26 ms·

Waymo's collision avoidance testing

382 points by EvgeniyZh 4y ago

xnx 4y ago
Waymo and Tesla's approach to self-driving could not be more different. One of the scariest parts about Tesla is that they don't even seem to know what they don't know. In related news: It looks like Tesla may add radar back: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-may-be-adding-a-radar-which-is-the-crutch-they-definitely-need/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-...
- ajross 4y ago
  I don't see how that's supported here? I mean, clearly Tesla does its own closed-track testing. I've seen coverage of that in the past. They don't release public software the doesn't pass these kinds of tests. Likewise it's not like Waymo restricts their testing to closed tracks, they have vehicles on the streets too. > One of the scariest parts about Tesla is that they don't even seem to know what they don't know. I'm curious what the reference here is? Again, are you taking coverage of Waymo's test environment as evience of its absence at its competitors?
  - thebooktocome 4y ago
    Tesla’s FSD is so terrifyingly bad at routine tasks (I used it for six months before giving up) that it’s natural to assume whatever closed track testing they did was ineffective. Or perhaps they did a lot, I don’t know—but it doesn’t feel like many of those lessons learned made it into the “production” system.
    - _ea1k 4y ago
      I really like AP in general, but for FSD Beta, I tend to agree. I've seen enough mistakes from even the really careful Youtubers that I don't understand why its still in the field. And those are the mistakes that they were willing to show! To be clear, I mean situations where the driver needed to take over but either didn't, or didn't in sufficient time to avoid an illegal or dangerous maneuver.
      - simondotau 4y ago
        From what I can tell of people posting FSD videos on YouTube, they are actively seeking adversarial conditions with a desire to show where it fails. I’m sure there are some YouTubers that are trying to sugarcoat FSD, but I haven’t seen any.
        _ea1k 4y ago
        I partially agree. I mean, I find dirty tesla's videos to be pretty fair. Having said that, he's also been really clear that the video doesn't always make it obvious just how many aspects of FSD are just plain weird. Even when its not actively failing, it moves in odd ways that are uncomfortable. He's also said that earlier versions resulted in curbed wheels.
        thebooktocome 4y ago
        Yep, my mate curbed his front passenger wheel that way. But I dunno how you fix that without LIDAR sensors mapping the terrain around the vehicle.
        _ea1k 4y ago
        Agreed, that's one way. The other way is multiple downward facing cameras with stereoscopic vision of the area immediately around the car. Mobileye demonstrated a system like that and it worked really well. Tesla's cameras have huge blind spots near the car and aren't stereoscopic in all directions. They had ultrasonic sensors at one time, but those had blind spots and major limitations too.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    Tesla claims they are safer than human drivers by fudging statistics about accidents per mile. Waymo describes in detail how they test their algorithm against specific scenarios and makes statements about those experiments. One company is trying to sell you cars and telling you what you want to hear, the other company is extremely careful with their statements.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      > fudging statistics about accidents per mile. How? The only problem with this page[0] is that they haven’t released 2022 stats. Otherwise: > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. 0: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
      - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
        That "vehicle safety report" is 70 words, none of which answer the question of "how many crashes were there" or "how many people were injured or killed." One of the few numbers they give us, the percentage of incidents/hour for driving "with active safety but without autopilot," bounces around by like a factor of two from quarter to quarter, which doesn't make any sense. Literally every provided number is in Tesla's favor, and context is only provided in ways favorable to Tesla. This is a press release, not a safety report.
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    There's no reference. It's just fashionable to hate on anything associated with Elon at the moment.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    While both Waymo and Tesla are testing vehicles on the streets, and have done so for some time, their approaches could hardly be more different.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    I'm honestly curious what test tracks Tesla uses. Do they just rent private tracks for their road testing before it gets to public beta? It clearly isn't done onroad by safety drivers. GM has Milford and Yuma + others, Waymo has Castle, Zoox uses Altamont Raceway, Nuro has a track at the Vegas speedway. I can't imagine Tesla's small Fremont loop and their winter track in Fairbanks are sufficient.
    - deleted 4y ago
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  - enragedcacti 4y ago
    > They don't release public software the doesn't pass these kinds of tests. Do we actually know that this is true? October of last year "internal QA" found regressions on an already public release and they rolled out an update in less than 24 hours after that was published. Both the fact that it was already public when QA found an issue and that they were able to push new public version in such a short time seems to me like they don't necessarily have a release gauntlet for each version, or at least not a very robust one. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/tesla-rolled-back-fsd-beta-v-10point3-and-reissued-10point3point1-update.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/tesla-rolled-back-fsd-beta-v...
- adrr 4y ago
  They need to add radar back. Ability to "see" slow downs or stopped traffic even if your vision is obscured is a great benefit for self driving.
  - freedom-fries 4y ago
    That's your opinion, but Tesla does not "need" to add anything from the point of view of actual Tesla customers! Tesla cars are selling faster than they can make them and adding a Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it faster.
    - appletrotter 4y ago
      Tesla is currently being sued by actual customers based on this exact issue. They've promised FSD, and can't deliver it - especially without lidar.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      > adding a Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it faster Tesla told the FCC that it plans to market a new radar starting next month. https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-self-driving-suite-concerns/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-se...
    - RankingMember 4y ago
      > Tesla cars are selling faster than they can make them If this is true, why are they reportedly cutting production and offering incentives? If they were booked solid, no incentives would be needed. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-cuts-dec-model-y-output-shanghai-plant-by-over-20-versus-nov-sources-2022-12-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-... > Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it faster. ? They are adding radar, though: https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-self-driving-suite-concerns/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-se...
  - threeseed 4y ago
    They need LiDAR. The biggest problem for FSD is still around bounding box detection. I just don't believe that you can infer the dimensions of objects using stereoscopic images with a reliability that you need to make FSD work.
- nova22033 4y ago
  But Tesla's software version is 10.69.x....69...get it...LOL!!
  - deleted 4y ago
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- jeffbee 4y ago
  I agree. Tesla FSD has so many obvious limitations that can be worked out on closed courses that it has no legitimate reason to be tested on public roads. For example, it cannot drive directly into the sun. That's a flaw they could work out on the test track (by adding different sensors). There needs to be regulatory intervention to force FSD off the road.
  - taf2 4y ago
    Curious you mention this I was using it this morning driving directly into the Sun... even without our lanes painted after they repaved the roads it kept me in the right part of the road and even engaged the turn signal automatically as it stopped at the traffic light before our right turn... I know they had issues with direct Sun few years ago but it would seem to me driving with it enabled into the sun works just fine...
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      https://youtu.be/DMa9VrEoUoY?t=420 https://youtu.be/DMa9VrEoUoY?t=420
      - taf2 4y ago
        Yeah, I see that is a pretty intense road and situation... my road is much much straighter... I'll try to capture it and share definitely not difficult...
        appletrotter 4y ago
        What is a "pretty intense road and situation" for you is some people's daily commute.
        palm-tree 4y ago
        How is this an intense road? It looks pretty wide and clear of traffic with a few parked cars. If it can't handle this, it's got no chance in an average city in Western Europe.
        4y ago
- leesec 4y ago
  And one of the scariest parts of Waymo is that they may never ship and it'll be 20 billion dollars down the drain
  - marricks 4y ago
    I mean, that’s good though right? If it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. Worst comes to worst taxi drivers still have a job.
    - leesec 4y ago
      I think you mean, worst comes to worst 1.35 million people still die in traffic accidents every year.
      - marricks 4y ago
        If companies really had a noble causing of reducing traffic fatalities I'm pretty sure the billions they spend could be better spent advocating for light rail and buses. And hey, thousands less people would die of lung diseases to boot.
  - michael1999 4y ago
    I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't the Phoenix launch count? They've definitely shipped something to prod.
- freedom-fries 4y ago
  The thing is – nobody cares! People can scream bloody murder till the cows come home, but Tesla for all its faults is king of the hill - literally more valuable the rest of the car industry combined. Musk is the invincible and irrespective of any shortcomings he's literally the richest person on Earth. Tesla's approach is demonstrably the best approach in the court of the customer, irrespective of what we (others on the road) think or are put at risk.
  - stardenburden 4y ago
    > literally the richest person on Earth Not anymore https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63963239 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63963239
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    Market cap has absolutely no relation to the "court of the customer", nor should it in terms of what safety features we allow or disallow.
  - themacguffinman 4y ago
    "we (others on the road)" is not "nobody", and we definitely care. The law is supposed to intervene in tragedy of the commons cases like this for precisely this reason. The free market is known to have a few blind spots and this is one of them.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - bdcravens 4y ago
    "invincible"? He has literally lost over $100B this year. Tesla's market share is eroding every year, and is expected to decline to less than 20% by 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/teslas-dominance-of-evs-is-eroding-as-cheaper-cars-hit-the-market.html#:~:text=S%26P%20Global%20Mobility%20reports%20Tesla's,less%20than%2020%25%20by%202025 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/teslas-dominance-of-evs-is-e.... There are plenty of people like me, who are choosing non-Teslas when they buy EVs.
  - blurbleblurble 4y ago
- bhauer 4y ago
  Which is consistent with what they had said at the time when they removed the low-resolution radar they had been using. Specifically, they had said that radar would be useful if it were sufficiently high resolution. The radar in the works and rumored to be added soon is anticipated to be high resolution.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  The really scary part is actually the one nobody in these comments seems to address. We are letting humans drive these things with barley any training on roads that are terrible designed for safety of the people around the vehicles. This utter disaster of a situation leads to 10000s of deaths that has well known solutions. But instead of preventing these deaths with well known low tech solution, a super expensive technological holy grail is gone somehow fix those problems.
  - MH15 4y ago
    Fully agree here but what's the "well known low tech solution", besides public transit?
    - jimjimjim 4y ago
      I agree with your and the parent poster's opinion that the best safest option is to encourage and fund buses and trains
latchkey 4y ago
I'd love to see an independent body conducting the same exact tests across all platforms (ie: Tesla).
- jeffbee 4y ago
  It should be adversarial. An independent body should administer test suites provided by the manufacturers. Everybody has to pass 99% of the union of all test scenarios before being allowed on the road. The tests are run monthly.
  - laichzeit0 4y ago
    So out of 10,000 tests, it’s okay if they fail on 100 of them?
    - jerf 4y ago
      As nice as it may be to think that humans are perfect, it's not like they'd score 100% on this level of testing either.
      - adventured 4y ago
        The automated driving systems will have to pass a far higher bar than human drivers as a comparison. People will get even more upset about self-driving tech causing injuries/wrecks/deaths/endangerment vs what human drivers cause. Long after self-driving systems are superior to human drivers on average, the headlines will still scream about humans being killed by self-driving tech. The sensationalism will still sell and people will still be very outraged about it. The expectation will be no mistakes. Anything short of that will always draw a hyper emotional negative response, which will lure in political/regulatory responses.
        Retric 4y ago
        I doubt it, the more common self driving deaths become the less newsworthy they will be.
ape4 4y ago
So the AI learns - slow down when driving between shipping containers
- frogblast 4y ago
  Well… Yes. It is a scenario where you you have a blind spot on the road ahead of you, so I’d hope a human driver would do the same.
abraxas 4y ago
I really want to see how testing goes for MobilEye when they start to open up their prototypes a little more. Of the youtube videos I've seen theirs is by far the most impressive and I have a lot of respect for Amnon Shashua.
notatoad 4y ago
i have to chuckle at the use of language to humanize their tech here - comparing "the waymo driver" to "NIEON". the one of those that sounds like the name of a robot from the future is actually just referring to a normal human.
- dmd 4y ago
  The whole point is that it's not a normal human; it's a model that is better than any human could be.
- pas 4y ago
  also "real agent" which just means human
rkagerer 4y ago
They refer to NIEON as an undistractable human driver, but isn't it just another model? Is that a bit misleading, or can someone shed more light on this?
- kibwen 4y ago
  There's a footnote: "NIEON is defined by (1) gaze being directed through the windshield toward the forward path during the conflict and (2) a lack of sleepiness and intoxication-related impairment."
  - snotrockets 4y ago
    So basically, a public transit driver.
- tantalor 4y ago
  NIEON is "a reference model that represents an ideal human state for driving" You can use this for comparison, as in "what would NIEON do in this situation"?
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  It's just a hypothetical for comparison: "is our self driving car doing as good or better than a competent, undistracted human driver?"
voz_ 4y ago
I spent a few years in self driving, I have immense respect for Waymo, and very little for Tesla. I think ultimately they will win the space.
- threeseed 4y ago
  I wouldn't rule out Cruise. They already have robotaxis in SF and are expanding into Arizona and Texas by the end of this year.
  - zndr 4y ago
    Saying they have taxi's in SF is a bit hyperbolic. I have an invite to that program and it's - only after 10pm - used such an odd slice of the city I not only can't get picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go. I would love to use either of these programs both for the novelty and because I think Autonomous driving is great, but I literally can't use the program I do have access to.
    - darkwizard42 4y ago
      I think the parent wasn't referring to it being perfect, but that open road real-life testing is something very few companies have, and was implying we shouldn't count out Cruise because they are at least at that stage.
    - hemloc_io 4y ago
      as a fellow beta tester, they are expanding their service area to include a majority of the city incl Mission. Totally agree w/ you rn thou right now it's basically a neat party trick I have to go out of my way to show off instead of a super useful service.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      > used such an odd slice of the city I not only can't get picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go. It's been a month and a half since they've covered almost the entire city except FiDi/Union Square (and Twin Peaks)[1]. That's not a trivial omission, but do you really never take rides that start or end in any other area? In particular, that entire area is a fairly close walk from the only dense transit line in the city. [1] https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1587589014525448192 https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1587589014525448192
akira2501 4y ago
The fact that they don't highlight any night testing is troubling, and that they have a single closed course facility in a place where it never snows. I often wonder if these companies are truly trying to revolutionize driving, or just trying to put a couple of "Johnny Cabs" in the southwest and call it a day. Their strategy really does seem geared towards the latter outcome.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Night isn't especially concerning for vehicles that have more sensors than simply cameras; headlights and infrared cameras exist. Rather, dealing with winter conditions seem like the reason that these will be confined to the southwest.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > Night isn't especially concerning for vehicles that have more sensors than simply cameras This is precisely the type of presumptions I'd like to see tested. I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble of all this and have a 118 acre road course, it seems the height of hubris to just say "well, the sensors will probably be better than cameras at night." It's amazing to me that on Hacker News people people have this puritanical embarrassment over obvious technical questions.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    Oh this is definitely false! Night is very concerning and is a problem for computer vision systems. During the day illumination is fairly consistent. Sure the sun moves around, but it's not a spotlight. At night, illumination varies a lot. A detector that works during the day may not work at all at night. This is no joke, there are papers that show dramatic performance losses for tasks like pedestrian detection at night. Cameras are worse at night. They need to be more sensitive which dramatically increases their noise. They may need to have longer exposures leading to blur, which is of course made worse if you are moving the camera. Headlights also don't provide the same visibility so your reactions must be faster. Reflections are a big problem too. Oncoming headlights are also an issue. Nighttime testing will be critical.
rootusrootus 4y ago
I realize this is essentially a PR piece, but still, it makes me feel much better about the potential future of automated driving than what Tesla is doing. If I owned TSLA right now I'd sell.
- tantalor 4y ago
  You can buy puts.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
    - jsolson 4y ago
      If you're buying puts you have bounded risk (the amount you invested), albeit with a more cliff-like risk profile than other strategies.
      - ihattendorf 4y ago
        In this case replace "you can remain solvent" with "the put remains valid".
      - JamesSwift 4y ago
        As well as a time/volatility element added so its not necessarily "TSLA went down a lot, so you profit a lot".
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      The argument literally everybody always makes and 99.99% they are simply wrong and don't want to admit it.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Options are gambling, which is not how I play the market. Aside from some lucky YOLOs, you are far more likely to lose money in that game.
mooneater 4y ago
Is any of Waymo Driver's design published? Like do they use RL or how do they approach control.
nixpulvis 4y ago
I almost feel like AI enabled vehicles need a special light on the exterior to indicate to other drovers that this thing is a robot. As I'm driving I would probably learn to approach these vehicles differently from the average normal driver.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- quitit 4y ago
  This sounds like an excellent idea. There is a lingering issue about drivers not paying attention and even sleeping while their vehicle is in self-driving mode, that's contrary to the requirement that the driver is actively supervising. I don't think it's a realistic expectation that drivers are always fully attentive and able to respond in time to a crash situation when the self-driving mode is active. Such a light would give me the heads up that I should stay on my toes.
- eftychis 4y ago
  I agree. But we end up adding more stressors to human drivers that way to gain what really?
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - nixpulvis 4y ago
    It's not necisarily a "stressor" if self-driving cars behave somewhat consistently, it's just another signal you can use when making decisions on the road. "Will this car suddenly decide to change lanes?", "Not likely, it's self driving and there aren't exits or major changes in traffic in front of it". There will also be quarks in any automatic system. Learning and then predicting these will make the streets safer and more comfortable. For example, perhaps self-driving cars are overly cautions around some local crosswalks. If I'm behind one of these things in the winter I might be aware I should leave even more extra room for the sudden slow downs that other cars will be less likely to do. If I'm smart this wont be the difference between an accident or not, but it will make for a smoother ride. My larger question is, will proliferation of AI cars increase or decrease net traffic flow. People seem to be driving larger and larger cars slower and slower anyway, so maybe this target is achievable, but this all worries me.
londons_explore 4y ago
Waymos velocity seems to have slowed dramatically since 2015 when they first did fully driverless rides on the public road and started deploying to multiple regions. Now, 2 billion dollars and 7 years later, they are still only in a handful of small regions with limited numbers of vehicles. That tells me there is still some fundamental issue that is hard to solve. I wonder why they aren't more transparent and tell us what that issue is that they've been battling for 7 years?
- londons_explore 4y ago
  It's clear which bits they haven't been focussing on... There are multiple videos on youtube of rides (some where it has gone wrong) and the user experience is terrible. The car has a robotic voice which plays a long and annoying unskippable message with every ride, and 'Rider support' sounding like they are following a strict script with no ability to be helpful or fix the problem [1]... Imagine if every time you started your car, a robotic voice said "Welcome to your Ford Pickup XYZ model. Please ensure your seatbelts are fastened. If you are too hot, you can adjust the climate with the climate controls. If you want to lower the windows, please don't put your arms out. etc etc. Have a nice ride today in your Ford(tm) Pickup(tm).". [1]: https://youtu.be/2ZmdxkBV5Tw?t=180 https://youtu.be/2ZmdxkBV5Tw?t=180
  - saxelsen 4y ago
    Not entirely different from getting on a plane? You have to listen to the safety protocol before take-off.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      Most things about planes are pretty user unfriendly to be fair... "arrive 2 hours before departure"... "queue for hours through security"... "walk miles to your gate"... "have to buy your ticket a long time in advance, and then 'check in' more than 3 hours in advance but less than 48 hours"... We're a long way from the ideal of "show up at the airport 5 mins before, hop on a plane, and hand cash to the pilot for your ride".
kolbe 4y ago
Consensus from the two AV articles today seems to be that Tesla, despite releasing more data to the public on their FSD system, is evil, incompetent and endangering society (the data doesn't say so, but just the fact that Tesla won't release even more data is shady). Whereas Waymo making a PR statement with no substance is proof Tesla will fail and Waymo will save us.
- bhauer 4y ago
  I wish HN would be better than that, but your summary is perfect.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    What's your response to the fact that Tesla's data is actually very bad? [1] [1]https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1602774335244177408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1602774341602639872%7Ctwgr%5E9e16bdc8a6b7142ed50710d0137c877d41002242%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Felectrek.co%2F2022%2F12%2F14%2Ftesla-full-self-driving-data-awful-challenge-elon-musk-prove-otherwise%2F https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1602774335244177408?re...
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  >Consensus from the two AV articles today Consensus from informed industry observers who are sounding the alarm bells about how dangerous Tesla's approach is from a first-principles standpoint The "data" Tesla released is a meaningless attempt to pull the wool over your eyes.
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  > Tesla, despite releasing far more data to the public on their FSD system, The same Tesla who argues to the California DMV that FSD is a level 2 system to dodge reporting requirements? The Tesla who has a major EV outlet demanding that they release meaningful disengagement data? [1] Perhaps I missed something but I really have no idea what data you could be talking about, unless by "data" you mean access to the FSD beta. [1] https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-data-awful-challenge-elon-musk-prove-otherwise/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-data-...
godelski 4y ago
I appreciate that in this they demonstrate not just rigs where a manikin is thrown in way of danger, but actual humans performing regular/irregular tasks. This to me is akin of the bullet proof {vest,glass,etc} manufacturer willing to put themselves behind their product for demonstration. With AI systems I think this is particularly important because with such high dimensional data it is possible that the vehicle picks up on things like the pull cable or that it is a manikin and not a human (e.g. pneumonia predictions strongly correlating with medical equipment within x-rays rather than inflammation). A kinda two for one confidence builder here.
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  > akin of the bullet proof {vest,glass,etc} manufacturer willing to put themselves behind their product for demonstration. I suspect the cyclist in the video is not a $500k/year ML engineer, it's a $50K/year veteran trying to stay out of the welfare line.
1024core 4y ago
While Waymo is spending $$$ gathering driving data, Tesla has 100s of 1000s of cars doing it, for free. In terms of sheer data, in this race, Tesla wins. Now whether Tesla can actually use the firehose of data and actually train models that use it productively, remains to be seen. With the departure of Karpathy, I am not so sure. If Tesla gave all the data to Waymo, Waymo would reach L5 in no time.
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  Waymo was collecting data before Tesla, and switched to simulated training a long time ago because it's more effective. The self driving AI can gain 100 years experience in just 1 day using simulation: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--simulation27.html https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Tesla uses simulation to but there is no replacement for real world data. The real world is crazy and Tesla can see people driving in real condition from Alaska to Miami Florida.
    - 1024core 4y ago
      Amateurs think that "simulation" is all you need. They see realistic environments on their PS4s and XBoxes and think that's enough. If simulated data were enough, why _hasn't_ Waymo launched in placed like NYC or Boston?
      - minsc_and_boo 4y ago
        If you think driverless car training in simulations is a playstation game, then you're projecting with your comment. Also, because of weather. Waymo just went live with full driverless for the public in Phoenix. Tesla can't do full driverless so I think that evidence settles the debate of simulated vs. data collection, unless you have evidence otherwise?
mabbo 4y ago
I think the problem we have with self-driving cars is more social than technological at this point. Consider the hypothetical: a million self-driving cars on the road that, collectively, will have 1/10th of the fatal accidents that human drivers would have[0]. But, the ones they do have are accidents a human driver would almost certainly have avoided. Is this something we would accept? My guess is that no, we wouldn't. Because the accidents avoided don't make the news, but the accidents that occur- especially ones that you say "my god, how did it screw that up?" will make the news, and our perception would be that they are more dangerous. Until Waymo's cars are better than most humans in every single situation, they won't be able to win over the public perception war. [0]I'm making those numbers up. I acknowledge that. But it's a hypothetical so give me some leeway on this!
- just-ok 4y ago
  I agree with you entirely. Continuing with your hypothetical, even though we’d be 90% safer as a collective, the safety of the individual feels compromised: the risk of an accident is non-uniform when involving humans (depending on e.g. age, experience, safety, alertness, etc.), but becomes uniform (or at least more uniform) with an algorithm in charge. That’s a tough thing for people to buy into.
  - _cs2017_ 4y ago
    A very good observation. Based on your comment, I think we can relax the requirement stated by OP by saying: "Until Waymo's cars reduce any individual's chance of an accident." So for example, suppose a Waymo car is better than humans overall, but tends to do worse than humans when there's a small bump on the road. And suppose that all humans (in a given regulator's area, e.g., California) tend to encounter such bumps at roughly the same rate (per mile driven) over their lifetime. In that case, it's probably going to be acceptable, since every individual is better off. I don't know, maybe this is not impactful / obvious enough for people to care about? What certainly is obvious is that the safest drivers are much safer than an average driver (does anyone know of a study that estimates this ratio?). Therefore, at the very least, the threshold for Waymo should be not the average accident rate, but the accident rate for the safest drivers.
siquick 4y ago
One reason to introduce self driving cars is to hopefully remove the number of SUVs from city roads, which are only driven by people because they’re “safer and protect me”. At best they’re an absolute nuisance to every other car and pedestrian, and at worse they’re absolute death traps that clog up roads.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  The self driving cars will be SUV or CUV at a minimum and there will be more of them, not less.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Exactly. Just like we saw with Uber & Lyft, but it will be exponentially worse. When I can easily just tell the car to go be available somewhere, or take my kid somewhere, or this package, etc, then guess what -- I'm gonna do it.
  - krferriter 4y ago
    We need personal car size limits on city streets, stricter regulation about viewing angles and heights for personally licensed cars, and car mass taxes in general. Some of these SUVs should not be drivable with normal consumer vehicle licences. They should require a higher license level and training on driving large vehicles.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      There is a very, very long list of things that should change to turn society away from car dependence. Free highways being a huge issue. Not having car registration be based on weight. Far higher requirements to be allowed to drive. There is a long list.
      - siquick 4y ago
        I don’t think OP is necessarily asking for less cars, just less big, dangerous cars.
bingblogger 4y ago
[dead]
Timothycquinn 4y ago
Personally, I don't understand the economics of lidar for self driving vehicles. 1) How many lidar units will one vehicle need and how much will this cost? 2) How will noise from other lidar systems be addressed? Eg two or more disparate lidar systems on other vehicles using similar frequencies? 3) How small can the lidar systems be made while still being effective in real world use? These units being used for testing are massive and probably stupendously expensive!
jcims 4y ago
Tesla mentioned in this thread almost twice as many times as Waymo. Elon love/hate is a powerful force.
pugworthy 4y ago
One thing I'm very curious about with AI driven cars, is whether they will develop some of the overly cautious / paranoid habits human drivers get around bicycles. Take people passing a bike in a bike lane for example. Some will go way under the speed limit, and not just pass the bike even though it's in it's own lane. Or others will swing WAY wide to pass them, even though again, they are in their own line. Will AI itself learn that indeed, bikes do suddenly veer into your lane, or will AI in fact learn that no, they don't do that?
random_upvoter 4y ago
As with all AI, it works until that special set of circumstances pop up where it fails and when it fails there is no bottom as to how it fails.
nojvek 4y ago
I'm the side of LIDAR is a crutch. Not only is it crazy expensive and has many moving parts, but the sensor input is a bunch of dots. One has to have cameras anyway for the high density vision input. With newer algorithms, you can stitch multiple cameras to reconstruct a scene and semantically identify important objects. I do like what Tesla is doing with its new voxel neural net. Yeah it will take a few more years, but the hard problems are doing what our visual cortex does with two cameras (our eyes). Also keep in mind a car has multiple cameras around to give full 360 view. They also sense in IR range that our eyes do not.
- samwillis 4y ago
  Teslas vision based system makes a prediction of what the environment around it is, how far away things are. A LIDAR based system knows with certainty how far way things are. LIDAR may be expensive now, thats not to say it won't get cheeper, with fewer parts. But the main issue is a social one, I don't think the public will except any fatalities as a result of a vision based system making a mistake. Even if the deal rate from accetends is lower than with a human driver. A self driving car can't be 50% better, or even 200% better it needs to be thousands of times better than a human driver for it to succeed. I think the certainty of a LIDAR baed system is the only way to do that. An AI based vision system is Tesla saying that can make a "brain" better than a human at understanding vision. LIDAR is saying, humans can't measure how far away things are, we can do better than humans by doing something they can't.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > I'm the side of LIDAR is a crutch. Not only is it crazy expensive and has many moving parts Newer lidar units are orders of magnitude cheaper, and solid state. If I could only choose between a camera and lidar, I'm going with the latter.
panick21_ 4y ago
Self driving cars are mostly a bad idea in most cases. The only thing worse then cars with 1 person in it driving around is cars with 0 people driving around. The goal should be less cars overall specially in cities. Technology that will cause more cars and more traffic is just terrible. Cities should ban cars, make it pedestrian and bicycle friendly, build 'self driving' metros and S-Bahn style train systems.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  There's no need to ban cars - it would be quiet sufficient just for governments to stop building infrastructure (and making various laws around its usage) as though cars were the only type of transport that mattered. FWIW, in principle self-driving tech could make our cities far more "people" friendly and less attuned to the needs to cars, but only if there was some sort of motivation for the tech to be developed with that goal in mind.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Actually there is a huge need to ban cars in cities. Many cities are doing it and those cities are far better to live in and visit because of it. Large scale pedestrianization of cities is a gigantic for for improvement of the world. Both in terms of less accidents, cleaner air, more attractive city, more efficient transit, increase health from bicycle use and walking. I could go on. So the program should be ban cars from anything that could even remotely be consider a core part of the city, massively slow cars down around the city, remove all on-street parking on all public land, eliminate all minimum parking requirements. The list of policies goes on. > self-driving tech could make our cities far more "people" friendly Having cars with 1 person use up the most valuable space in the world is bad enough, doing it with cars that have 0 people in them is worse. Self driving at best should be for a very small % of trips, maybe less then 1% in very few special cases, maybe for old people, people with disabilities and stuff like that.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      > Many cities are doing it Can you give an example of a such a city (other than the obvious examples of having sections of the inner core of a city where car usage is restricted, which is pretty much the norm in many older European cities)? But it doesn't make any sense to build (or even maintain) a city with roads designed for cars, then not allow them to be used for that purpose. If the roads and other car-based infrastructure were re-purposed in a way that made them clearly unsuitable for cars, again, as I said, you don't need to ban them - it just wouldn't be feasible or practical to use them for the vast majority of people.
tr33house 4y ago
can't wait for the day I'll leave work, get into a self-driving car, watch a movie, have it stop for takeout, sleep as it drives me across the country and then wake up in the morning on the other side of the country ready to start my day. Rooting for Waymo!
j2kun 4y ago
I recall reading an analysis of the self driving safety stats a few years back that concluded, if you counted incidents requiring human intervention as if they were accidents, then based on total miles driven, humans far outperformed self driving, by like an order of magnitude. In other words, companies (waymo included) were sugar coating their stats for good PR, though Waymo was still at the front of the pack. Some other comments on this thread suggest that self-driving is only perceived to be unsafe, but is statistically much more safe. Unless the stats improved significantly since then (and what specifically achieved that?), and an independent analysis can agree, I'm not trusting corporate PR.
- cco 4y ago
  >...if you counted incidents requiring human intervention as if they were accidents... The true number is somewhere between this worst case and the numbers Waymo presents. Most driver interventions that I've seen on video were not narrowly missed accidents; they're the car being confused by road construction, a double parked driver, pedestrians spilling onto a street etc. I have also seen (for Tesla at least), videos of driver interventions that definitely would have been accidents if the driver hadn't stepped in. I definitely agree with your point that I'd love to see more in-depth figures and the CA DMV might release those more detailed figures? I'm not sure. EDIT: Sure enough, the CA DMV disengagement reports list the exact cause (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/disengagement-reports/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...)
newman314 4y ago
While it feels like Waymo is taking a better approach than Tesla, I still do not see a viable solution to the trolley problem. These tests are nice and all but what is going to happen when a situation invariably arises where someone is going to get hurt? What's going to happen then? Is the car going to opt to protect the passenger (because customer) or the pedestrian (much more likely to be hurt/killed).
- jjcon 4y ago
  Answer: The passenger… now can be move on from this inane argument? If they are safer than humans it frankly doesn’t even matter.
- ericpauley 4y ago
  I suspect these cases are simply way more rare than people expect, especially if the car is driving defensively. If the car is, for instance, tracking likely pedestrians that will enter the road and slows down for safety when they’re near, someone would have to irresponsibly run into the road. If the choice is to hit them or turn over a cliff, I’d expect the car to hit the careless pedestrian.
eftychis 4y ago
I think the problem with self driving vehicles -- to add to that conversation, is the companies focus on the wrong market. For people it is asking for them to give up control either as drivers or as pedestrians in a city. Most people like to have a sense of control of their lives. (My take anyways. I know lots of people like having tracks in their career and progress but I would argue they still feel in control.) For the whole truck shipping lobby on the other hand it will be: save money. (I know that is a dystopian take, but I find me more likely for trucking or something similar to be the first fortress to "fall")
deleted 4y ago
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gniv 4y ago
I was driving through heavy rain recently and had a small epiphany: human drivers are willing to take way more risks under adverse weather conditions. There was no way the car could stop quickly from 65mph on a wet road if something appeared suddenly in front of it. The robot driver would really have to drive way slower than anybody else in order to be safe. That would be annoying for the passengers. In some countries it would also be constantly honked at.

382 points by EvgeniyZh 4y ago

xnx 4y ago

Waymo and Tesla's approach to self-driving could not be more different. One of the scariest parts about Tesla is that they don't even seem to know what they don't know. In related news: It looks like Tesla may add radar back: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-may-be-adding-a-radar-which-is-the-crutch-they-definitely-need/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-...

ajross 4y ago
I don't see how that's supported here? I mean, clearly Tesla does its own closed-track testing. I've seen coverage of that in the past. They don't release public software the doesn't pass these kinds of tests. Likewise it's not like Waymo restricts their testing to closed tracks, they have vehicles on the streets too. > One of the scariest parts about Tesla is that they don't even seem to know what they don't know. I'm curious what the reference here is? Again, are you taking coverage of Waymo's test environment as evience of its absence at its competitors?
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  Tesla’s FSD is so terrifyingly bad at routine tasks (I used it for six months before giving up) that it’s natural to assume whatever closed track testing they did was ineffective. Or perhaps they did a lot, I don’t know—but it doesn’t feel like many of those lessons learned made it into the “production” system.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    I really like AP in general, but for FSD Beta, I tend to agree. I've seen enough mistakes from even the really careful Youtubers that I don't understand why its still in the field. And those are the mistakes that they were willing to show! To be clear, I mean situations where the driver needed to take over but either didn't, or didn't in sufficient time to avoid an illegal or dangerous maneuver.
    - simondotau 4y ago
      From what I can tell of people posting FSD videos on YouTube, they are actively seeking adversarial conditions with a desire to show where it fails. I’m sure there are some YouTubers that are trying to sugarcoat FSD, but I haven’t seen any.
      - _ea1k 4y ago
        I partially agree. I mean, I find dirty tesla's videos to be pretty fair. Having said that, he's also been really clear that the video doesn't always make it obvious just how many aspects of FSD are just plain weird. Even when its not actively failing, it moves in odd ways that are uncomfortable. He's also said that earlier versions resulted in curbed wheels.
        thebooktocome 4y ago
        Yep, my mate curbed his front passenger wheel that way. But I dunno how you fix that without LIDAR sensors mapping the terrain around the vehicle.
        _ea1k 4y ago
        Agreed, that's one way. The other way is multiple downward facing cameras with stereoscopic vision of the area immediately around the car. Mobileye demonstrated a system like that and it worked really well. Tesla's cameras have huge blind spots near the car and aren't stereoscopic in all directions. They had ultrasonic sensors at one time, but those had blind spots and major limitations too.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  Tesla claims they are safer than human drivers by fudging statistics about accidents per mile. Waymo describes in detail how they test their algorithm against specific scenarios and makes statements about those experiments. One company is trying to sell you cars and telling you what you want to hear, the other company is extremely careful with their statements.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > fudging statistics about accidents per mile. How? The only problem with this page[0] is that they haven’t released 2022 stats. Otherwise: > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. 0: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
    - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
      That "vehicle safety report" is 70 words, none of which answer the question of "how many crashes were there" or "how many people were injured or killed." One of the few numbers they give us, the percentage of incidents/hour for driving "with active safety but without autopilot," bounces around by like a factor of two from quarter to quarter, which doesn't make any sense. Literally every provided number is in Tesla's favor, and context is only provided in ways favorable to Tesla. This is a press release, not a safety report.
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  There's no reference. It's just fashionable to hate on anything associated with Elon at the moment.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  While both Waymo and Tesla are testing vehicles on the streets, and have done so for some time, their approaches could hardly be more different.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I'm honestly curious what test tracks Tesla uses. Do they just rent private tracks for their road testing before it gets to public beta? It clearly isn't done onroad by safety drivers. GM has Milford and Yuma + others, Waymo has Castle, Zoox uses Altamont Raceway, Nuro has a track at the Vegas speedway. I can't imagine Tesla's small Fremont loop and their winter track in Fairbanks are sufficient.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- enragedcacti 4y ago
  > They don't release public software the doesn't pass these kinds of tests. Do we actually know that this is true? October of last year "internal QA" found regressions on an already public release and they rolled out an update in less than 24 hours after that was published. Both the fact that it was already public when QA found an issue and that they were able to push new public version in such a short time seems to me like they don't necessarily have a release gauntlet for each version, or at least not a very robust one. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/tesla-rolled-back-fsd-beta-v-10point3-and-reissued-10point3point1-update.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/tesla-rolled-back-fsd-beta-v...
adrr 4y ago
They need to add radar back. Ability to "see" slow downs or stopped traffic even if your vision is obscured is a great benefit for self driving.
- freedom-fries 4y ago
  That's your opinion, but Tesla does not "need" to add anything from the point of view of actual Tesla customers! Tesla cars are selling faster than they can make them and adding a Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it faster.
  - appletrotter 4y ago
    Tesla is currently being sued by actual customers based on this exact issue. They've promised FSD, and can't deliver it - especially without lidar.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    > adding a Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it faster Tesla told the FCC that it plans to market a new radar starting next month. https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-self-driving-suite-concerns/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-se...
  - RankingMember 4y ago
    > Tesla cars are selling faster than they can make them If this is true, why are they reportedly cutting production and offering incentives? If they were booked solid, no incentives would be needed. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-cuts-dec-model-y-output-shanghai-plant-by-over-20-versus-nov-sources-2022-12-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-... > Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it faster. ? They are adding radar, though: https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-self-driving-suite-concerns/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-se...
- threeseed 4y ago
  They need LiDAR. The biggest problem for FSD is still around bounding box detection. I just don't believe that you can infer the dimensions of objects using stereoscopic images with a reliability that you need to make FSD work.
nova22033 4y ago
But Tesla's software version is 10.69.x....69...get it...LOL!!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jeffbee 4y ago
I agree. Tesla FSD has so many obvious limitations that can be worked out on closed courses that it has no legitimate reason to be tested on public roads. For example, it cannot drive directly into the sun. That's a flaw they could work out on the test track (by adding different sensors). There needs to be regulatory intervention to force FSD off the road.
- taf2 4y ago
  Curious you mention this I was using it this morning driving directly into the Sun... even without our lanes painted after they repaved the roads it kept me in the right part of the road and even engaged the turn signal automatically as it stopped at the traffic light before our right turn... I know they had issues with direct Sun few years ago but it would seem to me driving with it enabled into the sun works just fine...
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/DMa9VrEoUoY?t=420 https://youtu.be/DMa9VrEoUoY?t=420
    - taf2 4y ago
      Yeah, I see that is a pretty intense road and situation... my road is much much straighter... I'll try to capture it and share definitely not difficult...
      - appletrotter 4y ago
        What is a "pretty intense road and situation" for you is some people's daily commute.
      - palm-tree 4y ago
        How is this an intense road? It looks pretty wide and clear of traffic with a few parked cars. If it can't handle this, it's got no chance in an average city in Western Europe.
      - 4y ago
leesec 4y ago
And one of the scariest parts of Waymo is that they may never ship and it'll be 20 billion dollars down the drain
- marricks 4y ago
  I mean, that’s good though right? If it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. Worst comes to worst taxi drivers still have a job.
  - leesec 4y ago
    I think you mean, worst comes to worst 1.35 million people still die in traffic accidents every year.
    - marricks 4y ago
      If companies really had a noble causing of reducing traffic fatalities I'm pretty sure the billions they spend could be better spent advocating for light rail and buses. And hey, thousands less people would die of lung diseases to boot.
- michael1999 4y ago
  I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't the Phoenix launch count? They've definitely shipped something to prod.
freedom-fries 4y ago
The thing is – nobody cares! People can scream bloody murder till the cows come home, but Tesla for all its faults is king of the hill - literally more valuable the rest of the car industry combined. Musk is the invincible and irrespective of any shortcomings he's literally the richest person on Earth. Tesla's approach is demonstrably the best approach in the court of the customer, irrespective of what we (others on the road) think or are put at risk.
- stardenburden 4y ago
  > literally the richest person on Earth Not anymore https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63963239 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63963239
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Market cap has absolutely no relation to the "court of the customer", nor should it in terms of what safety features we allow or disallow.
- themacguffinman 4y ago
  "we (others on the road)" is not "nobody", and we definitely care. The law is supposed to intervene in tragedy of the commons cases like this for precisely this reason. The free market is known to have a few blind spots and this is one of them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bdcravens 4y ago
  "invincible"? He has literally lost over $100B this year. Tesla's market share is eroding every year, and is expected to decline to less than 20% by 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/teslas-dominance-of-evs-is-eroding-as-cheaper-cars-hit-the-market.html#:~:text=S%26P%20Global%20Mobility%20reports%20Tesla's,less%20than%2020%25%20by%202025 https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/teslas-dominance-of-evs-is-e.... There are plenty of people like me, who are choosing non-Teslas when they buy EVs.
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
bhauer 4y ago
Which is consistent with what they had said at the time when they removed the low-resolution radar they had been using. Specifically, they had said that radar would be useful if it were sufficiently high resolution. The radar in the works and rumored to be added soon is anticipated to be high resolution.
panick21_ 4y ago
The really scary part is actually the one nobody in these comments seems to address. We are letting humans drive these things with barley any training on roads that are terrible designed for safety of the people around the vehicles. This utter disaster of a situation leads to 10000s of deaths that has well known solutions. But instead of preventing these deaths with well known low tech solution, a super expensive technological holy grail is gone somehow fix those problems.
- MH15 4y ago
  Fully agree here but what's the "well known low tech solution", besides public transit?
  - jimjimjim 4y ago
    I agree with your and the parent poster's opinion that the best safest option is to encourage and fund buses and trains

latchkey 4y ago

I'd love to see an independent body conducting the same exact tests across all platforms (ie: Tesla).

jeffbee 4y ago
It should be adversarial. An independent body should administer test suites provided by the manufacturers. Everybody has to pass 99% of the union of all test scenarios before being allowed on the road. The tests are run monthly.
- laichzeit0 4y ago
  So out of 10,000 tests, it’s okay if they fail on 100 of them?
  - jerf 4y ago
    As nice as it may be to think that humans are perfect, it's not like they'd score 100% on this level of testing either.
    - adventured 4y ago
      The automated driving systems will have to pass a far higher bar than human drivers as a comparison. People will get even more upset about self-driving tech causing injuries/wrecks/deaths/endangerment vs what human drivers cause. Long after self-driving systems are superior to human drivers on average, the headlines will still scream about humans being killed by self-driving tech. The sensationalism will still sell and people will still be very outraged about it. The expectation will be no mistakes. Anything short of that will always draw a hyper emotional negative response, which will lure in political/regulatory responses.
      - Retric 4y ago
        I doubt it, the more common self driving deaths become the less newsworthy they will be.

ape4 4y ago

So the AI learns - slow down when driving between shipping containers

frogblast 4y ago
Well… Yes. It is a scenario where you you have a blind spot on the road ahead of you, so I’d hope a human driver would do the same.

abraxas 4y ago

I really want to see how testing goes for MobilEye when they start to open up their prototypes a little more. Of the youtube videos I've seen theirs is by far the most impressive and I have a lot of respect for Amnon Shashua.

notatoad 4y ago

i have to chuckle at the use of language to humanize their tech here - comparing "the waymo driver" to "NIEON". the one of those that sounds like the name of a robot from the future is actually just referring to a normal human.

dmd 4y ago
The whole point is that it's not a normal human; it's a model that is better than any human could be.
pas 4y ago
also "real agent" which just means human

rkagerer 4y ago

They refer to NIEON as an undistractable human driver, but isn't it just another model? Is that a bit misleading, or can someone shed more light on this?

kibwen 4y ago
There's a footnote: "NIEON is defined by (1) gaze being directed through the windshield toward the forward path during the conflict and (2) a lack of sleepiness and intoxication-related impairment."
- snotrockets 4y ago
  So basically, a public transit driver.
tantalor 4y ago
NIEON is "a reference model that represents an ideal human state for driving" You can use this for comparison, as in "what would NIEON do in this situation"?
TulliusCicero 4y ago
It's just a hypothetical for comparison: "is our self driving car doing as good or better than a competent, undistracted human driver?"

voz_ 4y ago

I spent a few years in self driving, I have immense respect for Waymo, and very little for Tesla. I think ultimately they will win the space.

threeseed 4y ago
I wouldn't rule out Cruise. They already have robotaxis in SF and are expanding into Arizona and Texas by the end of this year.
- zndr 4y ago
  Saying they have taxi's in SF is a bit hyperbolic. I have an invite to that program and it's - only after 10pm - used such an odd slice of the city I not only can't get picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go. I would love to use either of these programs both for the novelty and because I think Autonomous driving is great, but I literally can't use the program I do have access to.
  - darkwizard42 4y ago
    I think the parent wasn't referring to it being perfect, but that open road real-life testing is something very few companies have, and was implying we shouldn't count out Cruise because they are at least at that stage.
  - hemloc_io 4y ago
    as a fellow beta tester, they are expanding their service area to include a majority of the city incl Mission. Totally agree w/ you rn thou right now it's basically a neat party trick I have to go out of my way to show off instead of a super useful service.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    > used such an odd slice of the city I not only can't get picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go. It's been a month and a half since they've covered almost the entire city except FiDi/Union Square (and Twin Peaks)[1]. That's not a trivial omission, but do you really never take rides that start or end in any other area? In particular, that entire area is a fairly close walk from the only dense transit line in the city. [1] https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1587589014525448192 https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1587589014525448192

akira2501 4y ago

The fact that they don't highlight any night testing is troubling, and that they have a single closed course facility in a place where it never snows. I often wonder if these companies are truly trying to revolutionize driving, or just trying to put a couple of "Johnny Cabs" in the southwest and call it a day. Their strategy really does seem geared towards the latter outcome.

kibwen 4y ago
Night isn't especially concerning for vehicles that have more sensors than simply cameras; headlights and infrared cameras exist. Rather, dealing with winter conditions seem like the reason that these will be confined to the southwest.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > Night isn't especially concerning for vehicles that have more sensors than simply cameras This is precisely the type of presumptions I'd like to see tested. I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble of all this and have a 118 acre road course, it seems the height of hubris to just say "well, the sensors will probably be better than cameras at night." It's amazing to me that on Hacker News people people have this puritanical embarrassment over obvious technical questions.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  Oh this is definitely false! Night is very concerning and is a problem for computer vision systems. During the day illumination is fairly consistent. Sure the sun moves around, but it's not a spotlight. At night, illumination varies a lot. A detector that works during the day may not work at all at night. This is no joke, there are papers that show dramatic performance losses for tasks like pedestrian detection at night. Cameras are worse at night. They need to be more sensitive which dramatically increases their noise. They may need to have longer exposures leading to blur, which is of course made worse if you are moving the camera. Headlights also don't provide the same visibility so your reactions must be faster. Reflections are a big problem too. Oncoming headlights are also an issue. Nighttime testing will be critical.

rootusrootus 4y ago

I realize this is essentially a PR piece, but still, it makes me feel much better about the potential future of automated driving than what Tesla is doing. If I owned TSLA right now I'd sell.

tantalor 4y ago
You can buy puts.
- concordDance 4y ago
  The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
  - jsolson 4y ago
    If you're buying puts you have bounded risk (the amount you invested), albeit with a more cliff-like risk profile than other strategies.
    - ihattendorf 4y ago
      In this case replace "you can remain solvent" with "the put remains valid".
    - JamesSwift 4y ago
      As well as a time/volatility element added so its not necessarily "TSLA went down a lot, so you profit a lot".
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    The argument literally everybody always makes and 99.99% they are simply wrong and don't want to admit it.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Options are gambling, which is not how I play the market. Aside from some lucky YOLOs, you are far more likely to lose money in that game.

mooneater 4y ago

Is any of Waymo Driver's design published? Like do they use RL or how do they approach control.

nixpulvis 4y ago

I almost feel like AI enabled vehicles need a special light on the exterior to indicate to other drovers that this thing is a robot. As I'm driving I would probably learn to approach these vehicles differently from the average normal driver.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quitit 4y ago
This sounds like an excellent idea. There is a lingering issue about drivers not paying attention and even sleeping while their vehicle is in self-driving mode, that's contrary to the requirement that the driver is actively supervising. I don't think it's a realistic expectation that drivers are always fully attentive and able to respond in time to a crash situation when the self-driving mode is active. Such a light would give me the heads up that I should stay on my toes.
eftychis 4y ago
I agree. But we end up adding more stressors to human drivers that way to gain what really?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  It's not necisarily a "stressor" if self-driving cars behave somewhat consistently, it's just another signal you can use when making decisions on the road. "Will this car suddenly decide to change lanes?", "Not likely, it's self driving and there aren't exits or major changes in traffic in front of it". There will also be quarks in any automatic system. Learning and then predicting these will make the streets safer and more comfortable. For example, perhaps self-driving cars are overly cautions around some local crosswalks. If I'm behind one of these things in the winter I might be aware I should leave even more extra room for the sudden slow downs that other cars will be less likely to do. If I'm smart this wont be the difference between an accident or not, but it will make for a smoother ride. My larger question is, will proliferation of AI cars increase or decrease net traffic flow. People seem to be driving larger and larger cars slower and slower anyway, so maybe this target is achievable, but this all worries me.

londons_explore 4y ago

Waymos velocity seems to have slowed dramatically since 2015 when they first did fully driverless rides on the public road and started deploying to multiple regions. Now, 2 billion dollars and 7 years later, they are still only in a handful of small regions with limited numbers of vehicles. That tells me there is still some fundamental issue that is hard to solve. I wonder why they aren't more transparent and tell us what that issue is that they've been battling for 7 years?

londons_explore 4y ago
It's clear which bits they haven't been focussing on... There are multiple videos on youtube of rides (some where it has gone wrong) and the user experience is terrible. The car has a robotic voice which plays a long and annoying unskippable message with every ride, and 'Rider support' sounding like they are following a strict script with no ability to be helpful or fix the problem [1]... Imagine if every time you started your car, a robotic voice said "Welcome to your Ford Pickup XYZ model. Please ensure your seatbelts are fastened. If you are too hot, you can adjust the climate with the climate controls. If you want to lower the windows, please don't put your arms out. etc etc. Have a nice ride today in your Ford(tm) Pickup(tm).". [1]: https://youtu.be/2ZmdxkBV5Tw?t=180 https://youtu.be/2ZmdxkBV5Tw?t=180
- saxelsen 4y ago
  Not entirely different from getting on a plane? You have to listen to the safety protocol before take-off.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Most things about planes are pretty user unfriendly to be fair... "arrive 2 hours before departure"... "queue for hours through security"... "walk miles to your gate"... "have to buy your ticket a long time in advance, and then 'check in' more than 3 hours in advance but less than 48 hours"... We're a long way from the ideal of "show up at the airport 5 mins before, hop on a plane, and hand cash to the pilot for your ride".

kolbe 4y ago

Consensus from the two AV articles today seems to be that Tesla, despite releasing more data to the public on their FSD system, is evil, incompetent and endangering society (the data doesn't say so, but just the fact that Tesla won't release even more data is shady). Whereas Waymo making a PR statement with no substance is proof Tesla will fail and Waymo will save us.

bhauer 4y ago
I wish HN would be better than that, but your summary is perfect.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  What's your response to the fact that Tesla's data is actually very bad? [1] [1]https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1602774335244177408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1602774341602639872%7Ctwgr%5E9e16bdc8a6b7142ed50710d0137c877d41002242%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Felectrek.co%2F2022%2F12%2F14%2Ftesla-full-self-driving-data-awful-challenge-elon-musk-prove-otherwise%2F https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1602774335244177408?re...
RC_ITR 4y ago
>Consensus from the two AV articles today Consensus from informed industry observers who are sounding the alarm bells about how dangerous Tesla's approach is from a first-principles standpoint The "data" Tesla released is a meaningless attempt to pull the wool over your eyes.
enragedcacti 4y ago
> Tesla, despite releasing far more data to the public on their FSD system, The same Tesla who argues to the California DMV that FSD is a level 2 system to dodge reporting requirements? The Tesla who has a major EV outlet demanding that they release meaningful disengagement data? [1] Perhaps I missed something but I really have no idea what data you could be talking about, unless by "data" you mean access to the FSD beta. [1] https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-data-awful-challenge-elon-musk-prove-otherwise/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-data-...

godelski 4y ago

I appreciate that in this they demonstrate not just rigs where a manikin is thrown in way of danger, but actual humans performing regular/irregular tasks. This to me is akin of the bullet proof {vest,glass,etc} manufacturer willing to put themselves behind their product for demonstration. With AI systems I think this is particularly important because with such high dimensional data it is possible that the vehicle picks up on things like the pull cable or that it is a manikin and not a human (e.g. pneumonia predictions strongly correlating with medical equipment within x-rays rather than inflammation). A kinda two for one confidence builder here.

killjoywashere 4y ago
> akin of the bullet proof {vest,glass,etc} manufacturer willing to put themselves behind their product for demonstration. I suspect the cyclist in the video is not a $500k/year ML engineer, it's a $50K/year veteran trying to stay out of the welfare line.

1024core 4y ago

While Waymo is spending $$$ gathering driving data, Tesla has 100s of 1000s of cars doing it, for free. In terms of sheer data, in this race, Tesla wins. Now whether Tesla can actually use the firehose of data and actually train models that use it productively, remains to be seen. With the departure of Karpathy, I am not so sure. If Tesla gave all the data to Waymo, Waymo would reach L5 in no time.

minsc_and_boo 4y ago
Waymo was collecting data before Tesla, and switched to simulated training a long time ago because it's more effective. The self driving AI can gain 100 years experience in just 1 day using simulation: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--simulation27.html https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Tesla uses simulation to but there is no replacement for real world data. The real world is crazy and Tesla can see people driving in real condition from Alaska to Miami Florida.
  - 1024core 4y ago
    Amateurs think that "simulation" is all you need. They see realistic environments on their PS4s and XBoxes and think that's enough. If simulated data were enough, why _hasn't_ Waymo launched in placed like NYC or Boston?
    - minsc_and_boo 4y ago
      If you think driverless car training in simulations is a playstation game, then you're projecting with your comment. Also, because of weather. Waymo just went live with full driverless for the public in Phoenix. Tesla can't do full driverless so I think that evidence settles the debate of simulated vs. data collection, unless you have evidence otherwise?

mabbo 4y ago

I think the problem we have with self-driving cars is more social than technological at this point. Consider the hypothetical: a million self-driving cars on the road that, collectively, will have 1/10th of the fatal accidents that human drivers would have[0]. But, the ones they do have are accidents a human driver would almost certainly have avoided. Is this something we would accept? My guess is that no, we wouldn't. Because the accidents avoided don't make the news, but the accidents that occur- especially ones that you say "my god, how did it screw that up?" will make the news, and our perception would be that they are more dangerous. Until Waymo's cars are better than most humans in every single situation, they won't be able to win over the public perception war. [0]I'm making those numbers up. I acknowledge that. But it's a hypothetical so give me some leeway on this!

just-ok 4y ago
I agree with you entirely. Continuing with your hypothetical, even though we’d be 90% safer as a collective, the safety of the individual feels compromised: the risk of an accident is non-uniform when involving humans (depending on e.g. age, experience, safety, alertness, etc.), but becomes uniform (or at least more uniform) with an algorithm in charge. That’s a tough thing for people to buy into.
- _cs2017_ 4y ago
  A very good observation. Based on your comment, I think we can relax the requirement stated by OP by saying: "Until Waymo's cars reduce any individual's chance of an accident." So for example, suppose a Waymo car is better than humans overall, but tends to do worse than humans when there's a small bump on the road. And suppose that all humans (in a given regulator's area, e.g., California) tend to encounter such bumps at roughly the same rate (per mile driven) over their lifetime. In that case, it's probably going to be acceptable, since every individual is better off. I don't know, maybe this is not impactful / obvious enough for people to care about? What certainly is obvious is that the safest drivers are much safer than an average driver (does anyone know of a study that estimates this ratio?). Therefore, at the very least, the threshold for Waymo should be not the average accident rate, but the accident rate for the safest drivers.

siquick 4y ago

One reason to introduce self driving cars is to hopefully remove the number of SUVs from city roads, which are only driven by people because they’re “safer and protect me”. At best they’re an absolute nuisance to every other car and pedestrian, and at worse they’re absolute death traps that clog up roads.

panick21_ 4y ago
The self driving cars will be SUV or CUV at a minimum and there will be more of them, not less.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Exactly. Just like we saw with Uber & Lyft, but it will be exponentially worse. When I can easily just tell the car to go be available somewhere, or take my kid somewhere, or this package, etc, then guess what -- I'm gonna do it.
- krferriter 4y ago
  We need personal car size limits on city streets, stricter regulation about viewing angles and heights for personally licensed cars, and car mass taxes in general. Some of these SUVs should not be drivable with normal consumer vehicle licences. They should require a higher license level and training on driving large vehicles.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    There is a very, very long list of things that should change to turn society away from car dependence. Free highways being a huge issue. Not having car registration be based on weight. Far higher requirements to be allowed to drive. There is a long list.
    - siquick 4y ago
      I don’t think OP is necessarily asking for less cars, just less big, dangerous cars.

bingblogger 4y ago

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Timothycquinn 4y ago

Personally, I don't understand the economics of lidar for self driving vehicles. 1) How many lidar units will one vehicle need and how much will this cost? 2) How will noise from other lidar systems be addressed? Eg two or more disparate lidar systems on other vehicles using similar frequencies? 3) How small can the lidar systems be made while still being effective in real world use? These units being used for testing are massive and probably stupendously expensive!

jcims 4y ago

Tesla mentioned in this thread almost twice as many times as Waymo. Elon love/hate is a powerful force.

pugworthy 4y ago

One thing I'm very curious about with AI driven cars, is whether they will develop some of the overly cautious / paranoid habits human drivers get around bicycles. Take people passing a bike in a bike lane for example. Some will go way under the speed limit, and not just pass the bike even though it's in it's own lane. Or others will swing WAY wide to pass them, even though again, they are in their own line. Will AI itself learn that indeed, bikes do suddenly veer into your lane, or will AI in fact learn that no, they don't do that?

random_upvoter 4y ago

As with all AI, it works until that special set of circumstances pop up where it fails and when it fails there is no bottom as to how it fails.

nojvek 4y ago

I'm the side of LIDAR is a crutch. Not only is it crazy expensive and has many moving parts, but the sensor input is a bunch of dots. One has to have cameras anyway for the high density vision input. With newer algorithms, you can stitch multiple cameras to reconstruct a scene and semantically identify important objects. I do like what Tesla is doing with its new voxel neural net. Yeah it will take a few more years, but the hard problems are doing what our visual cortex does with two cameras (our eyes). Also keep in mind a car has multiple cameras around to give full 360 view. They also sense in IR range that our eyes do not.

samwillis 4y ago
Teslas vision based system makes a prediction of what the environment around it is, how far away things are. A LIDAR based system knows with certainty how far way things are. LIDAR may be expensive now, thats not to say it won't get cheeper, with fewer parts. But the main issue is a social one, I don't think the public will except any fatalities as a result of a vision based system making a mistake. Even if the deal rate from accetends is lower than with a human driver. A self driving car can't be 50% better, or even 200% better it needs to be thousands of times better than a human driver for it to succeed. I think the certainty of a LIDAR baed system is the only way to do that. An AI based vision system is Tesla saying that can make a "brain" better than a human at understanding vision. LIDAR is saying, humans can't measure how far away things are, we can do better than humans by doing something they can't.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> I'm the side of LIDAR is a crutch. Not only is it crazy expensive and has many moving parts Newer lidar units are orders of magnitude cheaper, and solid state. If I could only choose between a camera and lidar, I'm going with the latter.

panick21_ 4y ago

Self driving cars are mostly a bad idea in most cases. The only thing worse then cars with 1 person in it driving around is cars with 0 people driving around. The goal should be less cars overall specially in cities. Technology that will cause more cars and more traffic is just terrible. Cities should ban cars, make it pedestrian and bicycle friendly, build 'self driving' metros and S-Bahn style train systems.

wizofaus 4y ago
There's no need to ban cars - it would be quiet sufficient just for governments to stop building infrastructure (and making various laws around its usage) as though cars were the only type of transport that mattered. FWIW, in principle self-driving tech could make our cities far more "people" friendly and less attuned to the needs to cars, but only if there was some sort of motivation for the tech to be developed with that goal in mind.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Actually there is a huge need to ban cars in cities. Many cities are doing it and those cities are far better to live in and visit because of it. Large scale pedestrianization of cities is a gigantic for for improvement of the world. Both in terms of less accidents, cleaner air, more attractive city, more efficient transit, increase health from bicycle use and walking. I could go on. So the program should be ban cars from anything that could even remotely be consider a core part of the city, massively slow cars down around the city, remove all on-street parking on all public land, eliminate all minimum parking requirements. The list of policies goes on. > self-driving tech could make our cities far more "people" friendly Having cars with 1 person use up the most valuable space in the world is bad enough, doing it with cars that have 0 people in them is worse. Self driving at best should be for a very small % of trips, maybe less then 1% in very few special cases, maybe for old people, people with disabilities and stuff like that.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    > Many cities are doing it Can you give an example of a such a city (other than the obvious examples of having sections of the inner core of a city where car usage is restricted, which is pretty much the norm in many older European cities)? But it doesn't make any sense to build (or even maintain) a city with roads designed for cars, then not allow them to be used for that purpose. If the roads and other car-based infrastructure were re-purposed in a way that made them clearly unsuitable for cars, again, as I said, you don't need to ban them - it just wouldn't be feasible or practical to use them for the vast majority of people.

tr33house 4y ago

can't wait for the day I'll leave work, get into a self-driving car, watch a movie, have it stop for takeout, sleep as it drives me across the country and then wake up in the morning on the other side of the country ready to start my day. Rooting for Waymo!

j2kun 4y ago

I recall reading an analysis of the self driving safety stats a few years back that concluded, if you counted incidents requiring human intervention as if they were accidents, then based on total miles driven, humans far outperformed self driving, by like an order of magnitude. In other words, companies (waymo included) were sugar coating their stats for good PR, though Waymo was still at the front of the pack. Some other comments on this thread suggest that self-driving is only perceived to be unsafe, but is statistically much more safe. Unless the stats improved significantly since then (and what specifically achieved that?), and an independent analysis can agree, I'm not trusting corporate PR.

cco 4y ago
>...if you counted incidents requiring human intervention as if they were accidents... The true number is somewhere between this worst case and the numbers Waymo presents. Most driver interventions that I've seen on video were not narrowly missed accidents; they're the car being confused by road construction, a double parked driver, pedestrians spilling onto a street etc. I have also seen (for Tesla at least), videos of driver interventions that definitely would have been accidents if the driver hadn't stepped in. I definitely agree with your point that I'd love to see more in-depth figures and the CA DMV might release those more detailed figures? I'm not sure. EDIT: Sure enough, the CA DMV disengagement reports list the exact cause (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/disengagement-reports/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...)

newman314 4y ago

While it feels like Waymo is taking a better approach than Tesla, I still do not see a viable solution to the trolley problem. These tests are nice and all but what is going to happen when a situation invariably arises where someone is going to get hurt? What's going to happen then? Is the car going to opt to protect the passenger (because customer) or the pedestrian (much more likely to be hurt/killed).

jjcon 4y ago
Answer: The passenger… now can be move on from this inane argument? If they are safer than humans it frankly doesn’t even matter.
ericpauley 4y ago
I suspect these cases are simply way more rare than people expect, especially if the car is driving defensively. If the car is, for instance, tracking likely pedestrians that will enter the road and slows down for safety when they’re near, someone would have to irresponsibly run into the road. If the choice is to hit them or turn over a cliff, I’d expect the car to hit the careless pedestrian.

eftychis 4y ago

I think the problem with self driving vehicles -- to add to that conversation, is the companies focus on the wrong market. For people it is asking for them to give up control either as drivers or as pedestrians in a city. Most people like to have a sense of control of their lives. (My take anyways. I know lots of people like having tracks in their career and progress but I would argue they still feel in control.) For the whole truck shipping lobby on the other hand it will be: save money. (I know that is a dystopian take, but I find me more likely for trucking or something similar to be the first fortress to "fall")

deleted 4y ago

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gniv 4y ago

I was driving through heavy rain recently and had a small epiphany: human drivers are willing to take way more risks under adverse weather conditions. There was no way the car could stop quickly from 65mph on a wet road if something appeared suddenly in front of it. The robot driver would really have to drive way slower than anybody else in order to be safe. That would be annoying for the passengers. In some countries it would also be constantly honked at.