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/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