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I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their
by qwerpy 8mo ago
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoTesla’s approach is smarter than Waymo. Maybe Tesla won’t win, perhaps a Chinese firm, but the winner will follow a vision based system and not a micro-mapping LIDAR system. “Vision is all you need.”
- vortegne 8mo agoAny evidence for this claim?
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoI don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.
- moooo99 8mo ago> But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road. Human drivers also have a brain that computers have struggled to replicate for decades. Also, many of the Chinese vehicle makers already include LIDARs in their vehicles for their current ADAS
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo agoHumans are not capable of safely operating motor vehicles. For a combination of practical and psychological reasons, we accept them as safe enough, stuffing the tens of thousands of Americans who get mowed down each year into the backs of our heads. But we know what the genuinely safe version of human-operated vehicles looks like, because we do it for planes, and it involves quite a lot of complex instruments other than the human eyeball. It would be an absolute catastrophe for the developers of autonomous vehicles to decide there's no need to do better than human drivers.
- astrange 8mo agoHuman drivers don't use fixed cameras. For one thing, they can move their heads. Fun fact, people can see light polarization. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4528539/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4528539/
- roryirvine 8mo agoAre there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar? Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it. You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoExcept for everyone at Tesla.
- roryirvine 8mo agoTesla don't belong in a list of companies with working autonomous driving systems. They might get there one day but, since they've been breaking promises about it for longer than those other companies have been in existence, at this point it's reasonable to treat what they have to say with extreme scepticism.
- UltraSane 8mo agoEveryone at Tesla probably thinks they should use LiDAR but Musk doesn't want to so they don't. Just like so many people must have told Musk using stainless steel for the body of the cybertruck was a terrible idea and he did it anyway. Musk is deep in the "only talks with yes men" phase of being a billionaire.
- UltraSane 8mo agoHuman eyes and vision system are so much better than current cameras and GPUs they aren't really comparable. Also we should be aiming at creating autonomous driving systems that are SAFER than humans and this requires as many sensor modalities as possible. Vision + LIDAR + Radar + Sonar + terahertz Radar. Terahertz radar is a very interesting new kind of radar. https://teradar.com/ https://teradar.com/
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- corford 8mo agoWith costs approaching $200 (if Hesai Group is to be believed - and there's no major reason I know of to doubt them), why won't LIDAR win?
- RivieraKid 8mo agoA system for personally owned vehicles has been on the roadmap for a long time. There's a partnership with Toyota related to this: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/04/waymo-and-toyota-outline-strategic-partnership https://waymo.com/blog/2025/04/waymo-and-toyota-outline-stra...
- UltraSane 8mo ago"if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better" Waymo's approach is proven to be better with every public fully autonomous ride they complete.