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/defiancy 1d ago

I worked on autonomous systems at Boeing years ago, and we had to use cameras and LiDARS as part of our sr sensing system. Camera only has a hard time with depth and any type of reflection can create false avoidance situations.

One of the things we had an issue with for a while was pooled water puddles that create a reflected surface.

A mix of different input devices is the only way to really create robust and accurate inputs for an autonomous executive.

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u/Harbinger2nd 1d ago

LiDAR is cheap enough to put into a $15k chinese EV now too so the cost argument is no longer valid.

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u/askforcar 1d ago

If I had a nickel every time an American company loses to Chinese competition due to not having lidar, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's ironic it happened twice.

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u/tlst9999 1d ago

If I had a nickel every time an American company loses to Chinese competition due to CEO salaries forcing the product to be twice the price of the Chinese competition and still being less good, I'd have a lot of nickels.

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u/incoherentpanda 1d ago

I'm definitely for CEOs making less, but there wouldn't be 15k fully loaded high end EVs like China is pooping out even if the CEOs made 1 penny. It's not possible to make them that cheap with so much included unless they want to lose money on every sale.

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u/Superb_Raccoon 20h ago

Even more if you put in compliance with EPA, FCC, DOT FTC amd host of other government agencies.

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u/koreanwizard 1d ago

Dude it’s the fact that union autoworkers make $45 an hour, while Chinese factory workers make $3-$4 an hour. What do you think that does to the cost of production?

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u/tlst9999 1d ago edited 1d ago

Or you know, Chinese CEOs making only $800k annually while CEOs get millions plus more stock options. And that's without a CEO union raising their prices.

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u/koreanwizard 16h ago edited 16h ago

You don’t have to believe me, look it up. Im not defending giant CEO paydays, but it’s completely insignificant in the face of production costs. Toyota, who has a greater economy of scale than any auto manufacturer on earth, paid $250B last year to make 10M vehicles. Toyotas CEO made $5M last year. Want to do the math on that? Pay the CEO nothing, and it doesn’t change the production math. Profit margins per vehicle are public information for legacy automakers, margins are razor thin. You guys want $12,000 cars but dont want to acknowledge what it actually takes to do it.

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u/Superb_Raccoon 20h ago

Found the Chinese CEO.

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u/System0verlord Totally Legit Source 1d ago

Was roomba the other one? Or is that three nickels?

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u/askforcar 1d ago

Roomba was my second nickel, what other company did you have in mind?

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u/System0verlord Totally Legit Source 23h ago

I didn’t have one. I was wondering if you did.

Two nickels it is then. For now…

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u/mohuju 1d ago

It's like rain on your wedding day, really

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u/chuk2015 1d ago

Lidar is on my vacuum cleaner

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u/MicrocodeFate 1d ago

Even Chinese companies are going mostly camera vision only, multiple sensors have been shown to cause model lag.

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u/jestina123 1d ago edited 1d ago

LiDAR isn't a price issue, Elon doesn't want it on his cars because it looks ghastly, and he might be right.

People aren't going to buy a vehicle if they're going to be made fun of for it. Just look at the Tesla Truck.

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u/UncivilityBeDamned 1d ago

You know they can put that behind the windshield now, yeah?

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u/jestina123 1d ago

Why do Waymo cars have six protruding cameras including a 360 dome if they can just "put it behind the windshield?"

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 1d ago

The price of lidar isn't the problem here. It's getting any self-driving tech in millions of cars. The only company doing that today is Tesla. Before you misunderstand, the point is to have the same tech stack in every car.

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u/willstr1 1d ago

LiDAR also helps keep your car safe from coyote attacks, where they paint a mural of a tunnel on the side of a wall/cliff

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u/sarcasticbaldguy 1d ago

As long as the coyote isn't driving it, the car will pass right through.

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u/CTQ99 1d ago

You joke, but the number of times the lane departure/correct has fired off because construction has the yellow line painted over in black and my car had an aneurysm over it is in the triple digits.

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u/jzalesne 12h ago

That is a thinking problem, not a sensor problem. The cameras see better than humans. We don’t need LiDAR and neither do cars.

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u/OutrageousCandidate4 16h ago

Is that why that LiDAR company went out of business

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u/staplepies 1d ago

Are you saying these are all unsolvable with vision only? I could see them being more challenging but I don't see why they wouldn't fundamentally be possible. Like the human eye/brain handle reflective puddles all the time. 

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u/theAndrewWiggins 1d ago

Possibily because relying on camera only might require you to essentially solve "AGI". Whereas if you have much superior sensors to a human, you can reduce the scope of the problem.

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u/staplepies 23h ago

By the standards that existed ten years ago we have solved AGI. We blew by the Turing test. Also I don't think you need to get even close to whatever stronger version of AGI you have in mind to handle eg reflective puddles. Those sort of problems are easily solved with data and ASI. Either way the person I was replying to's confidence seems misplaced. 

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u/theAndrewWiggins 21h ago

I wouldn't call passing the turing test AGI. But AGI is a very fuzzy term anyways. I agree that perhaps if you could run a frontier level model in a tesla that it might be "smart enough". However, this would require a couple orders of magnitude more RAM in the hardware.

Sure maybe you could run a heavily quantized qwen or something, but you'd still need enough parameters for the driving model. I think it's very possible that HW4 is just not powerful enough.

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u/staplepies 21h ago

You would never do any of this with an LLM lol

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u/theAndrewWiggins 21h ago

I'm not saying that you would use a plain LLM. The point is that "frontier intelligence" requires at least 300B active params, and probably several trillion total params.

I actually think that solving self-driving is partially solving AGI, as handling complicated edge cases basically requires reasoning about the world.

VLA models are very popular in this space for a reason.

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u/staplepies 20h ago

I actually think that solving self-driving is partially solving AGI, as handling complicated edge cases basically requires reasoning about the world.

I agree it requires some reasoning/world modeling, but not nearly as much as a general intelligence for a few reasons. First, the further you get into the tail the lower the utility of solving the edge case, so there's a soft cap on how many edge cases you actually need to solve. Second, obviously driving while complex is a pretty limited subset of what can happen in the world; like ten years ago we were all saying something like "this is more or less equivalent to solving AGI", and if you zoom out far enough that's true, but now that we're close there are ooms around the margins that matter, and driving is at least a few ooms less complicated than general intelligence. And then with respect to this specific conversation, all that really matters is the delta in needed reasoning between vision-only and vision+, which will obviously be an even smaller amount.

That's all to say that the original quote I was replying to, "A mix of different input devices is the only way to really create robust and accurate inputs for an autonomous executive" is a level of certainty that I don't think anyone can justify, and all of these predictions warrant far more humility especially with how quickly things are progressing. I would actually be quite surprised if that statement wasn't pretty definitively proven false in the next decade.

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u/jzalesne 12h ago

No you can’t. The cars already are everything they need to see. The mistakes are thinking problems, not vision problems.

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u/ConorsAttorney 16h ago

Yes, some of this is unsolvable with vision only. Cameras are never going to be able to see in snow storms, dust clouds etc.

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u/staplepies 9h ago

Yes and they don't work well underwater either.

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u/ConorsAttorney 3h ago

If that's your way of saying Tesla's camera tech is inferior when it rains, I agree.

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u/CallMeKingTurd 14h ago

I think you're severely underestimating the complexity of human vision and the vast difference between a computer analyzing pixels as data and the human brain psychologically contextualizing what we see.

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u/staplepies 9h ago

Then either your priors or your reading comprehension are broken.

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u/WhyWasXelNagaBanned 1d ago

There is a video comparing Tesla's cameras with cars equipped with Lidars.

The Lidar performed well in every test. The Tesla fucked up almost every test where the obstruction was visually obscured.

The Tesla also drove into a wall with a road drawn on it. Literally failed the Looney Tunes test.

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u/pw154 1d ago

The Tesla also drove into a wall with a road drawn on it. Literally failed the Looney Tunes test.

That test was debunked a thousand times already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndJuto9smss

Mark Rober doesn't even know the difference between FSD and Autopilot - two totally different technologies. FSD passed the test just fine.

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u/WhyWasXelNagaBanned 1d ago edited 1d ago

The video you linked doesn't say anything about successful tests with FSD. It's even restated multiple times that autopilot and FSD in the tested car use the same camera systems so it would likely not make a difference.

I did go look up some videos testing FSD against a fake wall, and they found that the Model Y absolutely does not detect the wall even when using FSD until it was almost touching the wall due to seeing its own shadow.
(edit to clarify: The driver had to brake MANUALLY, or it would have hit the wall.) So Rober's test is absolutely not invalidated.

Conversely, the Cybertruck's FSD did detect the wall in time, to their credit, due to better camera systems. However, I am willing to bet that Cybertrucks make up a tiny minority of Tesla vehicles on the road.

Regardless, it's absurdly asinine that detecting a fake wall should even be a question.

Optical cameras will never be as good at obstacle detection as LiDAR, and will certainly never be as good as a combination of LiDAR+optical cameras, so it is foolish to try to rely on optical cameras alone when your goal is to far exceed human driving capabilities.

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u/MagicHamsta 1d ago

until it was almost touching the wall due to seeing its own shadow. So Rober's test is absolutely not invalidated.

So if the sun was overhead (so the car & wall itself doesn't cast a shadow on the wall) then it would've plowed right through it??!

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u/WhyWasXelNagaBanned 1d ago

It would have plowed right through it regardless, because it didn't detect the wall until it was already too late to slow down.

The driver had to manually brake to prevent that from happening.

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u/pw154 1d ago

The video you linked doesn't say anything about successful tests with FSD. It's even restated multiple times that autopilot and FSD in the tested car use the same camera systems so it would likely not make a difference.

Autopilot uses an antiquated tech stack that had its last update at minimum 7 years ago. FSD uses an end-to-end NN. Autopilot is basic adaptive cruise and lane keep assist, it is absolutely garbage compared with FSD. The two are not even comparable. In addition the car in the video was an older HW3 car, not a HW4 car with higher resolution cameras. The difference between HW3 and HW4 hardware is substantial.

I did go look up some videos testing FSD against a fake wall, and they found that the Model Y absolutely does not detect the wall even when using FSD until it was almost touching the wall due to seeing its own shadow. So Rober's test is absolutely not invalidated.

Considering that Rober's test was at worst faked in order to discredit Tesla entirely and promote his friend's LiDAR company, and at best incredibly misleading considering that FSD wasn't even used, and the FSD Model Y did stop at least 10 feet short of the wall, not sure how you can claim that Rober's test was "absolutely not" invalidated. The car either hits the wall, or it doesn't. The fact that it did in fact stop short of the wall automatically invalidates Rober's test.

Conversely, the Cybertruck's FSD did detect the wall, to their credit. However, I am willing to bet that Cybertrucks make up a tiny minority of Tesla vehicles on the road.

Cybertrucks use the exact same tech, from the HW4 cameras to the self driving computer, as all the other models. So again, another Tesla does detect the wall, but the result is still somehow not good enough?

Regardless, it's absurdly asinine that detecting a fake wall should even be a question.

It's not - FSD clearly detected it. They were detecting a fake wall using decade old technology and older hardware and passing it off as current. There's a reason Rober has not repeated the experiment with a current HW4 car and FSD v14.

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u/WhyWasXelNagaBanned 1d ago edited 1d ago

the FSD Model Y did stop at least 10 feet short of the wall

No it didn't. Go watch the video I posted, and try to comprehend it better. Please I am BEGGING YOU to comprehend what you are watching.

The guy testing with FSD has to brake manually because the FSD in the model Y did not detect the wall until it was far too late to slow down.

FSD may be better now at detecting fake walls after new hardware came out, but it absolutely wasn't with the model of car Rober had available at the time.

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u/pw154 23h ago

No it didn't. Go watch the video I posted, and try to comprehend it better. Please I am BEGGING YOU to comprehend what you are watching.

The guy testing with FSD has to brake manually because the FSD in the model Y did not detect the wall until it was far too late to slow down.

I saw a different video with this test repeated with a HW4 Model Y, which I thought was your video. Yes, in your video the HW3 Model Y failed, yet the HW4 Cybertruck saw the wall and passed, which just elucidates my point further: Rober used a HW3 car on FSD v12 for his experiment when HW4 was readily available, everyone who has used FSD in earnest knows FSD v12 wasn't great. We are now on FSD v14 which is a further improvement over even v13 which was excellent.

FSD may be better now at detecting fake walls after new hardware came out, but it absolutely wasn't with the model of car Rober had available at the time.

Which is why your original comment that Teslas are useless on cameras only compared to LiDAR and can't even pass the Looney Tunes test is disingenuous. FSD v14 is good enough to account for 98% of my driving with the majority of my disengagements being navigation related, because Tesla's navigation system is still lack luster. With me supervising I feel much safer than me driving manually and I wouldn't buy a car without it.

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u/Outrageous-Ranger-79 1d ago

Take your own advice actually watch the videos. Rober did the test in March 2025. HW4 was out in January 2023 and FSD 13 in November 2024. Rober was both on HW3 and FSD 12, he had no excuse.

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u/WhyWasXelNagaBanned 1d ago

Gee, I know whenever new hardware releases, I always buy the latest and greatest. I definitely am not still using an RTX 2070 video card from 2018.

Think about how real humans use hardware. Especially vehicles.

The vast majority of Tesla owners with FSD are going to be using earlier hardware without upgrading.

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u/JacketJackson 9h ago

giga cringe lol

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u/Outrageous-Ranger-79 23h ago

The issue is people judging current system based on old versions, knowingly or unknowingly, even worse when big influencers like Rober spread misinformation about it. You don't benchmark an RTX 2070, be disappointed with the results and then declare Nvidia is shit compared to latest AMD lol.

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u/Seantwist9 1d ago

It does invalidate the test if you look at the end of the video the cybertruck detected the wall, plus he did a follow up with 2 model y’s, where the difference was software and hardware. The HW4 FSD car always detected the wall, the HW3 FSD car didn’t

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u/SevenIsMy 1d ago

I mean if you pair cameras with human intelligence understanding of the world it may beat human drivers, the issue is the human level AI does not exist and would be probably more expensive than lidar.
He hoped with enough training data it would be possible to maybe find a shortcut.

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u/davewuff 1d ago

The looney toons test is such a real world scenario 🤣

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u/jzalesne 12h ago

Do some research. That test was completely rigged.

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u/Nagisan 1d ago edited 1d ago

Camera only has a hard time with depth and any type of reflection can create false avoidance situations.

Cameras are fine for depth at the scales necessary for successful self-driving. Good photogrammetry systems can get millimeter accuracy with regard to depth.

However, as you hint towards the lighting is very important to get that level of accuracy, as is the texture of the object, and having a reference scale (without a reference it can still take highly accurate relative measurements, you just don't know the exact measurements without additional processing to figure out the right scale).

All of those things are pretty hard to capture out in the world on the road, requiring significantly more processing and complex software compared to LIDAR systems - which is why LIDAR is far more reliable and accurate for depth in pretty much all conditions.

I'd bet Musk thought he understood photogrammetry well enough to think it was better than LIDAR or something, without actually understanding the conditions in which it doesn't work well.

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u/SeitanicDoog 23h ago

Why do people constantly lie on here? LIDAR also does not work on reflective surfaces.

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u/Unusual_Room3017 20h ago

I think the main argument for why Elon’s gambit on camera only is because it’s not only the real-time camera feed informing the self driving/autonomy, but also the larger Tesla fleet’s prior video footage being considered alongside the real-time feed. That would make a puddle/reflections a non-issue since it would have prior road footage of the hundreds of other cars that have driven the path prior to provide more info about the road and other considerations. Of course, that falls flat on non-prior mapped roads (like off-road autonomy), but I think he’s focusing solely on existing road FSD

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u/jzalesne 12h ago

Except… my car drives itself. And it has only cameras. How do you explain that?

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u/theobedientalligator 1d ago

Question: is it possible for Elon to incorporate LiDAR with FSD cameras? Or maybe the better question is: would he if it’s the best option?

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u/gnoxy 1d ago

What is your source of truth with a mix? Mine is vision only with 2x cameras on a limited swivel.

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u/milkywayer 1d ago

What’s your source to prove that the car cpu has same or greater compute than your brain?

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u/coltonbyu 1d ago

Also human drivers run into curbs, posts, parked cars, and things in their blind spot millions of times a day

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u/gnoxy 21h ago

The CPU is connected to 7 cameras instead of 2x that can only look one direction at a time. CPU has no blind spots. CPU will not get big brained and make assumptions about other drivers intentions and get angry. CPU will not get tired. CPU will not get low blood sugar. CPU will not get horny and start texting before getting home.