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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 o

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.

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.