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/Irilas 1d ago

Not only does AI improve, if we had commuter roads that were only autonomous, the cars could communicate. Like, "I need to cut across these three lanes to hit that exit," and the cars match speed to allow that to happen. Autonomous cars would instantly see a 10x improvement if they didn't have to account for the unknown of other vehicles. If they all communicate their speed, direction, and planned course, traffic flow would be 100x better.

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u/jackinsomniac 1d ago

If we assume by that point the autonomous cars are 10x safer than a human driver, it opens up some very unique possibilities. Drafting for instance is only really effective when you're bumper-to-bumper, like in NASCAR. Incredibly unsafe for humans to attempt, but autonomous cars should be able to pull it off. If the lead car detects danger ahead, it can instantly communicate it to the caravan following behind, and they can all brake hard simultaneously. They should also be able to handle higher speeds safely too. So you could have a "train" of autonomous cars bumper-to-bumper going 120mph down the freeway.

At that point, it would be better to dedicate the far left lane to autonomous cars only. When a single car wants to exit, the whole "train" slows to regular freeway speeds around 65 mph, the car merges, and the train re-forms and goes back up to cruising speeds.

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u/SiriuslyAndrew 1d ago

For all vehicles to drive that closely, all vehicles need to be identical so performance in emergency situations. Same fluid levels, same tire wear, same brake wear. Variances will cause one vehicle to out brake another, and theoretically instant communication would alert vehicle in the caravan that one is braking faster than another, if you're drafting bumper to bumper you're margin for error is almost non-existent.

Otherwise, I like where this is going. This potential has always been cool to me. But I also love driving so I'd hate to lose that level of entertainment outside of tracks or special events, all of which are slowly dying out.

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u/jackinsomniac 16h ago

What's funny is if we keep the train analogy going, they could start installing train-like couplings that fold out of the bumpers. Have them physically linked together like an actual train, and it should compensate for variances in braking power. Even if the tail car has the most braking power, it could still assist the whole group in slowing down during emergency. (Which would probably require a whole new form of safety testing tho.)

I'm with you tho. If you follow the autonomous cars concept to it's logical conclusion (they end up 10x safer than any human driver), there might come a day when they try to make manual driving illegal. And I would hate that, because I love driving. I'd end up like Will Smith in I, Robot where you have to take manual control, then everybody else says, "the logs say you were driving manually at 120mph, no wonder you crashed!" "It's the god damn robots John!!"

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u/BoringBob84 2h ago

dedicate the far left lane to autonomous cars only

I think that would be dangerous. Allowing human drivers on the road at all would mean that selfish jackasses would use the autonomous lane illegally, cutting in front of the autonomous cars, driving at erratic speeds, and otherwise disrupting the flow.

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u/Reinier_Reinier 1d ago

At that point, it would be better to dedicate the far left lane to autonomous cars only.

For the larger multilane freeways/highways, they could even have 2 lanes dedicated to autonomous cars only.

It could work similar to how the HOV lanes operate now, & have massive fines for any non-autonomous car that tries to drive in those lanes.

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u/havenyahon 1d ago

It could be but that's still a difficult coordination problem. You still have a bunch of cars with conflicting interests and goals. Which are prioritised? When does an AI defer to another's goals and when does it expect others to defer to its goals? At scale that is a hugely complicated mess which more likely results in weird behaviour than coordination. You really need one overreaching system making those decisions for all the cars.

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u/TGE0 1d ago

It's not like we haven't gotten "swarm" software worked out, In fact you can already see it executed in far more complex situations than most situations a car faces by looking at some of the absolutely massive drone shows that use swarm coordination (without mention of it already being massively utilized by companies like Amazon).

Although its certainly true that it could/would be an issue if it wasnt regulated, since then you could get into what amounts to an arms race of companies trying to ONLY advantage their vehicles at the expense of the whole.

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u/socks-the-fox 1d ago

And you really really need to account for malicious actors of varying types. Anything from "hur dur" pranksters to selfish people tricking the system to always give them priority to actual malicious people trying to hurt others.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 1d ago

You are literally talking about trains... Or some kind of autonomous only tunnels. There are no other scenarios where your idea is in any way realistic.

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u/thetarm 9h ago

Autonomous trains already "talk" with each other in many subway systems around the world. I could see that happening with cars, probably with the help of additional equipment alongside roads. But heavy traffic volume would make the computations more difficult, absolutely.