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Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. It's not even a good bet. There still are zero self-driving Tesla's on the

Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. It's not even a good bet. There still are zero self-driving Tesla's on the road. Zero. It's even likely there will be legislation forcing LIDAR for self driving cars. Elon cannot flip the switch on self driving until they have millions of intervention free miles under their belt. Right now Tesla gets ~500 miles without intervention. One kid gets decked and the law will shutter his plan. There is another layer too, where because of his polarizing personality, a lot of critical talent is inaccessible to him. Keep in mind Elon is doing -none- of the engineering besides the social engineering. He relies on talented people who want to work for him. I know many talented people who could make a difference for Tesla, but none who would ever give Elon a single minute of time.

utyop22 1y ago
Yeah as time goes on, the grift has become more apparent. But will it get fully exposed before he dies? Thats the real question.
- blitzar 1y ago
  The amount of speical K he goes through that has a better chance of happening by the end of the year (tm) than self driving.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    Lol. True.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  If you look on twitter it's full of cringey "xXWealthMastersXx" accounts falling over themselves to hype Tesla. It's a full on steel domed welded shut echo chamber.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    Its becoming more obvious that X was acquired so that Musk had control of a form of mass communication to benefit himself. Very ugly world we live in - the joker masquerades as someone who is doing stuff for the benefit of humanity and crossdresses to appeal to whomever to benefit himself.
rayiner 1y ago
> Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. Maybe, maybe not. It's quite remarkable how far he's been able to go with camera only. And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well. There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR. At worst, the camera tech has kept Tesla at the front of where the industry has actually been going the last 5 years. Looking at the bigger picture, I'm not sure you can point to someone who has made as many good bets in different engineering fields as Elon. Elon is the opposite of the Gell Manning effect: you think he's wrong about areas you are educated about, and he proves you wrong. You can find my posts on HN mocking SpaceX for going with an oxygen/RP1 rocket as if we were back at the dawn of space travel. Boy was that wrong!
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Elon of 2012 was a dramatically different person than Elon of 2025. And like I pointed out he is talent constrained. Elon is not developing camera vision. He is seeking and hiring talented software people to do it. In 2012 Elon was celebrated and going to work for Tesla was a prestigious career. Something you could flex. Today you would be embarrassed to mention you took at job at Tesla, especially when so many other big name prestigious companies will pay the same or more for those same skills Elon desperately needs.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    I doubt that factors into most people’s decisions. If anything, aerospace and automotive engineers tend to lean centrist to conservative: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 (Table 5). And aerospace is disproportionately white men compared to other engineering fields. Additionally, my observation is that reactions to Musk are heavily influenced by individual levels of empathy, and “people focused versus systems focused” thinking. In my experience aerospace engineers are pretty low empathy and low people focus. When I got my degree in aerospace engineering in the early aughts—before SpaceX and the reboot of commercial aerospace—the most exciting job to look forward to was designing missiles for Raytheon and stuff like that. When I worked for a military contractor, the hypothetical scenarios always involved stuff like “so we just overthrew Iraq’s government, and now we need radio uplinks to our UAVs so we can blow up terrorists.” Nobody caught feelings over that stuff. I doubt many of these folks care about Elon’s tweets.
sporedro 1y ago
I don’t understand the vision bet. As a consumer, I want self driving with expectations of it being reliable and affordable. Again as a consumer I couldn’t care any less how it “works”. If someone is able to produce a car using more than just vision that works first, they will be the winner.
- webdevver 1y ago
  it kind of make a muskian sort of sense. "if the human brain can do it purely on optics, then so should we. if we need extra sensors that the human doesn't have, that means the model is worse than the human brain." i can totally see that going through elons 105iq head. and there is something to be said there. kind of, "no cheating allowed!", where "cheating" is defined as "a sensor the human wouldn't have had". whether it has value... well... thats hard to say, but you have to make a bet i suppose. the waymos are very expensive with their sensor arrangements. maybe that can be made cheap?
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    And if he didn't sell it as working better than it does, that would be a principled stance. And if he didn't have competitors, it would not be a damaging stance. But in the reality we're in...
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    > if the human brain can do it purely on optics The human brain doesn't do it purely on optics.
  - antisthenes 1y ago
    The human brain can do it on optics, poorly. We still have tens of thousands of car-related deaths in the US. Also, if doing it a different way than a human is cheating...are they sending data via organically grown neurons in the car? Didn't know that. Looks like "cheating" to me. Maybe it makes sense in Musks' head. Me - I want the car to be better than the human brain.
y1426i 1y ago
Over last 6 months, since their latest upgrade, I have been driving my Tesla mostly on FSD. And it is nothing short of amazing, out of this world. The car drives like a pro and exceptions have become very rare. You have to drive this to believe it. Unlike Waymo which is full of gizmos, this is just a regular car that drives itself. The bet on camera and simplified architecture shows here. If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanwaggoner 1y ago
  We've all been reading this exact comment for years now. Maybe it's actually different this time, I don't know. What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake. Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    It has felt much much better in recent months. Did a drive from SF to Yosemite that was basically fully autonomous - can’t do that on Waymo. That being said, I still had two issues in the city where it completely screwed up by being in the wrong lane. Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane and try to safely just go the wrong direction and recover and instead just tries to take the “correct” route at all costs which can be a safety issue. I agree that Waymo is generally safer for in city driving. It’s still not technically fully autonomous even though it appears that way; it has a lot of support people on the backend to resolve when the cars get stuck and whatnot. Waymo still can’t go on the highway or leave well-defined city limits whereas I can use my Tesla on every trip I’ve taken. I think comma.ai is a closer comparison point at this time as I can’t have a Waymo for my own personal use that I can take anywhere whenever.

utyop22 1y ago

Yeah as time goes on, the grift has become more apparent. But will it get fully exposed before he dies? Thats the real question.

blitzar 1y ago
The amount of speical K he goes through that has a better chance of happening by the end of the year (tm) than self driving.
- utyop22 1y ago
  Lol. True.
Workaccount2 1y ago
If you look on twitter it's full of cringey "xXWealthMastersXx" accounts falling over themselves to hype Tesla. It's a full on steel domed welded shut echo chamber.
- utyop22 1y ago
  Its becoming more obvious that X was acquired so that Musk had control of a form of mass communication to benefit himself. Very ugly world we live in - the joker masquerades as someone who is doing stuff for the benefit of humanity and crossdresses to appeal to whomever to benefit himself.

rayiner 1y ago

> Betting on solely camera vision for self-driving is not objectively a very good bet. Maybe, maybe not. It's quite remarkable how far he's been able to go with camera only. And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well. There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR. At worst, the camera tech has kept Tesla at the front of where the industry has actually been going the last 5 years. Looking at the bigger picture, I'm not sure you can point to someone who has made as many good bets in different engineering fields as Elon. Elon is the opposite of the Gell Manning effect: you think he's wrong about areas you are educated about, and he proves you wrong. You can find my posts on HN mocking SpaceX for going with an oxygen/RP1 rocket as if we were back at the dawn of space travel. Boy was that wrong!

Workaccount2 1y ago
Elon of 2012 was a dramatically different person than Elon of 2025. And like I pointed out he is talent constrained. Elon is not developing camera vision. He is seeking and hiring talented software people to do it. In 2012 Elon was celebrated and going to work for Tesla was a prestigious career. Something you could flex. Today you would be embarrassed to mention you took at job at Tesla, especially when so many other big name prestigious companies will pay the same or more for those same skills Elon desperately needs.
- rayiner 1y ago
  I doubt that factors into most people’s decisions. If anything, aerospace and automotive engineers tend to lean centrist to conservative: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 (Table 5). And aerospace is disproportionately white men compared to other engineering fields. Additionally, my observation is that reactions to Musk are heavily influenced by individual levels of empathy, and “people focused versus systems focused” thinking. In my experience aerospace engineers are pretty low empathy and low people focus. When I got my degree in aerospace engineering in the early aughts—before SpaceX and the reboot of commercial aerospace—the most exciting job to look forward to was designing missiles for Raytheon and stuff like that. When I worked for a military contractor, the hypothetical scenarios always involved stuff like “so we just overthrew Iraq’s government, and now we need radio uplinks to our UAVs so we can blow up terrorists.” Nobody caught feelings over that stuff. I doubt many of these folks care about Elon’s tweets.

sporedro 1y ago

I don’t understand the vision bet. As a consumer, I want self driving with expectations of it being reliable and affordable. Again as a consumer I couldn’t care any less how it “works”. If someone is able to produce a car using more than just vision that works first, they will be the winner.

webdevver 1y ago
it kind of make a muskian sort of sense. "if the human brain can do it purely on optics, then so should we. if we need extra sensors that the human doesn't have, that means the model is worse than the human brain." i can totally see that going through elons 105iq head. and there is something to be said there. kind of, "no cheating allowed!", where "cheating" is defined as "a sensor the human wouldn't have had". whether it has value... well... thats hard to say, but you have to make a bet i suppose. the waymos are very expensive with their sensor arrangements. maybe that can be made cheap?
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  And if he didn't sell it as working better than it does, that would be a principled stance. And if he didn't have competitors, it would not be a damaging stance. But in the reality we're in...
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > if the human brain can do it purely on optics The human brain doesn't do it purely on optics.
- antisthenes 1y ago
  The human brain can do it on optics, poorly. We still have tens of thousands of car-related deaths in the US. Also, if doing it a different way than a human is cheating...are they sending data via organically grown neurons in the car? Didn't know that. Looks like "cheating" to me. Maybe it makes sense in Musks' head. Me - I want the car to be better than the human brain.

y1426i 1y ago

Over last 6 months, since their latest upgrade, I have been driving my Tesla mostly on FSD. And it is nothing short of amazing, out of this world. The car drives like a pro and exceptions have become very rare. You have to drive this to believe it. Unlike Waymo which is full of gizmos, this is just a regular car that drives itself. The bet on camera and simplified architecture shows here. If you just extrapolate what has already been possible and bet on the pace of growth of AI algorithms and techniques, robotaxi is almost a certainity and humanoid robots a possibility.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ryanwaggoner 1y ago
We've all been reading this exact comment for years now. Maybe it's actually different this time, I don't know. What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake. Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?
- vlovich123 1y ago
  It has felt much much better in recent months. Did a drive from SF to Yosemite that was basically fully autonomous - can’t do that on Waymo. That being said, I still had two issues in the city where it completely screwed up by being in the wrong lane. Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane and try to safely just go the wrong direction and recover and instead just tries to take the “correct” route at all costs which can be a safety issue. I agree that Waymo is generally safer for in city driving. It’s still not technically fully autonomous even though it appears that way; it has a lot of support people on the backend to resolve when the cars get stuck and whatnot. Waymo still can’t go on the highway or leave well-defined city limits whereas I can use my Tesla on every trip I’ve taken. I think comma.ai is a closer comparison point at this time as I can’t have a Waymo for my own personal use that I can take anywhere whenever.