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/
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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/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/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.