undefined | Better HN

0 pointseverforward1y ago0 comments

They are both pursuing the same goal: making a self-driving car. That makes them comparable. There's nothing stopping Tesla from pre-mapping; their decision not to do that doesn't suddenly make them incomparable.

The only differentiating factor is that Tesla's approach has theoretical benefits, if they can prove it works. If they could hit the same disengagements/mile rate as Waymo, they would likely be ahead since they don't need pre-mapping.

That being said, theoretical benefits are worth about the same as monopoly money. Until they can demonstrate that they can get the same performance without pre-mapping and LIDAR, it's all just conjecture. There are no points awarded for "yeah, well if mine had worked it would have been better!" They might get there eventually, but the current signs don't seem promising. At least not for getting there before Waymo completely eats the market.

Also, at least Waymo's disengagements are known. They're defined by the DMV, it's basically "any time control needs to be taken away from the autopilot". If a human in the car manually takes over, that's a disengagement. If the car decides it can't drive safely and prompts a human to take over, that's a disengagement. If someone has to log in to the car with a joystick to get it somewhere, that's a disengagement.

The only confusing situation I'm aware of is when remote techs give the car waypoints, like if it gets confused in a parking lot. I don't believe that counts as a disengagement because the car is still driving itself, it's basically just failing at pathfinding. That seems reasonable to me, because it's not a safety risk at all, just an annoyance to the business.

0 comments

mgiannopoulos1y ago

Choosing between apples and oranges would be “pursuing the goal of eating”, but you’re still comparing apples with oranges. People are doing 2-3hour drives with FSD 12 with no disengagement. You should check out the recent progress. Meanwhile, Waymo is somehow going to map out in full detail entire countries in order to ever scale up.

Btw, the definition of disengagement is up to the companies, not the DMV https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/02/03/2023-disen...

everforwardOP1y ago

I used to work for one of these companies (wasn't really a fan of them, and it wasn't Waymo nor Tesla). There's certainly some level of creating optimistic disengagement numbers, but not on the scale of orders of magnitude; my guesstimate would be on the order of 5% or 10%.

They can't fudge them too hard without the CA DMV yanking their license.

> People are doing 2-3hour drives with FSD 12 with no disengagement. You should check out the recent progress.

2 or 3 hours is impressive in a vacuum, but not all that much compared to the other players. It's an accomplishment for sure, and would have been overall impressive in 2018 or 2020. In 2024, it's only impressive because it can do it without lidar or radar, and even then that may only be because Tesla is the only one doing that so there's really not a comparison point.

It's certainly still an accomplishment, but I'm not convinced that it's economically relevant at this point. Best of luck to them.

To be clear, I dislike Tesla, but I do hope this works out because the alternatives are much too expensive for consumers to actually own. They'll have to use an Uber/Lyft kind of system because the lidar sensors alone cost more than a Lamborghini last I heard.

They do appear to be having basically the exact issues people thought they would have without lidar, though. Namely that different types of sensors are vulnerable to different types of phantom objects, and it's difficult to eliminate those without either having a different sensor that doesn't see those phantoms to sanity check against, or creating issues with failing to detect real objects.

A couple of examples: Video is prone to detecting the stick cyclist on road signs as an actual cyclist, where it's obvious on lidar that it's a road sign. Inversely, lidar can read steam (like that coming out of a sewer manhole) as a physical object where video can tell that it isn't.

It's difficult to use a single signal to fix either of those without having knock on effects that cause failures to detect real objects. It's much easier to use a combination of signals to disintermediate. Cyclists are not flat, so lidar tells you it's not a cyclist.

> Meanwhile, Waymo is somehow going to map out in full detail entire countries in order to ever scale up.

They're owned by the preeminent digital maps provider, who likely has other uses for that data and will be able to package and re-sell it to the other vendors that require mapping data.

It's also worth pointing out that population, travel routes and income are not equally distributed. It's almost certainly an 80/20 problem where mapping 20% of a country lets you handle 80% of the rides. They can reach ~10% of the US population by mapping a number of cities you can count on your fingers. Highways are incredibly easy to map, so it wouldn't be difficult to interconnect those cities.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse