Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

Re:Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars by wmf on Monday September 28, 2020 @10:42PM (#24623721)

I guess the question is how you rank a prototype that's actually autonomous against a production car that's far from autonomous. IMO manufacturing cars sounds a lot easier than autonomy. There's also the fact that Waymo's goal is only autonomy within areas that have been mapped in hyper-detail while Tesla apparently wants to drive anywhere. How do you rank more progress towards a smaller goal vs. less progress towards a more ambitious goal?

One example of a stopped vehicle: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-...

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

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Re:Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars by ericmay on Monday September 28, 2020 @11:08PM (#24623834)

I don’t give it much rank because it doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have good, incremental progress toward a larger goal for sure. In my day-to-day I can use a Tesla. I have no use for Waymo so the progress isn’t relevant. Will Waymo map every street in hyper detail, or just Mountain View and New York? If I don’t care about the underlying goal, what reason do I have to care about progress toward that goal?

> “ Just before the crash, a large vehicle — a sport utility vehicle or pickup truck — changed lanes in front of him, the driver told the NTSB.”

And how does Waymo handle these scenarios?

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