9 ms·

What is success? Does 50 miles of geofenced and daily mapped streets mean Cruise won self driving? What if Waymo gets to 20k miles of geofenced roads and mont

What is success? Does 50 miles of geofenced and daily mapped streets mean Cruise won self driving? What if Waymo gets to 20k miles of geofenced roads and monthly mapped? What if Tesla gets to the point of one intervention/crash every 100k miles? 10M Miles?

gonehome 5y ago
Yeah, they’re not trying to solve the same thing? I think Tesla is right that to solve it for real you need to solve the general case which can’t rely on high resolution maps. The city cab case is smaller and can, so the cruise approach makes sense for that use case. It’s just narrower.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Or you solve for a subset of highways in a subset of weather conditions. That would be more useful to a lot of people than city cabs which exist today (with human drivers).
- jowday 5y ago
  The truth of it is that it’s just not possible (with currently existing technology/ML architectures) to create a truly autonomous taxi without HD maps. Everyone in the robotaxi industry knows this - even Tesla builds HD maps, they just don’t call them that.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    My knowledge only comes from Karpathy's talks about this (which are great, worth watching if you haven't seen them). I found his and Tesla's arguments convincing for the general case. That doesn't mean that the narrow cases aren't super cool or valuable (I signed up for this Cruise thing in SF). I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary (and the world is too large to economically map fast enough for that approach). You have to solve the vision problem. I don't know enough to comment on the approach differences beyond that, but my understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require (largely Lidar and these high resolution maps).
    - jowday 5y ago
      > I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary. My contention is that there’s no way to actually solve for the general case with currently existing technology. The amount of novelty in the real world is too great for any system to account for it without disambiguating via HD maps or remote support. >You have to solve the vision problem. This isn’t a vision problem specifically - even if you had LIDAR and high resolution imaging radar and 8 A100s on every Tesla, “true generalized self driving” wouldn’t be achievable without HD maps with our current understanding of Machine Learning. >My understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require. Tesla maps individual traffic light elements, stop signs, and lane markings, but will attempt to drive even if the area isn’t mapped. Disparities in FSD performance in different areas is largely attributable to some areas being better mapped than others - the mapping data has a huge effect on its performance. There are key elements of the driving task (including recognizing and reacting to every single type of sign other than a stop sign) that FSD can’t do and relies entirely on maps for.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Novelty isn’t nearly as big of a problem as you might think. One of Wamo’s famous videos was someone on an electric scooter chasing a duck in the middle of the street. That’s very odd behavior, but the car followed the rather simple option of just not hitting them and going forward when possible. Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A trash can rolling down the street can be treated just like an oil drum doing the same thing etc.
        jowday 5y ago
        > Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A trash can rolling down the street can be treated just like an oil drum doing the same thing etc. You’d think that, until you encounter something like a turn restriction sign with a bizarre conditional restriction that it’s never seen before. At which point the car needs to OCR the text, parse the semantic meaning, and apply to the scene.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  > I think Tesla is right that to solve it for real you need to solve the general case which can’t rely on high resolution maps. But they do relay on maps. You cannot use FSD without latest, high resolution maps.
danielrhodes 5y ago
Cruise is interesting insofar as they are not simply looking to sell their technology, but they also want to monetize it as a service. Not only will they not need a driver, they will also be able to buy the hardware (the car) at cost. If it's successful, their margins will be much higher than Uber and Lyft by a long shot.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Is this not what effectively everyone who is doing this (outside of Tesla) is looking at?
- vkou 5y ago
  As a taxpayer who pays for roads, and suffers from traffic congestion caused by one-occupant and zero-occupant vehicles, I'm eagerly looking forward to reducing the taxes I pay, by taxing those margins, instead. Ideally, the taxes could be high enough that driverless taxis will operate at barely above break-even. The financial comfort of me and my neighbours are more important to me than the profit margins of a firm that barely employs anyone in my town. Unlike a factory or a corporate office (that can threaten to move offshore, eliminating jobs and impoverishing a town), the firm in question is a hostage of local politics - not the other way around.
  - jurassic 5y ago
    Do you think your experience of congestion would be improved by everyone driving private vehicles instead? Not sure I follow the logic here.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Of course. If one assumes relatively inexpensive rob-taxis people living outside cities will definitely come in more often. I certainly would.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Yes, because in the common case, a taxi (driverless or otherwise) drives empty at least some of the time, to pick someone up, thus creating congestion, compared to a private vehicle, which doesn't drive empty. The cheaper and more convenient you make zero-person and single-person automobile transportation, the more people will use it, and the more congestion they will create. The more expensive and less convenient you make it, the more trips will use non-automotive, or public transportation, both of which produce far less congestion.
comex 5y ago
The human accident rate is about one per 500K miles, so if they were able to get in that range, then yes, they would have succeeded; drivers would be able to stop paying attention to the road without putting themselves and others in danger. But the current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles, judging from some quick googling. I see no particular reason to assume that incremental improvement can take us from 10 to 500K.
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  > current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles Maybe in rural areas? The videos on YouTube are far more than one per 10 miles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTybjJj0ptw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTybjJj0ptw
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    A helpful link for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
    - gitfan86 5y ago
      But are you using confirmation bias to find a cognitive bias that fits here. But, In all seriousness we don't have access to the data across all 60k FSD users to know what the intervention rate is and how it has been changing over time.
      - blahblarblar 5y ago
        Dirty Tesla used to track these stats in his testing and gave up because “it’s not changing”
        Retric 5y ago
        Which could be a sign some drivers are simply overly cautious. Suppose 1/10 of disconnects prevented a crash, reducing the risk of crashing to 0 only reduces the number of disconnects by 10%. To actually reduce that number you would need to make drivers feel more confident in the vehicle which is a useful metric, but only indirectly relating to safety.
stevofolife 5y ago
Success? Go from point A to point B with minimal incidents. It's not that complicated as most people make out of it.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  More importantly, "driverless" means no one at the driver seat. What Tesla has is barely even Level 3. Waymo right now is doing rides without anyone in the driverseat, aka Level 4. What Tesla is doing is not driverless.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nicbou 5y ago
I just drove through the Alps, at night, during a snow storm. This is hardly everyday driving, but it's the sort of experience Canadians are no strangers to. Success is when I trust the autopilot to handle the weather conditions where I live, not just sunny days in California.

gonehome 5y ago

Yeah, they’re not trying to solve the same thing? I think Tesla is right that to solve it for real you need to solve the general case which can’t rely on high resolution maps. The city cab case is smaller and can, so the cruise approach makes sense for that use case. It’s just narrower.

ghaff 5y ago
Or you solve for a subset of highways in a subset of weather conditions. That would be more useful to a lot of people than city cabs which exist today (with human drivers).
jowday 5y ago
The truth of it is that it’s just not possible (with currently existing technology/ML architectures) to create a truly autonomous taxi without HD maps. Everyone in the robotaxi industry knows this - even Tesla builds HD maps, they just don’t call them that.
- gonehome 5y ago
  My knowledge only comes from Karpathy's talks about this (which are great, worth watching if you haven't seen them). I found his and Tesla's arguments convincing for the general case. That doesn't mean that the narrow cases aren't super cool or valuable (I signed up for this Cruise thing in SF). I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary (and the world is too large to economically map fast enough for that approach). You have to solve the vision problem. I don't know enough to comment on the approach differences beyond that, but my understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require (largely Lidar and these high resolution maps).
  - jowday 5y ago
    > I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary. My contention is that there’s no way to actually solve for the general case with currently existing technology. The amount of novelty in the real world is too great for any system to account for it without disambiguating via HD maps or remote support. >You have to solve the vision problem. This isn’t a vision problem specifically - even if you had LIDAR and high resolution imaging radar and 8 A100s on every Tesla, “true generalized self driving” wouldn’t be achievable without HD maps with our current understanding of Machine Learning. >My understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require. Tesla maps individual traffic light elements, stop signs, and lane markings, but will attempt to drive even if the area isn’t mapped. Disparities in FSD performance in different areas is largely attributable to some areas being better mapped than others - the mapping data has a huge effect on its performance. There are key elements of the driving task (including recognizing and reacting to every single type of sign other than a stop sign) that FSD can’t do and relies entirely on maps for.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Novelty isn’t nearly as big of a problem as you might think. One of Wamo’s famous videos was someone on an electric scooter chasing a duck in the middle of the street. That’s very odd behavior, but the car followed the rather simple option of just not hitting them and going forward when possible. Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A trash can rolling down the street can be treated just like an oil drum doing the same thing etc.
      - jowday 5y ago
        > Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A trash can rolling down the street can be treated just like an oil drum doing the same thing etc. You’d think that, until you encounter something like a turn restriction sign with a bizarre conditional restriction that it’s never seen before. At which point the car needs to OCR the text, parse the semantic meaning, and apply to the scene.
justapassenger 5y ago
> I think Tesla is right that to solve it for real you need to solve the general case which can’t rely on high resolution maps. But they do relay on maps. You cannot use FSD without latest, high resolution maps.

danielrhodes 5y ago

Cruise is interesting insofar as they are not simply looking to sell their technology, but they also want to monetize it as a service. Not only will they not need a driver, they will also be able to buy the hardware (the car) at cost. If it's successful, their margins will be much higher than Uber and Lyft by a long shot.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Is this not what effectively everyone who is doing this (outside of Tesla) is looking at?
vkou 5y ago
As a taxpayer who pays for roads, and suffers from traffic congestion caused by one-occupant and zero-occupant vehicles, I'm eagerly looking forward to reducing the taxes I pay, by taxing those margins, instead. Ideally, the taxes could be high enough that driverless taxis will operate at barely above break-even. The financial comfort of me and my neighbours are more important to me than the profit margins of a firm that barely employs anyone in my town. Unlike a factory or a corporate office (that can threaten to move offshore, eliminating jobs and impoverishing a town), the firm in question is a hostage of local politics - not the other way around.
- jurassic 5y ago
  Do you think your experience of congestion would be improved by everyone driving private vehicles instead? Not sure I follow the logic here.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Of course. If one assumes relatively inexpensive rob-taxis people living outside cities will definitely come in more often. I certainly would.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Yes, because in the common case, a taxi (driverless or otherwise) drives empty at least some of the time, to pick someone up, thus creating congestion, compared to a private vehicle, which doesn't drive empty. The cheaper and more convenient you make zero-person and single-person automobile transportation, the more people will use it, and the more congestion they will create. The more expensive and less convenient you make it, the more trips will use non-automotive, or public transportation, both of which produce far less congestion.

comex 5y ago

The human accident rate is about one per 500K miles, so if they were able to get in that range, then yes, they would have succeeded; drivers would be able to stop paying attention to the road without putting themselves and others in danger. But the current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles, judging from some quick googling. I see no particular reason to assume that incremental improvement can take us from 10 to 500K.

waffle_maniac 5y ago
> current FSD beta's intervention rate is more like one per 10 miles Maybe in rural areas? The videos on YouTube are far more than one per 10 miles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTybjJj0ptw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTybjJj0ptw
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  A helpful link for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    But are you using confirmation bias to find a cognitive bias that fits here. But, In all seriousness we don't have access to the data across all 60k FSD users to know what the intervention rate is and how it has been changing over time.
    - blahblarblar 5y ago
      Dirty Tesla used to track these stats in his testing and gave up because “it’s not changing”
      - Retric 5y ago
        Which could be a sign some drivers are simply overly cautious. Suppose 1/10 of disconnects prevented a crash, reducing the risk of crashing to 0 only reduces the number of disconnects by 10%. To actually reduce that number you would need to make drivers feel more confident in the vehicle which is a useful metric, but only indirectly relating to safety.

stevofolife 5y ago

Success? Go from point A to point B with minimal incidents. It's not that complicated as most people make out of it.

ehsankia 5y ago
More importantly, "driverless" means no one at the driver seat. What Tesla has is barely even Level 3. Waymo right now is doing rides without anyone in the driverseat, aka Level 4. What Tesla is doing is not driverless.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nicbou 5y ago

I just drove through the Alps, at night, during a snow storm. This is hardly everyday driving, but it's the sort of experience Canadians are no strangers to. Success is when I trust the autopilot to handle the weather conditions where I live, not just sunny days in California.