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On Self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
- HarryHirsch 2y agoPedestrians and motorcyclists are supposed to play chicken, one supposes. The self-driving problem requires general intelligence and a theory of mind, both unsolved problems.
- Clubber 2y ago>Pedestrians and motorcyclists are supposed to play chicken, one supposes. The self-driving problem requires general intelligence and a theory of mind, both unsolved problems. Self driving only has to be better than people drivers, statistically, to be a benefit to society. This probably isn't a very high bar.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoThat's the other issue: the already low baseline. Pedestrian fatalities in the US are unacceptably high already, and let's not talk about the standards of driving instruction and road safety enforcement.
- wpietri 2y agoNo, comparing against a general population average is way too low, because automated cars won't randomly replace drivers. They need to be at least as good as the sort of good driver that self-driving cars would replace. Taxi drivers, for example, are much better drivers than average people. Further, I think a variety of factors, including politics and liability structures, mean self-driving cars will have to be radically better than the average human driver. For example, each car-caused death is seen as the responsibility of some human. But every Waymo death will be seen as the responsibility of Waymo. Responsibility for the current 100 deaths per day is diffuse, and so accepted. But if it's 40 deaths per day for Waymo and 60 for Musk, nobody's going to shrug at that.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoAsk a cyclist in SF whether they trust Waymo or the average driver more.
- wpietri 2y agoI'm a pedestrian in SF, and I definitely trust the automated cars less. I pretty rapidly slot a given driver into one mental model or another. But I have no idea what the automated cars are up to, and so have to give them a very wide berth.
- NoahKAndrews 2y agoThey said cyclists for a reason though. As a pedestrian, if you're confident the human sees you, it's very easy to make sure that you get through the interaction safely. That's not true at all for cyclists, where humans will see you and still drive dangerously around you.
- wpietri 2y agoSorry, I'm not following. I don't bike as much lately, but I was an ardent cyclist here for more than a decade. If I won't trust a vehicle as a pedestrian, where speeds are lower and I'm more maneuverable, I'm going to trust it even less as a cyclist in traffic. So if bryanlarsen thought the cyclist comparison to be unfavorable to Waymo, then I'm agreeing. But I think he thought it would be favorable, and I'd disagree on both counts.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoDrivers in SF routinely do things that make cyclists feel unsafe. Waymo's don't.
- wpietri 2y agoWhat's your evidence for that? As I said, I've seen them do things that make me give them a wide berth. And as I explained, that berth would only get wider on a bike, when I'm more vulnerable.
- taylodl 2y agoIs Tesla a transportation company or an automaker? They're going to have trouble trying to be both.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoTesla is a stock company. Their main product is their stock.
- testfrequency 2y agoI know this was wit, but Tesla has and always will be an energy company. The cars have obviously done well for them, but their solar and charging are the real innovations. I’ve been waiting for the day there’s pressure to split the car business away from Tesla
- tromp 2y agoThen who is playing Go?
- belter 2y ago"The only winning move is not to play."
- entropygiggles 2y agoThose of us who walk for transportation.
- im3w1l 2y agoI didn't realize how good question that was until I started looking into the state of self-driving in China to come up with a witty reply. It does seem they have many contenders.
- threetonesun 2y agoSearch for trolley maps of your area, probably late 1800s early 1900s. I think a lot about how Uber and Lyft have all the data to support where more public transit would have the biggest benefit but clearly ignore it.
- GaggiX 2y agoAutomatic train operation, everyday I take a metro train that doesn't even have a cabin for the driver.
- SilverBirch 2y agoLet's assume that Tesla is going all in on Robo taxies (I think a reasonable move given their core automotive business is not sound from a shareholder perspective). Then the problem they're facing is less technological than regulatory. If you were to assume that their self-driving is perfect, which it's not, they're meaningfully behind Waymo in an important way. Waymo have put the work in to establish themselves with regulators, gone slow in the roll out, responded to pressure and criticism and built trust. Musk seems to imagine that he can just put a 2 tonne death trap on the street and go "Tada!" and people will just accept it. They won't. The core problem is they'll need to go through years of hurdles to get regulatory approval, building up through the same steps that Waymo are going through. It's not a technological problem, it's a regulatory and political problem.
- iterateoften 2y agoWaymos advantage is also cooperating as a means to help shape the regulations that competitors will later have to meet. From a public acceptance view, I think after the first wave gets deployed by any company the companies that come after it will have significantly more leeway and the public will more easily accept them.
- SilverBirch 2y agoThat might be true, but it also destroys the economics. A massive factor in this is that to justify the valuation of Tesla you need to beleive not just that Tesla are going to solve self-driving (again) but they're going to do so and have a monopoly for some period of time. If Waymo really do solve it and roll out at scale, then all that Tesla is going to offer from an economic point of view is a race to the bottom. They'll entirely lose pricing power, which defeats the purpose of the pivot in the first place.
- dragonwriter 2y agoWaymo’s advantage is also that it is actually operating a robotaxi service, which isn't just making self-driving cars or having regulations in place, while Tesla is not.
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- lefstathiou 2y agoI Personally prefer the Tesla go to market strategy. They are tackling a much harder problem (machine vision) and if it ends up working, it will be done far more elegantly (a few cameras rather than tons of sensors) with far more significant implications to our day to day life (the tech can be extrapolated to tons of automation, like garbage roadside cleaning, side walk garbage collection, robots, etc). On regulation, I believe regulators are prone to bending to the will of local constituents. Uber was very effective at galvanizing voters when local markets were threatening legislation via the app. I imagine the many millions of people that will own a Tesla in 2 years will have no problem clicking a “message your local congressman” button on the screen to get this approved in most markets. It won’t matter if NYC, Portland, San Fran and LA ban it. Of course, the data will have to fully support the safety of Tesla FSD. I’m curious to watch it play out.
- airstrike 2y agoEmphasis on "if it ends up working"
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoThe Laconic "if" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
- Ringz 2y agoSolving that problem on machine vision would be nice, but: "Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar (theverge.com)" [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40299991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40299991
- poulpy123 2y ago> While no one was behind the wheel during my rides, Waymo has remote operators that sometimes provide guidance to its vehicles (Waymo declined to tell me whether—or how often—remote operators intervened during my rides) So basically Waymo are remote controlled taxis
- Retric 2y agoWhen a 10 person team can handle 100+ cars we call that automation Remote control like this requires cars to safely deal with hazards on their own. But, it doesn’t require software to be able to solve every problem.
- kbos87 2y agoI don't have any experience with Waymo taxis yet, but I have no doubt that a 10 person team could reliably handle 100+ Teslas today.
- Retric 2y agoThat’s why people many people think Tesla is behind on the path of self driving. It’s good enough when someone sitting in the drivers seat and paying attention, but that’s a long way from self driving.
- tsimionescu 2y agoHow could someone pay continuous attention to 10 different cars, ready to intervene in less than a second at any time for any of them? Because that is the standard that is required to drive a Tesla "FSD" vehicle.
- wpietri 2y agoHave they announce any numbers like that? The only thing I can recall hearing was having 72 operators for 50 vehicles, but that was back at initial launch. If I were in their shoes, especially given the Cruise debacle, I'd have continuous remote human monitoring of every vehicle. They're already burning billions on this; if having one minimum-wage worker per vehicle just hovering over a big red stop button prevents a gruesome accident and a multi-month pause, it'd be money well spent.
- frob 2y agoWeren't we supposed to have Tesla robotaxis making everyone $10k a year back in 2021? I will be shocked if there is an actual product that is actually usable within 6 month of August 8. Never trust a charlatan.
- wpietri 2y agoYup. One million robotaxis by the end of 2020: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-million-tesla-robotaxis-by-the-end-of-2020-where-are-they https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil... In May 2019, Kai-Fu Lee said, "If there are a million Tesla robo-taxis functioning on the road in 2020, I will eat them.": https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-million-tesla-robotaxis-by-the-end-of-2020-where-are-they https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil... Experts at the time knew what Musk was saying was nonsense, so I think "charlatan" is exactly the right word here.
- jejeyyy77 2y agoTesla is a software company - they'll never figure out manufacturing.
- andruby 2y agoHard to know if you're being sarcastic or not. I'm not a fan of how they handle FSD marketing, but they are very good at automating car manufactory. I believe they are more or less the only company that can mass-produce EVs at that scale _for a profit_. The traditional car brands are losing money on EV's and/or can't scale the production up enough. BYD is probably the only other manufacturer that can compete with Tesla on scale and cost.
- StephenSmith 2y agoYes, but Waymo hasn't (yet) made Google $1 of profit and FSD is almost pure margin for Tesla.
- tsimionescu 2y agoYes, it's easy to make margins off of a product you're selling for thousands of dollars a decade or so in advance of actually having it work.
- EcommerceFlow 2y agoAnyone who owns a Tesla and has used the new V12.3 understands why Elon is so bullish about the Robo-Taxi's. He's said they've internally seen a 5x-10x reduction in disengagements on 12.4 (already trained, out soon), and that 12.5 is even better. Their GPU stack by end of the year will also be 8x the size it was earlier this year. Combine all this together, and the "feedback loop" with millions of people using FSD, it's looking like the "vision only" strategy will work. My question is what happens to all other car markers if it turns out Elon and Andrej Karpathy's strategy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM23sjhtk4Q) is the correct one?
- andruby 2y agoSome car markers will die, others will rise (BYD), hopefully most will pivot successfully and survive, perhaps by buying some of the tech from Tesla and others.
- failbuffer 2y ago5x to 10x seems too vague to be the result of objective benchmarking.,. those sound more like aspirational numbers from a guy who's been promising FSD every year since forever.
- jaimex2 2y agoIt's 2024, surely no one is still clicking these? Arsetechnica doesn't know anything you don't already know.
- xyst 2y agoSo what happens to a Waymo vehicle when it needs remote assistance but internet is broken or cellular signal is degraded or unavailable? Does Waymo dispatch a physical person to the scene (like their old competitor, Cruise)?
- ajross 2y agoI mean, probably? That's a two-mode failure, so the generally correct engineering is to (1) not make things worse and (2) not worry about cost, because it's vanishingly rare. In this case, it's a "disabled vehicle in the road", which is not a new thing at all, and you rely on the existing infrastructure (tow trucks!) to handle it.
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoI was in SF which and happened to be driving next to an unoccupied Waymo. While considering other foot and vehicle traffic, I swerved into the Waymo's direction to test the reaction. The car swerved a bit, honked, and slowed. I then cut the vehicle off knowing it would submit to my position and continued to drive to my destination. The fastest way to get adoption is to isolate the lanes between driverless and human driver vehicles. Unexpected threats and bad actors like myself would not be able to cross that line, limiting the impact of foot traffic and outside interference.
- fab13n 2y agoThe choice is between: * be completely autonomous from day 1, and progressively increase the number of situations you can drive through; * or drive through every legal situation from day 1, and increase the % of them handled autonomously. I believe the 2nd approach, Tesla's, has one key advantage: it collects data about freak situations much faster and more exhaustively. Given how data has become the key resource in AI, that's probably a very strategic asset they've accumulated here. Also, Waymo's joker (remote operation by humans when the software bails out) is totally replicable by Tesla robotaxis.
- whoknowsidont 2y agoHonestly at this point we could have just had standardized infrastructure for self-driving vehicles to guide them along the road. We had government programs doing exactly this until republicans gutted them. Would have been more stable, cost-efficient, safer, and it'd actually exist today. The reality is that there are fundamental, unsolvable problems with the current "self-driving" stack. From the cameras to signal processing. Everyone involved in this space has been repeating the same thing since basically the early 2010's. Just stop pouring needless amounts of money into these projects that have offered very little fruit. Build the standardized, simpler infra with the money and fund trains while we're at it. Stop this non-sense.
- gilbetron 2y agoThis just doesn't work. You can make standardized infra, ignoring the insane cost it would take, but still the cars need to handle unusual situations even within that standardized infra. If you want autonomous vehicles on the road, they need to handle situations just like humans can. Reality is messy. Even in factories, within intense control, autonomous robots can struggle and it takes a lot of effort to keep them functioning.
- whoknowsidont 2y ago>but still the cars need to handle unusual situations even within that standardized infra. So? You're missing the point. It'd still be miles and miles ahead of where we are today. AND it'd still cost less money than we've spent today AND it'd keep money in the right places AND it'd provide plenty of useful jobs for people that need it. This wasn't some hypothetical either. We had working standards and working prototypes for all of this. Congress was actually gearing up to make this a reality back around 2010. But Republicans. It's what we in the business call a "no brainer." Saying "it just doesn't work" when it CLEARLY did is wild.
- gilbetron 2y agoI completely disagree. You're basically saying we should create something like an automotive/train hybrid system across the country hitting all communities in the country. That would take trillions. Like actually trillions, and it still wouldn't be good as having autonomous vehicles, because once we have autonomous vehicles, we also have autonomous aircraft and ships and all kinds of great things.
- geor9e 2y agoThis was such a poorly written opinion piece that I wouldn't be surprised if someone with a large GOOG-TSLA options spread commissioned it as a hit piece. It just repeats the fact that Waymo uses remote operators over and over, completely ignoring the fact that Tesla uses a local operator - the driver that takes control when it disengages. Its the same class of data being collected either way. The rest of the article read like ChatGPT generated fluff to make it longer, without real substance. It does make excellent engagement-bait, I'll give it that.
- gunapologist99 2y ago> Waymo declined to tell me whether—or how often—remote operators intervened during my ride Or just the entire ride. Declining to provide the information on how much humans were driving to a journalist writing an article about the experience just makes it look like Waymo decided that there would be zero errors. Meanwhile, Tesla just said go for it, and then the author wrote a review disparaging Tesla, who gave "full" access without human help. Instead of Waymo, who declined to say whether humans drove the car. Waymo could offer a Mechanical Turk to play chess with and this author wouldn't even blink. This is an information-free article with a click-bait title.
- ahahahahah 2y agoYour whole premise is flawed. Waymo remote operators cannot drive or control the car in that way.
- gunapologist99 2y ago"While no one was behind the wheel during my rides, Waymo has remote operators that sometimes provide guidance to its vehicles (Waymo declined to tell me whether—or how often—remote operators intervened during my rides). And while Tesla’s FSD works on all road types, Waymo’s taxis avoid freeways."
- ahahahahah 2y ago[flagged]