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The Waymo-Tesla duality is so fun. Tesla FSD already works everywhere, even on unpaved roads. It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo. Waymo works very well, ju

The Waymo-Tesla duality is so fun. Tesla FSD already works everywhere, even on unpaved roads. It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo. Waymo works very well, just not in as many places as Tesla. You might bet on Waymo because they have a fully working product already, but I’m betting on Tesla because of the vast amount of training data they are collecting. There’s a bitter lesson here.

ra7 2y ago
Waymo works in 4 cities as a fully autonomous vehicle. Tesla works nowhere as a fully autonomous vehicle.
appletrotter 2y ago
I’m betting on waymo because they use lidar
- dawnerd 2y ago
  Well and because they actually have real self driving cars without a safety driver. Tesla doesn't have that and only has demoed it in very specific scenarios.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    It's not that black-and-white. And those demos are VERY old at this point. I own a Tesla, though I don't own FSD, but this year, Tesla has given all cars a trial of FSD on two occasions. It works remarkably well. I backed out of my driveway, then enabled FSD and it drove all the way across Portland to a friend's place with zero intervention. It was about a 15 mile, 30 minute drive. It navigated neighborhood roads without markings and tons of cars parked on the curb. It got onto the freeway and navigated, including changing lanes to overtake slow traffic. Once I got to their place, I was able to tell it to automatically parallel park on the curb. As far as I'm concerned, Tesla has fulfilled their promise of full self driving. The "supervised" requirement is basically just being used as a legal loophole to avoid liability if it fails.
    - ra7 2y ago
      > The "supervised" requirement is basically just being used as a legal loophole to avoid liability if it fails. "If it fails" - so it is supervised for a reason then. It makes sense because FSD has an intervention rate in the low double digits according to community trackers like https://teslafsdtracker.com https://teslafsdtracker.com.
    - 8note 2y ago
      I think I'd only consider the promise met if they take the liability
crubier 2y ago
Waymo vs Tesla definitely smells like bitter lesson to me yes, 100%. With Waymo being on the bitter side, to be clear. Future will tell if the intuition is right on this one
- ghaff 2y ago
  Well, one thing is that many of us rarely take taxis. (Aside from reserved private cars to the airport now and then.) I'm unconvinced that self-driving changes the equation enough for most of us. I do have a trip coming up that 50% cheaper Uber might lead me to not rent a car but that's rare.
  - soco 2y ago
    Outside the US the situation is quite different. But I don't see Waymo testing outside the US, not even trying, so there.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Car ownership is pretty high in a lot of places. It's still pretty much central urban--lower ownership, harder to re-find a parking spot--vs. everywhere else. Taxis may be more common in some places but there are still a lot of privately owned cars and taking taxis or having drivers is really not the norm in most places.
      - soco 2y ago
        Nevertheless the comment I was answering to was about renting a car instead of taking a cab or the public transport.
- fhub 2y ago
  FWIW, Waymo has more cameras than a Tesla. Both companies are removing sensors over time. In some ways removing sensors is easier to prove out with real-life data than adding them. I think it is going to be fascinating to see how it plays out.
tapoxi 2y ago
But doesn't Waymo have the better hardware/sensors?
- bigyikes 2y ago
  I’m not sure about computing hardware, but Waymo absolutely has better sensors, yes. But it isn’t obvious to me that better sensors outperform better data.
  - runako 2y ago
    Isn't Waymo operating an autonomous taxi service for 100k trips per week an object example of outperformance? Shipping working product should count!
    - bigyikes 2y ago
      It definitely counts! I also didn’t realize the trip count was so high, that is very impressive. The diversity of geography may be critical, though. You can only drive the Embarcadero so many times before your loss bottoms out.
      - runako 2y ago
        It looks similar to a cable/fiber rollout where they have to onboard each region individually. I know they are currently doing this in the Atlanta metro. Like cable/fiber, once they have good models of the business and what it costs to roll out, they have the freedom to accelerate and do regions in parallel. If the business works, I would expect them to scale the pace of rollout.
    - xnx 2y ago
      > 100k trips per week Now 150k trips per week (things are moving fast) https://x.com/Waymo/status/1851365483972538407 https://x.com/Waymo/status/1851365483972538407
  - fhub 2y ago
    Waymo has much better data than Tesla. It is just the coverage of that data that is different.
laluser 2y ago
Waymo was able to do this with less miles. How much data does Tesla really need at this point? Assume you have all the data in the world that you could ever possibly want. How much of that can you really compress into a car for real FSD?
- dawnerd 2y ago
  Tesla was supposed to have what they needed when they released the Model 3. Then they had to upgrade the cameras and CPU which meant they had to re train. Then they re-wrote, so again retrain. Now it's new cameras and compute again. Cycle repeats.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    How over-fitted are their models to the cameras? I'd expect a layered architecture where a sensor layer does object-recognition and classification and then hands over this representation of the world to a higher-level planning model. You should have to retrain the whole stack for camera revisions - hell that's how it would work across car models with their different camera angles.
r00fus 2y ago
> Tesla FSD already works everywhere, even on unpaved roads. It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo. I would not bet on Tesla's FSD other than on highways. Same as many of the Tesla FSD owners I know.
- _ea1k 2y ago
  I think I dislike it more on the highway than in the city, and I really dislike it around traffic lights. The highway lane change decisions are awful. Maybe the end-to-end NN version is better, though. I haven't been able to try it (hw3).
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Indeed, it was not very long ago that FSD would happily take a straight line through a roundabout, lanes or "skirts" be damned, essentially treating it as a standard intersection.
x86x87 2y ago
so tesla works everywhere except where it doesn't work?
- bigyikes 2y ago
  No, the duality is: Waymo works any time, except where it doesn’t. Tesla works any where, except when it doesn’t.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - _ea1k 2y ago
    There are some "where" issues with Tesla too. I have an intersection where it consistently can't tell that its view is obstructed. It'll just yolo into the intersection then pause (after pulling out into the lane) when it realizes that it wasn't actually able to see. Its consistent behavior, and seems to be a flaw with obstruction detection. I might argue that every traffic light is sort of a where too. Mystery meat yellow light handling is scarily bad.
stavros 2y ago
I don't understand the "bitter lesson" reference here. The bitter lesson is that general methods of computation are more effective. How is one of the two not using general methods?
- bigyikes 2y ago
  My understanding is that Waymo is applying specialized centimeter-scale mapping and lidar to achieve superior results. In contrast, Tesla is using dumb cameras and just dumping boatloads of data into their model. It’s a more general solution. Maybe the reference doesn’t fit perfectly - the model architecture is likely similar under the hood - but there’s some analogy there.
  - ra7 2y ago
    I think you need to update your understanding. Just saying they have better results because of mapping and lidar is incredibly reductive. They have an extremely sophisticated AI/ML stack and simulators. Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U&t=2135s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U&t=2135s
Rebuff5007 2y ago
My definition of "works" includes the fact that a self-driving car will never drive into a parked fire truck, or many other things i've seen tesla FSD do.
fhub 2y ago
One challenge for Tesla and Waymo has been the piecemeal permitting process. Even though California gave Waymo a statewide permit they have still needed to work through various cities/counties for permits. I imagine one goal of Musk's is to make that all go away sometime next year. I'm not making a comment on whether I agree that is a good idea. Just speculating.
- Overtonwindow 2y ago
  Do you think it’s time for a specific federal regulation?
AlotOfReading 2y ago
FSD and Waymo are completely different products. FSD isn't even autonomous, as the user manual reminds you: Always remember that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) (also known as Autosteer on City Streets) does not make Model Y autonomous and requires a fully attentive driver who is ready to take immediate action at all times.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
runako 2y ago
> the vast amount of training data they are collecting They keep pushing this point. And they do appear to be collecting an absolute firehose of data from the millions of vehicles they have on the road. By comparison, Waymo collects a lot less data from many fewer vehicles. Which leads to some tough questions about Tesla's tech. If they have (conservatively) 10x the training data that Waymo has, why can't their product perform as well as Waymo? Do they need 100x? 1,000x? 10,000x? Assuming they were at parity with Waymo today, this would suggest that their AI is only at best 10% as effective as Waymo's, and possibly more like 1% or 0.1% or whatever. But since they can't achieve parity, it's not even possible to bound it. It's entirely possible that their current stack cannot solve the problem of autonomous driving any more than the expert systems of the 60s could do speech translation. I haven't heard a compelling argument as to why a system that is at best 10% as effective would ever be expected to be the leader.
- npinsker 2y ago
  Data isn’t as useful here as in other domains, since when you change the car’s behavior even a tiny bit, a lot of the timeseries is invalidated. It’s not evergreen, and it can be quite subjective what it means to “pass” a scenario that one previously failed. Also, Tesla collects data from its fleet, but that data’s fidelity is likely quite limited compared to other companies, because of bandwidth if nothing else. Waymo can easily store every lidar point cloud of every frame of driving.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Data quality is important, too.
xnx 2y ago
> It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo. I hope for the best for Tesla, but they are many years behind Waymo. The world definitely needs a second working self-driving system! Right now comparing Tesla and Waymo is nonsensical. Once you can sit in the backseat of a Tesla while it drives there might be some worthy comparisons to be made.
worik 2y ago
> I’m betting on Tesla I'll take that bet... I predict the Chinese, in a decade, will have the first FSD Tesla is miles behind
- kernal 2y ago
  >I predict the Chinese, in a decade, will have the first FSD I'll take that bet any day. China and innovation don't go hand in hand.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Didi's testing self driving taxis but before I take the bet and tell you that we should decide on the goal posts.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Uhm, we already have FSDs, both the USA and China, just not the Tesla FSD. China is running auto taxis in a few limited areas with full setups that rely on LIDAR, and I hear they are pretty good.
minwcnt5 2y ago
If training data is such an edge for Tesla, how is it that Waymo works so much better than FSD with only 1/1000th the data? I also don't see any evidence that Waymo can't work anywhere. They recently expanded to Austin, and it seems that it immediately drives better than FSD.
kernal 2y ago
Tesla FSD will never catch up to Waymo until they switch to LIDAR and have human assistance when the vehicle gets into complicated scenarios such as emergency vehicles blocking the road and redirecting traffic.
ryandvm 2y ago
I'm betting on Tesla not for the technology, but because President Quid Pro Bro is probably going to issue an Executive Order that turns every Tesla company into a federally blessed monopoly.
IshKebab 2y ago
Training data is trivial to collect. Betting on Tesla because they have more training data than Waymo is like betting on Roscosmos because they have more employees than SpaceX.

ra7 2y ago

Waymo works in 4 cities as a fully autonomous vehicle. Tesla works nowhere as a fully autonomous vehicle.

appletrotter 2y ago

I’m betting on waymo because they use lidar

dawnerd 2y ago
Well and because they actually have real self driving cars without a safety driver. Tesla doesn't have that and only has demoed it in very specific scenarios.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  It's not that black-and-white. And those demos are VERY old at this point. I own a Tesla, though I don't own FSD, but this year, Tesla has given all cars a trial of FSD on two occasions. It works remarkably well. I backed out of my driveway, then enabled FSD and it drove all the way across Portland to a friend's place with zero intervention. It was about a 15 mile, 30 minute drive. It navigated neighborhood roads without markings and tons of cars parked on the curb. It got onto the freeway and navigated, including changing lanes to overtake slow traffic. Once I got to their place, I was able to tell it to automatically parallel park on the curb. As far as I'm concerned, Tesla has fulfilled their promise of full self driving. The "supervised" requirement is basically just being used as a legal loophole to avoid liability if it fails.
  - ra7 2y ago
    > The "supervised" requirement is basically just being used as a legal loophole to avoid liability if it fails. "If it fails" - so it is supervised for a reason then. It makes sense because FSD has an intervention rate in the low double digits according to community trackers like https://teslafsdtracker.com https://teslafsdtracker.com.
  - 8note 2y ago
    I think I'd only consider the promise met if they take the liability

crubier 2y ago

Waymo vs Tesla definitely smells like bitter lesson to me yes, 100%. With Waymo being on the bitter side, to be clear. Future will tell if the intuition is right on this one

ghaff 2y ago
Well, one thing is that many of us rarely take taxis. (Aside from reserved private cars to the airport now and then.) I'm unconvinced that self-driving changes the equation enough for most of us. I do have a trip coming up that 50% cheaper Uber might lead me to not rent a car but that's rare.
- soco 2y ago
  Outside the US the situation is quite different. But I don't see Waymo testing outside the US, not even trying, so there.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Car ownership is pretty high in a lot of places. It's still pretty much central urban--lower ownership, harder to re-find a parking spot--vs. everywhere else. Taxis may be more common in some places but there are still a lot of privately owned cars and taking taxis or having drivers is really not the norm in most places.
    - soco 2y ago
      Nevertheless the comment I was answering to was about renting a car instead of taking a cab or the public transport.
fhub 2y ago
FWIW, Waymo has more cameras than a Tesla. Both companies are removing sensors over time. In some ways removing sensors is easier to prove out with real-life data than adding them. I think it is going to be fascinating to see how it plays out.

tapoxi 2y ago

But doesn't Waymo have the better hardware/sensors?

bigyikes 2y ago
I’m not sure about computing hardware, but Waymo absolutely has better sensors, yes. But it isn’t obvious to me that better sensors outperform better data.
- runako 2y ago
  Isn't Waymo operating an autonomous taxi service for 100k trips per week an object example of outperformance? Shipping working product should count!
  - bigyikes 2y ago
    It definitely counts! I also didn’t realize the trip count was so high, that is very impressive. The diversity of geography may be critical, though. You can only drive the Embarcadero so many times before your loss bottoms out.
    - runako 2y ago
      It looks similar to a cable/fiber rollout where they have to onboard each region individually. I know they are currently doing this in the Atlanta metro. Like cable/fiber, once they have good models of the business and what it costs to roll out, they have the freedom to accelerate and do regions in parallel. If the business works, I would expect them to scale the pace of rollout.
  - xnx 2y ago
    > 100k trips per week Now 150k trips per week (things are moving fast) https://x.com/Waymo/status/1851365483972538407 https://x.com/Waymo/status/1851365483972538407
- fhub 2y ago
  Waymo has much better data than Tesla. It is just the coverage of that data that is different.

laluser 2y ago

Waymo was able to do this with less miles. How much data does Tesla really need at this point? Assume you have all the data in the world that you could ever possibly want. How much of that can you really compress into a car for real FSD?

dawnerd 2y ago
Tesla was supposed to have what they needed when they released the Model 3. Then they had to upgrade the cameras and CPU which meant they had to re train. Then they re-wrote, so again retrain. Now it's new cameras and compute again. Cycle repeats.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  How over-fitted are their models to the cameras? I'd expect a layered architecture where a sensor layer does object-recognition and classification and then hands over this representation of the world to a higher-level planning model. You should have to retrain the whole stack for camera revisions - hell that's how it would work across car models with their different camera angles.

r00fus 2y ago

> Tesla FSD already works everywhere, even on unpaved roads. It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo. I would not bet on Tesla's FSD other than on highways. Same as many of the Tesla FSD owners I know.

_ea1k 2y ago
I think I dislike it more on the highway than in the city, and I really dislike it around traffic lights. The highway lane change decisions are awful. Maybe the end-to-end NN version is better, though. I haven't been able to try it (hw3).
FireBeyond 2y ago
Indeed, it was not very long ago that FSD would happily take a straight line through a roundabout, lanes or "skirts" be damned, essentially treating it as a standard intersection.

x86x87 2y ago

so tesla works everywhere except where it doesn't work?

bigyikes 2y ago
No, the duality is: Waymo works any time, except where it doesn’t. Tesla works any where, except when it doesn’t.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- _ea1k 2y ago
  There are some "where" issues with Tesla too. I have an intersection where it consistently can't tell that its view is obstructed. It'll just yolo into the intersection then pause (after pulling out into the lane) when it realizes that it wasn't actually able to see. Its consistent behavior, and seems to be a flaw with obstruction detection. I might argue that every traffic light is sort of a where too. Mystery meat yellow light handling is scarily bad.

stavros 2y ago

I don't understand the "bitter lesson" reference here. The bitter lesson is that general methods of computation are more effective. How is one of the two not using general methods?

bigyikes 2y ago
My understanding is that Waymo is applying specialized centimeter-scale mapping and lidar to achieve superior results. In contrast, Tesla is using dumb cameras and just dumping boatloads of data into their model. It’s a more general solution. Maybe the reference doesn’t fit perfectly - the model architecture is likely similar under the hood - but there’s some analogy there.
- ra7 2y ago
  I think you need to update your understanding. Just saying they have better results because of mapping and lidar is incredibly reductive. They have an extremely sophisticated AI/ML stack and simulators. Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U&t=2135s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U&t=2135s

Rebuff5007 2y ago

My definition of "works" includes the fact that a self-driving car will never drive into a parked fire truck, or many other things i've seen tesla FSD do.

fhub 2y ago

One challenge for Tesla and Waymo has been the piecemeal permitting process. Even though California gave Waymo a statewide permit they have still needed to work through various cities/counties for permits. I imagine one goal of Musk's is to make that all go away sometime next year. I'm not making a comment on whether I agree that is a good idea. Just speculating.

Overtonwindow 2y ago
Do you think it’s time for a specific federal regulation?

AlotOfReading 2y ago

FSD and Waymo are completely different products. FSD isn't even autonomous, as the user manual reminds you: Always remember that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) (also known as Autosteer on City Streets) does not make Model Y autonomous and requires a fully attentive driver who is ready to take immediate action at all times.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

runako 2y ago

> the vast amount of training data they are collecting They keep pushing this point. And they do appear to be collecting an absolute firehose of data from the millions of vehicles they have on the road. By comparison, Waymo collects a lot less data from many fewer vehicles. Which leads to some tough questions about Tesla's tech. If they have (conservatively) 10x the training data that Waymo has, why can't their product perform as well as Waymo? Do they need 100x? 1,000x? 10,000x? Assuming they were at parity with Waymo today, this would suggest that their AI is only at best 10% as effective as Waymo's, and possibly more like 1% or 0.1% or whatever. But since they can't achieve parity, it's not even possible to bound it. It's entirely possible that their current stack cannot solve the problem of autonomous driving any more than the expert systems of the 60s could do speech translation. I haven't heard a compelling argument as to why a system that is at best 10% as effective would ever be expected to be the leader.

npinsker 2y ago
Data isn’t as useful here as in other domains, since when you change the car’s behavior even a tiny bit, a lot of the timeseries is invalidated. It’s not evergreen, and it can be quite subjective what it means to “pass” a scenario that one previously failed. Also, Tesla collects data from its fleet, but that data’s fidelity is likely quite limited compared to other companies, because of bandwidth if nothing else. Waymo can easily store every lidar point cloud of every frame of driving.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Data quality is important, too.

xnx 2y ago

> It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo. I hope for the best for Tesla, but they are many years behind Waymo. The world definitely needs a second working self-driving system! Right now comparing Tesla and Waymo is nonsensical. Once you can sit in the backseat of a Tesla while it drives there might be some worthy comparisons to be made.

worik 2y ago

> I’m betting on Tesla I'll take that bet... I predict the Chinese, in a decade, will have the first FSD Tesla is miles behind

kernal 2y ago
>I predict the Chinese, in a decade, will have the first FSD I'll take that bet any day. China and innovation don't go hand in hand.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Didi's testing self driving taxis but before I take the bet and tell you that we should decide on the goal posts.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Uhm, we already have FSDs, both the USA and China, just not the Tesla FSD. China is running auto taxis in a few limited areas with full setups that rely on LIDAR, and I hear they are pretty good.

minwcnt5 2y ago

If training data is such an edge for Tesla, how is it that Waymo works so much better than FSD with only 1/1000th the data? I also don't see any evidence that Waymo can't work anywhere. They recently expanded to Austin, and it seems that it immediately drives better than FSD.

kernal 2y ago

Tesla FSD will never catch up to Waymo until they switch to LIDAR and have human assistance when the vehicle gets into complicated scenarios such as emergency vehicles blocking the road and redirecting traffic.

ryandvm 2y ago

I'm betting on Tesla not for the technology, but because President Quid Pro Bro is probably going to issue an Executive Order that turns every Tesla company into a federally blessed monopoly.

IshKebab 2y ago

Training data is trivial to collect. Betting on Tesla because they have more training data than Waymo is like betting on Roscosmos because they have more employees than SpaceX.