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Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

randyrand 2mo ago
Right. But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it or are 10+ cameras already safe enough? This article makes no attempt to answer the actual meat of the question. Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet. p.s. I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.
- curuinor 2mo ago
  Article has a paragraph about how lidar is rapidly getting cheaper, so the camera comparison is only temporary Dolgov also pushed back on the one knock that camera-only fans always reach for: cost. Waymo is on its sixth generation of hardware, and he said each generation has drastically cut the price. Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dgrin91 2mo ago
    Thats the million (billion? trillion?) dollar question. Will it get cheap enough? Will it get cheap enough to put on 100 million+ vehicles and be competitive with cameras? I honestly don't know the answer, but I haven't seen strong evidence to point to yes.
    - senordevnyc 2mo ago
      It’s already there.
    - parl_match 2mo ago
      > Will it get cheap enough? An Ojai costs less than a mid tier luxury vehicle. Is that not cheap enough? And the price is only coming down.
- tqi 2mo ago
  "Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet" Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving
  - ls612 2mo ago
    If 2x Mk 1 eyeballs are good enough then I figure cameras can get there too. Or are we going to outlaw that as well because of competitive incentives of Waymo?
    - 9dev 2mo ago
      Do you have any conception of how massively, incomprehensibly, extremely superior our sensory system is to any kind of camera-based computer vision we can make?
      - bigtex88 2mo ago
        Tesla fanboys aren't known for logic or rigorous thinking.
      - ls612 2mo ago
        In terms of dynamic range and color space? Yes absolutely. But for driving you don't really need a huge color space and for dynamic range you can just use separate cameras for daytime and nighttime.
        9dev 2mo ago
        You're again thinking in terms of image sensors, which is not representative of what your body is able to do. For example, your brain processes signals from all your senses combined, which allows prioritisation of things that trigger multiple senses at once. It also applies pattern matching against millions of years of evolution's worth of information about danger. But much more importantly, there is all sorts of post-processing happening that is so weird and complex and really a little decoupled from the raw visual information that it's futile to try and compare that to any digital operation you're thinking of in terms of cameras: If you were to look at a still captured from your eyes, you'd see an upside-down image that's only sharp in the very center of the image, blurry and desaturated pretty much everywhere else, grossly so in the corners, with several big black or blurry spots all over. From that perspective, eyes are awful really. Yet still, your brain manages to turn the stereoscopic vision into a spatial representation, calculate the movement and keep track of other objects relative to you, fill in areas you can't actually see, detect things moving in your peripherals, highlight things of importance, and so much more.
- foxyv 2mo ago
  Personally I would rather vote to ban them if they aren't safe enough. If car makers want to cheap out at the expense of public safety they should go to prison for the people they kill.
  - randyrand 2mo ago
    It's not car makers. It's car buyers. When a car buyer cannot afford self driving they'll just drive themselves. The bar should be safer than a human and as affordable as possible.
- ed_balls 2mo ago
  > Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet. Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only. 1) Both in 2028 2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035 3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving
  - otterley 2mo ago
    > Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. Why? So long as they're insured and their owners can be held criminally liable for injuries just as a human driver would be, why does the bar have to be higher?
    - kube-system 2mo ago
      Because driving risk is far from evenly distributed. If a self-driving car drives like an average human driver, for responsible drivers, this would mean incurring more risk by getting into one. A huge portion of the risk of human drivers is due to confounding human factors like negligence, distraction, medical issues, fatigue, etc. Responsible drivers can take most of these factors into their own hands -- not driving while sleepy, not driving drunk, not using their cell phone. These people don't want a vehicle A better comparison would be comparing the capability of a self-driving car to the skill of a human driver driving under ideal circumstances of health/responsibility/etc.
      - otterley 2mo ago
        We don't measure aggregate risk by discarding a part of the population, even if it's the poorer-performing part. Even today, you cannot fully avoid this risk: when you get into a vehicle driven by a stranger, you don't know a priori whether the driver is excellent or average. Ideally customer feedback weeds out poor drivers and reduces accident rates, but I'm not privy to data that would prove or disprove whether that actually happens - especially because new drivers join the pool every day.
        2mo ago
- senordevnyc 2mo ago
  You’re like 2-3 orders of magnitude off on your cost there.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- afavour 2mo ago
  Which is why we need strong regulation. People shouldn’t be able to vote with their wallet when other peoples lives are at stake.
- wasabi991011 2mo ago
  Where did you get $200k worth of extra sensors? Also, contrary to your statement, the article directly addresses the meat if the question: > The disagreement is whether “good enough to help a human drive” ever becomes “good enough to remove the human,” and his answer is no, because the sensing tops out before you get the last few nines. > Now, Tesla would point to its active Robotaxi service as an example of “removing the human”, but Dolgov also said that camera-only is also good for a demo, and that’s basically what Tesla’s Robotaxi service is right now.
- Animats 2mo ago
  LIDAR units are nowhere near that expensive. Even ten years ago, the Velodyne top of car units only cost about $80,000. The short range ones, found at vehicle corners and on the rear, are now around $200 - $1500. The long range car-top unit is still expensive, around $10,000, and that's dropping. The whole sensor suite on a Waymo is probably under US$20,000 right now. If that. The future direction for automotive seems to be more car-top sensors with narrower fields of view that add up to a full circle. Only the one that looks ahead needs 300m range.
  - parl_match 2mo ago
    Current estimates put the Ojai sensor cost between $15k and $30k. My inclination is that there is confusion between BOM and constructed cost.
- parl_match 2mo ago
  > But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it Of course not! So, you may be surprised to find that Waymo's sensor package doesn't cost $200k. Whoops!
- FireBeyond 2mo ago
  > I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun. Elon has already lied, on an investor call, about how such things are not necessary - he referenced how "Tesla cameras can count photons", as a reason why they were not affected by fog, rain, or snow. Except, no they can't, and they never will be able to. Not the cameras in any Tesla now (and even then). It's a completely different type of camera (and it would do effectively nothing useful from a visualization perspective, let alone functional camera for human viewing). And even if they changed the camera, or added some, well, you can't count photos if you're not in an enclosed space (you know, like the open road). This is where Elon gets really dangerous, in my mind, he knows enough to be dangerous, he knows what to say that convinces the layperson, or investor, passes the initial sniff test only to dramatically fall over when you investigate.
theshrike79 2mo ago
Lidar will give you XYZ (z = distance) on a single datapoint, cameras give you XY and you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras. Lidar is ugly and expensive, but requires way fewer cycles to calculate distances. And it works through fog and even some obstacles, nor does it care about glare or get "scared" of shadows. If we had infinite compute in the car, cameras would be the obvious solution ...but we don't. You can get "Pretty good" with cameras, but still people find specific spots where the car is 100% sure a shadow under a bridge is a car or something stupid like that.
- huflungdung 2mo ago
  [dead]
- thebruce87m 2mo ago
  > you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras. You can get 3D depth estimation from a single 2D image but I don’t know how good it is for automotive. https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation
  - parl_match 2mo ago
    "depth estimation" precision matters! and it's still prone to optical illusions and other issues (many solutions struggle with road shadows, for example. sound familiar?) I think the natural solution is a 360 lidar as a source of truth, followed by optical for everything else
hagbard_c 2mo ago
Competitor explains why competition's product falls short - film at 11. I'd say the proof is in the pudding, which system shows the best results under different circumstances. I suspect the end result will be that a combination of cameras and some scanning apparatus - lidar, radar, sonar - gives the best results and that self-driving systems will converge on that combination.
- senordevnyc 2mo ago
  We already have those results. It’s why Waymo is doing millions of paid rides per month while Tesla is LARPing a robotaxi service that’s basically doing zero fully autonomous rides, as far as anyone can tell.
  - m348e912 2mo ago
    Tesla is manufacturing thousands of robotaxis a month. LARP or not, I'd be very surprised if none of the robotaxis are put to use.
    - senordevnyc 2mo ago
      How is that a good thing? They’re manufacturing thousands of vehicles that are reliant upon software and regulatory approval that they don’t have. They can’t even get their existing vehicles to work for Robotaxi, but they’re going to start building thousands of vehicles without steering wheels? OK.
      - m348e912 2mo ago
        Where did I say it was a good thing (or even a bad thing)? I was just making an observation, and yet downvoted for doing so. Tesla is making a huge bet on robotaxi, it’s quite possible it will come to fruition.
        senordevnyc 2mo ago
        I upvoted you, fwiw.
tito 2mo ago
$60,000 for car with sensors? I'm delighted to hear Waymo may be anticipating such low price points: "We are hearing that Waymo is close to having its entire package (car + Waymo sensor suite and driver) at around $60,000"
- xnx 2mo ago
  The 100% tariffs on Chinese cars have been the biggest obstacle from not getting to that cost point sooner.
dgarrett 2mo ago
I can purchase a self-driving Tesla at a reasonable price, in-line with other cars of the same class. I can't purchase a Waymo at any price.
- xnx 2mo ago
  If Teslas could self drive you could sit in the back seat, or sleep, or send the car somewhere without being in it. Elon really wants them to, but Tesla's do not self drive.
  - swingandamiss 2mo ago
    If Rivian was completely equal with Tesla at FSD, your tone would be completely different about Rivian. We understand.
    - xnx 2mo ago
      Elon's an ass, but the world needs self driving in as many places, from as many providers, as soon as possible. I wish Elon wasn't so stubborn about admitting he was wrong.
- trentor 2mo ago
  "self-driving" in better than ideal conditions.
- parl_match 2mo ago
  You can't purchase a level 3 Tesla at any price, either. To me, true self-driving starts at level 3. Otherwise, it's supervised. And Tesla selling their product as "Full Self Driving (Supervised)" is like selling "Fully Cooked Meal (Frozen)". No! You call it a "frozen meal"!
  - FeloniousHam 2mo ago
    Whether it's "true" self-driving, it is unquestionably useful. Everyday, _every_ day, FSD drives me on my commute (down different paths depending on traffic) with the only intervention being a nudge on an unprotected left turn across a wide highway. Recent updates broke parking in my specific parking spot, but I'm confident this regression will be fixed.
HiJon89 2mo ago
> “Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” It feels like there's a lot of assumptions baked in here. For example, do humans get in accidents because eyes are insufficient driving sensors? Or because human drivers get tired, distracted, make mistakes, etc. Also, you can put 10 cameras on a car looking in all directions at the same time, which feels materially different from a human that only has 2 eyes which can only look in a single direction at a time. It's possible that massively superhuman driving performance can't be achieved with just cameras, but I'm not seeing a strong case for that being made here.
- AngryData 2mo ago
  Also humans can move their heads around which gives extra parralax information and thus better depth perception than two static cameras would imply.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- carabiner 2mo ago
  Humans also have prior world domain knowledge. A human driver seeing a guy running across the road behind an obstacle can infer that the human will probably pop out on the other side (and prepare accordingly). A human can see the silhouette of an object with 1 eye and still infer that it has depth because they know what objects are, which is why one-eyed people can drive legally everywhere in the US. This inference extends to everything, not just shapes but behaviors of anything in the road, animate and inanimate objects.
  - CrimsonRain 2mo ago
    You know...AIs these days, have that too. Not as good as humans yet, but it will surpass at some point. https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1u5eetx/hw4_fsd_avoids_hitting_people_before_it_can_see/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1u5eetx/hw4_fsd_a...
theahura 2mo ago
i know this doesnt take away from the point of the article, but the whole thing is written by ai which just immediately makes me distrust it
devy 2mo ago
I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti-Telsa/Musk when Musk got into politics. Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it. Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable). Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology. Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd! So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.
- gamblor956 2mo ago
  Tesla did not make Lidar affordable. They don't even use lidar. They also did not make lithium batteries affordable. Panasonic and CATL did that. Tesla was simply the first to exploit that bew affordability.
  - Harvesterify 2mo ago
    He did not say that Tesla made the LiDAR afforadable though.
- xnx 2mo ago
  The general approach to pioneering work like self-driving is: 1) Make it work 2) Make it right 3) Make it cheap For no good reason, Elon tried to solve step 3 before the other two. This is extra strange since SpaceX has done much better at pioneering work.
marlow_congdon 2mo ago
Personal experience, but my Tesla Model 3 drives most trips from start to finish. If I have to intervene, it's usually because other drivers aren't letting it into a lane and I have to get aggressive. Friends I know in Dallas and Austin (simpler, friendlier streets than where I live) say they don't drive at all anymore. Maybe it's not good enough for a robotaxi service yet, but the rate of progress since my first Tesla in 2022 has been crazy to watch, especially in the last year. Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked. Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?
- parl_match 2mo ago
  Because Waymo is largely unsupervised, they take a much more conservative route than Tesla does. Their route planner includes avoiding high-incident rate stretches of road. If there is a stretch of surface road with a complex intersection and aggressive drivers, you are there to step in. The Waymo Driver instead will try to avoid that area. Also, Tesla's hardware is not nearly complex or powerful enough to approach the low level of intervention or incident rate that Waymo has - but HW5 will be a massive step forward for them. That's going to be the make or break for me, personally. If Tesla can't make their solution work well on HW5, then they have serious structural issues in their program.
- questionableans 2mo ago
  Tried FSD once. It was very confused about a traffic circle, cruised up to it & slammed on the brakes. Got rear ended (at low speed). The incomplete, miscategorizing and glitching display of other vehicles and obstacles does not give me confidence that the car is able to correctly identify what’s around it, let alone drive accordingly. Even the lane departure warnings are 90% false positives (but I’d rather be warned than not). Just driving normally is much less stressful and more fun than supervising the car’s attempt at driving like a teenager.
cosmotic 2mo ago
I thought the pitch for just-cameras was that the hardware was cheaper and that it's what humans are "using", evidence that it should be sufficient. Just-cameras was to take more engineering to build upnfront but pay off in lower costs in the end. That argument disagrees with the graph that's presented.
- parl_match 2mo ago
  The argument made more sense 5+ years ago, but the hardware costs of sensors such as LIDAR has plummeted. In addition, a certain CEO of a certain car company has made very aggressive sales pitches about how LIDAR isn't necessary and even going so far as to sell unfinished self driving solutions as being completely capable of doing so. So hypothetically, if that car company were to adopt LIDAR, they would have been selling their solution under false claims in a sales capacity.
- qingcharles 2mo ago
  Sure, cameras (eyes) are mostly all that humans are using, but two points: 1) the vehicles aren't quite matched with the same experience and intelligence (right now) as exists behind a human's two "cameras" 2) we hold self-driving robots to a much higher standard. meatbags are getting smushed in large numbers daily by other humans, but a single robot smushing a human is headline news for days. giving the robot vastly more information about the world around it, in much higher detail will eventually allow it to drive much better than us. [obviously we should hold them to higher standards, we should create something much better at driving than the best humans]
xnx 2mo ago
Also worth watching the source presentation which is really interesting and informative beyond the Waymo specifics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4zrV3-6N8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4zrV3-6N8
bryanlarsen 2mo ago
> 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers That is a remarkable number. You can avoid 50% of multi-vehicle crashes by being a good driver yourself, but the other 50% are caused by the other driver. To get above 50% you have to drive defensively and do a good job modelling the actions of other drivers.
- tim333 2mo ago
  From my experience of potentially serious injury crashes, they are mostly from going too fast and crashing into something. The ones where I've stopped and some other bad driver has gone into me are mostly too slow to cause injury.

Right. But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it or are 10+ cameras already safe enough? This article makes no attempt to answer the actual meat of the question. Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet. p.s. I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.

curuinor 2mo ago
Article has a paragraph about how lidar is rapidly getting cheaper, so the camera comparison is only temporary Dolgov also pushed back on the one knock that camera-only fans always reach for: cost. Waymo is on its sixth generation of hardware, and he said each generation has drastically cut the price. Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- dgrin91 2mo ago
  Thats the million (billion? trillion?) dollar question. Will it get cheap enough? Will it get cheap enough to put on 100 million+ vehicles and be competitive with cameras? I honestly don't know the answer, but I haven't seen strong evidence to point to yes.
  - senordevnyc 2mo ago
    It’s already there.
  - parl_match 2mo ago
    > Will it get cheap enough? An Ojai costs less than a mid tier luxury vehicle. Is that not cheap enough? And the price is only coming down.
tqi 2mo ago
"Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet" Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving
- ls612 2mo ago
  If 2x Mk 1 eyeballs are good enough then I figure cameras can get there too. Or are we going to outlaw that as well because of competitive incentives of Waymo?
  - 9dev 2mo ago
    Do you have any conception of how massively, incomprehensibly, extremely superior our sensory system is to any kind of camera-based computer vision we can make?
    - bigtex88 2mo ago
      Tesla fanboys aren't known for logic or rigorous thinking.
    - ls612 2mo ago
      In terms of dynamic range and color space? Yes absolutely. But for driving you don't really need a huge color space and for dynamic range you can just use separate cameras for daytime and nighttime.
      - 9dev 2mo ago
        You're again thinking in terms of image sensors, which is not representative of what your body is able to do. For example, your brain processes signals from all your senses combined, which allows prioritisation of things that trigger multiple senses at once. It also applies pattern matching against millions of years of evolution's worth of information about danger. But much more importantly, there is all sorts of post-processing happening that is so weird and complex and really a little decoupled from the raw visual information that it's futile to try and compare that to any digital operation you're thinking of in terms of cameras: If you were to look at a still captured from your eyes, you'd see an upside-down image that's only sharp in the very center of the image, blurry and desaturated pretty much everywhere else, grossly so in the corners, with several big black or blurry spots all over. From that perspective, eyes are awful really. Yet still, your brain manages to turn the stereoscopic vision into a spatial representation, calculate the movement and keep track of other objects relative to you, fill in areas you can't actually see, detect things moving in your peripherals, highlight things of importance, and so much more.
foxyv 2mo ago
Personally I would rather vote to ban them if they aren't safe enough. If car makers want to cheap out at the expense of public safety they should go to prison for the people they kill.
- randyrand 2mo ago
  It's not car makers. It's car buyers. When a car buyer cannot afford self driving they'll just drive themselves. The bar should be safer than a human and as affordable as possible.
ed_balls 2mo ago
> Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet. Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only. 1) Both in 2028 2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035 3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving
- otterley 2mo ago
  > Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. Why? So long as they're insured and their owners can be held criminally liable for injuries just as a human driver would be, why does the bar have to be higher?
  - kube-system 2mo ago
    Because driving risk is far from evenly distributed. If a self-driving car drives like an average human driver, for responsible drivers, this would mean incurring more risk by getting into one. A huge portion of the risk of human drivers is due to confounding human factors like negligence, distraction, medical issues, fatigue, etc. Responsible drivers can take most of these factors into their own hands -- not driving while sleepy, not driving drunk, not using their cell phone. These people don't want a vehicle A better comparison would be comparing the capability of a self-driving car to the skill of a human driver driving under ideal circumstances of health/responsibility/etc.
    - otterley 2mo ago
      We don't measure aggregate risk by discarding a part of the population, even if it's the poorer-performing part. Even today, you cannot fully avoid this risk: when you get into a vehicle driven by a stranger, you don't know a priori whether the driver is excellent or average. Ideally customer feedback weeds out poor drivers and reduces accident rates, but I'm not privy to data that would prove or disprove whether that actually happens - especially because new drivers join the pool every day.
      - 2mo ago
senordevnyc 2mo ago
You’re like 2-3 orders of magnitude off on your cost there.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
afavour 2mo ago
Which is why we need strong regulation. People shouldn’t be able to vote with their wallet when other peoples lives are at stake.
wasabi991011 2mo ago
Where did you get $200k worth of extra sensors? Also, contrary to your statement, the article directly addresses the meat if the question: > The disagreement is whether “good enough to help a human drive” ever becomes “good enough to remove the human,” and his answer is no, because the sensing tops out before you get the last few nines. > Now, Tesla would point to its active Robotaxi service as an example of “removing the human”, but Dolgov also said that camera-only is also good for a demo, and that’s basically what Tesla’s Robotaxi service is right now.
Animats 2mo ago
LIDAR units are nowhere near that expensive. Even ten years ago, the Velodyne top of car units only cost about $80,000. The short range ones, found at vehicle corners and on the rear, are now around $200 - $1500. The long range car-top unit is still expensive, around $10,000, and that's dropping. The whole sensor suite on a Waymo is probably under US$20,000 right now. If that. The future direction for automotive seems to be more car-top sensors with narrower fields of view that add up to a full circle. Only the one that looks ahead needs 300m range.
- parl_match 2mo ago
  Current estimates put the Ojai sensor cost between $15k and $30k. My inclination is that there is confusion between BOM and constructed cost.
parl_match 2mo ago
> But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it Of course not! So, you may be surprised to find that Waymo's sensor package doesn't cost $200k. Whoops!
FireBeyond 2mo ago
> I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun. Elon has already lied, on an investor call, about how such things are not necessary - he referenced how "Tesla cameras can count photons", as a reason why they were not affected by fog, rain, or snow. Except, no they can't, and they never will be able to. Not the cameras in any Tesla now (and even then). It's a completely different type of camera (and it would do effectively nothing useful from a visualization perspective, let alone functional camera for human viewing). And even if they changed the camera, or added some, well, you can't count photos if you're not in an enclosed space (you know, like the open road). This is where Elon gets really dangerous, in my mind, he knows enough to be dangerous, he knows what to say that convinces the layperson, or investor, passes the initial sniff test only to dramatically fall over when you investigate.

theshrike79 2mo ago

Lidar will give you XYZ (z = distance) on a single datapoint, cameras give you XY and you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras. Lidar is ugly and expensive, but requires way fewer cycles to calculate distances. And it works through fog and even some obstacles, nor does it care about glare or get "scared" of shadows. If we had infinite compute in the car, cameras would be the obvious solution ...but we don't. You can get "Pretty good" with cameras, but still people find specific spots where the car is 100% sure a shadow under a bridge is a car or something stupid like that.

huflungdung 2mo ago
[dead]
thebruce87m 2mo ago
> you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras. You can get 3D depth estimation from a single 2D image but I don’t know how good it is for automotive. https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation
- parl_match 2mo ago
  "depth estimation" precision matters! and it's still prone to optical illusions and other issues (many solutions struggle with road shadows, for example. sound familiar?) I think the natural solution is a 360 lidar as a source of truth, followed by optical for everything else

hagbard_c 2mo ago

Competitor explains why competition's product falls short - film at 11. I'd say the proof is in the pudding, which system shows the best results under different circumstances. I suspect the end result will be that a combination of cameras and some scanning apparatus - lidar, radar, sonar - gives the best results and that self-driving systems will converge on that combination.

senordevnyc 2mo ago
We already have those results. It’s why Waymo is doing millions of paid rides per month while Tesla is LARPing a robotaxi service that’s basically doing zero fully autonomous rides, as far as anyone can tell.
- m348e912 2mo ago
  Tesla is manufacturing thousands of robotaxis a month. LARP or not, I'd be very surprised if none of the robotaxis are put to use.
  - senordevnyc 2mo ago
    How is that a good thing? They’re manufacturing thousands of vehicles that are reliant upon software and regulatory approval that they don’t have. They can’t even get their existing vehicles to work for Robotaxi, but they’re going to start building thousands of vehicles without steering wheels? OK.
    - m348e912 2mo ago
      Where did I say it was a good thing (or even a bad thing)? I was just making an observation, and yet downvoted for doing so. Tesla is making a huge bet on robotaxi, it’s quite possible it will come to fruition.
      - senordevnyc 2mo ago
        I upvoted you, fwiw.

tito 2mo ago

$60,000 for car with sensors? I'm delighted to hear Waymo may be anticipating such low price points: "We are hearing that Waymo is close to having its entire package (car + Waymo sensor suite and driver) at around $60,000"

xnx 2mo ago
The 100% tariffs on Chinese cars have been the biggest obstacle from not getting to that cost point sooner.

dgarrett 2mo ago

I can purchase a self-driving Tesla at a reasonable price, in-line with other cars of the same class. I can't purchase a Waymo at any price.

xnx 2mo ago
If Teslas could self drive you could sit in the back seat, or sleep, or send the car somewhere without being in it. Elon really wants them to, but Tesla's do not self drive.
- swingandamiss 2mo ago
  If Rivian was completely equal with Tesla at FSD, your tone would be completely different about Rivian. We understand.
  - xnx 2mo ago
    Elon's an ass, but the world needs self driving in as many places, from as many providers, as soon as possible. I wish Elon wasn't so stubborn about admitting he was wrong.
trentor 2mo ago
"self-driving" in better than ideal conditions.
parl_match 2mo ago
You can't purchase a level 3 Tesla at any price, either. To me, true self-driving starts at level 3. Otherwise, it's supervised. And Tesla selling their product as "Full Self Driving (Supervised)" is like selling "Fully Cooked Meal (Frozen)". No! You call it a "frozen meal"!
- FeloniousHam 2mo ago
  Whether it's "true" self-driving, it is unquestionably useful. Everyday, _every_ day, FSD drives me on my commute (down different paths depending on traffic) with the only intervention being a nudge on an unprotected left turn across a wide highway. Recent updates broke parking in my specific parking spot, but I'm confident this regression will be fixed.

HiJon89 2mo ago

> “Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” It feels like there's a lot of assumptions baked in here. For example, do humans get in accidents because eyes are insufficient driving sensors? Or because human drivers get tired, distracted, make mistakes, etc. Also, you can put 10 cameras on a car looking in all directions at the same time, which feels materially different from a human that only has 2 eyes which can only look in a single direction at a time. It's possible that massively superhuman driving performance can't be achieved with just cameras, but I'm not seeing a strong case for that being made here.

AngryData 2mo ago
Also humans can move their heads around which gives extra parralax information and thus better depth perception than two static cameras would imply.
deleted 2mo ago
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carabiner 2mo ago
Humans also have prior world domain knowledge. A human driver seeing a guy running across the road behind an obstacle can infer that the human will probably pop out on the other side (and prepare accordingly). A human can see the silhouette of an object with 1 eye and still infer that it has depth because they know what objects are, which is why one-eyed people can drive legally everywhere in the US. This inference extends to everything, not just shapes but behaviors of anything in the road, animate and inanimate objects.
- CrimsonRain 2mo ago
  You know...AIs these days, have that too. Not as good as humans yet, but it will surpass at some point. https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1u5eetx/hw4_fsd_avoids_hitting_people_before_it_can_see/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1u5eetx/hw4_fsd_a...

theahura 2mo ago

i know this doesnt take away from the point of the article, but the whole thing is written by ai which just immediately makes me distrust it

devy 2mo ago

I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti-Telsa/Musk when Musk got into politics. Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it. Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable). Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology. Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd! So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.

gamblor956 2mo ago
Tesla did not make Lidar affordable. They don't even use lidar. They also did not make lithium batteries affordable. Panasonic and CATL did that. Tesla was simply the first to exploit that bew affordability.
- Harvesterify 2mo ago
  He did not say that Tesla made the LiDAR afforadable though.
xnx 2mo ago
The general approach to pioneering work like self-driving is: 1) Make it work 2) Make it right 3) Make it cheap For no good reason, Elon tried to solve step 3 before the other two. This is extra strange since SpaceX has done much better at pioneering work.

marlow_congdon 2mo ago

Personal experience, but my Tesla Model 3 drives most trips from start to finish. If I have to intervene, it's usually because other drivers aren't letting it into a lane and I have to get aggressive. Friends I know in Dallas and Austin (simpler, friendlier streets than where I live) say they don't drive at all anymore. Maybe it's not good enough for a robotaxi service yet, but the rate of progress since my first Tesla in 2022 has been crazy to watch, especially in the last year. Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked. Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?

parl_match 2mo ago
Because Waymo is largely unsupervised, they take a much more conservative route than Tesla does. Their route planner includes avoiding high-incident rate stretches of road. If there is a stretch of surface road with a complex intersection and aggressive drivers, you are there to step in. The Waymo Driver instead will try to avoid that area. Also, Tesla's hardware is not nearly complex or powerful enough to approach the low level of intervention or incident rate that Waymo has - but HW5 will be a massive step forward for them. That's going to be the make or break for me, personally. If Tesla can't make their solution work well on HW5, then they have serious structural issues in their program.
questionableans 2mo ago
Tried FSD once. It was very confused about a traffic circle, cruised up to it & slammed on the brakes. Got rear ended (at low speed). The incomplete, miscategorizing and glitching display of other vehicles and obstacles does not give me confidence that the car is able to correctly identify what’s around it, let alone drive accordingly. Even the lane departure warnings are 90% false positives (but I’d rather be warned than not). Just driving normally is much less stressful and more fun than supervising the car’s attempt at driving like a teenager.

cosmotic 2mo ago

I thought the pitch for just-cameras was that the hardware was cheaper and that it's what humans are "using", evidence that it should be sufficient. Just-cameras was to take more engineering to build upnfront but pay off in lower costs in the end. That argument disagrees with the graph that's presented.

parl_match 2mo ago
The argument made more sense 5+ years ago, but the hardware costs of sensors such as LIDAR has plummeted. In addition, a certain CEO of a certain car company has made very aggressive sales pitches about how LIDAR isn't necessary and even going so far as to sell unfinished self driving solutions as being completely capable of doing so. So hypothetically, if that car company were to adopt LIDAR, they would have been selling their solution under false claims in a sales capacity.
qingcharles 2mo ago
Sure, cameras (eyes) are mostly all that humans are using, but two points: 1) the vehicles aren't quite matched with the same experience and intelligence (right now) as exists behind a human's two "cameras" 2) we hold self-driving robots to a much higher standard. meatbags are getting smushed in large numbers daily by other humans, but a single robot smushing a human is headline news for days. giving the robot vastly more information about the world around it, in much higher detail will eventually allow it to drive much better than us. [obviously we should hold them to higher standards, we should create something much better at driving than the best humans]

xnx 2mo ago

Also worth watching the source presentation which is really interesting and informative beyond the Waymo specifics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4zrV3-6N8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4zrV3-6N8

bryanlarsen 2mo ago

> 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers That is a remarkable number. You can avoid 50% of multi-vehicle crashes by being a good driver yourself, but the other 50% are caused by the other driver. To get above 50% you have to drive defensively and do a good job modelling the actions of other drivers.

tim333 2mo ago
From my experience of potentially serious injury crashes, they are mostly from going too fast and crashing into something. The ones where I've stopped and some other bad driver has gone into me are mostly too slow to cause injury.