Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
I don't understand the sarcasm. Driverless trains for mass transit are in operation in lots of places around the world and have been for some time (eg the Docklands light railway in London) https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/dlr/
Driverless personal transportation is the unsolved problem.
Weirdly, DLR trains still have an attendant onboard. A better example of a fully centrally operated train would be something like the SkyTrain lines in Vancouver.
The book The Box discusses similar compromises that were made with the longshoremen unions during the transition from conventional hull-packing to containers. There's a certain fairness to it at least for a time, but the technology existing to make the role truly unnecessary does prime things for the next round of discussions when it can be fully eliminated or moved to an off-board overseer remotely monitoring multiple trains at once.
The point is that we don't have mass transit in most places in the US. Trains and light rail are indisputably better for everyone but we're betting the entire country on yet more cars.
Then have the track go to each persons doorstep. Also make sure the pod shows up within 5 minutes at your doorstep when you hail it from your phone. Each pod should be private and airconditioned. Each pod should also lay its own track when driving to remote locations.
They actually invented something like that called a train around 1804 and very soon when they've developed it a bit more it will solve all our traffic problems.
The commenter was being sarcastic about trains I think, but while we should be using public transport where possible there is sometimes a need for door-to-door transport so I don't see why we can't explore new ideas that may combine some of the advantages of both for certain use cases
Not sure where you are getting this information. Where there are trains, people take the trains far more.
In Tokyo, the vast majority of passengers rely on the extensive and efficient train system, which is often considered the best in the world. Cars are less commonly used due to high parking costs, traffic congestion, and the convenience of public transportation options like trains and subways.
Transportation Options in Tokyo
Train Passengers
Rail Network: Tokyo has the most extensive urban railway network in the world, with 40 million passengers daily.
Frequency: Trains run every two to three minutes during rush hours, ensuring minimal wait times.
Accessibility: Major stations are equipped with elevators and clear signage in multiple languages, making it easy for tourists to navigate.
Car Usage
Driving Conditions: Driving in Tokyo can be challenging due to narrow roads, heavy traffic, and limited parking availability.
Parking Costs: Finding parking can be difficult and expensive, with many areas lacking sufficient parking lots.
Rental Considerations: Renting a car may incur additional costs such as tolls and drop-off fees, especially if returning the car to a different location.*
If automation fails on a track, there are many people dead and toxic chemicals spilled everywhere - just look at US freight accidents. With orders of magnitude more mass, 3x less friction than tire/asphalt and no way to steer, many avoidable accidents are now also fatal. Now you need grade separation so this whole thing isn't compatible with pedestrians and bikes. But sure, keep posting this tired joke.
Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.
In the Midwest, golf carts are exactly what people use to get around in small towns. It's not unreasonable that neighborhoods might be closed to large vehicles and use other forms of transit within their boundaries.
I use an electric scooter to get around areas where a car would be inappropriate or undesired. I keep it in the back of my car always (along with my helmet, gloves and goggles) so that I can pull it out when needed.
Pretty convenient when I unexpectedly find myself needing to use a parking garage and such. The scooter can take me out of the parking garage and into the building with no issue. And then I can keep it with me in the building until it's time to get back to the car.
It's also probably cheaper than a golf cart - mine was just about $3,600 brand new. Though used carts are probably cheaper still, and there are also much cheaper scooters.
I actually used to use only an electric scooter for transit, but then I got hit by a pickup truck who didn't check the bike lane before turning. So I did driver's ed, got my license and leased a BEV.
Cool!
I thought this is more a thing of elderly care centers. I like the drivingfeeling of golf carts, so I would clearly do this as well if it would be allowed on public streets.
Though on most streets with all these SUV around, it will feel unsafe for me.
The state reduced regulation around vehicle registration so farmers can drive their SxSs and ATVs on the street (with some restrictions, obviously they don't go on the interstate) and then people in town registering their golf carts or whatever as second cars for around town stuff.
Oh golf carts were awesome in small lake communities in PA. Was much better than driving cars down those narrow roads and made much more sense for shorter distances. Plus kids got more freedom since we were allowed to drive the carts well before we could get drivers licenses (Might not be good to be as lax in a larger city though)
yeah, I can say that except for elder areas (not necessarily dedicated facilities, but there are things like "RV parks" which cater mostly to older folks but also families; they usually have 10mph speed limits), I've never seen someone driving a golf cart around town while I've lived in MI, OH, or PA.
I do see people driving horse-drawn carriages, ATVs (probably illegally), snowmobiles (legally in some parts of MI during Winter or condition-dependent), and riding mowers (probably illegally) in and around towns, though. Very rarely, I see someone driving an e-bike; this rareness is mostly because they aren't allowed on the sidewalks here and there's no bike lane, so you need to drive and signal like a car, which is pretty awkward given how many e-bikes don't even come with real brake lights (though many falsely advertise red rear running lights as a brake light, which'd be illegal to drive unless you hand-signal whenever you brake).
Coronado Island, near San Diego, California, for one.
Sun City, Arizona, though these are golf communities/mega-master-planned communities. Coronado is a better example of a mixed vehicle environment with golf carts bopping around all the time on the same streets.
Coronado isn't a good example. Or at least not one that scales, that's a VERY affluent neighborhood.
The golf cart isn't a replacement for a car, it's one you have on the side. I would argue that its partially because they're easier to park in a very touristy environment
Interesting that this seems like a slam-dunk argument for why reusable rockets and other improvements are practically impossible (e.g. "we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it's a physical impossibility"), and wouldn't matter in any case for structural reasons (e.g. "market inelasticity (cutting launch cost in half wouldn't make much of a difference)", yet in the fifteen years since it was written launch costs have fallen to a third of what they were, continue to fall, and the number of payloads to orbit has gone up by an order of magnitude or more (so much for "market inelasticity").
Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.
Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.
Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.
And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
So in other words, like literally every other word out of Elon’s mouth for a decade now, it’s incredibly dishonest. He lies about everything, all the time, without any acknowledgment. Nothing is ever delivered on time, most of it isn’t delivered at all, and virtually every bit of promised capability is exaggerated.
Why does anyone want to do business with a person or company like that? I genuinely do not understand.
Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.
Any evidence of this?, even it its true right now, and they are being ultra cautious, (they are hardly going to just dump 100k unsupervised teslas in one week), it won't stay that way for long. They will overtake Waymo in a few months, then kill them by the end of the year.
This is totally false. If there are any truly autonomous robotaxis in Austin (a bit if, since Tesla has repeatedly lied and faked things like this in the past), it’s only a handful and they’re limited to a tiny area. The “robotaxis” with a safety driver are the ones that have the bigger area, probably because Tesla sucks at actual self-driving. Still. After a decade of broken promises and shitty engineering practices.
Elon has been blatantly lying about FSD for years, and yet the fans still take whatever he says as gospel. And yet the skeptics are the ones with EDS? lol, ok.
Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them.
I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target and their paper might become obsolete the next day.
Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.
Waymo routinely uses safety drivers, sorry, "autonomous specialists" when expanding to new cities[1][2]. Waymo cars occasionally contact the remote support. If support is not available, the cars just stay where they stopped[3].
Tesla has rolled out a small number of cars with no safety driver[4].
In short, you are either grossly misinformed or intentionally lying. Is it a political echochamber you are stuck in?
[1] https://waymo.com/faq/ "Our vehicles are primarily driving autonomously, but you’ll sometimes notice that our cars have autonomous specialists riding in the driver’s seat. These specialists are there to monitor our autonomous driving technology and share important feedback to help us improve the Waymo experience."
[2] https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk/ "Our autonomous specialists who are present in the vehicle during testing are highly trained professionals."
You are grossly misinformed. Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times. In novel situations humans will provide instructions on what path to take but this is relatively infrequent. Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control when the car does something stupid. The small number of robotaxis without safety drives are limited to a tiny area and not open to the public.
> Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times
Consumer version of FSD can park a car if a driver doesn't take contol[1]. Waymo seems to require a remote command to initiate parking instead of just standing there with hazard lights on[2].
> Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control
Every single robotaxi in Austin doesn't have a driver behind the wheel. So a driver can't be ready to take control. Stop lying. I no longer believe that you are misinformed.
Not for a very long time. Just think about how big of an advantage lidar and radar are at night or radar is in snow and rain?
If Tesla had been smart they would have used regular cameras and event based cameras where the pixels send a signal whenever their brightness changes enough. These can have microsecond latency. And multi spectral cameras. Combined this data would provide very rich data for neural networks.
lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
> lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
A year? They'll be gone in two weeks!
Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
> None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile".
With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the point now where an internet enabled phone is basically disposable, costing people ~ a few hours of wages.
History has shown that technology costs decrease over time, and rapidly if it's a critically important technology. If you don't agree, share a counter example.
Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k which is not 'a few hours of wages' well not for most of us. I agree technology prices decreases over time but Waymo is starting at 5x the cost, by the time a Waymo costs even the same price as a Model Y, let alone a Cybercab it will be too late. That's my prediction, I could be wrong though, maybe Elon and Tesla are lying and so are all the users of least version of FSD.
Try to avoid cherry picking if you want to have a discussion where you or the other person learns something. All the Elon stans on this site that I've encountered are highly disingenuous, starting to think that's not a coincidence.
Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.
The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components.
Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
> Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
The consumer does not care about which car picks them up or what hardware integration it has. The consumer cares about which car is available in their service area, how quickly it will arrive, how much it will cost, how quickly it can get to their destination, and that it will do so safely.
> Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.
I am only refuting the claim that Tesla has reached parity with Waymo in Austin. They are nowhere near.
Because Tesla has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, I will want to see Tesla scale up the robotaxi business to the level of Waymo (which is currently far ahead) before I proclaim them the winner.
You are not really backing your claims with facts or numbers, just opinion and future predictions which may or may not come true.
> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have.
> didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware
A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.
I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but
> If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion.
That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)
Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.
Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.
It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.
> In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
I just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.
Yeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing to just speed and turn correctly(I.e 2 params). You also seem to overestimate the inertia of the tech advantage. Being first is not always the most important thing. See google AI as prime example.
The failure of self-driving cars has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with regulation. It’s been demonstrated time and again that statistically, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars.[1]
Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
Your link does not prove your point. It's about ADAS and even shows that it is not universally safer than human driving.
> However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur more frequently than Human-Driven Vehicle accidents under dawn/dusk or turning conditions, which is 5.25 and 1.98 times higher, respectively.
>> The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
Maybe a part of the fault is also the self driving systems themselves that keep crashing and killing people. I don’t have data to say with certainty whether self driving cars are safer or less safe than humans(I think they are less safe especially if taken out of their “trial” zones/sampling) but I can tell you that is less acceptable for self driving cars to kill people than it is for humans for “obvious” reasons especially when the self driving cars do this due stupid mistakes that a human driver would not (I.e goes straight into another car in plain day).
No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
Sure. But they can be way better than human drivers with only cameras. Visibility is rarely the cause of car crashes. Reaction time. Decision making. Follow distance. Speed. All these things are way more important to get right than "seeing through fog"
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
When Tesla engineers/Elon talk about it it's usually pitched as a safety thing, by standardizing on one sensor they reduce "sensor contention". Famously Karpathy once described radar as a source of noise that held their vision sensors back.
I don't know who will end up being right in the long term, however I don't think this was a form choice, I think they believe a pure camera system will be more functional.
The industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about.
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
This is about the opposite of reality. Tesla is way behind in actually deploying autonomous vehicles, and other robotaxi makers with real deployments besides Waymo also use lidar.
Yeah millions of miles per day in autonomous driving for Tesla.
Yes it's still supervised (somewhat, you don't have to pay much attention anymore) but the technology is absolutely there and just being refined at this point.
Waymos are geofenced, restricted to certain roads, and have remote humans in the loop at lot more than most people assume.
Not actually autonomous until it can be more or less trusted to handle itself, without constant human supervision. Until then, it's just prototype or testing miles.
Tesla's current robotaxi deployment is also geofenced and monitored by humans -- moreso than Waymo, even -- but of course Tesla superfans always conveniently leave that out of the narrative.
I don't think you understand that the level of autonomy that anyone with FSD currently has. It drives itself for hours with 0 interventions. Someone did a coast-to-coast drive with no interventions. Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?
They will turn of the supervision requirements soon, and suddenly there will be hundreds of thousands of teslas that can drive themselves.
> Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?
Yes, because you're confusing "can generally make the decisions necessary to drive by itself" with "can be trusted to drive by itself with a non-attentive human occupant".
> They will turn of the supervision requirements soon
Oh, totally; this year, right?
The complete lack of self awareness is absolutely astounding.
Yeah it’ll happen this year. Please mark my words.
Waymos get stuck in weird situations every day. They need intervention, even on their guardrails. FSD is of course not perfect, but yes they have obviously cracked the code (it’s obvious if you use it or get beyond the groupthink here), and are being cautious with turning off supervision requirements. As they should.
Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.
It's been a while since I looked it up but I understand the human is about 50% of taxi operating costs. That's not trivial of course but it's also not dwarfing vehicle costs.
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
This yes.
> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.
This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.
We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.
> The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment.
And regulatory capture by the incumbent. Reach the top then push for regulation behind you. Thats’s one big additional obstacle to overcome for a new player.
OpenAI was so willing to support regulating AI just as soon as they thought they’ve gained enough of an advantage over the competition and they can burn the bridge behind them.
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down.
At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements.
Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter.
There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there.
What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work.
Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day).
This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
Of course a new genre defining company can do what existing companies did and vastly increase the market if they make it better, more efficient, easier whatever. All taxi companies are not all transportation needs, not even on the road. Busses, planes, etc. There will be really new market niches, how about if your RV lets you sleep comfortably and drives all night, you never need to pay or stop (if you can sleep in a moving vehicle), gas or charge itself up.
I was thinking it won't be just one company with this tech, so they'll compete and reduce the value of driverless cars down, by attacking the profit of each other. That would be healthier than having pseudo monopoly power because there are only 2 of them - like say ios and android are basically the world of cell phones, with a few very tiny other companies.
Cosign, there's a reason it took forever and a day for Waymo to actually scale. It's great stuff, changed the way I live, but they gotta wince at the economics.
I feel like the bigger issue is that Cruise evidently had an unsafe company culture (like Uber): It wasn't just that they had an incident, it's that they lied about the incident and tried to cover things up.
This has been a pretty consistent pattern -- Cruise was always less transparent about its safety data than Waymo, and its claims tended to be opaque and non-measurable, whereas Waymo was partnering with insurance companies to get hard data.
Waymo is going to have incidents, too, but I think they have made the (correct) decision that being open and transparent about safety stuff is the way they move past those; Cruise made a decision in the opposite direction, and it killed them.
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
Cruise was always run as a separate business from GM until they shut it down. I think they got too nervous about committing to the Silicon Valley investment style: high capital, high risk, long time horizon, high reward.
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary.
I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways.
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero.
That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
But Waymo or their competitors are not in the "shuttling people around" business. They're developing a driver. Robotaxi is one of the applications.
The winner-takes-all aspect comes from economies of scale for example. If Waymo is several years ahead and has better economics, how can Cruise catch up? They will have lower cost of capital. Top people will want to work at Waymo rather than Cruise. It will be hard to close the R&D gap. When Cruise is where Waymo is today, Waymo will already have a lightweight package that will be used by Ford, VW or Toyota and capable to drive everywhere in any weather conditions.
I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?
I think there is probably a healthy subset of people on here who take Uber etc. all the time. I, on the other hand, maybe take it a half-dozen times a year (plus some private cars to the airport).
I'd love a really good driver assistive system for my car (ala FSD today) but I likely wouldn't actually get driven around a lot more unless the economics were more compelling than seem likely anytime soon.
For most people the economics won't every work out. Uber/Taxis make sense if you only need them a few times per year. However even if the driver is free, if you are using your car daily as most people do it won't work out.
People who yell "share" forget that most people are driving during rush hour, and so the car will be idle the rest of the day anyway. As such there isn't that much money to save by sharing a car.
In my observation, some cities that have "OK" public transit, people can make-do without cars if they Uber, Zipcar, traditional rentals, walk, and use transit. I also observe that it involves a lot of juggling and probably not regular well-outside-of-town trips.
Absent driving yourself at all, you're going to be very limited most places. Which may be OK for continuing a college lifestyle but mostly doesn't work unless you have a partner who handles the driving.
Try to raise prices and see how fast those regional "monopolies" evaporate. MoviePass was the winner in the "unlimited movie tickets" subscription space.
1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world.
2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
For national security reasons, several other countries won't allow Waymo (or Tesla or any other US company) to "win" in their territory. This will ensure that at least a couple other competitors remain worldwide regardless of whether it makes sense in purely economic terms.
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]
replacing a gas engine with an electric motor and installing a battery pack is not hard. The EV1 was a pretty bad car. The real secret sauce of modern electric cars is cheap Lithium Ion battery packs.
The EV1 predated the Roadster by a decade. Had GM been improving the EV1 for those 10 years, including Lithium Ion batteries, GM would have been far ahead of everyone . . . had they just kept going with a technology that was inevitable. Where would Cruse be today had they continued with this new technology that is inevitable?
Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course.
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
“Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens" - sick burn Waymo haha
From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself:
Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week".
They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car
2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs some technician to come to get a drink unstuck does it make sense to get up and arms about how it's not "fully automated" or whatever? In all contexts why people would care (eg. unit economics, safety, customer experience), there's no meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous.
>> What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever?
Yeah, good point. If Waymo were honest they'd say their system is "autonomous". Fully autonomous implies 100% autonomy. Otherwise, how is it "fully"?
But, hey, don't ask me. Write a paper with robot that is 99% autonomous but a human has to take control every once in a while and see how easy you can get that past any reviewer in robotics or AI.
Come on, you know what the fixation is. Nothing riles up the Tesla fanboys like the clear unambiguous fact that Waymo is doing 1000x better at “full self driving” than Tesla ever has.
It's like that time with Facebook and MySpace. A while ago now. I was in a student group at uni and this student, call her Alice, asked me for my Facebook. I said I don't have one, I don't like Facebook, and the conversation continued. Later another student came in, call him Bob. Alice told Bob "Where were you, we just had a big fight about Facebook over Myspace". I asked when that happened since I was there and didn't remember it and Alice said "that was me and you. We had a big fight about it. Did you forget?". I said, nonplussed, that I didn't think we had a fight. "But you said you don't like Facebook. So you like MySpace". Said Alice. Oh Alice.
From that I understand that you, like Alice, must be a very astute observer of human behaviour. No hidden motive stays hidden for long, with you, does it? Well done. You got me. I'm a Tesla fanboi. That's what I am, through and through.
Pay close attention to the wording: "The Waymo Driver ... remains in control of driving". That means it applies the controls needed to go from point A to point B on its own. However, it does not choose point A and point B on its own: a human chooses them. That's autonomous path planning, but not autonomous navigation, and certainly not "fully autonomous" anything.
Waymo prevaricates about the "influence" the human operator has on the path taken by the Waymo Driver [1] but it is clear there are situations that the Waymo Driver cannot choose point A and point B on its own, at least safely, otherwise Waymo would not be paying for humans to do it. They'd let the system do it on its own. It can't. It's not "fully autonomous".
We can play with words and accept whatever terminological obfuscation Waymo wants to impose in order to pimp its wares, or we can accept that current systems have limitations, and choose to understand the real SOTA over marketing.
_____________
[1] Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider idib.
The simple reality with remote controllers is that there is a lot of extra network latency that pretty much makes any real time controlling of the car impractical. Most of this stuff happens over mobile networks too so there might be package loss, low resolution video. Maybe the video freezes for a second or two occasionally. Etc.
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:
If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.
A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
Agree. Also, you have a general intelligence and a pair of eyes, not just a pair of eyes. In the absence of an artificial general intelligence, we need better sensors than a human has if we are to hope to approximate human performance.
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
Tesla’s approach is smarter than Waymo. Maybe Tesla won’t win, perhaps a Chinese firm, but the winner will follow a vision based system and not a micro-mapping LIDAR system.
Humans are not capable of safely operating motor vehicles. For a combination of practical and psychological reasons, we accept them as safe enough, stuffing the tens of thousands of Americans who get mowed down each year into the backs of our heads. But we know what the genuinely safe version of human-operated vehicles looks like, because we do it for planes, and it involves quite a lot of complex instruments other than the human eyeball.
It would be an absolute catastrophe for the developers of autonomous vehicles to decide there's no need to do better than human drivers.
Human eyes and vision system are so much better than current cameras and GPUs they aren't really comparable.
Also we should be aiming at creating autonomous driving systems that are SAFER than humans and this requires as many sensor modalities as possible. Vision + LIDAR + Radar + Sonar + terahertz Radar.
Are there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar?
Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it.
You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.
Tesla don't belong in a list of companies with working autonomous driving systems.
They might get there one day but, since they've been breaking promises about it for longer than those other companies have been in existence, at this point it's reasonable to treat what they have to say with extreme scepticism.
Everyone at Tesla probably thinks they should use LiDAR but Musk doesn't want to so they don't. Just like so many people must have told Musk using stainless steel for the body of the cybertruck was a terrible idea and he did it anyway. Musk is deep in the "only talks with yes men" phase of being a billionaire.
There is plenty of people saying that Tesla has unsupervised Robotaxis comparable with Waymo, however someone did a research https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 , turns out their cars are limited to a single Geofenced Bus Route.
Congratulations to the Waymo team! I was excited reading through the overview. What I'm monitoring in the self-driving space is Lidar and Radar integration. There are leaders like Elon with Tesla who insist that they're not necessary yet Waymo has devoted effort for them in their 6th generation. My personal perspective is that Lidar and Radar are a core requirement for self-driving because "These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases."
Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS...
The image caption reads:
Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions.
Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
"Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency."
ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on.
My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.
They already have a partnership with Geely to make their peeople carrier type thing and Hyundai for Ioniqs. I think what they're really saying here is they're standardizing on this so they could theoretically in future put it in any car - or atleast any car manufacturer could adopt it.
They've already talked about this new hardware many times, this is just announcing that said new models are starting fully driverless operations.
Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.
The zeekr vehicle mentioned here is made in an almost entirely dark factory in China. It has very few humans on the floor and spits out 800 cars per day. It’s literally dark in there.
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour?
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
I do a lot of driving in Austin for a living. I am not a fan of these for several reasons. But on average they're quite competent and I see humans do dumber stuff all the time. I can also cut them off in traffic without repercussions!
I disagree, but maybe it’s because I only drive in the areas they operate during rush hour - when everyone’s decision making in traffic is extra impactful about causing delays.
The places I see the most human error are the places Waymos don’t operate - interstates, highways and older narrow neighborhoods.
Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.
Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them.
In some cases, yes. This morning, though, I was stuck behind one that just decided to stop and turn on the hazards in the middle of a two-lane, bidirectional street with no parking. This has happened more than once.
I believe they are waiting for passengers - they usually have some kind of LED display with what looks like initials on the topmost sensor when they're doing this.
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength.
No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up.
This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.
Even if it doesn't allow you to resolve the ambiguity, knowing that there is an ambiguity is extremely valuable. Say the lidar detects a pedestrian but the camera doesn't. Which one do you believe? Well, you propagate the ambiguity and take appropriate action, i.e. slow down, change lanes, etc. Don't drive through an area where there's a decent chance that you're going to kill someone by doing it.
Yes, absolutely. Knowledge about the fact that a conflict between sensors exists is valuable in its own right, it means you are seeing something that needs more work than simple reinforcement.
Fail safe, always. That's what I tried to get at with 'absence of quorum', it means you are in uncharted territory.
You have an extremely detailed world model including a mental model of the drivers and other road users around you. You rely on sight, sound, experience and lots of knowledge. You are aware of the social contracts at work when dealing with shared resources and your brain is many orders of magnitude more powerful than any box full of electronics.
What you can do with 'just vision' misses the fact that you are part of the hardware.
You rely on a moving camera, microphones and vibrations all together. Driven by a supposedly more advanced meatware than what tech can create today, so that it can properly reason even with faulty/missing signals.
Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius
Agreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages.
I bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes.
Unsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying.
Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input.
But the real point is that cameras are cheap, so you can stick them in many many vehicles and gather vast amounts of data for training. This is why Waymo will lose - either to Tesla or more likely a Chinese car manufacturer.
I do not like Elon because I do not think nazi salutes or racism are cool, but I do think Tesla are correct here. Waymo wins for a while, then it dies.
Cameras are only "cheap" because of mobile phone camera development, radar/lidar is going through the same process with car and mobile robotics.
So the "we can train cheaply because of lots of cameras" falls down when, for example, BYD has all of its cars with lidar for ADAS but can collect the data for training as well as the vision from cameras and whatever other sensors like tyre pressures and suspension readings and all the other sensors that are on a modern car.
The argument that we can make the cars cheaper in the future by not collecting the additional data now has been proven wrong by the CN and KR manufacturers.
That's also independent of the whole EV side of things.
It's just that the cost of lidars are falling like crazy, with new automotive lidars using phased-array laser optics instead of what waymo started with (mechanically scanned lidars)
The data is key. You need a lot of homogenous data collected at vast scale over places and time, and you need to be able to synthesise data accurately.
Waymo gets limited data from very limited locations, and will have a harder time synthesising data than others.
Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.
Humans are not good drivers when it comes to long, monotonous rides (because we get tired)
But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.
Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
> humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well
In May 2016, Tesla Model S driver Joshua Brown died in Williston, Florida, when his vehicle on Autopilot collided with a white tractor-trailer that turned across the highway. The Autopilot system and driver failed to detect the truck's white side against a brightly lit sky, causing the car to pass underneath the trailer.
Our eyes are supported by our brain's AGI which can evaluate the input from our eyes in context. All Tesla had is a camera, and it didn't perform as well as eyes + AGI would have.
When you don't have AGI, additional sensors can provide backup. LiDAR would have saved Joshua Brown's life.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me.
The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty.
For which car? The older the car (hardware) version the worse it is. I've never had any front camera blinding issues with a 2022 car (HW3).
The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data.
It doesn't run well on HW3 at all. HW4 has significantly better FSD when running comparable versions (v14). The software has little to do with the front camera getting blinded though.
"works fine" as in can follow a wide asphalt roads' white lines. That is absolutely trivial thing, Lego mind storms could follow a line just fine with a black/white sensor.
This vision clearly doesn't scale to more complex scenarios.
I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.
This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
> I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.
> This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
Whether sensor fusion makes sense is a highly domain specific question. Guidance like "pick a sensor and stick with it" might have been correct for the projects you've worked on, but there's no reason to think this translates well to other domains.
For what it's worth, sensor fusion is extremely common in SLAM type applications.
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.
There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.
I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
The other day I slammed the brakes at a green light, because I could hear sirens approaching -- even though the buildings on the corner prevented any view of the approaching fire trucks or their flashing lights. Do Teslas not have this ability?
Nuanced point: Even if vision alone were sufficient to drive, adding sensors to the cars today could speed up development. Tesla‘s world model could be improved, speeding up development of the vision only model that is truly autonomous.
Stongly disagree. I don‘t like the fella but thinking that he founds and successfully manages SpaceX and Tesla to their market value _by chance_ is ridiculous.
> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
I would firmly disagree with that.
What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc.
The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips.
The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors.
If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now.
SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.
You say that you disagree with my point, but then your first paragraph just restates my argument. And your subsequent paragraphs don‘t refer to my comment at all.
I never claimed he‘s a good engineer, nor that he has high EQ, nor that he is honest, nor that he has sole responsibility for the success of his companies.
Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced
themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).
Lowest cost per mile will win and Tesla's cyber cab doesn't need expensive suite of sensors. They use lidar in their validation/calibration test cars which is the correct use of lidar. People are already driving USA coast to coast without an SINGLE intervention. It's already over, Tesla has won, Waymo cant compete on cost.
Been hearing this bullshit for a decade. Any day now…
Meanwhile Waymo is doing half a million rides a week, and Tesla is doing what, a few dozen? Maybe? Maybe zero? Who knows, because they lie and obfuscate about everything. Meanwhile I can go take a Waymo right now in cities all over America.
Well, given that Elon openly lies on investor calls...
One of his latest, on the topic of rain/snow/mist/fog and handling with cameras:
"Well, we have made that a non-issue as we actually do photon counting in the cameras, which solves that problem."
No, Elon, you don't. For two reasons: reason one, part A, the types of cameras that do photon counting don't work well for normal 'vision'/imagery associated with cameras, and part B, are not actually present in your cars at all. And reason two, photon counting requires the camera being in an enclosed space to work, which cars on the road ... aren't.
What Elon has mastered the art of is making statements that sound informed, pass the BS detector of laypeople, and optionally are also plausibly deniable if actually called out by an SME.
> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?".
Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents.
I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.
I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.
It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.
It’s vaporware and it’s dollars and cents. Tesla EVs are already too expensive. He has no margin to include thousands more on sensors, alternative being the lawsuits that would follow if he admits it was all vaporware.
I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too.
I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I don't think they're that far behind Waymo where it really matters, which is the thing actually working.
Nice illusion of competence on easy conditions…Until it hits a person and Tesla EV performs far worse than the Waymo both during th crash and afterwards PR wise. Guarantee you Elon will throw the driver under the bus for not watching, not his sketchy system.
Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving?
As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
(1) is true, but actually driving is definitely harder without hearing or with diminished hearing. And Several US states, including CA, prohibit inhibiting hearing while driving, e.g., by wearing a headset, earbuds, or earplugs.
Human inner ear is worse than a $3 IMU in your average smartphone in literally every way. And that IMU also has a magnetometer in it.
Beating human sensors wasn't hard for over a decade now. The problem is that sensors are worthless. Self-driving lives and dies by AI - all the sensors need to be is "good enough".
Human hearing is excellent. Good directional perception and sensitivity.
Eyesight is the weakest sense. Poor color sensitivity, low light sensitivity, blindspot. The terrible natural design flaws are compensated by natural nystagmas and the brain filling in the blanks.
Well, in TFA the far more successful manufacturer of self driving cars is saying you're wrong. I think they're in much better position to know than you :)
I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
It was actually about all kinds of information about the safety of their cars, how the company handles collisions, how they decide to make human drivers take over, details of injuries caused by their cars, etc.
The DMV required them to submit their safety data before allowing the vehicles on the road. Waymo claims that the data the DMV needed about the public safety of their cars, and the emails they exchanged about it with regulators, were entirely "trade secrets" to keep them hidden from the public who understandably felt like they should be able to access that information since those cars are going to be on their streets.
I think past experience shows that the US prefers a wait and see approach - owning in part I think to it federal structure, where states compete for companies good graces and money, so if State A bans something, State B will allow it and gain an advantage in that area.
Moreover, why draw a hard line on vision only when there is existing technology is available to augment it? It's not like they have to develop 3 novel technologies.
There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) without some extra guidance. Whether Waymo's business model makes sense primarily depends on how often these agents need to intervene (unlike safety drivers where you need one safety driver per vehicle and you're just running an expensive taxi).
This is just quibbling about semantics, and with arbitrary definitions of "safety driver" on top. Waymo's remote operators are clearly safety drivers: they are there to improve the safety of their safe-driving cars. Otherwise, why are they needed?
>This is just quibbling about semantics, and with arbitrary definitions of "safety driver" on top.
Dunno, you're engaging in the same "quibbling about semantics" and "arbitrary definitions", when for all intents and purposes, Waymo is fully autonomous. Is there any meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous? If we're sending a space probe to alpha centauri, then the last 1% would be very important, because help is light-years away, but the same isn't true for autonomous cars. What's more misleading, claiming that 99% autonomy is "fully autonomous", or claiming that waymo "uses safety drivers" while omitting the fact that they're rarely used, in contrast to other vendors (eg. uber, when they were doing tests) where they also have "safety drivers" monitoring the car all the time?
Who said Waymo Driver is "99% autonomous"? You did. I didn't. If I thought it is, I wouldn't mind calling it "fuly autonomous". But I don't think it's "99% autonomous", otherwise it wouldn't need remote safety drivers.
To clarify, how Waymo's remote safety drivers operate is that they are called to make decisions that the Waymo Driver can't make, when it gets in situations that are not covered by its training. Here's the relevant text from further down the Waymo blog post:
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
Note the wording "The Waymo Driver ... remains in control of driving". That has a very precise meaning.
In plain English, the Waymo Driver asks a human to choose a destination for it and then it autonomously follows a path to that destination. That's autonomous path planning, but not autonomous navigation. Path planning is common as sparrows [1] and it's certainly not enough to qualify a system as "fully autonomous", despite Waymo's marketing copy to the contrary.
If Waymo Driver was "fully autonomous" even to the "99%" extent you say I'm quibbling about (I'm not) then it would be capable of autonomous navigation without any support from humans. If it didn't manage to do it right all the time we'd say it has some error, not that it's not fully autonomous. Like when a blender fails to blend my bastard sword, I won't say the blander can't blend, I'll just say it can't blend my bastard sword.
Btw I deliberately left the first sentence in the quote above where Waymo says "the Waymo Driver takes the lead" just in case leaving it out created the impression I'm trying to downplay the system's capabilities. It's rather the other way around. "Takes the lead" is a completely useless anthropomorphizing of an automated system made in order to create an impression of capabilities that the system doesn't have. Most likely the procedure that "takes the lead" is a hand-coded routine that calls home when some set of variables crosses a threshold. More like a tripwire than "takes the lead".
The Waymo Driver is not "fully autonomous". It's an impressively well-functioning and safe system, to the extent we can trust the scant data shared by Waymo, which we can't totally because that data is itself only shared for the purpose of marketing, but nobody needs to accept Waymo's press releases as reality.
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[1] Really. There's dozens upon dozens of different approaches. I'm on my other computer and I don't have access to my papers-to-read folder but there's just one survey I often quote that lists three different categories each with many sub-categories. It's not so much an open problem as one where it's difficult to choose a solution, just because there are so many around. One way or another, no system is "fully autonomous" just because it can autonomously follow a path between points A and B, while avoiding obstacles. I even worked on one myself.
They're there to improve the availability of their self- driving cars. If they were to all just walk away, there would be no danger of crashes, but a lot more of their cars stopped in inconvenient places.
There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".
This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?
Everything you’ve mentioned don’t do anything to diminish the magnitude of this achievement in the slightest. It’s clearly just FUD and most people see it as that. There are dozens of refutations of everything you’ve pointed out in this thread already. Maybe besides DoorDash, what’s that about?
>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?
They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.
The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.
This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.
From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing:
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.
I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit.
I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.
I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.
It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.
I think this thread conflating between walkable and having good transit. A walkable city means almost everything you need is within walking distance. That doesn’t mean there are buses or trains to take you out of this area. I live in a walkable part of the city. Within a 15-minute walk, there are three supermarkets, perhaps twenty restaurants with different cuisines, four pharmacies, one each of USPS/UPS/FedEx for shipping, four different banks, three dry cleaners… you get the idea. The only transportation tool I need is my two legs.
Now of course sometimes I’m not content staying within this 15-minute circle. Then I simply choose the fastest method of transport to get there. Is BART or Muni faster than the Waymo trip? Then yes I’ll take pubic transportation. That’s what good transit is for.
NotJustBikes doesn't have a particularly great reputation among transit enthusiasts. A lot of his videos have become repetitive and focused on complaints rather than specific ways of making things better. Understandably, few people are willing to spend an hour listening to someone complain on the Internet.
> "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities..."
Congestion charges. Limited licensing for TNCs. Dedicated public or private holding areas rather than "milling about". All of these have solutions.
> Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks.
It is already best practice in urban design to separate cars that need to quickly transit an area without interacting with it into completely independent routes where there are no bikes or pedestrians, and combine transit/bikes/walking into livable mixed mode streets where cars are not allowed. NotJustBikes has many examples of this, most commonly around Europe.
> To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity.
This is what already happens in places that don't have usable, safe, or car-competitive transit, modulo autonomous, including currently most of North America. The solution to needing fewer cars -- self driving or not -- is investment in transit and in ground-up overhaul of existing cities to optimize for transit and deprioritization of cars.
This is my complaint about many types of YouTube pundits.
I had tuned in to some channels for analysis and insightful commentary, for example, film and TV series.
But every one devolved into “Worst episode ever!” and “<studio> has RUINED <franchise>!”
So to sum up, the YouTube recommendations algorithm has ruined independent criticism and there is nothing on anymore. Join my Patreon, “UnJustLikes” for the deep dive!
No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.
Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be.
Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.
But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested.
In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
>In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
All the incentives you described exists today. On any given road any space devoted to sidewalks or bike lanes means less space for cars, and you already need separation between car lanes and sidewalks. You also have the same incentive to "restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space", because any controlled access roadway increases speed and throughput. Finally if you restrict pedestrians to certain areas (we all live in megatowers?), that actually makes taxis (including robotaxis) less attractive relative to public transit, because their whole value proposition is that they take you exactly where you want to go. Therefore it's unclear how automated cars would make things worse.
I hate how much space in cities is devoted to cars, and I wish we had much better transit of all sorts.
But - I'm just not sure your analysis is right. Someone who drives a self-owned car will park it in a downtown area for hours. Someone who takes a taxi of any sort will use much, much less amortized parking spot space. New York is a pretty good example of this.
Good public transit beats the snot out of cars, but a dense taxi deployment seems to get more people moved per total car-dedicated-space than private car drivership does.
And if we can reduce the amount of space dedicated to parking, we can increase density, which reduces the need for driving.
So the problem will be if we have self-driving whatevers at the expense of public transit, but perhaps not if it's at the expense of private car drivership.
Why would driverless cars mill around? They would just wait around in underground garages. They can even block each other, so they don't need that much space to park.
My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems.
This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
Cool, so where can I buy a car in which, wherever I am, I can comfortably sit at the back knowing that it will take me to destination like a good driver? Or that I can summon to come to pick me up?
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
I don't understand the sarcasm. Driverless trains for mass transit are in operation in lots of places around the world and have been for some time (eg the Docklands light railway in London) https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/dlr/
Driverless personal transportation is the unsolved problem.
Weirdly, DLR trains still have an attendant onboard. A better example of a fully centrally operated train would be something like the SkyTrain lines in Vancouver.
The attendant is a legacy of a union settlement as I understand it. It's not actually required for the ooperation of the system.
The book The Box discusses similar compromises that were made with the longshoremen unions during the transition from conventional hull-packing to containers. There's a certain fairness to it at least for a time, but the technology existing to make the role truly unnecessary does prime things for the next round of discussions when it can be fully eliminated or moved to an off-board overseer remotely monitoring multiple trains at once.
Not all DLR trains. They do things like keep an eye on people and check tickets - there aren't any ticket barriers.
The point is that we don't have mass transit in most places in the US. Trains and light rail are indisputably better for everyone but we're betting the entire country on yet more cars.
Maybe even have multiple people in each pod, and on the set track, have common stops where people are likely to get on/off.
Then have the track go to each persons doorstep. Also make sure the pod shows up within 5 minutes at your doorstep when you hail it from your phone. Each pod should be private and airconditioned. Each pod should also lay its own track when driving to remote locations.
They actually invented something like that called a train around 1804 and very soon when they've developed it a bit more it will solve all our traffic problems.
Because trains are famously awesome for the last mile(s)?
It's a tongue-in-cheek description of how buses and trams work. ie: It's not a new idea, we just tacked "driverless" onto it.
I think the idea is that they could go full speed in sync, then afterwards they could still take you to your doorstep.
The commenter was being sarcastic about trains I think, but while we should be using public transport where possible there is sometimes a need for door-to-door transport so I don't see why we can't explore new ideas that may combine some of the advantages of both for certain use cases
Trams are pretty ok
Tube/metro too.
In high to very high density living contexts, when done right, yes.
I agree. The only wrinkle is that it's impractical to build a train line from my house to the train station.
Power could be delivered by overhead catenary wire. Battery and/or ultra caps could handle if it has to go off wire.
Anything that isn’t point to point transit, or requires interacting with the public, is a non-starter for most people in the developed world.
Even in Japan, half of commutes are by car and that number has been growing.
Not sure where you are getting this information. Where there are trains, people take the trains far more.
In Tokyo, the vast majority of passengers rely on the extensive and efficient train system, which is often considered the best in the world. Cars are less commonly used due to high parking costs, traffic congestion, and the convenience of public transportation options like trains and subways.
Transportation Options in Tokyo Train Passengers
Car Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Greater_TokyoYou just re-invented trollies
If automation fails on a track, there are many people dead and toxic chemicals spilled everywhere - just look at US freight accidents. With orders of magnitude more mass, 3x less friction than tire/asphalt and no way to steer, many avoidable accidents are now also fatal. Now you need grade separation so this whole thing isn't compatible with pedestrians and bikes. But sure, keep posting this tired joke.
Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.
Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....
In the Midwest, golf carts are exactly what people use to get around in small towns. It's not unreasonable that neighborhoods might be closed to large vehicles and use other forms of transit within their boundaries.
I use an electric scooter to get around areas where a car would be inappropriate or undesired. I keep it in the back of my car always (along with my helmet, gloves and goggles) so that I can pull it out when needed.
Pretty convenient when I unexpectedly find myself needing to use a parking garage and such. The scooter can take me out of the parking garage and into the building with no issue. And then I can keep it with me in the building until it's time to get back to the car.
It's also probably cheaper than a golf cart - mine was just about $3,600 brand new. Though used carts are probably cheaper still, and there are also much cheaper scooters.
I actually used to use only an electric scooter for transit, but then I got hit by a pickup truck who didn't check the bike lane before turning. So I did driver's ed, got my license and leased a BEV.
Cool! I thought this is more a thing of elderly care centers. I like the drivingfeeling of golf carts, so I would clearly do this as well if it would be allowed on public streets. Though on most streets with all these SUV around, it will feel unsafe for me.
The state reduced regulation around vehicle registration so farmers can drive their SxSs and ATVs on the street (with some restrictions, obviously they don't go on the interstate) and then people in town registering their golf carts or whatever as second cars for around town stuff.
Oh golf carts were awesome in small lake communities in PA. Was much better than driving cars down those narrow roads and made much more sense for shorter distances. Plus kids got more freedom since we were allowed to drive the carts well before we could get drivers licenses (Might not be good to be as lax in a larger city though)
Seems like more of a sunbelt thing.
That's fascinating, I didn't know that! What are some example cities/towns where this is common?
Grew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.
yeah, I can say that except for elder areas (not necessarily dedicated facilities, but there are things like "RV parks" which cater mostly to older folks but also families; they usually have 10mph speed limits), I've never seen someone driving a golf cart around town while I've lived in MI, OH, or PA.
I do see people driving horse-drawn carriages, ATVs (probably illegally), snowmobiles (legally in some parts of MI during Winter or condition-dependent), and riding mowers (probably illegally) in and around towns, though. Very rarely, I see someone driving an e-bike; this rareness is mostly because they aren't allowed on the sidewalks here and there's no bike lane, so you need to drive and signal like a car, which is pretty awkward given how many e-bikes don't even come with real brake lights (though many falsely advertise red rear running lights as a brake light, which'd be illegal to drive unless you hand-signal whenever you brake).
> Grew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.
Well, I guess you are not as well traveled in the Midwest as you think.
There are even laws about this: https://www.cityofdelafieldwi.gov/678/Golf-Cart-Permit
I've seen it in North Dakota fwiw, summer only obviously. Loads of them in Palm Springs also.
Where in ND? (On a golf course?)
Tom Scott visits Peachtree City, Georgia
https://youtu.be/pcVGqtmd2wM
Is there anything in Georgia not named Peachtree?
Coronado Island, near San Diego, California, for one.
Sun City, Arizona, though these are golf communities/mega-master-planned communities. Coronado is a better example of a mixed vehicle environment with golf carts bopping around all the time on the same streets.
Coronado isn't a good example. Or at least not one that scales, that's a VERY affluent neighborhood.
The golf cart isn't a replacement for a car, it's one you have on the side. I would argue that its partially because they're easier to park in a very touristy environment
Interesting that this seems like a slam-dunk argument for why reusable rockets and other improvements are practically impossible (e.g. "we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it's a physical impossibility"), and wouldn't matter in any case for structural reasons (e.g. "market inelasticity (cutting launch cost in half wouldn't make much of a difference)", yet in the fifteen years since it was written launch costs have fallen to a third of what they were, continue to fall, and the number of payloads to orbit has gone up by an order of magnitude or more (so much for "market inelasticity").
Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.
What you envision might happen in 2100+
Google was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching”
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap...
https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
And the HN discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745
Have you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want.
http://zoox.com
Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.
Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it.
Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.
Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.
And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver?
https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?).
However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.
So in other words, like literally every other word out of Elon’s mouth for a decade now, it’s incredibly dishonest. He lies about everything, all the time, without any acknowledgment. Nothing is ever delivered on time, most of it isn’t delivered at all, and virtually every bit of promised capability is exaggerated.
Why does anyone want to do business with a person or company like that? I genuinely do not understand.
Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.
The unsupervised area is a tiny subset of the supervised area.
Any evidence of this?, even it its true right now, and they are being ultra cautious, (they are hardly going to just dump 100k unsupervised teslas in one week), it won't stay that way for long. They will overtake Waymo in a few months, then kill them by the end of the year.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qvf7hu/te...
It's unsurprising someone so out of the loop on its true status is so hyped on it's future...
If robotaxi was doing legit rides, Elon would be posting about it 20 times a day.
Reddit is extremely anti Musk and Tesla, that sub reddit being the typical example. Let's just wait and see where we are in 6 months.
This is totally false. If there are any truly autonomous robotaxis in Austin (a bit if, since Tesla has repeatedly lied and faked things like this in the past), it’s only a handful and they’re limited to a tiny area. The “robotaxis” with a safety driver are the ones that have the bigger area, probably because Tesla sucks at actual self-driving. Still. After a decade of broken promises and shitty engineering practices.
Elon has been blatantly lying about FSD for years, and yet the fans still take whatever he says as gospel. And yet the skeptics are the ones with EDS? lol, ok.
> and there won't be, for years, if ever.
That is a lot of confidence. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space?
What makes you so certain?
Because camera only simply won't be reliable enough with current technology.
Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them.
I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target and their paper might become obsolete the next day.
FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.
Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.
Not a single waymo requires a "safety driver" and the self driving never disengages the way it does on Teslas.
Waymo routinely uses safety drivers, sorry, "autonomous specialists" when expanding to new cities[1][2]. Waymo cars occasionally contact the remote support. If support is not available, the cars just stay where they stopped[3].
Tesla has rolled out a small number of cars with no safety driver[4].
In short, you are either grossly misinformed or intentionally lying. Is it a political echochamber you are stuck in?
[1] https://waymo.com/faq/ "Our vehicles are primarily driving autonomously, but you’ll sometimes notice that our cars have autonomous specialists riding in the driver’s seat. These specialists are there to monitor our autonomous driving technology and share important feedback to help us improve the Waymo experience."
[2] https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk/ "Our autonomous specialists who are present in the vehicle during testing are highly trained professionals."
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36zdxl41jro
[4] https://youtu.be/03e5ixbXIa4
You are grossly misinformed. Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times. In novel situations humans will provide instructions on what path to take but this is relatively infrequent. Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control when the car does something stupid. The small number of robotaxis without safety drives are limited to a tiny area and not open to the public.
Waymo works while robotaxi doesn't.
> Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times
Consumer version of FSD can park a car if a driver doesn't take contol[1]. Waymo seems to require a remote command to initiate parking instead of just standing there with hazard lights on[2].
> Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control
Every single robotaxi in Austin doesn't have a driver behind the wheel. So a driver can't be ready to take control. Stop lying. I no longer believe that you are misinformed.
[1] https://youtu.be/VU3i1Pgk4M0?t=1460
[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r... "We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately"
Technology is moving fast.
When do you think it will be reliable enough?
Not for a very long time. Just think about how big of an advantage lidar and radar are at night or radar is in snow and rain?
If Tesla had been smart they would have used regular cameras and event based cameras where the pixels send a signal whenever their brightness changes enough. These can have microsecond latency. And multi spectral cameras. Combined this data would provide very rich data for neural networks.
Sounds like you’re an expert. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space? In what capacity?
I'm not an expert, just someone who understand how these technologies work. Sensor fusion is a fascinating thing.
lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
> lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
A year? They'll be gone in two weeks!
Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
> None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile".
With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the point now where an internet enabled phone is basically disposable, costing people ~ a few hours of wages.
History has shown that technology costs decrease over time, and rapidly if it's a critically important technology. If you don't agree, share a counter example.
Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k which is not 'a few hours of wages' well not for most of us. I agree technology prices decreases over time but Waymo is starting at 5x the cost, by the time a Waymo costs even the same price as a Model Y, let alone a Cybercab it will be too late. That's my prediction, I could be wrong though, maybe Elon and Tesla are lying and so are all the users of least version of FSD.
> Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k
https://www.walmart.com/ip/ST-MOTOROLA-XT2413V-CDMA-LTE-BLUE...
Try to avoid cherry picking if you want to have a discussion where you or the other person learns something. All the Elon stans on this site that I've encountered are highly disingenuous, starting to think that's not a coincidence.
Been hearing this for years now. But sure, any day now…
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo
Tesla is far behind Waymo on all meaningful measures.
Waymo sells more than 450k rides every week. Tesla is nowhere near that number.
Waymo offers rides in six cities. Tesla does two.
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.
Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.
The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components.
Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
> Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
The consumer does not care about which car picks them up or what hardware integration it has. The consumer cares about which car is available in their service area, how quickly it will arrive, how much it will cost, how quickly it can get to their destination, and that it will do so safely.
> Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.
I am only refuting the claim that Tesla has reached parity with Waymo in Austin. They are nowhere near.
Because Tesla has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, I will want to see Tesla scale up the robotaxi business to the level of Waymo (which is currently far ahead) before I proclaim them the winner.
You are not really backing your claims with facts or numbers, just opinion and future predictions which may or may not come true.
I hope they are both successful, find their own niche, and even more players enter the market.
Agree, competition is healthy.
> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have.
> didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware
A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.
I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but
> If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion.
That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)
They'd need one more thing, a time machine.
TSLA market cap was about 50B for the first several years of their FSD effort.
I think they'd choose lidar if they started now.
If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T
You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
You can. It’s called a secondary offering. The SEC has a whole process.
You can sell more stock to raise money regardless of market cap.
They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.
If you ordered 8M LIDARs, the unit price would quickly plummet. Thankfully, this is already happening thanks to Chinese efforts in that space.
This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.
$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)
You're years out of date on that number. I doubt it's been true this decade. Reasonable current estimates are under a few tens of thousand at most.
No, I know how much each honeycomb costs (BOM cost, that is); pretty confident on the radars; and I can guess at the cameras and compute.
Then they're way behind others in the industry, and I'm not sure I believe that given the people I know there.
Then you should be asking them instead of arguing with random internet people
It's between 7k (chinese) and 17k (european) now.
You are either intentionally lying or very confident about facts you don't know. Could you please source your numbers?
You are confident that I am wrong - why don't you share your source?
I'm giving ballpark numbers because I am in this space and don't want to dox myself.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
Parity is not defined by how willing one is to let their robots kill the general public.
Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.
> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.
Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.
It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.
> In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
I just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.
Failures happen. That sounds like a death trap (literally, since EVs are challenging to escape after a failure).
You should look up how hard it is to escape a plane after a failure
I think what you're looking for is a bike.
I was thinking in the same direction when I wrote my 5000 word analysis on the current state of VLAMs. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/visual-language-action-model...
Yeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing to just speed and turn correctly(I.e 2 params). You also seem to overestimate the inertia of the tech advantage. Being first is not always the most important thing. See google AI as prime example.
The failure of self-driving cars has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with regulation. It’s been demonstrated time and again that statistically, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars.[1]
Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4
Your link does not prove your point. It's about ADAS and even shows that it is not universally safer than human driving.
> However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur more frequently than Human-Driven Vehicle accidents under dawn/dusk or turning conditions, which is 5.25 and 1.98 times higher, respectively.
>> The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
Maybe a part of the fault is also the self driving systems themselves that keep crashing and killing people. I don’t have data to say with certainty whether self driving cars are safer or less safe than humans(I think they are less safe especially if taken out of their “trial” zones/sampling) but I can tell you that is less acceptable for self driving cars to kill people than it is for humans for “obvious” reasons especially when the self driving cars do this due stupid mistakes that a human driver would not (I.e goes straight into another car in plain day).
Do you have some insight we don't have?
I mean yes, there are really good systems, but the heavy, long tail is still not solved.
No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
Sure. But they can be way better than human drivers with only cameras. Visibility is rarely the cause of car crashes. Reaction time. Decision making. Follow distance. Speed. All these things are way more important to get right than "seeing through fog"
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
When Tesla engineers/Elon talk about it it's usually pitched as a safety thing, by standardizing on one sensor they reduce "sensor contention". Famously Karpathy once described radar as a source of noise that held their vision sensors back.
I don't know who will end up being right in the long term, however I don't think this was a form choice, I think they believe a pure camera system will be more functional.
Funny.
the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that
So you hope the people keeping you safe continue to put themselves in danger for you. Got it.
Yup. I came in to ask that same question. Lot of money potentially “left on the table”.
Musk has been talking about this (generalizing the self driving model for their Optimus bot) for a while now.
Which is why their strategy (purely vision/photons in, controls out) seems to be more widely applicable and scalable over time.
And waymo seems to be arriving there too as they keep reducing the equipment (it would seem)
The industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about.
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
This is about the opposite of reality. Tesla is way behind in actually deploying autonomous vehicles, and other robotaxi makers with real deployments besides Waymo also use lidar.
Yeah millions of miles per day in autonomous driving for Tesla. Yes it's still supervised (somewhat, you don't have to pay much attention anymore) but the technology is absolutely there and just being refined at this point.
Waymos are geofenced, restricted to certain roads, and have remote humans in the loop at lot more than most people assume.
Not actually autonomous until it can be more or less trusted to handle itself, without constant human supervision. Until then, it's just prototype or testing miles.
Tesla's current robotaxi deployment is also geofenced and monitored by humans -- moreso than Waymo, even -- but of course Tesla superfans always conveniently leave that out of the narrative.
I don't think you understand that the level of autonomy that anyone with FSD currently has. It drives itself for hours with 0 interventions. Someone did a coast-to-coast drive with no interventions. Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?
They will turn of the supervision requirements soon, and suddenly there will be hundreds of thousands of teslas that can drive themselves.
The skepticism is hard to get.
> Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?
Yes, because you're confusing "can generally make the decisions necessary to drive by itself" with "can be trusted to drive by itself with a non-attentive human occupant".
> They will turn of the supervision requirements soon
Oh, totally; this year, right?
The complete lack of self awareness is absolutely astounding.
Yeah it’ll happen this year. Please mark my words.
Waymos get stuck in weird situations every day. They need intervention, even on their guardrails. FSD is of course not perfect, but yes they have obviously cracked the code (it’s obvious if you use it or get beyond the groupthink here), and are being cautious with turning off supervision requirements. As they should.
This must be a sarcasm, right?
ya'll are so biased because of politics
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.
You might want to look up the price of lidar in 2026 before talking about affordability.
Dude, $26k Chinese cars come with lidar in the base configuration
Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.
Most cars don't have a paid driver. Uber, taxis, and trucking is a tiny minority of drivers.
I guess your time isn't vlauable.
It's been a while since I looked it up but I understand the human is about 50% of taxi operating costs. That's not trivial of course but it's also not dwarfing vehicle costs.
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
This yes.
> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.
This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.
We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.
> The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment.
And regulatory capture by the incumbent. Reach the top then push for regulation behind you. Thats’s one big additional obstacle to overcome for a new player.
OpenAI was so willing to support regulating AI just as soon as they thought they’ve gained enough of an advantage over the competition and they can burn the bridge behind them.
I think this post just got brigaded, wow.
I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible.
(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
It seems tough culturally.
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down.
At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements.
Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter.
There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there.
What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work.
Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day).
This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
Of course a new genre defining company can do what existing companies did and vastly increase the market if they make it better, more efficient, easier whatever. All taxi companies are not all transportation needs, not even on the road. Busses, planes, etc. There will be really new market niches, how about if your RV lets you sleep comfortably and drives all night, you never need to pay or stop (if you can sleep in a moving vehicle), gas or charge itself up.
I was thinking it won't be just one company with this tech, so they'll compete and reduce the value of driverless cars down, by attacking the profit of each other. That would be healthier than having pseudo monopoly power because there are only 2 of them - like say ios and android are basically the world of cell phones, with a few very tiny other companies.
>The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
Were there even reliable metrics for this? They only seem small like car dealerships seem small - not of consolidation.
Cosign, there's a reason it took forever and a day for Waymo to actually scale. It's great stuff, changed the way I live, but they gotta wince at the economics.
Anecdote: living in an area where Waymo is becoming mainstream, but we've been seeing their mapping cars drive around streets for five years prior.
Waymo has been attracting outside capital just fine.
I think the bigger issue is that Cruise was not succeeding at building the driver.
Cruise was shutdown after a safety incident, same as Uber.
I feel like the bigger issue is that Cruise evidently had an unsafe company culture (like Uber): It wasn't just that they had an incident, it's that they lied about the incident and tried to cover things up.
This has been a pretty consistent pattern -- Cruise was always less transparent about its safety data than Waymo, and its claims tended to be opaque and non-measurable, whereas Waymo was partnering with insurance companies to get hard data.
Waymo is going to have incidents, too, but I think they have made the (correct) decision that being open and transparent about safety stuff is the way they move past those; Cruise made a decision in the opposite direction, and it killed them.
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
If that were really the risk they would spin them out.
I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
Cruise was always run as a separate business from GM until they shut it down. I think they got too nervous about committing to the Silicon Valley investment style: high capital, high risk, long time horizon, high reward.
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
(Also former Cruise employee)
Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary.
(Another former employee)
I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways.
(Another former).
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero.
That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
But Waymo or their competitors are not in the "shuttling people around" business. They're developing a driver. Robotaxi is one of the applications.
The winner-takes-all aspect comes from economies of scale for example. If Waymo is several years ahead and has better economics, how can Cruise catch up? They will have lower cost of capital. Top people will want to work at Waymo rather than Cruise. It will be hard to close the R&D gap. When Cruise is where Waymo is today, Waymo will already have a lightweight package that will be used by Ford, VW or Toyota and capable to drive everywhere in any weather conditions.
I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?
People who drive their own cars are larger than all. You can find single markets where those people are more than all combined world wide.
I think there is probably a healthy subset of people on here who take Uber etc. all the time. I, on the other hand, maybe take it a half-dozen times a year (plus some private cars to the airport).
I'd love a really good driver assistive system for my car (ala FSD today) but I likely wouldn't actually get driven around a lot more unless the economics were more compelling than seem likely anytime soon.
For most people the economics won't every work out. Uber/Taxis make sense if you only need them a few times per year. However even if the driver is free, if you are using your car daily as most people do it won't work out.
People who yell "share" forget that most people are driving during rush hour, and so the car will be idle the rest of the day anyway. As such there isn't that much money to save by sharing a car.
In my observation, some cities that have "OK" public transit, people can make-do without cars if they Uber, Zipcar, traditional rentals, walk, and use transit. I also observe that it involves a lot of juggling and probably not regular well-outside-of-town trips.
Absent driving yourself at all, you're going to be very limited most places. Which may be OK for continuing a college lifestyle but mostly doesn't work unless you have a partner who handles the driving.
Try to raise prices and see how fast those regional "monopolies" evaporate. MoviePass was the winner in the "unlimited movie tickets" subscription space.
What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.
1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world.
2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
Tesla has already done a geofenced system in Austin (in the shape of a penis). It went poorly.
For national security reasons, several other countries won't allow Waymo (or Tesla or any other US company) to "win" in their territory. This will ensure that at least a couple other competitors remain worldwide regardless of whether it makes sense in purely economic terms.
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]
[0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/
replacing a gas engine with an electric motor and installing a battery pack is not hard. The EV1 was a pretty bad car. The real secret sauce of modern electric cars is cheap Lithium Ion battery packs.
The EV1 predated the Roadster by a decade. Had GM been improving the EV1 for those 10 years, including Lithium Ion batteries, GM would have been far ahead of everyone . . . had they just kept going with a technology that was inevitable. Where would Cruse be today had they continued with this new technology that is inevitable?
That and making them look like normal cars not futuristic golf carts.
Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course.
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
“Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior)
He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.
Yep. Participants of Waymo's early rider program are under NDA.
Sure, but he test drove with them until they shut down, and they never improved (according to him)
Cruise seemed to have a significantly inferior product based on observed safety and what Cruise employees have said on HN.
"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs"
Nice abbreviation.
You can tell they're enjoying their job.
I loved it.
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens" - sick burn Waymo haha
From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...
Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself:
Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week".
They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car
2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs some technician to come to get a drink unstuck does it make sense to get up and arms about how it's not "fully automated" or whatever? In all contexts why people would care (eg. unit economics, safety, customer experience), there's no meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous.
>> What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever?
Yeah, good point. If Waymo were honest they'd say their system is "autonomous". Fully autonomous implies 100% autonomy. Otherwise, how is it "fully"?
But, hey, don't ask me. Write a paper with robot that is 99% autonomous but a human has to take control every once in a while and see how easy you can get that past any reviewer in robotics or AI.
Come on, you know what the fixation is. Nothing riles up the Tesla fanboys like the clear unambiguous fact that Waymo is doing 1000x better at “full self driving” than Tesla ever has.
Oh dear. You sussed me out, didn't you?
It's like that time with Facebook and MySpace. A while ago now. I was in a student group at uni and this student, call her Alice, asked me for my Facebook. I said I don't have one, I don't like Facebook, and the conversation continued. Later another student came in, call him Bob. Alice told Bob "Where were you, we just had a big fight about Facebook over Myspace". I asked when that happened since I was there and didn't remember it and Alice said "that was me and you. We had a big fight about it. Did you forget?". I said, nonplussed, that I didn't think we had a fight. "But you said you don't like Facebook. So you like MySpace". Said Alice. Oh Alice.
From that I understand that you, like Alice, must be a very astute observer of human behaviour. No hidden motive stays hidden for long, with you, does it? Well done. You got me. I'm a Tesla fanboi. That's what I am, through and through.
They don’t have remote drivers. Your own link says that.
> The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.
…
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Pay close attention to the wording: "The Waymo Driver ... remains in control of driving". That means it applies the controls needed to go from point A to point B on its own. However, it does not choose point A and point B on its own: a human chooses them. That's autonomous path planning, but not autonomous navigation, and certainly not "fully autonomous" anything.
Waymo prevaricates about the "influence" the human operator has on the path taken by the Waymo Driver [1] but it is clear there are situations that the Waymo Driver cannot choose point A and point B on its own, at least safely, otherwise Waymo would not be paying for humans to do it. They'd let the system do it on its own. It can't. It's not "fully autonomous".
We can play with words and accept whatever terminological obfuscation Waymo wants to impose in order to pimp its wares, or we can accept that current systems have limitations, and choose to understand the real SOTA over marketing.
_____________
[1] Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider idib.
> one-in-a-million events
So we just made driving a million times more efficient for human labor input
The simple reality with remote controllers is that there is a lot of extra network latency that pretty much makes any real time controlling of the car impractical. Most of this stuff happens over mobile networks too so there might be package loss, low resolution video. Maybe the video freezes for a second or two occasionally. Etc.
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
I'm a skeptic, because Self Driving is sold as a digital chauffeur.
Not 99% of a chauffeur, 100%. (or 99.99999%)
The roll out of this is clearly limited by the number of remote employees that are filling in the 1%.
> They have been fully autonomous for many years.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
They cannot take over. They can give advice in unusual circumstances.
I don't have to argue about Tesla or what other people are saying about Tesla.
These days they can’t take over, but they sure could years back.
For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:
If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.
A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
Agree. Also, you have a general intelligence and a pair of eyes, not just a pair of eyes. In the absence of an artificial general intelligence, we need better sensors than a human has if we are to hope to approximate human performance.
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
Nice dig at Tesla.
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
A system for personally owned vehicles has been on the roadmap for a long time.
There's a partnership with Toyota related to this: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/04/waymo-and-toyota-outline-stra...
"if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better"
Waymo's approach is proven to be better with every public fully autonomous ride they complete.
Tesla’s approach is smarter than Waymo. Maybe Tesla won’t win, perhaps a Chinese firm, but the winner will follow a vision based system and not a micro-mapping LIDAR system.
“Vision is all you need.”
With costs approaching $200 (if Hesai Group is to be believed - and there's no major reason I know of to doubt them), why won't LIDAR win?
Any evidence for this claim?
I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it.
But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.
Humans are not capable of safely operating motor vehicles. For a combination of practical and psychological reasons, we accept them as safe enough, stuffing the tens of thousands of Americans who get mowed down each year into the backs of our heads. But we know what the genuinely safe version of human-operated vehicles looks like, because we do it for planes, and it involves quite a lot of complex instruments other than the human eyeball.
It would be an absolute catastrophe for the developers of autonomous vehicles to decide there's no need to do better than human drivers.
Human drivers don't use fixed cameras. For one thing, they can move their heads.
Fun fact, people can see light polarization.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4528539/
> But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.
Human drivers also have a brain that computers have struggled to replicate for decades.
Also, many of the Chinese vehicle makers already include LIDARs in their vehicles for their current ADAS
Human eyes and vision system are so much better than current cameras and GPUs they aren't really comparable.
Also we should be aiming at creating autonomous driving systems that are SAFER than humans and this requires as many sensor modalities as possible. Vision + LIDAR + Radar + Sonar + terahertz Radar.
Terahertz radar is a very interesting new kind of radar. https://teradar.com/
Are there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar?
Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it.
You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.
Except for everyone at Tesla.
Tesla don't belong in a list of companies with working autonomous driving systems.
They might get there one day but, since they've been breaking promises about it for longer than those other companies have been in existence, at this point it's reasonable to treat what they have to say with extreme scepticism.
Everyone at Tesla probably thinks they should use LiDAR but Musk doesn't want to so they don't. Just like so many people must have told Musk using stainless steel for the body of the cybertruck was a terrible idea and he did it anyway. Musk is deep in the "only talks with yes men" phase of being a billionaire.
There is plenty of people saying that Tesla has unsupervised Robotaxis comparable with Waymo, however someone did a research https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 , turns out their cars are limited to a single Geofenced Bus Route.
Congratulations to the Waymo team! I was excited reading through the overview. What I'm monitoring in the self-driving space is Lidar and Radar integration. There are leaders like Elon with Tesla who insist that they're not necessary yet Waymo has devoted effort for them in their 6th generation. My personal perspective is that Lidar and Radar are a core requirement for self-driving because "These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases."
Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS...
The image caption reads:
but the image itself for me is blank.It's a video, mate. Look here: https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/5ZEkKDR8uqlAfiQW7f...
Thank you so much!
I’ve had this issue with other Google posts as well. The first video/image on the page doesn’t show up.
Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.
Waymo already has a teen mode for this.
Yeah but I mean consumer versions I can use in my semi rural area. I doubt we will have a Waymo taxi service out here anytime soon.
Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this (https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...) new vehicle design?
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
From the post:
"Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency."
ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on.
My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.
They already have a partnership with Geely to make their peeople carrier type thing and Hyundai for Ioniqs. I think what they're really saying here is they're standardizing on this so they could theoretically in future put it in any car - or atleast any car manufacturer could adopt it.
They've already talked about this new hardware many times, this is just announcing that said new models are starting fully driverless operations.
Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.
The zeekr vehicle mentioned here is made in an almost entirely dark factory in China. It has very few humans on the floor and spits out 800 cars per day. It’s literally dark in there.
Tesla really messed up going for cheap cameras only and no lidar or radar.
This almost sounds as if Waymo pivots from taxi service to automated driver OEM?
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour?
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
I do a lot of driving in Austin for a living. I am not a fan of these for several reasons. But on average they're quite competent and I see humans do dumber stuff all the time. I can also cut them off in traffic without repercussions!
I disagree, but maybe it’s because I only drive in the areas they operate during rush hour - when everyone’s decision making in traffic is extra impactful about causing delays.
The places I see the most human error are the places Waymos don’t operate - interstates, highways and older narrow neighborhoods.
Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.
Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them.
You mean double parking waiting for passengers? Its a taxi, so I doubt it.
Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?
In some cases, yes. This morning, though, I was stuck behind one that just decided to stop and turn on the hazards in the middle of a two-lane, bidirectional street with no parking. This has happened more than once.
I believe they are waiting for passengers - they usually have some kind of LED display with what looks like initials on the topmost sensor when they're doing this.
Maybe the menace is the drivers. That's indisputable when you look at injuries per mile.
I don’t see many injurious car accidents in dense inner-city streets.
Elon in shambles
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450
Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength.
No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up.
This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.
Even if it doesn't allow you to resolve the ambiguity, knowing that there is an ambiguity is extremely valuable. Say the lidar detects a pedestrian but the camera doesn't. Which one do you believe? Well, you propagate the ambiguity and take appropriate action, i.e. slow down, change lanes, etc. Don't drive through an area where there's a decent chance that you're going to kill someone by doing it.
Yes, absolutely. Knowledge about the fact that a conflict between sensors exists is valuable in its own right, it means you are seeing something that needs more work than simple reinforcement.
Fail safe, always. That's what I tried to get at with 'absence of quorum', it means you are in uncharted territory.
Last time I checked I relied entirely on vision to drive autonomously.
That's a very naive way of looking at this.
You have an extremely detailed world model including a mental model of the drivers and other road users around you. You rely on sight, sound, experience and lots of knowledge. You are aware of the social contracts at work when dealing with shared resources and your brain is many orders of magnitude more powerful than any box full of electronics.
What you can do with 'just vision' misses the fact that you are part of the hardware.
I don’t disagree - what you’re saying is major improvements in AI would be needed to make this work. You are correct.
You rely on a moving camera, microphones and vibrations all together. Driven by a supposedly more advanced meatware than what tech can create today, so that it can properly reason even with faulty/missing signals.
Humans also get into accidents all the time, that's not a great benchmark.
And birds didn't invent jet engines, so obviously we don't need those either, right?
You also have hearing, you can move your head and wear sunglasses to avoid glare, etc.
You have a much better GPU than it has.
Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius
Agreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages.
I've been trying to fuse my stone knives and bearskins, but I fear I will never craft a tricorder.
More importantly you can detect a failed sensor.
Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.
Because they bought a Tesla with only cameras on it.
Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving.
I bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes.
Add a tow hitch to Waymos and any car can be autonomous!
Unsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying.
Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input.
But the real point is that cameras are cheap, so you can stick them in many many vehicles and gather vast amounts of data for training. This is why Waymo will lose - either to Tesla or more likely a Chinese car manufacturer.
I do not like Elon because I do not think nazi salutes or racism are cool, but I do think Tesla are correct here. Waymo wins for a while, then it dies.
Cameras are only "cheap" because of mobile phone camera development, radar/lidar is going through the same process with car and mobile robotics.
So the "we can train cheaply because of lots of cameras" falls down when, for example, BYD has all of its cars with lidar for ADAS but can collect the data for training as well as the vision from cameras and whatever other sensors like tyre pressures and suspension readings and all the other sensors that are on a modern car.
The argument that we can make the cars cheaper in the future by not collecting the additional data now has been proven wrong by the CN and KR manufacturers.
That's also independent of the whole EV side of things.
Chinese are going with lidars as well.
It's just that the cost of lidars are falling like crazy, with new automotive lidars using phased-array laser optics instead of what waymo started with (mechanically scanned lidars)
Tesla doesn't even use good cameras. Compare to https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/ro-on-6th-gen-waymo-driver#:~...
That assumes that hardware was/is/will be more expensive than.. simply scaling up data collection and training?
Which seems like a very bad assumption, I'm not even sure it was ever true and is getting less and less true.
The data is key. You need a lot of homogenous data collected at vast scale over places and time, and you need to be able to synthesise data accurately.
Waymo gets limited data from very limited locations, and will have a harder time synthesising data than others.
Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.
To be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely.
Humans are not good drivers when it comes to long, monotonous rides (because we get tired)
But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.
Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
Incorrect. Humans are fairly good engineers, so cars are pretty safe nowadays.
If you include minor fender-benders and unreported incidents, estimates drop to around 100,000–200,000 miles between any collision event.
This is cataclysmically bad for a designed system, which is why targets are super-human, not human.
I don't think averages work that way
Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
> humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well
In May 2016, Tesla Model S driver Joshua Brown died in Williston, Florida, when his vehicle on Autopilot collided with a white tractor-trailer that turned across the highway. The Autopilot system and driver failed to detect the truck's white side against a brightly lit sky, causing the car to pass underneath the trailer.
Our eyes are supported by our brain's AGI which can evaluate the input from our eyes in context. All Tesla had is a camera, and it didn't perform as well as eyes + AGI would have.
When you don't have AGI, additional sensors can provide backup. LiDAR would have saved Joshua Brown's life.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me.
The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty.
FSD doesn't "work fine" driving directly into the sun. There are loads of YT videos that demonstrate this.
For which car? The older the car (hardware) version the worse it is. I've never had any front camera blinding issues with a 2022 car (HW3).
The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data.
Nobody cares that you think v14.7.22b runs well on HW3.1. Literally nobody.
It doesn't run well on HW3 at all. HW4 has significantly better FSD when running comparable versions (v14). The software has little to do with the front camera getting blinded though.
"works fine" as in can follow a wide asphalt roads' white lines. That is absolutely trivial thing, Lego mind storms could follow a line just fine with a black/white sensor.
This vision clearly doesn't scale to more complex scenarios.
No, works fine when it's snowing and roads are covered with snow (no lines visible). At least on the latest HW+SW.
Especially the part where the cameras do not meet minimum vision requirements [1] in many states where it operates such as California and Texas.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43605034
I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.
This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
> I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.
> This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
Whether sensor fusion makes sense is a highly domain specific question. Guidance like "pick a sensor and stick with it" might have been correct for the projects you've worked on, but there's no reason to think this translates well to other domains.
For what it's worth, sensor fusion is extremely common in SLAM type applications.
> if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree
Use 3 sensors
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.
There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.
I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
The other day I slammed the brakes at a green light, because I could hear sirens approaching -- even though the buildings on the corner prevented any view of the approaching fire trucks or their flashing lights. Do Teslas not have this ability?
I don‘t know whether Tesla‘s self-driving mode could do that.
However, notice that deaf people are allowed to drive, ie. you are not expected to be able to have full hearing to be allowed on the road.
Nuanced point: Even if vision alone were sufficient to drive, adding sensors to the cars today could speed up development. Tesla‘s world model could be improved, speeding up development of the vision only model that is truly autonomous.
I think his companies succeeded despite Elon. Tesla should be a $5T company and he fucked it up.
Stongly disagree. I don‘t like the fella but thinking that he founds and successfully manages SpaceX and Tesla to their market value _by chance_ is ridiculous.
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> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
I would firmly disagree with that.
What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc.
The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips.
The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors.
If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now.
SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.
You say that you disagree with my point, but then your first paragraph just restates my argument. And your subsequent paragraphs don‘t refer to my comment at all.
I never claimed he‘s a good engineer, nor that he has high EQ, nor that he is honest, nor that he has sole responsibility for the success of his companies.
Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).
This is all true, but is completely consistent with your parent post's claim that he's good at building unicorn companies.
Lowest cost per mile will win and Tesla's cyber cab doesn't need expensive suite of sensors. They use lidar in their validation/calibration test cars which is the correct use of lidar. People are already driving USA coast to coast without an SINGLE intervention. It's already over, Tesla has won, Waymo cant compete on cost.
Tesla is using the ill-advised "make it cheap before you make it work" approach.
Been hearing this bullshit for a decade. Any day now…
Meanwhile Waymo is doing half a million rides a week, and Tesla is doing what, a few dozen? Maybe? Maybe zero? Who knows, because they lie and obfuscate about everything. Meanwhile I can go take a Waymo right now in cities all over America.
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> lol ok whatever Waymo's says is gospel and everything Tesla says is suspect, EDS in action. Get help.
Given the history on this topic: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
It's not unreasonable to distrust anything Elon says, especially about Tesla/self driving.
Great source, some random guys website that hasn't been updated for 4 years.
> Great source, some random guys website that hasn't been updated for 4 years.
It's literally linking to direct quotes from Elon, can you explain the problem with that?
You’re right, some random guy commenting on HN is a much better source.
His autopilot has killed several people, sometimes the owner of the car, sometimes other drivers sharing the road. It is hard to root for this guy.
Well, given that Elon openly lies on investor calls...
One of his latest, on the topic of rain/snow/mist/fog and handling with cameras:
"Well, we have made that a non-issue as we actually do photon counting in the cameras, which solves that problem."
No, Elon, you don't. For two reasons: reason one, part A, the types of cameras that do photon counting don't work well for normal 'vision'/imagery associated with cameras, and part B, are not actually present in your cars at all. And reason two, photon counting requires the camera being in an enclosed space to work, which cars on the road ... aren't.
What Elon has mastered the art of is making statements that sound informed, pass the BS detector of laypeople, and optionally are also plausibly deniable if actually called out by an SME.
> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?".
Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents.
I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.
The guy quite clearly couldn't put a html page up (see his tweets around Twitter's acquisition), and that's a field where he supposedly "worked".
At all the other topics he couldn't even name the field. The only thing he is good at is scamming people dumb enough to fall for this.
And what fraction Elon-Intelligence is needed to believe he actually invented/solved all that by himself?
Or did I miss the sarcasm?
I certainly don't trust anything he says 100%.
This is - to me - entirely separate from the fact that his companies routinely revolutionize industries.
If only there was a filter so we could fuse different sensor measurements into a better whole..
I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.
It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.
It’s vaporware and it’s dollars and cents. Tesla EVs are already too expensive. He has no margin to include thousands more on sensors, alternative being the lawsuits that would follow if he admits it was all vaporware.
The terms of service probably require you to sue Tesla in that Texas district with his corrupt judge pal.
I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too.
I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I don't think they're that far behind Waymo where it really matters, which is the thing actually working.
I suspect they have a long tail problem with FSD. It might work fine 99% but that's simply not good enough.
Nice illusion of competence on easy conditions…Until it hits a person and Tesla EV performs far worse than the Waymo both during th crash and afterwards PR wise. Guarantee you Elon will throw the driver under the bus for not watching, not his sketchy system.
the driver and the pedestrian both
Palm Springs from San Jose? Albeit freeway throughout but that's quite impressive.
Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
> humans only use vision to drive
I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving?
As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
> hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved
Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections.
Involved? Yes. Necessary? Pretty sure no.
If it makes you happy, you can read "only vision" as "no lidar or radar." Cars already have microphones and IMUs.
1. in US you can get a driver's license if you're deaf so as a society we think you can drive without hearing
2. since this is in context of Tesla: tesla cars do have microphones and FSD does use it for responding to sirens etc.
(1) is true, but actually driving is definitely harder without hearing or with diminished hearing. And Several US states, including CA, prohibit inhibiting hearing while driving, e.g., by wearing a headset, earbuds, or earplugs.
Human inner ear is worse than a $3 IMU in your average smartphone in literally every way. And that IMU also has a magnetometer in it.
Beating human sensors wasn't hard for over a decade now. The problem is that sensors are worthless. Self-driving lives and dies by AI - all the sensors need to be is "good enough".
Human hearing is excellent. Good directional perception and sensitivity. Eyesight is the weakest sense. Poor color sensitivity, low light sensitivity, blindspot. The terrible natural design flaws are compensated by natural nystagmas and the brain filling in the blanks.
> The problem is that sensors are worthless
Well, in TFA the far more successful manufacturer of self driving cars is saying you're wrong. I think they're in much better position to know than you :)
I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
Waymo has posted videos of accidents they've avoided purely because their lidar picked up on a pedestrian before their cameras saw anything.
A favorite of mine: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1900219562437861685
They're very public about the data that makes them look good, but they went to court to keep their safety data from the public. (https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/waymo-to-keep-robotaxi-saf...)
That lawsuit was about trade secrets shared with DMV. And DMV advised them to file a restraining order against a third party seeking redacted info.
It was actually about all kinds of information about the safety of their cars, how the company handles collisions, how they decide to make human drivers take over, details of injuries caused by their cars, etc.
The DMV required them to submit their safety data before allowing the vehicles on the road. Waymo claims that the data the DMV needed about the public safety of their cars, and the emails they exchanged about it with regulators, were entirely "trade secrets" to keep them hidden from the public who understandably felt like they should be able to access that information since those cars are going to be on their streets.
I think past experience shows that the US prefers a wait and see approach - owning in part I think to it federal structure, where states compete for companies good graces and money, so if State A bans something, State B will allow it and gain an advantage in that area.
Moreover, why draw a hard line on vision only when there is existing technology is available to augment it? It's not like they have to develop 3 novel technologies.
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There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
Directing the movements of a car is now “fleet response”, not “driving”. Give them a fucking innovation award or something.
If a passenger says to you, "go around this car by using that private driveway", are they driving the car?
This is a lie:
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
From: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) without some extra guidance. Whether Waymo's business model makes sense primarily depends on how often these agents need to intervene (unlike safety drivers where you need one safety driver per vehicle and you're just running an expensive taxi).
This is just quibbling about semantics, and with arbitrary definitions of "safety driver" on top. Waymo's remote operators are clearly safety drivers: they are there to improve the safety of their safe-driving cars. Otherwise, why are they needed?
>This is just quibbling about semantics, and with arbitrary definitions of "safety driver" on top.
Dunno, you're engaging in the same "quibbling about semantics" and "arbitrary definitions", when for all intents and purposes, Waymo is fully autonomous. Is there any meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous? If we're sending a space probe to alpha centauri, then the last 1% would be very important, because help is light-years away, but the same isn't true for autonomous cars. What's more misleading, claiming that 99% autonomy is "fully autonomous", or claiming that waymo "uses safety drivers" while omitting the fact that they're rarely used, in contrast to other vendors (eg. uber, when they were doing tests) where they also have "safety drivers" monitoring the car all the time?
Who said Waymo Driver is "99% autonomous"? You did. I didn't. If I thought it is, I wouldn't mind calling it "fuly autonomous". But I don't think it's "99% autonomous", otherwise it wouldn't need remote safety drivers.
To clarify, how Waymo's remote safety drivers operate is that they are called to make decisions that the Waymo Driver can't make, when it gets in situations that are not covered by its training. Here's the relevant text from further down the Waymo blog post:
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
Note the wording "The Waymo Driver ... remains in control of driving". That has a very precise meaning.
In plain English, the Waymo Driver asks a human to choose a destination for it and then it autonomously follows a path to that destination. That's autonomous path planning, but not autonomous navigation. Path planning is common as sparrows [1] and it's certainly not enough to qualify a system as "fully autonomous", despite Waymo's marketing copy to the contrary.
If Waymo Driver was "fully autonomous" even to the "99%" extent you say I'm quibbling about (I'm not) then it would be capable of autonomous navigation without any support from humans. If it didn't manage to do it right all the time we'd say it has some error, not that it's not fully autonomous. Like when a blender fails to blend my bastard sword, I won't say the blander can't blend, I'll just say it can't blend my bastard sword.
Btw I deliberately left the first sentence in the quote above where Waymo says "the Waymo Driver takes the lead" just in case leaving it out created the impression I'm trying to downplay the system's capabilities. It's rather the other way around. "Takes the lead" is a completely useless anthropomorphizing of an automated system made in order to create an impression of capabilities that the system doesn't have. Most likely the procedure that "takes the lead" is a hand-coded routine that calls home when some set of variables crosses a threshold. More like a tripwire than "takes the lead".
The Waymo Driver is not "fully autonomous". It's an impressively well-functioning and safe system, to the extent we can trust the scant data shared by Waymo, which we can't totally because that data is itself only shared for the purpose of marketing, but nobody needs to accept Waymo's press releases as reality.
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[1] Really. There's dozens upon dozens of different approaches. I'm on my other computer and I don't have access to my papers-to-read folder but there's just one survey I often quote that lists three different categories each with many sub-categories. It's not so much an open problem as one where it's difficult to choose a solution, just because there are so many around. One way or another, no system is "fully autonomous" just because it can autonomously follow a path between points A and B, while avoiding obstacles. I even worked on one myself.
They're there to improve the availability of their self- driving cars. If they were to all just walk away, there would be no danger of crashes, but a lot more of their cars stopped in inconvenient places.
There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".
This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?
Everything you’ve mentioned don’t do anything to diminish the magnitude of this achievement in the slightest. It’s clearly just FUD and most people see it as that. There are dozens of refutations of everything you’ve pointed out in this thread already. Maybe besides DoorDash, what’s that about?
I wonder how much of this tech is being sold to or planned to be sold to the military.
When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?
Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo.
I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.
>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
I don't. There's the written rules of the road, and then there's reality. I'd rather they drive like humans do.
As somebody very far away from any even partially autonomous cars, what kind of laws do they break?
I've been in a Waymo that's run a red light.
I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?
The latter.
They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.
The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.
This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.
From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
I know it’s the latter. I was just critiquing the writing style.
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing:
https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.
I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit.
I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.
I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.
It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.
I think this thread conflating between walkable and having good transit. A walkable city means almost everything you need is within walking distance. That doesn’t mean there are buses or trains to take you out of this area. I live in a walkable part of the city. Within a 15-minute walk, there are three supermarkets, perhaps twenty restaurants with different cuisines, four pharmacies, one each of USPS/UPS/FedEx for shipping, four different banks, three dry cleaners… you get the idea. The only transportation tool I need is my two legs.
Now of course sometimes I’m not content staying within this 15-minute circle. Then I simply choose the fastest method of transport to get there. Is BART or Muni faster than the Waymo trip? Then yes I’ll take pubic transportation. That’s what good transit is for.
You exemplify the defeatism that the auto makers are counting on.
I literally have never owned a vehicle in my life. If you feel I exemplify defeatism then I think you need to look inward.
NotJustBikes doesn't have a particularly great reputation among transit enthusiasts. A lot of his videos have become repetitive and focused on complaints rather than specific ways of making things better. Understandably, few people are willing to spend an hour listening to someone complain on the Internet.
> "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities..."
Congestion charges. Limited licensing for TNCs. Dedicated public or private holding areas rather than "milling about". All of these have solutions.
> Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks.
It is already best practice in urban design to separate cars that need to quickly transit an area without interacting with it into completely independent routes where there are no bikes or pedestrians, and combine transit/bikes/walking into livable mixed mode streets where cars are not allowed. NotJustBikes has many examples of this, most commonly around Europe.
> To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity.
This is what already happens in places that don't have usable, safe, or car-competitive transit, modulo autonomous, including currently most of North America. The solution to needing fewer cars -- self driving or not -- is investment in transit and in ground-up overhaul of existing cities to optimize for transit and deprioritization of cars.
This is my complaint about many types of YouTube pundits.
I had tuned in to some channels for analysis and insightful commentary, for example, film and TV series.
But every one devolved into “Worst episode ever!” and “<studio> has RUINED <franchise>!”
So to sum up, the YouTube recommendations algorithm has ruined independent criticism and there is nothing on anymore. Join my Patreon, “UnJustLikes” for the deep dive!
Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?
No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.
Why are you trying to make people on a text-based site watch a dumb video.
Just say what you want to say ... with words!
That video is 54 minutes long. Maybe, if it's the basis for your argument, you could post a summary?
Yeah, sort of.
Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be.
Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.
But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested.
In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
>In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
All the incentives you described exists today. On any given road any space devoted to sidewalks or bike lanes means less space for cars, and you already need separation between car lanes and sidewalks. You also have the same incentive to "restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space", because any controlled access roadway increases speed and throughput. Finally if you restrict pedestrians to certain areas (we all live in megatowers?), that actually makes taxis (including robotaxis) less attractive relative to public transit, because their whole value proposition is that they take you exactly where you want to go. Therefore it's unclear how automated cars would make things worse.
I hate how much space in cities is devoted to cars, and I wish we had much better transit of all sorts.
But - I'm just not sure your analysis is right. Someone who drives a self-owned car will park it in a downtown area for hours. Someone who takes a taxi of any sort will use much, much less amortized parking spot space. New York is a pretty good example of this.
Good public transit beats the snot out of cars, but a dense taxi deployment seems to get more people moved per total car-dedicated-space than private car drivership does.
And if we can reduce the amount of space dedicated to parking, we can increase density, which reduces the need for driving.
So the problem will be if we have self-driving whatevers at the expense of public transit, but perhaps not if it's at the expense of private car drivership.
Okay, so the video is just random predictions? Why should we believe any of this is true?
I regularly bike, which is why I'm hugely in favor of self driving cars; they're way safer for me when biking than human driven cars.
Why would driverless cars mill around? They would just wait around in underground garages. They can even block each other, so they don't need that much space to park.
My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems.
This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem.
Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.
Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
It's already been solved city by city, so I don't know what you're talking about.
Cool, so where can I buy a car in which, wherever I am, I can comfortably sit at the back knowing that it will take me to destination like a good driver? Or that I can summon to come to pick me up?
You can't, because the only actually autonomous cars right now are robotaxis.
Ah, and why so? Why are they introduced city by city?
To verify they can operate safely in any given city, and because you need operations staff and resources in every city for a robotaxi service.
Same reason Tesla is doing it that way.