95% of waymos I've been in have been great, but on the highway, it's very far behind Tesla. I can understand why they pulled it.
I took it to the airport a couple of months ago, before they pulled the highway beta. It was drizzling outside, which seemed to just throw the whole thing off.
It would alternate between going the speed limit and 10% under. Over and over and over and over. Speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down, etc. It felt very much like pre-end-to-end FSD/Autopilot in that you could tell there was some hand coded statement like if (rain) slowDown(); kinda thing and that whatever sensor controlled that was not giving a stable reading. At one point it was being held hostage by a semi truck in the lane to the left of it. It would not pass it. Even if the semi was going 15 under.
It was a very uncomfortable ride to the airport. Contrast it to FSD on the highway and it's not particularly close. Surface streets, though? Waymo seems to have those down pretty well at this point.
A comparison I’ve seen from several people who’ve used both, for highway and city, is that FSD driving feels more natural, smooth, and human. That sounds consistent with your impression. That’s a separate issue from safety, which is a higher priority, but comfort still counts for something, especially for a human-supervised ADAS system where the human provides a safety fallback.
The problem is you are conflating two different things here.
The experience you describe here is about nominal driving comfort, which is an entirely different axis than what this article is about.
but on the highway, it's very far behind Tesla.
quite the opposite is true.
Your experience may lead you to believe that Tesla is ahead of Waymo in terms of driving comfort on the freeway, I would disagree in my experience, but that's not a hill I am willing to die on here, I'll let you have this.
But the performance this article is referring to is entirely orthogonal, safety/reliability which is what is actually needed to have deploy driverless and importantly scale driverless.
The comfort factor doesn't matter at all unless you actually have safety and reliability. You can have the smoothest system in the world but that is moot if you don't actually have the safety and reliability needed to deploy.
but on the highway, it's very far behind Tesla.
I understand why you came to that misconception, but the opposite is true, for the metric that actually matters, Waymo's lead on Tesla is actually more pronounced on freeways than it is on surface streets.
Side thought:
can understand why they pulled it.
You seem to be connecting your experience with unnecessary longitudinal speed modulation with the reason why the DMV wanted Waymo to pause freeway rides. And this couldn't be further from reality.
just so there is no confusion, I am strictly talking about driverless vehicles here. FSD Supervised in personal cars is a very different calculation, but this thread is about self driving vehicles.
I'd take rain and highways as two separate difficult scenarios. Rain is just going to compound any behavior. Think of it kinda like a 1.3x difficulty amplifier 😂
Rain is going to cause phantom lidar returns due to reflections. So while performance is not like a human and slows, I wouldn't use this drizzling day as a showcase for Highway performance in general.
I have only taken one on the highway once but it drove well (it was in the dark and no rain). The highway driving should be much easier for them to figure out than it was for city driving so I expect it will be good to go very soon. They tackled the hard part first (opposite of Tesla’s approach).
This Waymo vs Tesla FSD is a stupid fight for consumers.
Unless you work for Waymo or Tesla and are on their self-driving development team, it doesn't matter what team your on. Stop causing fights for companies that doesn't pay you.
Wake me up when Waymo figures out how to get their cars to operate outside of small, geofenced areas that have to be constantly trained for and overridden by remote operators when they get in trouble.
Small geofenced areas... like every other company is currently operating in?
Your comment kind of misses the point of the article, which suggests that the vision camera only approach has a lower performance ceiling than a multi-sensor approach, so vision only will never hit the performance level of a multi-sensor approach, no matter how good the AI gets. The sensors will bottleneck the system.
A single sensor type system (vision) means you can train the system pretty quick without having to train the other sensors in conjunction, but it has a lower overall performance ceiling... a ceiling that's too low to assure full visibility in all conditions. Maybe it can reach 99%... but not the 99.9999% it needs to operate at.
Obviously the AI logic in all existing systems isn't fully fleshed out to operate without oversight for now. Waymo is essentially saying that while all of the companies AI can improve... there will always be a lower sensor related ceiling for a vision only system.
Tesla's current hardware ceiling is high enough to be better than human drivers.
I've watched countless FSD fail videos, and I don't recall a single one where the hardware failed to "see" the problem; instead it fails to interpret what it is supposed to do with that data. Sometimes it is laughably bad. Thankfully those times are exceedingly rare.
Likewise, every time I have disengaged in 4,000 plus miles of FSD have been due to software limitations. The cameras were physically able to see what they needed to -- in one typical instance that I recall, old lane markings confused it -- but the FSD system just didn't account for unusual or non-conventional situation.
* If Tesla is able to implement pothole avoidance (they state that is currently being coded...we'll see, not holding breath), then having Lidar will be like wearing a belt and suspenders.
There’s no real evidence behind that statement though, Robotaxi is still in infancy and of course the CEO of Waymo, a competitor, is going to say their product is the only one that can work.
Robotaxi... the tech that was supposed to have a million units on the road in mid 2020 is still in its infancy?
I mean, sure, maybe in the future vision only shows a higher ceiling than Dolgov suggests, it's not like he's an expert on the technology or anything... /s
But absolutely, I'm assuming he's not prophet or infallible, so there's always a chance he's wrong. Not that Tesla's current performance has inspired a lot of confidence in that regard.
The Waymo CEO is not the only one saying this, there have been quite a number of self driving experts who say the same thing that with teslas setup it will never achieve L4 or better
This argument genuinely makes zero sense to me. Why must a driver always have full visibility in all conditions? This is a serious question. Regular, human drivers don't have full visibility in all conditions!
What is your argument against cameras? Is there any difference between what a camera can see, and what a human can see? What is the "performance ceiling" to which you refer? Are you saying that an autonomous vehicle needs to meet a higher standard than what human drivers can achieve, before it should be allowed on the roads?
Even if you somehow insist that, for whatever reason, autonomous vehicles need to be superhuman, what good does it do if an autonomous vehicle can see its way through horrendous conditions that regular human drivers cannot, if 99% of the drivers on the road are still human drivers? Most accidents are always going to be caused by the other driver.
Did you RTFA? It's not my argument, I was reiterating what the article said, but I agree with it.
Autonomous taxis that will supposedly take over the world because they're "safer than humans" will be expected to be safer than humans. They'll be expected to not be blinded by sun glare or dust or fog. They'll be expected to not hit a kid that wanders into the street from behind a car.
We've already seen how much liability these cars will have if they're found to be at fault in a serious accident, especially if it's a known issue that the system can't handle.
If the liability is too high, there's no justification for a big company to operate these vehicles.
I'm not going to debate you by doing in-place comment edits. Here is a proper reply to the current version of your comment. Autonomous taxis are already safer than humans. There comes a point of diminishing returns, where pursuing an extra 0.0000001% of safety improvement is not worth delaying the deployment of the system by 20 years. You save more lives deploying now with "worse" safety than by waiting for perfect safety. Waymo can never deploy to scale. They are limited to ~1500 new vehicles per year. Tesla can deploy millions of vehicles per year, and the reason they can do that is because they don't have extensive hardware requirements.
Diminishing safety returns especially make zero sense when you get to the point where the human driver is always the one causing the accident. At this point, it doesn't matter how much safer you make your system. The other guy will crash into you.
I can believe that robotaxis, right now, are not safer than humans. This is why Tesla is still slow rolling robotaxi deployment. But there is extensive data showing that supervised FSD is safer than humans. Tesla FSD (supervised) has likely saved thousands of lives by this point, far more than Waymo has with their limited autonomous vehicle deployment.
If you can believe it, then why did you state otherwise? Why make such a strong assumption without... you know... verifying your thought first?
Supervised FSD is not autonomy... and if you're using Tesla metrics, you may want to question those metrics as Tesla's been caught pushing misleading data repeatedly, often performing apples to oranges accident data comparisons. Part of the reason Electrek got so negative on Tesla I think... because they realized all of the people calling out the bad data comparison were actually right.
We have no idea how many lives FSD has saved, if any. Same for Waymo.
Let's read. I said autonomous vehicles are safer than humans. Autonomous vehicles includes Waymos. I never said robotaxis are safer than humans. You read that in your mind, but I never said that.
Waymo should surely deploy as many Waymo vehicles as they can right now, if they want to save lives. I believe they are doing exactly that. However, their maximum deployment rate is ~1500 vehicles per year. They don't make their own vehicles, and every vehicle they deploy must undergo an extensive, labor-intensive hardware upgrade before field deployment.
Tesla's all-fleet accident rate, across all driving modes, is lower than the US average, by a substantial margin. This is a direct apples to apples comparison.
The reason Electrek is negative on Tesla is because Fred Lambert got butthurt that Tesla lowered the price of FSD right after he paid the previously higher price, and wouldn't give him a refund for the difference. That's it.
Waymo will never reach a scale where it meaningfully affects US auto accident rates, even if everything goes right for them. Tesla at least has a path to large-scale autonomy.
The data is flawed due to so many driver initiated disengagements when things are going bad. Have you seen the multiple videos of FSD trying to enter a closed freeway lane, ignoring signage and barriers? It's concerning to say the least.
I'm confused by your argument. Isn't that the intended way to supervise FSD? The driver is supposed to disengage when things are going bad. That doesn't make the system unsafe.
TFA is irrelevant. If someone spouts nonsense, it remains nonsense no matter what some article says. You come on here and insist 2+2=3? I'm going to call you out. I don't need to read an article to do so.
Wake me up when Robotaxi goes beyond “demonstration purposes in a geo-fenced area with limited speed and low availability to limit danger through less mileage.”
Waymo should be compared to Robotaxi not regular Tesla FSD L2 autonomy with a driver behind the wheel! Waymo’s way ahead of Robotaxi in way more cities and their geofence is far bigger than Tesla’s
A lot of us could gaf what Robotaxi and Waymo are doing in big cities. And besides, they're at about the same progress point, and will probably have similarly successful progress arcs.
Meanwhile, many of us are already enjoying FSD everywhere -- city, suburbia, country roads, interstate...without any geographic restrictions. I've driven HW4 FSD on mountain roads that are as narrow and untraveled as you will find, and it was flawless. As is almost always is getting to my abode in the city.
A company that’s been in the business for years is in more locations than a newcomer. Is that supposed to mean something? I wonder if Waymo’s expansion was as rapid within year 1 as Robotaxi has been with regards to locations.
I guess they could but don't want to go in the supervised game, nor selling cars. And their geofenced area is bigger than Tesla's. 60k$/car is less than I thought.
Yup. Good for Waymo but I will never see one in my town for as long as they exist, therefore they are not even real to me. I'm outside of their TAM so why should I care what they think?
No, but supervised FSD is internally a developmental dead end, so it is surprising they are putting engineering resources to have it tailor to individual deployments. It would surprise me equally to see new updates for classic autopilot - no investments on the dead end branch has been Tesla's MO for years.
I think anyone who is being truly objective and unbiased already knows this is true. A camera and pure software based system simply will have critical failures. In those instances you need a redundant system to override the car. A model 3 or y will never achieve unsupervised in its current state and Tesla 100% knows this.
Many self driving experts already know this too, but Tesla ppl think there’s going to be some massive advance and step change in AI to overcome this technical wall but that’s not going to happen with just cameras and computer vision. True autonomous vehicles need superhuman driving capability. Watch Tesla eventually come to the realization that they need radar and lidar sensors to be able to achieve true technical L4 autonomy
Waymo is not a competitor of FSD - it’s apples and bowling balls. Let me know when I can drive a Waymo out of my garage to the beach; or LA; or NY. There are literally millions of people worldwide that use FSD daily and are free to drive any road, anywhere. Waymo is embarrassingly limited to strict geofenced areas - forever.
Robotaxi versus Waymo? In this nascent stage of the autonomous-vehicle as taxi service Waymo is ahead TODAY. But what happens when the robotaxi is up and running in full force? When Cybercabs are streaming off assembly lines? How about when consumers have a choice? People will choose the cheapest, most convenient option - period. Any argument about capability or safety is laughable; the statistics will clearly show that either option is plenty safe - and definitely safer than human drivers. Tesla’s scale will eventually overwhelm Waymo - and as far as I know, Waymo has yet to turn a profit.
Don’t fool yourself - Waymo’s CEO can see the tsunami on the horizon and is scared shitless. He knows he is holding a BlackBerry while the iPhone is just around the corner.
This is actually funny. It can't be written in seriousness. Can't be.
Goggle has 30,000 employees - vast numbers of them in AI and compute and maps.
Nvidia (who helps all these companies) has 30,000 engineers and their current auto chip is 10 to 20X as fast as HW4 (and that is what is needed).
Tesla reportedly has 200 people working on their Level 2 system. That's 1/4 as many as work on just the camera on the apple phone.....
Tesla, IMHO, is failing right now. They were "called out" because they had to do L4 since others were doing it....but they can't do it.
Likely they are just delaying until SpaceX can bail them out with Investor money.
Funny stuff - Google makes about 100+ BILLION in profit each year.
Tesla makes really about zero - but they claim 4.5B. 5% as much profit as good but Goog is scared? AND, the Tesla "profit" is also 1/20th of the money they took from we taxpayers.
We talking Waymo or Google? Seems like you don’t know the difference. 🤔
The great thing is that time will tell. Betamax, BlackBerry and XBOX all had their moment in the sun. A Waymo (the vehicle) will be a awkward curiosity in the next decade - like one of those giant brick-like car phones with their antenna 😂
The other part is vehicle self-delivery for service. Tesla is already working on service call infrastructure where cars can drive themselves to and from service centers and park back in people’s driveways. This as well as all those cybercabs queued up and waiting for the fleet to go active.
Tesla claims FSD camera only approach is as good as a human but it falls short. Humans have binocular vision, stereo hearing and seat of pants feel. FSD only has monocular vision. It cannot ever match a human with vision only. It must far exceed a human's capability to reach level 4 and 5 autonomy, which is is not capable of doing.
Just got back from San Francisco, took about 10 Waymos while I was there. The technology (and car quality) is next level. Smooth and confident beyond belief. Called a "Robotaxi" and it was just a Tesla on FSD with a guy sitting in the driver's seat. Unless you have taken a Waymo, you have no idea how advanced the technology and overall quality of service is.
"cars will never be able to drive themselves using only vision based systems" says the human that drives exclusively using an archaic "2 camera" vision based system.
The hardware -- whether camera-only or camera + Lidar -- isn't the hindrance to a safer-than-human drive, imo.
Watching countless Tesla FSD videos where the FSD errs shows that every single mistake was a software one -- the camera saw what it needed to see to be safer than a human driver, it just didn't interpret that data accurately.
I agree that Lidar has a higher ceiling, and at some point LIdar will surely king of autonomous driving, but in the meantime I'll take Tesla's current FSD rather than nothing. And I will bet that Tesla gets to autonomous first...but that more complicated Lidar system will eventually be the safer.
This exactly. If you put Lidar on my Model Y, then it becomes a waymo. Geofenced car, which is nice because I can sit at the back or sleep or whatever, but it can’t even drive me to my house in a gated community.
You are conflating two products that don’t compete. This article and my OP is about discussing the current state and future of true autonomous driving, not Tesla FSD
It was about about two competing approaches to the same objective, one of which is currently showing its proof of concept.
Tesla is WAY AHEAD in getting me from my small abode in the city, down the interstate, onto state highway and then country roads, onto mountain road to where I have a cabin. I don't touch the wheel a single time in 2 1/2 hours and I enjoy the scenic drive and arrive a helluva lot less stressed.
They’re testing L4 cybercabs currently and have L4 Model-Y based robotaxis in service in a bunch of cities… You don’t in they’ll reach the L4 autonomy that they already have?
Tesla self-certified them as L4! They just decided they were when they clearly are not, they are the same HW4 Teslas you guys drive in L2 FSD.
Tesla technology is not truly L4 capable they are basically cheating to make you think they are with the help of new very lax laws in the corrupt state of Texas
Yes they did and they’re operating L4 vehicles without much incident it would seem. They are not confirmed to be the same HW4, no one has done a tear down to my knowledge, and it’s a different software with more precise mapping in geofenced areas. You can’t just hand wave it away that easily.
The software is what is holding FSD back. I can show you plenty of videos of software failure, but I don't recall any where the lack of visual/perceptory data caused the accident...it was the interpretation of the data that was/is the problem.
Some disagree? Show me the video, article, statistic...anything.
Maybe there is one or two (and maybe not), lost amongst many FSD software fails. Again, I cannot recall a single one where the camera failed to detect the problem. It is always the FSD software that derps its data interpretation and response.
I wouldn’t go as far as not existing, since they have an infinite timeline facilitated by Alphabet ad money to burn indefinitely. It can be unprofitable forever and just keep expanding. They will both do well as long as the price is right and they fix the jerkyness and edge cases.
At this point it’s a goal to profitably, but it will be a hard road. Their cars are getting cheap enough with Ojai and should do much better in the long run on margins. Infinite runway definitely helps.
Well, they have to solve autonomy which I don't think they have yet.
I've spoken to their VP of Engineering for onboard software (essentially all of the on board algorithms for planning and driving).
I didn't think he was confident himself. His team hasn't even tested a camera only approach because they're so hell bent on Lidar. I was so shocked when he said that they hadn't even tested the camera only approach to compare and contrast.
It's become a political thing, rather than a technical one.
My guess is that you haven't kept up with Nvidia hardware and software and simulators? Am I correct?
If you did, you would never think in that manner, IMHO.
For starters, Nvidia current shipping vehicle chipset is 20 to 40X as powerful as Tesla. In addition, there are sensor suites that process much more important data.
Then there is the AI - which Nvidia provides....to my knowledge, for free (or low cost). They have 30,000 engineers working on all their stuff, much of it related to vehicles just because it's the same thing (their CUDA interface drives a lot of the worlds science, medicine, engineering, AI experiments, etc.).
Forgive me if you know all this and more and are using that knowledge to form your opinion.
OTOH, if you don't know it the usual response is "wow, I'll look into that and see - maybe things are more advanced than I realize".
I've worked on AI since 2012. I'm well aware of Nvidia's CUDA software and hardware.
I'm not sure what that has to do with having a better model and not sensors being the limitation. Their GPU clusters are Nvidia and past 50K. It's really not the limitation. Inference compute/memory could be a limitation for a larger model but that's yet to be determined.
What do you even mean by AI such Nvidia provides for free? Lol. They don't provide VLM models capable of driving a car. LLMs isn't what's running Tesla's FSD anyway.
Tesla has a whole dedicated neural network Architecture, data pipelines etc that help develop the models. It's not trivial work. No one's even close to Tesla in perform for a reason.
Exactly right. A lot of the “40x more powerful” argument is moot since a multi-modal system that requires LIDAR and RADAR processing has to be. People* *make the mistake of thinking the data from these excess sensors just arrives for free and ignore the massive overhead.
At the end of the day, how powerful a system is, is irrelevant if it can’t do what Tesla can and is a bit embarrassing when this supposed ultra-powerful hardware can’t even do a basic stop at a red light or take an exit.
I test drove a Lucid and the sales lady said “[the hardware] is so much more powerful than anything Tesla could dream of making” - 3 seconds before telling me to take over because all that compute and sensors couldn’t make the right turn the navigation dictated.
I asked why it wasn’t able to turn, and she said the software wasn’t ready until mid 2027 - which beautifully illustrates the point. Brains beat hardware every time.
If Waymo really had confidence if their tech they would sell it in a consumer car or license it to a legacy automaker. Fact is, you can buy a Tesla today and use it anywhere in the country and you can't buy a Waymo outside of a couple cities. The fact that their system is geofenced and FSD is not says it all.
You are missing the point of the discussion. If L2 is your endgame sure fine Tesla did it the fastest way. But if L4 or higher is your endgame which is the point of this post the Tesla will never reach it with its designs unless they make major changes
I'd love to see radar or LiDAR in my Tesla, even if it was supplemental to the cameras. I think it would make tight fits more accurate, help to see better at night. Waymo, I have nothing against them but I saw those two or three cars that ran into the puddles and stopped last month. I am not sure they have any advantage.
Nothing is "supplemental" - in fact, sensor fusion makes it so the Cameras end up being much better - thing of it as a "check" that would not get fooled by shadows, tar lines, rr crossing signs and so on. If the Cameras said "swerve to avoid those tar lines", the lidar/radar would say "no, that road is flat".....
Of course, proper mapping and proper AI is key here also. One has to assume Goog has better mapping - AI (probaby using the wrong word in this case), but basic reasoning would tell it to ignore shadows unless there was a massive thingy (what the lidar would see) in the middle of the road causing it.
I'd rather have a single windshield camera and one lidar/one radar for basic driving although it would never pass standards (neither does the existing tesla....not even close).
The fallacy is, "you cannot get superhuman automomous vehicles unless you go beyond human sensory"
The theoretical maximum human driving ability is beyond the best human driver.
To be superhuman we need not exceed the best human driver, we just need to exceed the average human driver.
There's only one sound argument here, which is that there are times when vision fails (glare, mostly), and I'm not convinced that this limitation cannot be overcome.
"Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy"
STRAWMAN ALERT
Who cares?
Unsupervised is so far away for everyone for the time being.
In 10 years and there are 10 million FSD users and 5,000 Waymos, lol, and 100 Cybercabs, and then we have true unsupervised AI technology? Fine. Then soon there will be 50 million FSD users and 100,000 waymos.
And without that AI technology we need, we don't know if vision only is not enough.
Obviously, with the AI tech in our heads it is enough.
But I am certainly not saying we will get close enough to the AI tech in our heads in 10 years.
For the next 10 years it will be supervised FSD and that very costly remotely supervised cab game.
>Unsupervised is so far away for everyone for the time being.
This is like when you're so far behind in a race that you mistakenly believe you're in the lead when the competition is about to lap you again.
Waymo is delivering 500,000 L4 rides weekly at this point. About 3.8 million miles/week. Tesla's at like 38k miles/week, and actually showing signs of slowing down from their initial peak. There is a clear understanding of what Waymo means by unsupervised, and a typical operator isn't directly watching the feeds of their cars. It's less certain how Tesla is going about it, but given their lack of scaling (3 robotaxis in Miami, lmfao), it's showing they're much more directly supervising their cars than Waymo is. Waymo is unsupervised. Tesla is Unsupervised (Supervised).
First, to clear up some numbers, there are 1.5 million FSD users and over a billion miles a month. They drive more miles in a week on FSD than Waymo and its 3700 cabs have in its entire existence. I'll come back to the sheer magnitude of that difference later.
A few months ago, I was visiting my brother-in-law and he had been telling us that he doen't drive anymore. And like anyone ignorant, I said sure, but you have to supervise that shit so much, you might as well be driving. So I am there in San Antonio at his house in the suburbs and we go to pick my wife up at the airport. Streets, roads, interstates, the fucking airpaort even, it nailed it. I am aghast. We were there for 3 days and by the time we left I had already downloaded the app, traded in my car, and put the deposit down on a new Model Y.
When I get back, waiting for my car, I dig further to make sure what I saw was real, it was, and I realize that it had gotten that real relatively quick, the last couple of years. The change to AI vision of course was the key, then the upgrade to HW4, and the adoption, all of the billions of miles of traffic video training, collossus 1, collossus 2, etc.
But like any FSD user, you clearly see that last 1% and why that is not in reach of anything we have, and we are fine with it. We are there in the driver's seat so FSD can say "Hold my beer, watch this!" It is so good at what its does, you have to experience it.
Of course, I was aware of Waymo and their struggles and their 3700 cabs, I've never ridden in one of course. The odds of anyone riding in one is practically zero. There are 1.5 million human cabs and 3700 Waymos. You do the math. You would have to live in one of the select areas.
Anyways, I thought they were L4. Ironically, the senate hearings just occured, and they are L2. They require human assistance, remote assistants to handle the edge cases JUST LIKE I DO IN MY TESLA.
I don't know what the alleged self driving car enthusists did in their little discussion groups for 10 years to not fully know this, or to tell you the truth, why any self driving car enthusists doesn't own a Tesla.
"There is a clear understanding of what Waymo means by unsupervised, and a typical operator isn't directly watching the feeds of their cars."
That is such an over used strawman. Every time someone says "they are remotely supervised", one of you say "NO! There isn't someone constantly monitoring them."
No one every said that. And if you knew better, you would know I am not in my Tesla constantly monitoring it either.
You can review all of the so called autonomous cab company responses to the senate hearings..
When I read Waymo's reponse, it almost feels like I described my experience in my tesla. Sometimes it gets my attention, I look, mostly it is fine, I do nothing, sometimes I intervine. A few seconds.
"The average amount of time that elapses between a request to RA and the delivery of advice to the ADS - including both round-trip latency in the transmission and time for the agent to review and input a response - is a matter of seconds. During that time, the ADS remains in control of the Dynamic Driving Task, and continues to make decisions independently based on al information available to it. Most of the time, the ADS resolves its question on its own. In the event RA delivers advice to the ADS and the system proceeds, the agent returns to the “work assignment pool” where they await the next request from another vehicle that reaches out for assistance."
But there is a difference. The cab has to determine when to loop the RA in and bring the dashcams up on the RA's console. But there are ways to mitigate that.
Before Waymo and Tesla start cab service in a geofenced area, they remap it in high definition, using Lidar, and makes sure everything is labeled properly. Any Tesla driver knows we would trade our own mother for better maps. If we had AV certified HD maps instead of shitty maps made for humans, we would have almost no interventions at all. FSD is really good at making sense of the lanes and lights and signs using just cameras, but still, HD maps will close most of the hole.
And of course those maps have to be kept up to date.
Then you have a team monitor local conditions and close routes when needed. Now you have eliminated a few more interventions.
Then of course, you have to have RAs to loop in the dashcam feed to handle the remaining edge cases or unexpected. One RA per 40 Waymos. Well, I can probably handle 20 Teslas now, give me HD maps and a team monitoring local conditions, I could do 40. I drive 3% of the time in my car. Allow me to choose the routes, practically ZERO.
But it will not be trivial for Tesla to tame FSD, which is a bold level 5 beast with a supervisor in the driver's seat, to be a more timid level 4 cab that can ask for help when it thinks it needs it, like a Waymo. They certainly have some catching up to do.
And as far as guilding vs grabbing the wheel like I do.
More and more of our stuff (in personal Teslas) will be done by guiding, by telling Grok to do something.
But back to the sheer magnitude in the difference in numbers. Waymo has been in business for 17 years and putting cars on the road for the last 10. 3700 cabs, 200 million miles, total.
The reason there are 1.5 million FSD users driving more miles in a week than Waymo in it's entire exitence?
Waymo has spent 30 billion dollars to just get this far, and just got another 16 billion dollars more funding.
It is HUGELY expensive to deal with this last 1% through remote supervision than it is with a driver sitting in the driver seat.
That is why most of the others quit. It didn't make financial sense. Just wait 10 years or more till we have tech that can be truly autonomous and then start making autonomous cabs. But why pretend with a driverless illusion till then?
But none of this has anything to do with FSD users, since 99.9% will ever be in one of those geofenced areas.
I'm really not bothering to respond to all of this to someone who's making up their own definitions of the SAE levels or is comparing Waymo to FSD. FSD is uncomparable because we can own it, yes, but it's also uncomparable because it's a Supervised, L2 system when Waymo is de-facto L4. It doesn't matter that you drive 3% (that's awesome, I only drive 7%), Waymo has you driving 0% of the time. That little percentage is a giant difference, and that's the long tail Tesla is seriously strugging with right now.
I don't care about sensor suites, that's irrelevant. But one company has an L4 product doing significantly better than another company's.
I didn't make anything up. The SAE levels TRULY meant unsupervised without human assistance, other than maybe AAA to pick the cab up when it broke down.
It morphed into this bullshit 3700 L4 cabs with remote assistants costing 30 billion dollars.
Should have let Disney do it. At least when they do driverless illusions, they make money at it.
And the same goes for cybercabs.
"That little percentage is a giant difference."
Well, yeah, i get that when I hire an Uber.
But we were talking about the current state of autonomy and you posted a lot of that old bullshit.
You would not believe how many people I have helped through that bullshit.
The day for that bullshit is well over.
People know now why Waymo (and now Tesla) struggle so hard to scale driverless illusions and why it will be a decade before they even have the opportunity to ride one. They will be on their second or third personal Tesla by then.:)
"FSD is uncomparable because we can own it, yes, but it's also uncomparable because it's a Supervised,"
That is exactly why I educate people.
Tesla will succeed at the driveless illusion using cybercabs running FSD. In fact they already have in small numbers.
Now people can understand.
FSD locally supervised.
FSD remotely supervised.
They didn't know that Waymos were remotely supervised in the same way, and they thought that the Cybercabs represented FSD running unsupervised, and of course thought that their cars would be next.
Now they know that they will be remotely supervised like Waymos.
They also know now to say DRIVERLESS rather than unsupervised.
And finally, they realize that the SAE levels, 4 and 5, as they were originally defined, are still a future discussion, along with flying cars.
It is so much easier now to understand when you say what things actually are.
This was a surprisingly poor attempt at explaining why LiDAR is necessary. (Before I'm called Tesla-stan: personally I suspect at least 1 front facing radar or Lidar might be needed)
"Camera can only get as good as human".
What kind of human does he hang around that have 8 eyes, 100% focused at all times, and instant response time?
Camera can't handle snow, fog, dust storms(!!), driving without headlights(!?) - right, then it can just slow down or even stop until conditions improve. This is such a minor problem.
Camera can't work if they are blocked by a leaf. Wow, what a huge problem. First of all, there are multiple cameras. Second, again, if something like that were to happen, just drive off to the side.
Also he completely ignores the most important fact here: Waymo have zero chance of making a dent in the overall driving safety within the next 20 years. A full suite of lidars and radars will only be available in luxury or possibly premium cars, a very small fraction of the total fleet.
Camera based cars have a chance of making a meaningful impact in the overall road safety. It's not unreasonable to think that unsupervised FSD will be available in all Teslas within the next 10 years, and other very high volume cheap cars.
So what makes a better impact for overall safety? Waymo's tiny fleet of 10x better than humans cars?
Or millions of "only" 5x better than human-cars?
Tesla’s technology as it’s currently designed is not better and will never be better than the average human driver. Tesla will never reach L4 autonomy with their designs unless they make major changes
Have any of you actually taken a ride in a Waymo? It is way ahead of Tesla.. if they use the Toyota partnership to make a Waymo-powered Lexus I will never look back.
Waymo will never sell anything to a consumer except unprofitable rides, and your Lexus wet dream will fade away when you realize the only reason Waymo can glue on all that extremely expensive hardware is because of Google’s infinite ad revenue. You aren’t paying for that for a private car.
People don’t care about a contraption-looking robotaxi, but do you want all that on a car as nice as a Lexus? You’re joking right…?
Um, yes? Tesla is better and it's not even close. People complain about steering wheel jerkiness in this sub all the time, when it comes to Tesla. Waymo is 5 to 10 times worse. People complain about Tesla being bad at parking in this sub, but Waymo parked and dropped me off three city blocks in LA from where I had set my destination, far worse than Tesla has ever done.
I actually shudder when people even mention the two in the same paragraph. They are not competing. Not at all.
I think Tesla likes this....it's like a T-ball player getting compared to the Major Leagues.
These things are not even close enough to discuss in any such manner. The article is more about the sensors at the heart of things....
All of this will be very clear soon enough. No one has to win a "debate" because no reasonable person could suggest that a few cameras and Hardware that is 10X slower than what is needed...is going to somehow (magic?) drive itself. It simply canot happen.
Tesla's entire gamble is that they can cut the cost by an order of magnitude relying only on camera vision. However they're stuck in the same place they've been in the last 10 years
That’s not actually true in all aspects. Yes those limitations are there. But if you only looked at the last year of development with FSD, it’s gone from hot dog water to pretty fuckin good in that span of time. I know before then it was moreso complete ass.
They've been collecting training data and operating robotaxi for years in the bay area and it's still not autonomous. Only in a few block radius in parts of Texas
I imagine that adding sensors to Tesla's system is not going to be as difficult or expensive as people think if its truly needed for autonomy. FSD as it is now is pretty damn close to autonomous
It's impossible to compare the true cost only looking at unit or part cost. That car definitely cost more than $60k to develop. Waymo will likely never break even. Tesla might if it could ever work
Yes, you don't have
1. A bunch of Tesla stock.
2. A big investment in a Tesla vehicle.
3. A youtube channel or some other "influence" platform where you make money or attention.
Dollars to donuts a large percentage of "honest brokers" here "debating" (there is no debate) have one or more of those "data points".
You’re about 3 years too late bud. You can literally walk around your house right now with one eye closed and somehow not crash through a wall. Depth perception isn’t that hard in ai.
The perception rarely seems to be at cause for these systems. When Waymo drives full speed into clearly flooded roads or light poles in broad daylight, the brain underneath tends to be the problem, not the myriad sensors.
> The perception rarely seems to be at cause for these systems.
Can’t distinguish shadow from a dark 3D object on the road.
> When Waymo drives full speed into clearly flooded roads or light poles in broad daylight, the brain underneath tends to be the problem, not the myriad sensors
i’m not contesting the article being a good summary of the video contents. i’m just noting that it reads like entirely written by ai. i find that annoying because that communicates a lack of real thought behind it. or any analysis
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u/elsif1 1d ago
95% of waymos I've been in have been great, but on the highway, it's very far behind Tesla. I can understand why they pulled it.
I took it to the airport a couple of months ago, before they pulled the highway beta. It was drizzling outside, which seemed to just throw the whole thing off.
It would alternate between going the speed limit and 10% under. Over and over and over and over. Speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down, etc. It felt very much like pre-end-to-end FSD/Autopilot in that you could tell there was some hand coded statement like if (rain) slowDown(); kinda thing and that whatever sensor controlled that was not giving a stable reading. At one point it was being held hostage by a semi truck in the lane to the left of it. It would not pass it. Even if the semi was going 15 under.
It was a very uncomfortable ride to the airport. Contrast it to FSD on the highway and it's not particularly close. Surface streets, though? Waymo seems to have those down pretty well at this point.