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Anyone knows whether there are fundamental differences in the approach waymo took vs tesla, or are they following the same algorithms and techniques, with more

• duped 2y ago
  iirc the big thing is they use LIDAR/RADAR in addition to camera sensors, Tesla is hellbent on only using cameras. Also, Waymo works.
  • sixQuarks 2y ago
    So you’re going to ignore all the data Tesla is collecting, and it’s purely AI approach? Very biased comments here, I get it, everyone hates Elon, but let’s not lie to ourselves.
    • tracerbulletx 2y ago
      No one's ignoring it. They're saying that Waymo currently works, and Tesla Self Driving does not currently work.
      • lopkeny12ko 2y ago
        My Tesla drives me around the city autonomously every day and you're telling me it doesn't
      • sixQuarks 2y ago
        Waymo is restricted to very specific pre-mapped areas. It is not a scalable solution.
        • fragmede 2y ago
          For all their faults, one thing you can't say about Google is they don't know how to scale. Prior to Google Maps, Street View would have seemed impossibly expensive, but now we take it for granted. If they need to do a LIDAR run with a car over every public road in the US for them to deploy it, it seems like they could just do that. All they'd have to do is add LIDAR sensors to the existing Street View imaging fleet and continue running them.
    • Zigurd 2y ago
      If it turns out LIDAR 3d mapping is needed, how much is camera-only data worth?
      • sixQuarks 2y ago
        If on the chance Lidar is needed, which I know it's not because my car drives me in every type of situation I've thrown at it, then camera only data is still valuable because it gathers so many crazy edge cases.
• nerdix 2y ago
  One major difference is that Waymo went all in on lidar while Tesla did not.
• xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
  Fundamentally different.
• gazook89 2y ago
  Waymo uses LiDAR and Tesla uses optical cameras. At least that is my understanding as a Joe Schmoe in the Midwest.
• jowday 2y ago
  Fundamentally different - people will flock to LiDAR vs Vision when debating this, but the more fundamental difference is that Waymo uses HD mapping + remote support.
  • bsaul 2y ago
    Thanks, i was expecting something beyond just the lidar thing. Can you elaborate more about mapping + remote ? I've never tested neither a tesla autopilot nor a waymo (european here). edit : also, are there differences in the core algorithms ? Tesla seems to be full AI / ML. Is waymo the same ? ( as the company is older i wonder if they haven't built more things manually)
    • infecto 2y ago
      Touched on it to your original question but they require cars to drive through their service regions on a regular basis to keep a very detailed map of the environment. Not just the 2d map of a representation of the entire environment. On the remote part, Waymo will encounter trouble and they have support to take control of the vehicle remotely.
    • ra7 2y ago
      Waymo has been at the forefront of cutting edge AI/ML since the beginning: https://waymo.com/research/ https://waymo.com/research/ This is a good read: https://www.understandingai.org/p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominate-robotaxisfirst https://www.understandingai.org/p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominat... This talk by Waymo co-CEO is even better (especially from 33:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U
    • jowday 2y ago
      Neither of them are “full AI/ML”, they’re both traditional robotics systems with ML used for detection/prediction/planning at certain steps. Elon will sometimes say something about moving to a “new ML stack”, but Tesla reverse engineers regularly look inside of what’s running in the cars and that’s not the case at all. Contrary to what other people in this thread are saying, the remote support isn’t remote direct driving of the car - essentially what will happen is that if the car finds itself in a situation where it’s unsure of how to proceed and it’s safe to stop, it will pause for a few seconds and wait for a remote operator to clarify a situation for it. A good example might be road construction - if the car detects new road construction work that doesn’t match its map of the area, and its onboard systems determine that it’s not sure how to proceed through the construction with confidence, it will send what it thinks the top five likeliest ways to proceed to a remote operator. The operator then selects the proper path (or says that none of them are proper). The car will then follow the path presented by the operator, but actual driving behavior /collision detection / pathfinding is still determined locally. Think of it like ordering a unit around in StarCraft.
• atx2bos 2y ago
  to my knowledge, Tesla has gone the computer vision route where they are solely relying on cameras and algorithms, while Waymo went the way of more traditional LIDAR and other scanners to close achieve the safe full self drive. The disadvantage of using the LIDAR and full sensor stack is largely price.
  • ra7 2y ago
    The advantage is that it works.
    • ronnier 2y ago
      So does Tesla’s. I use it daily. From home going through a busy city, onto a major highway with rush hour traffic, into a downtown area to work. It can do this without me touching the wheel or pedal for the entire length of the drive. I have a hw4 S plaid and it’s made dramatic improvements over this last year. I’m blown away at how good it is (also blown away by waymo).
      • ra7 2y ago
        The difference is you are in the driver's seat paying attention at all times and ready to intervene. That's the expectation set by the system. It's the fundamental difference between partial autonomy and full autonomy.
        • ronnier 2y ago
          Waymo also has drivers. They are just remote and they intervene when needed. Waymois is also bound to highly mapped roads in a few cities. Don’t get me wrong waymo is impressive, I use it as much as possible. The future looks amazing. Do you also agree Tesla’s self driving is impressive?
          • ra7 2y ago
            Well, we know exactly how Waymo's remote operators help out: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/. They can't prevent accidents in real time like the Tesla drivers do and can't "control" or "drive" the vehicles. Tesla FSD is impressive for a driver assist system. But that's all it is — a driver assist. They need orders of magnitude improvement to match Waymo's performance and go driverless.
• intelkishan 2y ago
  Tesla is aiming for a camera only method, whereas Waymo is going for a camera+LIDAR approach.
  • misiti3780 2y ago
    and high def maps, which may or may not be up to date
  • Zigurd 2y ago
    Waymo's latest hardware uses 13 cameras, 4 LIDARs, 6 radars and at least one mic. Def not early-optimized. I have not found a BOM for the whole package. That's a significantly different idea of how much, and how varied, sensor input it takes.
• deleted 2y ago
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• tw04 2y ago
  Tesla thinks they can do everything with nothing but cameras. Everyone else is using multiple sensors to give the computer additional info to verify what the vision is sensing. At this point it seems extremely unlikely Tesla will ever produce fsd with vision only. Probably why they added radar back into the model s refresh. It is currently not enabled afaik. I find it fascinating the crew of Tesla fanboys on this site that run around downvoting anyone who isn’t drinking the koolade, but never have anything factual or constructive to add to the conversation. There is literally no indication at all that Tesla is right and every other expert in the industry is wrong about vision only never working. We’re a decade in and they still can’t prevent phantom braking that a 2010 ford Taurus didn’t suffer from.
• infecto 2y ago
  This an explanation from a layman on the auto side. Tesla has focused on attempting to solve all cases using vision and generalize it as much as possible. The pro is you would be able to drop FSD capabilities anywhere in the US and it will work. The con is the tail of edge cases take significantly more effort then the first 80%. Waymo instead of being generalized, works off of a detailed map for each region they drive in. They have a complete expectation of every detail on those roads and so then only need to account for the dynamic unknowns on the road. The pro is that they are getting to hands off driving sooner. The con is that anywhere its deployed needs detailed mapping and for that mapping to be kept up to date. Time will tell which strategy pays off.
  • borg16 2y ago
    if i am interested in reading more about this, can you point me to some resources?
    • RivieraKid 2y ago
      Google "waymo dolgov" on YouTube, there's a recent lecture and a recent interview by Dmitri Dolgov. In the lecture, he talks about their architecture.
    • jowday 2y ago
      I’d advise you to ignore lay explanations of the space - outside of the industry most of the discourse about self driving cars is poisoned by Elon’s deceptive presentations and his followers who parrot what he says. If you want a grounded explanation of how Tesla’s stack works, follow @greentheonly on twitter. He’s a Tesla reverse engineer who regularly posts about the software that’s actually running on the car. If you want an explanation about how real AV companies stacks work, I’d read Sebastian Thrun’s robotics textbook - then imagine what’s outlined in that book but with ML plugged in to a ton of spaces throughout the stack. This is also similar to how Tesla’s stack works, btw - greens just good to follow because a lot of people refuse to believe Tesla isn’t running some kind of “LLM but for driving” fully end to end black box model. Tesla won’t launch a robotaxi anytime soon because they can’t use remote support or HD maps - although I think they’ve been stepping up their mapping efforts. Even the demo at Universal studios a few weeks ago was HD mapped - per @greentheonlys twitter. I worked in the space for years and have seen the internal of both a traditional robotaxi company’s stack and Tesla’s.
• doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > fundamental differences No. A Tesla with a driver and a Waymo have a lot in common: "When self driving cars don't actually drive themselves" https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/insider/when-self-driving-cars-dont-actually-drive-themselves.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/insider/when-self-driving... There isn't a big story to this. Does Waymo share details about how and when its vehicles are driven remotely? Since the answer is no, you can only assume that it is pretty often. Really kudos to Zoox for turning a profile about them into this unveiling of Waymo. I fell for Waymo's sleight of hand. Aspirationally, we really do want self driving cars.
  • 05 2y ago
    > when its vehicles are driven remotely? They aren't. The car asks the remote operator about its options, the operator suggests an option, the car proceeds. Nobody is driving in realtime over LTE, that would be insane.
    • tzs 2y ago
      > Nobody is driving in realtime over LTE, that would be insane. To be pedantic that's not really a good argument against the possibility of remote driving. All of Waymo's service areas are inside the coverage areas of AT&T's 5G+, Verizon's 5G Ultra Wide, and T-Mobile's 5G Ultra Capacity networks.
      • doctorpangloss 2y ago
        Just because they figured out an efficient way for the cars to be driven remotely doesn't mean that the cars are not being driven remotely. This ventures a bit into a subjective sense of what is self driving, and clearly, Waymos overstate their self driving ability through a variety of very clever, very powerful sleights of hand.
  • kccqzy 2y ago
    Waymo shared that their disengagement rate is 17k miles per disengagement meaning they are driven by human test drivers once per 17k miles, across all causes. It doesn't include assists by humans because that's not driving: it's merely remote humans answering a question about where to drive in case of a novel obstacle on the road. You'd be nuts to think remote humans actually drive: the internet infrastructure is not designed for guaranteed low latency. I also wouldn't trust NYT reporting on anything related to Big Tech: they have a well-documented pattern of anti-big-tech biased reporting.
• hiddencost 2y ago
  Tesla chose to recklessly endanger lives, killing at least 50 people by releasing an unsafe beta test. Their goal was to capture market share from Waymo. This is the thing that drives me nuts: wantonly ignoring regulations designed to protect consumers, and claiming that it was going to save more people than it hurt, in the long run. Tesla's participation in the market has not and will not make self driving arrive earlier than if they had refrained from participating. All it has done is given them an opportunity to compete for market share, and engage in pump and dump scams by misrepresenting their progress to naive investors.
• valine 2y ago
  People get hung up on the vision stack and mapping. Obviously, any self-driving car needs a way to perceive the world around it, and Tesla’s approach is very different from Waymo. The software that actually does the driving, ie turns the wheel and works the pedals, is very similar between the two companies. Tesla took a big step in Waymo’s direction earlier this year when they replaced their optimization based path planner with a neural network.
• Zigurd 2y ago
  Tesla is taking a minimalist approach to every important factor: Specialized vs unmodified production cars; back seat in-vehicle UI + app vs app-only for sitting in back; multiple sensor types vs camera-only; intensive mapping of a service area vs crowdsourced; only Waymo-owned vehicles vs private cars seconded to the service. The biggest small detail is that Waymo's expansion is gated on achieving performance goals like very little need for remote supervision because Google won't hire a building full of remote monitors. Tesla claims this will be possible "by next year."
  • UltraSane 2y ago
    Tesla is betting the farm on vision only L4 AD actually being possible and so far have not done much to prove this is the case.
• martythemaniak 2y ago
  People will tell you they're fundamentally different, but they are in fact the same. First, there are two different, independent aspects: Perception and Action. Seeing the world, vs taking action in that world. For perception Waymo uses more sensors than Tesla. It uses lidar to construct a 3D scene of what the car is seeing, while Tesla uses SLAM-like techniques with their cameras. What people are missing is that these are only a small part of the perception problem - lidar returns a monochromatic 3D scene so it cannot see labels, markings, read signs, lights etc. LIDAR simply doesn't carry the necessary information needed to navigate the world, thus it is a secondary source of info. Cameras in motion do carry all the information needed, so the big difference between them is only one part of the overall perception stack. Once you have constructed a labeled, accurate 3D scene (whether by lidar or SLAM), "action" is the same and there is no difference between Tesla and Waymo here. They both have to learn how to drive safely using the same information, so it's going to be a lot like LLMs where there's difference between LLAMA/Claude/GPT, but they're also all kinda the same thing.
  • nobunaga 2y ago
    The fact that you don’t know the difference in capabilities between cameras and LiDAR means you shouldn’t really be commenting. LiDAR allows you to also ‘see’ things in conditions where weather is bad visibility is limited. Cameras cannot allow you to do this. Going through this thread, it is mind blowing how people let their fanboyism for others talk nonsense. So many Elon lovers here. Can all those Elon lovers just jump in the backseat of a Tesla and turn on FSD (which is an oxymoron) and jump on a high way or something? The world would be a better place. I can’t wait to see their faces and a the drivel they will come up with next year when Elon announces delays and other bull**t fit why he can’t launch what he promised. It’s going to be hilarious.
• dyauspitr 2y ago
  The biggest difference is the presence of lidar in Waymo vehicles which means they have an accurate physical representation of the world vs the vision only based approach that Tesla is taking.
• lopkeny12ko 2y ago
  I would highly recommend watching this side by side comparison video of the experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kswp1DwUAAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kswp1DwUAAI
  • ra7 2y ago
    It's apples-to-oranges comparison. One is doing it completely driverless and has to get it right every single time. The other has a driver ready to intervene and just needs a single intervention-free drive.
  • agildehaus 2y ago
    I would recommend watching this video, where the same YouTuber is using FSD which takes an exit and needs intervention to avoid running directly into a divider. https://youtu.be/LbCGAN6Pk_c?t=2026 https://youtu.be/LbCGAN6Pk_c?t=2026
    • lopkeny12ko 2y ago
      You seem to be stating this as some kind of gotcha. 1. Since that video, FSD 12.5.6.1 has been released, and v13 (which is what is rumored to have been used on Cybercab) is just around the corner. It is completely disingenuius to point to a video 7 months old (on FSD 12.3!) and insinuate that it is representative of the current experience. 2. In FSD, interventions are in your hands. With Waymo in the same situation, your fate lies solely in the remote operator watching your vehicle and how quickly they are able to react. FSD is obviously not perfect but the rate of interventions plummets with every new major release.
      • agildehaus 2y ago
        I have videos of safety critical interventions in v12.5. Here's one of it attempting to drive straight through a roundabout at 50 miles per hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XagBTmpgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XagBTmpgw Your understanding of remote support is entirely wrong. At no point can a remote operator "drive" a Waymo. They confirm or change plans when the car gets stuck -- that's it.
• deleted 2y ago
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