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I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s
by tfourb 1y ago
I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather).
Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least. Which is sad because I personally hoped that my kids would never have to get a driver’s License.
- BoorishBears 1y agoI've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.
- thephotonsphere 1y agoTesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-interview-ai4-conference-las-vegas-lidar-radar-self-driving-safety-tesla/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...
- ACCount37 1y agoHumans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.
- BuckRogers 1y agoExcept a car isn’t a human. That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here. Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.
- ACCount37 1y agoThis isn't a "mistake". This is the key problem of getting self-driving to work. Elon Musk is right. You can't cram 20 radars, 50 LIDARs and 100 cameras into a car and declare self-driving solved. No amount of sensors can redeem a piss poor driving AI. Conversely, if you can build an AI that's good enough, then you don't need a lot of sensors. All the data a car needs to drive safely is already there - right in the camera data stream.
- vrighter 1y agoif additional sensors improve the ai, then your last statement is categorically untrue. The reason it worked better is that those additional sensors gave it information that wac not available in the video stream
- ACCount37 1y ago"If." So far, every self-driving accident where the self-driving car was found to be at fault follows the same pattern: the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, and it didn't make the right call. The bottleneck isn't in sensors.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 1y agoIn that case we're probably even further from self-driving cars than I'd have guessed. Adding more sensors is a lot cheaper than putting a sufficient amount of compute in a car.
- latexr 1y agoIndeed. Mark Rober did some field tests on that exact difference. LiDAR passed all of them, while Tesla’s camera-only approach failed half. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
- randallsquared 1y agoI'm not sure the guy who did the Tesla crash test hoax and (partially?) faked his famous glitterbomb pranks is the best source. I would separately verify anything he says at this point.
- latexr 1y ago> Tesla crash test hoax First I’m hearing of that. In doing a search, I see a lot of speculation but no proof. Knowing the shenanigans perpetrated by Musk and his hardcore fans, I’ll take theories with a grain of salt. > and (partially?) faked his famous glitterbomb pranks That one I remember, and the story is that the fake reactions were done by a friend of a friend who borrowed the device. I can’t know for sure, but I do believe someone might do that. Ultimately, Rober took accountability, recognised that hurt his credibility, and edited out that part from the video. https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-21-viral-glitter-bomb-video-fake-mark-rober.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-21-viral-glitter-bomb-video... I have no reason to protect Rober, but also have no reason to discredit him until proof to the contrary. I don’t follow YouTube drama but even so I’ve seen enough people unjustly dragged through the mud to not immediately fall for baseless accusations. One I bumped into recently was someone describing the “fall” of another YouTuber, and in one case showed a clip from an interview and said “and even the interviewer said X about this person”, with footage. Then I watched the full video and at one point the interviewer says (paraphrased) “and please no one take this out of context, if you think I’m saying X, you’re missing the point”. So, sure, let’s be critical about the information we’re fed, but that cuts both ways.
- amelius 1y agoThe nice thing about LiDAR is that you can use it to train a model to simulate a LiDAR based on camera inputs only. And of course to verify how good that model is.
- mycall 1y agoI can't wait until V2X and sensor fusion comes to autonomous vehicles, greatly improving the detailed 3D mapping of LiDAR, the object classification capabilities of cameras, and the all-weather reliability of radar and radio pings.
- perryizgr8 1y ago> only cameras, which sounds crazy Crazy that billions of humans drive around every day with two cameras. And they have various defects too (blind spots, foveated vision, myopia, astigmatism, glass reflection, tiredness, distraction).
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoThe goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. How many cities are Waymo in now? I think what they are doing is terrific, but each car must cost a fortune.
- BoorishBears 1y agoThe cars aren't expensive by raw cost (low six figures, which is about what an S-class with highway-only L3 costs) But there is a lot of expenditure relative to each mile being driven. > The goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. This won't happen any time soon, so I and millions of other people will continue to derive value from them while you wait for that.
- freehorse 1y ago> I and millions of other people People "wait" because of where they live and what they need. Not all people live and just want to travel around SF or wherever these go nowadays.
- BoorishBears 1y agoWhy the scare quotes on wait? There is literally nothing for you to do but wait. At the end of the day it's not like no one lives in SF, Phoenix, Austin, LA, and Atlanta either. There's millions of people with access to the vehicles and they're doing millions of rides... so acting like it's some great failing of AVs that the current cities are ones with great weather is frankly, a bit stupid. It takes 5 seconds to look up the progress that's been made even in the last few years.
- yladiz 1y agoLow six figures is quite expensive, and unobtainable to a large number of people.
- BoorishBears 1y agoNot even close. It's a 2-ton vehicle that can self-drive reliably enough to be roving a city 24/7 without a safety driver. The measure of expensive for that isn't "can everyone afford it", the fact we can even afford to let anyone ride them is a small wonder.
- saint_yossarian 1y agoHow many of those rides required human intervention by Waymo's remote operators? From what I can tell they're not sharing that information.
- BoorishBears 1y agoI worked at Zoox, which has similar teleoperations to Waymo: remote operators can't joystick the vehicles. So if we're saying how many times would it have crashed without a human: 0. They generally intervene when the vehicles get stuck and that happens pretty rarely, typically because humans are doing something odd like blocking the way.
- boulos 1y agoOur next vehicle sensor suite will be able to handle winter weather (https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo-driver https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...).
- suddenlybananas 1y agoI'll believe it when I see it.
- DougBTX 1y agoThat’s one of the interesting things about innovation, you have to believe that things are possible before they have been done.
- AYBABTME 1y agoOnly if you've set out to build it. Otherwise you can sit and wait.
- layer8 1y agoBelieving a thing is possible doesn’t by itself make it so, however.
- pixl97 1y agoThis is kind of weird. It's like saying "Driving in snow is impossible", well we know it is possible because humans do it. And this even ignores all the things modern computer controlled vehicles do above and beyond humans as it is. Take most people used to driving modern cars and chunk them an old armstrong steering car and they'll put themselves into a ditch on a rainy day. Really the last things in self driving cars is fast portable compute and general intelligence. General intelligence will be needed for the million edge cases we need while driving. The particular problem is once we get this general intelligence a lot of problems are going to disappear and bring up a whole new set of problems for people and society at large.