My other neighbor (a self-employed roofer) did the crazy bits. I would be inclined to credit Musk with broad outlines and I would give him credit for being able to participate in the engineering process by asking some sensible questions. I would not be inclined to credit him with imposing tried-and-true design methods and constraints. Similarly, I would give him credit for broad outline path-to-profitability. I would not give him credit for day-to-day diligence of double-entry accounting that the CFO worries about or the contract negotiations his PMs answer to the CFO's staff for.
- kergonath 6y agoHe never got any engineering training. The closest he got was a BA in Physics. But yes, he’s a good marketer and his first product is himself.
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y agoMusk has no engineering training whatsoever.
- jiofih 6y agoNot only he sold two tech companies where he worked as a software engineer early in his career, but he has been the chief engineer for SpaceX for almost twenty years, and the results of that kind of speak for themselves?
- speedgoose 6y agoTesla is quite far from full self driving. They have too much phantom breaking on the simple adaptive cruise control in good conditions.
- api 6y agoPhantom braking and similar issues are a full stop for me, no pun intended. That just seems fantastically dangerous given that so many drivers don’t pay much attention when they don’t expect you to brake. Seems like a recipe for full speed rear end collisions. Tesla may make this stuff work eventually but it doesn’t seem safe at the moment and you can count me out.
- saetaes 6y agoAs a Model X owner who rarely engages Autopilot for this exact reason, I concur. The number of times the car has suddenly started braking for no good reason (clear weather and good road conditions, few cars around) is way too high.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y agoAccording to Elon, phantom braking was fixed in October: https://twitter.com/EVHQ2/status/1314287584105779200 https://twitter.com/EVHQ2/status/1314287584105779200.
- freewilly1040 6y ago“It should be”.... not exactly the lost reassuring response on a common failure mode of a safety critical system
- burmanm 6y agoIt isn't, it still does it with all the other weird braking incidents also, like snowy road, truck comes from another direction in the corner - the car will alert and brake even when both are on their correct sides of the road. Not to mention any of those mid-road poles that are meant for the pedestrians. If they have snow then the car will again brake thinking I'm going to hit something. Impossible to use the cruise control on many roads.
- albertTJames 6y agoanother baseless musk bashing. Waymo doesn't have nearly as much data as Tesla. They're not playing in the same category.
- ra7 6y agoAh yes, the "more data will magically solve self driving" argument.
- api 6y agoMore data makes it easier to train and evaluate systems but will not fix an inadequate approach. Humans can drive with vision alone because humans are way way smarter than glorified regression models. We have a higher order model of what is happening. I am skeptical that you can replicate this with current AI. The approach of using LIDAR to compensate for dumber AI with more and better data seems more sound.
- albertTJames 6y ago“Seems” That’s all it is to you LIDAR fanboys. You simply do not know what you are talking about.
- mxschumacher 6y agoalso Google being short on data given they've been working on this problem for 12 years is a pretty poor argument. If anything, it should tell us how are the problem of self-driving really is.
- rio517 6y agoHe didn't say that. You're putting words in his "mouth."
- ra7 6y agoI mean, the argument literally was Tesla supposedly having more data than Waymo and nothing else. So I'm not sure how they didn't imply what I said.
- spsful 6y agoIs anyone else confused on the merits of Waymo's argument? They differentiate "driver assistance" from "fully autonomous" systems in that Tesla somehow can never achieve the latter because they have developed the former. The only specific reason for this that I could find was a mention of LiDAR and how Waymo sees it as indispensable. > Krafcik says that Waymo has largely completed technical work on its self-driving software and is now focused on scaling the technology up. ...cool? Again, no mention of a SPECIFIC reason Tesla cannot do the same work as Waymo outside of not having LiDAR sensors. They attack Tesla for not developing a fully autonomous vehicle from the get-go, but don't seem to explain why this makes it any harder for them to make the finished product.
- rcxdude 6y agoThe core point is you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous. They're just completely different from the point of view of the reliability of the software you need. A huge amount of things with driver assist you can write off as 'the driver will take over'. There's not a specific part of you can point to and say 'that's what will stop them', so much as the entire design of the system needs a different level of consideration because it becomes so safety critical, as opposed to safety-enhancing (autonomous driving is probably the most complex safety critical design ever attempted, by at least an order of magnitude. Driver assist is way easier by comparison). It affects the attributes of the sensors, the design of the neural networks interpreting those sensors, the high level design of the decision making of the whole vehicle, the low-level design of the electronics, basically everything. Tesla hasn't put forward a plan which indicates their full autonomous development is going to be anything other than a continuation of their driver assist work (and it's certainly frequently and incorrectly stated that the state of their driver assist puts them ahead in the race to full autonomy), and if they want to be credible to those familiar with the challenges involved, they need to actually show something more than that.
- Udik 6y ago> you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous Ok. So Waymo has developed a 100% reliable full self driving system that handles every possible situation. It was never put in a situation in which it would have given back control to a human driver, because that would have meant "going smoothly" to driver assist mode, and we have already said that this is impossible.
- ra7 6y agoI think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package. This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodologies (Tesla's quarterly safety report is a grand total of a single paragraph). Compare this to how transparent Waymo is [1], the difference in safety culture between Tesla and its competitors is stark. Not to mention how Tesla skirts around the rules by refusing to report autonomous miles with the excuse of classifying it as a driver assist system, while naming the technology "Full Self Driving" and Elon Musk hyping it up every chance he gets on how it will be Level 5-ready by end of the year. [1] - https://waymo.com/safety/ https://waymo.com/safety/
- justapassenger 6y agoFSD rollout is purely driven by Elon’s ego. He’s addicted to fame and power, and that comes from image he created of himself being an Iron Man. I’m pretty sure he got to a point where he believes in it, and thinks he’s invincible and can solve any problem, because he’s so much smarter than everyone. Stock bubble making wealthiest man only helped to solidify that.
- dilap 6y agoI 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.)
- Barrin92 6y agohis 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/1327517694099275778?s=20 https://twitter.com/shannonwoodward/status/13275176940992757...
- jariel 6y agoMusk's propensity for risk tolerance, projected into the consumer market, with some weird hubris about this, might just end up killing a few people and a few lawsuits. It may not impeded Tesla in any way though.
- screye 6y agoI worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree with this article. I avoid using cruise control and auto-lane-keep for the same reasons. Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster. On the other hand, I can see Tesla's strategy paying off as a low probability win but no lose situation. If 3d lidar is necessary, then I think Waymo (Alphabet) is closest to self-driving success. If they 'win', I see them licensing their tech to every other manufacturer. In such an outcome, Tesla ends up no worse than all of its competitors. It is a no-lose scenario. However, in the unlikely scenario that 2D videos are sufficient for L5 self-driving, Tesla wins BIG. No one will be even close, especially due to the scale of 2D data that they have gathered.
- rcxdude 6y agoThis 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)
- mxschumacher 6y agoit's interesting how optimistic long term visions conflict - if you really think autonomous cabs will become widespread then by implication you are also saying that car sales will be drastically lower. Tough to be serious betting on both. The math of "you'll pay more for the car but the car will go out and make money for you as a robotic Uber" sounds like a pyramid scheme to me; if too many people do it, it can no longer work.
- rcxdude 6y ago
- fogof 6y ago> They believe that lidar sensors will be indispensable to get early self-driving vehicles on the road. I agree with this assessment. It seems to me that lidar has a consistency in its ability to detect objects that computer vision based techniques just don't have. While cameras may eventually be able to achieve the same thing, I would argue that lidar will always be as safe or safer, and for that reason I think it will be the only acceptable version if self driving breaks out in the next few years.
- Animats 6y ago"I watched a few hours of early unedited footage posted by Tesla owners who received the new software. The software made a number of mistakes, including two incidents where a Tesla seemed to be on the verge of colliding with another vehicle before the driver intervened." What, Tesla still can't detect big, obvious obstacles reliably? That's pathetic. A half-dozen cases of running into stationary obstacles at full speed should have taught them something. Running into obstacles at full speed, with no braking, is quite rare for human drivers. Usually, there's braking, but too late. Mercedes once did a study showing that over half of accidents would not have occurred if braking started about 100ms earlier. Tesla's approach means the driver has nothing to do until something goes wrong. Then they have to react in under a second. That just doesn't work. That's been known for decades. Great video on cockpit automation: "Children of the Magenta" (1997).[1] It's an American Airlines chief pilot talking to his pilots about automation-induced accidents. The aviation industry started dealing with over-reliance on imperfect automation a long time ago. [1] https://vimeo.com/159496346 https://vimeo.com/159496346
- snoshy 6y agoWhat you're saying is not a capability that even most commercially available automatic braking systems can do well. Several studies have pitted the half-dozen or so cars available with automatic emergency braking systems on them, and they've all been just about the same. Apologies for a lack of citations on this since I have to run, but we at least have to compare Tesla to the rest of the industry, or compare their actual AV solution (FSD, which is in limited beta and only has been for just a month or two).
- jiofih 6y agoInstead of trusting this anecdote, why don’t you jump over to YouTube and search for “Tesla FSD” to see what it really looks like? Lots of very instructive videos available from people on the beta program.
- Animats 6y agoYes. Check out this one.[1] Watch the display for what it sees and isn't seeing. Awareness of oncoming traffic is almost nonexistent. Except when the FedEx truck is reflected in some windows; then it detects the reflection as a vehicle. Although the streets are almost empty, the driver takes over frequently. This is way below what Waymo and Cruise can do. [1] https://youtu.be/6G1Z2J3WUSg?t=231 https://youtu.be/6G1Z2J3WUSg?t=231
- paul7986 6y agoIm anti-robot car ... so many ppl will die for progress with this. I'm even more after my friend's Jeep Compass's AI system decided to lock up her brakes and steering wheel as she was turning into the bathroom area after the Golden Gate Bridge. The AI said nope im taking over your going to crash and thus you cant maneuver your way out of hitting the highway wall which she did and total that piece of junk; all bruised up too! I will avoid getting any AI features in any new cars I buy or just buy older ones. Unfortunately, those around me will be driving these cars where their brakes and steering wheel just might lock up too and boom they and or we are in accident. An accident that the driver who could had control didnt because algorithms can never guess the millions of different driving scenarios & execute the right one!
- jiofih 6y agoI would bet quite confidently that your friend would not have been able to avoid a crash, and the “AI” is just a convenient third party to blame. You need to be at a speed way above recommended for an exit, to trigger the anti-collision system, and actually sustain injuries. Humans tend to overestimate their abilities quite strongly, especially in hindsight.
- paul7986 6y agoSure, I hear what your saying, but her insurance company said oh no worries we will pay for it all. It's not your fault... do you not think they have data about these things and why would they pay for it carte blanche?
- jiofih 6y agoUnless you only have third-party coverage, I don’t think there’s any insurance company that would deny payment unless you were drunk or willingly taking risk somehow.
- staticman2 6y agoMy Dad avoided a crash where he was nearly killed with children in the car and believes he did it because an angel took over the steering wheel and corrected his driving error faster than he could. How is this relevant to you friend's story, you may ask? It's relevant to show humans are not necessarily reliable narrators of why a crash occurred.
- karmakaze 6y agoNot buying the storyline. Certainly Tesla will have to keep upgrading its systems to achieve true FSD. They could even decide that LIDAR has become cheap enough to use anyway. What they have is cars on the road collecting data. They'll have to collect new data and develop new algorithms on that data but that path is not excluded from them. > "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance system until one day you can magically leap to a fully autonomous driving system," Krafcik said. "In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers." Not a good argument, very handwavy. Better sensors is not a moat. What is your software, how is it qualitatively superior? No one suspected that NNs or even DNNs could produce AlphaGo/AlphaZero until it did. Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR.
- ra7 6y ago> Until Waymo gives their tech to the public and we can compare how well their less used but superior hardware and software performs it's all opinions and PR. What constitutes giving tech to the public? They are in Phoenix and they say they will be rolling out in other cities soon. So you can go to Phoenix and hail an autonomous ride to compare yourself, where you will find that no else is even close to offering truly driverless rides like Waymo is.
- xiphias2 6y agoWaymo is amazing, but it doesn't make the business profitable: it needs to scale up the investment in hardware and keep its advantage until Tesla gets good enough to compete. This PR is mostly aimed at investors in Waymo.
- xiphias2 6y agoI expect Tesla and Waymo to be the 2 best driverless solutions in the near future. Tesla is a real competitor to Waymo, as the better sensor has a litmited time advantage until deep learning algorithms improve even more. Waymo doesn't have too much time to get back the billions of dollars of invested R&D money, while Tesla is already profitable even without self driving.
- sixQuarks 6y agoAnyone 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.
- DisjointedHunt 6y agoAgreed. The only company with actual autonomous driving hardware at a scale of a Million+ cars on the road right now.
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y agoThe "autonomous driving hardware" they have is about the same as anyone else. It's just that those other companies advertise it truthfully as a safety feature rather than pretending you have R2D2 as a chauffeur.
- plutonorm 6y agoAgree. The key to solving the problem is data and they have it, by the bucket load. The HN crowd is pretty conservative when it comes to tech it seems.
- vegannet 6y agoI’ll take that bet. How much? I’m not anti-Tesla but I do see Tesla as a brand more than a technology company: good for business but not good good for breaking new ground with technology — I’d put a lot against Tesla on that bet (I don’t think it matters for the business much though).
- sixQuarks 6y agoI 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.
- georgewfraser 6y agoI have a model Y and what it has today is 80% as useful as a completely self driving car. It’s mostly self driving on the highway, and the situations it can’t handle are very predictable: toll booths, stopped cars in the middle of the road, things like that. You need to available to drive but you always have plenty of warning before you need to take over.
- Arainach 6y ago80% as good is 1000% as dangerous. Tesla's vehicles perform just well enough to convince many users they're good enough to "self drive" and ignore while failing catastrophically in edge cases and absolutely not being ready to completely ignore. Tesla's reckless "autopilot" branding contributes to this.
- georgewfraser 6y agoMy point is that it doesn’t fail in edge cases. It has very clear limitations, there are no surprises. Even if you were literally asleep at the wheel, the worst thing that would happen is it’d end up stopped in front of a traffic light, waiting for you to take over.
- totalZero 6y ago> the worst thing that would happen is it’d end up stopped in front of a traffic light, waiting I get your overall point, but this particular statement is empirically false.
- Arainach 6y ago"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 freeway (https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/18/21445168/tesla-driver-sleeping-police-charged-canada-autopilot https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/18/21445168/tesla-driver-sle... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhObsMnipS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhObsMnipS8 https://www.businessinsider.com/drivers-sleeping-in-tesla-cars-autopilot-asleep-while-driving-videos-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/drivers-sleeping-in-tesla-ca... and many more). At a bare minimum, their code needs to bring the vehicle to a safe half rather than continue on its way forever dinging if the user refuses to interact with it. And no, there are far worse things that can happen. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51645566 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51645566 https://apnews.com/article/ca5e62255bb87bf1b151f9bf075aaadf https://apnews.com/article/ca5e62255bb87bf1b151f9bf075aaadf
- probe 6y agoTSLA and Comma.Ai aren't only ones. Ghost (https://driveghost.com/ https://driveghost.com/) is funded by top VCs (incubated at sutter hill ventures, same firm that incubated Snowflake) with a highly technical second time founder in John Hayes (first company is the public company Pure Storage). They're taking the same bet (i.e. CV + ML advances on a large and high quality enough data set are enough). After listening to Hoetz on podcasts, I wouldn't underestimate this approach. People trying orthogonal technical approaches win surprisingly often.
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y agoThe misanthropic, cynical view: Crashes are excellent training input.
- jfoster 6y agoYou're not too far off; all SDC systems (including Tesla & Waymo) use disengagements to train on. So it's not accidents themselves, but human takeovers prior to what might otherwise have been an accident.
- travisoneill1 6y agoSelf driving is an unsolved problem, so I don't see how Waymo's CEO is qualified to say whether or not Tesla's plan is "how it works."
- m463 6y agoFrom other technologies such as speech recognition, "how it works" seems to be - collect a lot of data and develop and train better and better models. So tesla is collecting data, lots of it. Additionally, there's the capitalism side of things - make sure you have a revenue stream to continue "develop and train" So tesla has a revenue stream matched with the data collection. So... Tesla is head and shoulders above Waymo in this.
- julienreszka 6y agoIf anything, technology should make people more responsible, not less. Everything that puts your life on autopilot is garbage.
- giorgis 6y agoIs anyone here working in the self-driving industry? I have a background in Mechanical Engineering so that means knowledge in controls/motion planning stuff. Is this still something that's being worked on in companies like Waymo? Or is it in less demand compared to computer vision/object detection problems? I like the idea of working on both technologies however I feel the knowledge gap between them is big.
- darepublic 6y agoWhy not develop roads that act like tracks and can be guided by an algorithm. Seems like a simpler problem albeit less robust than autonomous vehicle
- anonytrary 6y agoWhat happens when a deer crosses the road? What happens when there's a fire along the highway (e.g California)? What happens when there's debris and objects in the road? What happens if a car needs to make an emergency stop? Where do you place these new roads? Do they require roads to be re-built or can they be added to existing roads? What is the cost of replacing the entire highway and city infrastructure? The AV companies decided that the simpler problem is to have AI that works on highways, then incrementally teach it how to handle more complex situations. This is the most additive solution, whereas your solution is not necessarily additive and does not necessarily preclude the need for AI.
- darepublic 6y agoSimpler doesn't mean cheaper. Also simpler doesn't preclude AI either
- cromwellian 6y agoWatching this video of regular folk (not tech journalists or other "reviewers", or paid PR) riding in FSD Waymo has done a lot to reduce my "but it'll never happen" feeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4 It may very well be that future FSD modes will require highly detailed maps, manual curation, limited areas where things can work, but even that would be valuable. e.g. if self driving trucks only work on long haul highway-only, that's still a win. If FSD taxis are mostly rolled out in medium to big cities in the beginning, it's still be a win. Trying to boil the ocean all at once, and launching an enduser consumer FSD program that can handle wherever the driver takes it, may be the wrong way to do it, top-down instead of bottom up. Start with small geographic areas, and expand as you go.
- epistasis 6y agoHuh, I'm surprised you find those videos convincing about the future of self driving cars. To me, they don't seem much better than the demos people were giving ten years ago, in academic competitions, etc. The Tesla videos scare the hell out of me. My own auto pilot purchase scares me whenever I use it. I can't even use cruise control in my Tesla without it randomly slamming on the brakes. It's pretty straightforward to make batteries and an electric car. To make a computer vision product work? Based on everything I've seen of the field over the past 20 years, I am not impressed by Tesla's efforts in the least. They seem crazy, not competent.
- username90 6y agoYou don't think that driving actual customers is different from showing a demo that worked in a few cases?
- jfoster 6y agoWhy do you choose to drive a car where you think the people created it are more crazy than competent?
- Fricken 6y agoWaymo is quite a bit better than they were 10 years ago. It would be harder for a casual observer to note how much Waymo has improved in the past 4 or 5 years because the gains have been made largely at the statistical margins of performance. It's easy to build a robot that can do one thing right, and that's all you need to get a cool demo. It's hard to build a robot that can deal with the many 1000s of things that can go wrong while attempting to do one thing right.
- vadym909 6y agoIts so frustrating when smart people can't speak plainly enough. Most people will see this video with a tile like "Watch Tesla's Full Self-Driving navigate from SF to LA with (almost) no help" and assume Tesla is FSD capable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQG2IynmRf8&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQG2IynmRf8&feature=emb_logo How then can Waymo say its not? Why can't they instead release a video comparing the Pros and Cons of Tesla FSD vs theirs.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoI really wish Tesla would abandon this quixotic quest for self-driving and focus on what they do best: Building the world's best cars. If they could fix their build quality and repair issues I'd buy one tomorrow without any fancy driver assistance software because the Tesla Model S is the most fun car I've ever driven (manually).
- judge2020 6y agoPart of having a good car is abstracting away the biggest downside to driving: actually paying attention to the road for over an hour to and from work until you retire at 62 or later. > If they could fix their build quality and repair issues I'd buy one tomorrow without any fancy driver assistance software because the Tesla Model S is the most fun car I've ever driven (manually). While I'm not sure about the S, you might still be able to buy a "standard range" Model 3 which doesn't have any autopilot functionality, although is only marginally cheaper at $35k vs $38k - https://redd.it/eumoyl https://redd.it/eumoyl
- ranman 6y agoWhile I’m all for being critical of TSLA’s FSD rollout I do think a bit of perspective is warranted: in the USA drivers are routinely drunk, distracted, or just plain stupid. Everyday day I get on the road and I’m forced to drive defensively because I cannot trust any car on the road to behave logically. How is that situation changed at all by having computers that don’t behave logically? There’s a huge confirmation bias at play where you all seem to think human drivers are good... they’re not. They’re absolutely 100% not. The average driver is a complete moron. Go spend 10 minutes scrolling the /r/IdiotsInCars subreddit to get a feel for what I’m talking about. So no, I don’t think TSLA is being irresponsible in their FSD rollout. At worst it’s equivalent to the average human driver.
- anonytrary 6y ago> Go spend 10 minutes scrolling the /r/IdiotsInCars subreddit to get a feel for what I’m talking about. I don't think that is enough to form a conclusion. I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles and have yet to see an /r/IdiotsInCars moment. I think drivers are better than you think they are. If there are even just 10 recorded idiots a day, then that sub can be active and interesting every single day, but that doesn't reflect the fact that there may be 10,000,000 responsible drivers for each of those idiots. > At worst it’s equivalent to the average human driver. So I think this needs to be backed up with actual data and not some anecdotes from Reddit.
- sidibe 6y agoOh they've got the data. I see it everywhere, Tesla has way less accidents per mile than us horrible human drivers. I don't know what it's based on because every few minutes of footage there's a scary moment on FSD beta videos which are produced by Tesla enthusiasts who have signed some form of NDA (no live stream allowed).
- kerng 6y agoSo much hate towards Tesla here. I'm more neutral - dont have a strong opinion on this. But from Google's messaging it seems that the Waymo CEO is maybe a bit defensive (scared?). Tesla has probably the long term better strategy which leads to more accurate up to date data to constantly improve their system. Tesla's crowdsourcing strategy might be the winning horse in this race.
- joeblau 6y agoThe term you’re looking for is “Federated Machine Learning.” The more cars Tesla has, the faster they can train the neural networks edge cases.
- cycrutchfield 6y agoThat’s not really what federated ml means, unless they are doing the gradient updates from the cars directly.
- f5e4 6y agoTesla does not use federated ML. Federated ML is specifically about training models on device, and is mainly a technique for preserving data privacy.
- stingraycharles 6y agoThey are collecting data on all cars yes, but are training a model in one place. That is not federated machine learning, it’s federated data collection at best.
- cbozeman 6y agoI 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.
- blueblisters 6y agoI think Tesla has a distinct advantage over Waymo because of their ability to control the entire vehicle stack from low-level ECUs to the batteries, motors and high-level autonomous stack. Waymo has to partner with automobile OEMs who are still figuring out how to build electric vehicles, and build them in a way that can integrate with Waymo's technology.
- perryizgr8 6y agoI don't think there is any reason for Waymo not to pair up their system with a regular petrol car. Electric vehicle capability is orthogonal to self driving.
- blueblisters 6y agoDepends, if they are planning to run a taxi fleet or restrict themselves to new personal vehicles, integration and operational costs for ICE vehicles is likely going to be higher than EVs in a couple of years. There is little common between the vehicle dynamics and control for ICE and Electric vehicles, and it might be more practical to focus on one platform.
- Sprbdg 6y agoI doubt that regulators will just sign off on self driving tech across the board. I imagine that it will be transitioned in starting with freeways / motorways - in which case, the question is probably a technicality.
- Geee 6y agoFSD is all about collecting insane amount of data about edge cases that happen in the real world. Tesla has built the infrastructure for this, and will win the FSD race by a wide margin.
- burmanm 6y agoIs snow an edge case? My cameras don't function when it's snowing or there's snow in the ground. Or there's snow banks around the road. My dash is lit with the "some cameras are blocked" 24/7 for the whole winter time. And proximity readings are blinking those yellow / red lights all the time from the right side as it thinks the snow bank next to the road is too close. Or the system thinks the camera is blocked because the light reflexes from the snow. Seriously, if they can't solve even simple problems, how are they going to solve something more complex? I'd be happy for even a implementation of a removal of these warnings when the system doesn't understand what it's doing, but I don't think they know when it doesn't function correctly.
- Geee 6y agoIt doesn't work perfectly yet, but they're on their way making it work. Give it some time.
- theshrike79 6y agoSnow is a difficult problem even for humans. In worst cases the road turns from a 2 lane road to a 1.5-1.8 lane road when there's enough snow on the banks. Multi-lane motorways turn from 4 lanes to 2-8-3.5 lanes. Humans have trouble navigating that, dunno how any FSD system would manage it in our lifetime.
- Geee 6y agoAlso sometimes the "lanes" that form on the road can cross the center divider to the oncoming lane, which is really dangerous if you're not paying attention. I almost hit an oncoming semi-truck just one day because of this. It's an example of a rare edge case.
- 6y ago
- seebetter 6y agoThe arguments against Elon are so daft. I remember a Drive.AI exec saying in 2018 how Tesla’s auto pilot was like driving drunk. Drive.AI then collapsed with Apple acquiring it. Sorry hard to respect a company called “Waymo” (sounds satirical) and a CEO who just wantonly dismisses Tesla “we don’t see them as a competitor.” It’s like delusional SV mindsets.
- deegles 6y agoCan someone please describe a scenario where an alert driver in a FSD Tesla would be allowed to blame the vehicle for the accident? Every Tesla + Autopilot accident I’ve read about has been blamed on driver error. This “heads I win, tails you lose” approach is disingenuous at best.
- 3pt14159 6y agoWhat I think most people miss with FSD is that it's going to have a higher crash rate than average while the kinks are still being ironed out. That is ok because we're seeking to reduce the crash rate overall as fast as possible. I've been in many, many accidents in my life. Usually as the person not at fault or in the passenger seat or on the bicycle. I love the idea of self-driving cars. They will save many lives. The critical part to get right, however, is to test FSD on people that are more prone to get in car accidents in the first place. The elderly, recovering alcoholics, etc. That way we have the best of both worlds. Real world data to improve algorithms on, but also not raising the overall crash rate.
- LatteLazy 6y agoOne of the reasons I doubt self driving will happen any time soon (beyond Lane assist and similar minor changes) is that everyone is desperate to talk about why they're the expert and how it will work and no one seems to have a product ready to sell. It reminds me of chip makers arguing over the definitions of 2nm, when they were not producing anything smaller than 20nm...
- amelius 6y agoWhy are it now the car companies who decide "how it works"?
- macspoofing 6y agoOn the one end, you have a company that is going head-first and releasing things which aren't ready into the market. On the other end you have a company that is terrified of releasing anything to the market. It's interesting to see these two companies butting heads.
- ajnin 6y agoMusk has stated that since humans manage to get all info from the road using only 2 cameras, then Tesla cars can do the same and don't need lidar. Which makes sense, but also humans cause thousands of deadly accidents per year using those 2 cameras. So there is no certainty Tesla will be able to do better, it is a gamble.
- ralfd 6y agoElon Musks reply on twitter: > To my surprise, Tesla has better AI hardware & software than Waymo (money) https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1353564655088619520 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1353564655088619520
- alisonkisk 6y ago"I'm rubber, your glue". A completely void reply.
- leesec 6y ago"For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all," Krafcik said. "We manufacture a completely autonomous driving system. Tesla is an automaker that is developing a really good driver assistance system." This is absolutely hilarious to me. What an amazing cope. To downplay Tesla's approach is something you'd expect from a competing CEO. To straight up declare they are not even a competitor is delusional. They are clearly competitors.
- onaboat 6y agoTesla has been regressing with so many easy-to-fix bugs like Spotify playlists being cut off at 100 songs (broken for two months now). I don't ever see myself trusting their FSD when their developer and QA teams are causing or missing so many obvious regressions.
- mchusma 6y agoIt's a long road ahead, but right now Tesla has orders of magnitudes of more real driverless miles driven, in more areas and conditions. All done safer than humans statistically. It's possible for someone else to win, but right now Waymo is certainly the underdog under any metric you could come up with EXCEPT that lidar is required in the short term. So it's makes sense that is his public stance.
- morpheos137 6y agoSelf-driving doesn't work until we develop AGI with a self preservation drive akin to that of human beings. Doesn't matter how good your sensors are if you can not efficiently integrate sensor inputs into a model of the world that is useful for driving including so called "edge-cases." (Edge-cases are the whole problem by the way...) Lets use this analogy. Imagine a person with severe mental retardation or a person zonked out of their mind on a dissociative drug. Their eyes (sensors) may work just as good as anybody else...but would you trust them to drive a car?