Waymo has proven driverless operations in Chandler, then Downtown Phoenix, then San Francisco. Truly driverless, no people in car. They’ve demonstrated driverless capability and the ability to expand to new regions, even if it means taking HD maps.

Tesla has not proven any reliable driverless operation, anywhere. They have removed hardware from their cars (radar, uss) and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years nor any willingness to change from their “vision only, big data” strategy.

If things continue on the current trajectory Waymo will likely be operating in all major US cities and metros in a few years while Tesla’s self driving offering will probably be forcibly renamed by regulation and end in a class action lawsuit.

Basically, Waymo has proven N and N+1 capability, meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N, and has lied to consumers and actually reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting measures.

"ot shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years nor any willingness to change from their “vision only, big data” strategy."

I guess they did now that they can make their own cheap lidars and adding them back in 2023.

Reversing the "cameras only" position is a step in the right direction. They are currently ~3 years behind collecting lidar data compared to Cruise / Waymo. I wonder if they'll be able to make it up with "ghost-rider" volume in 2023.

? Where are you seeing that they're adding lidar? The big news recently was that they're going to bring back radar.

> nor any willingness to change from their “vision only, big data” strategy.

It sounds like they might actually be including a new radar system in January. Nothing official yet though from what I've seen.

https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/tesla-radar-car-next-month-se...

> and have not shown any meaningful progress in the past ~5 years

Really? I’ve had some casual interest in the progress of FSD beta and the past six months alone has seen dramatic improvements to numerous adversarial situations.

FSD beta is currently able to drive with confidence on unmarked roads at night in the rain, with only basic maps for wayfinding. This has been demonstrated by customers in their own cars, driving roads which haven’t been vetted by the developers.

I’m sure Waymo and other systems can do this too, but I haven’t seen it demonstrated.

> Waymo has proven driverless operations in Chandler, then Downtown Phoenix, then San Francisco.

And how many years did that take. Are they adding profitable operations in new cities year after year, with every year adding new cities?

As far as I can see they simply lose billion and billions of $ for no real success in actually having a product.

Tesla is actually using the technology to improve its Level 2 systems and make money with it.

> meanwhile Tesla has yet to prove N

First of all, Waymo has not proven N, because they don't make money on any of these things.

Tesla at least try to drive in N+10000000 other cases and navigate many of them without seeing them first.

If you have to go one by one threw every single city in the world its not clear to me that this is a better approach then solving a more general problem.

> reduced their chances at achieving N due to cost cutting measures

Tesla just made 3 billion $ of profit in a quarter. What cost cutting? They are currently doing major investments in upgraded sensors suits, upgraded data-centers and overall their team is still growing.

How much did Waymo make again?

Just because Tesla is profitable and making money by selling vehicles does not mean they are on a better path to engineering a self driving system than Waymo.

The opposite is also true, just because Waymo does not make money does not reflect the capability of their self driving systems. Saying "Waymo has not proven N, because they don't make money on any of these things." doesn't make any sense, and is not even true.

I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.

We are discussing who is closer to realizing a fully self-driving system, not who runs a better business.

> Just because Tesla is profitable and making money by selling vehicles does not mean they are on a better path to engineering a self driving system than Waymo.

That not what I said, what it means it has more staying power.

> doesn't make any sense, and is not even true

What data are you basing this on? Are any of their operations profitable? If they are, why are they not expanding those operations to make more profit?

> I can go to downtown Phoenix right now and request (and pay for) a fully self-driving ride from point A to point B. Teslas can not reliably complete any self driving route without any disengagements.

Yeah, but Tesla didn't spend 7 years only focusing on Phoenix, so using that as a comparison is just dishonest.

You are stacking the field in favor of what you want the winner to be.

Here is my proposal for a more fair test on who is actually 'winning' self driving:

"You take a car, and put it on any random road anywhere in the world, how well can it navigate to any other random road in the world"

How well does Waymo do on that test? I would guess worse then Tesla.

That test is much closer to what it actually takes to really claim that self driving is 'solved'.

In my opinion neither are close to this and both will burn many more billions and many more years before getting there. So to just confidently claim Waymo is way ahead is nonsense in my opinion.

Collecting HD Maps is an 80/20 problem (I have a patent in a subfield of this, for better or worse lol) - you can get a ton of value from a small set of focused areas. If you can solve greater metro areas (no dirt roads?), you've got a real solution.

I also think that the mapping and routing component matters a lot less than how good your collision and realtime avoidance systems are. And in that arena, Tesla is an unmitigated disaster.

Thanks for your anwser. I see a lot of bad things on Tesla FSD and I totally get the critics.

Yet, I follow DirtyTesla's YouTube channel and I think FSD is quite impressive compared to any other self driving software I've seen.

Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for example in similar situations? I can't find anything even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.

I'm not a fanboy nor do I possess any TSLA actions (or even a car for that matter), I'm just interested in the field and until now I thought Tesla was the most promising tech (it seems I'm wrong, but I really like to see it!).

Compare Waymo[0] with Tesla [1]..

These are easily searchable which leads me to question your sincerity in feinting ignorance.

[0]https://youtu.be/mWvhw1KCmbo

[1]https://youtu.be/3mnG_Gbxf_w

I think you missed OPs point.

As I understand it, Waymo can’t drive on unmapped roads, and therefore there are no comparable videos of Waymo actually doing that.

You chose a Waymo video from their marketing channel, and a newspaper hit piece. And then questioned sincerity of OP…

Not to mention that there’s no evidence that any autonomous driving system was engaged on that Tesla.

did I? Here's a direct quote I was responding to:

>I see a lot of bad things on Tesla FSD and I totally get the critics...I think FSD is quite impressive compared to any other self driving software I've seen. > >Would you mind to direct me to similar videos from Waymo for example in similar situations? I can't find anything even remotely as good as what Tesla is doing now.

I can't believe one can make an honest argument that Tesla is ahead of Waymo on FSD

The honest argument is that we’ve seen Tesla’s technology in unsupervised and uncontrolled adversarial conditions across hundreds of wildly diverse cities in the USA, whereas we haven’t seen Waymo do anything other than narrow geofenced areas or curated marketing videos. Right now if you dropped a Waymo and a Tesla in Michigan, one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move at all.

I agree that Waymo could well be far ahead of Tesla. With the information at hand I don’t have a way to make an assessment either way.

That was exactly my point, thanks for explaining it better than I did (as you must have guessed by now, English is not my native language, sorry).

They're just asking questions. Geeez.

99% of the time it doesn't kill you isn't what we're shooting for.

With 1.5 fatalities per 100,000,000 miles[0], the benchmark to meet is 99.9999985% of the time it doesn't kill you. Injuries are going to be a lot higher, obviously. Still, I think most self-driving enthusiasts underestimate the bar that needs to be crossed wrt safety. And general vehicle safety isn't going to remain stagnant. I think it's going to be a cost vs injuries tradeoff for quite a while until we get human-level or better self-driving safety in all circumstances.

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/193018/number-of-us-cras...

Waymo currently works with HD maps.

Tesla currently works not at all.

It's not valid to compare Waymo's current capability unfavorably to a version of Tesla's capability that only exists in someone's head.

I would bet on Waymo working on a dirt road before Tesla does.

??

Literally a Tesla with FSD working well on a dirt road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv1l6aTnB_I

my dumb car "works" for self driving assuming a straight enough road without obstacles. A safety critical system needs to have a very robust definition of "works" that is far beyond "it happened to not crash on this particular road at this particular time with this particular set of obstacles".

Fair enough; my "not at all" was hyperbole, Tesla's driver assistance software does not in fact crash every single time it is used without human intervention.

I do find it mildly disturbing that in that video, the driver points out the car making fully blind turns where it cannot see that there's nothing it would hit.

Did I miss the dirt road part? That looks like it starts on a rural but paved road, and ends in a town.

This is something that seems really important, and is definitely a significant effort, but actually is inconsequential.

Think about a section of lightly used suburban road. The amount of work that went into making it involved was immense. A crew of road workers using expensive machines and large amounts of material were required to make it, and are required in it's maintenance. Don't forget the surveyors and engineers who made a highly detailed map and plans in the first place! (Though that map format isn't useful to self driving cars).

Also consider the sheer number of cars that drive that patch in a day. One car every few minutes adds up over hours, days, months, years.

So, yeah they have to drive a mapping car down the street a bunch of times to expand their coverage area. However this is insignificant compared to the effort that goes into our transportation infrastructure already.

Not to mention that Google Street View has demonstrated that such effort is viable even with way less incentive!

Besides, most miles driven are spent on highways and other town-connecting roads. To the average consumer, self-driving cars are way more interesting for commuting or long-distance travel than they are for a 5-minute drive to the supermarket.

The cars themselves have the hardware necessary to make an HD map.

That means that Tesla could make an HD map covering 95% of miles driven in the USA within a week with their fleet of users. And next week they could make an updated version of the same map.

So, making and updating an HD map isn't an issue.

Tesla cars do not have LIDAR sensors. The downside risk is that high resolution imaging using multiple sensors is a requirement for level 5 AVs to work well enough. That means all the data Tesla has collected could be of limited value.

I created some 3D models of a real world building and surrounding environment using photogrammetry from 20+ megapixel DSLR photos and decided the accuracy was totally inadequate and the artefacts were too hard to manually clean up.

I then hired a dude with a LIDAR scanner and did it properly. The difference in quality/accuracy is like 120x80 ASF video files in 1996 compared to 4K footage today.

Anyone who thinks you can build "HD" virtual worlds using the crappy cameras on a Tesla needs their heads examining. Maybe with thousands of passes and some epic compute and signal processing, but why bother? Just LIDAR it.

My Tesla can't even decide if a traffic light is a single traffic light or not on a sunny summer's day from a distance of twenty feet. Almost every time it is either dark or humid or winter (road grime) it tells me one or more cameras are obscured. But only after I've already started driving, obviously. This supposedly cutting edge AI driving machine frequently thinks I'm leaving the carriageway on UK B-roads (it's almost dangerous) and is significantly less reliable at distance cruise control and lane-assist than my Skodă. (I presume VW just quietly bought a black box from Bosch or whoever to do this.)

Tesla are barking up the wrong tree IMO. At this point the camera-only stance feels like a religious thing, not based on sanity or the real practical world. I imagine that someone came to Elon and said "reconciling conflicting radar and camera signals is hard" and he applied his considerable genius and issued an edict to "let's not do that then!" like it would magically make all the actual hard problems go away.

Heck, Teslas can't even seem to reliably parallel park themselves, frequently getting stuck halfway, or hitting kerbs. If they can't solve that highly constrained problem, I'm hardly going to trust taking my eyes off it at 70mph.

This is a very good question. Elon is dumping on LIDAR and 3D high resolution mapping.

That may be a smokescreen. Tesla collects a lot of data from their cars. What they do not have are these supposedly superfluous high resolution maps. If Tesla's camera-sourced data proves to be insufficient, that will have been a very bad gamble, in addition to whether camera data is sufficient for real time decisions.

When they pay off, bold gambles make businessmen look smart. That's why nearly all business hagiographies are the product of survivorship bias. Just like your buddy who won in Vegas.

We will see this risk-taking play out in Starship and Starlink, too.