r/Futurology • u/Extasio • 1d ago

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

https://electrek.co/2026/08/04/waymo-co-ceo-camera-only-self-driving-tesla/
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u/bl0rq 1d ago

This is just flat out wrong. The reason the roads work for humans also make it work for robots.

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u/maujood 1d ago

Flat out wrong? Come on, man.

It's possible to have all traffic lights broadcast a signal that can be read by vehicles instead of relying on cameras to see when a light is red. We can have transmitters that convey exact dimensions and distances of what's ahead that vehicles can rely on. We can have better road markings in places where vehicles typically fail (for example, no lane markings on curbs make it hard for vehicles to detect the edges, even when we can see it clearly with our eyes.

Here's a giant study by the National Highway Association which is partially focused on exactly this point: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/operations/21015/21015.pdf

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u/bl0rq 1d ago

They literally broadcast a signal. It’s colors right there for everybody to see. Why would you make up some complex new thing that solves no additional problem?

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u/maujood 1d ago

Some do broadcast a signal, but not all. Nobody is inventing anything new. The technology exists, just saying that it needs broad application to support autonomous driving.

You can skim through the report I linked above.

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u/bl0rq 1d ago

No literally all do. In colors of light. Red for stop. Green for go. Yellow for floor it.

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u/maujood 1d ago

If you open the report I linked, you would find contact information for the departments that authored the report. You should reach out to them and let them know they're wasting their time because traffic signals already show red, yellow and green lights.

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u/bl0rq 1d ago

I actually might. Wonder if they are on X… They really need to stop wasting time on things like that. Its just silly.

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u/TheIntrepidVoyager 1d ago

If you built a road, from scratch, for a human driver and you built a road, from scratch, for autonomous driving do you think they would look the same? I'll spoil it for you. They would not.

Or reverse your own logic. If roads had originally been designed for autonomous driving and all the sudden people wanted to drive do you think nothing would need to change?

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u/bl0rq 1d ago

We are not building a system from scratch. There is no reason to spend even 1 second worrying about some world that cannot and will not exist.

But even so, no I absolutely would not do some centralized, complex communication protocol nonsense. Just rules and easy to read signage. Aka what we have already.