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> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla And it costs about 9% of what a new Model 3 would r

by ajross 3y ago

> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla And it costs about 9% of what a new Model 3 would run you. It's also coming to market almost 5 years after the Tesla HW3 stack that runs almost all cars on the roads to which you're making the comparison. > My argument on autonomous driving is that it can't just match the safety of the average human driver. It needs to be 100-1000x better, unquestionably better for everyone, always. That sounds like maybe a marketing argument? You're saying that if it was only 2x better at some visceral metric (total traffic deaths, say) that you think people wouldn't accept it and it would be regulated out of existence, either by liability concerns or actual lawmaking? The counter argument is that those metrics are, after all, visceral. The US has 40k traffic fatalities per year. You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? No. "Merely better" is the standard that will stick. > I think that's probably only achievable with LIDAR Everyone on your side of the argument does, but frankly this has become an argument of faith and not substance. LIDAR capability has become a proxy for "not Tesla", so people line up along their brand loyalties. For myself, LIDAR is actually the technology looking like it isn't panning out. It's not getting cheaper or more reliable. LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Most importantly, LIDAR at its best still only gives you the 3D shape of the world, and that's not enough. LIDAR doesn't help with lane selection, it doesn't help with traffic behavior modelling, it doesn't help with sign reading. It doesn't help with merge strategies. All that stuff has to be done with vision anyway. The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side.

rootusrootus 3y ago
> The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side. You don't spend much time on the Tesla subreddits. The only reason there aren't more crashes is because most people seem to be reasonably good at keeping their hands on the wheel to take over. Every day people post videos of the wacky choices FSD makes. The most interesting part is that frequently the graphics on the screen suggest it can actually detect the correct lane markings and such, and still chooses to cut the corners and cross into other lanes. Anybody who's being honest and has watched FSD from the beginning is under no illusions that real self-driving Teslas are happening anytime soon, or with the current hardware. It's not even close.
- ajross 3y ago
  > You don't spend much time on the Tesla subreddits. No, but I watch my car drive me around every day. This always devolves into an argument like this. I wanted to talk about LIDAR and limitations, not flame about collisions that woulda/maybe/coulda happened in funny internet videos. Believe what you want. But if they aren't crashing they aren't crashing. And you won't get anyone to ban cars that don't crash.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    It does always devolve into the same discussion, I agree. All of the evidence says it doesn't work well. One guy says "but it does for me!" And the discussion ends. In some situations with well marked, simple road design, it works great. Give it a multiple-lane turn intersection to navigate and things get interesting. Give it a three lane turn where the outermost lane is fairly sharp, and it will just cut across the middle lane because it seems to have a built-in limit on how hard it can turn the wheel. What's noteworthy is that it doesn't significantly improve with each revision. It'll get a little better, then regress, over and over, but still the fundamentals are unreliable. At some point maybe it becomes clear that the current strategy is topped out. I do think it tends to be better behaved than AP on the highway, though, so I look forward to a stack merge there.
    - ajross 3y ago
      > All of the evidence says it doesn't work well. Except actual accident statistics, you mean. > Give it a multiple-lane turn intersection to navigate and things get interesting. Give it a three lane turn where the outermost lane is fairly sharp, and it will just cut across the middle lane because it seems to have a built-in limit on how hard it can turn the wheel. Now you've digressed into navigation choices and not safety. And... I agree! This is exactly what I was talking about upthread. It's an issue for real improvement, and notably not something that can be helped by LIDAR at all. Tesla is actually way ahead here, as I see it. Waymo and Cruise operate in heavily constrained environments that disallow challenging maneuvers entirely. (FWIW: that three-lane turn behavior you're talking about doesn't seem familiar. I don't see that with my car, and we have a few intersecions like that around here. In general multi-lane turns are marked, and the car is quite good about figuring it out.)
joshuahutt 3y ago
> The counter argument is that those metrics are, after all, visceral. The US has 40k traffic fatalities per year. You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? It'll be framed as a technology that will kill 20k people per year.
gcanyon 3y ago
I think the truth is somewhere between the 100x and 2x numbers. Here's why: Let's say self-driving does reduce the number of deaths by half. Then there are different classes of people who ride in cars: 1. People who would have died without self-driving, and did in fact die with self-driving. 2. People who would have died without self-driving, and didn't because of self-driving. If you leave it at that, you might think that of the 40K number you mentioned, with self-driving being 2x as safe we'd have 20K in class 1, and 20K in class 2. But that's not accurate. There is an additional class of people: 3. People who wouldn't have died without self-driving, and who died because of some failure of self-driving. Since drivers are supposed to be ready to take control at any time, car manufacturers want public perception to be that there is no category 3 -- and with good reason, because: The problem self-driving car manufacturers have is that people in category 2 are anonymous -- almost invisible. At the end of the year we can look at the totals and say, "yup, there are 20,000 people out there alive because of self-driving." But if the numbers are actually: 1. 19,000 2. 20,000 3. 1,000 Then people aren't going to be thinking about the 20,000 anonymous lives saved by self driving. They're going to be thinking of the 1,000 very obvious and named people in category 3, who would still be alive today were it not for the fact that their car drove them into a semi. I don't know what ratio of category 2 to 3 is necessary for people to accept self-driving as a benefit, but I'm betting that 2x as safe isn't going to get category 3 low enough to make the case.
- samwillis 3y ago
  Very well put, and exactly what I meant in my original comment. Category 3 deaths need the be astronomically low for people to widely except fully autonomous driving.
  - chopin 3y ago
    Especially if the crash reason is non-intuitive.
    - gcanyon 3y ago
      Yep -- I think that if self-driving cars prevented all accidents, but each year one self-driving car randomly drove at max speed into the side of a Walmart, people would reject that trade. I think of myself as fairly logical, and I'd have a hard time accepting that. The Trolley Problem is hard.
ra7 3y ago
> For myself, LIDAR is actually the technology looking like it isn't panning out. It's not getting cheaper or more reliable. This is just plain wrong. Lidar is getting cheaper by the year. They are now so cheap you’re starting see them in consumer vehicles from Volvo, Mercedes, Cadillac, Nio, XPeng, BYD, etc. Self driving companies have also slashed lidar costs drastically. Waymo, for example, had a 90% cost reduction for their 5th gen Lidar. This is the opposite of a technology “not panning out”. It’s looking like Tesla is the outlier here because they made a bad bet. > LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Lidar autonomy is the only one proven to work without a driver, so this is a very strange take. We’re seeing robotaxi companies starting to expand driverless operations to big cities. Vision solutions are the only ones that still do not have a single driverless mile. It seems like all your arguments fit into what you’re accusing others of — that you’re the one using lidar as a proxy for “not Tesla” and getting basic facts wrong.
- ajross 3y ago
  > They are now so cheap you’re starting see them in consumer vehicles from Volvo, Mercedes, Cadillac, Nio, XPeng, BYD, etc. I'm googling, and not finding a reference here. As far as I can tell not one of these manufacturers (or anyone else) is shipping a consumer vehicle with a LIDAR sensor. You're just citing press releases about plans, I guess? Look, the argument goes like this: 1. LIDAR gives somewhat better depth info, and slightly inferior vision. 2. Depth info from camera devices is proven sufficient. Again, Teslas don't hit stuff due to sensor failures, period (lots of nitpicking in this thread over that framing, here I'm being a bit more precise). 3. All the remaining hard problems are about recognition and decisionmaking, all of which gets sourced from vision data, not a point cloud. The conclusion being that LIDAR isn't worth it. It's not giving significant advantages. If you were designing an autonomy system from scratch today, you wouldn't bet it on LIDAR (especially as there's no proven off the shelf device!).
  - ra7 3y ago
    > I'm googling, and not finding a reference here. As far as I can tell not one of these manufacturers (or anyone else) is shipping a consumer vehicle with a LIDAR sensor. You're just citing press releases about plans, I guess? XPeng P5, XPeng G9, Nio ET7 are all shipping with lidar. You'll also see them in many other models starting this year: Mercedes S-class/EQS w/ Drive Pilot, Volvo EX90, Volvo XC90, Audi A6L/A7L/A8L/Q8, Polestar 3, etc. The list is growing [1]. > 2. Depth info from camera devices is proven sufficient. Again, Teslas don't hit stuff due to sensor failures, period (lots of nitpicking in this thread over that framing, here I'm being a bit more precise). Teslas absolutely hit stuff. Plenty of examples in Reddit and YouTube about FSD hitting curbs, bollards and other things. We also don't know any accident numbers about Tesla because they actively hide it. They skirt CA DMV rules by not reporting it and have a very questionable methodology for what they consider an accident (they don't count it if airbags don't deploy). > 3. All the remaining hard problems are about recognition and decisionmaking, all of which gets sourced from vision data, not a point cloud. This is wrong, too. Object detection and decision making uses fused input from cameras, lidar and radar. They don't just use cameras. There's plenty of literature to look up on sensor fusion and how they're being used throughout the perception/behavior prediction stack. > The conclusion being that LIDAR isn't worth it. It's not giving significant advantages. Only if you lack the ability to do sensor fusion or if you have already falsely promised customers their cars are capable of fully autonomous driving and painted yourself into a corner. Only one company stands out here. [1] https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/21/shanghai-auto-show-nearly-40-models-with-lidars/ https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/21/shanghai-auto-show-nearly-40...
jeffreygoesto 3y ago
First of all, they do hit stuff. Second, Lidar can measure both lanes and traffic and predict it. And Lidar will be 4D...
engmgrmgr 3y ago
This isn’t true; LiDAR points provide an intensity value that provides information about surface material and ambient environment. Further, this information is influenced by angle and distance. Lane lines and road signs in particular typically use reflective paints that are very easy to detect in LiDAR, but beyond that, you can approximate material composition of a LiDAR scene pretty easily. Another big point you’re missing is that LiDAR can provide control points to photometric sensor fusion systems. While there are also purely photo based control point matching systems, they’re much more complex and require nontrivial offline preprocessing.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? Have you heard of this miracle technology that is like 100x safer than cars, and kills zero people a year in most countries, and we've had it for 50 years? called high speed rail? Covid is still killing more than 20K people a year, and no-one gives a damn. We have this miracle technology called ventilation, it reduces you chance of infection like 4x. You can buy air purifiers for $200 at Ikea and they work. You can install Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation, CDC has a whole page about them. If saving 20K people would be the top priority, Nuclear power would replace coal in the 70's, air purifiers would be legally required in every office and coming into work with Covid would be a criminal offense. > LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Why do you believe this to be the case - is there a measurement or estimate I can see of how fast visual solutions are iterating?

by ajross 3y ago

rootusrootus 3y ago

> The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side. You don't spend much time on the Tesla subreddits. The only reason there aren't more crashes is because most people seem to be reasonably good at keeping their hands on the wheel to take over. Every day people post videos of the wacky choices FSD makes. The most interesting part is that frequently the graphics on the screen suggest it can actually detect the correct lane markings and such, and still chooses to cut the corners and cross into other lanes. Anybody who's being honest and has watched FSD from the beginning is under no illusions that real self-driving Teslas are happening anytime soon, or with the current hardware. It's not even close.

ajross 3y ago
> You don't spend much time on the Tesla subreddits. No, but I watch my car drive me around every day. This always devolves into an argument like this. I wanted to talk about LIDAR and limitations, not flame about collisions that woulda/maybe/coulda happened in funny internet videos. Believe what you want. But if they aren't crashing they aren't crashing. And you won't get anyone to ban cars that don't crash.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  It does always devolve into the same discussion, I agree. All of the evidence says it doesn't work well. One guy says "but it does for me!" And the discussion ends. In some situations with well marked, simple road design, it works great. Give it a multiple-lane turn intersection to navigate and things get interesting. Give it a three lane turn where the outermost lane is fairly sharp, and it will just cut across the middle lane because it seems to have a built-in limit on how hard it can turn the wheel. What's noteworthy is that it doesn't significantly improve with each revision. It'll get a little better, then regress, over and over, but still the fundamentals are unreliable. At some point maybe it becomes clear that the current strategy is topped out. I do think it tends to be better behaved than AP on the highway, though, so I look forward to a stack merge there.
  - ajross 3y ago
    > All of the evidence says it doesn't work well. Except actual accident statistics, you mean. > Give it a multiple-lane turn intersection to navigate and things get interesting. Give it a three lane turn where the outermost lane is fairly sharp, and it will just cut across the middle lane because it seems to have a built-in limit on how hard it can turn the wheel. Now you've digressed into navigation choices and not safety. And... I agree! This is exactly what I was talking about upthread. It's an issue for real improvement, and notably not something that can be helped by LIDAR at all. Tesla is actually way ahead here, as I see it. Waymo and Cruise operate in heavily constrained environments that disallow challenging maneuvers entirely. (FWIW: that three-lane turn behavior you're talking about doesn't seem familiar. I don't see that with my car, and we have a few intersecions like that around here. In general multi-lane turns are marked, and the car is quite good about figuring it out.)

joshuahutt 3y ago

> The counter argument is that those metrics are, after all, visceral. The US has 40k traffic fatalities per year. You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? It'll be framed as a technology that will kill 20k people per year.

gcanyon 3y ago

I think the truth is somewhere between the 100x and 2x numbers. Here's why: Let's say self-driving does reduce the number of deaths by half. Then there are different classes of people who ride in cars: 1. People who would have died without self-driving, and did in fact die with self-driving. 2. People who would have died without self-driving, and didn't because of self-driving. If you leave it at that, you might think that of the 40K number you mentioned, with self-driving being 2x as safe we'd have 20K in class 1, and 20K in class 2. But that's not accurate. There is an additional class of people: 3. People who wouldn't have died without self-driving, and who died because of some failure of self-driving. Since drivers are supposed to be ready to take control at any time, car manufacturers want public perception to be that there is no category 3 -- and with good reason, because: The problem self-driving car manufacturers have is that people in category 2 are anonymous -- almost invisible. At the end of the year we can look at the totals and say, "yup, there are 20,000 people out there alive because of self-driving." But if the numbers are actually: 1. 19,000 2. 20,000 3. 1,000 Then people aren't going to be thinking about the 20,000 anonymous lives saved by self driving. They're going to be thinking of the 1,000 very obvious and named people in category 3, who would still be alive today were it not for the fact that their car drove them into a semi. I don't know what ratio of category 2 to 3 is necessary for people to accept self-driving as a benefit, but I'm betting that 2x as safe isn't going to get category 3 low enough to make the case.

samwillis 3y ago
Very well put, and exactly what I meant in my original comment. Category 3 deaths need the be astronomically low for people to widely except fully autonomous driving.
- chopin 3y ago
  Especially if the crash reason is non-intuitive.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    Yep -- I think that if self-driving cars prevented all accidents, but each year one self-driving car randomly drove at max speed into the side of a Walmart, people would reject that trade. I think of myself as fairly logical, and I'd have a hard time accepting that. The Trolley Problem is hard.

ra7 3y ago

> For myself, LIDAR is actually the technology looking like it isn't panning out. It's not getting cheaper or more reliable. This is just plain wrong. Lidar is getting cheaper by the year. They are now so cheap you’re starting see them in consumer vehicles from Volvo, Mercedes, Cadillac, Nio, XPeng, BYD, etc. Self driving companies have also slashed lidar costs drastically. Waymo, for example, had a 90% cost reduction for their 5th gen Lidar. This is the opposite of a technology “not panning out”. It’s looking like Tesla is the outlier here because they made a bad bet. > LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Lidar autonomy is the only one proven to work without a driver, so this is a very strange take. We’re seeing robotaxi companies starting to expand driverless operations to big cities. Vision solutions are the only ones that still do not have a single driverless mile. It seems like all your arguments fit into what you’re accusing others of — that you’re the one using lidar as a proxy for “not Tesla” and getting basic facts wrong.

ajross 3y ago
> They are now so cheap you’re starting see them in consumer vehicles from Volvo, Mercedes, Cadillac, Nio, XPeng, BYD, etc. I'm googling, and not finding a reference here. As far as I can tell not one of these manufacturers (or anyone else) is shipping a consumer vehicle with a LIDAR sensor. You're just citing press releases about plans, I guess? Look, the argument goes like this: 1. LIDAR gives somewhat better depth info, and slightly inferior vision. 2. Depth info from camera devices is proven sufficient. Again, Teslas don't hit stuff due to sensor failures, period (lots of nitpicking in this thread over that framing, here I'm being a bit more precise). 3. All the remaining hard problems are about recognition and decisionmaking, all of which gets sourced from vision data, not a point cloud. The conclusion being that LIDAR isn't worth it. It's not giving significant advantages. If you were designing an autonomy system from scratch today, you wouldn't bet it on LIDAR (especially as there's no proven off the shelf device!).
- ra7 3y ago
  > I'm googling, and not finding a reference here. As far as I can tell not one of these manufacturers (or anyone else) is shipping a consumer vehicle with a LIDAR sensor. You're just citing press releases about plans, I guess? XPeng P5, XPeng G9, Nio ET7 are all shipping with lidar. You'll also see them in many other models starting this year: Mercedes S-class/EQS w/ Drive Pilot, Volvo EX90, Volvo XC90, Audi A6L/A7L/A8L/Q8, Polestar 3, etc. The list is growing [1]. > 2. Depth info from camera devices is proven sufficient. Again, Teslas don't hit stuff due to sensor failures, period (lots of nitpicking in this thread over that framing, here I'm being a bit more precise). Teslas absolutely hit stuff. Plenty of examples in Reddit and YouTube about FSD hitting curbs, bollards and other things. We also don't know any accident numbers about Tesla because they actively hide it. They skirt CA DMV rules by not reporting it and have a very questionable methodology for what they consider an accident (they don't count it if airbags don't deploy). > 3. All the remaining hard problems are about recognition and decisionmaking, all of which gets sourced from vision data, not a point cloud. This is wrong, too. Object detection and decision making uses fused input from cameras, lidar and radar. They don't just use cameras. There's plenty of literature to look up on sensor fusion and how they're being used throughout the perception/behavior prediction stack. > The conclusion being that LIDAR isn't worth it. It's not giving significant advantages. Only if you lack the ability to do sensor fusion or if you have already falsely promised customers their cars are capable of fully autonomous driving and painted yourself into a corner. Only one company stands out here. [1] https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/21/shanghai-auto-show-nearly-40-models-with-lidars/ https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/21/shanghai-auto-show-nearly-40...

jeffreygoesto 3y ago

First of all, they do hit stuff. Second, Lidar can measure both lanes and traffic and predict it. And Lidar will be 4D...

engmgrmgr 3y ago

This isn’t true; LiDAR points provide an intensity value that provides information about surface material and ambient environment. Further, this information is influenced by angle and distance. Lane lines and road signs in particular typically use reflective paints that are very easy to detect in LiDAR, but beyond that, you can approximate material composition of a LiDAR scene pretty easily. Another big point you’re missing is that LiDAR can provide control points to photometric sensor fusion systems. While there are also purely photo based control point matching systems, they’re much more complex and require nontrivial offline preprocessing.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? Have you heard of this miracle technology that is like 100x safer than cars, and kills zero people a year in most countries, and we've had it for 50 years? called high speed rail? Covid is still killing more than 20K people a year, and no-one gives a damn. We have this miracle technology called ventilation, it reduces you chance of infection like 4x. You can buy air purifiers for $200 at Ikea and they work. You can install Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation, CDC has a whole page about them. If saving 20K people would be the top priority, Nuclear power would replace coal in the 70's, air purifiers would be legally required in every office and coming into work with Covid would be a criminal offense. > LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Why do you believe this to be the case - is there a measurement or estimate I can see of how fast visual solutions are iterating?