5 ms·

A Song of “Full Self-Driving”

100 points by latexr 1y ago

ddalex 1y ago
Full self driving is either a hard problem - requiring advanced sensors and algorithms; or an easy problem - solvable with cameras and neural nets. If it's hard, Waymo has an insurmountable lead. If it is easy, everyone can replicate easily what Tesla is doing. I'm not seeing any strategic moat on Tesla's side
- rcxdude 1y ago
  The notional moat is that it's easy given enough training data, which Tesla has a significant hoard of. I'm skeptical of this (they've been in that situation for a long time now), but that's the argument.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    Tesla has imagery from lo-res cameras. If it turns out that LIDAR and/or radar is needed for AVs, the value of that data is questionable.
- tomp 1y ago
  You simply have no idea how AI works. The key ingredient is data - the bitter lesson. It's not about better algorithms, but simply about algorithms that can process more data efficiently (e.g. transformers). Tesla is one of the few companies that have a data flywheel - a fleet of (non-self-driving) cars collecting real-world data worldwide all the time at massive scale! Now that is an insourmountable lead. (Along with good engineering, which, believe it or not, is still a competitive advantage - see e.g. German car companies unable to launch a single useful on-board computer, let alone a software-defined self-driving car.) Google is one of the few companies that could compete, even without Waymo, because of YouTube.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    It will turn out there isn't a linear relationship between data volumes and successful self driving. There will be a wall somewhere that prevents it from being achieved regardless of data (assuming current AI techniques and hardware available in the foreseeable future). So what will happen is Musk and co will demand that roads be redesigned to accommodate their tech (e.g. cars network and human drivers are banned from major highways).
    - tomp 1y ago
      Maybe, but so far we don't really have any examples of good AI (or even barely working AI like GPT4o) that wasn't trained on massive amounts of data. Is data enough? Maybe not, there's a lot of progress on RL now that can do wonders without even more data. Is data necessary? No evidence to the contrary, yet.
    - testing22321 1y ago
      > what will happen is Musk and co will demand that roads be redesigned to accommodate their tech Every road, in every country on earth? No, that is never going to happen.
  - aatd86 1y ago
    How would youtube help with driving?
    - tomp 1y ago
      Massive amount of "world" data - enough for Google to successfully train Veo3, a "video generation" model that is extremely good, and evidently includes a decent "world model" i.e. a model that can generate or, more accurately, predict the (short-term) "future" - like "what happens if you let go of an apple" (it falls down) etc. This kind of "world models" that can understand physics enough to be able to predict short term future (like humans can) are crucial for any kind of real-world AI (i.e. robotics, including self-driving), because they constitute what could be termed as "physical common sense" (that humans have, but also animals, to some degree). Is it enough for self-driving? No, you also need to understand road rules, communicate with humans (pedestrians and fellow drivers), etc. but it's a good, possibly necessary, step - it allows you to better handle many unpredictable (tail of distribution) situations: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g75ftb/waymo_meets_water_fountain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g75ftb/wa... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJH8hED11I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJH8hED11I
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  I agree with you on the moat side. Tesla is very late to this market. But, I would also argue that Waymo's moat isn't that wide either. Waymo is probably behind their Chinese counterparts that are already operating at a larger scale. More rides. Larger cities. And more of them. Waymo isn't the only player in the market and unlike Tesla and their Chinese competitors, they aren't really structured as a manufacturing operation. They are modifying consumer cars made by others, probably at great cost. That raises the question about how they are going to scale. Waymo is so far not a scalable operation. They can manage thousands of cars. But can they handle millions? Or make a profit. Chinese manufacturers, like Tesla, have a ready answer to that by virtue of their proven manufacturing skills. And it seems they so far don't need Waymo's software to get their cars to drive themselves. Tesla is late. But they can build cars at scale. So, I'm not ready to claim they are too late yet. I think Waymo might have a bright future ahead licensing their platform to manufacturers that are, so far, not showing many signs of having their own version of this. As for whether this is technically possible or not, I think it's hard to argue that it's not from the back of a self driving taxi. I've not had that pleasure yet (none around near where I live) but I've seen enough to not be that foolish.
  - jonstewart 1y ago
    I wonder how long a Chinese FSD car would last on the BWI parkway coping with Maryland drivers before it pulled over for a good cry.
    - gcr 1y ago
      Who would you trust more: an FSD that’s learned to survive Xi’an rush hour and Wenzhou’s interpretive traffic balet, or one that’s learned to panic brake in Palo Alto? America doesn’t have a monopoly on challenging driving situations, y’know. :-)
      - op00to 1y ago
        Is it still the case in China that it's cheaper to kill a pedestrian you hit with your car than it is to pay out damages? This might be propaganda! If so, I wonder if or how that affects the algorithms for pedestrian avoidance. :)
- steveBK123 1y ago
  I had a Tesla 2018-2022, and switched to a competing EV brand at that point. The fact that Tesla has removed sensors since then while competitors have added says a lot. My car doesn't even have LIDAR but it has 5 radar sensors (corners & forward) so it can do all sorts of neat stuff. For example, it has actual working adjacent lane blindspot detection, which Tesla never dialed in. It also can warn you about oncoming cars at intersections or when backing out of parking spots. It even flashes lights on the doors if you try to open a door when a car is coming in the adjacent lane. None of that is full self driving but it leaves me wondering what Tesla can ever accomplish with cameras-only.
  - rimunroe 1y ago
    > For example, it has actual working adjacent lane blindspot detection Is this not standard? I don’t think my Hyundai Ioniq 5’s blind spot detection has ever failed to warn me about a car in my blind spot
    - steveBK123 1y ago
      Tesla literally didn't have it in 2018, and slowly added a poor implementation of it over time. Recall the card hardware had no light not he mirror or in the window sill to alert you, so their early version required looking at the screen. Current Teslas at least actually have some sort of light in the sill, but again its using cameras only, no radar, sonar, whatever.
      - gcr 1y ago
        That’s really surprising. Whenever I rent a car, I’ve relied on that feature as standard issue for modern vehicles. It’s like selling a Tesla without an air conditioner.
        philistine 1y ago
        Tesla's were ahead of the curve on most things when they first came out. Tesla has refused to join the year model model, so their changes have been haphazard, often regressive, and ultimately very slow. They still are ahead on some technologies, with the Cybertruck's one and only interesting technology its drive-by-wire system, but the industry has caught up and overtaken Tesla with the relentless progress of the year model.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  How hard the problem is may depend on how successful you are at lobbying politicians to force your solution down the public's throat...
- boshalfoshal 1y ago
  You are thinking about "hard" and "easy" in the wrong frame of mind. What Tesla does is not "easy" either. Their moat is manufacturing and the R&D they've spent on codesigning their HW and SW stack, and their insane supply chain. Ford does not suddenly have several million cars with 8-9 cameras to tap into for training data, nor does it have the infrastructure/talent to train models with the data it may get. I think you are underselling the Tesla moat. Its the same reason why there are only 3-4 "frontier" AI labs, and the rest are just playing catchup, despite a lot of LLM improvements being pretty well researched and open in papers.
walthamstow 1y ago
The thing about Tesla having more cars on the road is obviously true, but Google Street View captures my house in London at a decent frequency, about twice a year, so those cars are driving around capturing data all the time in major cities. I assume they're capturing more than just images, does anyone know for a fact?
- xnx 1y ago
  Lidar was added in 2017 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View#:~:text=LIDAR%20scanners%20from%20Velodyne%20were,depth%20information%20and%20positional%20information. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View#:~:text=L...
  - flir 1y ago
    Thanks! I thought the 3D models in Google Maps were just Extremely Clever Math. Lidar and Extremely Clever Math makes more sense.
    - tavavex 1y ago
      It's actually photogrammetry, not LiDAR (or at least, the LiDAR scans aren't done by Street View cars), which is why it's limited only to certain pre-scanned cities instead of everywhere with modern Street View.
- prepend 1y ago
  They were sued, and lost, for capturing and analyzing data off all the WiFi networks they drove by. [0] I assume they are recording all the metadata and data that they can to stay compliant with this. My guess is they have a list of every MAC address of every device they can find, geolocated. And then they match that to data from all those apps that ask to discover devices on my local network. Now they know how old my tv and lightbulbs are, etc etc [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joffe_v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joffe_v._Google,_Inc.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
amarcheschi 1y ago
The title made me think of something different, well, there actually is a song about musk and its cars, although it is from 4 years ago https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI&pp=ygUScGVuZWxvcGUgc2NvdHQgcmF0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI&pp=ygUScGVuZWxvcGU...
bhouston 1y ago
Maybe Elon isn’t Stark or Scott and the world is more complex than simple analogies. Elon is a great promoter and does have visionary ideas and has often been able to execute them when he is paying attention. He is also running a harem to get +100 or more children, seems racist for many reasons, over promises (but this comes with being a promoter), and has biased X/twitter to favour whatever ideas he currently likes.
- krapp 1y ago
  I think it's more accurate to say other people have been able to execute on his ideas (which aren't even entirely his) when he isn't allowed to interfere. Cybertruck and X are what you get when Elon Musk has his limiters off. SpaceX and Tesla are what you get when a competent team knows how to manage him and his ego.
  - bhouston 1y ago
    Yeah other people have executed but this actually true of anyone who starts companies and employs tons of people. He isn’t a sole practitioner in a lab. Also the ideas are not completely his mostly because this isn’t novel basic research. This is applied engineering and thus one needs to grab onto ideas who are ready for implementation at scale. This means they are well known ideas. I don’t disagree that Elon messes things a lot, especially recently. DOGE cuts are being undone via court ruling nearly as fast as he did them.
    - krapp 1y ago
      There's a greater tendency to treat Elon like a Tony Stark archetype whose singular genius and skill are responsible for his accomplishments than there is for other CEOs. No one would claim that Steve Jobs personally invented portable music players, or that Jeff Bezos invented internet commerce, but they will claim that there would be no electric cars or private space travel if not for Elon Musk, even given the same employees and funding.
      - bhouston 1y ago
kklisura 1y ago
> For years, Elon Musk has been promising that Teslas will operate completely autonomously in “Full Self Driving” (FSD) mode. And when I say years, I mean years... > Musk was sued by a group of shareholders who claimed that the Tesla boss had defrauded them with his lofty claims about the capabilities of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance tech, including Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. [1] > After hearing the case, U.S. district Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin claimed that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that the Tesla boss had acted with “deliberate recklessness,” .... That’s because Musk’s lawyers didn’t decide to argue that Tesla’s claims about its self-driving abilities were perfectly accurate. Instead, the legal team representing Musk basically said that nobody would realistically believe what Musk was banging on about... [1] > In a mind-numbing statement, Musk’s lawyers argue that his claims about Tesla Autopilot safety were “vague statements of corporate optimism are not objectively verifiable” [2] > The lawyers even argued, successfully, that “no reasonable investor would rely” on many of the alleged misleading statements because they are “mere puffing” [2] Never trust Elon's statements. [1] https://qz.com/tesla-robotaxi-lawsuit-elon-musk-lawyers-claims-1851665636 https://qz.com/tesla-robotaxi-lawsuit-elon-musk-lawyers-clai... [2] https://electrek.co/2024/10/02/elon-musk-celebrates-winning-lawsuit-tesla-self-driving-claims-embarrassing-defense/ https://electrek.co/2024/10/02/elon-musk-celebrates-winning-...
- lazide 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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cbeach 1y ago
To save your time, this is another article that focusses on the author's personal (and political) affectations with Elon Musk, as opposed to being a substantive technical review of FSD. FTA: > we’ve turned over large portions of America to insanely rich people who have no idea what they’re doing > It’s about oligarchy > What happened? Elon Musk was stupid. That’s what happened. > the stock market pretend that Musk hasn’t failed Anyone who's seen recent FSD videos on YouTube will understand the incredible progress that has been made, and how FSD is a real-world solution whereas Waymo (geo fences, "safety drivers" etc) isn't comparable
- sega_sai 1y ago
  Are you saying that the factual content of the article is incorrect? If not, yes the author may have views on Musk, but that is irrelevant in the context of the article.
  - epgui 1y ago
    Look, I can see just as well as anyone else that Musk is wildly off on his timelines, and I really don't like the guy either. That said, the article is full of facts that are decontextualized or presented in a misleading/misled manner.
- zippothrowaway 1y ago
  Becasue youtube videos now pass as data rather than self-interested anecdotes. What a sad world we live in.
  - cbeach 1y ago
    Hundreds of thousands of hours of people physically demonstrating FSD technology in the real world, with production cars and real users (who are not employed by the manufacturer) is meaningful evidence, even if it happens to be published on YouTube
  - epgui 1y ago
    > self-interested anecdotes It's more than that-- many people are spending a lot of time just testing FSD, filming it, actively looking for failure modes, and being quite methodical about it. We don't have the same data Tesla has about its fleet obviously, but we can all go and observe the progress being made.
jp57 1y ago
“Of course we already have full self-driving technology. It’s called Waymo…” Is it FSD, though? Understand that Waymo has remote tele-operators, who can intercede if necessary. How many are there? How many cars does each handle? I’m not sure the company makes that public.
- ddalex 1y ago
  They demoed what the operators do, they can only review the data and select one of a few possible options, they never take control of the car
- 420official 1y ago
  Waymo is firmly SAE self driving level 4 "automated driving" vs Tesla at level 2 "driver support". You're correct that waymo has operators that can jump in in the event something unusual happens, but the vast majority of the time the vehicle is operating autonomously within their defined area. All that is described by SAE level 4 where no human is driving while automatic driving is engaged. https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Google still carries trauma from buying Motorola, and all of Motorola's employees. They would never have expanded Waymo if it meant hiring buildings full of remote operators. And they've demonstrated that that's not how it works anyway.
x187463 1y ago
FSD is incredible in that it works everywhere, most of the time. The problem is it works most of the time. I do not think the current FSD sensor suite (camera only) will ever be safely capable of true unsupervised FSD. I use FSD every day. I would seriously estimate FSD has put 95% of the miles on my car. I regularly encounter the following: * treating red lights like stop signs * completely ignoring flash reds * stopping at flashing yellows * ignoring school zones * driving 10mph under the limit * driving 20mph over the limit * ignoring turn only lanes resulting in being dumped into oncoming traffic until it leisurely moves back into the correct lane * waiting until the last minute to get into the correct lane to make a turn/take an exit * ignoring signs indicating a lane ends and having to force its way into traffic * ignoring signs a lane ends and changing into the lane only to have to change back immediately * pulling out in front of cars, especially at night or other camera obscuring events * ignoring cars merging onto the highway and blocking them until I take over and get out of the way I treat it like cruise control. And based on the recent accident during which FSD decided to run itself off a perfectly straight, open, clear rode and into a tree, I keep my hand on the wheel. Even in a geo-fenced environment, FSD is NOT going to work for unsupervised robo-taxi applications. Musk needs to get out of the way and let them stick LIDARs on these cars. All that being said, it has also handled really complex driving in/around DC/Baltimore including some tricky merges/transitions that are hard to track as a human driver. It's knowledge of all of the surrounding vehicles allows it to make these maneuvers with far more confidence that I would. It also frees me up to track the bigger picture of traffic while not having to manage my speed/lane position. It's like driving with a friend who's not necessarily the best driver, but is basically competent. Let's just hope it doesn't decide to drive me in to a tree for no particular reason.
- op00to 1y ago
  I don't want to be seen as defending Tesla's overpromising and underdelivering, but everything you mentioned I see on a daily basis from all makes and models of motor vehicles on the roadway. Of course, FSD should be better than humans, but it's somewhat humorous to me that right now it's got the same problems as people.
  - ddalex 1y ago
leesec 1y ago
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Coeur 1y ago
"Lane-departure detection, front-collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control, emergency break assist—all of these features are powered by lidar." That's not true. Lane-departure detection uses mostly radar and cameras, adaptive cruise control usually uses radar and sometimes cameras, and emergency break assist is often just a brake pedal sensor. Front-collision avoidance uses lidar in some cars from the last 2 years. Lidar might very much be needed for full self driving, but it not yet used in many cars on the road today. The writer does not have all his facts straight.
aaron695 1y ago
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100 points by latexr 1y ago

Full self driving is either a hard problem - requiring advanced sensors and algorithms; or an easy problem - solvable with cameras and neural nets. If it's hard, Waymo has an insurmountable lead. If it is easy, everyone can replicate easily what Tesla is doing. I'm not seeing any strategic moat on Tesla's side

rcxdude 1y ago
The notional moat is that it's easy given enough training data, which Tesla has a significant hoard of. I'm skeptical of this (they've been in that situation for a long time now), but that's the argument.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Tesla has imagery from lo-res cameras. If it turns out that LIDAR and/or radar is needed for AVs, the value of that data is questionable.
tomp 1y ago
You simply have no idea how AI works. The key ingredient is data - the bitter lesson. It's not about better algorithms, but simply about algorithms that can process more data efficiently (e.g. transformers). Tesla is one of the few companies that have a data flywheel - a fleet of (non-self-driving) cars collecting real-world data worldwide all the time at massive scale! Now that is an insourmountable lead. (Along with good engineering, which, believe it or not, is still a competitive advantage - see e.g. German car companies unable to launch a single useful on-board computer, let alone a software-defined self-driving car.) Google is one of the few companies that could compete, even without Waymo, because of YouTube.
- dboreham 1y ago
  It will turn out there isn't a linear relationship between data volumes and successful self driving. There will be a wall somewhere that prevents it from being achieved regardless of data (assuming current AI techniques and hardware available in the foreseeable future). So what will happen is Musk and co will demand that roads be redesigned to accommodate their tech (e.g. cars network and human drivers are banned from major highways).
  - tomp 1y ago
    Maybe, but so far we don't really have any examples of good AI (or even barely working AI like GPT4o) that wasn't trained on massive amounts of data. Is data enough? Maybe not, there's a lot of progress on RL now that can do wonders without even more data. Is data necessary? No evidence to the contrary, yet.
  - testing22321 1y ago
    > what will happen is Musk and co will demand that roads be redesigned to accommodate their tech Every road, in every country on earth? No, that is never going to happen.
- aatd86 1y ago
  How would youtube help with driving?
  - tomp 1y ago
    Massive amount of "world" data - enough for Google to successfully train Veo3, a "video generation" model that is extremely good, and evidently includes a decent "world model" i.e. a model that can generate or, more accurately, predict the (short-term) "future" - like "what happens if you let go of an apple" (it falls down) etc. This kind of "world models" that can understand physics enough to be able to predict short term future (like humans can) are crucial for any kind of real-world AI (i.e. robotics, including self-driving), because they constitute what could be termed as "physical common sense" (that humans have, but also animals, to some degree). Is it enough for self-driving? No, you also need to understand road rules, communicate with humans (pedestrians and fellow drivers), etc. but it's a good, possibly necessary, step - it allows you to better handle many unpredictable (tail of distribution) situations: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g75ftb/waymo_meets_water_fountain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g75ftb/wa... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJH8hED11I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJH8hED11I
jillesvangurp 1y ago
I agree with you on the moat side. Tesla is very late to this market. But, I would also argue that Waymo's moat isn't that wide either. Waymo is probably behind their Chinese counterparts that are already operating at a larger scale. More rides. Larger cities. And more of them. Waymo isn't the only player in the market and unlike Tesla and their Chinese competitors, they aren't really structured as a manufacturing operation. They are modifying consumer cars made by others, probably at great cost. That raises the question about how they are going to scale. Waymo is so far not a scalable operation. They can manage thousands of cars. But can they handle millions? Or make a profit. Chinese manufacturers, like Tesla, have a ready answer to that by virtue of their proven manufacturing skills. And it seems they so far don't need Waymo's software to get their cars to drive themselves. Tesla is late. But they can build cars at scale. So, I'm not ready to claim they are too late yet. I think Waymo might have a bright future ahead licensing their platform to manufacturers that are, so far, not showing many signs of having their own version of this. As for whether this is technically possible or not, I think it's hard to argue that it's not from the back of a self driving taxi. I've not had that pleasure yet (none around near where I live) but I've seen enough to not be that foolish.
- jonstewart 1y ago
  I wonder how long a Chinese FSD car would last on the BWI parkway coping with Maryland drivers before it pulled over for a good cry.
  - gcr 1y ago
    Who would you trust more: an FSD that’s learned to survive Xi’an rush hour and Wenzhou’s interpretive traffic balet, or one that’s learned to panic brake in Palo Alto? America doesn’t have a monopoly on challenging driving situations, y’know. :-)
    - op00to 1y ago
      Is it still the case in China that it's cheaper to kill a pedestrian you hit with your car than it is to pay out damages? This might be propaganda! If so, I wonder if or how that affects the algorithms for pedestrian avoidance. :)
steveBK123 1y ago
I had a Tesla 2018-2022, and switched to a competing EV brand at that point. The fact that Tesla has removed sensors since then while competitors have added says a lot. My car doesn't even have LIDAR but it has 5 radar sensors (corners & forward) so it can do all sorts of neat stuff. For example, it has actual working adjacent lane blindspot detection, which Tesla never dialed in. It also can warn you about oncoming cars at intersections or when backing out of parking spots. It even flashes lights on the doors if you try to open a door when a car is coming in the adjacent lane. None of that is full self driving but it leaves me wondering what Tesla can ever accomplish with cameras-only.
- rimunroe 1y ago
  > For example, it has actual working adjacent lane blindspot detection Is this not standard? I don’t think my Hyundai Ioniq 5’s blind spot detection has ever failed to warn me about a car in my blind spot
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    Tesla literally didn't have it in 2018, and slowly added a poor implementation of it over time. Recall the card hardware had no light not he mirror or in the window sill to alert you, so their early version required looking at the screen. Current Teslas at least actually have some sort of light in the sill, but again its using cameras only, no radar, sonar, whatever.
    - gcr 1y ago
      That’s really surprising. Whenever I rent a car, I’ve relied on that feature as standard issue for modern vehicles. It’s like selling a Tesla without an air conditioner.
      - philistine 1y ago
        Tesla's were ahead of the curve on most things when they first came out. Tesla has refused to join the year model model, so their changes have been haphazard, often regressive, and ultimately very slow. They still are ahead on some technologies, with the Cybertruck's one and only interesting technology its drive-by-wire system, but the industry has caught up and overtaken Tesla with the relentless progress of the year model.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
How hard the problem is may depend on how successful you are at lobbying politicians to force your solution down the public's throat...
boshalfoshal 1y ago
You are thinking about "hard" and "easy" in the wrong frame of mind. What Tesla does is not "easy" either. Their moat is manufacturing and the R&D they've spent on codesigning their HW and SW stack, and their insane supply chain. Ford does not suddenly have several million cars with 8-9 cameras to tap into for training data, nor does it have the infrastructure/talent to train models with the data it may get. I think you are underselling the Tesla moat. Its the same reason why there are only 3-4 "frontier" AI labs, and the rest are just playing catchup, despite a lot of LLM improvements being pretty well researched and open in papers.

walthamstow 1y ago

The thing about Tesla having more cars on the road is obviously true, but Google Street View captures my house in London at a decent frequency, about twice a year, so those cars are driving around capturing data all the time in major cities. I assume they're capturing more than just images, does anyone know for a fact?

xnx 1y ago
Lidar was added in 2017 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View#:~:text=LIDAR%20scanners%20from%20Velodyne%20were,depth%20information%20and%20positional%20information. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View#:~:text=L...
- flir 1y ago
  Thanks! I thought the 3D models in Google Maps were just Extremely Clever Math. Lidar and Extremely Clever Math makes more sense.
  - tavavex 1y ago
    It's actually photogrammetry, not LiDAR (or at least, the LiDAR scans aren't done by Street View cars), which is why it's limited only to certain pre-scanned cities instead of everywhere with modern Street View.
prepend 1y ago
They were sued, and lost, for capturing and analyzing data off all the WiFi networks they drove by. [0] I assume they are recording all the metadata and data that they can to stay compliant with this. My guess is they have a list of every MAC address of every device they can find, geolocated. And then they match that to data from all those apps that ask to discover devices on my local network. Now they know how old my tv and lightbulbs are, etc etc [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joffe_v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joffe_v._Google,_Inc.
- aspenmayer 1y ago

amarcheschi 1y ago

The title made me think of something different, well, there actually is a song about musk and its cars, although it is from 4 years ago https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI&pp=ygUScGVuZWxvcGUgc2NvdHQgcmF0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI&pp=ygUScGVuZWxvcGU...

bhouston 1y ago

Maybe Elon isn’t Stark or Scott and the world is more complex than simple analogies. Elon is a great promoter and does have visionary ideas and has often been able to execute them when he is paying attention. He is also running a harem to get +100 or more children, seems racist for many reasons, over promises (but this comes with being a promoter), and has biased X/twitter to favour whatever ideas he currently likes.

krapp 1y ago
I think it's more accurate to say other people have been able to execute on his ideas (which aren't even entirely his) when he isn't allowed to interfere. Cybertruck and X are what you get when Elon Musk has his limiters off. SpaceX and Tesla are what you get when a competent team knows how to manage him and his ego.
- bhouston 1y ago
  Yeah other people have executed but this actually true of anyone who starts companies and employs tons of people. He isn’t a sole practitioner in a lab. Also the ideas are not completely his mostly because this isn’t novel basic research. This is applied engineering and thus one needs to grab onto ideas who are ready for implementation at scale. This means they are well known ideas. I don’t disagree that Elon messes things a lot, especially recently. DOGE cuts are being undone via court ruling nearly as fast as he did them.
  - krapp 1y ago
    There's a greater tendency to treat Elon like a Tony Stark archetype whose singular genius and skill are responsible for his accomplishments than there is for other CEOs. No one would claim that Steve Jobs personally invented portable music players, or that Jeff Bezos invented internet commerce, but they will claim that there would be no electric cars or private space travel if not for Elon Musk, even given the same employees and funding.
    - bhouston 1y ago

kklisura 1y ago

> For years, Elon Musk has been promising that Teslas will operate completely autonomously in “Full Self Driving” (FSD) mode. And when I say years, I mean years... > Musk was sued by a group of shareholders who claimed that the Tesla boss had defrauded them with his lofty claims about the capabilities of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance tech, including Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. [1] > After hearing the case, U.S. district Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin claimed that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that the Tesla boss had acted with “deliberate recklessness,” .... That’s because Musk’s lawyers didn’t decide to argue that Tesla’s claims about its self-driving abilities were perfectly accurate. Instead, the legal team representing Musk basically said that nobody would realistically believe what Musk was banging on about... [1] > In a mind-numbing statement, Musk’s lawyers argue that his claims about Tesla Autopilot safety were “vague statements of corporate optimism are not objectively verifiable” [2] > The lawyers even argued, successfully, that “no reasonable investor would rely” on many of the alleged misleading statements because they are “mere puffing” [2] Never trust Elon's statements. [1] https://qz.com/tesla-robotaxi-lawsuit-elon-musk-lawyers-claims-1851665636 https://qz.com/tesla-robotaxi-lawsuit-elon-musk-lawyers-clai... [2] https://electrek.co/2024/10/02/elon-musk-celebrates-winning-lawsuit-tesla-self-driving-claims-embarrassing-defense/ https://electrek.co/2024/10/02/elon-musk-celebrates-winning-...

lazide 1y ago
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cbeach 1y ago

To save your time, this is another article that focusses on the author's personal (and political) affectations with Elon Musk, as opposed to being a substantive technical review of FSD. FTA: > we’ve turned over large portions of America to insanely rich people who have no idea what they’re doing > It’s about oligarchy > What happened? Elon Musk was stupid. That’s what happened. > the stock market pretend that Musk hasn’t failed Anyone who's seen recent FSD videos on YouTube will understand the incredible progress that has been made, and how FSD is a real-world solution whereas Waymo (geo fences, "safety drivers" etc) isn't comparable

sega_sai 1y ago
Are you saying that the factual content of the article is incorrect? If not, yes the author may have views on Musk, but that is irrelevant in the context of the article.
- epgui 1y ago
  Look, I can see just as well as anyone else that Musk is wildly off on his timelines, and I really don't like the guy either. That said, the article is full of facts that are decontextualized or presented in a misleading/misled manner.
zippothrowaway 1y ago
Becasue youtube videos now pass as data rather than self-interested anecdotes. What a sad world we live in.
- cbeach 1y ago
  Hundreds of thousands of hours of people physically demonstrating FSD technology in the real world, with production cars and real users (who are not employed by the manufacturer) is meaningful evidence, even if it happens to be published on YouTube
- epgui 1y ago
  > self-interested anecdotes It's more than that-- many people are spending a lot of time just testing FSD, filming it, actively looking for failure modes, and being quite methodical about it. We don't have the same data Tesla has about its fleet obviously, but we can all go and observe the progress being made.

jp57 1y ago

“Of course we already have full self-driving technology. It’s called Waymo…” Is it FSD, though? Understand that Waymo has remote tele-operators, who can intercede if necessary. How many are there? How many cars does each handle? I’m not sure the company makes that public.

ddalex 1y ago
They demoed what the operators do, they can only review the data and select one of a few possible options, they never take control of the car
420official 1y ago
Waymo is firmly SAE self driving level 4 "automated driving" vs Tesla at level 2 "driver support". You're correct that waymo has operators that can jump in in the event something unusual happens, but the vast majority of the time the vehicle is operating autonomously within their defined area. All that is described by SAE level 4 where no human is driving while automatic driving is engaged. https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
Zigurd 1y ago
Google still carries trauma from buying Motorola, and all of Motorola's employees. They would never have expanded Waymo if it meant hiring buildings full of remote operators. And they've demonstrated that that's not how it works anyway.

x187463 1y ago

FSD is incredible in that it works everywhere, most of the time. The problem is it works most of the time. I do not think the current FSD sensor suite (camera only) will ever be safely capable of true unsupervised FSD. I use FSD every day. I would seriously estimate FSD has put 95% of the miles on my car. I regularly encounter the following: * treating red lights like stop signs * completely ignoring flash reds * stopping at flashing yellows * ignoring school zones * driving 10mph under the limit * driving 20mph over the limit * ignoring turn only lanes resulting in being dumped into oncoming traffic until it leisurely moves back into the correct lane * waiting until the last minute to get into the correct lane to make a turn/take an exit * ignoring signs indicating a lane ends and having to force its way into traffic * ignoring signs a lane ends and changing into the lane only to have to change back immediately * pulling out in front of cars, especially at night or other camera obscuring events * ignoring cars merging onto the highway and blocking them until I take over and get out of the way I treat it like cruise control. And based on the recent accident during which FSD decided to run itself off a perfectly straight, open, clear rode and into a tree, I keep my hand on the wheel. Even in a geo-fenced environment, FSD is NOT going to work for unsupervised robo-taxi applications. Musk needs to get out of the way and let them stick LIDARs on these cars. All that being said, it has also handled really complex driving in/around DC/Baltimore including some tricky merges/transitions that are hard to track as a human driver. It's knowledge of all of the surrounding vehicles allows it to make these maneuvers with far more confidence that I would. It also frees me up to track the bigger picture of traffic while not having to manage my speed/lane position. It's like driving with a friend who's not necessarily the best driver, but is basically competent. Let's just hope it doesn't decide to drive me in to a tree for no particular reason.

op00to 1y ago
I don't want to be seen as defending Tesla's overpromising and underdelivering, but everything you mentioned I see on a daily basis from all makes and models of motor vehicles on the roadway. Of course, FSD should be better than humans, but it's somewhat humorous to me that right now it's got the same problems as people.
- ddalex 1y ago

leesec 1y ago

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Coeur 1y ago

"Lane-departure detection, front-collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control, emergency break assist—all of these features are powered by lidar." That's not true. Lane-departure detection uses mostly radar and cameras, adaptive cruise control usually uses radar and sometimes cameras, and emergency break assist is often just a brake pedal sensor. Front-collision avoidance uses lidar in some cars from the last 2 years. Lidar might very much be needed for full self driving, but it not yet used in many cars on the road today. The writer does not have all his facts straight.

aaron695 1y ago

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