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Companies like Waymo and Cruise use this kind of technology too. Unfortunately there are tons of corner cases of weird things you haven't seen before -- for exa

Companies like Waymo and Cruise use this kind of technology too. Unfortunately there are tons of corner cases of weird things you haven't seen before -- for example, some special vehicles self-occlude and you never get enough coverage to observe them correctly until you're too close. In general, radars and lidars used in _conjunction_ with cameras can handle occluded objects much better. Also, to measure the performance / evaluate observations generated from this tech, you would want to compare it to a pretty sizable 3D ground truth set which Tesla does not currently have. There are pretty big advantages to starting with a maximal set of sensors even if (eventually) breakthroughs turn them into unnecessary crutches.

leobg 5y ago
That was very insightful. Do you work in that space? It is comments like yours that make HN a special place.
quantumduck 5y ago
I agree that there are pretty big advantages to start with maximal set of sensors, but that is true only when you are a company with the sole goal of trying to make autonomy stack with shit ton of money and a product that you can modify because you own it. That's not true in the case of Tesla. They started as a EV company that offered autonomy later and since they were selling the product, they had to decide a minimal set of sensors that would, in theory, still work to keep the product cost reasonable. Tesla does have a sizeable 3D ground truth; they collected tons of data mounting LiDAR on their test vehicles.
- kajecounterhack 5y ago
  > Tesla does have a sizeable 3D ground truth; they collected tons of data mounting LiDAR on their test vehicles. "Sizable" for evaluating safety has to be big enough to give small confidence intervals on your error -- and with self-driving, you need to cover a robust set of rare scenarios upsampled from general driving as well. I really doubt Tesla has what they need to convince themselves of higher levels of safety.

leobg 5y ago

That was very insightful. Do you work in that space? It is comments like yours that make HN a special place.

quantumduck 5y ago

I agree that there are pretty big advantages to start with maximal set of sensors, but that is true only when you are a company with the sole goal of trying to make autonomy stack with shit ton of money and a product that you can modify because you own it. That's not true in the case of Tesla. They started as a EV company that offered autonomy later and since they were selling the product, they had to decide a minimal set of sensors that would, in theory, still work to keep the product cost reasonable. Tesla does have a sizeable 3D ground truth; they collected tons of data mounting LiDAR on their test vehicles.

kajecounterhack 5y ago
> Tesla does have a sizeable 3D ground truth; they collected tons of data mounting LiDAR on their test vehicles. "Sizable" for evaluating safety has to be big enough to give small confidence intervals on your error -- and with self-driving, you need to cover a robust set of rare scenarios upsampled from general driving as well. I really doubt Tesla has what they need to convince themselves of higher levels of safety.