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Part of me agrees with what you said, but my primary view is: There's no indication that Tesla has solved the fundamental challenge of self-driving - making th
by RivieraKid 1y ago
Part of me agrees with what you said, but my primary view is:
There's no indication that Tesla has solved the fundamental challenge of self-driving - making the system incredibly reliable and safe and able to handle myriads of rare situations. Tesla is at a point where multiple self-driving companies were years ago. The general experience from this field is that scaling is extremely hard because improving reliability and safety by orders of magnitude is extremely hard.
I think people are too hung up on the sensor suite. Once you solve the fundamental problem, a sensor suite is kind of an implementation detail. Waymo's system is robust to the removal of any sensor type / map. There's a good chance that Waymo in a camera-only mode would perform better than the Tesla robotaxi.
Mapping is not an issue, it's less expensive than people expect and you only need to do it once, so the cost per mile is approximately zero. And in Waymo's case, there's a lot of room for streamlining the process. The more you map, the easier and faster it gets. BTW, MobilEye has a very lightweight and crowdsourced mapping process, they're also camera-centric and have a cheap hardware package.
Waymo's long-term goal is a a system that is cheap and works everywhere. They've spent 15 years with a focus on solving the hard problem. Now they seem to be close to the finish line and they're shifting their focus and money into the easier stuff, optimizing hardware and expansion.
- zdp7 1y agoMapping isn't a one time thing. You need to constantly be constantly updated. Bridges collapse, roads get washed out, lines get repainted and the list goes on. Even when you have it remapped regularly it can be wrong. Cedar road in Sonora California is a good example. They thankfully no longer have it connected, but they have a section of it mislabeled. If you look at the map, there's a section of Cedar road in the parking lot of Avalon Training. That's not actually Cedar road. Cedar road is actually the dirt road to the East of that. It used to be properly mapped to the dirt road. The problem with that is it quickly narrows and has major erosion. At one point there is a two foot drop off that is not safe to cross. Not sure how FSD would have handled it.
- RivieraKid 1y agoMap updates are not a problem, it probably takes something like 1% of the original work per year. The system is designed to be robust to map errors by the way.
- leesec 1y agoThis comment is incredibly wrong but I'll just say there is nothing easy about expanding from 2000 cars to several million.
- RivieraKid 1y agoIt's relatively easy if you've solved self-driving. It's no longer a monumental research problem. Waymo has been scaling 5x annually since Oct 2020 and they say it was mainly enabled by increases in reliability.
- leesec 1y agoThey haven't been scaling by 5x annually. They had like 600 units and now they have maybe 2000
- RivieraKid 1y agoThey have, in terms of paid rides per week. 100 to 250,000 in less than 5 years. See this logarithmic chart: https://x.com/brianwilt/status/1827219050197610624 https://x.com/brianwilt/status/1827219050197610624
- leesec 1y agoOk. I'm talking about cars
- RivieraKid 1y agoWhen I said "Waymo has been scaling 5x annually" I was talking about paid rides.
- leesec 1y agoclearly the rides are limited by the number of cars