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- Hacker News
- 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.
by randyrand - Which is why we need strong regulation. People shouldn’t be able to vote with their wallet when other peoples lives are at stake.by afavour
- You’re like 2-3 orders of magnitude off on your cost there.by senordevnyc
- Personally I would rather vote to ban them if they aren't safe enough. If car makers want to cheap out at the expense of public safety they should go to prison for the people they kill.by foxyv
- > Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet.
Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only.
1) Both in 2028
2) lidar in 2030 and cameras in 2035
3) Gov will require lidar for full self driving
by ed_balls - "Ultimately, people will vote with their wallet"
Seems like a bad way to legislate this, since everyone else on the roads pays the price for cut rate self driving
by tqi - Article has a paragraph about how lidar is rapidly getting cheaper, so the camera comparison is only temporary
Dolgov also pushed back on the one knock that camera-only fans always reach for: cost. Waymo is on its sixth generation of hardware, and he said each generation has drastically cut the price. Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”
by curuinor - LIDAR units are nowhere near that expensive. Even ten years ago, the Velodyne top of car units only cost about $80,000.
The short range ones, found at vehicle corners and on the rear, are now around $200 - $1500. The long range car-top unit is still expensive, around $10,000, and that's dropping. The whole sensor suite on a Waymo is probably under US$20,000 right now. If that.
The future direction for automotive seems to be more car-top sensors with narrower fields of view that add up to a full circle. Only the one that looks ahead needs 300m range.
by Animats - Where did you get $200k worth of extra sensors?
Also, contrary to your statement, the article directly addresses the meat if the question:
> The disagreement is whether “good enough to help a human drive” ever becomes “good enough to remove the human,” and his answer is no, because the sensing tops out before you get the last few nines.
> Now, Tesla would point to its active Robotaxi service as an example of “removing the human”, but Dolgov also said that camera-only is also good for a demo, and that’s basically what Tesla’s Robotaxi service is right now.
by wasabi991011 - 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.
by dgarrett - What does this have to do with anything at all?by bigtex88
- "self-driving" in better than ideal conditions.by trentor
- "FSD (Supervised)" is a marketing name... which they updated with the parenthetical almost certainly because of brewing legal issues with false advertising. It does not self-drive.
https://www.tesla.com/support/fsd#pay-attention
> FSD (Supervised) is an advanced driver assistance system that is intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver. It does not turn a Tesla into a fully autonomous vehicle.
by kube-system - You can't buy a self-driving Tesla today. Even Tesla tells you that in the fine print. Its self-driving (supervised). If it was actually self driving, they wouldn't be saying (supervised).by vel0city
- If Teslas could self drive you could sit in the back seat, or sleep, or send the car somewhere without being in it. Elon really wants them to, but Tesla's do not self drive.by xnx
- You can't purchase a level 3 Tesla at any price, either.
To me, true self-driving starts at level 3. Otherwise, it's supervised.
And Tesla selling their product as "Full Self Driving (Supervised)" is like selling "Fully Cooked Meal (Frozen)". No! You call it a "frozen meal"!
by parl_match - 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.by hagbard_c
- We already have those results. It’s why Waymo is doing millions of paid rides per month while Tesla is LARPing a robotaxi service that’s basically doing zero fully autonomous rides, as far as anyone can tell.by senordevnyc
- > “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.
by HiJon89 - Humans of course generally have human level intelligence and Teslas don't yet which means with similar inputs they'll probably do worse. Also I'm not sure Tesla's cameras provide as good an input as sitting in the driving seat? Certainly I can't drive nearly as well looking at the reversing screen as looking through the window.by tim333
- Also humans can move their heads around which gives extra parralax information and thus better depth perception than two static cameras would imply.by AngryData
- Humans also have prior world domain knowledge. A human driver seeing a guy running across the road behind an obstacle can infer that the human will probably pop out on the other side (and prepare accordingly). A human can see the silhouette of an object with 1 eye and still infer that it has depth because they know what objects are, which is why one-eyed people can drive legally everywhere in the US. This inference extends to everything, not just shapes but behaviors of anything in the road, animate and inanimate objects.by carabiner
- Also worth watching the source presentation which is really interesting and informative beyond the Waymo specifics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4zrV3-6N8by xnx
- 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 itby theahura
- > 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.
by bryanlarsen - From my experience of potentially serious injury crashes, they are mostly from going too fast and crashing into something. The ones where I've stopped and some other bad driver has gone into me are mostly too slow to cause injury.by tim333
- 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.by cosmotic
- Sure, cameras (eyes) are mostly all that humans are using, but two points:
1) the vehicles aren't quite matched with the same experience and intelligence (right now) as exists behind a human's two "cameras"
2) we hold self-driving robots to a much higher standard. meatbags are getting smushed in large numbers daily by other humans, but a single robot smushing a human is headline news for days. giving the robot vastly more information about the world around it, in much higher detail will eventually allow it to drive much better than us.
[obviously we should hold them to higher standards, we should create something much better at driving than the best humans]
by qingcharles - The argument made more sense 5+ years ago, but the hardware costs of sensors such as LIDAR has plummeted.
In addition, a certain CEO of a certain car company has made very aggressive sales pitches about how LIDAR isn't necessary and even going so far as to sell unfinished self driving solutions as being completely capable of doing so.
So hypothetically, if that car company were to adopt LIDAR, they would have been selling their solution under false claims in a sales capacity.
by parl_match - 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?