[HN Gopher] Waymo's collision avoidance testing
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Waymo's collision avoidance testing
        
       Author : EvgeniyZh
       Score  : 288 points
       Date   : 2022-12-14 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.waymo.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.waymo.com)
        
       | nixpulvis wrote:
       | I almost feel like AI enabled vehicles need a special light on
       | the exterior to indicate to other drovers that this thing is a
       | robot. As I'm driving I would probably learn to approach these
       | vehicles differently from the average normal driver.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | quitit wrote:
         | This sounds like an excellent idea. There is a lingering issue
         | about drivers not paying attention and even sleeping while
         | their vehicle is in self-driving mode, that's contrary to the
         | requirement that the driver is actively supervising.
         | 
         | I don't think it's a realistic expectation that drivers are
         | always fully attentive and able to respond in time to a crash
         | situation when the self-driving mode is active. Such a light
         | would give me the heads up that I should stay on my toes.
        
       | latchkey wrote:
       | I'd love to see an independent body conducting the same exact
       | tests across all platforms (ie: Tesla).
        
         | linuxftw wrote:
         | IMO, public road, public code.
        
           | cobaltoxide wrote:
           | That's a nice phrase, but it seems impractical given the
           | enormous complexity of these systems.
        
             | linuxftw wrote:
             | Impractical or not, public streets belong to the public,
             | and the public gets to dictate how they are used or not
             | used.
             | 
             | I'm willing to negotiate. If companies don't want to
             | release their code, they can put up $50M in a trust, and
             | $1M bond per car, and automatically accept at-fault for any
             | fatalities involving one of their self-driving units, with
             | a minimum of $1M paid out for each deceased to their
             | survivors.
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | It should be adversarial. An independent body should administer
         | test suites provided by the manufacturers. Everybody has to
         | pass 99% of the union of all test scenarios before being
         | allowed on the road. The tests are run monthly.
        
           | xoa wrote:
           | > _It should be adversarial. An independent body should
           | administer test suites provided by the manufacturers.
           | Everybody has to pass 99% of the union of all test scenarios
           | before being allowed on the road. The tests are run monthly._
           | 
           | While I appreciate the spirit you're being overly glib, and
           | we should all be wary of overly simplistic answers since
           | reality can have surprising emergent effects. Like, your
           | proposal as written would give behind manufacturers who cut
           | corners and were bad an effective veto over companies doing
           | well. If say Tesla finds they have to pretty much start from
           | scratch, that they're 5 years behind Waymo now because they
           | took a shoddy haphazard approach, well they might as well
           | create a bunch of impossible tests that Waymo can't pass. It
           | doesn't matter that they can't pass them, because they
           | couldn't pass the ones Waymo proposes either, so this way
           | they could throw a spanner in the works and pull back on the
           | leaders. You could alter your suggestion to be that
           | manufacturers can only propose tests that they themselves can
           | pass with ready-to-ship vehicles, so everyone has to meet
           | each other's standards. But what if there really are tests
           | that everyone should pass but that no one can yet? Or what if
           | there is explicit or tacit collusion in the other direction,
           | where everyone low balls the tests because ultimately it's
           | more profitable to get stuff shipping?
           | 
           | Basically I don't see any reason to not just have the
           | government continue to be involved here and come up with
           | independent road safety standards as advised by their own
           | experts, with public comment and rationale. Ultimately it's
           | the public interest at stake and the rules are about use of
           | public infrastructure. Why not just have an aggressive
           | federal standard course and set of tests that everyone must
           | meet?
           | 
           | I also think in terms of incentives that FSD car
           | manufacturers should be fully liable for any accidents caused
           | by the car while FSD is active, simple as that.
        
             | jefftk wrote:
             | What if you limited to test scenarios that a human
             | ("NIEON") could reliably pass?
        
               | sebzim4500 wrote:
               | I'm sure motivated engineers could come up with tests
               | that are extremely difficult for current AI but basically
               | useless for deploying a real self driving system.
               | 
               | See the millions of examples of trolley problems, for
               | example.
        
               | jefftk wrote:
               | Trolley problem examples are hard, but your "NIEON" won't
               | reliably pass either.
        
             | jeffbee wrote:
             | If Tesla can't pass each and every one of their proposed
             | tests then they aren't even in the game. What you describe
             | would not occur.
        
           | raldi wrote:
           | And a meta body should coordinate with manufacturers to
           | periodically submit faulty products to make sure they're
           | flagged.
        
           | lowbloodsugar wrote:
           | 100%
        
           | latchkey wrote:
           | I watched this video yesterday which seems really
           | applicable...
           | 
           | How to crash an airplane - Nickolas Means
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=099cHWSbAL8
           | 
           | Reflecting on the video, they don't need to save everyone,
           | but it certainly should be the first time when not everyone
           | dies.
        
           | laichzeit0 wrote:
           | So out of 10,000 tests, it's okay if they fail on 100 of
           | them?
        
             | jerf wrote:
             | As nice as it may be to think that humans are perfect, it's
             | not like they'd score 100% on this level of testing either.
        
               | kibwen wrote:
               | In fact, we can even subject human drivers to the same
               | tests and compare the results.
        
               | lelanthran wrote:
               | > As nice as it may be to think that humans are perfect,
               | it's not like they'd score 100% on this level of testing
               | either.
               | 
               | Someone posted upthread that current fatalities on
               | something stupid like 1.5 per 100000 miles.
               | 
               | Humans are currently ahead in the safety stats game.
        
               | adventured wrote:
               | The automated driving systems will have to pass a far
               | higher bar than human drivers as a comparison. People
               | will get even more upset about self-driving tech causing
               | injuries/wrecks/deaths/endangerment vs what human drivers
               | cause.
               | 
               | Long after self-driving systems are superior to human
               | drivers on average, the headlines will still scream about
               | humans being killed by self-driving tech. The
               | sensationalism will still sell and people will still be
               | very outraged about it.
               | 
               | The expectation will be no mistakes. Anything short of
               | that will always draw a hyper emotional negative
               | response, which will lure in political/regulatory
               | responses.
        
               | gretch wrote:
               | >People will get even more upset about self-driving tech
               | causing injuries/wrecks/deaths/endangerment vs what human
               | drivers cause.
               | 
               | Will they?
               | 
               | I mean for example Tobacco companies lied and the truth
               | that we know today is that smoking is very very
               | detrimental to their health. It's also detrimental non-
               | smokers in society via second hand smoke, and secondary
               | effects like cigarette butt litter. It doesn't even
               | provide any solid utility like transportation does, it
               | just feels good.
               | 
               | Not only do people still smoke today, people _start_
               | smoking today given all the information we have.
               | 
               | So when I see behavior like that, I'm not confident that
               | people won't want FSD just because it's 'dangerous'.
        
               | mwigdahl wrote:
               | You're 100% correct. People will want FSD for themselves
               | for sure. That won't stop them from blaming the tech
               | companies when they read articles about the cars killing
               | people. Ralph Nader's _Unsafe At Any Speed_ tanked
               | Corvair sales after publication, although his critiques
               | arguably applied to other cars more than the Corvair. The
               | sales of other, similar contemporary cars weren't
               | affected at all.
               | 
               | FSD will be incredibly convenient, which means humans
               | will always be motivated to come up a reason, valid or
               | otherwise, that justifies their own use of the tech while
               | allowing themselves to condemn others for mishaps
               | incurred doing the exact same thing.
               | 
               | "They didn't maintain it correctly." "They didn't listen
               | to the warnings." "They bought the wrong brand." "They
               | weren't current on software updates."
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | I doubt it, the more common self driving deaths become
               | the less newsworthy they will be.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | > Long after self-driving systems are superior to human
               | drivers on average
               | 
               | For starters, that's not the correct metric. Self driving
               | systems have to at least surpass the median driver, not
               | the average (mean). Auto-related fatality stats are
               | heavily skewed by a small subset of drivers who engage in
               | very risky habits.
        
               | sebzim4500 wrote:
               | Why should they have to pass the median?
               | 
               | > Auto-related fatality stats are heavily skewed by a
               | small subset of drivers who engage in very risky habits.
               | 
               | Right and it would be great if those people used self
               | driving cars instead.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | > Why should they have to pass the median?
               | 
               | Because you have to convince people like me to buy a
               | self-driving car, and as long as that car is more likely
               | to get me killed than I am, my family will remain in a
               | car that I drive. I do not drive drunk, I avoid driving
               | in inclement weather when not required, or at night, or
               | when I'm really tired. I don't race, I don't road rage, I
               | am a very defensive driver. I have not had an at-fault
               | accident _ever_ (in 30 years and counting since I got my
               | license) and the only accidents I 've ever been in at all
               | were minor fender-benders.
               | 
               | So convince me why I should endanger myself so that you
               | can have an unsafe computer driven auto on the road?
               | 
               | > Right and it would be great if those people used self
               | driving cars instead.
               | 
               | So make a self-driving car for _them_. You will need to
               | subsidize it, since these types of drivers are more
               | likely than not unable to afford a fancy new toy. When
               | the technology can finally cross the median point, then
               | we can talk again about regular, good drivers hanging up
               | their keys.
        
             | Antipode wrote:
             | Maybe have variable points per test and have a minimum
             | passing point total, so that an important test could fail
             | you in its own.
        
               | jeffbee wrote:
               | Yeah we can quibble over the details. The key aspect is
               | adversaries.
        
           | sekh60 wrote:
           | Kinda crazy to think the tests have to be done monthly, but
           | they'd have to be due to software updates, what crazy times
           | we are approaching.
        
             | lapetitejort wrote:
             | The "unit" in "unit test" will now refer to the car crashed
             | on every Jenkins build
        
       | kolbe wrote:
       | Consensus from the two AV articles today seems to be that Tesla,
       | despite releasing more data to the public on their FSD system, is
       | evil, incompetent and endangering society (the data doesn't say
       | so, but just the fact that Tesla won't release even more data is
       | shady). Whereas Waymo making a PR statement with no substance is
       | proof Tesla will fail and Waymo will save us.
        
         | enragedcacti wrote:
         | > Tesla, despite releasing far more data to the public on their
         | FSD system,
         | 
         | The same Tesla who argues to the California DMV that FSD is a
         | level 2 system to dodge reporting requirements? The Tesla who
         | has a major EV outlet demanding that they release meaningful
         | disengagement data? [1]
         | 
         | Perhaps I missed something but I really have no idea what data
         | you could be talking about, unless by "data" you mean access to
         | the FSD beta.
         | 
         | [1] https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-
         | data-...
        
           | kolbe wrote:
           | Tesla themselves released safety data quarterly for years. I
           | don't know why it stopped, but internet guesses range from
           | Tesla is a fraud to the NHTSA started to question its
           | accuracy, and they pulled it for liability reason. Tesla
           | actually updates miles driven on Twitter. And going on
           | YouTube, you can find endless videos of user experiences. I
           | said thousands of hours before, but it very well could be
           | hundreds of thousands of hours.
           | 
           | Find anything on Waymo. The NHTSA released autopilot and AV
           | vehicle crash data in raw number of crashes, and I wanted to
           | normalize both Tesla and Waymo somehow, and I couldn't find
           | anything from Waymo other than some repeated claim of "over
           | 20 million miles" which dates back years. If it is only 20
           | million, then Waymo is insanely dangerous, and no one should
           | be defending them, but I have a feeling they're into the
           | hundreds of millions at this point. Also, look up similar
           | YouTube experiences. Waymo has almost nothing--a few people
           | following their vehicles
        
         | bhauer wrote:
         | I wish HN would be better than that, but your summary is
         | perfect.
        
           | RC_ITR wrote:
           | What's your response to the fact that Tesla's data is
           | actually very bad? [1]
           | 
           | [1]https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1602774335244177408?
           | re...
        
         | RC_ITR wrote:
         | >Consensus from the two AV articles today
         | 
         | Consensus from informed industry observers who are _sounding
         | the alarm bells about how dangerous Tesla 's approach is from a
         | first-principles standpoint_
         | 
         | The "data" Tesla released is a meaningless attempt to pull the
         | wool over your eyes.
        
       | pugworthy wrote:
       | One thing I'm very curious about with AI driven cars, is whether
       | they will develop some of the overly cautious / paranoid habits
       | human drivers get around bicycles.
       | 
       | Take people passing a bike in a bike lane for example. Some will
       | go way under the speed limit, and not just pass the bike even
       | though it's in it's own lane. Or others will swing WAY wide to
       | pass them, even though again, they are in their own line.
       | 
       | Will AI itself learn that indeed, bikes do suddenly veer into
       | your lane, or will AI in fact learn that no, they don't do that?
        
       | panick21_ wrote:
       | Self driving cars are mostly a bad idea in most cases. The only
       | thing worse then cars with 1 person in it driving around is cars
       | with 0 people driving around.
       | 
       | The goal should be less cars overall specially in cities.
       | Technology that will cause more cars and more traffic is just
       | terrible.
       | 
       | Cities should ban cars, make it pedestrian and bicycle friendly,
       | build 'self driving' metros and S-Bahn style train systems.
        
         | wizofaus wrote:
         | There's no need to _ban_ cars - it would be quiet sufficient
         | just for governments to stop building infrastructure (and
         | making various laws around its usage) as though cars were the
         | only type of transport that mattered. FWIW, in principle self-
         | driving tech could make our cities far more  "people" friendly
         | and less attuned to the needs to cars, but only if there was
         | some sort of motivation for the tech to be developed with that
         | goal in mind.
        
       | ape4 wrote:
       | So the AI learns - slow down when driving between shipping
       | containers
        
         | frogblast wrote:
         | Well... Yes. It is a scenario where you you have a blind spot
         | on the road ahead of you, so I'd hope a human driver would do
         | the same.
        
       | rkagerer wrote:
       | They refer to NIEON as an undistractable human driver, but isn't
       | it just another model? Is that a bit misleading, or can someone
       | shed more light on this?
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | There's a footnote:
         | 
         |  _" NIEON is defined by (1) gaze being directed through the
         | windshield toward the forward path during the conflict and (2)
         | a lack of sleepiness and intoxication-related impairment."_
        
           | snotrockets wrote:
           | So basically, a public transit driver.
        
         | tantalor wrote:
         | NIEON is "a reference model that represents an ideal human
         | state for driving"
         | 
         | You can use this for comparison, as in "what would NIEON do in
         | this situation"?
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | It's just a hypothetical for comparison: "is our self driving
         | car doing as good or better than a competent, undistracted
         | human driver?"
        
       | bingblogger wrote:
       | Share your unique Blog post, create a Backlink to your site and
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       | 
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       | random_upvoter wrote:
       | As with all AI, it works until that special set of circumstances
       | pop up where it fails and when it fails there is no bottom as to
       | how it fails.
        
       | nojvek wrote:
       | I'm the side of LIDAR is a crutch. Not only is it crazy expensive
       | and has many moving parts, but the sensor input is a bunch of
       | dots. One has to have cameras anyway for the high density vision
       | input.
       | 
       | With newer algorithms, you can stitch multiple cameras to
       | reconstruct a scene and semantically identify important objects.
       | I do like what Tesla is doing with its new voxel neural net.
       | 
       | Yeah it will take a few more years, but the hard problems are
       | doing what our visual cortex does with two cameras (our eyes).
       | Also keep in mind a car has multiple cameras around to give full
       | 360 view. They also sense in IR range that our eyes do not.
        
         | samwillis wrote:
         | Teslas vision based system makes a prediction of what the
         | environment around it is, how far away things are. A LIDAR
         | based system knows _with certainty_ how far way things are.
         | 
         | LIDAR may be expensive now, thats not to say it won't get
         | cheeper, with fewer parts.
         | 
         | But the main issue is a social one, I don't think the public
         | will except _any_ fatalities as a result of a vision based
         | system making a mistake. Even if the deal rate from accetends
         | is lower than with a human driver.
         | 
         | A self driving car can't be 50% better, or even 200% better it
         | needs to be thousands of times better than a human driver for
         | it to succeed. I think the certainty of a LIDAR baed system is
         | the only way to do that.
         | 
         | An AI based vision system is Tesla saying that can make a
         | "brain" better than a human at understanding vision.
         | 
         | LIDAR is saying, humans can't measure how far away things are,
         | we can do better than humans by doing something they can't.
        
       | abraxas wrote:
       | I really want to see how testing goes for MobilEye when they
       | start to open up their prototypes a little more. Of the youtube
       | videos I've seen theirs is by far the most impressive and I have
       | a lot of respect for Amnon Shashua.
        
       | tr33house wrote:
       | can't wait for the day I'll leave work, get into a self-driving
       | car, watch a movie, have it stop for takeout, sleep as it drives
       | me across the country and then wake up in the morning on the
       | other side of the country ready to start my day. Rooting for
       | Waymo!
        
       | voz_ wrote:
       | I spent a few years in self driving, I have immense respect for
       | Waymo, and very little for Tesla. I think ultimately they will
       | win the space.
        
         | lynndotpy wrote:
         | This is my view as well. (I did self-driving related research,
         | like platooning and taxi scheduling/allocation.) Waymo, Baidu,
         | Didi, and others are the names that come to mind for places
         | that produce research, produce data, _and_ apply their
         | technology in real-world practice.
         | 
         | My impression of Tesla is mostly shaped from (1)
         | nonparticipation in the research community, (2) a very early
         | "mission accomplished" declaration by calling their cars fully
         | self driving, and (3) a longterm refusal to use LIDAR.
         | 
         | I don't consider Tesla a player in self-driving (edit: self-
         | driving _research_ ), but I don't think Tesla does either.
         | There's no reason for them to try to "win" the space.
         | 
         | From Tesla's side, it makes more sense to continue on their
         | current tack: Applying results from existing research. I think
         | Tesla's strategy is to be the highest bidder when it comes time
         | for Waymo (or Didi, etc) to sell their tech.
        
           | pantalaimon wrote:
           | How do you view the approach of comma.ai ?
        
             | lynndotpy wrote:
             | I don't know anything about them to be honest! Just
             | searched them up.
             | 
             | AFAIK, they aren't working on self-driving or trying to
             | advance research there, so it doesn't make sense to compare
             | them to Waymo either.
             | 
             | But an open-source driver-assist upgrade package is
             | interesting, but doesn't overlap with my experience. Sorry
             | I don't have anything more meaningful to say!
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | They literally sell a package to purchasers of cars called
           | full self driving and autopilot. They claim their competitive
           | advantage is all the cameras of miles driven. They put
           | special boards in cars for it. They absolutely consider
           | themselves a player.
        
             | minsc_and_boo wrote:
             | I don't think anyone is doubting that Tesla considers
             | _themselves_ to be a player, especially since it sells more
             | add-ons to their cars. Repeatedly publicly knocking the
             | benefits of LIDAR in self driving demonstrates otherwise.
        
               | mehwoot wrote:
               | > _I don 't think anyone is doubting that Tesla considers
               | themselves to be a player_
               | 
               | > _I don 't consider Tesla a player in self-driving, but
               | I don't think Tesla does either_
        
               | pdabbadabba wrote:
               | They clearly are a player in the self-driving cars
               | _market_. They may not be a player in self-driving
               | _research_. These things can both be true at the same
               | time.
               | 
               | I think that's the distinction driving the confusion
               | here.
        
             | lynndotpy wrote:
             | Let me clarify my position: Tesla does not advance self-
             | driving research, and they don't need to. Tesla won't be
             | the first to release fully self-driving cars. (I think 'SAE
             | levels' are bunk, but let's say this is level 4.5 for the
             | sake of discussion.)
             | 
             | EDIT: Sorry, and to clarify, I meant "not a player in self-
             | driving _research_. I also do not think anyone has any
             | vehicles we should call  "self driving".
             | 
             | (I'll keep the rest of my pre-edit clarification below.)
             | 
             | To clarify further:
             | 
             | Tesla's offerings come from applying and engineering
             | existing published research. That takes work, and they're
             | making some money from that.
             | 
             | To the extent that "fully self driving" is an achievable
             | goal, it makes no sense to expect Tesla to make the
             | advances that get us there, when (1) they aren't doing
             | that, and (2) they don't need to do that to make money.
             | 
             | To make this even more clear, let's make it concrete with
             | one plausible future: In 2032, Waymo (or Didi, whoever)
             | achieves true 'level 4' fully-self driving with proprietary
             | technology. Their tech is seen in trucks, busses, taxis, as
             | well as being equipped to a few thousand private vehicles.
             | The safety stats are superhuman, and insuring such a
             | vehicle is cheap.
             | 
             | In this future, Tesla Motors would like to enter into an
             | exclusive partnership to integrate this technology into the
             | cars they manufacture.
        
               | 411111111111111 wrote:
               | > _Tesla won 't be the first to release fully self-
               | driving cars._
               | 
               | Technically speaking: yes, they were the first ones, back
               | in 2017.
               | 
               | Their car might've been more likely to crash then
               | actually end up at the desired destination, but they did
               | release first with a pretty hilariously bad product.
        
               | kiratp wrote:
               | Literally making their own AI training chips with novel
               | architecture doesn't count as participating in research?
               | 
               | Google has tried and failed at commercializing similar
               | technology in other verticals (like building
               | environmental automation from their DC tech). The reason
               | is actual incumbents (rightly) see the value of their
               | position while Google comes at it as "our AI is the
               | value, you just make dumb things".
               | 
               | I expect the automakers to ship mediocre stacks that are
               | put together by existing players like Bosch.
               | 
               | As an ex-Googler I would be floored if Waymo actually
               | lands a sell-into deal with an automaker. A fully
               | vertical taxi service is their path today because they
               | tried and failed to sign any partnerships.
        
             | hcrisp wrote:
             | Maybe it depends on how you define "full" self-driving. Is
             | it full if it works only for the scenarios it was designed?
             | Are you working full time if you only work 30 hours a week?
        
             | munificent wrote:
             | They want customers to consider them a player.
             | 
             | They doesn't necessarily mean that they themselves believe
             | their own marketing.
        
         | mv4 wrote:
         | can you elaborate? something wrong with Tesla's approach?
        
           | everly wrote:
           | Yes. Photogrammetry + ML is fundamentally inferior to a
           | LiDAR-based solution, particularly on the time-scale motor
           | vehicles operate on.
        
           | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
           | They have a habit of running into things.
        
             | aantix wrote:
             | How do the number of accidents compare to Waymo when fleet
             | size is taken into account?
        
               | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
               | The stats don't matter much when it's clear they can't
               | handle collision avoidance with anything outside their
               | limited training set like airplanes. You have to ask what
               | else can't they detect in front of the car if they're
               | 100% dependent on ML to decide there's an obstruction.
               | That is an irresponsible threat to public safety no
               | matter how lucky they are scraping by on their current
               | architecture.
        
               | jcims wrote:
               | Except the stats *do* matter. It's how we measure things
               | that operate in the real world. The blind baby stroller
               | benchmark might be academically interesting, but if
               | distracted drivers are smashing kids on public roads for
               | another decade while Waymo perfects it's craft the net
               | result is just more flat people.
        
               | redox99 wrote:
               | Talking of FSD beta here, I don't think there has been
               | any death or even major accident to date. But that's
               | mostly because (especially until a few months ago) it was
               | bad enough that nobody would trust it, so people were
               | always alert to intervene.
               | 
               | If you were to let FSD beta just drive by itself enough
               | time, and intentionally never intervene, it _would_
               | eventually crash, no doubt about it. Before v10.69 it was
               | hard to get a 20 minute drive with no interventions
               | (unless it was mostly straight roads).
        
               | amf12 wrote:
               | Relevant HN:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984922
               | 
               | Comparing disengagement and driver intervention data
               | might be useful to compare Tesla FSD vs others.
        
         | threeseed wrote:
         | I wouldn't rule out Cruise.
         | 
         | They already have robotaxis in SF and are expanding into
         | Arizona and Texas by the end of this year.
        
           | zndr wrote:
           | Saying they have taxi's in SF is a bit hyperbolic. I have an
           | invite to that program and it's
           | 
           | - only after 10pm - used such an odd slice of the city I not
           | only can't get picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go.
           | 
           | I would love to use either of these programs both for the
           | novelty and because I think Autonomous driving is great, but
           | I literally can't use the program I do have access to.
        
             | darkwizard42 wrote:
             | I think the parent wasn't referring to it being perfect,
             | but that open road real-life testing is something very few
             | companies have, and was implying we shouldn't count out
             | Cruise because they are at least at that stage.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | hemloc_io wrote:
             | as a fellow beta tester, they are expanding their service
             | area to include a majority of the city incl Mission.
             | 
             | Totally agree w/ you rn thou right now it's basically a
             | neat party trick I have to go out of my way to show off
             | instead of a super useful service.
        
             | wutbrodo wrote:
             | > used such an odd slice of the city I not only can't get
             | picked up, it doesn't GO any where I go.
             | 
             | It's been a month and a half since they've covered almost
             | the entire city except FiDi/Union Square (and Twin
             | Peaks)[1]. That's not a trivial omission, but do you really
             | never take rides that start or end in any other area? In
             | particular, that entire area is a fairly close walk from
             | the only dense transit line in the city.
             | 
             | [1] https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1587589014525448192
        
         | aeternum wrote:
         | Great appeal to authority. Why not explain the technical
         | reasons you believe Waymo will win?
        
         | guilamu wrote:
         | I did not spent a few years in self driving, but correct if I'm
         | wrong, but how would Waymo win when they can work only with HD
         | maps (aka, nearly nowhere) while Tesla FSD work nearly
         | perfectly now even on dirt roads (aka anywhere) with no map at
         | all?
        
           | Zigurd wrote:
           | This is a _very_ good question. Elon is dumping on LIDAR and
           | 3D high resolution mapping.
           | 
           | That may be a smokescreen. Tesla collects a lot of data from
           | their cars. What they do not have are these supposedly
           | superfluous high resolution maps. If Tesla's camera-sourced
           | data proves to be insufficient, that will have been a very
           | bad gamble, in addition to whether camera data is sufficient
           | for real time decisions.
           | 
           | When they pay off, bold gambles make businessmen look smart.
           | That's why nearly all business hagiographies are the product
           | of survivorship bias. Just like your buddy who won in Vegas.
           | 
           | We will see this risk-taking play out in Starship and
           | Starlink, too.
        
           | voz_ wrote:
           | Collecting HD Maps is an 80/20 problem (I have a patent in a
           | subfield of this, for better or worse lol) - you can get a
           | ton of value from a small set of focused areas. If you can
           | solve greater metro areas (no dirt roads?), you've got a real
           | solution.
           | 
           | I also think that the mapping and routing component matters a
           | lot less than how good your collision and realtime avoidance
           | systems are. And in that arena, Tesla is an unmitigated
           | disaster.
        
             | guilamu wrote:
             | Thanks for your anwser. I see a lot of bad things on Tesla
             | FSD and I totally get the critics.
             | 
             | Yet, I follow DirtyTesla's YouTube channel and I think FSD
             | is quite impressive compared to any other self driving
             | software I've seen.
             | 
             | Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo
             | for example in similar situations? I can't find anything
             | even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.
             | 
             | I'm not a fanboy nor do I possess any TSLA actions (or even
             | a car for that matter), I'm just interested in the field
             | and until now I thought Tesla was the most promising tech
             | (it seems I'm wrong, but I really like to see it!).
        
               | vgt wrote:
               | Compare Waymo[0] with Tesla [1]..
               | 
               | These are easily searchable which leads me to question
               | your sincerity in feinting ignorance.
               | 
               | [0]https://youtu.be/mWvhw1KCmbo
               | 
               | [1]https://youtu.be/3mnG_Gbxf_w
        
               | Zigurd wrote:
               | They're just asking questions. Geeez.
        
               | zaroth wrote:
               | I think you missed OPs point.
               | 
               | As I understand it, Waymo can't drive on unmapped roads,
               | and therefore there are no comparable videos of Waymo
               | actually doing that.
               | 
               | You chose a Waymo video from their marketing channel, and
               | a newspaper hit piece. And then questioned sincerity of
               | OP...
        
               | simondotau wrote:
               | Not to mention that there's no evidence that any
               | autonomous driving system was engaged on that Tesla.
        
               | vgt wrote:
               | did I? Here's a direct quote I was responding to:
               | 
               | >I see a lot of bad things on Tesla FSD and I totally get
               | the critics...I think FSD is quite impressive compared to
               | any other self driving software I've seen. > >Would you
               | mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for
               | example in similar situations? I can't find anything even
               | remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.
               | 
               | I can't believe one can make an honest argument that
               | Tesla is ahead of Waymo on FSD
        
           | dinobones wrote:
           | Waymo has proven driverless operations in Chandler, then
           | Downtown Phoenix, then San Francisco. Truly driverless, no
           | people in car. They've demonstrated driverless capability and
           | the ability to expand to new regions, even if it means taking
           | HD maps.
           | 
           | Tesla has not proven any reliable driverless operation,
           | anywhere. They have removed hardware from their cars (radar,
           | uss) and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past
           | ~5 years nor any willingness to change from their "vision
           | only, big data" strategy.
           | 
           | If things continue on the current trajectory Waymo will
           | likely be operating in all major US cities and metros in a
           | few years while Tesla's self driving offering will probably
           | be forcibly renamed by regulation and end in a class action
           | lawsuit.
           | 
           | Basically, Waymo has proven N and N+1 capability, meanwhile
           | Tesla has yet to prove N, and has lied to consumers and
           | actually reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost
           | cutting measures.
        
             | panick21_ wrote:
             | > Waymo has proven driverless operations in Chandler, then
             | Downtown Phoenix, then San Francisco.
             | 
             | And how many years did that take. Are they adding
             | profitable operations in new cities year after year, with
             | every year adding new cities?
             | 
             | As far as I can see they simply lose billion and billions
             | of $ for no real success in actually having a product.
             | 
             | Tesla is actually using the technology to improve its Level
             | 2 systems and make money with it.
             | 
             | > meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N
             | 
             | First of all, Waymo has not proven N, because they don't
             | make money on any of these things.
             | 
             | Tesla at least try to drive in N+10000000 other cases and
             | navigate many of them without seeing them first.
             | 
             | If you have to go one by one threw every single city in the
             | world its not clear to me that this is a better approach
             | then solving a more general problem.
             | 
             | > reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting
             | measures
             | 
             | Tesla just made 3 billion $ of profit in a quarter. What
             | cost cutting? They are currently doing major investments in
             | upgraded sensors suits, upgraded data-centers and overall
             | their team is still growing.
             | 
             | How much did Waymo make again?
        
               | dinobones wrote:
               | Just because Tesla is profitable and making money by
               | selling vehicles does not mean they are on a better path
               | to engineering a self driving system than Waymo.
               | 
               | The opposite is also true, just because Waymo does not
               | make money does not reflect the capability of their self
               | driving systems. Saying "Waymo has not proven N, because
               | they don't make money on any of these things." doesn't
               | make any sense, and is not even true.
               | 
               | I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and
               | pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point
               | B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving
               | route without any disengagements.
               | 
               | We are discussing who is closer to realizing a fully
               | self-driving system, not who runs a better business.
        
             | simondotau wrote:
             | > and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5
             | years
             | 
             | Really? I've had some casual interest in the progress of
             | FSD beta and the past six months alone has seen dramatic
             | improvements to numerous adversarial situations.
             | 
             | FSD beta is currently able to drive with confidence on
             | unmarked roads at night in the rain, with only basic maps
             | for wayfinding. This has been demonstrated by customers in
             | their own cars, driving roads which haven't been vetted by
             | the developers.
             | 
             | I'm sure Waymo and other systems can do this too, but I
             | haven't seen it demonstrated.
        
             | guilamu wrote:
             | "ot shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years nor
             | any willingness to change from their "vision only, big
             | data" strategy."
             | 
             | I guess they did now that they can make their own cheap
             | lidars and adding them back in 2023.
        
               | daveguy wrote:
               | Reversing the "cameras only" position is a step in the
               | right direction. They are currently ~3 years behind
               | collecting lidar data compared to Cruise / Waymo. I
               | wonder if they'll be able to make it up with "ghost-
               | rider" volume in 2023.
        
               | RankingMember wrote:
               | ? Where are you seeing that they're adding lidar? The big
               | news recently was that they're going to bring back radar.
        
             | vel0city wrote:
             | > nor any willingness to change from their "vision only,
             | big data" strategy.
             | 
             | It sounds like they might actually be including a new radar
             | system in January. Nothing official yet though from what
             | I've seen.
             | 
             | https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-
             | se...
        
           | Laremere wrote:
           | This is something that seems really important, and is
           | definitely a significant effort, but actually is
           | inconsequential.
           | 
           | Think about a section of lightly used suburban road. The
           | amount of work that went into making it involved was immense.
           | A crew of road workers using expensive machines and large
           | amounts of material were required to make it, and are
           | required in it's maintenance. Don't forget the surveyors and
           | engineers who made a highly detailed map and plans in the
           | first place! (Though that map format isn't useful to self
           | driving cars).
           | 
           | Also consider the sheer number of cars that drive that patch
           | in a day. One car every few minutes adds up over hours, days,
           | months, years.
           | 
           | So, yeah they have to drive a mapping car down the street a
           | bunch of times to expand their coverage area. However this is
           | insignificant compared to the effort that goes into our
           | transportation infrastructure already.
        
             | crote wrote:
             | Not to mention that Google Street View has demonstrated
             | that such effort is viable even with way less incentive!
             | 
             | Besides, most miles driven are spent on highways and other
             | town-connecting roads. To the average consumer, self-
             | driving cars are way more interesting for commuting or
             | long-distance travel than they are for a 5-minute drive to
             | the supermarket.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | The cars themselves have the hardware necessary to make an HD
           | map.
           | 
           | That means that Tesla could make an HD map covering 95% of
           | miles driven in the USA within a week with their fleet of
           | users. And next week they could make an updated version of
           | the same map.
           | 
           | So, making and updating an HD map isn't an issue.
        
             | Zigurd wrote:
             | Tesla cars do not have LIDAR sensors. The downside risk is
             | that high resolution imaging using multiple sensors is a
             | requirement for level 5 AVs to work well enough. That means
             | all the data Tesla has collected could be of limited value.
        
             | HereBeBeasties wrote:
             | I created some 3D models of a real world building and
             | surrounding environment using photogrammetry from 20+
             | megapixel DSLR photos and decided the accuracy was totally
             | inadequate and the artefacts were too hard to manually
             | clean up.
             | 
             | I then hired a dude with a LIDAR scanner and did it
             | properly. The difference in quality/accuracy is like 120x80
             | ASF video files in 1996 compared to 4K footage today.
             | 
             | Anyone who thinks you can build "HD" virtual worlds using
             | the crappy cameras on a Tesla needs their heads examining.
             | Maybe with thousands of passes and some epic compute and
             | signal processing, but why bother? Just LIDAR it.
             | 
             | My Tesla can't even decide if a traffic light is a single
             | traffic light or not on a sunny summer's day from a
             | distance of twenty feet. Almost every time it is either
             | dark or humid or winter (road grime) it tells me one or
             | more cameras are obscured. But only after I've already
             | started driving, obviously. This supposedly cutting edge AI
             | driving machine frequently thinks I'm leaving the
             | carriageway on UK B-roads (it's almost dangerous) and is
             | significantly less reliable at distance cruise control and
             | lane-assist than my Skoda. (I presume VW just quietly
             | bought a black box from Bosch or whoever to do this.)
             | 
             | Tesla are barking up the wrong tree IMO. At this point the
             | camera-only stance feels like a religious thing, not based
             | on sanity or the real practical world. I imagine that
             | someone came to Elon and said "reconciling conflicting
             | radar and camera signals is hard" and he applied his
             | considerable genius and issued an edict to "let's not do
             | that then!" like it would magically make all the actual
             | hard problems go away.
             | 
             | Heck, Teslas can't even seem to reliably parallel park
             | themselves, frequently getting stuck halfway, or hitting
             | kerbs. If they can't solve that highly constrained problem,
             | I'm hardly going to trust taking my eyes off it at 70mph.
        
           | codenesium wrote:
           | 99% of the time it doesn't kill you isn't what we're shooting
           | for.
        
             | daveguy wrote:
             | With 1.5 fatalities per 100,000,000 miles[0], the benchmark
             | to meet is 99.9999985% of the time it doesn't kill you.
             | Injuries are going to be a lot higher, obviously. Still, I
             | think most self-driving enthusiasts underestimate the bar
             | that needs to be crossed wrt safety. And general vehicle
             | safety isn't going to remain stagnant. I think it's going
             | to be a cost vs injuries tradeoff for quite a while until
             | we get human-level or better self-driving safety in all
             | circumstances.
             | 
             | [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/193018/number-of-us-
             | cras...
        
           | margalabargala wrote:
           | Waymo currently works with HD maps.
           | 
           | Tesla currently works not at all.
           | 
           | It's not valid to compare Waymo's current capability
           | unfavorably to a version of Tesla's capability that only
           | exists in someone's head.
           | 
           | I would bet on Waymo working on a dirt road before Tesla
           | does.
        
             | Domenic_S wrote:
             | ??
             | 
             | Literally a Tesla with FSD working well on a dirt road:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv1l6aTnB_I
        
               | margalabargala wrote:
               | Fair enough; my "not at all" was hyperbole, Tesla's
               | driver assistance software does not in fact crash every
               | single time it is used without human intervention.
               | 
               | I do find it mildly disturbing that in that video, the
               | driver points out the car making fully blind turns where
               | it cannot see that there's nothing it would hit.
        
               | enragedcacti wrote:
               | my dumb car "works" for self driving assuming a straight
               | enough road without obstacles. A safety critical system
               | needs to have a very robust definition of "works" that is
               | far beyond "it happened to not crash on this particular
               | road at this particular time with this particular set of
               | obstacles".
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | I like the level 5 or bust approach taken by Waymo and Cruise.
         | Anything in the middle (like what Tesla is doing) is IMO more
         | dangerous than useful. The whole "the car is self-driving but
         | you must also pay attention and have your hands on the wheel at
         | all times" thing is idiotic.
        
           | jvolkman wrote:
           | Here's Chris Urmson talking about this 7 years ago when he
           | was still working on (what is now) Waymo:
           | https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=169
        
           | Justsignedup wrote:
           | Humans are notoriously bad at just paying attention and not
           | being in charge. Those few seconds their actual attention is
           | needed are critical.
           | 
           | I do appreciate that my car can do full distance control and
           | assist if I am drifting, but it doesn't control itself, so I
           | can never disengage. Personally I feel that this is wonderful
           | and should be the limit. Anything past that should just be
           | fully autonomous. Otherwise you're asking for trouble.
        
             | mikepurvis wrote:
             | 100%. If I'm driving and my attention wanders, I need the
             | _immediate_ feedback of drifting out of the lane and having
             | to abruptly course correct, and being like  "dang yeah,
             | let's not do that again", possibly reinforced by passengers
             | scowling at me from elsewhere in the vehicle.
             | 
             | I can't imagine trying to focus on supervising an AI pilot
             | without that kind of feedback.
        
               | xplanephil wrote:
               | interestingly, I don't have much trouble with that, as it
               | works exactly like most airplanes that I fly as a pilot.
               | 
               | An airplane autopilot is a dumb device, in that it does
               | execute _exactly_ the plan you tell it to, and it is up
               | to the pilot to at all times decide whether the current
               | plan still makes sense or needs to be altered. So the
               | pilot makes the strategic decisions, and leaves most of
               | the physical tasks of flying to the autopilot.
               | 
               | I find myself using my M3 w/FSD in exactly the same way,
               | as that I put on autosteer pretty much immediately when
               | I'm out of the driveway, but I constantly nudge it into
               | the lane that I want it to be in (by using the turn
               | signal) or push the accelerator when I think it is taking
               | too long pondering a turn. So i leave the physical
               | driving (keep lane and distance) to the car but manage
               | the car to always go exactly where I want it.
               | 
               | I have no trouble staying alert this way when doing
               | medium long drives. Long highway drives where autopilot
               | is so good that it requires no manual interaction is
               | where the trouble starts and I find it hard to keep
               | paying attention.
               | 
               | This is where in an airplane you have a copilot and can
               | discuss strategic things like overnight stops, fuel
               | stops, etc... Maybe Tesla needs a built-in chatbot to
               | make me do that :)
        
               | mtgx wrote:
        
           | jsnell wrote:
           | Aren't they geofenced, which would make them level 4?
        
           | redox99 wrote:
           | > Anything in the middle (like what Tesla is doing) is IMO
           | more dangerous than useful.
           | 
           | Even if a hypothetical, future Tesla FSD sometimes crashes in
           | ways that could be prevented had the driver payed attention,
           | it could still be statistically safer than a fully human
           | driver (ie the number of FSD crashes even if left unattended
           | < the number of crashes by humans driving).
           | 
           | To clarify, I'm not talking about the current state of FSD,
           | I'm talking about a hypothetical, future Level 3.
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | Doing such aggregations is pointless. The majority of
             | traffic accidents are caused by drunk drivers, drivers who
             | are too young/too old, people on their phones or otherwise
             | distracted, people driving in bad conditions, people
             | driving unsafe cars etc. So yes, while Tesla autopilot may
             | be better than all of them on average, I will still only
             | use it if it is better than ME.
        
               | redox99 wrote:
               | > I will still only use it if it is better than ME.
               | 
               | You're free to not use it. But if Tesla FSD is safer than
               | the average driver (even if that's because the average
               | driver is on their phone) then, going back to your
               | statement, it _is_ more useful than dangerous for the
               | average driver.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | >Anything in the middle (like what Tesla is doing) is IMO
           | more dangerous than useful
           | 
           | Intuitively I would have agreed with you, except Tesla has
           | been doing it for years and their cars are statistically
           | safer by every metric (fatalities, indicents, etc.).
        
             | twiceaday wrote:
             | > their cars are statistically safer by every metric
             | 
             | Compared to what population? Older, tech-savvy people
             | buying 60k-120k usd vehicles? And do you mean in full self-
             | driving mode Beta, which Tesla won't allow you to use
             | unless you have a track record of save driving?
        
           | peder wrote:
           | I suspect the below-"Level 5" driving systems will become
           | more of an "augmented driving". I've driven in newer vehicles
           | with automatic lane centering, pedestrian detection, etc. and
           | they don't really seem like they're even doing anything, you
           | still feel like you're the one driving, except that it's more
           | precise with the occasional interruption by the car when it
           | perceives risk of a collision.
           | 
           | These augmented systems will probably reduce the risk of
           | accidents so greatly that the value proposition for Level 5
           | driving systems just won't be there.
        
             | chime wrote:
             | > These augmented systems will probably reduce the risk of
             | accidents so greatly that the value proposition for Level 5
             | driving systems just won't be there.
             | 
             | I've driven a lot for decades and frankly enjoy driving. I
             | drove from TPA to SLC via PHX and back for fun. But I will
             | pay $500/mo level-5 subscription for a comfortable car that
             | drives itself.
        
               | oangemangut wrote:
               | I'm trying to figure out how many hours a month are you
               | in a vehicle where that makes sense for you?
        
               | HDThoreaun wrote:
               | Having level 5 available honestly opens up tons of
               | options that were not available before. A 90 minute
               | commute is so much more palatable when you can be
               | sleeping. So are road-trips.
        
               | david_allison wrote:
               | That's $17/day. If it gives you an extra hour a day and
               | eliminates driving-based stress then it seems very well
               | priced. Especially if it includes the car
        
               | dpkirchner wrote:
               | $500 seems reasonable compared to loan payments, full
               | insurance, and parking. The math may not make as much
               | sense if you would otherwise own your car outright,
               | though.
        
             | amf12 wrote:
             | > These augmented systems will probably reduce the risk of
             | accidents so greatly that the value proposition for Level 5
             | driving systems just won't be there.
             | 
             | The value proposition of L5 systems is also the _not
             | driving_ part.
        
             | Animats wrote:
             | "Augmented driving" is Level 2. That's where commercial
             | products (GM, Mercedes, Tesla) are now.
             | 
             | Volvo was talking about level 3 back in 2017, but they gave
             | up.[1] Level 3 means that the system may ask the driver to
             | take over, but if the driver does not do so, the system
             | must get the vehicle to a safe condition. Preferably pulled
             | over out of traffic, but as least stopped without hitting
             | anything. The driver is not required to watch the road.
             | 
             | The serious players are trying to get to level 4, where the
             | driver is not expected to take over but the set of roads
             | you can use is limited.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q00jIBhkq4
        
               | peder wrote:
               | The leveling system is a bit off. Level 3 doesn't mean
               | "better" than Level 2. A Level 2 system might actually
               | offer the best safety profile of any of the Levels.
               | That's what I'm getting at: there's a lot of runway in
               | Level 2 systems, and I think they'll be so good that it
               | will kill momentum for Level 3+ systems.
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | Yes. Eliminating or vastly reducing the head-on
               | collisions caused by drivers drifting across the center
               | line, and the rear-end collisions where they don't see
               | the stopped or slow car ahead of them, are a huge win.
               | I'd trade full self-driving for really effective lane
               | departure warnings and auto-braking collision avoidance
               | any day of the week. Next step (or included) would be
               | reacting to red lights/stop signs if it appears that the
               | driver is not stopping. Deal with those things well and
               | you've eliminated the causes of most serious accidents.
        
               | masklinn wrote:
               | The problem is that when a level 2 system gets too smart
               | it can confuse drivers and lead to bad reactions in
               | response.
               | 
               | e.g. let's say you have a level 2 system which starts
               | auto-evading, suddenly steering without user input, the
               | user is likely to reflexively try counter-steering in
               | response.
        
               | cycomanic wrote:
               | I think Mercedes has level 4 on highways now? I think
               | this is the way forward actually, let cars drive cars
               | themselves on the long boring bits (which are actually
               | easy for AI) and leave the driving to the humans
               | everywhere else. Having tried many augmented systems I
               | don't believe in self driving in varied conditions within
               | 10 years. I think the locations where waymo operates is a
               | good indication of what is possible at the moment.
        
             | peder wrote:
             | I'll also add that I think what Waymo is doing right now is
             | closer to a semi-autonomous streetcar. There's probably
             | immense value in that approach, especially as an
             | alternative to mass-transit systems that have costly labor,
             | but it's not clear that they are imminently close to
             | "anywhere, anytime" self-driving.
        
         | babelfish wrote:
         | What does 'win' mean here? It seems like being able to pass on
         | the costs of fleet management, insurance, gas, parking/storage,
         | etc to drivers (the way taxis/ride sharing apps currently do)
         | will always be cheaper than maintaining it yourself, even if
         | you save on the driver fees.
        
           | paxys wrote:
           | This would imply that Uber/Lyft drivers on average are losing
           | money by being on the service, which is obviously not the
           | case. Having a large fleet of driverless taxis, even if you
           | have to maintain them yourself, will be a very profitable
           | business. There are other potential revenue sources as well,
           | like licensing the tech to car manufacturers.
        
             | just-ok wrote:
             | _> obviously not the case_
             | 
             | This is a strong claim. I thought there was a decent body
             | of evidence that suggested most drivers make much less
             | money than they think, when you take
             | depreciation/repairs/etc. into account?
        
           | kibwen wrote:
           | At the rate things are going right now, Waymo will win when
           | Tesla throws in the towel on developing in-house and licenses
           | Waymo's tech in order to finally deliver on full self-
           | driving.
        
             | mahkeiro wrote:
             | They are also Chinese solutions in that space like Baidu
             | Apollo.
        
             | moonchrome wrote:
             | Tesla already sold self driving for years - waymo uses way
             | more sensors than a camera from what I can tell - not only
             | would that bump unit cost they would probably have to
             | upgrade previous customers due to their marketing.
        
               | misiti3780 wrote:
               | and fuck with the aerodynamics - causing drag on the
               | cars, decreasing range.
               | 
               | LIDR isnt an option.
        
               | cycomanic wrote:
               | That highly depends on the lidar system. All players are
               | working a lot on minaturizing LIDAR systems and they
               | fundamentally don't have to be as big as the waymo
               | systems.
        
               | someotherperson wrote:
               | > not only would that bump unit cost they would probably
               | have to upgrade previous customers due to their
               | marketing.
               | 
               | Only if they don't change they name. They can call it an
               | upgraded RealDrive(tm) QuantumSense(tm) feature that no
               | longer requires having your hands on the wheel.
        
             | hobofan wrote:
             | How things are going right now, I'd be surprised if anyone
             | will be willing to license Tesla's tech.
        
       | siquick wrote:
       | One reason to introduce self driving cars is to hopefully remove
       | the number of SUVs from city roads, which are only driven by
       | people because they're "safer and protect me". At best they're an
       | absolute nuisance to every other car and pedestrian, and at worse
       | they're absolute death traps that clog up roads.
        
         | panick21_ wrote:
         | The self driving cars will be SUV or CUV at a minimum and there
         | will be more of them, not less.
        
       | akira2501 wrote:
       | The fact that they don't highlight any night testing is
       | troubling, and that they have a single closed course facility in
       | a place where it never snows.
       | 
       | I often wonder if these companies are truly trying to
       | revolutionize driving, or just trying to put a couple of "Johnny
       | Cabs" in the southwest and call it a day. Their strategy really
       | does seem geared towards the latter outcome.
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | Waymo has been testing in other cities, including ones with
         | snow, for years.
         | 
         | One example: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/waymo-starts-
         | testing-in...
        
         | abhorrence wrote:
         | Recently there have been Waymo vehicles out on the streets in
         | the Seattle area. I even saw one driving around the day it was
         | snowing here.
         | 
         | I suspect we'll start seeing more training and testing in
         | places with less nice weather as time goes on.
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | Night isn't especially concerning for vehicles that have more
         | sensors than simply cameras; headlights and infrared cameras
         | exist. Rather, dealing with winter conditions seem like the
         | reason that these will be confined to the southwest.
        
           | dvirsky wrote:
           | It could just be that night testing doesn't look as good in a
           | blog post.
        
           | akira2501 wrote:
           | > Night isn't especially concerning for vehicles that have
           | more sensors than simply cameras
           | 
           | This is precisely the type of presumptions I'd like to see
           | tested. I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble of all
           | this and have a 118 acre road course, it seems the height of
           | hubris to just say "well, the sensors will probably be better
           | than cameras at night."
           | 
           | It's amazing to me that on Hacker News people people have
           | this puritanical embarrassment over obvious technical
           | questions.
        
           | light_hue_1 wrote:
           | Oh this is definitely false!
           | 
           | Night is very concerning and is a problem for computer vision
           | systems.
           | 
           | During the day illumination is fairly consistent. Sure the
           | sun moves around, but it's not a spotlight. At night,
           | illumination varies a lot. A detector that works during the
           | day may not work at all at night. This is no joke, there are
           | papers that show dramatic performance losses for tasks like
           | pedestrian detection at night.
           | 
           | Cameras are worse at night. They need to be more sensitive
           | which dramatically increases their noise. They may need to
           | have longer exposures leading to blur, which is of course
           | made worse if you are moving the camera.
           | 
           | Headlights also don't provide the same visibility so your
           | reactions must be faster. Reflections are a big problem too.
           | Oncoming headlights are also an issue.
           | 
           | Nighttime testing will be critical.
        
             | minsc_and_boo wrote:
             | >Cameras are worse at night. They need to be more sensitive
             | which dramatically increases their noise.
             | 
             | This is solved by having multiple sensors. Nighttime is
             | really not a problem, especially given the broad spectrum
             | and LIDAR.
        
         | jack_pp wrote:
         | These speech recognition systems don't really work that well
         | when there's a lot of speakers present, talking over one
         | another. Are these researchers even trying to revolutionize
         | speech recognition? it seems their only goal is to make speech
         | recognition work with one speaker in a silent room and call it
         | a day.
        
           | akira2501 wrote:
           | I think the safety margin between a speaker and a car are two
           | entirely different things. If your smart speaker fails to
           | work for you, this does not offer any potential to harm me.
           | 
           | I think it's worth putting them into different classes, don't
           | you/
        
             | jack_pp wrote:
             | Research and all tech advancements are done in increments,
             | there's no other way about it. I see no point in tackling
             | rough weather conditions when the basics aren't even
             | finished. Of course for the product to actually hit the
             | roads it needs to be held to a very high standard but
             | that's beside the point. You were criticizing their
             | progress, even though we know they don't have a final
             | product yet and they're probably some ways off.
             | 
             | It's like criticizing the Wright Brothers, saying stuff
             | like "meh, they barely were off the ground, who cares"
        
           | STM32F030R8 wrote:
           | What does that have to do with self driving cars? These are
           | meant to be used on roads in varied conditions. Your comment
           | isn't applicable.
        
             | pb7 wrote:
             | Some conditions don't exist in many places. Someone can
             | have a self-driving car and use it for life in Arizona and
             | it doesn't matter that it wouldn't work in Alaska. It's
             | still progress and still useful to a subset of people.
             | Hell, even a car that works 9 months out of the year in the
             | Northeast would be useful. Don't see too many bikes out
             | when it's -5 degrees but no one is claiming bikes aren't
             | useful.
        
               | throwayyy479087 wrote:
               | To be fair I have seen a large number of people say that
               | bikes aren't useful because they can't perform a
               | supercommute or can't be used when it's below 0.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Waymo and Tesla's approach to self-driving could not be more
       | different. One of the scariest parts about Tesla is that they
       | don't even seem to know what they don't know. In related news: It
       | looks like Tesla may add radar back:
       | https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/12/12/tesla-...
        
         | freedom-fries wrote:
         | The thing is - nobody cares!
         | 
         | People can scream bloody murder till the cows come home, but
         | Tesla for all its faults is king of the hill - literally more
         | valuable the rest of the car industry combined. Musk is the
         | invincible and irrespective of any shortcomings he's literally
         | the richest person on Earth.
         | 
         | Tesla's approach is demonstrably the best approach in the court
         | of the customer, irrespective of what we (others on the road)
         | think or are put at risk.
        
           | mikeyouse wrote:
           | Market cap has absolutely no relation to the "court of the
           | customer", nor should it in terms of what safety features we
           | allow or disallow.
        
           | themacguffinman wrote:
           | "we (others on the road)" is not "nobody", and we definitely
           | care. The law is supposed to intervene in tragedy of the
           | commons cases like this for precisely this reason. The free
           | market is known to have a few blind spots and this is one of
           | them.
        
           | stardenburden wrote:
           | > literally the richest person on Earth
           | 
           | Not anymore https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63963239
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | "invincible"? He has literally lost over $100B this year.
           | 
           | Tesla's market share is eroding every year, and is expected
           | to decline to less than 20% by 2025.
           | 
           | https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/teslas-dominance-of-evs-
           | is-e....
           | 
           | There are plenty of people like me, who are choosing non-
           | Teslas when they buy EVs.
        
           | macawfish wrote:
           | He sucks
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | adrr wrote:
         | They need to add radar back. Ability to "see" slow downs or
         | stopped traffic even if your vision is obscured is a great
         | benefit for self driving.
        
           | freedom-fries wrote:
           | That's your opinion, but Tesla does not "need" to add
           | anything from the point of view of actual Tesla customers!
           | 
           | Tesla cars are selling faster than they can make them and
           | adding a Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it
           | faster.
        
             | RankingMember wrote:
             | > Tesla cars are selling faster than they can make them
             | 
             | If this is true, why are they reportedly cutting production
             | and offering incentives? If they were booked solid, no
             | incentives would be needed.
             | 
             | https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
             | transportation/tesla-...
             | 
             | > Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make it
             | faster.
             | 
             | ? They are adding radar, though:
             | https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-
             | se...
        
             | threeseed wrote:
             | > adding a Radar will slow down the manufacturing, not make
             | it faster
             | 
             | Tesla told the FCC that it plans to market a new radar
             | starting next month.
             | 
             | https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-
             | se...
        
             | appletrotter wrote:
             | Tesla is currently being sued by actual customers based on
             | this exact issue. They've promised FSD, and can't deliver
             | it - especially without lidar.
        
           | threeseed wrote:
           | They need LiDAR. The biggest problem for FSD is still around
           | bounding box detection.
           | 
           | I just don't believe that you can infer the dimensions of
           | objects using stereoscopic images with a reliability that you
           | need to make FSD work.
        
             | cycrutchfield wrote:
             | How do our eyes work?
        
               | threeseed wrote:
               | By us constantly moving them around in three dimensions
               | unlike a car.
               | 
               | And also having a computer behind them that deeply
               | understands what an object is, the forms it should take
               | and what its expected behaviour should be. We don't ever
               | confuse billboards for real people.
        
               | sebzim4500 wrote:
               | >By us constantly moving them around in three dimensions
               | unlike a car.
               | 
               | Fair but to compensate the car has many more cameras than
               | we do.
        
               | vel0city wrote:
               | For looking forward Tesla's have three fixed cameras
               | looking from the rear view mirror. All the other cameras
               | do not have stereoscopic vision and are not looking
               | forward. A camera looking out from a side pillar isn't
               | helping gauge the distance to something far up the road.
               | 
               | On top of that these cameras can't move, can't be re-
               | aimed, and have generally far worse dynamic range than
               | our eyes.
        
               | RankingMember wrote:
               | Our eyes work in concert with a supercomputer accessing
               | huge stores of contextual data (far eclipsing anything in
               | a Tesla neural database) to understand and react to
               | unique situations.
        
               | minsc_and_boo wrote:
               | Rather poorly, given the rate of traffic accidents by
               | humans.
        
               | vel0city wrote:
               | Far more complex sensors than cameras attached to some of
               | the most complicated and least understood processing
               | systems running a general intelligence with millions and
               | millions of years of training.
               | 
               | Also, when you're in the car, you probably move your head
               | more than you realize. Moving your head around and
               | looking around also gives you better understandings of
               | distance. Far more than a couple of cameras feeding a few
               | megapixel images into a ML model.
        
               | xnx wrote:
               | Why make the difficult task of self-driving any harder,
               | by artificially limiting the sensors you use? Planes have
               | rigid aluminum wings and jet engines instead of bone
               | muscle and feathers.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | leesec wrote:
         | And one of the scariest parts of Waymo is that they may never
         | ship and it'll be 20 billion dollars down the drain
        
           | marricks wrote:
           | I mean, that's good though right? If it doesn't work it
           | doesn't work. Worst comes to worst taxi drivers still have a
           | job.
        
             | leesec wrote:
             | I think you mean, worst comes to worst 1.35 million people
             | still die in traffic accidents every year.
        
           | michael1999 wrote:
           | I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't the Phoenix launch
           | count? They've definitely shipped something to prod.
        
         | nova22033 wrote:
         | But Tesla's software version is 10.69.x....69...get it...LOL!!
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | I agree. Tesla FSD has so many obvious limitations that can be
         | worked out on closed courses that it has no legitimate reason
         | to be tested on public roads. For example, it cannot drive
         | directly into the sun. That's a flaw they could work out on the
         | test track (by adding different sensors). There needs to be
         | regulatory intervention to force FSD off the road.
        
           | taf2 wrote:
           | Curious you mention this I was using it this morning driving
           | directly into the Sun... even without our lanes painted after
           | they repaved the roads it kept me in the right part of the
           | road and even engaged the turn signal automatically as it
           | stopped at the traffic light before our right turn... I know
           | they had issues with direct Sun few years ago but it would
           | seem to me driving with it enabled into the sun works just
           | fine...
        
             | jeffbee wrote:
             | https://youtu.be/DMa9VrEoUoY?t=420
        
               | taf2 wrote:
               | Yeah, I see that is a pretty intense road and
               | situation... my road is much much straighter... I'll try
               | to capture it and share definitely not difficult...
        
               | appletrotter wrote:
               | What is a "pretty intense road and situation" for you is
               | some people's daily commute.
        
               | palm-tree wrote:
               | How is this an intense road? It looks pretty wide and
               | clear of traffic with a few parked cars. If it can't
               | handle this, it's got no chance in an average city in
               | Western Europe.
        
               | judge2020 wrote:
               | Might've been because it perfectly obscured the straight-
               | ahead view, given the hills where he's driving. While not
               | perfect, the lenses on Tesla's forward-facing camera is
               | good at retaining detail if the sun is above eyeline. htt
               | ps://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1200626377097129984?
               | ...
        
         | bhauer wrote:
         | Which is consistent with what they had said at the time when
         | they removed the low-resolution radar they had been using.
         | Specifically, they had said that radar would be useful if it
         | were sufficiently high resolution. The radar in the works and
         | rumored to be added soon is anticipated to be high resolution.
        
         | ajross wrote:
         | I don't see how that's supported here? I mean, clearly Tesla
         | does its own closed-track testing. I've seen coverage of that
         | in the past. They don't release public software the doesn't
         | pass these kinds of tests. Likewise it's not like Waymo
         | restricts their testing to closed tracks, they have vehicles on
         | the streets too.
         | 
         | > One of the scariest parts about Tesla is that they don't even
         | seem to know what they don't know.
         | 
         | I'm curious what the reference here is? Again, are you taking
         | coverage of Waymo's test environment as evience of its absence
         | at its competitors?
        
           | newaccount74 wrote:
           | Tesla claims they are safer than human drivers by fudging
           | statistics about accidents per mile.
           | 
           | Waymo describes in detail how they test their algorithm
           | against specific scenarios and makes statements about those
           | experiments.
           | 
           | One company is trying to sell you cars and telling you what
           | you want to hear, the other company is extremely careful with
           | their statements.
        
             | judge2020 wrote:
             | > fudging statistics about accidents per mile.
             | 
             | How? The only problem with this page[0] is that they
             | haven't released 2022 stats. Otherwise:
             | 
             | > To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any
             | crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds
             | before impact, and we count all crashes in which the
             | incident alert indicated an airbag or other active
             | restraint deployed.
             | 
             | 0: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
        
               | CobrastanJorji wrote:
               | That "vehicle safety report" is 70 words, none of which
               | answer the question of "how many crashes were there" or
               | "how many people were injured or killed." One of the few
               | numbers they give us, the percentage of incidents/hour
               | for driving "with active safety but without autopilot,"
               | bounces around by like a factor of two from quarter to
               | quarter, which doesn't make any sense. Literally every
               | provided number is in Tesla's favor, and context is only
               | provided in ways favorable to Tesla.
               | 
               | This is a press release, not a safety report.
        
           | thebooktocome wrote:
           | Tesla's FSD is so terrifyingly bad at routine tasks (I used
           | it for six months before giving up) that it's natural to
           | assume whatever closed track testing they did was
           | ineffective. Or perhaps they did a lot, I don't know--but it
           | doesn't feel like many of those lessons learned made it into
           | the "production" system.
        
             | jsight wrote:
             | I really like AP in general, but for FSD Beta, I tend to
             | agree. I've seen enough mistakes from even the really
             | careful Youtubers that I don't understand why its still in
             | the field.
             | 
             | And those are the mistakes that they were willing to show!
             | To be clear, I mean situations where the driver needed to
             | take over but either didn't, or didn't in sufficient time
             | to avoid an illegal or dangerous maneuver.
        
               | simondotau wrote:
               | From what I can tell of people posting FSD videos on
               | YouTube, they are actively seeking adversarial conditions
               | with a desire to show where it fails. I'm sure there are
               | some YouTubers that are trying to sugarcoat FSD, but I
               | haven't seen any.
        
               | jsight wrote:
               | I partially agree. I mean, I find dirty tesla's videos to
               | be pretty fair.
               | 
               | Having said that, he's also been really clear that the
               | video doesn't always make it obvious just how many
               | aspects of FSD are just plain weird. Even when its not
               | actively failing, it moves in odd ways that are
               | uncomfortable.
               | 
               | He's also said that earlier versions resulted in curbed
               | wheels.
        
           | JacobThreeThree wrote:
           | There's no reference. It's just fashionable to hate on
           | anything associated with Elon at the moment.
        
           | mannykannot wrote:
           | While both Waymo and Tesla are testing vehicles on the
           | streets, and have done so for some time, their approaches
           | could hardly be more different.
        
           | enragedcacti wrote:
           | > They don't release public software the doesn't pass these
           | kinds of tests.
           | 
           | Do we actually know that this is true? October of last year
           | "internal QA" found regressions on an already public release
           | and they rolled out an update in less than 24 hours after
           | that was published. Both the fact that it was already public
           | when QA found an issue and that they were able to push new
           | public version in such a short time seems to me like they
           | don't necessarily have a release gauntlet for each version,
           | or at least not a very robust one.
           | 
           | https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/tesla-rolled-back-fsd-
           | beta-v...
        
           | AlotOfReading wrote:
           | I'm honestly curious what test tracks Tesla uses. Do they
           | just rent private tracks for their road testing before it
           | gets to public beta? It clearly isn't done onroad by safety
           | drivers.
           | 
           | GM has Milford and Yuma + others, Waymo has Castle, Zoox uses
           | Altamont Raceway, Nuro has a track at the Vegas speedway. I
           | can't imagine Tesla's small Fremont loop and their winter
           | track in Fairbanks are sufficient.
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | panick21_ wrote:
         | The really scary part is actually the one nobody in these
         | comments seems to address. We are letting humans drive these
         | things with barley any training on roads that are terrible
         | designed for safety of the people around the vehicles.
         | 
         | This utter disaster of a situation leads to 10000s of deaths
         | that has well known solutions.
         | 
         | But instead of preventing these deaths with well known low tech
         | solution, a super expensive technological holy grail is gone
         | somehow fix those problems.
        
       | mabbo wrote:
       | I think the problem we have with self-driving cars is more social
       | than technological at this point.
       | 
       | Consider the hypothetical: a million self-driving cars on the
       | road that, collectively, will have 1/10th of the fatal accidents
       | that human drivers would have[0]. _But_ , the ones they _do_ have
       | are accidents a human driver would almost certainly have avoided.
       | 
       | Is this something we would accept?
       | 
       | My guess is that no, we wouldn't. Because the accidents avoided
       | don't make the news, but the accidents that occur- especially
       | ones that you say "my god, how did it screw that up?" will make
       | the news, and our perception would be that they are more
       | dangerous.
       | 
       | Until Waymo's cars are better than most humans _in every single
       | situation_ , they won't be able to win over the public perception
       | war.
       | 
       | [0]I'm making those numbers up. I acknowledge that. But it's a
       | hypothetical so give me some leeway on this!
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | It's not necessarily true for people who think they are in the
         | 99th percentile of best drivers.
        
         | tim333 wrote:
         | So far people have been pretty good about accepting self
         | driving cars, even the Teslas on autopilot that crash into
         | parked trucks quite regularly.
        
         | qwezxcrty wrote:
         | Why self-driving trains are much easier to implement, yet there
         | are not that many systems capable of doing that? Many newer
         | metro lines are GoA 2 or 3, theoretically capable of running
         | autonomously, but they always require a driver in the loop.
         | 
         | My partial answer is, making an extremely reliable system is
         | hard. If someone wrote a deadly bug even only happen at a very
         | corner case, it still can kill people. And it's quite hard to
         | prove there isn't such bugs.
        
           | konschubert wrote:
           | Regulations. Nobody ever got fired for buying microsoft or
           | for requiring a driver in the seat.
        
         | semi-extrinsic wrote:
         | A bigger problem is this: Say you need to prove to the public
         | that the autonomous car is significantly safer, and you do an
         | apples-to-apples comparison between a hypothetical Level 4/5
         | car and well designed new Level 2 electric car like a Volvo C40
         | or a BMW i4.
         | 
         | The modern Level 2 car is already today at below 1 fatality per
         | billion vehicle miles travelled (VMT). The autonomous car then
         | needs to be below 0.1 fatalities per billion VMT. Meaning that
         | if you have 1 million vehicles of your make deployed, they each
         | need to have driven 30-40 000 miles autonomously before you
         | have enough statistics!
         | 
         | That means _proving_ the safety of a Level 4 /5 autonomous
         | system is extremely expensive and slow, and requires
         | significant public adoption before it's proven to be safe. The
         | consequence is that, _assuming_ proven safety is necessary
         | before public adoption, it becomes impossible to prove safety.
         | 
         | Another point is that OTA upgrades for autonomy become entirely
         | pointless, as you'll be polluting your statistics if you change
         | the code more frequently than every ~3 years.
        
           | cipheredStones wrote:
           | > The modern Level 2 car is already today at below 1 fatality
           | per billion vehicle miles travelled (VMT)
           | 
           | Does this statistic count fatalities to people outside the
           | car? I ask because (in the US, at least) car safety ratings
           | don't take those into consideration.
        
             | rootusrootus wrote:
             | > in the US, at least) car safety ratings don't take those
             | into consideration
             | 
             | Which ratings? The NHTSA does include non-occupant
             | fatalities in their statistics. E.g.
             | https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-
             | data...
        
           | ryanwaggoner wrote:
           | I think you'd use crashes, not fatalities.
        
         | rwmj wrote:
         | My semi-serious suggestion is self-driving cars should be
         | painted bright orange with big squishy bumpers and a maximum 20
         | mph speed limit. They would still be perfectly useful as taxis
         | in big cities but it would greatly limit the damage they could
         | do to anyone.
        
         | alphabetting wrote:
         | If 10% of the time they got into accidents humans would have
         | avoided we wouldn't be where we are today. I can't imagine any
         | scenarios where these cars get in accidents that a human would
         | have certainly avoided. You also say avoided accidents don't
         | make the news but I'm pretty sure footage of them avoiding
         | accidents that humans would have no chance of will be a major
         | part of their marketing.
        
           | RhodesianHunter wrote:
           | >I can't imagine any scenarios where these cars get in
           | accidents that a human would have certainly avoided.
           | 
           | Then you've not been following the space. The one that
           | immediately comes into mind is the Tesla that slammed into
           | the side of the semi truck because it was painted blue like
           | the sky.
        
             | alphabetting wrote:
             | I've been following it pretty closely. I don't consider
             | Teslas to be anywhere near self driving. By saying "these
             | cars" I was referring to Waymo.
        
         | brightball wrote:
         | Another part of this is that driving is a lot of fun. People
         | (like me) really enjoy it and definitely wouldn't give it up
         | easily.
        
         | lynx23 wrote:
         | You're hitting the nail spot on with this one for me. As a
         | blind pedestrian, I very much feel I am in danger of falling
         | into exactly that group of potential victims you are hinting
         | at. Right now, I have the illusive comfort of the
         | "Vertrauensgrundsaatz" which basically tells every driver
         | obtaining a drivers licence that they need to take special care
         | when it comes to disabled pedestrians. Sure, one might say
         | these new self driving systems will "just" have to follow that
         | same rule as well, but I am very much doubtful this is
         | technically possible. So currently, I feel like the drive to
         | put innovation on the streets and pull money out of pockets is
         | actually actively endangering me in the future. Not very bright
         | outlook I must say.
        
           | nicbou wrote:
           | By your use of German, I assume that you experience a far
           | higher driving standard than people in North America and
           | frankly most of the world, and even that is far from perfect.
           | 
           | The Vertrauensgrundsatz does not account for distracted,
           | tired and inebriated drivers.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | konschubert wrote:
           | As a pedestrian who isn't disabled but just inattentive and
           | erratic, I know I will feel much safer around 100 waymo cars
           | than 100 human cars.
        
           | jjeaff wrote:
           | My guess is that self driving cars are already far, far
           | better than human drivers at not hitting pedestrians.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | krferriter wrote:
             | My guess is that it depends a lot on the driver. There are
             | a lot of really reckless drivers, or really bad drivers out
             | there on the roads right now. I know people who've been in
             | several (relatively minor) car crashes, driving the same-
             | ish sort of route to/from college and work that I was
             | during the same period. I think they're just a bad driver.
             | I feel like they're driving recklessly when I'm a passenger
             | in a car they're driving. So a self-driving car might be a
             | better driver than them, while also being worse than the
             | median driver, and much much worse than like the upper
             | portion of the human driver spectrum, like the 1st quintile
             | of the 20% of human drivers who are pretty good.
             | 
             | Given how reckless some drivers are, I'd imagine the
             | distribution of crashes among drivers is very skewed. I
             | don't know numbers, but I'd expect to see something like
             | 80% of car crashes involving (or objectively caused by) 20%
             | of the drivers, with most car crashes involving people who
             | have been involved in numerous crashes, and a large
             | minority of drivers having been involved in zero car
             | crashes.
        
               | seanmcdirmid wrote:
               | > My guess is that it depends a lot on the driver.
               | 
               | There is a lot of variation in drivers. Young ones with
               | good reflexes and senses but bad on experience, old ones
               | with worse reflexes and senses but better on experience.
               | Ones that stop at stop signs, ones that blow through them
               | if they think they can get away with it. Cities like New
               | Orleans where drivers are much more aggressive because
               | the cops don't care, etc...
        
               | bandyaboot wrote:
               | I think the important point is that self driving cars are
               | likely better than the averaged real world group of
               | existing human drivers at avoiding pedestrians.
        
         | alexose wrote:
         | This is one reason I never understood Tesla's vision-based
         | approach. In order to be accepted, self-driving cars don't need
         | to be just somewhat better than humans most of the time. They
         | need to vastly better in _every_ situation, as you mention, to
         | the point that they 'll need every sensory advantage they can
         | get.
         | 
         | I got out of a ticket once because I didn't see a "no through
         | traffic" sign against a bright sunset. No chance that same cop
         | gives a self-driving car a pass, nor should he.
        
           | jkeddo wrote:
           | They are standing firm on the vision-only approach because it
           | is the correct approach. FSD cannot be perfected unless the
           | Tesla team puts 100% exclusive focus on perfecting vision
           | based models that don't have lidar as a fallback. Tesla can
           | only use lidar again for redundancy only after vision is
           | fully solved problem.
           | 
           | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BurningTheShips
        
             | seanmcdirmid wrote:
             | Combing multiple sensory inputs is a hard problem in
             | itself. Say Tesla uses LIDAR with vision...they can have a
             | great vision experience, a great LIDAR experience, but
             | fuses those two experiences together can create lots of
             | problems that wind up being worse than either by itself.
        
           | szundi wrote:
           | Karpathy claimed they worked for years and could not reap the
           | benefits from multiple sensors however hard they tried. He
           | seemed really convinced and does not get to me as one who
           | tells stuff just to justify cost reductions, like Elon
           | sometimes is carried away.
        
             | hackmiester wrote:
             | The problem is, in reality, we have Tesla vehicles that
             | sold with other sensors that are now disabled, and those
             | cars are now very difficult to drive with any automation
             | enabled, even simple cruise control, due to the limitations
             | of vision-only driving. And this is leading to them
             | slamming on brakes at inopportune times, blinding oncoming
             | drivers with the bright headlights, etc. - issues that did
             | not happen when other sensors were used.
        
               | kiratp wrote:
               | This claim is not true.
               | 
               | As someone who drives a Tesla with the FSD beta, the
               | vehicle has been getting progressively better since 2018.
               | 
               | It's drives smoother and brakes more predictably dive
               | they stopped using the front radar.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | This claim is not true.
               | 
               | As someone who owned a 2019 Tesla and who owns a 2023
               | Tesla, the older car had better autopilot. It was
               | starting to degrade in 2020. The new one is worse.
               | Phantom braking was quite rare in 2019. The very first
               | night I drove home the new car, it phantom braked on a
               | lonely, empty stretch of I-5.
               | 
               | I want the radar back.
        
               | jkeddo wrote:
               | FSD stack is disabled on highways. You are using the
               | years old code. Beta v11 when it comes out will enable
               | OP's FSD referenced improvements for highways.
        
               | brandonagr2 wrote:
               | In reality, we have Tesla vehicles that sold with other
               | sensors that are now disabled, and those cars are now
               | better to drive with automation enabled than with the
               | extraneous sensors, even simple cruise control is better
               | and phantom braking is actually decreased vs spurious
               | radar returns that existed previously, due to the
               | limitations of low resolution radar. Auto high beams is
               | now better at not blinding oncoming drivers with bright
               | headlights, etc. - issues that happened all the time when
               | other sensors were used previously.
        
               | papertokyo wrote:
               | How is your experience the direct opposite of the parent
               | post, given the same change?
        
               | kiratp wrote:
               | Believe it or not, if you spend enough time with a Tesla,
               | you quickly realize that actually detecting things is a
               | solved problem.
               | 
               | The thing they need to improve and are doing so rapidly
               | is actual trajectory policy calculations.
               | 
               | And that's not going to get better with more sensors
               | seeing the same things it already sees.
        
             | muglug wrote:
             | It's also possible they weren't able to see benefits given
             | the processors that were available to them at the time.
             | 
             | It's also possible that they were so far behind Waymo in
             | the journey to FSD that they weren't yet at a point where
             | multiple sensors would make a significant difference.
        
               | alexose wrote:
               | This is my read on it as well. I listened to the same
               | interview (it was definitely on the front page, if not at
               | #1 for a while). I stepped away feeling like Karpathy had
               | described a lot of good business reasons for not using
               | other sensors, but not a lot of good technical reasons.
               | Sensor fusion is hard, yes, but maybe not harder than
               | perfectly re-projecting 2D pixel images into 3D vector
               | space.
               | 
               | Just my interpretation, but it felt to me like a hail
               | mary because they were fully committed to being the first
               | mover. Waiting around for LiDAR prices to come down would
               | have meant that Waymo would have beat them.
        
             | impulser_ wrote:
             | I always thought it came down to two reason, costs and
             | looks. Telsa has to sell a car people want to drive daily.
             | They can't have a bunch of lidar sensors on their cars no
             | one would buy them even if they could drive themselves.
             | Also they would most likely cost a lot more due to lidar
             | sensors not being cheap compared to normal cameras.
             | 
             | Unlike Waymo who doesn't care about selling cars to people
             | to drive daily. No one going to care that the taxi they are
             | taking looks ugly as long as it get them to the place they
             | are going for cheaper. The cost is also a less of a factor
             | due to them being able to produce an income by charging
             | people to ride in them.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | > They can't have a bunch of lidar sensors on their cars
               | 
               | Why not? There are production cars with lidar now that
               | isn't the big spinning thing on top of the car.
        
             | upbeat_general wrote:
             | If you're referring to the Lex Friedman interview, at the
             | start of his answer, he mentions it was a cost-based
             | decision. And that _radar /ultrasonic_ wasn't worth it for
             | them, due to the additional time it took. Not that it
             | wasn't helpful, just more effort that could be better spent
             | elsewhere.
        
               | 10x_contrarian wrote:
               | He clearly states that extra sensors "contribute noise
               | and entropy into everything. And they bloat stuff."
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W1JBAfV4Io
               | 
               | Essentially that trying to utilize multiple sensors
               | cripples any progress (given that resources will never be
               | infinite).
        
             | righttoolforjob wrote:
             | Then something else was the bottleneck at the time. It is
             | very easy to prove that some sensors in some situations
             | will be able to perceive things that other sensors cannot.
             | In those situations the additional sensors are crucial
             | first steps. I would guess the bottleneck is shitty
             | reliance on statistical machine learning with a long tail
             | of unhandled edge cases. Each case very uncommon, but in
             | aggregate a very important sum.
        
             | typon wrote:
             | You are misunderstanding the situation. Karpathy claimed
             | that sensor fusion of radar, sonar and vision isn't working
             | well. He made no such claim about Lidar. Lidar is the
             | sensor that is the crucial difference between Waymo and
             | Tesla's approach to self driving.
        
               | stergios wrote:
               | The reason he claimed sensor fusion was not working well
               | was due to vendor versioning. He claimed the same sensor
               | from different manufacturing batches performed
               | differently and thus needed to be re-characterized, which
               | then has follow on effects in various math models.
               | Multiply this by many sensors, and the need for
               | replacement parts inventory for a decade or two and the
               | problem becomes intractable was his claim on his most
               | recent appearance on the LF podcast.
        
               | cbsmith wrote:
               | Almost sounds like a supply chain/manufacturing problem
               | than a software problem.
        
             | ErikVandeWater wrote:
             | Wasn't the Summon feature downgraded when they moved to a
             | vision-only approach? One YT video I saw compared a version
             | 1 and a more recent version and the vision-only wasn't able
             | to do as much. Contradicts the idea additional sensors do
             | not add value.
        
           | rootusrootus wrote:
           | One of my biggest concerns about Tesla's vision based
           | approach is that it appears to be entirely about cutting
           | costs. Nothing about it says they _actually_ think it is
           | superior; the cameras on a Model 3 /Y are mediocre. They were
           | mediocre the day the Model 3 was first released. If you were
           | going to rely on a vision system in a serious way, you'd at
           | least invest in better camera tech. Hell, Subaru EyeSight has
           | a significantly better camera setup, last I checked, and who
           | looks to Subaru as a technical leader?
           | 
           | Someone else said it here on HN, and I think they're
           | absolutely right -- Tesla is all about vertical integration,
           | and this is preventing them from excelling at anything other
           | than saving pennies. A good part of why the new EV
           | competition is doing everything better is they didn't roll
           | their own tech. They bought packaged solutions from companies
           | that only do one thing, but do it _well_.
        
           | taeric wrote:
           | I also never understood why we had to use "vision" approaches
           | that have the same visual spectrum as what humans see. Any
           | sort of sensor on a device is already synthetic, why limit
           | the spectrum that you attach it to? Should use light sensors,
           | sound sensors, gps, everything.
        
             | rootusrootus wrote:
             | And even then, the best cameras today are still a long ways
             | off from matching human eyesight. Tesla's cameras are not
             | state of the art, either.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | So far nobody really cared how road markings, signs etc
             | look outside of the human visual spectrum, so there's
             | likely a lot more variation there. Both in terms of how
             | things look like when new, and in terms of acceptable wear.
        
               | taeric wrote:
               | Right. But that is in designing the existing roads. I'm
               | talking about the cars. And I'm specifically asking why
               | not adding more options? I don't mind a camera being part
               | of the solution at all. Gives an obvious path to human
               | labeling of training data. But, why not have more?
        
         | GaryNumanVevo wrote:
         | To me, self-driving seems like a band-aid fix for terrible car
         | infrastructure. Driving a car is already one of the most
         | dangerous things the average American can do. Due in part to
         | larger, heavier vehicles, high speeds in residential areas,
         | etc. Even if you had a "perfect" driver that doesn't prevent
         | someone from ramming into you.
        
           | rootusrootus wrote:
           | > one of the most dangerous things the average American can
           | do
           | 
           | About comparable to the risk of falling. Lower risk than
           | suicide. Or death by opioid overdose. And of course, the most
           | dangerous thing most Americans do, by a huge huge huge
           | margin, is overeat and lounge on the couch.
        
         | gitfan86 wrote:
         | It is a valid point but the financial incentives are so big
         | that some jurisdictions will allow it. In fact they already do
         | allow these autonomous systems on public roads. That is going
         | to continue to expand and since the financial incentives are
         | huge even when deaths happen the governments will continue to
         | allow it.
         | 
         | And in fact some regulators fully understand the tradeoffs and
         | will prefer autonomy for the better good of the public. An
         | example of this is the Boeing 737 Max, those crashes wouldn't
         | have happened if there were no autopilot systems. But
         | regulators are not suggesting that all autonomous systems on
         | planes be turned off because of the safety and financial
         | advantages of keeping them in place even though they are
         | obviously not perfect.
        
         | larusso wrote:
         | As a software engineer myself they will always lose the
         | argument. I saw so many smart systems falter in some weird way
         | that I would never trust a software system completely. I drive
         | an EV with some AI based system that automatically throttles
         | the car etc. But to trust my life and my Familie in the hands
         | of this system (or any other) no thank you.
        
         | taeric wrote:
         | To double down further on the social side of this, public
         | transit is largely getting there faster than point to point
         | driving. In that many trains and such are already largely
         | "hands off the wheels" for operation.
         | 
         | Relatedly, another "problem" with "self-driving" cars is that
         | we want all of the convenience and ease of use, without
         | adjusting liability and ownership considerations. Consider, if
         | Waymo gets to the point where they have a self driving car that
         | you have to have a subscription to use, do you own the car? Are
         | you the liable for any accidents it has?
         | 
         | To lean in on that hypothetical. I'd imagine a lot of families
         | will use self driving cars to send kids to school. Is
         | effectively a bus that terminates at your house. Who is liable
         | for a mistake if the operation of it is completely remote?
        
           | amf12 wrote:
           | > Consider, if Waymo gets to the point where they have a self
           | driving car that you have to have a subscription to use, do
           | you own the car? Are you the liable for any accidents it has?
           | 
           | I'd imagine the company would take on liability, as long as
           | humans can't drive the vehicle or they aren't driving when
           | the accident occurred. Mercedes already got the ball rolling
           | on this [1].
           | 
           | [1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-
           | if-...
        
             | taeric wrote:
             | I can't see that path getting taken without you basically
             | losing ownership of the car?
        
         | cbsmith wrote:
         | This is the gist of it, but you have to ask yourself why it's
         | just the accepted wisdom that it's okay to have the massive
         | level of failure we have now.
        
         | yyyk wrote:
         | I agree it's a social problem, but IMHO it's a rather different
         | social problem: Current cars, roads and car culture is adapted
         | to human drivers, and AI is expected to be able to integrate
         | into that.
         | 
         | What if we would make cars and rules that are adapted to AI
         | cars and ignore human drivers? e.g. Ban human drivers from some
         | roads, allow AI cars with designs that exploit AI advantages
         | (e.g. much better reaction time) but do not require or even
         | allow human backup (enabling us to put the passengers in a
         | secured shell), etc. I suspect we could than reach a 1/20th
         | rate today.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | > will have 1/10th of the fatal accidents
         | 
         | I think I'm relatively safe from cars on the sidewalk. Yet with
         | fsd cars I'm not so sure anymore.
        
         | 10x_contrarian wrote:
         | I think you're mistaken. There are still massive technological
         | challenges. I have seen nearly no evidence that current self-
         | driving car technology is even remotely close to matching the
         | ability of a novice human driver. Sure while the "don't crash
         | into things" algorithms may generally be fine, these systems
         | seem to frequently deadlock in completely mundane situations.
         | They also seem dependent on remote operator assistance when
         | encountering non-ideal conditions, greatly limiting their
         | maximum speed.
         | 
         | If anything, legislation and social acceptance has moved faster
         | than the technology. That's the opposite what many of us
         | observing this space expected 10 years ago.
         | 
         | At this point I'm starting to have doubts about whether the
         | full dream of self-driving cars will even be realized within my
         | lifetime.
        
           | baby wrote:
           | I read this comment after taking a cruise in SF, which is a
           | self driving cab with no driver. It basically reminds me of
           | all the comments saying that VR has no future, written by
           | people who have never tried VR and would get their mind blown
           | by it if they tried the latest iteration. Maybe you should
           | come to SF and try one of these self driving cars yourself :)
        
             | 10x_contrarian wrote:
             | I actually do live in the Bay Area and spend a lot of time
             | in San Francisco. I applied for the Cruise waitlist well
             | over a year ago but have not been accepted. I've tried to
             | organize with friends who have access but we rarely have a
             | reason to go the Richmond or Golden Gate Park after 10PM.
             | The coverage area is very limited.
             | 
             | I'm impressed that they're actually offering driverless
             | rides on SF streets, but my point stands. The cars operate
             | only on the slowest streets at the quietest hours. Any
             | problem they encounter is handled by remote operators.
             | 
             | I'm not outright dismissive of self-driving cars. I truly
             | want them to exist. I don't even own a car and dislike
             | being behind the wheel. I just don't buy into infinite hype
             | pushed by a revolving door of charlatans.
             | 
             | Also I do have a modern VR headset and celebrate the
             | technology. But, to make a similar comparison, the
             | metaverse "ready player one" vision is not within our
             | lifetimes.
        
         | just-ok wrote:
         | I agree with you entirely.
         | 
         | Continuing with your hypothetical, even though we'd be 90%
         | safer _as a collective_ , the safety of the _individual_ feels
         | compromised: the risk of an accident is non-uniform when
         | involving humans (depending on e.g. age, experience, safety,
         | alertness, etc.), but becomes uniform (or at least more
         | uniform) with an algorithm in charge.
         | 
         | That's a tough thing for people to buy into.
        
           | jsbg wrote:
           | > the safety of the individual feels compromised
           | 
           | Exactly. I have had zero accidents in 20 years; I'm not
           | interested in a car that will lower the overall accident rate
           | if it increases mine.
        
           | _cs2017_ wrote:
           | A very good observation. Based on your comment, I think we
           | can relax the requirement stated by OP by saying:
           | 
           | "Until Waymo's cars reduce any individual's chance of an
           | accident."
           | 
           | So for example, suppose a Waymo car is better than humans
           | overall, but tends to do worse than humans when there's a
           | small bump on the road. And suppose that all humans (in a
           | given regulator's area, e.g., California) tend to encounter
           | such bumps at roughly the same rate (per mile driven) over
           | their lifetime. In that case, it's probably going to be
           | acceptable, since every individual is better off.
           | 
           | I don't know, maybe this is not impactful / obvious enough
           | for people to care about?
           | 
           | What certainly is obvious is that the safest drivers are much
           | safer than an average driver (does anyone know of a study
           | that estimates this ratio?). Therefore, _at the very least_ ,
           | the threshold for Waymo should be not the average accident
           | rate, but the accident rate for the safest drivers.
        
         | watwut wrote:
         | I really don't think so. And we are not nearly close to that
         | situation either. We have some obvious crashes in cars that are
         | nowhere near to be probably "safer then human". And then we
         | have super confident claims of safety by manufacturer.
        
       | godelski wrote:
       | I appreciate that in this they demonstrate not just rigs where a
       | manikin is thrown in way of danger, but actual humans performing
       | regular/irregular tasks. This to me is akin of the bullet proof
       | {vest,glass,etc} manufacturer willing to put themselves behind
       | their product for demonstration. With AI systems I think this is
       | particularly important because with such high dimensional data it
       | is possible that the vehicle picks up on things like the pull
       | cable or that it is a manikin and not a human (e.g. pneumonia
       | predictions strongly correlating with medical equipment within
       | x-rays rather than inflammation). A kinda two for one confidence
       | builder here.
        
         | killjoywashere wrote:
         | > akin of the bullet proof {vest,glass,etc} manufacturer
         | willing to put themselves behind their product for
         | demonstration.
         | 
         | I suspect the cyclist in the video is not a $500k/year ML
         | engineer, it's a $50K/year veteran trying to stay out of the
         | welfare line.
        
       | 1024core wrote:
       | While Waymo is spending $$$ gathering driving data, Tesla has
       | 100s of 1000s of cars doing it, for free. In terms of sheer data,
       | in this race, Tesla wins. Now whether Tesla can actually use the
       | firehose of data and actually train models that use it
       | productively, remains to be seen. With the departure of Karpathy,
       | I am not so sure.
       | 
       | If Tesla gave all the data to Waymo, Waymo would reach L5 in no
       | time.
        
         | dundermuffl1n wrote:
         | Seems like something I'd expect CNBC to say, not Hacker News.
        
           | influxmoment wrote:
           | Hacker News is superficial negative group think. Inverse
           | hacker news is where it's at. Then you can predict the
           | success of startups like Dropbox and Coinbase
        
         | minsc_and_boo wrote:
         | Waymo was collecting data before Tesla, and switched to
         | simulated training a long time ago because it's more effective.
         | 
         | The self driving AI can gain 100 years experience in just 1 day
         | using simulation: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-
         | not-offline--sim...
        
           | panick21_ wrote:
           | Tesla uses simulation to but there is no replacement for real
           | world data. The real world is crazy and Tesla can see people
           | driving in real condition from Alaska to Miami Florida.
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | Waymos velocity seems to have slowed dramatically since 2015 when
       | they first did fully driverless rides on the public road and
       | started deploying to multiple regions.
       | 
       | Now, 2 billion dollars and 7 years later, they are still only in
       | a handful of small regions with limited numbers of vehicles.
       | 
       | That tells me there is still some fundamental issue that is hard
       | to solve. I wonder why they aren't more transparent and tell us
       | what that issue is that they've been battling for 7 years?
        
         | jmartrican wrote:
         | I suspect that the issue is with cars being so cautious that
         | they just stop as people keep walking, or at best herky jerky
         | move fwd. In NYC, a car like that wouldn't get anywhere as the
         | pedestrians just won't stop. the pedestrians stop when they see
         | that the driver isn't going to stop and they gonna get hit.
        
         | londons_explore wrote:
         | It's clear which bits they haven't been focussing on... There
         | are multiple videos on youtube of rides (some where it has gone
         | wrong) and the user experience is terrible. The car has a
         | robotic voice which plays a long and annoying unskippable
         | message with every ride, and 'Rider support' sounding like they
         | are following a strict script with no ability to be helpful or
         | fix the problem [1]...
         | 
         | Imagine if every time you started your car, a robotic voice
         | said "Welcome to your Ford Pickup XYZ model. Please ensure your
         | seatbelts are fastened. If you are too hot, you can adjust the
         | climate with the climate controls. If you want to lower the
         | windows, please don't put your arms out. etc etc. Have a nice
         | ride today in your Ford(tm) Pickup(tm).".
         | 
         | [1]: https://youtu.be/2ZmdxkBV5Tw?t=180
        
           | saxelsen wrote:
           | Not entirely different from getting on a plane? You have to
           | listen to the safety protocol before take-off.
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | Most things about planes are pretty user unfriendly to be
             | fair... "arrive 2 hours before departure"... "queue for
             | hours through security"... "walk miles to your gate"...
             | "have to buy your ticket a long time in advance, and then
             | 'check in' more than 3 hours in advance but less than 48
             | hours"...
             | 
             | We're a long way from the ideal of "show up at the airport
             | 5 mins before, hop on a plane, and hand cash to the pilot
             | for your ride".
        
         | stevehawk wrote:
         | (I know nothing about self driving)
         | 
         | I seems like the hardest 90% of the work is the last 10%.
        
         | summerlight wrote:
         | Regulation is one of the major factor that slows down. You need
         | more and more test cases to achieve higher reliability, but
         | data collection at scale need approvals and regulators want to
         | see if it's reliable enough to approve. This chicken and egg
         | problem is not something easy to solve since at its heart it's
         | a trust problem. Tesla was an exception because they choose to
         | put all the responsibility to the drivers by making it
         | technically ADAS but marketing it as "full self-driving".
        
         | gok wrote:
         | Waymo first deployed on public roads in 2019
         | 
         | (I appreciate 2019 _feels_ like 7 years ago)
        
           | jeffbee wrote:
           | Did you mean offered a service to the general public? Because
           | Google's older self-driving car drove that one blind guy to
           | the Taco Bell drive-thru more than 10 years ago. And they had
           | been driving Googlers back and forth from their homes and
           | offices for years prior.
        
       | rootusrootus wrote:
       | I realize this is essentially a PR piece, but still, it makes me
       | feel _much_ better about the potential future of automated
       | driving than what Tesla is doing. If I owned TSLA right now I 'd
       | sell.
        
         | teacpde wrote:
         | Not to defend TSLA, but I don't think self driving is the
         | reason why Tesla cars sell, it is more about being arguably the
         | best mass produced EV out there.
        
           | watwut wrote:
           | Afaik, they are not. They have best charging network in
           | United States. They come low in reliability index. And many
           | people like their software.
           | 
           | They are not obvious winner among EV cars currently. They
           | were first to do actual high end EV car and that vision
           | changed the market back then.
        
           | rootusrootus wrote:
           | > more about being arguably the best mass produced EV out
           | there.
           | 
           | In 2018 this would be a really good argument. What does Tesla
           | do better now, compared to another modern purpose built EV,
           | for example a Ford Mustang Mach E, or a Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia
           | EV6, etc?
           | 
           | I struggle to identify any particular feature I would say
           | they are better at, much less something that would make it
           | the best mass produced EV. I say this as a two-time Model 3
           | owner, having just bought the most recent one two weeks ago.
           | I don't quite have buyers remorse yet, but it's nagging at me
           | that I may have just made a foolish choice for the wrong
           | reasons.
        
             | lallysingh wrote:
             | I think Tesla's charging network is a nice part of the
             | package. I'm pretty worried about going EV -- I'm not going
             | tesla, because I don't like the way they look -- mostly
             | about dealing with finding charging stations that work (and
             | well) when I need them.
        
         | aeternum wrote:
         | A canned test should not make you feel better. This could be
         | the first time they actually passed the test. They might still
         | fail with a cardboard cutout half the size.
        
         | Robotbeat wrote:
         | Will I ever be able to have self driving on a personal vehicle,
         | or is this just centralized automating the work of a taxi
         | driver? IMHO, these are two _very_ different things for the
         | consumer. This is why I actually prefer the Tesla approach, or
         | actually Comma AI. (If it can be made to work robustly...)
         | 
         | It would suck to be in a world where the only way to do self-
         | driving is indistinguishable from the Uber or taxi service we
         | already have (and likely wouldn't even be cheaper if it's
         | proprietary to one or two mega-companies who can extract nearly
         | all the productivity surplus from this as monopoly rents).
        
           | i_love_cookies wrote:
           | tbh car ownership for day-to-day is kind of silly, leave it
           | to more commercial use and enthusiasts
           | 
           | i may be biased since i use public transit or bike for
           | everything
        
             | kfarr wrote:
             | Coming from a corn-fed midwesterner who got his license as
             | soon as legally possible, car ownership is totally silly.
             | We are all fleet managers of extremely complicated
             | mechanical objects with huge liabilities from a financial,
             | legal and moral perspective. If self-driving cars do one
             | thing it could at least set people free from personal
             | vehicle ownership, even if they still have car dependent
             | lifestyle.
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | > i may be biased since i use public transit or bike for
             | everything
             | 
             | That's just a different way of saying that you never have
             | any cargo (children, groceries, etc) to move.
             | 
             | You should also bear in mind that not everyone wants to
             | live in such high density that everything you could ever
             | need is 5 minutes away on foot.
        
               | kfarr wrote:
               | > That's just a different way of saying that you never
               | have any cargo (children, groceries, etc) to move.
               | 
               | We have plenty of cargo (children and groceries) and do
               | not own a car.
        
             | Robotbeat wrote:
             | Having just had to get around quite a bit via walking and
             | scootering, I'm definitely not excited about a future
             | totally without personal cars. This works very well if
             | you're childless or if you live in a place like Manhattan
             | (loved the subway there) or with excellent weather, but
             | it's just not the same as the personal room and safe area
             | with your personal belongings that a personally owned car
             | provides.
        
               | panick21_ wrote:
               | Kids can use bicycles from when they are very young, and
               | until then you can put them into a little thing you can
               | drag behind your bicycle.
               | 
               | If you are doing longer travel, using the train is
               | actually awesome. Those trains have actual places for
               | children to play in.
               | 
               | If you cities and that goes for small cities as well are
               | properly designed its very possible. Its just that in the
               | US cities are literally designed so as to make it
               | impossible.
        
               | jonasdegendt wrote:
               | I extensively use car sharing services in Europe and it
               | covers almost all of my use cases, the only exception
               | being long distance trips, those are just too expensive
               | when you're paying by the minute or kilometer at todays
               | prices.
               | 
               | There's options with fixed parking spots, and services
               | that allow pick up and drop off anywhere.
               | 
               | You tend to structure your life a little different once
               | you don't own your own car anymore, you start to think
               | twice about little trips you would've done otherwise. On
               | the flip side I now have access to 5 different types of
               | cars ranging from small to big (vans) from my phone. It
               | doesn't even require that much more planning considering
               | it's reached critical mass around here and there's a ton
               | of cars available.
               | 
               | The biggest player around is profitable too, so it's not
               | going away any time too. It's saved me thousands and
               | spared me from so much hassle surrounding car ownership.
               | I consider myself an enthousiast but I just got a
               | motorcycle for the weekend instead, pennies on the dollar
               | compared to a car.
               | 
               | All in all I notice I'm just happier not being in a car
               | all the time anymore, you might consider it your safe
               | area but it might as well be a golden cage at times.
               | 
               | I understand it's different once your throw small
               | children in the mix so it might make sense there, but the
               | reality is that a lot of people could do with a lot less
               | car at most points in their life.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | Something that seems to happen a lot on HN is the
               | pervasive assumption that everyone lives in an urban
               | area, or wants to. It is totally fine that some people
               | choose that life, but it makes for these one-sided
               | conversations where someone explains in detail why they
               | have the right answer, while describing things that
               | largely do not even exist outside of a relatively dense
               | urban environment.
        
               | waboremo wrote:
               | What's the difference from a (better maintained) taxi
               | service? Especially one that in this hypothetical future,
               | would be driverless.
               | 
               | In general I think the trend of personal car ownership is
               | something that will become somewhat of a hobby rather
               | than a daily necessity, even outside of cities as long as
               | Waymo (and others) are able to actually achieve their
               | ambitious goals. The only way I see that reversing is if
               | people are forced to live out of their cars due to absurd
               | home costs, which is a very very bleak future.
        
               | Robotbeat wrote:
               | Because you don't have your personal belongings in the
               | taxi, you have to take them in and out. A personal car is
               | a little room, like a little part of your home, that you
               | bring with you when you travel. With kids especially
               | (diapers, wipes, books, toys, car seats, snacks, a place
               | to change diapers or change clothes or breastfed in
               | privacy or nap, etc... protected from the elements and
               | climate controlled), this is really helpful.
        
             | rootusrootus wrote:
             | > i may be biased since i use public transit or bike for
             | everything
             | 
             | It is good to recognize this. A very large portion of the
             | population does not live somewhere that makes good sense
             | for pervasive public transit, walking, or biking for
             | regular transportation needs. And many of those people
             | actively don't want to live somewhere like that. Personal
             | vehicles have a use case, and that does not become invalid
             | just because it does not match your own preferences.
        
           | krschultz wrote:
           | I do not think the outcome is only Uber / Lyft but with AI,
           | but if that is the outcome I still think it would be a win.
           | Today supply of Uber / Lyft in my area at off hours is
           | spotty, and that makes it unreliable. I have gotten stuck
           | walking home 2+ miles multiple times in the last year because
           | I couldn't get a ride at any price. That's not a problem in
           | Manhattan, but not everywhere is Manhattan. Driverless cars
           | would be on 24/7/365 so wouldn't have that problem. The more
           | reliable these taxi services are, the more viable it is for
           | people to get rid of their cars.
           | 
           | I also expect long term self driving cars will be safer than
           | humans, and as a person that primarily walks around instead
           | of driving that's a benefit to me even if I'm not in the car.
        
             | mechagodzilla wrote:
             | Why wouldn't driverless cars have the exact same problems?
             | A driverless car is pretty expensive, so it needs to be
             | making money a high fraction of the time or it's not
             | economical for a company to invest in it, just like a
             | regular taxi service (I'm really curious how they would
             | handle 'surge' times - have fleets of cars that sit parked
             | and unused 99% of the time??). Uber and Lyft actually have
             | a lot of flexibility in this regard, since the cars already
             | exist for other reasons (and don't cost Uber/Lyft anything
             | when they're not driving). The idea that 'driverless'
             | somehow means 'lots of cars, everywhere, at all times, very
             | cheap' doesn't make any sense to me from an economics
             | perspective.
        
         | tantalor wrote:
         | You can buy puts.
        
           | concordDance wrote:
           | The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay
           | solvent.
        
             | jsolson wrote:
             | If you're buying puts you have bounded risk (the amount you
             | invested), albeit with a more cliff-like risk profile than
             | other strategies.
        
               | JamesSwift wrote:
               | As well as a time/volatility element added so its not
               | necessarily "TSLA went down a lot, so you profit a lot".
        
               | ihattendorf wrote:
               | In this case replace "you can remain solvent" with "the
               | put remains valid".
        
             | panick21_ wrote:
             | The argument literally everybody always makes and 99.99%
             | they are simply wrong and don't want to admit it.
        
           | rootusrootus wrote:
           | Options are gambling, which is not how I play the market.
           | Aside from some lucky YOLOs, you are far more likely to lose
           | money in that game.
        
       | Timothycquinn wrote:
       | Personally, I don't understand the economics of lidar for self
       | driving vehicles. 1) How many lidar units will one vehicle need
       | and how much will this cost? 2) How will noise from other lidar
       | systems be addressed? Eg two or more disparate lidar systems on
       | other vehicles using similar frequencies? 3) How small can the
       | lidar systems be made while still being effective in real world
       | use? These units being used for testing are massive and probably
       | stupendously expensive!
        
       | notatoad wrote:
       | i have to chuckle at the use of language to humanize their tech
       | here - comparing "the waymo driver" to "NIEON". the one of those
       | that sounds like the name of a robot from the future is actually
       | just referring to a normal human.
        
         | dmd wrote:
         | The whole point is that it's _not_ a normal human; it 's a
         | model that is better than any human could be.
        
         | pas wrote:
         | also "real agent" which just means human
        
       | jcims wrote:
       | Tesla mentioned in this thread almost twice as many times as
       | Waymo.
       | 
       | Elon love/hate is a powerful force.
        
       | mooneater wrote:
       | Is any of Waymo Driver's design published? Like do they use RL or
       | how do they approach control.
        
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