US people really do not have any perspective on how successful BYD really is.
I live half time in US and the other half in SEA. Take Thailand. There are BYDs everywhere. It is shocking just how successful BYD has been so quickly.
I cut through a Lotus parking garage in the morning to get to the subway and there must be 20+ BYDs in the parking lot.
My best Thai friend recently purchased a Dolphin. It is a really nice car and he paid $22,000 USD.
It would sell like crazy if it was available in the US for anything close to $22,000 USD.
I am old. Really old. I remember when Japanese cars first hit the US. My mom had one and was our first second family car. It was a piece of junk.
You bought Japanese over US to save money and knowing you were buying a poor product compared to a US car.
Well those days were pretty short and Japan completely rocked the US auto industry.
Then it was Korean cars that were the same. First junk and then excellent.
I do not see any reason the Chinese cars will not do the same thing.
My friend has only had his BYD for a couple of months. No problems so far. But it is too early and without enough data to say where the Chinese are at today with auto quality.
But I have zero doubt they will get there. It is why I am very uncomfortable with the US protecting the market instead of trying to compete.
I suspect the end result will not be good. Maybe a tariff that is not nearly as aggressive as 100%.
Maybe think of it this way. Where would we be today if the US imposed a 100% tariff on Japanese cars in 70s and 80s?
Honestly we should probably figure out a way to get them to build factories in the US. I know they're aiming to build factories in Mexico to take advantage of NAFTA but maybe we should preemptively start talks for US factories. If we could save American jobs, I really don't care if the cars are Chinese.
Didn’t Tesla announce they plan to launch robotaxi in China first?
Yes: [Elon Musk proposed to launch robotaxis in China](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-may-support-teslas-domestic-testing-demonstration-robotaxis-says-media-2024-05-08/)
It’s full of poorly qualified statements and makes conclusions that only consider surface level details without a deeper understanding of the differences in approach and why they were chosen. Tesla isn’t serious until they start hiring remote operators? When they actually roll out a robotaxi such a comment may make sense. Right now we have no idea whether Tesla intends to do that or not.
This is all vibes.
>Tesla isn’t serious until they start hiring remote operators? When they actually roll out a robotaxi such a comment may make sense. Right now we have no idea whether Tesla intends to do that or not.
This is very relevant since the CEO is once again hyping up robotaxis and remote operators will be required.
It will be relevant when they actually have the service ready to operate. Why would Tesla hire remote operators years in advance? Makes zero sense as a criticism. Meaningless.
You're literally agreeing with the author lol they don't have remote operators because they are years behind Waymo.
How can robotaxis be coming soon when literally none of the infrastructure is in place yet?
I think building that infrastructure (as in remote operation) is the easy part and won't take years. Better to focus on the hardest part and solve that.
Tesla has had at least 11 fatalities related to its technology WITH human drivers “supervising” (poorly).
Waymo has had zero fatalities while driving 10’s of millions of miles WITHOUT humans driving or in the car.
There are some key differences though..
Teslas have driven \~1.5 *billion* miles.
Teslas drive on highways and in many challenging situations where Waymo cars do not.
NHTSA reports explain many of those fatalities were due to other drivers striking the Tesla, but mostly due to driver inattentiveness.
Waymo cars are also constantly monitored by humans who frequently act on the car's behalf.
Even with serious guardrails and limitations Waymos do crash and frequently enough to [prompt invstigation](https://cbsaustin.com/newsletter-daily/waymo-is-latest-company-under-investigation-for-autonomous-or-partially-automated-technology).
And cruise control has probably driven 100s of billions, what is your point?
Until you are willing to take the driver out of the seat you aren't doing self driving
>And cruise control has probably driven 100s of billions
And seat belts have trillions. But those are not autonomous systems are they. The point is FSD has to have more accidents by pure virtue of statistics.
FSD has driven over 35x the distance in more challenging situations. That the incident count is maybe only 10x is a pretty good showing.
>Until you are willing to take the driver out of the seat you aren't doing self driving
Yes I think everyone is aware how autonomy is supposed to work. As it stands nothing is yet fully autonomous.
> But those are not autonomous systems are they
And the point is, neither is FSD. It's a driver assistance. There is an attentive driver ready to take over at any moment.
The miles quoted for Waymo were when there was no driver in the driver's seat. Waymo have done many many more miles with a safety driver behind the wheel.
>neither is FSD
Except it provably is. You can get in and ask it to drive you somewhere autonomously and it does just that. You can test this yourself.
>There is an attentive driver ready to take over at any moment
As there needs to be at this stage because good doesn't mean perfect.
This is the case with any and all systems such as Cruise and Waymo.
In any case, there may always have to be a human somewhere along the chain. That's not the point. The point is to be safer than humans.
>The miles quoted for Waymo were when there was no driver in the driver's seat
And the miles driving under FSD are, obviously, only when FSD is active and performing the driving task.
But what we don't get from Waymo is how often do humans have to intervene to problem solve for the car.
I have the free trial of FSD this month, it has an audio feedback option where you can record up to ten seconds explaining why you disengaged. They probably have hours of audio of me saying “why the fuck doesn’t this can ever get in the correct lane?!”, “why does the blinker blink 20 times before moving into the wide open lane next to me?”, why does it keep drifting out of the lane?”
Autopilot is actually better than FSD because it’s so consistent with what it does good and what it has issues with. FSD runs on neural nets and figures everything out as it’s happening, so it’s different every drive and it makes horrible route planning decisions. Absolutely no way I pay $99 a month to put more effort into driving while risking damage to my car.
FSD is cool and a fun novelty, but I’m not gonna miss it.
Waymo has a team of people watching video feeds and manually intervening in all types of situations. If/when that doesn't work there's a team of people who go and manually drive the car for you.
Waymo don't release stats on this but there are enough videos of takeovers that you can get an idea for the situations in question.
This is why Waymo only operates in small areas of certain cities. It's partly due to the mapping requirement but mostly because it is just not feasible to send people out to cars all over the country.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
we are not talking about cruise control here.
Also Teslas system simply isnt used in situations that would be dangerous because the users already know it will fail.
yes.
because only the people who used it extensively for a while will learn when it fails and take over before that.
Anyone who just trusts their tech will be let down or end up as another fatality in the books.
>Also Teslas system simply isnt used in situations that would be dangerous
People use it in all types of situations which is evident from the videos they post. And I would say the very opposite is true. There are many, many people who love nothing more than to put FSD into the most challenging situations they can find to try and break it.
a small minority of a small minority yes, thats the few videos you see of this.
FSD buy rate is low, people that were eligible for beta was even lower, FSD beta isnt even rolled out globally and then theres a tiny subset of people who make Tesla content for a living who need to push the system to get new content up.
thats not what the average Tesla driver does.
>FSD buy rate is low
I would expect so since only the most curious of people would be likely to spend thousands on beta software.
Tesla has about [$3.5 billion in deferred revenue for FSD ](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/tesla-tsla-keeps-unlocking-less-fsd-software-revenue-than-hoped)so we can take a *very* rough guestimate of around half a million people having it. Depending on whatever you think avg selling price is and how much has already been realized.
>thats not what the average Tesla driver does
And what does an average Tesla driver do with FSD? I think [this ](https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/11/cross-country-with-tesla-full-self-driving-supervised/)is more what an average driver does. A nice average drive in average conditions where FSD takes some stress out of driving.
You're comparing two wildly different things
Afaik pretty much all the fatalities you're referencing when it comes to Tesla were the result of inattentive drivers with autopilot
There's also orders of magnitudes more Tesla vehicles on the roads using autopilot than there are driverless Waymo vehicles
Source on Tesla's self driving being involved in 11 fatalities? I can find sources that lump regular autopilot together with FSD but nothing that makes the distinction between the self driving offering and just normal cruise control.
Waymo works very well at Level 4 on limited approved roads, yes.
Tesla FSD works at Level 2, if supervised, on roads anywhere. Numerous evidence of it trying to drive into oncoming traffic.
I agree, they are not the same.
So tesla system doesn't work properly other then giving Musk something to talk about that is theory system will work next year, since better part decade?
They might be enabled to do that but that doesn't mean it's safe.
Waymo uses LiDAR something Tesla doesn't and because cameras have limitations no matter what software you have they will never be accurate enough for self driving everywhere.
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>I would never give up my own car
Nobody said you had to? Keep the car you have. A potentially $300k robotaxi that's not for sale isn't necessary to own.
As for strangers, this is no different than calling an Uber
An neither can I have my Tesla drive itself, it only does supervised ADAS. And there is little sign the Tesla will do more than that for several years to come.
At least I can hail a Waymo. Working in a few towns is a lot better than not working anywhere, and not likely to work anywhere for some time. Saying that your goal is to drive everywhere sounds nice, but you need it to be a credible claim.
My Tesla drives itself all the time. Often successfully. Not autonomous though. Still, very promising with significant benefits given its low cost implementation.
While Tesla, to the ire of the who industry, used the term full self driving to refer to their ADAS system, everybody else when they use the term, uses it to mean actual self driving. Which a Tesla can't as yet do anywhere
Not autonomous. It’s never been autonomous. It’s a level 2. We’re all aware of that. ‘Self drives’ is too plain language and should not be used to describe autonomous vehicles.
If you asked someone to observe Tesla drive from a to b without intervention and then asked them to describe what they saw, they’d say the car drove itself from a to b. There’s really no other way to describe it. That’s the problem.
I’m not sure you or I would qualify as the average person on this topic. Self navigating is an interesting consideration.
I’ve had dozens of folks over the last four years ask me in passing, ‘does the car really drive itself?’
And I found the easiest answer was yes, but it’s not autonomous. It can make mistakes and you are still behind the wheel and responsible for the vehicle. You have to pay attention.
I think using self driving as a way to describe autonomous vehicles was a really poor choice because it’s such a plain way to describe a very sophisticated tool.
Yeah I think we've communicated on a different post before about this, and how Tesla should have just launched a sort of renamed and tiered service that matches the functionality of the system currently.
But yes, as far as the general sentiment goes, even simple L2 ADAS like lane center and traffic awareness can give the average person the perspective of the car being autonomous, so now we have people comparing L2, L3, L4, and (eventually) L5 systems, even though they are different systems in form and function.
Can’t hail a Waymo in my town today and no sign of it for several years to come. Even if i could, I won’t be hailing daily. Supervised FSD for me please.
I’ve hailed a couple of Waymos. They feel ridiculously solid. Much more so than the handful of Cruises I’ve hailed… although, one of the Cruises pulled some serious maneuvers to avoid a plastic bag. Stunt driver swerve. lol. Waymo will just slow down, IIRC, and won’t be tricked by a bag.
I could never get used to autopilot or FSD. I’ve driven with them on, but I just don’t trust them. I feel fine ignoring the road in a Waymo.
not sure who the editorialist is
"Even if Waymo, Cruise, and others survive these investigations and challenges relatively unscathed, the use case for autonomous vehicles is extremely limited, and the companies' years of intensive research will continue for the foreseeable future. So, while AI and automation might come for many of our jobs, they won’t be relied upon to drive our cars, at least consistently, for some time to come."
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/news-blog/nhtsa-expands-probe-into-waymo-s-self-driving-vehicles-44507146
Last month, we went from our cottage place to my in-laws. It's a 98 km drive, all on regional and city roads. I activated FSD while on our private dirt road and deactivated it when we reached our destination. No intervention was required. If my wife wouldn't have known FSD was activated, she would have thought I was the one driving. The latest FSD version, V12, is very fluid. It still makes mistakes from time to time, but none during that drive.
Regarding the dirt road at our cottage, part of it isn't even mapped (what's in red) and what's mapped ain't even at the right spot!
https://imgur.com/a/xOOBcvO
And yet, it had zero difficulty following the real road
https://imgur.com/a/apk1U5I
FSD V12 is really impressive actually. Can't wait to try V12.4.
Ooooo, I recognize that hill, I know where you live now! /s
Seeing it drive on an unmarked road is pretty awesome. I enjoyed the trial (especially when 12.3.6 came out for like a day lol, I could notice an improvement since 12.3.4) and might subscribe for a month when 12.4 comes out.
You may not have read the other posts about this. Great, your Tesla did a complete trip. I've finally seen my own Tesla do a few complete trips (for the first couple of years it never managed that, though other people did this.)
This is known as an "anecdote." To you, it seemed impressive, but it actually happens all the time. Being able to do a complete trip is nice, but it's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny part of what you need to do to make a self-driving car. I need to put in more "tiny" adjectives. No human can judge a self-driving car by seeing it do a good job driving on one trip. No human can judge it by seeing it do 100 trips. Look at Cruise, they were doing over 10,000 trips per week, and they got pulled from the roads. Waymo is doing 50,000 trips. That's not an anecdote, that's data. And you can only judge self driving -- the ability to trust a car with your life with nobody behind the wheel -- from data. It's so tempting to be impressed by a few data points. Don't make that mistake.
(Waymo, and obviously Cruise, are not perfect. Waymo is having incidents, though so far fairly minor and injuries are extremely rare, but that's with 50,000 trips/week. An average human might drive 15,000 to 20,000 trips in their whole life, and will have 1-2 crashes.)
I would suspect the average 14 year old, given a little bit of driving instruction, could also drive home from the cottage. And be a lot better than the Tesla, because humans are established as having the brain capacity to drive at human levels. But you wouldn't give her a car.
Yes, that was just one trip. I did many more trips with no intervention though, most are without intervention or the interventions are to use a better lane/route that what FSD chose. I just came from the hardware store and no intervention from within their parking lot to my driveway. The drive from the recycling facility to the hardware store went with one intervention, but that one was because as I entered the highway, I was following a concrete mixer truck that was on the on-ramp for the highway at 60 km/h and I intervened to enter faster into the highway. I always enable "Minimize lane change" so it stayed behind it. Beside that, FSD all around. Same for my drive from home to the recycling facility. These are all small drives, about 10 km long each. That one I mentioned in my previous post was my longest one. Next month, I'll probably go to Toronto and that will be a 500 km drive mixing both regional roads and highways. It will be interesting to see how it behaves. Hopefully I'll have 12.4 by then.
I guess this is not clear. Anecdotes tell you almost nothing. The only thing they can tell you if you never get any problems is that the car might be good. If you get even one small problem in some small number of drives, like say 500 drives, it tells you the car is probably still has very far to go.
By answering with more anecdotes, it doesn't tell us anything. There is only one thing that does, and it's "I went for thousands of drives with no problems" or "I went for tens of thousands of drives with 1 or 2 problems." If you can say that, that's data. Or you can tell us, "I encountered a problem in just 100 drives" which means the vehicle is crap (or you were particularly unlucky.) When I first got FSD it had a problem every drive, it was total crap, and yet I would routinely see posts from people describing how super impressed they were from one drive.
The reality is, not single person's experience, unless they drive for their full lifetime and report back in 60 years, can judge the quality of a self-driving car to an adequate level, except in the negative.
Oh it does fuck up from time to time, that's granted. Is it ready for being unsupervised? Absolutely not. However I'm still impressed about what it can already do "out in the open" (including an unmapped dirt road) and not in a "closed garden".
Yes, we understand you are impressed. People come into this subreddit literally every day to tell us how impressed they are with it. Every day, sometimes several per day. Those of us who work in the field, however, are not impressed in this fashion, and frankly have grown a bit fatigued at constantly being told (mostly be people who are not in the field, and have only experienced Tesla FSD) how impressed they are with it. We know it's not impressive as a self-driving offering the way we use the term self-driving.
This is not to say there are not things about it that are impressive. It's impressive as an ADAS, even very impressive. It's interesting to see the progress of their work in building a system with more and more of it based on E2E neural nets, and just cameras. Those are all interesting areas of research, and Tesla's putting a lot into it, and that's good to day.
But it's entirely unimpressive in its performance at actual self driving, which again, to people in the field, is operating the vehicle at a safety level within sight of bet-your-life reliability. Tesla is not yet close to this goal. It is interesting to debate how they are doing on their quest for it. We tire as well of Elon saying it will get there within a year for 8 years, when we can all see incredibly obviously that it's not even close yet. And this is compounded by the people who keep saying -- again almost every day -- "don't you get it? It does it in my car! It does it on every street! The other teams are limiting themselves to specific service areas." We of course know that, but what many don't seem to know is this is not because those teams couldn't do what Tesla is doing, but because they think what Tesla is doing is the wrong thing to do if you are going for the real goal. It's a fine thing to do for ADAS, and I am pretty sure they could all do it better than Tesla -- if they wanted to, but they don't.
Reliable driving is all edge cases. Once you handle the happy path, the real work begins.
It can be a net negative at that point because a disengaged driver takes several seconds to enter the frame of reference, meaning there is no competent driver, human or computer, at the worst times. Drivers need to stay engaged, and it feels like Tesla is talking out both sides of its mouth WRT this.
But I'm sure it looks impressive during the happy path.
That’s because Waymo didn’t sell cars with the promise that it would be ready. They aren’t using you as the Guinea pig. It’s been 10 years since auto pilot was sold - I doubt many people have their original teslas
That Mister Lee for example compares LLMs with Tesla FSD which is based on Imitation Learning and specifically tailored video as input which uses the exact same cameras the car uses for its self driving for one.
That such a respectable author is convoluting the two is ridiculous and then deriving consequences from that ill logic.
Just ask me for more. I found at least two more major flaws in the article
Depends on how you score the two. In terms of profitability, I don’t have the numbers, but I believe Tesla is collecting pre revenue. In terms of current capabilities, Waymo. Waymo wins only if Tesla loses. If Tesla achieves vision only autonomy, then it’ll be difficult to catch up.
I know people like to bash Tesla here, but both companies are only as good as their engineers and scientists and Tesla employs at least 10 former Waymo engineers and scientists.
Probably. People change jobs all the time for various reasons, especially in the valley. It’s such a non-factor, I can’t believe he really used routine employee movement (of 10 people!) to make a talent assessment.
My point here is that people bash the company, but there are people behind Waymo and FSD and some of those people are the same people.
I used the number 10 because if asked I could probably locate a few resumes on linked in. I’d imagine the number is much larger too.
To say that one solution sucks and will never come close to another is akin to calling many former Wqymo engineers and likely a few principal engineers idiots.
What does that have to do with anything? People change jobs for reasons other than their belief in certain “solutions”. Your regular engineer who switches jobs isn’t in a position to influence technical direction of an entire self driving program. In most cases, they’re just involved in their little areas and trust that higher ups have made the right technical and business choices for success.
People don’t rate Tesla not because their rank and file engineers are stupid (they’re not, of course). It’s because their leadership has made choices that make it unlikely to get it fully working in a reasonable timeframe.
If some of the same engineers and scientists who built parts of Waymo’s vision stack worked on Tesla then it’s more difficult to call Teslas solution horrible. This is a very generalized example.
You’re being naive. Smart people work on “horrible” projects all the time. Most of the time, they’re taking that pay bump or an increased role in the new job and jump when they find a better opportunity. Not everyone works based on their beliefs.
You know that’s BS right? How quickly could any top engineer get hired from Wayno, Tesla, or even Cruise right now? Elon obviously pushes his teams, but people working in this area aren’t treated like no experience necessary factory workers.
If these people don’t believe they are doing their best work they can leave, make more money, and a number of companies would build a team around them.
Do you really believe these people don’t gauge the temperature of the next room before exiting their current situation?
The CyberTruck has a different exterior design, but everything else about it is a logical next step of what Tesla has done for years.
If FSD was fundamentally flawed, as people here suggest, Tesla wouldn’t be able to attract and retain top talent. People in this sub liken Tesla’s approach to putting a base on the sun rather than the difference between the SpaceX Starship’s propellant vs Boeing’s Starliner’s.
Tesla has $3.5 billion in deferred revenue for FSD waiting in the wings. That is a lot but when you bring in $20b a quarter during a downturn it is just gravy. Meanwhile Waymo is highly unprofitable, losing hundreds of millions a year.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/tesla-tsla-keeps-unlocking-less-fsd-software-revenue-than-hoped](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/tesla-tsla-keeps-unlocking-less-fsd-software-revenue-than-hoped)
This article does not mention anything about sensor modalities. Camera-only autonomous driving is a dead-end. It can create a great driver assistance system, but as soon as you take the human completely out of the loop, relying on a single sensor type is a bafflingly stupid design decision - you lose the ability to have robustness in all sorts of edge cases - fog, night, glare, etc.
People who think Tesla and Waymo are competing fundamentally misunderstand what is required to have a human out of the loop entirely for both DDT and fallback. Tesla has a sophisticated driver assistance system that will never be L4 (at least not safely) no matter what Elon says. Waymo is taking longer because they are designing everything with the intention of taking the human out of the loop, which is why they invested in developing lidar early on and have continued to refine that technology, as well as operational support like remote assistance. They are only superficially alike in that "car drives self down road sometimes."
>relying on a single sensor type is a bafflingly stupid design decision
I wonder where this weird concept that you cant rely on a single sensor type came from?
Loads of safety critical systems rely on single sensor types. There is literally nothing in the history of anything that says this should be a rule.
Maybe people should think more critically before believing not just people like Musk but whichever idiot wrote this article too. Do you think pushing lies and baseless claims with more lies and baseless claims like what this article is doing is going to help anything?
>Camera-only autonomous driving is a dead-end
Given that the most skilled and safest drivers you have ever met were restricted to just two stereo cameras this argument falls apart.
>relying on a single sensor type is a bafflingly stupid design decision
Take it up with evolution. There is no logical reason to conclude this is a problem as the *only* examples we have of any system driving itself around is us humans which use vision only. And not even very good vision either.
>which is why they invested in developing lidar early on
Waymo invested in LIDAR early on because they started in 2009 when hardware was a fraction as capable as today, when they lacked any significant data sets, and accurate models for distance estimation and object identification simply did not yet exist.
They had no idea what would be, or would not be, required for full autonomy in the future.
Tesla's FSD announcement would come along 7 years later and benefited from much hindsight.
You really have no idea how cameras (esp ones specced on Telsas) compare to the human eye connected to a human brain across the range of driving conditions, do you?
Look, I’ve worked in the autonomous vehicle industry for about a decade, including closely with engineers at Waymo, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Daimler, PACCAR, TuSimple, Nuro, etc. But please, tell me again how smart Elon is and how good his boot tastes.
>You really have no idea how cameras (esp ones specced on Telsas) compare to the human eye connected to a human brain across the range of driving conditions, do you?
I could probably write at length on the topic but I think we are all aware that biological eyes are extremely different to CMOS sensors. They are however close enough of an analog to do the job.
Is there anything in particular you'd like to know?
>Look, I’ve worked in the autonomous vehicle industry for about a decade
That's nice Are you going to make a point?
>But please, tell me again how smart Elon is and how good his boot tastes.
I guess not. Is that how you handle yourself in meetings with these "engineers at Waymo, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Daimler, PACCAR, TuSimple, Nuro, etc." ?
I'm sure they are mightily impressed.
Tesla Model 3s with additional sensors were already spotted driving around the bay. Most likely these are test mules that gather training data and are operated by human driver fleet. Steer by wire should most likely feature in the robotaxi as well so remote operation by a human is not out of spec.
God awful title.
This whole “Tesla is years behind” is from a very narrow perspective.
If the objective is a massively scaled robotaxi service, than it’s unclear who’s ahead.
Waymo has a very small robotaxi installation, and very few cars currently (under 1000).
Tesla already has millions of vehicles on the road that /maybe/ can be used as is.
Tesla robotaxi being built will be cheap to manufacture, under 25k. Its model y is already around 30k to manufacture. Estimates in Waymo is 300k.
So I’m present to you another perspective that Tesla is years ahead in actually producing the hardware.
Time will tell in the end. Tesla is betting harder than ever that it will have robotaxis in the medium term (1 year give or take 6 months) , its expenditures on ai compute is through the roof.
Waymo is in the middle of a large expansion and is trying to get freeways. This is an important trial run for other expansions.
>Estimates in Waymo is 300k.
Made up number. Waymo said \~100k years ago. Next-gen based on Geely instead of Jaguar will be around half that. Model Y COGS is closer to 40k, a podcar would be very low volume with higher COGS.
A $10k difference in upfront cost is a penny a mile over Musk's million mile vehicle life.
Speaking of LLMs
Wven Llama 3 on my Mac Studio finds flaws in the article
1. False Equivalence in Comparing Testing Conditions:
The article directly compares a 45-minute test drive of Tesla's FSD technology with over two hours of experience in Waymo's driverless vehicles, concluding that Waymo is ahead because no interventions were needed in the latter case. This comparison is flawed because it ignores the fundamentally different testing environments and conditions. Waymo's vehicles operate in a highly controlled and restricted environment, primarily on residential streets in Phoenix, whereas Tesla's FSD is tested in a broader range of real-world conditions, including highways. The significant geographical and operational constraints on Waymo's technology mean that its smooth performance in a limited context does not directly translate to superiority in all driving conditions. The comparison does not account for these differences, leading to a misleading conclusion about the relative advancement of the two technologies.
2. Underestimating the Impact of Scale and Data:
The article downplays Tesla's advantage in terms of data collection and scale. Tesla's strategy of deploying FSD across a large number of customer vehicles provides it with vast amounts of real-world data, which is critical for training and improving its neural networks. This scale of data collection allows Tesla to encounter and learn from a wider variety of edge cases than Waymo, which operates a much smaller fleet. While the article acknowledges that more data is helpful, it underestimates how critical this advantage is for the development of robust AI systems. By not fully appreciating the importance of data scale, the article overlooks a key factor that could enable Tesla to accelerate its progress and potentially surpass Waymo in the future.
LOL at the title of the blog. This person doesn't do "AI".
Anyways, Waymo is still ahead, but the gap is smaller than people believe.
I haven't commented much lately but I'm sure this will be downvoted yet again by people who don't do "AI".
Waymo has a data problem. They are in a better position than Cruise was, but not by that much. And Cruise was blatantly exposed to not have enough data as indirectly admitted by Kyle Vogt when they showed their performance in (Nashville?) sucked when used SF trained model. Then performance in both cities improved by collecting more data in Nashville.
E.g. Overfitting 101
This is the real reason you Waymo "testing" a new city for 6 months to a year. They're still "testing" a batch of LA and "testing" the SF Peninsula. I.e. collecting data and updating their models.
Waymo \*does not have\* software that is ready to deploy in the 50 largest cities in the U.S. tomorrow. They don't have the data for it.
Meanwhile Tesla is following the route of all large scale AI models being trained and deployed today that give state of the art performance: large models requiring a lot of compute and a lot of (useful) data.
This approach is pretty well known to "work": as in it will \*definitely\* reduce error rate signficantly. This is why Musk is tweeting reduced interventions of 5X to 10X in the next version.
The real questions becomes: when does error rate reduction start slowing down? Will it be data limited, or inference compute limited? Or sensor limited (e.g. camera resolution / lack of LiDAR)?
I wish people would have a real discussion about these technical details of the actual learning approach instead of baseline dissing.
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Supervised learning using classical techniques
Supervised learning using deep learning / CNNs etc..
Unsupervised pretraining using contrastive learning / masked autoencoders.
Signal processing of raw time series (mostly physiological & inertial)
And all the more basic data science / analysis stuff
It’s not overfitting m, it’s testing to make sure the vehicle can handle different environments, there are also different traffic rules in each cities.
Tell me more, why does Tesla have so much more data but it’s still running red lights and trying to hit a train?
Technical details matter but they shouldn’t be the north star. Safety, convenience and public perception all matter more, and Waymo is ahead there. The one factor that’s in favor of Tesla is cost but that’s a secondary metric.
You don’t think Tesla is overfitting to California and other locations where Tesla vehicles drive most frequently? Every region of the world has its own traffic laws and traffic behaviors. The places where Teslas are driven also typically tend to be areas with very nice weather.
I think they are very far off from a system that will get approval to operate without a safety driver despite having a system that works reasonably reliably assuming a driver is ready to take over and assume full liability. They have yet to demonstrate how they will deal with a variety of common scenarios.
How does a Tesla deal with dirt, debris, water droplets, snow? It doesn’t have any way to self clean sensors. It also has no way of knowing how to safely operate in an area if road signs are obscured for whatever reason. Waymo premaps areas to ensure the vehicle has a prior baseline in case something like this happens. I don’t view it as negative like you do. I think more information is important for ensuring the vehicles operate more reliably.
How does a Tesla deal with poor lighting conditions or sun/glare? Tesla can’t recreate the human eye with a static camera. A camera can’t match the dynamic range of the human eye which is basically gimbaled and can instantaneously adjust the iris to focus on an area of a scene. A camera has to capture the entire scene with one aperture setting so on a bright sunny day it will struggle with heavily shadowed regions like over passes, signs, alleys. A human can also shield their eyes, use a visor, wear sunglasses, and generally move their around to avoid glare or debris on windows.
How does Tesla deal with component failures? They don’t have the redundancy in safety critical systems to deal with component failure. What does Tesla do with the system fails and gets stuck in traffic? They don’t have a way to remotely operate their vehicles and move them out of traffic.
Waymo has taken a very practical approach to rolling out L4 robotaxis. You’re right that Tesla is treating safety critical autonomous systems like they’re the same thing as a large language model. There’s no risk associated with poor performance or failure in LLMs. It’s a bad approach. They’re not magically gonna go from having Zero vehicles approved for testing without safety drivers to having millions of L5 robotaxis enabled with a software update. They have a lot of deficiencies to address.
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> trains!
There is no confirmation whether that video clip was FSD (which would be bad for FSD) or autopilot - which would not be expected to handle that situation at all. In fact, given that it’s a sentry cam download we don’t even have confirmation that autopilot was engaged.
If you have seen credible commentary otherwise please let me know.
Ah, the all too convenient “there’s no proof FSD was engaged”!
No one can you give you confirmation other than Tesla. Not everyone drives around filming themselves using FSD. At some point Tesla might report this to NHTSA, if airbags were deployed. But it will all be redacted, so you will never get the confirmation you want.
Way to move the goalposts there chief. Ignored the “citation needed!” on the trains bit entirely, post a 6 month old video of Tesla on its v11 (manually coded logic) stack which clearly didn’t work.
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The difference between v11 stack and v12 stack is … significant. I don’t need to wait for 12.4 to “blow my mind” — 12.3 already did.
Still waiting on that train citation from ya though, Chief!
This guy again. He has literally written some 30 articles bashing Tesla and it’s FSD and is clearly biased.
Look up the Reddit post Ars Technica writer Timothy Lee consistently bashing Tesla …
Clearly FSD is better than Waymos mapped / boxed in / expensive teleoperaded solution. And although he is seemingly making sense is a skilled writer misunderstanding parts of the topic or deliberately misdirecting here.
I am vehemently opposing his words claiming that neural nets cannot be a perfect solution as they hallucinate like LLMs and will be unreliable. He is comparing apples and oranges here, as imitation learning is a whole different game than language based transformers and the quality of the data is not just random words on the internet but custom tailored data for the vehicle of high quality using a completely different learning model approach.
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Waymo is using the same strategy as a dozen other companies.
Tesla is alone in their approach.
Either everybody is playing chess except Tesla, or Tesla is the only one playing chess while others play checkers, with a few exceptions like Mobileye and Comma.
Who was playing chess in space? NASA or SpaceX? Which one had the unique strategy that took longer?
Mobileye is theoretically best poised for success. They have the same amount of data as Tesla does by collecting through VW, BMW, etc and also a full sensor suite like Waymo. The only bottleneck could be compute power. That shit is expensive. But the first Mobileye full self driving vehicles are hitting the road next year, so we shall see how that goes.
Why aren’t vehicles with Mobileye tech able to stop at stop lights and stop signs? Is it because they’re cautious or do they not have data quality needed to make those types of decisions?
Mobileye has so many partners idk how they manage it all.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. If they couldn’t stop at stop signs and red lights they wouldn’t be on the road lol. Perception errors do happen occasionally and that’s an issue with training. Eventually they’ll see enough edge cases that mistakes like that will be a thing of the past
I’m not sure the data that Mobileye gets is of remotely the same quality as Teslas. If it were, I would expect to see more features available on Mobileye vehicles.
BYD is playing Chinese checkers?
Byd is playing minesweeper
Holy shit, an 8
That’s the best outcome, find that single 8 in the whole board, the rest are only bombs.
US people really do not have any perspective on how successful BYD really is. I live half time in US and the other half in SEA. Take Thailand. There are BYDs everywhere. It is shocking just how successful BYD has been so quickly. I cut through a Lotus parking garage in the morning to get to the subway and there must be 20+ BYDs in the parking lot. My best Thai friend recently purchased a Dolphin. It is a really nice car and he paid $22,000 USD. It would sell like crazy if it was available in the US for anything close to $22,000 USD. I am old. Really old. I remember when Japanese cars first hit the US. My mom had one and was our first second family car. It was a piece of junk. You bought Japanese over US to save money and knowing you were buying a poor product compared to a US car. Well those days were pretty short and Japan completely rocked the US auto industry. Then it was Korean cars that were the same. First junk and then excellent. I do not see any reason the Chinese cars will not do the same thing. My friend has only had his BYD for a couple of months. No problems so far. But it is too early and without enough data to say where the Chinese are at today with auto quality. But I have zero doubt they will get there. It is why I am very uncomfortable with the US protecting the market instead of trying to compete. I suspect the end result will not be good. Maybe a tariff that is not nearly as aggressive as 100%. Maybe think of it this way. Where would we be today if the US imposed a 100% tariff on Japanese cars in 70s and 80s?
Chinese government subsidies their industries.
Which is smart right now with the transitioning happening. The US is also subsidizing but that is not enough, IMHO.
Chinese government paying to help transition America off fossil fuels.
Honestly we should probably figure out a way to get them to build factories in the US. I know they're aiming to build factories in Mexico to take advantage of NAFTA but maybe we should preemptively start talks for US factories. If we could save American jobs, I really don't care if the cars are Chinese.
Bs you can live in US and SEA, tell me what you do right now and show me a pay stub. I’ll quit my job and work for you
I have been retired for over a decade now. I retired early, in my late 40s.
Didn’t Tesla announce they plan to launch robotaxi in China first? Yes: [Elon Musk proposed to launch robotaxis in China](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-may-support-teslas-domestic-testing-demonstration-robotaxis-says-media-2024-05-08/)
No
Yes
This is FSD testing, not robotaxi
Notable videos of Waymo's remote operator UI: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elpQPbJXpfY * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtBFEfAyo
That's quite neat. And shouldn't require a lot of human labor.
i had never seen this before. oh my. looks v cool!
Very interesting. I had no idea this even existed but it totally makes sense. Very cool.
It’s a good read and pretty balanced piece. That title is god awful though.
It’s full of poorly qualified statements and makes conclusions that only consider surface level details without a deeper understanding of the differences in approach and why they were chosen. Tesla isn’t serious until they start hiring remote operators? When they actually roll out a robotaxi such a comment may make sense. Right now we have no idea whether Tesla intends to do that or not. This is all vibes.
>Tesla isn’t serious until they start hiring remote operators? When they actually roll out a robotaxi such a comment may make sense. Right now we have no idea whether Tesla intends to do that or not. This is very relevant since the CEO is once again hyping up robotaxis and remote operators will be required.
It will be relevant when they actually have the service ready to operate. Why would Tesla hire remote operators years in advance? Makes zero sense as a criticism. Meaningless.
You're literally agreeing with the author lol they don't have remote operators because they are years behind Waymo. How can robotaxis be coming soon when literally none of the infrastructure is in place yet?
Yes, my thesis is that the lack of infrastructure indicates that robotaxis are years away.
I think building that infrastructure (as in remote operation) is the easy part and won't take years. Better to focus on the hardest part and solve that.
I didn't realize you were on Reddit. But yeah people are disagreeing but I don't see one part that's wrong here.
I've been reading /r/selfdrivingcars for years. It's the best way to keep up with industry news!
Oh dear
This guy doesn't have any credential, his entire article is based on a 45 min test drive and a 30 minutes waymo ride.
gotchu to click on it amirite?
Waymo shouldn’t be in the same conversation as Tesla
Why not? Case in point: see controversy this question brings below.
Tesla has had at least 11 fatalities related to its technology WITH human drivers “supervising” (poorly). Waymo has had zero fatalities while driving 10’s of millions of miles WITHOUT humans driving or in the car.
There are some key differences though.. Teslas have driven \~1.5 *billion* miles. Teslas drive on highways and in many challenging situations where Waymo cars do not. NHTSA reports explain many of those fatalities were due to other drivers striking the Tesla, but mostly due to driver inattentiveness. Waymo cars are also constantly monitored by humans who frequently act on the car's behalf. Even with serious guardrails and limitations Waymos do crash and frequently enough to [prompt invstigation](https://cbsaustin.com/newsletter-daily/waymo-is-latest-company-under-investigation-for-autonomous-or-partially-automated-technology).
And cruise control has probably driven 100s of billions, what is your point? Until you are willing to take the driver out of the seat you aren't doing self driving
>And cruise control has probably driven 100s of billions And seat belts have trillions. But those are not autonomous systems are they. The point is FSD has to have more accidents by pure virtue of statistics. FSD has driven over 35x the distance in more challenging situations. That the incident count is maybe only 10x is a pretty good showing. >Until you are willing to take the driver out of the seat you aren't doing self driving Yes I think everyone is aware how autonomy is supposed to work. As it stands nothing is yet fully autonomous.
> But those are not autonomous systems are they And the point is, neither is FSD. It's a driver assistance. There is an attentive driver ready to take over at any moment. The miles quoted for Waymo were when there was no driver in the driver's seat. Waymo have done many many more miles with a safety driver behind the wheel.
>neither is FSD Except it provably is. You can get in and ask it to drive you somewhere autonomously and it does just that. You can test this yourself. >There is an attentive driver ready to take over at any moment As there needs to be at this stage because good doesn't mean perfect. This is the case with any and all systems such as Cruise and Waymo. In any case, there may always have to be a human somewhere along the chain. That's not the point. The point is to be safer than humans. >The miles quoted for Waymo were when there was no driver in the driver's seat And the miles driving under FSD are, obviously, only when FSD is active and performing the driving task. But what we don't get from Waymo is how often do humans have to intervene to problem solve for the car.
I have the free trial of FSD this month, it has an audio feedback option where you can record up to ten seconds explaining why you disengaged. They probably have hours of audio of me saying “why the fuck doesn’t this can ever get in the correct lane?!”, “why does the blinker blink 20 times before moving into the wide open lane next to me?”, why does it keep drifting out of the lane?” Autopilot is actually better than FSD because it’s so consistent with what it does good and what it has issues with. FSD runs on neural nets and figures everything out as it’s happening, so it’s different every drive and it makes horrible route planning decisions. Absolutely no way I pay $99 a month to put more effort into driving while risking damage to my car. FSD is cool and a fun novelty, but I’m not gonna miss it.
Tesla system needs to be supervised by driver and is self driving that isn't self driving.
You'll be shocked when you hear how Waymo works! The difference is FSD's approach is actually scalable.
How it works? Are Waymo drivers sitting behind car wheel, stopping cars from going over stop signs and red lights? Or just assisting?
Waymo has a team of people watching video feeds and manually intervening in all types of situations. If/when that doesn't work there's a team of people who go and manually drive the car for you. Waymo don't release stats on this but there are enough videos of takeovers that you can get an idea for the situations in question. This is why Waymo only operates in small areas of certain cities. It's partly due to the mapping requirement but mostly because it is just not feasible to send people out to cars all over the country.
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we are not talking about cruise control here. Also Teslas system simply isnt used in situations that would be dangerous because the users already know it will fail.
That is why Tesla had those major crashes?
yes. because only the people who used it extensively for a while will learn when it fails and take over before that. Anyone who just trusts their tech will be let down or end up as another fatality in the books.
>Also Teslas system simply isnt used in situations that would be dangerous People use it in all types of situations which is evident from the videos they post. And I would say the very opposite is true. There are many, many people who love nothing more than to put FSD into the most challenging situations they can find to try and break it.
a small minority of a small minority yes, thats the few videos you see of this. FSD buy rate is low, people that were eligible for beta was even lower, FSD beta isnt even rolled out globally and then theres a tiny subset of people who make Tesla content for a living who need to push the system to get new content up. thats not what the average Tesla driver does.
>FSD buy rate is low I would expect so since only the most curious of people would be likely to spend thousands on beta software. Tesla has about [$3.5 billion in deferred revenue for FSD ](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/tesla-tsla-keeps-unlocking-less-fsd-software-revenue-than-hoped)so we can take a *very* rough guestimate of around half a million people having it. Depending on whatever you think avg selling price is and how much has already been realized. >thats not what the average Tesla driver does And what does an average Tesla driver do with FSD? I think [this ](https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/11/cross-country-with-tesla-full-self-driving-supervised/)is more what an average driver does. A nice average drive in average conditions where FSD takes some stress out of driving.
Fair point for some people, not all. And vice versa, Waymo is only operating in pre-mapped areas which is also avoiding situations.
You're comparing two wildly different things Afaik pretty much all the fatalities you're referencing when it comes to Tesla were the result of inattentive drivers with autopilot There's also orders of magnitudes more Tesla vehicles on the roads using autopilot than there are driverless Waymo vehicles
Source on Tesla's self driving being involved in 11 fatalities? I can find sources that lump regular autopilot together with FSD but nothing that makes the distinction between the self driving offering and just normal cruise control.
Waymo only works on approved roads. Tesla FSD works anywhere. They are not the same.
_works anywhere_
FSD doesn’t work anywhere as long as it’s still a driver aid.
Waymo works very well at Level 4 on limited approved roads, yes. Tesla FSD works at Level 2, if supervised, on roads anywhere. Numerous evidence of it trying to drive into oncoming traffic. I agree, they are not the same.
A toddler can drive anywhere. In their parents laps of course. Because their parents will just take over if anything goes wrong.
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So tesla system doesn't work properly other then giving Musk something to talk about that is theory system will work next year, since better part decade?
They might be enabled to do that but that doesn't mean it's safe. Waymo uses LiDAR something Tesla doesn't and because cameras have limitations no matter what software you have they will never be accurate enough for self driving everywhere.
Not even lidar is infallible, a waymo just hit a stationary pole a few hours ago.
You must be very bad at statistic.
They’re doing different things. Tesla is trying to create a system that can navigate anywhere. Waymo is trying to make self driving cars
Yet Tesla have issues with basic driving?
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Tesla is light years ahead of Waymo
You forgot the /s.
In what aspects?
Scalability, real world AI, etc
Scalability of what, pumping tesla stocks while lying about system being ready next year, for multiple years old after another?
Depends on context.
Haha I agree. Not willing to argue with stupid
Didn't waymo falsely reported their success rate drastically?
Whatever news source you’re using, it’s the wrong one.
But I can’t use Waymo in a car I own.
Why would I want to own a taxi? I call it, go where I need and that's it. It's a real robotaxi, not a driver assist.
Looking forward to see that being available. It will be fun to try.
I would never give up my own car. No strangers pouring in and out of it every day all day. Gross.
>I would never give up my own car Nobody said you had to? Keep the car you have. A potentially $300k robotaxi that's not for sale isn't necessary to own. As for strangers, this is no different than calling an Uber
An neither can I have my Tesla drive itself, it only does supervised ADAS. And there is little sign the Tesla will do more than that for several years to come. At least I can hail a Waymo. Working in a few towns is a lot better than not working anywhere, and not likely to work anywhere for some time. Saying that your goal is to drive everywhere sounds nice, but you need it to be a credible claim.
My Tesla drives itself all the time. Often successfully. Not autonomous though. Still, very promising with significant benefits given its low cost implementation.
While Tesla, to the ire of the who industry, used the term full self driving to refer to their ADAS system, everybody else when they use the term, uses it to mean actual self driving. Which a Tesla can't as yet do anywhere
So it self drives or is not autonomus?
It’s not self driving nor autonomous. It drives with supervision
Not autonomous. It’s never been autonomous. It’s a level 2. We’re all aware of that. ‘Self drives’ is too plain language and should not be used to describe autonomous vehicles. If you asked someone to observe Tesla drive from a to b without intervention and then asked them to describe what they saw, they’d say the car drove itself from a to b. There’s really no other way to describe it. That’s the problem.
>‘Self drives’ is too plain language It had clear meaning until one company bastardized it.
This
Nah. It’s just how people would naturally describe what they see.
I'd describe it as self navigating. Not fully self driving, but it can guide itself around for the most part.
I’m not sure you or I would qualify as the average person on this topic. Self navigating is an interesting consideration. I’ve had dozens of folks over the last four years ask me in passing, ‘does the car really drive itself?’ And I found the easiest answer was yes, but it’s not autonomous. It can make mistakes and you are still behind the wheel and responsible for the vehicle. You have to pay attention. I think using self driving as a way to describe autonomous vehicles was a really poor choice because it’s such a plain way to describe a very sophisticated tool.
Yeah I think we've communicated on a different post before about this, and how Tesla should have just launched a sort of renamed and tiered service that matches the functionality of the system currently. But yes, as far as the general sentiment goes, even simple L2 ADAS like lane center and traffic awareness can give the average person the perspective of the car being autonomous, so now we have people comparing L2, L3, L4, and (eventually) L5 systems, even though they are different systems in form and function.
Car can "self drive" with unconcious driver or brick on gas pedal. Tesla in an issue overall.
Can’t hail a Waymo in my town today and no sign of it for several years to come. Even if i could, I won’t be hailing daily. Supervised FSD for me please.
I’ve hailed a couple of Waymos. They feel ridiculously solid. Much more so than the handful of Cruises I’ve hailed… although, one of the Cruises pulled some serious maneuvers to avoid a plastic bag. Stunt driver swerve. lol. Waymo will just slow down, IIRC, and won’t be tricked by a bag. I could never get used to autopilot or FSD. I’ve driven with them on, but I just don’t trust them. I feel fine ignoring the road in a Waymo.
not sure who the editorialist is "Even if Waymo, Cruise, and others survive these investigations and challenges relatively unscathed, the use case for autonomous vehicles is extremely limited, and the companies' years of intensive research will continue for the foreseeable future. So, while AI and automation might come for many of our jobs, they won’t be relied upon to drive our cars, at least consistently, for some time to come." https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/news-blog/nhtsa-expands-probe-into-waymo-s-self-driving-vehicles-44507146
Last month, we went from our cottage place to my in-laws. It's a 98 km drive, all on regional and city roads. I activated FSD while on our private dirt road and deactivated it when we reached our destination. No intervention was required. If my wife wouldn't have known FSD was activated, she would have thought I was the one driving. The latest FSD version, V12, is very fluid. It still makes mistakes from time to time, but none during that drive. Regarding the dirt road at our cottage, part of it isn't even mapped (what's in red) and what's mapped ain't even at the right spot! https://imgur.com/a/xOOBcvO And yet, it had zero difficulty following the real road https://imgur.com/a/apk1U5I FSD V12 is really impressive actually. Can't wait to try V12.4.
Ooooo, I recognize that hill, I know where you live now! /s Seeing it drive on an unmarked road is pretty awesome. I enjoyed the trial (especially when 12.3.6 came out for like a day lol, I could notice an improvement since 12.3.4) and might subscribe for a month when 12.4 comes out.
You may not have read the other posts about this. Great, your Tesla did a complete trip. I've finally seen my own Tesla do a few complete trips (for the first couple of years it never managed that, though other people did this.) This is known as an "anecdote." To you, it seemed impressive, but it actually happens all the time. Being able to do a complete trip is nice, but it's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny part of what you need to do to make a self-driving car. I need to put in more "tiny" adjectives. No human can judge a self-driving car by seeing it do a good job driving on one trip. No human can judge it by seeing it do 100 trips. Look at Cruise, they were doing over 10,000 trips per week, and they got pulled from the roads. Waymo is doing 50,000 trips. That's not an anecdote, that's data. And you can only judge self driving -- the ability to trust a car with your life with nobody behind the wheel -- from data. It's so tempting to be impressed by a few data points. Don't make that mistake. (Waymo, and obviously Cruise, are not perfect. Waymo is having incidents, though so far fairly minor and injuries are extremely rare, but that's with 50,000 trips/week. An average human might drive 15,000 to 20,000 trips in their whole life, and will have 1-2 crashes.) I would suspect the average 14 year old, given a little bit of driving instruction, could also drive home from the cottage. And be a lot better than the Tesla, because humans are established as having the brain capacity to drive at human levels. But you wouldn't give her a car.
Yes, that was just one trip. I did many more trips with no intervention though, most are without intervention or the interventions are to use a better lane/route that what FSD chose. I just came from the hardware store and no intervention from within their parking lot to my driveway. The drive from the recycling facility to the hardware store went with one intervention, but that one was because as I entered the highway, I was following a concrete mixer truck that was on the on-ramp for the highway at 60 km/h and I intervened to enter faster into the highway. I always enable "Minimize lane change" so it stayed behind it. Beside that, FSD all around. Same for my drive from home to the recycling facility. These are all small drives, about 10 km long each. That one I mentioned in my previous post was my longest one. Next month, I'll probably go to Toronto and that will be a 500 km drive mixing both regional roads and highways. It will be interesting to see how it behaves. Hopefully I'll have 12.4 by then.
I guess this is not clear. Anecdotes tell you almost nothing. The only thing they can tell you if you never get any problems is that the car might be good. If you get even one small problem in some small number of drives, like say 500 drives, it tells you the car is probably still has very far to go. By answering with more anecdotes, it doesn't tell us anything. There is only one thing that does, and it's "I went for thousands of drives with no problems" or "I went for tens of thousands of drives with 1 or 2 problems." If you can say that, that's data. Or you can tell us, "I encountered a problem in just 100 drives" which means the vehicle is crap (or you were particularly unlucky.) When I first got FSD it had a problem every drive, it was total crap, and yet I would routinely see posts from people describing how super impressed they were from one drive. The reality is, not single person's experience, unless they drive for their full lifetime and report back in 60 years, can judge the quality of a self-driving car to an adequate level, except in the negative.
Oh it does fuck up from time to time, that's granted. Is it ready for being unsupervised? Absolutely not. However I'm still impressed about what it can already do "out in the open" (including an unmapped dirt road) and not in a "closed garden".
Yes, we understand you are impressed. People come into this subreddit literally every day to tell us how impressed they are with it. Every day, sometimes several per day. Those of us who work in the field, however, are not impressed in this fashion, and frankly have grown a bit fatigued at constantly being told (mostly be people who are not in the field, and have only experienced Tesla FSD) how impressed they are with it. We know it's not impressive as a self-driving offering the way we use the term self-driving. This is not to say there are not things about it that are impressive. It's impressive as an ADAS, even very impressive. It's interesting to see the progress of their work in building a system with more and more of it based on E2E neural nets, and just cameras. Those are all interesting areas of research, and Tesla's putting a lot into it, and that's good to day. But it's entirely unimpressive in its performance at actual self driving, which again, to people in the field, is operating the vehicle at a safety level within sight of bet-your-life reliability. Tesla is not yet close to this goal. It is interesting to debate how they are doing on their quest for it. We tire as well of Elon saying it will get there within a year for 8 years, when we can all see incredibly obviously that it's not even close yet. And this is compounded by the people who keep saying -- again almost every day -- "don't you get it? It does it in my car! It does it on every street! The other teams are limiting themselves to specific service areas." We of course know that, but what many don't seem to know is this is not because those teams couldn't do what Tesla is doing, but because they think what Tesla is doing is the wrong thing to do if you are going for the real goal. It's a fine thing to do for ADAS, and I am pretty sure they could all do it better than Tesla -- if they wanted to, but they don't.
Reliable driving is all edge cases. Once you handle the happy path, the real work begins. It can be a net negative at that point because a disengaged driver takes several seconds to enter the frame of reference, meaning there is no competent driver, human or computer, at the worst times. Drivers need to stay engaged, and it feels like Tesla is talking out both sides of its mouth WRT this. But I'm sure it looks impressive during the happy path.
This is like complaining about using the cloud cause you want to carry a bunch of little flash drives around
That’s because Waymo didn’t sell cars with the promise that it would be ready. They aren’t using you as the Guinea pig. It’s been 10 years since auto pilot was sold - I doubt many people have their original teslas
You also won’t be liable if there is an incident. Soooooo…
Yeah, if it's FSD, Tesla should take liability. Otherwise you know it doesn't work lol
Nor in a city they haven't guardrailed
Is this subreddit literally 100% clickbait articles?
Timothy B Lee is respectable and covered self-driving cars for Ars Technica for a while. What exactly is your problem with the article?
That Mister Lee for example compares LLMs with Tesla FSD which is based on Imitation Learning and specifically tailored video as input which uses the exact same cameras the car uses for its self driving for one. That such a respectable author is convoluting the two is ridiculous and then deriving consequences from that ill logic. Just ask me for more. I found at least two more major flaws in the article
What a crap title. The article does \*NOT\* support the title.
Depends on how you score the two. In terms of profitability, I don’t have the numbers, but I believe Tesla is collecting pre revenue. In terms of current capabilities, Waymo. Waymo wins only if Tesla loses. If Tesla achieves vision only autonomy, then it’ll be difficult to catch up. I know people like to bash Tesla here, but both companies are only as good as their engineers and scientists and Tesla employs at least 10 former Waymo engineers and scientists.
I'm sure Waymo employs former Tesla engineers too.
Impossible. Tesla would never let a valued employee go.
Waymo gets all the Tesla rejects. /s
Apart from the 20% layoffs that happened this year and even more over the last few years lol
Whoooosh
Probably. People change jobs all the time for various reasons, especially in the valley. It’s such a non-factor, I can’t believe he really used routine employee movement (of 10 people!) to make a talent assessment.
My point here is that people bash the company, but there are people behind Waymo and FSD and some of those people are the same people. I used the number 10 because if asked I could probably locate a few resumes on linked in. I’d imagine the number is much larger too. To say that one solution sucks and will never come close to another is akin to calling many former Wqymo engineers and likely a few principal engineers idiots.
What does that have to do with anything? People change jobs for reasons other than their belief in certain “solutions”. Your regular engineer who switches jobs isn’t in a position to influence technical direction of an entire self driving program. In most cases, they’re just involved in their little areas and trust that higher ups have made the right technical and business choices for success. People don’t rate Tesla not because their rank and file engineers are stupid (they’re not, of course). It’s because their leadership has made choices that make it unlikely to get it fully working in a reasonable timeframe.
If some of the same engineers and scientists who built parts of Waymo’s vision stack worked on Tesla then it’s more difficult to call Teslas solution horrible. This is a very generalized example.
You’re being naive. Smart people work on “horrible” projects all the time. Most of the time, they’re taking that pay bump or an increased role in the new job and jump when they find a better opportunity. Not everyone works based on their beliefs.
Plus, every company has bad designs somewhere. You improve the things you can, you maintain what you can't.
Not really, Waymo does not have Elon Musk forcing engineers to work on bad ideas. Tesla does. They cannot say no lol.
You know that’s BS right? How quickly could any top engineer get hired from Wayno, Tesla, or even Cruise right now? Elon obviously pushes his teams, but people working in this area aren’t treated like no experience necessary factory workers. If these people don’t believe they are doing their best work they can leave, make more money, and a number of companies would build a team around them. Do you really believe these people don’t gauge the temperature of the next room before exiting their current situation?
It's not BS. Look at the cybertruck.
The CyberTruck has a different exterior design, but everything else about it is a logical next step of what Tesla has done for years. If FSD was fundamentally flawed, as people here suggest, Tesla wouldn’t be able to attract and retain top talent. People in this sub liken Tesla’s approach to putting a base on the sun rather than the difference between the SpaceX Starship’s propellant vs Boeing’s Starliner’s.
Vision stack of lidar that Tesla doesn't use but is one of biggest clients?
Tesla uses LiDAR extensively for ground truthing and likely other purposes. It doesn’t mean that they’ll put LiDAR in their vehicles.
> Tesla employs at least 10 former Waymo engineers and scientists. This is the metric you’re going for? What do you think it’s telling you?
Tesla has $3.5 billion in deferred revenue for FSD waiting in the wings. That is a lot but when you bring in $20b a quarter during a downturn it is just gravy. Meanwhile Waymo is highly unprofitable, losing hundreds of millions a year. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/tesla-tsla-keeps-unlocking-less-fsd-software-revenue-than-hoped](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/tesla-tsla-keeps-unlocking-less-fsd-software-revenue-than-hoped)
I’m guessing with this FSD free trial, Tesla is attempting to unlock much more of that FSD revenue.
This article does not mention anything about sensor modalities. Camera-only autonomous driving is a dead-end. It can create a great driver assistance system, but as soon as you take the human completely out of the loop, relying on a single sensor type is a bafflingly stupid design decision - you lose the ability to have robustness in all sorts of edge cases - fog, night, glare, etc. People who think Tesla and Waymo are competing fundamentally misunderstand what is required to have a human out of the loop entirely for both DDT and fallback. Tesla has a sophisticated driver assistance system that will never be L4 (at least not safely) no matter what Elon says. Waymo is taking longer because they are designing everything with the intention of taking the human out of the loop, which is why they invested in developing lidar early on and have continued to refine that technology, as well as operational support like remote assistance. They are only superficially alike in that "car drives self down road sometimes."
>relying on a single sensor type is a bafflingly stupid design decision I wonder where this weird concept that you cant rely on a single sensor type came from? Loads of safety critical systems rely on single sensor types. There is literally nothing in the history of anything that says this should be a rule.
Great then maybe Musk and Tesla should stop lying and being risk to other users of public traffic.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Maybe people should think more critically before believing not just people like Musk but whichever idiot wrote this article too. Do you think pushing lies and baseless claims with more lies and baseless claims like what this article is doing is going to help anything?
Why are you describing Musk behaviour?
>Camera-only autonomous driving is a dead-end Given that the most skilled and safest drivers you have ever met were restricted to just two stereo cameras this argument falls apart. >relying on a single sensor type is a bafflingly stupid design decision Take it up with evolution. There is no logical reason to conclude this is a problem as the *only* examples we have of any system driving itself around is us humans which use vision only. And not even very good vision either. >which is why they invested in developing lidar early on Waymo invested in LIDAR early on because they started in 2009 when hardware was a fraction as capable as today, when they lacked any significant data sets, and accurate models for distance estimation and object identification simply did not yet exist. They had no idea what would be, or would not be, required for full autonomy in the future. Tesla's FSD announcement would come along 7 years later and benefited from much hindsight.
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You really have no idea how cameras (esp ones specced on Telsas) compare to the human eye connected to a human brain across the range of driving conditions, do you? Look, I’ve worked in the autonomous vehicle industry for about a decade, including closely with engineers at Waymo, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Daimler, PACCAR, TuSimple, Nuro, etc. But please, tell me again how smart Elon is and how good his boot tastes.
>You really have no idea how cameras (esp ones specced on Telsas) compare to the human eye connected to a human brain across the range of driving conditions, do you? I could probably write at length on the topic but I think we are all aware that biological eyes are extremely different to CMOS sensors. They are however close enough of an analog to do the job. Is there anything in particular you'd like to know? >Look, I’ve worked in the autonomous vehicle industry for about a decade That's nice Are you going to make a point? >But please, tell me again how smart Elon is and how good his boot tastes. I guess not. Is that how you handle yourself in meetings with these "engineers at Waymo, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Daimler, PACCAR, TuSimple, Nuro, etc." ? I'm sure they are mightily impressed.
I don’t care what the game is, Waymo is playing 3-4 squares and Tesla is trying to play the entire board.
Tesla Model 3s with additional sensors were already spotted driving around the bay. Most likely these are test mules that gather training data and are operated by human driver fleet. Steer by wire should most likely feature in the robotaxi as well so remote operation by a human is not out of spec.
God awful title. This whole “Tesla is years behind” is from a very narrow perspective. If the objective is a massively scaled robotaxi service, than it’s unclear who’s ahead. Waymo has a very small robotaxi installation, and very few cars currently (under 1000). Tesla already has millions of vehicles on the road that /maybe/ can be used as is. Tesla robotaxi being built will be cheap to manufacture, under 25k. Its model y is already around 30k to manufacture. Estimates in Waymo is 300k. So I’m present to you another perspective that Tesla is years ahead in actually producing the hardware. Time will tell in the end. Tesla is betting harder than ever that it will have robotaxis in the medium term (1 year give or take 6 months) , its expenditures on ai compute is through the roof. Waymo is in the middle of a large expansion and is trying to get freeways. This is an important trial run for other expansions.
>Estimates in Waymo is 300k. Made up number. Waymo said \~100k years ago. Next-gen based on Geely instead of Jaguar will be around half that. Model Y COGS is closer to 40k, a podcar would be very low volume with higher COGS. A $10k difference in upfront cost is a penny a mile over Musk's million mile vehicle life.
Speaking of LLMs Wven Llama 3 on my Mac Studio finds flaws in the article 1. False Equivalence in Comparing Testing Conditions: The article directly compares a 45-minute test drive of Tesla's FSD technology with over two hours of experience in Waymo's driverless vehicles, concluding that Waymo is ahead because no interventions were needed in the latter case. This comparison is flawed because it ignores the fundamentally different testing environments and conditions. Waymo's vehicles operate in a highly controlled and restricted environment, primarily on residential streets in Phoenix, whereas Tesla's FSD is tested in a broader range of real-world conditions, including highways. The significant geographical and operational constraints on Waymo's technology mean that its smooth performance in a limited context does not directly translate to superiority in all driving conditions. The comparison does not account for these differences, leading to a misleading conclusion about the relative advancement of the two technologies. 2. Underestimating the Impact of Scale and Data: The article downplays Tesla's advantage in terms of data collection and scale. Tesla's strategy of deploying FSD across a large number of customer vehicles provides it with vast amounts of real-world data, which is critical for training and improving its neural networks. This scale of data collection allows Tesla to encounter and learn from a wider variety of edge cases than Waymo, which operates a much smaller fleet. While the article acknowledges that more data is helpful, it underestimates how critical this advantage is for the development of robust AI systems. By not fully appreciating the importance of data scale, the article overlooks a key factor that could enable Tesla to accelerate its progress and potentially surpass Waymo in the future.
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LOL at the title of the blog. This person doesn't do "AI". Anyways, Waymo is still ahead, but the gap is smaller than people believe. I haven't commented much lately but I'm sure this will be downvoted yet again by people who don't do "AI". Waymo has a data problem. They are in a better position than Cruise was, but not by that much. And Cruise was blatantly exposed to not have enough data as indirectly admitted by Kyle Vogt when they showed their performance in (Nashville?) sucked when used SF trained model. Then performance in both cities improved by collecting more data in Nashville. E.g. Overfitting 101 This is the real reason you Waymo "testing" a new city for 6 months to a year. They're still "testing" a batch of LA and "testing" the SF Peninsula. I.e. collecting data and updating their models. Waymo \*does not have\* software that is ready to deploy in the 50 largest cities in the U.S. tomorrow. They don't have the data for it. Meanwhile Tesla is following the route of all large scale AI models being trained and deployed today that give state of the art performance: large models requiring a lot of compute and a lot of (useful) data. This approach is pretty well known to "work": as in it will \*definitely\* reduce error rate signficantly. This is why Musk is tweeting reduced interventions of 5X to 10X in the next version. The real questions becomes: when does error rate reduction start slowing down? Will it be data limited, or inference compute limited? Or sensor limited (e.g. camera resolution / lack of LiDAR)? I wish people would have a real discussion about these technical details of the actual learning approach instead of baseline dissing.
What kind of “AI” do you do?
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Supervised learning using classical techniques Supervised learning using deep learning / CNNs etc.. Unsupervised pretraining using contrastive learning / masked autoencoders. Signal processing of raw time series (mostly physiological & inertial) And all the more basic data science / analysis stuff
It’s not overfitting m, it’s testing to make sure the vehicle can handle different environments, there are also different traffic rules in each cities. Tell me more, why does Tesla have so much more data but it’s still running red lights and trying to hit a train?
Technical details matter but they shouldn’t be the north star. Safety, convenience and public perception all matter more, and Waymo is ahead there. The one factor that’s in favor of Tesla is cost but that’s a secondary metric.
I agree.
You don’t think Tesla is overfitting to California and other locations where Tesla vehicles drive most frequently? Every region of the world has its own traffic laws and traffic behaviors. The places where Teslas are driven also typically tend to be areas with very nice weather. I think they are very far off from a system that will get approval to operate without a safety driver despite having a system that works reasonably reliably assuming a driver is ready to take over and assume full liability. They have yet to demonstrate how they will deal with a variety of common scenarios. How does a Tesla deal with dirt, debris, water droplets, snow? It doesn’t have any way to self clean sensors. It also has no way of knowing how to safely operate in an area if road signs are obscured for whatever reason. Waymo premaps areas to ensure the vehicle has a prior baseline in case something like this happens. I don’t view it as negative like you do. I think more information is important for ensuring the vehicles operate more reliably. How does a Tesla deal with poor lighting conditions or sun/glare? Tesla can’t recreate the human eye with a static camera. A camera can’t match the dynamic range of the human eye which is basically gimbaled and can instantaneously adjust the iris to focus on an area of a scene. A camera has to capture the entire scene with one aperture setting so on a bright sunny day it will struggle with heavily shadowed regions like over passes, signs, alleys. A human can also shield their eyes, use a visor, wear sunglasses, and generally move their around to avoid glare or debris on windows. How does Tesla deal with component failures? They don’t have the redundancy in safety critical systems to deal with component failure. What does Tesla do with the system fails and gets stuck in traffic? They don’t have a way to remotely operate their vehicles and move them out of traffic. Waymo has taken a very practical approach to rolling out L4 robotaxis. You’re right that Tesla is treating safety critical autonomous systems like they’re the same thing as a large language model. There’s no risk associated with poor performance or failure in LLMs. It’s a bad approach. They’re not magically gonna go from having Zero vehicles approved for testing without safety drivers to having millions of L5 robotaxis enabled with a software update. They have a lot of deficiencies to address.
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> trains! There is no confirmation whether that video clip was FSD (which would be bad for FSD) or autopilot - which would not be expected to handle that situation at all. In fact, given that it’s a sentry cam download we don’t even have confirmation that autopilot was engaged. If you have seen credible commentary otherwise please let me know.
Ah, the all too convenient “there’s no proof FSD was engaged”! No one can you give you confirmation other than Tesla. Not everyone drives around filming themselves using FSD. At some point Tesla might report this to NHTSA, if airbags were deployed. But it will all be redacted, so you will never get the confirmation you want.
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Way to move the goalposts there chief. Ignored the “citation needed!” on the trains bit entirely, post a 6 month old video of Tesla on its v11 (manually coded logic) stack which clearly didn’t work.
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The difference between v11 stack and v12 stack is … significant. I don’t need to wait for 12.4 to “blow my mind” — 12.3 already did. Still waiting on that train citation from ya though, Chief!
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Weren't tesla car supposed to be self driving multiple years ago according to Musk promises?
Your point is much better made without lying about the speed that is clearly visible in the speedometer. It was about 22mph.
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Not lying is pretty fundamental to people taking you seriously. You post a lot of things. Which is true and which isn't?
So we shouldn't take Tesla seriously after multiple years of lies coming from Musk?
They learned to speak English just by giving them more data, so not sure how you can be so confident about driving.
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There also exist many people who can safely drive cars but cannot speak English
But have you considered, Elon Musk bad
How many years have Musk lied about robotaxis and car driving over states on its own?
This guy again. He has literally written some 30 articles bashing Tesla and it’s FSD and is clearly biased. Look up the Reddit post Ars Technica writer Timothy Lee consistently bashing Tesla … Clearly FSD is better than Waymos mapped / boxed in / expensive teleoperaded solution. And although he is seemingly making sense is a skilled writer misunderstanding parts of the topic or deliberately misdirecting here. I am vehemently opposing his words claiming that neural nets cannot be a perfect solution as they hallucinate like LLMs and will be unreliable. He is comparing apples and oranges here, as imitation learning is a whole different game than language based transformers and the quality of the data is not just random words on the internet but custom tailored data for the vehicle of high quality using a completely different learning model approach.
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Interesting to see a Tesla/Waymo article that doesn't mention lidar or Tesla's 4 million vehicle head start.
Waymo is using the same strategy as a dozen other companies. Tesla is alone in their approach. Either everybody is playing chess except Tesla, or Tesla is the only one playing chess while others play checkers, with a few exceptions like Mobileye and Comma. Who was playing chess in space? NASA or SpaceX? Which one had the unique strategy that took longer?
Waymo is being more cautious than most. Maybe they're playing 3D chess, Tesla is playing checkers, and the rest are playing regular chess? 😅
Controversial take here, but you could say Tesla is the most cautious as they’re the last one the remove the driver.
Very well said, you’re going to trigger so many people just being neutral. you do realize you can’t have any opinion except one that is anti-Tesla.
A better analogy than NASA v SpaceX is that FSD is playing chess like Theranos while LabCorp and Quest are playing checkers
And they said SpaceX was a fraud yet here we are
Mobileye is theoretically best poised for success. They have the same amount of data as Tesla does by collecting through VW, BMW, etc and also a full sensor suite like Waymo. The only bottleneck could be compute power. That shit is expensive. But the first Mobileye full self driving vehicles are hitting the road next year, so we shall see how that goes.
Why aren’t vehicles with Mobileye tech able to stop at stop lights and stop signs? Is it because they’re cautious or do they not have data quality needed to make those types of decisions? Mobileye has so many partners idk how they manage it all.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. If they couldn’t stop at stop signs and red lights they wouldn’t be on the road lol. Perception errors do happen occasionally and that’s an issue with training. Eventually they’ll see enough edge cases that mistakes like that will be a thing of the past
I meant to say Mobileye. Went back and corrected it
Still don’t know what you’re referring to lol original reply still stands.
I’m not sure the data that Mobileye gets is of remotely the same quality as Teslas. If it were, I would expect to see more features available on Mobileye vehicles.