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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it.
Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable).
Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology.
Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd!
So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.
1) Make it work
2) Make it right
3) Make it cheap
For no good reason, Elon tried to solve step 3 before the other two. This is extra strange since SpaceX has done much better at pioneering work.
They also did not make lithium batteries affordable. Panasonic and CATL did that. Tesla was simply the first to exploit that bew affordability.
Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked.
Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?
The incomplete, miscategorizing and glitching display of other vehicles and obstacles does not give me confidence that the car is able to correctly identify what’s around it, let alone drive accordingly.
Even the lane departure warnings are 90% false positives (but I’d rather be warned than not).
Just driving normally is much less stressful and more fun than supervising the car’s attempt at driving like a teenager.
If there is a stretch of surface road with a complex intersection and aggressive drivers, you are there to step in. The Waymo Driver instead will try to avoid that area.
Also, Tesla's hardware is not nearly complex or powerful enough to approach the low level of intervention or incident rate that Waymo has - but HW5 will be a massive step forward for them.
That's going to be the make or break for me, personally. If Tesla can't make their solution work well on HW5, then they have serious structural issues in their program.
Lidar is ugly and expensive, but requires way fewer cycles to calculate distances. And it works through fog and even some obstacles, nor does it care about glare or get "scared" of shadows.
If we had infinite compute in the car, cameras would be the obvious solution ...but we don't. You can get "Pretty good" with cameras, but still people find specific spots where the car is 100% sure a shadow under a bridge is a car or something stupid like that.
You can get 3D depth estimation from a single 2D image but I don’t know how good it is for automotive.
https://huggingface.co/tasks/depth-estimation
I think the natural solution is a 360 lidar as a source of truth, followed by optical for everything else
It feels like there's a lot of assumptions baked in here. For example, do humans get in accidents because eyes are insufficient driving sensors? Or because human drivers get tired, distracted, make mistakes, etc.
Also, you can put 10 cameras on a car looking in all directions at the same time, which feels materially different from a human that only has 2 eyes which can only look in a single direction at a time.
It's possible that massively superhuman driving performance can't be achieved with just cameras, but I'm not seeing a strong case for that being made here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1u5eetx/hw4_fsd_a...
This article makes no attempt to answer the actual meat of the question.
Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet.
p.s. I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.
Also, contrary to your statement, the article directly addresses the meat if the question:
> The disagreement is whether “good enough to help a human drive” ever becomes “good enough to remove the human,” and his answer is no, because the sensing tops out before you get the last few nines.
> Now, Tesla would point to its active Robotaxi service as an example of “removing the human”, but Dolgov also said that camera-only is also good for a demo, and that’s basically what Tesla’s Robotaxi service is right now.
The short range ones, found at vehicle corners and on the rear, are now around $200 - $1500. The long range car-top unit is still expensive, around $10,000, and that's dropping. The whole sensor suite on a Waymo is probably under US$20,000 right now. If that.
The future direction for automotive seems to be more car-top sensors with narrower fields of view that add up to a full circle. Only the one that looks ahead needs 300m range.
Dolgov also pushed back on the one knock that camera-only fans always reach for: cost. Waymo is on its sixth generation of hardware, and he said each generation has drastically cut the price. Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”
An Ojai costs less than a mid tier luxury vehicle. Is that not cheap enough?
And the price is only coming down.
Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving
People will drive themselves manually if they can't afford it.
Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only.
1) Both in 2028
2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035
3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving
Why? So long as they're insured and their owners can be held criminally liable for injuries just as a human driver would be, why does the bar have to be higher?
A huge portion of the risk of human drivers is due to confounding human factors like negligence, distraction, medical issues, fatigue, etc. Responsible drivers can take most of these factors into their own hands -- not driving while sleepy, not driving drunk, not using their cell phone. These people don't want a vehicle
A better comparison would be comparing the capability of a self-driving car to the skill of a human driver driving under ideal circumstances of health/responsibility/etc.
2) Politics - loss of jobs and urge to ban them - there needs to be a counterargument
3) Government does mandate a lot of safety features. Just insure it wont fly as this is number one risk for everybody.
Of course not!
So, you may be surprised to find that Waymo's sensor package doesn't cost $200k. Whoops!
Elon has already lied, on an investor call, about how such things are not necessary - he referenced how "Tesla cameras can count photons", as a reason why they were not affected by fog, rain, or snow.
Except, no they can't, and they never will be able to. Not the cameras in any Tesla now (and even then). It's a completely different type of camera (and it would do effectively nothing useful from a visualization perspective, let alone functional camera for human viewing). And even if they changed the camera, or added some, well, you can't count photos if you're not in an enclosed space (you know, like the open road).
This is where Elon gets really dangerous, in my mind, he knows enough to be dangerous, he knows what to say that convinces the layperson, or investor, passes the initial sniff test only to dramatically fall over when you investigate.
I can't purchase a Waymo at any price.
To me, true self-driving starts at level 3. Otherwise, it's supervised.
And Tesla selling their product as "Full Self Driving (Supervised)" is like selling "Fully Cooked Meal (Frozen)". No! You call it a "frozen meal"!
I wish Elon wasn't so stubborn about admitting he was wrong.
https://www.tesla.com/support/fsd#pay-attention
> FSD (Supervised) is an advanced driver assistance system that is intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver. It does not turn a Tesla into a fully autonomous vehicle.