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Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove ver
by mlsu 8mo ago
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
- harikb 8mo agoGoogle Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber. What you envision might happen in 2100+
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoGoogle was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching” https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weapon-in-its-gigabit-comeback-has-failed/ https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap... https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-... And the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745
- AlotOfReading 8mo agoPlenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
- kjksf 8mo agoTesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD. Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program. Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla. And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
- g947o 8mo ago> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program. Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.
- dinobones 8mo ago> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
- llboston 8mo agoAccording to https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
- DerekL 8mo agoAre these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver? https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robotaxi-safety-monitor-it-just-moved-them-to-a-trailing-car/ https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
- MetaWhirledPeas 8mo ago> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.
- standardUser 8mo agoEvery car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.
- bluGill 8mo agoMost cars don't have a paid driver. Uber, taxis, and trucking is a tiny minority of drivers.
- standardUser 8mo agoI guess your time isn't vlauable.
- ghaff 8mo agoIt's been a while since I looked it up but I understand the human is about 50% of taxi operating costs. That's not trivial of course but it's also not dwarfing vehicle costs.
- g947o 8mo agoYou might want to look up the price of lidar in 2026 before talking about affordability.
- ddalex 8mo agoDude, $26k Chinese cars come with lidar in the base configuration
- standardUser 8mo agoIt's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.
- fragmede 8mo agoHave you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want. http://zoox.com http://zoox.com Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- nektro 8mo agothe biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that
- nielsbot 8mo agoYup. I came in to ask that same question. Lot of money potentially “left on the table”.
- Petersipoi 8mo agoSo you hope the people keeping you safe continue to put themselves in danger for you. Got it.
- coffeemug 8mo agoFrom an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up. Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-strange-persistence-of-rockets-can-teach-us-about-innovation.html https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....
- bonsai_spool 8mo agoIn the Midwest, golf carts are exactly what people use to get around in small towns. It's not unreasonable that neighborhoods might be closed to large vehicles and use other forms of transit within their boundaries.
- coffeemug 8mo agoThat's fascinating, I didn't know that! What are some example cities/towns where this is common?
- jasonwatkinspdx 8mo agoGrew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.
- SecretDreams 8mo ago> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. This yes. > The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership. We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.
- SecretDreams 8mo agoI think this post just got brigaded, wow.
- close04 8mo ago> The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. And regulatory capture by the incumbent. Reach the top then push for regulation behind you. Thats’s one big additional obstacle to overcome for a new player. OpenAI was so willing to support regulating AI just as soon as they thought they’ve gained enough of an advantage over the competition and they can burn the bridge behind them.
- jsemrau 8mo agoI was thinking in the same direction when I wrote my 5000 word analysis on the current state of VLAMs. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/visual-language-action-models https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/visual-language-action-model...
- thefounder 8mo agoYeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing to just speed and turn correctly(I.e 2 params). You also seem to overestimate the inertia of the tech advantage. Being first is not always the most important thing. See google AI as prime example.
- p-e-w 8mo agoThe failure of self-driving cars has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with regulation. It’s been demonstrated time and again that statistically, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars.[1] Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4
- brulx126 8mo agoYour link does not prove your point. It's about ADAS and even shows that it is not universally safer than human driving. > However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur more frequently than Human-Driven Vehicle accidents under dawn/dusk or turning conditions, which is 5.25 and 1.98 times higher, respectively.
- thefounder 8mo ago>> The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them. Maybe a part of the fault is also the self driving systems themselves that keep crashing and killing people. I don’t have data to say with certainty whether self driving cars are safer or less safe than humans(I think they are less safe especially if taken out of their “trial” zones/sampling) but I can tell you that is less acceptable for self driving cars to kill people than it is for humans for “obvious” reasons especially when the self driving cars do this due stupid mistakes that a human driver would not (I.e goes straight into another car in plain day).
- lorenzo1860 8mo agoDo you have some insight we don't have? I mean yes, there are really good systems, but the heavy, long tail is still not solved.
- zacmps 8mo agoI think what you're looking for is a bike.
- rbbydotdev 8mo agoI’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
- boredpudding 8mo agoMaybe even have multiple people in each pod, and on the set track, have common stops where people are likely to get on/off.
- lysace 8mo agoBecause trains are famously awesome for the last mile(s)?
- IsTom 8mo agoTrams are pretty ok
- chpatrick 8mo agoI think the idea is that they could go full speed in sync, then afterwards they could still take you to your doorstep.
- circuit10 8mo agoThe commenter was being sarcastic about trains I think, but while we should be using public transport where possible there is sometimes a need for door-to-door transport so I don't see why we can't explore new ideas that may combine some of the advantages of both for certain use cases
- atonse 8mo agoMusk has been talking about this (generalizing the self driving model for their Optimus bot) for a while now. Which is why their strategy (purely vision/photons in, controls out) seems to be more widely applicable and scalable over time. And waymo seems to be arriving there too as they keep reducing the equipment (it would seem)
- fragmede 8mo agoNo it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
- Petersipoi 8mo agoSure. But they can be way better than human drivers with only cameras. Visibility is rarely the cause of car crashes. Reaction time. Decision making. Follow distance. Speed. All these things are way more important to get right than "seeing through fog"
- farresito 8mo ago> In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Rover222 8mo agoThe industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about. Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
- super_flanker 8mo agoThis must be a sarcasm, right?
- Rover222 8mo agoya'll are so biased because of politics
- TulliusCicero 8mo agoThis is about the opposite of reality. Tesla is way behind in actually deploying autonomous vehicles, and other robotaxi makers with real deployments besides Waymo also use lidar.
- Rover222 8mo agoYeah millions of miles per day in autonomous driving for Tesla. Yes it's still supervised (somewhat, you don't have to pay much attention anymore) but the technology is absolutely there and just being refined at this point. Waymos are geofenced, restricted to certain roads, and have remote humans in the loop at lot more than most people assume.
- TulliusCicero 8mo agoNot actually autonomous until it can be more or less trusted to handle itself, without constant human supervision. Until then, it's just prototype or testing miles. Tesla's current robotaxi deployment is also geofenced and monitored by humans -- moreso than Waymo, even -- but of course Tesla superfans always conveniently leave that out of the narrative.
- culopatin 8mo agoI just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.
- mandeepj 8mo ago> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
- guywithahat 8mo agoWhen Tesla engineers/Elon talk about it it's usually pitched as a safety thing, by standardizing on one sensor they reduce "sensor contention". Famously Karpathy once described radar as a source of noise that held their vision sensors back. I don't know who will end up being right in the long term, however I don't think this was a form choice, I think they believe a pure camera system will be more functional.
- Hikikomori 8mo agoFunny.