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I Personally prefer the Tesla go to market strategy. They are tackling a much harder problem (machine vision) and if it ends up working, it will be done far mor

I Personally prefer the Tesla go to market strategy. They are tackling a much harder problem (machine vision) and if it ends up working, it will be done far more elegantly (a few cameras rather than tons of sensors) with far more significant implications to our day to day life (the tech can be extrapolated to tons of automation, like garbage roadside cleaning, side walk garbage collection, robots, etc). On regulation, I believe regulators are prone to bending to the will of local constituents. Uber was very effective at galvanizing voters when local markets were threatening legislation via the app. I imagine the many millions of people that will own a Tesla in 2 years will have no problem clicking a “message your local congressman” button on the screen to get this approved in most markets. It won’t matter if NYC, Portland, San Fran and LA ban it. Of course, the data will have to fully support the safety of Tesla FSD. I’m curious to watch it play out.

airstrike 2y ago
Emphasis on "if it ends up working"
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  The Laconic "if" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
Ringz 2y ago
Solving that problem on machine vision would be nice, but: "Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar (theverge.com)" [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40299991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40299991
- EcommerceFlow 2y ago
  $2mil is nothing worth of equipment, most likely just some testing or ground truth stuff. Borderline fake news or a lack of critical thinking imo.
- neom 2y ago
  Lidar probably makes a lot of sense of small scale accurate articulation of robotics where precision matters, could be for internal use too.
- jejeyyy77 2y ago
  2m is nothing lol
kbos87 2y ago
I find it funny to think back to the fervor of comments on HN a year ago about Tesla doubling down on vision only and how this would prove to be dangerous and ineffective. A year has gone by and not only have we not seen the catastrophe that was thought to be inevitable, but Autopilot has gotten leaps and bounds better. I use it every day and over the past few months it's gotten so good that there are few scenarios where I ever intervene, and when I do, it's because it's always because it's being a little too slow/hesitant for me at an intersection. I'm not a Musk fan one bit, but I see this as evidence that the popular narrative has diverged wildly from the reality of Tesla's product.
- ajross 2y ago
  Exactly. The technical argument about capabilities is largely settled at this point. Vision won, LiDAR didn't "lose", but it's clearly not any better. Yet every time the subject comes up we rehash the same arguments from 2020/21 as if the evidence of the last ~billion miles (or whatever) of road testing doesn't exist. The crashes didn't show up. The bodies aren't there. The disaster didn't happen. The product is "safe" for whatever reasonable definition you want to pick. And to be clear, my sense is the same: FSD microdriving at this point is better than mine, interventions are about planning and intersection recognition. It'll be slow to take turns sometimes, it'll be in the wrong lane to prepare for a turn, stuff like that.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Vision didn't "win" in any way, shape, or form. The only products on the road that offer actual self driving don't rely on vision only, they have vision + lidar + other sensors. Teslas are not "self driving", they don't allow you in any way to rely on the car alone, for any length of time, to drive itself: it's the drivers who are preventing accidents, not Tesla's FSD. When drivers of these vehicles lose attention, accidents do happen and people have died.
    - ajross 2y ago
      And exactly as predicted, these are all arguments that could have been made, verbatim, three years ago. And yet...
xyst 2y ago
> Uber was very effective at galvanizing voters when local markets were threatening legislation via the app By “very effective”, you mean just throwing around millions [1] of dollars to spam the local population to “galvanize” them to vote for/against certain laws? Didn’t work in Austin, TX [2]. You are overestimating the power of what FSD can do. The unfortunate mistake most TSLA drivers do in the first place. TSLA is playing catch up and burning massive amounts of cash. Laying off people left and right. The market and interest for TSLA is shrinking. [1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-04-30/money-doesnt-talk-it-swears/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-04-30/money-... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-austin-texas-when-uber-and-lyft-left-town-2016-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-austin-texa...
- ipaddr 2y ago
  What doesn't work in Austin works everywhere else.
jejeyyy77 2y ago
not to mention much more scalable than waymos approach, both in terms of rollout, but more importantly in terms of data collection - the gold of the AI era.
kube-system 2y ago
Relying on vision might be good for the advancement of computer vision, but is it good for automated driving? It seems to be an unnecessary anthropomorphization to me. One of the greatest weaknesses of human drivers is the limited information available to act on. And there’s no possible scenario in which computer vision overcomes information unavailability issues. Fog or obstructions will always defeat it.
- ryandvm 2y ago
  Absolutely. Replicating the way humans do it is also going to replicate the failure modes (optical illusions, crappy low light performance, etc.)

airstrike 2y ago

Emphasis on "if it ends up working"

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
The Laconic "if" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

Ringz 2y ago

Solving that problem on machine vision would be nice, but: "Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar (theverge.com)" [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40299991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40299991

EcommerceFlow 2y ago
$2mil is nothing worth of equipment, most likely just some testing or ground truth stuff. Borderline fake news or a lack of critical thinking imo.
neom 2y ago
Lidar probably makes a lot of sense of small scale accurate articulation of robotics where precision matters, could be for internal use too.
jejeyyy77 2y ago
2m is nothing lol

kbos87 2y ago

I find it funny to think back to the fervor of comments on HN a year ago about Tesla doubling down on vision only and how this would prove to be dangerous and ineffective. A year has gone by and not only have we not seen the catastrophe that was thought to be inevitable, but Autopilot has gotten leaps and bounds better. I use it every day and over the past few months it's gotten so good that there are few scenarios where I ever intervene, and when I do, it's because it's always because it's being a little too slow/hesitant for me at an intersection. I'm not a Musk fan one bit, but I see this as evidence that the popular narrative has diverged wildly from the reality of Tesla's product.

ajross 2y ago
Exactly. The technical argument about capabilities is largely settled at this point. Vision won, LiDAR didn't "lose", but it's clearly not any better. Yet every time the subject comes up we rehash the same arguments from 2020/21 as if the evidence of the last ~billion miles (or whatever) of road testing doesn't exist. The crashes didn't show up. The bodies aren't there. The disaster didn't happen. The product is "safe" for whatever reasonable definition you want to pick. And to be clear, my sense is the same: FSD microdriving at this point is better than mine, interventions are about planning and intersection recognition. It'll be slow to take turns sometimes, it'll be in the wrong lane to prepare for a turn, stuff like that.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Vision didn't "win" in any way, shape, or form. The only products on the road that offer actual self driving don't rely on vision only, they have vision + lidar + other sensors. Teslas are not "self driving", they don't allow you in any way to rely on the car alone, for any length of time, to drive itself: it's the drivers who are preventing accidents, not Tesla's FSD. When drivers of these vehicles lose attention, accidents do happen and people have died.
  - ajross 2y ago
    And exactly as predicted, these are all arguments that could have been made, verbatim, three years ago. And yet...

xyst 2y ago

> Uber was very effective at galvanizing voters when local markets were threatening legislation via the app By “very effective”, you mean just throwing around millions [1] of dollars to spam the local population to “galvanize” them to vote for/against certain laws? Didn’t work in Austin, TX [2]. You are overestimating the power of what FSD can do. The unfortunate mistake most TSLA drivers do in the first place. TSLA is playing catch up and burning massive amounts of cash. Laying off people left and right. The market and interest for TSLA is shrinking. [1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-04-30/money-doesnt-talk-it-swears/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-04-30/money-... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-austin-texas-when-uber-and-lyft-left-town-2016-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-austin-texa...

ipaddr 2y ago
What doesn't work in Austin works everywhere else.

jejeyyy77 2y ago

not to mention much more scalable than waymos approach, both in terms of rollout, but more importantly in terms of data collection - the gold of the AI era.

kube-system 2y ago

Relying on vision might be good for the advancement of computer vision, but is it good for automated driving? It seems to be an unnecessary anthropomorphization to me. One of the greatest weaknesses of human drivers is the limited information available to act on. And there’s no possible scenario in which computer vision overcomes information unavailability issues. Fog or obstructions will always defeat it.

ryandvm 2y ago
Absolutely. Replicating the way humans do it is also going to replicate the failure modes (optical illusions, crappy low light performance, etc.)