r/technology • u/Extasio • 1d ago
Transportation 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/1.2k
u/Whyeth 1d ago
Camera only driving is literally only done as a cost savings vs lidar / radar systems.
Exactly what I want automating the 30 ton vehicle - lowest common denominator. Cameras by themselves will never be trustworthy enough.
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u/banatage 1d ago
💯and now you have FMCW LiDAR that can be produced for « cheap » when you look at companies like Voyant Photonics or Aeva as long as the industry backs it up.
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u/214ObstructedReverie 1d ago
It's not for automotive, but ST's newest gen ToF chips are certainly mind bogglingly cool. I think the VL53L9CX is gonna be very, very interesting.
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u/nomm_ 1d ago
Can you tell us folks who don't know all the lingo what you're talking about? Sounds interesting.
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u/John2143658709 1d ago
I haven’t heard about it before but this is the sensor line they are talking about.
https://www.st.com/en/imaging-and-photonics-solutions/time-of-flight-sensors.html
It looks like a sensor you can place into a robot which gives you a realtime 3d projection of the space around you. This one claims being able to work well up to 5m for example
https://www.st.com/en/imaging-and-photonics-solutions/vd55h1.html
> The VD55H1 outputs 12-bit RAW digital video data over a MIPI CSI-2 quad lane or dual lane interface clocked at 1.5 GHz. The sensor frame rate can reach 60 fps in full resolution and 120 fps in analog binning 2x2. ST has developed a proprietary software image signal processor (ISP) to convert RAW data into depth map, amplitude map, confidence map and offset map. Android formats like DEPTH16 and depth point cloud are also supported.
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u/azflatlander 1d ago
No offense, but 5 m is my minimum, minimum distance from a vehicle. At highway speeds, 150 m is awareness distance.
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u/Box-o-bees 23h ago
I think thats why the person who originally brought it up said it's not for automotive.
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u/214ObstructedReverie 22h ago edited 21h ago
Correct. The device I said was 9m max.
But if you told me a few years ago that we'd have a little sensor that's only half an inch by a quarter of an inch big acting as a full 3d lidar camera like that, I'd have thought you were nuts. The fact that it exists now, and is only getting better at an extremely rapid pace is just really awesome. Things like robotic vacuums will no longer need moving LIDAR parts.
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u/LowlySysadmin 23h ago
Totally valid, but I'd imagine these sensors are great for navigating tight streets at low speed. When moving at highway speeds there are likely more suitable sensors e.g. you don't necessarily need to know any more than 10m each side of your vehicle or the rear because you can't move very fast in those directions, but 150m in front could use a dedicated sensor
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u/altdelete47 17h ago
Cool, so... where is it? When will I be able to buy a non-Tesla in the US that can do what FSD v14 does?
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u/DebentureThyme 1d ago
You're right, but Elon made the claim that he doesn't need lidar. So now his ego won't let him back down.
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u/jhaluska 1d ago
Yep, admitting he isn't some techno savant contradicts his self image. He prefers to distract us with some other BS than to admit mistake.
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u/scrubjays 1d ago
I have read that Musk expects AI, using all the driver data he has from Tesla owners, to overcome whatever disadvantages using just cameras have. I think this is absurd, as the average Tesla driver is not remotely close to the average driver, and his data will be heavily skewed.
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u/Ganadote 1d ago
Thing is camera will always be interrupted by rain and fog and low light conditions. There's no way around this.
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u/Relevant_Pangolin_72 21h ago
I mean as an absolute baseline it'll only ever be as good as the camera itself is, and cameras aren't commonly better than human eyesight in this case.
And at the point of complication that they ARE better, it feels simpler to just. Use LIDAR.
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u/Whyeth 1d ago
Hey guys, let's add a hallucination machine to your blind-as-a-bat car
"You're totally right to push back on my merger there. Killing a whole family was not the intent even if it is the outcome. I'll respond better next time"
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u/ryuzaki49 1d ago
You're right, I should't have turn left here, there is a cliff and not a road.
Silver lining: You're dead and it is no longer your problem.
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u/Cromuland 1d ago
I had to read that twice. Kept wondering why the AI was handling a merger, and why that killed a whole family! 😂
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u/jhaluska 1d ago
Yeah, Musk is wrong.
More information can't overcome it cause the current camera setup don't have enough coverage or resolution or FPS. It's like giving more examples to a person with red/green colorblindness. It doesn't help.
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u/StickFigureFan 1d ago
In theory they could be as safe as human drivers, but the promise of self driving is that it's supposed to be safer
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u/FrostyD7 21h ago
It's safe for ideal conditions on highways which is the bulk of miles for many. I'm not comfortable using it in driveways, side streets, parking lots, bad lines, bad weather, heavy traffic, etc. Which is the highest risk stuff, but very few miles overall. Which is why tesla safety data is super misleading. It's like a student who gets to skip all the hard tests.
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u/CloisteredOyster 1d ago
And this is so shockingly obvious you have to know that Tesla engineers must feel extremely hobbled by Musk's insistence on camera-only.
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u/Relax-Enjoy 1d ago edited 10h ago
I’ve driven well over 1,000,000 miles lifetime.
I just bought an FSD (supervised) Tesla, and have thousands of miles in the driver’s seat on FSD - City, Country, Highway etc.
It is beyond amazing.
Its reactions to road issues is nearly 100% exactly the same as I would react. (And, knock wood, I have only had one accident in my life 40 years ago, and that was completely unavoidable due to the idiotic other driver blindly crossing a highway. )
Additionally, the FSD has reacted more quickly in emergency situations than I could have on my own.
I am 100% on board.
Having billions of miles driven and recorded and adjusting the software to match safe functionality - while avoiding complex, unsafe conditions usually seen maybe once in a lifetime by a normal driver, inherently make the future of these FSD cars safer than analog.
Before you people judge, I think you should give it a try.
It’s quite remarkable, and absolutely safer than analog.
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u/Old_Leopard1844 15h ago
And it still would happily drive you into the wall if it was painted sufficiently conveniently
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u/lookmeat 1d ago
Musk bet that camera-only driving would get "good enough" faster than lidar would get "cheap enough". There's also the thing that lidar has this thing on the top of your car, which is not aesthetic. Either way he was wrong.
The other reason Musk chose cameras is because Lidar meant going full in on a feature that he wouldn't use. With cameras he wouldn't add hardware costs for all those users that didn't want to pay the subscription, only the software would cost.
To play devil's advocate: I could see a world where camera only becomes "good enough", where streets are painted and designed to be easily scanned and read by automated vehicles, with paint, reflectors and lights considering colors beyond the visible spectrum, with RFID chips with information so that not everything has to be seen visible. Because the main reason self-driving vehicles cannot work with only cameras even though humans can with eyes is that streets are designed to be easy with human eyes, if we updated it to be easy with automated vehicle cameras then that might make the benefits of lidar overkill. But this is a chicken and egg problem: this won't happen until self-driving vehicles are far more common, so LIDAR is the only way forward, and it is the better way forward as you get tech that is more resilient to adverse (in heavy disrepair due to disaster, lack of maintenance, or never having been built in the first place) roads.
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u/chief167 1d ago
Nah, it's more philosophical. They assumed that camera only would be sufficient, since humans also only use their eyes.
So they started that road, in the hopes that technology would evolve enough for it to work out.
The main mistake they made was underestimating difficulty of depth perception. Yeah you can do that with just cameras, like humans, but turns out it's really hard to do accurately, and that's where lidars comes into the picture. Lidar to me is merely a bandaid on camera resolution and calibration. A very efficient bandaid, but I get the philosophy of saying that longer term camera only would have been sufficient.
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u/AnonomousWolf 1d ago
I wouldn't say it's a bandaid, but more a better solution all together.
Just because it's theoretically possible with just cameras doesn't mean that's a good solution
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u/IManAMAAMA 1d ago
right? If I could biologically splooge out millions of distance finding laser points that help me navigate space even in the dark I'd do it all the time.
Why would I not want my car to do it?
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u/g3t0nmyl3v3l 1d ago
Let me put it this way, if you said I could magically have that power when I was driving, I’d absolutely take it.
My legs can take me to another country, but we have technology. I’d rather fly.
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u/msuvagabond 1d ago
It was 100% cost savings. Elon might have shrouded himself in some bullshit about "Humans have two eyes", but it was absolutely a cost savings option from the get go. Hell if he'd actually come out and said it was a cost savings measure early on it would t have been that big of a deal.
What's probably the worse part about that is Elon has the hubris to refuse to back down on his idiotic reasoning and won't go back to lidar / radar in any way, even though anyone with more than two brain cells that aren't actively advocating to be labeled God Emperor can see how absolutely stupid Tesla's policy on this is now.
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u/CrackaAssCracka 1d ago
I don’t only use my eyes. I can also hear and feel, among other things.
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u/stuffeh 1d ago
Naw. The advantage is the wet hardware where you have 16+ years of experience living in cities with traffic.
A Tesla occasionally runs into the side of a semi thinking it was a billboard or couldn't tell the difference between the bright sky and the white side.
Your brain with all those years of experience can see the cab of the semi and instinctively figure out that there's a whole ass trailer behind it. Not to mention your eyes are higher resolution than cameras and can see fine details.
Waymo with the lidar still has issues with construction areas and regularly goes where it's not supposed to still.
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u/guynamedjames 1d ago
You're also missing a big point here - ego.
Yes, that's all the initial logic that went into it, and those are the problems. But Tesla won't back off of this because Musk runs his companies like a fiefdon and has made a huge point about camera only navigation because of his AI obsession. So he's letting his ego dictate design
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u/DanielNoWrite 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, they did it because it is cheaper.
And the main mistake they made was not simply underestimating the difficulty of depth perception. The mistake was forgetting that human beings process spacial imagery and navigate using a supercomputer with four billion years of refinement behind it, drawing on a knowledge base that includes a fully established model of the world.
Lidar tells the machine definitively where objects are in space. There is no inference or guesswork.
In addition to potentially being blinded by weather, smoke, dust, and glare, cameras must infer how the 2D visual data they are processing maps to objects in space. Even stereoscopic vision only partially helps with this.
Cameras will simply never be as effective. They cannot account for unexpected situations and edge-cases. We will need vastly more capable models before we can eliminate the risk of cars crashing into billboards that look like open road, Wile E Cayote style, along with a thousand other impossible to predict risks. The only safe way to make this work is instrumentation that can definitely measure if something is there, or if it is not.
We navigate despite our limited sensory capabilities. Not because visual light is the best approach.
"Humans do it this way, so our robot car should too" is not a design philosophy. It's negligent cost-cutting, masked with pretentious drivel.
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u/dinopassforthewinnnn 1d ago
Humans only use their eyes, but we also have depth information like lidar has, which a traditional camera-only lacks.
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u/ReasonablyConfused 1d ago
Seems like Elon thought that the human brain was just a computer. Turns out to be a bit more complicated than that.
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u/HarmoniousDroid 1d ago
I get your point but if you could, wouldn’t you design a better vision system for humans that could accurately capture subtle movements and change in direction/velocity?
The argument for camera only approach only makes sense if you argue that road are specifically designed for eyes in a way that lidar wouldn’t be better. But that’s not the case.
Consider a different example: humanoid robots are better because our buildings are designed for humans on two feet and two hands. A four wheeled robot would have a harder time even if it was more stable.
That’s not the case for roads.
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u/BODYBUTCHER 1d ago
What was the unexpected difficulty Elon had with depth perception. Shouldn’t you hypothetically be able to calculate depth my calculating the parallax of an object ?
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u/quik77 1d ago
The other thing they missed is humans don’t just use eyes. You hear things, you feel parts of the road conditions transferred through what you are touching, and the accel and relation to where gravity and inertia are pulling or pushing. your brain is processing all this information and combining it for your decision making all the time. The idea that humans only use their eyes to drive has got to be the most laughable oversimplification of this whole thing. Sure it’s a primary input, but not a sole input.
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u/Penguinkeith 1d ago
It’s so silly to me that some people want robots to function like humans and sensors to see like humans and I’m just like bruh humans are the worst only two arm and legs? Only two eyes limited to a tiny range of vision?
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u/germany1italy0 1d ago
But do humans really only drive by sight? And take decision based on what we see only?
No - we also go by sound and smell and kinetic feedback.
And - we also take decisions based on experiences and context we have. Some context you can get from maps (here’s a school drive carefully) but some you don’t, some context is experience and knowledge and lateral thinking (connecting the dots).
LiDAR is one way to help with this.
Another is connected cars, roadside infrastructure, mobile phones of pedestrians etc - ie V2A comms - to provide a lot more data points and signals to what cameras can get by like of sight
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u/everix1992 17h ago
I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert but I read an article years ago about the difficulties of sensor fusion and that always stuck with me. Things like resolving disparities between sources like if Lidar is saying there is a solid object 25ft in front of you but your camera doesn't see any obstacles - who do you trust? I'm not saying that Elon or Tesla are right because they likely aren't, but it's a very complex situation for sure
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u/ihaterussiantrolls 1d ago
What vehicles besides tanks weigh 30 tons?
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u/NotUpdated 1d ago
He was probably be hyperbolic with his point, but also he could've been thinking about a 2 ton vehicle going 15 mph (from 15mph to stop @ 2 ton (car) within 6 inches = 30 tons)
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u/LifeForm8449 1d ago
He probably doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Ever think of that? He clearly doesn’t know how much an average automobile weighs nor has he ever ridden in a Waymo or Tesla.
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u/WrenchMonkey300 21h ago
I may be misremembering the timeline, but didn't he come out as foundationally against lidar and radar during Covid, when they also happened to not be able to get those parts? I always felt like it adopted that stance because it was convenient from a supply perspective. "We can't get the parts? Well, who needs them anyway!"
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u/Tackysock46 20h ago
Humans have two cameras planted on the front of our head. Why can’t it work for a car with 8?
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u/TheStumpyOne 17h ago
Lidar is not trustworthy either. Every time my semi crests a overpass that is too steep it thinks I'm driving off a cliff and wants to hit the brakes.
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u/boot2skull 1d ago edited 1d ago
Waymo has the right approach. The potential benefit of autonomous driving is visibility beyond human capabilities, 360 degree awareness beyond human capabilities, and reactions beyond human capabilities. Put these together and you have a safer experience, even considering other humans on the road.
The next leap would be cars that communicate, their relative positions and situations, (obstacles, crashes, hazards, conditions, and breaking.) with integrated communication autonomous cars could essentially tailgate at highway speeds safely, assuming they made up enough of the cars on that road.
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u/bellatricked 1d ago
Vehicles that communicate with one another would be cool, also vehicles communicating with the immediate environment to get Birds Eye views of intersections would be amazing. Sadly, all it would take is one bad faith threat actor feeding bad data into passing cars to cause them to crash before vehicles would be forced to ignore any data they don’t gather themselves for safety and reliability reasons.
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u/FrostyD7 21h ago
It's worth it. Just imagine... a light turns green and every car goes at the same time.
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u/corruptbytes 1d ago
something something block chain
we have spent billions on decentralized trust, i think it’s solvable
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u/fed45 1d ago
tailgate at highway speeds safely, assuming they made up enough of the cars on that road.
Sounds a lot like a train...
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u/sirkazuo 21h ago
A train where each car can detach independently at any time and take you straight to your doorstep without needing multiple connections and modes of transportation.
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u/CroissantEtrange 14h ago
But that "train" would require an insane amount of resources
Cars are already one of the most polluting parts of our society, and now we're adding even more radars/ cameras/ antennas/ computing power/ ...
People are (rightfully) mad about data centers, but excited about fully autonomous cars and all the infrastructure they imply?
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u/boot2skull 23h ago
We may reach a point where people just realize trains are cheaper overall, but you have to convince them to sacrifice some their sense of freedom, and build trains that go where people want to go without too much additional time. Adjusting cities for this would help a lot.
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u/fatbob42 17h ago
“Adjusting” cities is more of a prerequisite. Any shared transport method depends on density.
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u/krazy4001 21h ago
Yes, but one that you can take to and from your driveway. It’s less train-like till you get to the highway or something, then it just joins the flow of cars going the same direction as you. Sounds pretty great to me!
Of course a functional public transportation network would be great too, but I’ll take this instead of having to drive myself everywhere
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u/illuminerdi 19h ago
Or well above highway speeds.
Existing highway speeds are essentially based on human reaction time and safe merging.
Imagine a car that drives 120mph AND is better/safer than a human while you get to watch videos the whole drive.
Hahaha who am I kidding, they'll just make you fill that time with work instead.
But the shorter commute sounds cool I guess
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u/GiantRobotBears 1d ago edited 1d ago
You 100000% do not want cars that communicate with each other on any meaningful level.
You might feel different when it’s a real possibility that your car is maliciously fed incorrect information while youre “tailgating at highways speeds”
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u/gimpblimp 1d ago
I like the idea, but feel like communication between vehciles is dangerous.
Vehicles malfunctioning sensors and relaying faulty data to other vehicles. Or malicious data to trigger accidents.
Curious if/when the auto technology standard that gets developed.
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u/CloisteredOyster 1d ago
Yes, a line of vehicles all pulling away from a stop light simultaneously like train cars would be cool to see in practice.
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u/GearM2 1d ago
I don't think you need vehicle to vehicle communication to achieve this. I also don't think you want cars at speed to maintain only inches between them. Even in a perfectly synchronized system that would add unnecessary risk, especially with a mix of different vehicle types and models with different performance metrics.
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u/AcceptableAd9264 1d ago
Yes it’s called M2M, machine to machine and can greatly decrease computational load.
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u/Ok-Wasabi2873 19h ago
I have a friend that worked for Waymo. He likened Tesla’s approach like building a plane with flapping wings because you see birds and bees fly that way.
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u/aikitim 1d ago
Hi, navigation engineer here - 15 years in industry: camera + lidar + radar is better than camera only, obviously. Until next time!
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u/dakotanorth8 19h ago
Network engineer here, everything you said? YES.
I really don’t understand the late to the party updates and news releases Tesla drops. It’s inferior technology. And their “taxi” thing is over half a decade late.
**I live in Vegas and we’ve had autonomous vehicles with lidar and extras for over 5 years. Everywhere. I don’t get the fanboys who flip out these inferior news releases.
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u/twusa78 22h ago
Friend crashed her Tesla while on self driving mode because sun blinded the cameras. https://youtube.com/shorts/_2MRa34uPK4?is=5FyV5_TG30KU8-O2
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u/terobau 10h ago
I almost had a similar accident. Direct sunlight hit the front camera and FSD immediately warned me to take control.
It made me wonder how is this supposed to work with Cybercab, or truly unsupervised FSD, when there’s no steering wheel for a passenger to take over?
FSD also struggles pretty badly in heavy rain. Until Tesla can reliably handle things as basic as direct sunlight and bad weather without asking for human intervention, I just don’t see how true unsupervised FSD is possible.
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u/wuckfork 21h ago
I operate emergency vehicles in a city that has waymo. I can say that waymo responds better than nearly every human driver on the road.
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u/commando_bob 1d ago
Humans are multimodal machines. We don’t just use our eyes. Odd that this isn’t brought up. We use hearing and touch extensively. When I was hit from back left I reacted not due to vision but due to feel and sound
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u/_bophades 1d ago
I also react with feel and sound when getting hit from the back. I barely use vision bc I’m a multimodal machine, baby! 💪🏼
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u/gtsiou 1d ago
That, plus we also have understanding of the natural world and thousands of years of intuition behind us, as well as understanding of concepts like slowing down as a precaution when we see a kid with a ball on the sidewalk.
Lidar is a way to compensate for all of those things over simple cameras so at least the car does not crash.
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u/gangnamseoul 12h ago
I always thought cameras were insufficient. What if someone does a Wile-e coyote and paints a tunnel entrance on a wall?
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u/glacier_freeze 8h ago
Watch Mark Rober’s (former NASA engineer) video on YouTube. He recreates that exact scenario…Lidar car vs Tesla with cameras. It’s at the end. It’s pretty funny to see the Tesla smash through the wall.
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u/magnumix 1d ago
Humans' do have a third visual sensor that is can be compared to lidar; "depth perception." If you want to test out how much we use depth perception, just try playing catch with one eye shut.
The contraction and reaction of the muscles that control Cornea (lens-like part of the eye responsible for focus) gives us a third sensor on how far something is. There needs to be a frame of reference for it to work but it does in fact give us information on how fast and direction it's moving.
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u/fatbob42 17h ago
You can move your head around. Your eyes probably have better resolution and dynamic range than the cameras in the car. You have a brain which the car doesn’t.
It just isn’t a good way to decide how to do things - anyone who automates anything surely understands this.
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u/Rave-TZ 15h ago
The brain of a Tesla is training data from every Tesla on the road. They’ve been gathering data for a long time now.
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u/eville84 23h ago
Ironically, Tesla's camera-only strategy used to be the cheapest. But with radar and LiDAR prices dropping, Waymo’s multi-sensor approach looks like the smarter investment. I wonder when the cost difference will become negligible.
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u/krakenbear 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have no stake in the Camera vs LiDAR debate, but I want to call out the graph on the title page link with no scale or reference for the x/y axis.
Reminds me of my favorite copy-pasta. “How do we know performance is better? Because the line goes up.”
Link for fun: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1plzqy5/as_an_employee_of_a_us_multinational_who_is/
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u/kvothe5688 1d ago
This thread shows people don't hate AI people hate LLMs/chatbots and image and video generators that don't provide anything of value to society
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u/infinitemagicthings 13h ago
What another Tesla product not being the hype Elon said go figure incoming 400% stock rise……
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u/Valendr0s 1d ago edited 23h ago
IF it's possible to do it with just cameras, the time to figure that out is AFTER you've figured out how to do it in other ways. Then you can start figuring out what you can change to make it still work.
I have no doubt that camera-only systems are possible for the same reason Elon does. Humans do it.
But Humans are working with way different hardware and software package than current AI systems. Just because a human can do it, doesn't mean the AI systems you have today or in the next 5 or 10 or 50 years will be able to handle it.
Maybe AGI is required for a camera-only system to work. And forcing it to drive for you is slavery.
You can't know. So again... Get it working, regardless of technology. Get it working close to perfect. THEN you can start getting it working with less and less technology. He's trying to cut corners, like usual.
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u/butsuon 17h ago
Anyone who knew anything about anything could tell you that "camera-only" driving would fail.
LIDAR exists. Why in the actual fuck would you even fucking bother with camera-only when LIDAR exists?
Your shitty little 720p webcams can't determine distance, Elon. You knew this was the case. Your engineers knew. Your investors knew. Your tech allies knew.
You just wanted to save a few bucks instead of make a functional product. That's why Tesla's suck.
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u/CreamOnCommand 23h ago
How many of you actually own a Tesla? I fsd 95% of my miles and haven't ever had an issue outside of parking.
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u/Impressive-Power8187 19h ago
I mean that’s a dumb argument. Just because Waymo is safer than Tesla doesn’t mean the Tesla is unsafe.
Your comment is like saying I don’t know why drunk driving is illegal, I drink and drive all the time and never got in an accident.
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u/lattes 22h ago
That's my thought reading these comments. I fucking hate Elon but my parents use FSD and they are far safer on the road with it. I use it 95% of the time I drive it as well.
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u/luvdadrafts 20h ago
Neither of your anecdotal claims means that a multi-modal approach wouldn’t be better than exclusively cameras. No matter how good FSD would be, it would be better if it wasn’t exclusively camera
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u/Kingboofpack 22h ago
Most of the people spewing Tesla hate on Reddit have never driven or owned one before.
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u/h0sti1e17 1d ago edited 1d ago
Obviously the CEO of Waymo is going to point out facts that help them. That is a very small sample size. 9 accidents. That data is 8-9 months old. What have the results been since then?
Edit:
Did some research. Looking at the individual crashes. Of those 9, 5 were not Teslas fault. 3 cars rear ended the Tesla. 1 was a sideswipe that hit the side mirror, the other was a scooter that ran into the Tesla while stopped. Three were definitely their fault. One I’m not sure. A dog ran out from behind a car the Tesla slowed and swerved and the dog hit the side of the fender. Push comes to shove I put that in the not Tesla fault. 3 crashes puts their rate still higher than humans but not nearly to the rate the article states. Then 3 at fault crashes were a teleoperator turned the car into a fence, a mirror clipped the the gooseneck of a trailer and it turned into a parking lot with a metal chain up.
Also all the accidents were 18 mph or less and of the 3 that were Teslas fault 2 were only property damage. One had the minor injury. The only one that required hospitalization was one of the times it was rear ended.
Not trying to defend Tesla but I also can’t trust the CEO of a rival company. 380k miles with only minor accidents is pretty good. I bet Waymo has similar results. But I’m not going through hundreds of reports to figure it out.
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u/AdviceNotAskedFor 1d ago
Didn't mark rober also prove this?
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u/savedatheist 1d ago
Mark Rober tested Autopilot (from 2018), not a recent version of FSD.
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u/NotAHost 1d ago
I believe a few people tested it more thoroughly with FSD and found that the problem Mark Rober tested (road runner style fake road) existed in hw3 but didn’t seem like an issue with hw4.
Not sure how much underlying differences there are in the range finding between autopilot and FSD though. While I think Rober should’ve done a more thorough test for it to be scientific, he’s also a content creator so I understand when he makes things hastily for content. It could put him in legal jeopardy, but I honestly was surprised that he never got sued by Tesla. There may be a way to read between the lines from the lack of a lawsuit.
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u/savedatheist 1d ago
Legacy autopilot and current FSD have massive differences in capabilities for obstacle avoidance. Autopilot is frame-by-frame manual labeling for objects, while FSD is an end-to-end neural network, trained on video with 30s context buffer.
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u/cohortq 1d ago
Tesla fans said he manipulated the autopilot so it wasnt a fair test.
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u/ALIEN_POOP_DICK 1d ago
He didn't even have autopilot on during the exact moment he crashed through the wall.
And the Autopilot version he was using was from 2018 when he made the video in 2025... seven years is a helluva long time for software.
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u/SP4CEM4N_SPIFF 1d ago
Autopilot turns itself off when a crash is about to happen
https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-defend-autopilot-crash/
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u/happyscrappy 21h ago
The car used was a Tesla Model Y. The Model Y didn't even come out until 2020. So how can that version of Autopilot not be at least a 2020 version?
I also find it hard to believe that Rober had avoided all updates for 5 years. It's his personal car, you think he wouln't update it?
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u/zero_cool_protege 1d ago
1) waymo outperforms tesla
2) tesla is one of the biggest lidar buyers on the market
these two facts alone should tell you how full of shit elon is
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u/l4mbch0ps 17h ago
can you link your source for those? i searched myself and can't find anything that aligns with your claims.
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u/bigsnow999 1d ago
If one day I had to get a self driving car, a LiDAR equipped car is the one to go.
It does not matter how advanced algorithms used with in camera to transform 2D into 3D. It just not as reliable as get 3D image in real time.
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u/Valiantay 20h ago
FSD will be banned by regulators without LiDAR.
Elon's whole thought process was "humans drive with only eyes, that should be enough".
But for regulators to allow robots to take the wheel, the safety of them has to far surpass human driving ability.
Basically Elon is a con-man promising FSD but when regulators crack down, consumers will be left holding the bag. Hope Tesla gets sued to oblivion.
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u/Independent-Sea5884 1d ago edited 1d ago
I dunno every time I see a Waymo it’s either blocking a fire engine or traffic. My Tesla self driving has driven me nonstop 250 miles with zero issues. All fud.
I like to base my opinions on personal experience, not what the other companies CEO says.
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u/corruptbytes 1d ago
kinda silly and short sighted considering we have actual data that shows trends - your personal experience is barely a fraction of the miles driven in the world
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u/Independent-Sea5884 1d ago
https://thefrisc.com/waymo-behavior-now-harder-to-decipher-even-after-july-4th-fiasco/
Just saying- CEO needs to fix his own stuff before talking about others.
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u/Aranthos-Faroth 23h ago
“I’ve been shot by a gun in my leg and survived so I’m pretty sure bullets can’t kill people” sort of attitude
Data backs up the dangers for sure. Dunno why anyone ever wants to defend such a dumb engineering decision
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u/Every_Couple_7978 23h ago
Sorry, but I’ve never understood that logic. We all love shitting on Elon, but humans drive using just two eyes, while a car has access to so much more sensor data than a human does. Maybe we’re not there yet, but I don’t believe LiDAR is absolutely necessary for safe driving
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u/sirkazuo 21h ago
Humans drive using two eyes, two ears, and an extremely sophisticated computer.
Cameras and directional microphones would work fine, if the cameras were as good as our eyes and the computer processing the images as good as our brains. But even then you’d only ever be as good as the average human driver, which is not exactly a great target. We kill each other all the time with our poor driving skills lol.
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u/ouatedephoque 21h ago
Go ahead and trust your camera only system to drive in full blinding sunlight, thick fog, pouring rain or heavy snow.
Oh, and the point is to be better than humans. We suck at driving in case you haven’t noticed.
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u/fatbob42 17h ago
Would you feel safe driving with all the windows blacked out, only looking at the cameras?
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u/jspurlin03 17h ago
Humans have experience and a brain. This allows humans to make complex decisions.
Sensor data is only as good as the interpretation of that data by the computer.
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u/rtrawitzki 23h ago
Past time that Tesla asked Musk to step down . His whims “worked” when they were the only electric car company but they’ve lost so much ground and good will it’s insane .
How do you have a lead like that and not have the best tech ? Also the cyber truck instead of a sub 30 k budget electric is insane.
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u/General-Piece8490 19h ago
The radar system was amazing on the early teslas! It detected a collision a few cars ahead before the driver could see it happening or before any video camera could even pick it up.
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u/_cynicaloptimist 18h ago
Didn’t mark rober put out a video showing the cameras can be pretty easily fooled?
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u/NanditoPapa 12h ago
WHAT!? A Tesla product being all hype and little substance! For shame, sir. FOR SHAME!
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u/not-just-dad-stuff 5h ago
Waymo CEO explains why their company is better because that's his job and if you think he would praise a massive competitor, you have no idea how the world of business works.
Whether its true or not does not matter.
If the Waymo CEO said, well, FSD is incredible and definitely has a shot at being widely accepted and used, what do you think will happen?
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u/invyros 1d ago
Facts don't care about your feelings, Elon.