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I 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-d

by screye 6y ago

I 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 ago
This 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 ago
  it'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
    Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more specialised, expensive cars which are designed for way higher duty cycles than most consumer cars.
    - swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
      In poorer nations autonomous cars could take much longer for mass adoption due to different, sometimes harsher road conditions, and lack of reliable road-map data. In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.
      - mxschumacher 6y ago
        yes, making autonomous driving work in central Delhi or Agadir will be much different from a US highway. Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        TheDong 6y ago
        Your impression of Delhi and Agadir doesn't seem right to me. By the numbers, Delhi has the highest crime-rate in india, but it has a 5 times lower rate of crime than San Francisco does. And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.
- nickik 6y ago
  Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use. Their arrogance is about as convincing as that of the rocket companies or car companies that didn't think EV were gone happen. Saying 'in my industry they are joke' is kind of a joke by itself by now. Also Tesla wants to operate a taxi services too so I don't understand your argument.
  - jfim 6y ago
    > Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use. Waymo is actually operating a driverless paid service in Arizona [0] with point to point pick up and drop off. Does Tesla actually offer this service today? [0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-car https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-...
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      > driverless paid service Which works in one small limited area of the earth because of high-def maps, which is not what you would normally call "scalable".
      - mikejb 6y ago
        Right, because who would digitalize the entire world and take pictures of every house and store front - that'd be insane!
      - jfim 6y ago
        At some point there was also a car company that only sold a single electrical car model, it was pretty expensive and they didn't make that many cars per year, which is not what you would normally call "scalable." Back to the original goalposts, as far as I know, Waymo is the only company that at this point, does offer a commercial service that's fully driverless. As you point out, they don't cover all of Earth, but neither do any of their competitors. Even Uber and Lyft, with human drivers, don't support all pick up and drop off locations, they only work in certain service areas.
- another_kel 6y ago
  How much value is there really? The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. Don’t forget that you also need to buy brand new vehicles and compete with Uber/taxis.
  - KorematsuFred 6y ago
    > The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. The analogy is that the electric bulb did not replace candle as such but created entirely new possibilities that were unimaginable when the bulb was invented. This is nearly true for any invention and not just self driving cars. Advancements in self driving will change not just how people go to office or dates but will also change how goods are hauled, how docks are loaded, how agricultural products are transported, how fruits are picked from trees and how law enforcement deals with patrolling and so on.
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      You didn't really answer their question... The candle was a candle and an electric bulb was an electric bulb. One could do things the other was not capable of. FSD however, is pretty close to what humans do. It's cost that's the difference. If you want a more apt analogy, this us more like the invention of a household CFL bulb. It's cheaper, it increases accessibility and quality in some dimensions, but it's not allowing you to do so much that was utterly impossible before. The comment you replied to wasn't saying FSD enables nothing new but rather that saying stuff like "change how people go to the office" is rather odd when today right now you can pay people for "FSD" and we already did see the shift from it...
- 0x10c0fe11ce 6y ago
  I’m one of those who will still buy my cars for one simple reason, I’m unable to live in other people’s filth. I’ve rented lost of shared electric cars and sometimes you just want to drive it into the sea.
- elisharobinson 6y ago
  Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could expect to be cashflow positive in 7~8 years (assuming exponential ramp up of production and 0 competition) ... all of these thing need to happen for this taxi service X to succeed ,i think to get all these things right is highly unlikely and i feel Elon knows this aswell so he took the path of simpler tech and trying a software service model which is infinitely more scale-able .
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    1. You don't need all of that capital in a first year. 2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.
  - reitzensteinm 6y ago
    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 $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash. Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.
    - elisharobinson 6y ago
      Yes i think i over inflated the number of cars required . https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 going through the data there are about 5 million drivers in Uber in 2019 . i will admit 100B$ 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 still have to compete with Tesla at somepoint which has a best car platform vs < X car company> in the market. Not to mention they already have close to 1 million cars with all the hardware(their claim, i still feel tesla TPU v2 with TSMC 7nm is a must have) and they are on track to producing 500k cars in US with these capabilities. while no other car company is even trying to integrate < X lidar autonomy startup> in mass production Today . Not to mention that currently the primary hindrance for Tesla is software which can scale much better in comparison to a ground up redesign of a car plant to accommodate lidar based systems .
onion2k 6y ago
Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.
- Zhenya 6y ago
  autonomous driving needs to be safer than humans to be adopted (some say way safer). So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.
  - dilap 6y ago
    Humans drive great when they're not distracted, with just two 2d cameras. But we get distracted a lot. So an advanced enough AI could easily be better at humans than driving w/o LIDAR, simply by driving as well as humans when not distracted, and not getting distracted.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      An advanced enough AI, and we are really far from it. Current AIs are really good at isolated problem solving, but driving is not in that domain.
    - YZF 6y ago
      Agreed. Once we're past "the singularity" a computer with human hardware can drive as good as humans. But our eyes are not cameras and the singularity hasn't happened last time I checked. Btw, we also need some additional hardware to do a good job, headlights, defogger, wiper blades...
- sixQuarks 6y ago
  wow, getting downvoted for stating this fact. I can't believe the anti-Musk bias here on HN. You would think HN would actually appreciate one of the more innovative entrepreneurs on the planet.
  - 6y ago
justapassenger 6y ago
You can see in all public talks how Karpathy focuses almost exclusively on image recognition. Yeah, that’s great and important, but that’s a step one in making any autonomous vehicle. And the easiest one.
- DisjointedHunt 6y ago
  He's also spoken at length about deriving point clouds from images alone at the Teslas autonomy day for investors. Can't expect a commercial company operating at the bleeding edge to host a "IP giveaway" day as researchers do.
- tim333 6y ago
  >And the easiest one Some of Telas biggest problems seem to stem from not recognising stationary trucks in their path.
NationalPark 6y ago
Surely you use power steering, drive-by-wire pedals, and anti-lock breaks though, right? Or even an automatic transmission? Is it so different to use lane assist or cruise control?
- screye 6y ago
  The key difference being they are reliable 100% of the time. Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them. Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    I agree on lane assist, but I'm confused, how does cruise control fail? I just set it to a speed on the highway... and the speed stays there until I brake. Are you talking about adaptive cruise control (ACC) to follow the speed of the car in front?
    - mongol 6y ago
      I also don't use cruise control. Not because I don't trust it, but I don't trust myself to react as quickly with it on. If my "gas foot" rests, it will take longer for it to hit the brake if needed, than if I engage continuously while driving. No scientific proof for this, except my own perception of my own attention.
      - pedrocr 6y ago
        I have the same worry when using cruise control. What I've trained myself to do is to cover the accelerator pedal when overtaking other cars or in any situation where I might have to brake. That way the car is still maintaining speed for me but I'm ready to intervene, to get back the safety margin. With adaptive cruise it may even increase the safety as both me and the cruise control can both brake.
      - 6y ago
JackFr 6y ago
> Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster. That's why I disable the anti-locking brake system and only drive a car with a manual transmission.
- markdown 6y ago
  I only fly in aircraft built more than twenty years ago, avoiding any fly-by-wire death traps.
- screye 6y ago
  That is an entirely unfaithful reading of what I said. Convenience features that always work are good. Cruise control and lane keep assist frequently fail, and take control away from you in a way that disallows you from maneuvering to safety. I can't think of a single instance where Automatic transmissions or ABS misbehave. If my transmission or braking failed in 1/100 instances, then I'd stop using them too.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jsight 6y ago
I'm pretty sure mobileye has demonstrated their FSD solution without lidar as well. It seems like they are treating lidar as optional. They have many more cameras than Tesla to support the camera only approach, though.
- screye 6y ago
  At some point, you have enough cameras that you are probably (implicitly or explicitly) doing 3D reconstructions that Lidar does anyways. At that point, why not just use LIDAR ? To save some $2-3k? That feels 'penny wise pound foolish'. This is a premium feature and LIDAR keeps getting cheaper.
anonytrary 6y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. There is no such thing as "sort of self driving". It's either completely autonomous or I'm going to have to be paying some attention and I might as well be doing all of the driving at that point.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  This is how I feel. My brain is pretty damn autonomous while driving. If I have to still pay attention to my “self-driving” car, that seems both more dangerous and taxing than just letting my brain do all the driving.
- somedude895 6y ago
  I treat Tesla's Autopilot basically like it's a very new driver or sonebody learning to drive. You're constantly paying attention to what it's doing but you can rely on it to keep its lane and distance from other cars. I appreciate it immensely on longer drives since I don't get as tired / exhausted from constantly having to be giving micro-inputs. It allows me to drive for hours and keep my head feeling fresh for much longer than when I drive other cars with no asststance features.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    I'm the same, for some reason I get extremely fatigued when I'm driving a "normal" car. Something about having to adjust the car just a little bit ALL THE TIME makes my brain not be able to relax. With a the limited lane assist in my EV (basically it stays in lane and changes lanes if I turn on the signal), I can drive longer distances and stay alert without getting tired. All I need to do is apply slight torque to the steering wheel and mind the other vehicles on the road.
- jfoster 6y ago
  How about automatic vs manual, or simple cruise control?
cyrux004 6y ago
So you don't use adaptive cruise control or lane centering features which are available in almost all new cars today. Clearly you are in the tiny minority, because almost every car manufacturer is adding basic AP like functionality even in base versions of cars. A lot of users feel this helps with long drives to which I agree
- samoa42 6y ago
  > Clearly you are in the tiny minority, because almost every car manufacturer is adding basic AP like functionality even in base versions of cars the average car in germany is 12 years old. from this perspective new-ish cars are a minority .
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    9,6 years [1] Finland has 12,2 because all the 10 year old German cars get imported here :D [1] https://www.aut.fi/en/frontpage_vanha/statistics/international_statistics/average_age_of_passenger_cars_in_some_european_countries https://www.aut.fi/en/frontpage_vanha/statistics/internation...
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Be aware that Comma.ai doesn't bill itself as self-driving, it is just driver assist.
smaudet 6y ago
The only times I have ever had accidents or close calls in a car (where another driver was not at fault for e.g. reckless driving behavior) has been with cruise control or with auto keep lane - the former I spun out, the later it tried to drive me off of a highway at 70 mph repeatedly. The sorts of assistive technologies that would actually help are not really being worked on, assistive has been misunderstood as meaning "allowing the driver to be lazier". Sure - if Tesla pulls it off, it's great. But it's a gamble with more than just Teslas stock, that is what makes Elon an unethical sociopath here... Waymo's approach is assuredly safer, there is still the possibility of technical glitches but it the approach doesn't create more problems with humans than it solves. Yes, sure, humans can be dangerous, but if that's the problem then it's safest to just not get on the road period, kinda negates the whole point of an FSD though...
perryizgr8 6y ago
> I avoid using cruise control and auto-lane-keep for the same reasons. Either I am in control or I am not. Do you also turn off features like ABS, ESC, traction control etc?
ilaksh 6y ago
I think your derogatory comments about Karparthy are ludicrous. Considering the scale of deployment, complexity of the application, and the life-and-death stakes, what he and his team have achieved so far is probably the greatest engineering achievement in the history of AI.
JonathanFly 6y ago
>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. Potentially Tesla's 2D data lead means they will still be the leader even if the compute resources in the current cars isn't up to the task, and maybe even if they have to add additional sensors like lidar. They can probably retrain their models and still get a lot of out of it. My personal guess is that full 3D lidar isn't needed, but some additional cameras and other cheap sensors probably are. There's a ton of stuff that costs a fraction of the cost of lidar that might fill in the gaps.
- La1n 6y ago
  >costs a fraction of the cost of lidar What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive.
  - JonathanFly 6y ago
    >What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive. Waymo says it cost $75,000 for the lidar in one car a decade ago, and in 2019 they said they got the cost down to $7,500. So at the time Tesla decided to forgo lidar the costs were certainly very high. I'm guessing the range in your vacuum is multiple orders of magnitude less than a car. Waymo must have been betting costs would drastically fall over time. No idea if it's a lot less than 7500 now.
    - esotericimpl 6y ago
      Lifar also looks terrible. Tesla cars are beautiful.
  - faisalhackshah 6y ago
    Robot vacuums typically don't use Lidar. They user a laser pointer and an offset camera. Distance is estimated by the pixel offset between the laser dot, and the center of the image. Object very far away: Laser dot in center of image. Object very close: Laser dot at maximal offset from center of image.
neillyons 6y ago
Elon talked about LIDAR at the autonomy investor day. Basically he said that the Dragon spacecraft has LIDAR and he spearheaded that effort. He also said that LIDAR and cameras both use the same wavelength, if you are going to add a sensor it makes more sense to add one which is outside of the visible wavelength. Even though I know nothing about driverless cars, the reasoning from Elon makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q
- mikejb 6y ago
  Whilst Lidar and cameras may have similar wavelengths, they have very different information outputs. Cameras give you a 2D colored image from which you essentially guesstimate the distance of objects. Lidar gives you a 2D depth map with much higher confidence in the data that comes out of the stream. Elon has a high incentive to talk down Lidar in cars: He/Tesla placed the bet initially on cameras because Lidar is/was too expensive, and promised these cars will be able to drive themselves ("regulatory approval pending"). Retrofitting Lidar is not an option (price, sensor&cable placement), so a lot of his (and Tesla's) promises ride on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary. A lot of Tesla's (Car's and Car company's) value rely on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary.
  - Seanambers 6y ago
    From what I understand Teslas have a front facing radar giving them accurate range measurement forward and they incorporate that in and use nets to do SLAM for other angels where the radar isn't. But i'm not an expert in this so take it with a grain of salt please :)
dalbasal 6y ago
I agree with your sentiments on driver assist. I'm not comfortable with the ambiguity of responsibility. But that's not really the key point, it's just how we feel. These features act as premium goodies, like old cruise control or whatever. People buy them, use them. They generate data. User-developer feedback loops. That's already a fact. The debate is about the importance of this . The core debate (of this article: waymo_v_tesla), is about technology paths. Do you start with driver assist and move up the Ls gradually as units are produced, KMs are accumulated and dollars come in? Alternatively, do you get as close as possible with a prototype and then closer with the next one..? worry about financial/product viability once you have a working archetype. This dovetails with the lidar question. Ultimately, I find the disagreement fascinating. There's probably value in having these two throwing their weight into opposing camps. IDK which approach will win in self driving. Every technology is its own example. That said, I like Elon's approach as a generality. To me, it's about thinking of technology and invention as an industrial/societal effort rather than a lab effort... even if reduced to a lab at a company. Learning curves exist. Feedback loops exist. A technology with products and customer and usage progresses, often. You could not have "produced" Moore's law the Waymo way, most likely.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  I think we can reduce this argument further. Musk thinks that is it acceptable to ship features when there is a safety risk, Waymo doesn't There is also a bit of ego in there as well. Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. Its nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. Tesla have spent Billions of dollars trying to re-create a lidar like depth sensor using radar and monocular slam. Its just not going to cut it for a number of years. CNNs are just not fast or robust enough to replace a lidar. Especially with the quality and placement of the sensors in a tesla.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    That is in fact, the top comment. Respectfully, I don't think that this is a reduction though. It's a sidestep. I don't mean that the safety (and other ethical) concerns aren't real, and I accept that there are legitimate criticisms of Tesla/Elon... both philosophically and practically. That is not the actual debate in this article though. It's not the debate between Tesla and Waymo's CEOs. That debate is about the path to a technological goal: actually autonomous vehicles. The lidar question is closer to the core of the debate, but IMO it's a detail. Here the disagreement might have gotten unproductive. As you say, egos (famously big & nerdy ones) have have been dragged into it. >> Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. It's nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. I agree with the first and disagree with the second statement. This, IMO, is actually at the core of the debate. In (my assumed version of) Musk's Modus Operandi, technology strategy and business strategy converge much more than in the Waymo/Krafcik MO... They're at opposite ends of the poll. Business decisions are R&D decisions. Putting things into production is R&D, affects R&D, determines R&D. In a caricature/model version of the Waymo MO, technology is invented in a research lab. Once it's ready, it can be productized outside of the lab. "Technology" is defined as the core "proof of concept." In the Musk MO, technology is produced in an industry/company. A lab cannot reduce the price of computing by half every 18 months for decades. A lab can't improve the price/weight/performance of batteries to the point of EV viability. It takes an active industry/market to do these things. You need customers. You need commercially scale factories, increasing annual unit production. Etc. Large and increasing numbers of people working on it. A lot of technology never leaves R&D. Lunar Travel didn't becomes cheaper over time. This confuses people because we expect technology to improve. Doing something people did 50 years ago should be cheap and easy, intuitively. In reality, that momentum is not a guarantee. If no one works on it, it doesn't improve. Software, hardware and such improve at a monstrous pace. But, every year there are way more people working on hardware and software. If the space "industry" had 100X more people working on it compared to 60s, it would have improved to. I'm not calling Musk's approach superior, but Waymo's is certainly more common. Novelty itself is valuable. It's interesting that we have both approaches at play. n=2, but at least we'll get to see how this plays out.

by screye 6y ago

rcxdude 6y ago

This 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 ago
it'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
  Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more specialised, expensive cars which are designed for way higher duty cycles than most consumer cars.
  - swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
    In poorer nations autonomous cars could take much longer for mass adoption due to different, sometimes harsher road conditions, and lack of reliable road-map data. In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.
    - mxschumacher 6y ago
      yes, making autonomous driving work in central Delhi or Agadir will be much different from a US highway. Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - TheDong 6y ago
        Your impression of Delhi and Agadir doesn't seem right to me. By the numbers, Delhi has the highest crime-rate in india, but it has a 5 times lower rate of crime than San Francisco does. And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.
nickik 6y ago
Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use. Their arrogance is about as convincing as that of the rocket companies or car companies that didn't think EV were gone happen. Saying 'in my industry they are joke' is kind of a joke by itself by now. Also Tesla wants to operate a taxi services too so I don't understand your argument.
- jfim 6y ago
  > Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use. Waymo is actually operating a driverless paid service in Arizona [0] with point to point pick up and drop off. Does Tesla actually offer this service today? [0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-car https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-...
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    > driverless paid service Which works in one small limited area of the earth because of high-def maps, which is not what you would normally call "scalable".
    - mikejb 6y ago
      Right, because who would digitalize the entire world and take pictures of every house and store front - that'd be insane!
    - jfim 6y ago
      At some point there was also a car company that only sold a single electrical car model, it was pretty expensive and they didn't make that many cars per year, which is not what you would normally call "scalable." Back to the original goalposts, as far as I know, Waymo is the only company that at this point, does offer a commercial service that's fully driverless. As you point out, they don't cover all of Earth, but neither do any of their competitors. Even Uber and Lyft, with human drivers, don't support all pick up and drop off locations, they only work in certain service areas.
another_kel 6y ago
How much value is there really? The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. Don’t forget that you also need to buy brand new vehicles and compete with Uber/taxis.
- KorematsuFred 6y ago
  > The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. The analogy is that the electric bulb did not replace candle as such but created entirely new possibilities that were unimaginable when the bulb was invented. This is nearly true for any invention and not just self driving cars. Advancements in self driving will change not just how people go to office or dates but will also change how goods are hauled, how docks are loaded, how agricultural products are transported, how fruits are picked from trees and how law enforcement deals with patrolling and so on.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    You didn't really answer their question... The candle was a candle and an electric bulb was an electric bulb. One could do things the other was not capable of. FSD however, is pretty close to what humans do. It's cost that's the difference. If you want a more apt analogy, this us more like the invention of a household CFL bulb. It's cheaper, it increases accessibility and quality in some dimensions, but it's not allowing you to do so much that was utterly impossible before. The comment you replied to wasn't saying FSD enables nothing new but rather that saying stuff like "change how people go to the office" is rather odd when today right now you can pay people for "FSD" and we already did see the shift from it...
0x10c0fe11ce 6y ago
I’m one of those who will still buy my cars for one simple reason, I’m unable to live in other people’s filth. I’ve rented lost of shared electric cars and sometimes you just want to drive it into the sea.
elisharobinson 6y ago
Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could expect to be cashflow positive in 7~8 years (assuming exponential ramp up of production and 0 competition) ... all of these thing need to happen for this taxi service X to succeed ,i think to get all these things right is highly unlikely and i feel Elon knows this aswell so he took the path of simpler tech and trying a software service model which is infinitely more scale-able .
- me_me_me 6y ago
  1. You don't need all of that capital in a first year. 2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  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 $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash. Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.
  - elisharobinson 6y ago
    Yes i think i over inflated the number of cars required . https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 going through the data there are about 5 million drivers in Uber in 2019 . i will admit 100B$ 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 still have to compete with Tesla at somepoint which has a best car platform vs < X car company> in the market. Not to mention they already have close to 1 million cars with all the hardware(their claim, i still feel tesla TPU v2 with TSMC 7nm is a must have) and they are on track to producing 500k cars in US with these capabilities. while no other car company is even trying to integrate < X lidar autonomy startup> in mass production Today . Not to mention that currently the primary hindrance for Tesla is software which can scale much better in comparison to a ground up redesign of a car plant to accommodate lidar based systems .

onion2k 6y ago

Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.

Zhenya 6y ago
autonomous driving needs to be safer than humans to be adopted (some say way safer). So this argument of humans don't need it, is sort of, well yes. We're trying to do better than humans.
- dilap 6y ago
  Humans drive great when they're not distracted, with just two 2d cameras. But we get distracted a lot. So an advanced enough AI could easily be better at humans than driving w/o LIDAR, simply by driving as well as humans when not distracted, and not getting distracted.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    An advanced enough AI, and we are really far from it. Current AIs are really good at isolated problem solving, but driving is not in that domain.
  - YZF 6y ago
    Agreed. Once we're past "the singularity" a computer with human hardware can drive as good as humans. But our eyes are not cameras and the singularity hasn't happened last time I checked. Btw, we also need some additional hardware to do a good job, headlights, defogger, wiper blades...
sixQuarks 6y ago
wow, getting downvoted for stating this fact. I can't believe the anti-Musk bias here on HN. You would think HN would actually appreciate one of the more innovative entrepreneurs on the planet.
- 6y ago

justapassenger 6y ago

You can see in all public talks how Karpathy focuses almost exclusively on image recognition. Yeah, that’s great and important, but that’s a step one in making any autonomous vehicle. And the easiest one.

DisjointedHunt 6y ago
He's also spoken at length about deriving point clouds from images alone at the Teslas autonomy day for investors. Can't expect a commercial company operating at the bleeding edge to host a "IP giveaway" day as researchers do.
tim333 6y ago
>And the easiest one Some of Telas biggest problems seem to stem from not recognising stationary trucks in their path.

NationalPark 6y ago

Surely you use power steering, drive-by-wire pedals, and anti-lock breaks though, right? Or even an automatic transmission? Is it so different to use lane assist or cruise control?

screye 6y ago
The key difference being they are reliable 100% of the time. Cruise control frequently fails and lane assist that explicitly the one that take steering control away from you has put me in dangerous situations more often than it has saved me from them. Lane assist as an alarm to alert you is great though.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I agree on lane assist, but I'm confused, how does cruise control fail? I just set it to a speed on the highway... and the speed stays there until I brake. Are you talking about adaptive cruise control (ACC) to follow the speed of the car in front?
  - mongol 6y ago
    I also don't use cruise control. Not because I don't trust it, but I don't trust myself to react as quickly with it on. If my "gas foot" rests, it will take longer for it to hit the brake if needed, than if I engage continuously while driving. No scientific proof for this, except my own perception of my own attention.
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      I have the same worry when using cruise control. What I've trained myself to do is to cover the accelerator pedal when overtaking other cars or in any situation where I might have to brake. That way the car is still maintaining speed for me but I'm ready to intervene, to get back the safety margin. With adaptive cruise it may even increase the safety as both me and the cruise control can both brake.
    - 6y ago

JackFr 6y ago

> Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster. That's why I disable the anti-locking brake system and only drive a car with a manual transmission.

markdown 6y ago
I only fly in aircraft built more than twenty years ago, avoiding any fly-by-wire death traps.
screye 6y ago
That is an entirely unfaithful reading of what I said. Convenience features that always work are good. Cruise control and lane keep assist frequently fail, and take control away from you in a way that disallows you from maneuvering to safety. I can't think of a single instance where Automatic transmissions or ABS misbehave. If my transmission or braking failed in 1/100 instances, then I'd stop using them too.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jsight 6y ago

I'm pretty sure mobileye has demonstrated their FSD solution without lidar as well. It seems like they are treating lidar as optional. They have many more cameras than Tesla to support the camera only approach, though.

screye 6y ago
At some point, you have enough cameras that you are probably (implicitly or explicitly) doing 3D reconstructions that Lidar does anyways. At that point, why not just use LIDAR ? To save some $2-3k? That feels 'penny wise pound foolish'. This is a premium feature and LIDAR keeps getting cheaper.

anonytrary 6y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. There is no such thing as "sort of self driving". It's either completely autonomous or I'm going to have to be paying some attention and I might as well be doing all of the driving at that point.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
This is how I feel. My brain is pretty damn autonomous while driving. If I have to still pay attention to my “self-driving” car, that seems both more dangerous and taxing than just letting my brain do all the driving.
somedude895 6y ago
I treat Tesla's Autopilot basically like it's a very new driver or sonebody learning to drive. You're constantly paying attention to what it's doing but you can rely on it to keep its lane and distance from other cars. I appreciate it immensely on longer drives since I don't get as tired / exhausted from constantly having to be giving micro-inputs. It allows me to drive for hours and keep my head feeling fresh for much longer than when I drive other cars with no asststance features.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  I'm the same, for some reason I get extremely fatigued when I'm driving a "normal" car. Something about having to adjust the car just a little bit ALL THE TIME makes my brain not be able to relax. With a the limited lane assist in my EV (basically it stays in lane and changes lanes if I turn on the signal), I can drive longer distances and stay alert without getting tired. All I need to do is apply slight torque to the steering wheel and mind the other vehicles on the road.
jfoster 6y ago
How about automatic vs manual, or simple cruise control?

cyrux004 6y ago

So you don't use adaptive cruise control or lane centering features which are available in almost all new cars today. Clearly you are in the tiny minority, because almost every car manufacturer is adding basic AP like functionality even in base versions of cars. A lot of users feel this helps with long drives to which I agree

samoa42 6y ago
> Clearly you are in the tiny minority, because almost every car manufacturer is adding basic AP like functionality even in base versions of cars the average car in germany is 12 years old. from this perspective new-ish cars are a minority .
- theshrike79 6y ago
  9,6 years [1] Finland has 12,2 because all the 10 year old German cars get imported here :D [1] https://www.aut.fi/en/frontpage_vanha/statistics/international_statistics/average_age_of_passenger_cars_in_some_european_countries https://www.aut.fi/en/frontpage_vanha/statistics/internation...

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Be aware that Comma.ai doesn't bill itself as self-driving, it is just driver assist.

smaudet 6y ago

The only times I have ever had accidents or close calls in a car (where another driver was not at fault for e.g. reckless driving behavior) has been with cruise control or with auto keep lane - the former I spun out, the later it tried to drive me off of a highway at 70 mph repeatedly. The sorts of assistive technologies that would actually help are not really being worked on, assistive has been misunderstood as meaning "allowing the driver to be lazier". Sure - if Tesla pulls it off, it's great. But it's a gamble with more than just Teslas stock, that is what makes Elon an unethical sociopath here... Waymo's approach is assuredly safer, there is still the possibility of technical glitches but it the approach doesn't create more problems with humans than it solves. Yes, sure, humans can be dangerous, but if that's the problem then it's safest to just not get on the road period, kinda negates the whole point of an FSD though...

perryizgr8 6y ago

> I avoid using cruise control and auto-lane-keep for the same reasons. Either I am in control or I am not. Do you also turn off features like ABS, ESC, traction control etc?

ilaksh 6y ago

I think your derogatory comments about Karparthy are ludicrous. Considering the scale of deployment, complexity of the application, and the life-and-death stakes, what he and his team have achieved so far is probably the greatest engineering achievement in the history of AI.

JonathanFly 6y ago

>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. Potentially Tesla's 2D data lead means they will still be the leader even if the compute resources in the current cars isn't up to the task, and maybe even if they have to add additional sensors like lidar. They can probably retrain their models and still get a lot of out of it. My personal guess is that full 3D lidar isn't needed, but some additional cameras and other cheap sensors probably are. There's a ton of stuff that costs a fraction of the cost of lidar that might fill in the gaps.

La1n 6y ago
>costs a fraction of the cost of lidar What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive.
- JonathanFly 6y ago
  >What makes lidar for use in self-driving that expensive? I have a robot-vacuum with a lidar that wasn't all that expensive. Waymo says it cost $75,000 for the lidar in one car a decade ago, and in 2019 they said they got the cost down to $7,500. So at the time Tesla decided to forgo lidar the costs were certainly very high. I'm guessing the range in your vacuum is multiple orders of magnitude less than a car. Waymo must have been betting costs would drastically fall over time. No idea if it's a lot less than 7500 now.
  - esotericimpl 6y ago
    Lifar also looks terrible. Tesla cars are beautiful.
- faisalhackshah 6y ago
  Robot vacuums typically don't use Lidar. They user a laser pointer and an offset camera. Distance is estimated by the pixel offset between the laser dot, and the center of the image. Object very far away: Laser dot in center of image. Object very close: Laser dot at maximal offset from center of image.

neillyons 6y ago

Elon talked about LIDAR at the autonomy investor day. Basically he said that the Dragon spacecraft has LIDAR and he spearheaded that effort. He also said that LIDAR and cameras both use the same wavelength, if you are going to add a sensor it makes more sense to add one which is outside of the visible wavelength. Even though I know nothing about driverless cars, the reasoning from Elon makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q

mikejb 6y ago
Whilst Lidar and cameras may have similar wavelengths, they have very different information outputs. Cameras give you a 2D colored image from which you essentially guesstimate the distance of objects. Lidar gives you a 2D depth map with much higher confidence in the data that comes out of the stream. Elon has a high incentive to talk down Lidar in cars: He/Tesla placed the bet initially on cameras because Lidar is/was too expensive, and promised these cars will be able to drive themselves ("regulatory approval pending"). Retrofitting Lidar is not an option (price, sensor&cable placement), so a lot of his (and Tesla's) promises ride on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary. A lot of Tesla's (Car's and Car company's) value rely on cameras working out and Lidar not being necessary.
- Seanambers 6y ago
  From what I understand Teslas have a front facing radar giving them accurate range measurement forward and they incorporate that in and use nets to do SLAM for other angels where the radar isn't. But i'm not an expert in this so take it with a grain of salt please :)

dalbasal 6y ago

I agree with your sentiments on driver assist. I'm not comfortable with the ambiguity of responsibility. But that's not really the key point, it's just how we feel. These features act as premium goodies, like old cruise control or whatever. People buy them, use them. They generate data. User-developer feedback loops. That's already a fact. The debate is about the importance of this . The core debate (of this article: waymo_v_tesla), is about technology paths. Do you start with driver assist and move up the Ls gradually as units are produced, KMs are accumulated and dollars come in? Alternatively, do you get as close as possible with a prototype and then closer with the next one..? worry about financial/product viability once you have a working archetype. This dovetails with the lidar question. Ultimately, I find the disagreement fascinating. There's probably value in having these two throwing their weight into opposing camps. IDK which approach will win in self driving. Every technology is its own example. That said, I like Elon's approach as a generality. To me, it's about thinking of technology and invention as an industrial/societal effort rather than a lab effort... even if reduced to a lab at a company. Learning curves exist. Feedback loops exist. A technology with products and customer and usage progresses, often. You could not have "produced" Moore's law the Waymo way, most likely.

KaiserPro 6y ago
I think we can reduce this argument further. Musk thinks that is it acceptable to ship features when there is a safety risk, Waymo doesn't There is also a bit of ego in there as well. Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. Its nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. Tesla have spent Billions of dollars trying to re-create a lidar like depth sensor using radar and monocular slam. Its just not going to cut it for a number of years. CNNs are just not fast or robust enough to replace a lidar. Especially with the quality and placement of the sensors in a tesla.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  That is in fact, the top comment. Respectfully, I don't think that this is a reduction though. It's a sidestep. I don't mean that the safety (and other ethical) concerns aren't real, and I accept that there are legitimate criticisms of Tesla/Elon... both philosophically and practically. That is not the actual debate in this article though. It's not the debate between Tesla and Waymo's CEOs. That debate is about the path to a technological goal: actually autonomous vehicles. The lidar question is closer to the core of the debate, but IMO it's a detail. Here the disagreement might have gotten unproductive. As you say, egos (famously big & nerdy ones) have have been dragged into it. >> Tesla have made a business decision not to use lidar. It's nothing to do with the maturity of the tech. I agree with the first and disagree with the second statement. This, IMO, is actually at the core of the debate. In (my assumed version of) Musk's Modus Operandi, technology strategy and business strategy converge much more than in the Waymo/Krafcik MO... They're at opposite ends of the poll. Business decisions are R&D decisions. Putting things into production is R&D, affects R&D, determines R&D. In a caricature/model version of the Waymo MO, technology is invented in a research lab. Once it's ready, it can be productized outside of the lab. "Technology" is defined as the core "proof of concept." In the Musk MO, technology is produced in an industry/company. A lab cannot reduce the price of computing by half every 18 months for decades. A lab can't improve the price/weight/performance of batteries to the point of EV viability. It takes an active industry/market to do these things. You need customers. You need commercially scale factories, increasing annual unit production. Etc. Large and increasing numbers of people working on it. A lot of technology never leaves R&D. Lunar Travel didn't becomes cheaper over time. This confuses people because we expect technology to improve. Doing something people did 50 years ago should be cheap and easy, intuitively. In reality, that momentum is not a guarantee. If no one works on it, it doesn't improve. Software, hardware and such improve at a monstrous pace. But, every year there are way more people working on hardware and software. If the space "industry" had 100X more people working on it compared to 60s, it would have improved to. I'm not calling Musk's approach superior, but Waymo's is certainly more common. Novelty itself is valuable. It's interesting that we have both approaches at play. n=2, but at least we'll get to see how this plays out.