Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

> 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers

That is a remarkable number. You can avoid 50% of multi-vehicle crashes by being a good driver yourself, but the other 50% are caused by the other driver. To get above 50% you have to drive defensively and do a good job modelling the actions of other drivers.

I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti-Telsa/Musk when Musk got into politics.

Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it.

Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable).

Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology.

Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd!

So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.

$60,000 for car with sensors? I'm delighted to hear Waymo may be anticipating such low price points: "We are hearing that Waymo is close to having its entire package (car + Waymo sensor suite and driver) at around $60,000"

Lidar will give you XYZ (z = distance) on a single datapoint, cameras give you XY and you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras.

Lidar is ugly and expensive, but requires way fewer cycles to calculate distances. And it works through fog and even some obstacles, nor does it care about glare or get "scared" of shadows.

If we had infinite compute in the car, cameras would be the obvious solution ...but we don't. You can get "Pretty good" with cameras, but still people find specific spots where the car is 100% sure a shadow under a bridge is a car or something stupid like that.

Personal experience, but my Tesla Model 3 drives most trips from start to finish. If I have to intervene, it's usually because other drivers aren't letting it into a lane and I have to get aggressive. Friends I know in Dallas and Austin (simpler, friendlier streets than where I live) say they don't drive at all anymore. Maybe it's not good enough for a robotaxi service yet, but the rate of progress since my first Tesla in 2022 has been crazy to watch, especially in the last year.

Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked.

Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?

I thought the pitch for just-cameras was that the hardware was cheaper and that it's what humans are "using", evidence that it should be sufficient. Just-cameras was to take more engineering to build upnfront but pay off in lower costs in the end. That argument disagrees with the graph that's presented.

Also worth watching the source presentation which is really interesting and informative beyond the Waymo specifics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4zrV3-6N8

i know this doesnt take away from the point of the article, but the whole thing is written by ai which just immediately makes me distrust it

> “Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.”

It feels like there's a lot of assumptions baked in here. For example, do humans get in accidents because eyes are insufficient driving sensors? Or because human drivers get tired, distracted, make mistakes, etc.

Also, you can put 10 cameras on a car looking in all directions at the same time, which feels materially different from a human that only has 2 eyes which can only look in a single direction at a time.

It's possible that massively superhuman driving performance can't be achieved with just cameras, but I'm not seeing a strong case for that being made here.

Competitor explains why competition's product falls short - film at 11. I'd say the proof is in the pudding, which system shows the best results under different circumstances. I suspect the end result will be that a combination of cameras and some scanning apparatus - lidar, radar, sonar - gives the best results and that self-driving systems will converge on that combination.

I can purchase a self-driving Tesla at a reasonable price, in-line with other cars of the same class.

I can't purchase a Waymo at any price.

Right. But are $200K worth of extra sensors actually worth it or are 10+ cameras already safe enough?

This article makes no attempt to answer the actual meat of the question.

Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet.

p.s. I wonder if you could prevent glare by placing an LCD-like device in front of the lens dynamically blocking out the sun.