I did not spent a few years in self driving, but correct if I'm wrong, but how would Waymo win when they can work only with HD maps (aka, nearly nowhere) while Tesla FSD work nearly perfectly now even on dirt roads (aka anywhere) with no map at all?
Waymo has proven driverless operations in Chandler, then Downtown Phoenix, then San Francisco. Truly driverless, no people in car. They’ve demonstrated driverless capability and the ability to expand to new regions, even if it means taking HD maps.
Tesla has not proven any reliable driverless operation, anywhere. They have removed hardware from their cars (radar, uss) and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years nor any willingness to change from their “vision only, big data” strategy.
If things continue on the current trajectory Waymo will likely be operating in all major US cities and metros in a few years while Tesla’s self driving offering will probably be forcibly renamed by regulation and end in a class action lawsuit.
Basically, Waymo has proven N and N+1 capability, meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N, and has lied to consumers and actually reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting measures.
> and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years
Really? I’ve had some casual interest in the progress of FSD beta and the past six months alone has seen dramatic improvements to numerous adversarial situations.
FSD beta is currently able to drive with confidence on unmarked roads at night in the rain, with only basic maps for wayfinding. This has been demonstrated by customers in their own cars, driving roads which haven’t been vetted by the developers.
I’m sure Waymo and other systems can do this too, but I haven’t seen it demonstrated.
> Waymo has proven driverless operations in Chandler, then Downtown Phoenix, then San Francisco.
And how many years did that take. Are they adding profitable operations in new cities year after year, with every year adding new cities?
As far as I can see they simply lose billion and billions of $ for no real success in actually having a product.
Tesla is actually using the technology to improve its Level 2 systems and make money with it.
> meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N
First of all, Waymo has not proven N, because they don't make money on any of these things.
Tesla at least try to drive in N+10000000 other cases and navigate many of them without seeing them first.
If you have to go one by one threw every single city in the world its not clear to me that this is a better approach then solving a more general problem.
> reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting measures
Tesla just made 3 billion $ of profit in a quarter. What cost cutting? They are currently doing major investments in upgraded sensors suits, upgraded data-centers and overall their team is still growing.
Just because Tesla is profitable and making money by selling vehicles does not mean they are on a better path to engineering a self driving system than Waymo.
The opposite is also true, just because Waymo does not make money does not reflect the capability of their self driving systems. Saying "Waymo has not proven N, because they don't make money on any of these things." doesn't make any sense, and is not even true.
I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.
We are discussing who is closer to realizing a fully self-driving system, not who runs a better business.
> Just because Tesla is profitable and making money by selling vehicles does not mean they are on a better path to engineering a self driving system than Waymo.
That not what I said, what it means it has more staying power.
> doesn't make any sense, and is not even true
What data are you basing this on? Are any of their operations profitable? If they are, why are they not expanding those operations to make more profit?
> I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.
Yeah, but Tesla didn't spend 7 years only focusing on Phoenix, so using that as a comparison is just dishonest.
You are stacking the field in favor of what you want the winner to be.
Here is my proposal for a more fair test on who is actually 'winning' self driving:
"You take a car, and put it on any random road anywhere in the world, how well can it navigate to any other random road in the world"
How well does Waymo do on that test? I would guess worse then Tesla.
That test is much closer to what it actually takes to really claim that self driving is 'solved'.
In my opinion neither are close to this and both will burn many more billions and many more years before getting there. So to just confidently claim Waymo is way ahead is nonsense in my opinion.
Reversing the "cameras only" position is a step in the right direction. They are currently ~3 years behind collecting lidar data compared to Cruise / Waymo. I wonder if they'll be able to make it up with "ghost-rider" volume in 2023.
Collecting HD Maps is an 80/20 problem (I have a patent in a subfield of this, for better or worse lol) - you can get a ton of value from a small set of focused areas. If you can solve greater metro areas (no dirt roads?), you've got a real solution.
I also think that the mapping and routing component matters a lot less than how good your collision and realtime avoidance systems are. And in that arena, Tesla is an unmitigated disaster.
Thanks for your anwser. I see a lot of bad things on Tesla FSD and I totally get the critics.
Yet, I follow DirtyTesla's YouTube channel and I think FSD is quite impressive compared to any other self driving software I've seen.
Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for example in similar situations? I can't find anything even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.
I'm not a fanboy nor do I possess any TSLA actions (or even a car for that matter), I'm just interested in the field and until now I thought Tesla was the most promising tech (it seems I'm wrong, but I really like to see it!).
>I see a lot of bad things on Tesla FSD and I totally get the critics...I think FSD is quite impressive compared to any other self driving software I've seen.
>
>Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for example in similar situations? I can't find anything even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.
I can't believe one can make an honest argument that Tesla is ahead of Waymo on FSD
The honest argument is that we have seen Tesla’s technology exposed to unsupervised and uncontrolled adversarial conditions across hundreds of wildly diverse cities in the USA, whereas we haven’t seen Waymo vehicles doing anything outside of curated geofenced areas or curated marketing videos. Right now if you dropped a Waymo and a Tesla on an unsealed road in Michigan, one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to drive.
I agree that Waymo could well be far ahead of Tesla, but there isn't enough information in the public domain to say this with confidence. We don't have the ability to make a proper comparative assessment.
This is something that seems really important, and is definitely a significant effort, but actually is inconsequential.
Think about a section of lightly used suburban road. The amount of work that went into making it involved was immense. A crew of road workers using expensive machines and large amounts of material were required to make it, and are required in it's maintenance. Don't forget the surveyors and engineers who made a highly detailed map and plans in the first place! (Though that map format isn't useful to self driving cars).
Also consider the sheer number of cars that drive that patch in a day. One car every few minutes adds up over hours, days, months, years.
So, yeah they have to drive a mapping car down the street a bunch of times to expand their coverage area. However this is insignificant compared to the effort that goes into our transportation infrastructure already.
Not to mention that Google Street View has demonstrated that such effort is viable even with way less incentive!
Besides, most miles driven are spent on highways and other town-connecting roads. To the average consumer, self-driving cars are way more interesting for commuting or long-distance travel than they are for a 5-minute drive to the supermarket.
my dumb car "works" for self driving assuming a straight enough road without obstacles. A safety critical system needs to have a very robust definition of "works" that is far beyond "it happened to not crash on this particular road at this particular time with this particular set of obstacles".
Fair enough; my "not at all" was hyperbole, Tesla's driver assistance software does not in fact crash every single time it is used without human intervention.
I do find it mildly disturbing that in that video, the driver points out the car making fully blind turns where it cannot see that there's nothing it would hit.
With 1.5 fatalities per 100,000,000 miles[0], the benchmark to meet is 99.9999985% of the time it doesn't kill you. Injuries are going to be a lot higher, obviously. Still, I think most self-driving enthusiasts underestimate the bar that needs to be crossed wrt safety. And general vehicle safety isn't going to remain stagnant. I think it's going to be a cost vs injuries tradeoff for quite a while until we get human-level or better self-driving safety in all circumstances.
This is a very good question. Elon is dumping on LIDAR and 3D high resolution mapping.
That may be a smokescreen. Tesla collects a lot of data from their cars. What they do not have are these supposedly superfluous high resolution maps. If Tesla's camera-sourced data proves to be insufficient, that will have been a very bad gamble, in addition to whether camera data is sufficient for real time decisions.
When they pay off, bold gambles make businessmen look smart. That's why nearly all business hagiographies are the product of survivorship bias. Just like your buddy who won in Vegas.
We will see this risk-taking play out in Starship and Starlink, too.
The cars themselves have the hardware necessary to make an HD map.
That means that Tesla could make an HD map covering 95% of miles driven in the USA within a week with their fleet of users. And next week they could make an updated version of the same map.
I created some 3D models of a real world building and surrounding environment using photogrammetry from 20+ megapixel DSLR photos and decided the accuracy was totally inadequate and the artefacts were too hard to manually clean up.
I then hired a dude with a LIDAR scanner and did it properly. The difference in quality/accuracy is like 120x80 ASF video files in 1996 compared to 4K footage today.
Anyone who thinks you can build "HD" virtual worlds using the crappy cameras on a Tesla needs their heads examining. Maybe with thousands of passes and some epic compute and signal processing, but why bother? Just LIDAR it.
My Tesla can't even decide if a traffic light is a single traffic light or not on a sunny summer's day from a distance of twenty feet. Almost every time it is either dark or humid or winter (road grime) it tells me one or more cameras are obscured. But only after I've already started driving, obviously. This supposedly cutting edge AI driving machine frequently thinks I'm leaving the carriageway on UK B-roads (it's almost dangerous) and is significantly less reliable at distance cruise control and lane-assist than my Skodă. (I presume VW just quietly bought a black box from Bosch or whoever to do this.)
Tesla are barking up the wrong tree IMO. At this point the camera-only stance feels like a religious thing, not based on sanity or the real practical world. I imagine that someone came to Elon and said "reconciling conflicting radar and camera signals is hard" and he applied his considerable genius and issued an edict to "let's not do that then!" like it would magically make all the actual hard problems go away.
Heck, Teslas can't even seem to reliably parallel park themselves, frequently getting stuck halfway, or hitting kerbs. If they can't solve that highly constrained problem, I'm hardly going to trust taking my eyes off it at 70mph.
Tesla cars do not have LIDAR sensors. The downside risk is that high resolution imaging using multiple sensors is a requirement for level 5 AVs to work well enough. That means all the data Tesla has collected could be of limited value.
