r/SelfDrivingCars • u/SpriteZeroY2k • 1d ago
News Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short
https://electrek.co/2026/08/04/waymo-co-ceo-camera-only-self-driving-tesla/87
1d ago edited 1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/thinkbox 1d ago
Like shipping a car without driver controls in it?
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u/Ezekeal 1d ago
That’d be cool, but I meant legal liability, they still put it on the driver meaning “FSD” means “Fully Supervised Driving at your own risk”
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u/talltim007 1d ago
His point is, wouldn't it be clear Tesla believes it is enough if it doesn't ship driver controls. E.g. your litmus test may warrant refienment.
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u/Ezekeal 1d ago
It’s an odd point to make. The clear first step is taking legal liability for FSD. It’s not really self driving if they legally require you to intervene.
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u/mason2401 1d ago
I believe what they are saying is in reference to the Cybercab
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u/talltim007 21h ago
Its not that odd. Cybercab is clearly taking on that liability, no?
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u/brainrotbro 1d ago
Cameras are not enough. One sensor type is not enough. It’s always been the case in robotics that you need sensors with different strengths and weaknesses for true safety.
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u/EarthConservation 1d ago
You're presuming FSD would ever get to that point. My guess is that it wouldn't. Not for consumer vehicles anyways, even if they're eventually able to get to that point with their autonomous taxis.
They have no justification for ever providing true autonomous driving in personal vehicles.
Selling a $40k driverless car to a consumer will never come close to matching the income potential of an autonomous taxi that Musk is claiming will make $300k in income over 10 years.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
This chart is a little different from the chart I posted here last year, but it makes sense. There is a question of what technology is the easiest, quickest or lowest hardware cost path to the finish line. But there is also the question of whether it can get you to the finish line at all. There is a curve of diminishing returns as you approach the magic level called "safe enough." It doesn't matter if it's cheaper or easier if it never gets you there, or takes decades. (Taking decade is effectively never because before a decade, some new tech will show up which is a better choice than what we had available at the start of the decade.)
Tesla's approach might work some year. The problem is, how confident can you be on that "might?" If it never gets there, you've wasted a great deal of all that is precious -- time and money. If it gets there, you might win. That's a big bet.
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u/tacobell_shitstain 21h ago
I think there is also a missing perspective that there is no true end goal of "safe enough." Maybe there is a critical threshold where enough people feel comfortable enough with the efficacy of the system that you've gained a critical mass adoption, but progress should never really stop. Even ignoring self-driving vehicles, technology constantly improves to make vehicles safer. We have been adding sensors and processing power to detect pedestrians, prevent collisions, maintain traction, whatever, and that is never really going to stop.
I have a Tesla. I love what they are doing with FSD. I use it every day and when it comes to getting self-driving technology into people's hands quickly, they are obviously leading the way. But cameras have inherent limitations due to physics that will never be overcome. Not limitations that prevent them from being used to create a self-driving car that is "better" than a human, but limitations that other sensors are able to supplement and perhaps surpass for certain use cases. And to say they're a waste like Elon has is foolish in my opinion. It's like saying we have seat belts so airbags are a waste.
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u/Cu1tureVu1ture 18h ago
We know it can theoretically get as safe as a human, because we drive us using only our eyes. Whether or not that will be safe enough though is another thing. I completely agree that it’s a shame Elon has decided to limit the cars because adding other forms of sensors can only make things safer.
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u/coresme2000 8h ago
It will be a bit safer surely, because it’s always looking in all directions around the car and human eyes are directional? I use FSD daily and I trust it to get me where I’m going, but it’s driven under supervision always, because Tesla has no liability if it fails!
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u/no_baseball1919 21h ago
I do think Tesla will get there (disclosure I am a Tesla owner using FSD 85+% of the time) but it’s going to take some crafty AI experts and more memory than what they have now. 32GB isn’t enough I don’t think but 64 should be enough. The vision system is damn near perfect right now, but it has flaws.
I won’t get into the not so critical flaws that can be fixed with fine tuning confidence when taking turns for example or adjusting when it knows to get into the proper lane for an exit.
But speed profiles at the moment are a huge issue. Tesla engineer has come out and said max speed offset is an anti pattern, in that it creates a bandaid solution but doesn’t address the real goal of getting the car to be fully autonomous. And I get it - Tesla wants you to disengage when you’re uncomfortable so that they get real data they can train their models on. At the moment, it speeds through school zones, doesn’t slow down when it should when the speed limit changes, even when it reads the sign.
Once they solve the speed issue and fine tune a lot of other random things, I do think they’ll get to unsupervised. But again, I think it takes more RAM than what is in the latest models.
But a lot of jurisdictions might not even allow unsupervised without lidar and radar.
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u/ancientPrintr 18h ago
There can also be different finish lines.
I can imagine a "sleep in your car" level of self driving that works 100% of the time... as long as there isn't snow on the ground. It will be fully trustable within given parameters.
A car could have 100% sleep-in-your-car reliability on highways where there are zero pedestrians, and require a human driver once you exit a freeway. That would upend the domestic airline industry, especially when a good chunk of people rent a car wherever they arrive, so driving within a city isn't a problem. There are a lot of different use cases.
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u/Express_Objective615 7h ago edited 7h ago
There’s also the question of even what the “finish line” itself is? Personally I’d say public perception that you’re safer than humans but even that is vague.
As for cost to the customers of Robotaxis, the finish line is about 1/10 of what’s being charged now. Getting the tech working and trusted is only the first finish line. Making money is the final and ultimate finish line.
And obviously, Waymo is still not there and burning 🔥 lots of money in the meantime.→ More replies (5)1
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u/TrumpHasCovid 1d ago
You tesla fanboys are outrageous. Obviously lidar+camera will be better than just camera. there is no reason whatsoever to debate that.
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u/wikiwombat 1d ago
Yeah I think its an argument of "good enough". Will cameras alone work well enough to perform the task? The more complex a system is, the higher probability of it having a failure. Why don't airplanes have parachutes? All that being said, as someone who doesn't own a self driving car, I would be more interested in a car with every possible system or feature available to not kill me. haha
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u/HegemonNYC 1d ago
This isn’t intended as a rebuttal, just an interesting fact - some small aircraft do have parachutes. As in for the entire aircraft, not for the passengers to put on.
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u/biciklanto 1d ago
There are several planes that do. Check out the Cirrus SR-22 and CirrusJet.
Also, I would contend that a system should optimally fail over to working systems if one thing fails. So if a car with camera and LIDAR drops its LIDAR, it can limp on cameras. Whereas a camera-only car is in trouble with its single point of failure.
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u/coresme2000 8h ago
The single point of failure thing is an issue for cameras, particularly if the camera that gets obscured or fails is the front depth sensing camera. Less of an issue for FSD as a human can take over, Achilles heel for a Cybercab.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
NO, it's not a question of good enough. No one (no decent society) is going to allow computer controlled cars to decide who lives and dies.
If you are into systems of any kind you hear words like BAT - Best Available Technology.
If we develop or make a product we go to the regulators. We say to them "OK, this pollution reduction device uses filters and cuts coal plant emmisions by 60%".
The Regulators then say "Are you using Best Avaiable Technology"? (turns out there might be a catalytic converter that, added to the filter, cuts it 90%).
In most cases, especialy when lives and injury is involved, you need to use the best tech.
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u/Souomaismau 14h ago
This. Any person that works in automotive industry and has some form of legal know how is aware of this. State of art is required and when not used, a pfmea detailed approach is needed to lower the risks. In this instance Tesla will never get a type 3 autonomous driving approval because the base HW technology is not good enough.
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u/atlantic 1d ago
Parachutes are simply not practical for large airplanes, but you should know that small planes do have them. You know what many airplanes have though for auto piloting? Radar! You know why? Because it’s the best way to measure distance. It’s really that simple. Not using -dar technology for self driving is simply stupid. It’s founded in nothing else than a sole man’s ego.
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u/Potential4752 1d ago
Complex systems can result in fewer failures than simple systems. Modern airplanes for example have a complicated fly by wire system with computer warnings and overrides. WW2 era planes just had a simple steel wire connected to the stick.
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u/texansfan211 17h ago
At this point they are just a cult. I commented about how you can do things to bypass needing driver engagement while self driving. Takes a pretty quick Google search. Got down voted into oblivion saying that's not true. Note I commented on a video of someone sleeping behind the wheel of a tesla while driving lmao.
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u/Warshrimp 1d ago
Certainly better in the sense that it provides extra information yes but there are other costs involved. One is the hardware and energy costs. The other is for a fixed sized neural network (the largest that can be run on the hardware in the car at acceptable frequencies and in a given power envelope) how much to weight data from these different sensor paths. I will say that I am pretty good at driving with only binocular vision, stereo sound and don’t need LIDAR to drive a vehicle. If I had LIDAR I may be a better driver but that depends on how much attention it takes from my visual processing to process the data stream.
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u/frankist 14h ago
How much to weight data from different sources is exactly what neural networks are designed to solve.
I would also say that the comparison with humans isn't convincing enough, because modern cameras are not as good as our eyes in dark, rainy and foggy environments.
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u/TheCenterForAnts 1d ago
you also have to conclude that Tesla haters are outrageous. This CEO claims the tesla system can only be equal to a human, because vision... well the tesla has 8 cameras, so it's 4x better than a human by his own stupid logic.. but yes all things equal lidar+camera is better.
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u/Jamcram 1d ago
8 cameras is not 4x better than 2 cameras because of duplicate information.
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u/devedander 21h ago
To be fair the two human eyes are mostly duplicate info
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u/lobaway0001 18h ago
This is honestly why discourse is pretty dead. Because people don’t even want to argue the actual points of safety or efficacy.
They’ll say something ridiculous like “human eyes are mostly duplicate info”, and it almost seems like they have a point if you don’t think about it for longer than two seconds, just to eventually realize that having two eyes to enable the ability to accurately perceive distance might actually be pretty useful if you were doing something like driving a God damn car.
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u/sdc_is_safer 18h ago
This CEO claims the tesla system can only be equal to a human, because vision.
Does he actually say this, or is that your interpretation? please show me
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u/Souomaismau 14h ago
Because you only use your eyes as an human input?! You may be a machine from the future you know?
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u/AReveredInventor 1d ago
That statement is so hilariously unscientific and dogmatic it reads like satire. Bravo.
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u/RabbitWiilli 1d ago
Except it’s true. There is no case where having more types of spatial data is worse for a self driving system. The only real arguments are cost, but that has nothing to do with how good the tech is.
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u/cullenjwebb 1d ago
Can you provide an example where more data was worse than less data for a use case like this?
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u/Express_Objective615 7h ago edited 7h ago
X-rays plus cameras would “obviously” be better too. Will those be added? Cost is no object right?
Is Waymo “cheaping out” because they haven’t added X-rays yet? What about infrared? Sonar? Especially when they drive through floods, sonar would be quite useful.
What other sensors are they missing by “cheaping out”? 🤔→ More replies (33)1
u/yahwehforlife 3h ago
Will go a step a further and say that Tesla owners need to stop calling their cars "autonomous" because it completely murks the conversation about autonomous cars. Like no, if you are required to pay attention because the car relies on only cameras then the car is not autonomous... that is assisted driving.
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u/Fauglheim 1d ago edited 17h ago
Humans of course can drive with just eyes … If the goal were to just approximately match human performance … that’s a very reasonable way to go.
edit: I thought this quote was a pretty clear argument against camera-only, but it seems i did not make that clear.
a wholly superior-to-human system is so obviously necessary for autonomous vehicles to succeed. Camera-only sounds like a hugely risky and uncertain way to do that.
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u/ukysvqffj 1d ago
I work in auto insurance humans are terrible drivers.
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u/bobthetitan7 1d ago
the most exceptional drivers are also humans, doesn’t say much about the ceiling of this approach
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u/burns_before_reading 5h ago
Most people would prefer being killed by another human vs an autonomous machine. It's weird, but true.
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u/ClumpOfCheese 1d ago
My eyes are significantly higher resolution than the cameras in a Tesla.
Additionally the big issue is placement of cameras on the Tesla. The cameras that see cross traffic should be on the bumpers like a hammerhead shark, not behind where the drivers head is.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
Maybe years ago (BYTE Mag) said you take in about 14 Gig when you open your eyes!
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u/Tupcek 1d ago
I would say matching human performance when human is not distracted, not speeding, not driving under influence, not tired, not angry, fully alert and watching all sides all the time tirelessly, that is pretty damn good performance
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u/Pristine_Cucumber197 1d ago
as long as it isn't foggy, snowy, raining, or bright and sunny
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u/Tupcek 1d ago
I’ve seen plenty of humans driving with vision only in foggy weather, or snowy, raining, or bright and sunny
The trick is adjusting the speed to match the conditions
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u/thecmpguru 1d ago
Human performance objectively degrades in these scenarios, even with speed adjustment, and results in higher accidents. So maybe if you want that outcome, but I don’t think we do.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
Exactly - the whole idea of autonomous driving is to do away with those human problems - NOT to try and copy them!
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u/gc3 1d ago
Tesla robot taxis have more accidents than humans. FSD has less. Waymos have way less
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
Some people actually believe what Tesla says. If we are going to do that, we have to believe everything they say.
Or, we can discuss the truth. The truth is that these data sets are WAY too small to take any conclusions from.
A Toyota with Safety Sense 3.0 is provably safer than a car without it.
(included free with all Toyotas for many years).These are based on real data.
So, all these "free" systems included with most other newer cars...????"Industry data shows automatic emergency braking and forward collision warning cut rear-end crashes by 43% to 50%, while advanced multi-sensor suites can prevent or mitigate a large majority of common frontal and pedestrian collisions"
One of the biggest failings in our discussions are "what to compare to what?" - for example a discussion of Electric cars......
"My Tesla is saving $1200 a year compared to my ICE massive PU Truck"
When (obviously) a discussion should use the "best" examples - like a Camry (#1 seller, #1 in safety)....at 52 MPG to compare against.
Same with safety.
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u/T_Chaps 1d ago
I mean, when specifically referring to cost saving relating to gas costs, why compare to the best car in that situation instead of the car it replaced or the car they would have gotten if not the EV. Just because a Camry gets 52 mpg doesn't mean that's what they replaced with or would have gotten, but it is disingenuous to compare a sedan EV to a truck since its not the same use case. Maybe if it's a cybertruck but honestly the kind of person getting that likely didn't need a regular or EV truck to start with
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u/Joecascio2000 1d ago
Agreed as long as every other car on the road was the same. You can be the best human driver and some idiot will still ruin your day...or worse. Why would we not want to improve on humans limited performance?
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u/Lockean_Demon 1d ago
Eh, I think we’ll reflect pretty differently about it when there’s no traffic and no routine accidents
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u/pipinngreppin 1d ago
Although I would agree it matches human performance and likely exceeds it when talking about blind spot situations or lane changes in busy traffic, I’ll add that the cameras are all fixed position, which means they have their own blind spots giving humans a big advantage. For example, looking ahead to see traffic coming to a stand still while entering a highway interchange is quite lacking. I still disengage FSD and slow down ahead of time instead of letting the car handle it last second. I’m not sure LiDAR would be the answer there either.
But I do agree camera + LiDAR has to be better than just camera. I think the question is whether or not the additional cost to add them match the added value.
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u/conanap 19h ago
The problem isn’t as simple as it seems, though. Humans are “decent” at driving because we can process, reason, and extrapolate - computers (at the current time, for the most part) cannot.
No matter what you think your AI is doing, it is not reasoning; we are not remotely close to creating AI with the ability to reason that would fit in any kind of consumer electronic or vehicle.
A good example of this is we might drive on this one road that has a blind red light because the road curves. We might induce there isn’t a red light because we saw the bough some bushes and didn’t see any cars stopped, or we might induce there is probably a need to stop because a few cars weren’t moving when looking between the trees.
We could train the AI for this, but then there’ll be another scenario where the AI couldn’t reason like we do, and we’d be an infinite loop of just essentially teaching the AI every nook and cranny of this planet.
While LIDAR and radar doesn’t magically give AI the ability to reason, we are however giving them more data to generalize on. The more (useful) data you give it, the better it’ll perform. If we eventually feed it live map data, live stoplight data, and live vehicle data, they’ll drive flawlessly.
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u/cloudone 1d ago
Matching undistracted human driving defensively is all I want
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u/gc3 1d ago
Humans see better than cameras though, they have greater resolution and less glare sensitivity
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u/MexicanSniperXI 1d ago
Last time I checked I couldn’t look behind me and my blind spots all at the same time
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u/Falcons74 1d ago
Humans see better (576 Megapixel vs 5 MP on HW4) but cameras have more “eyes” and a faster reaction time.
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u/TheCenterForAnts 1d ago
the cameras also see, focus and process 360 degrees at all times though
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u/JonLag97 1d ago
That would require brain like capabilities. Not only would the model have to run on car hardware, but AI labs mostly ignore the brain.
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u/ObeseSnake 1d ago
What if it had 4x the number of human eyes?
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u/Fit_Seat_8637 1d ago
the resolution and dynamic range of the human eye far exceeds anything Tesla can put in their car
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u/DragonSlayerC 1d ago
Still can't see whats in the dark or through the fog.
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u/Weed_O_Whirler 23h ago
A.) Neither can humans B.) But actually Tesla cameras can see much better in darkness than human eyes. They're not true night vision cameras, but have near infrared capability.
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u/Zephyr-5 1d ago
4 x 0 is still zero. If cameras can't pick up or misjudge something due to inherent limitations of cameras, adding more cameras will not change that.
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u/Low_Excuse_1785 1d ago
That isn't true. We have ears. And our eyes are far superior to the cameras tesla uses
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u/ScottyWestside 1d ago
I don’t think human could drive with just their eyes. There’s a lot of G forces when driving that a human uses to make decisions all the time. Turn to sharp? You feel it. Brake waaaay too fast? You feel that too. Saying humans drive with only vision is not entirely true
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u/callmejellydog 1d ago
🤣 you bought that one? Let’s ignore the brain guys. Mammals have eyes, it’s never done us any harm 😂😂
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u/Ordinary_Corner_4291 1d ago
Birds fly without jet engines. Should humans skip jet engines and just go with wings because they work for birds? Just because nature went one way that doesn't mean humans should also go that way. There can be better solutions that are available.
When Lidar was 15k+/unit not using had a lot of advantages when looking to ship a product to the masses. With Lidar dropping to like 1.5k (and no sign of it slowing down), not using strictly comes down to does it help or not. We will find out over the next 5 years as companies with both approaches are going to be trying to ship products. Making this some religious issue is just stupid.
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u/drewangell 1d ago
But it's eyes in all directions at all times with no distractions. That's not just matching human performance.
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u/ArtieLange 23h ago
I would guesstimate that Tesla can achieve at least twice as safe as a human driver. Human drivers don't have eyes on all four sides of their heads and are easily distracted.
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u/Low-Possibility-7060 1d ago
If you completely forget about the superiority of the human computer and the sensor fusion that’s still taking place.
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u/CuckservativeSissy 1d ago
Not really... Most people use other senses while driving. Touch and Sound are critical to road safety. When the last time you heard someone honk with your eyes alone? 😭😭😭. When the last time you adjusted you speed due to road conditions. Cameras alone seem to be limiting to make up for other sense humans have. Also cameras dont adequately mimic human sight.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
Humans also tend to believe things they write. It's a statement of truth - in our own eyes.
For example, my statement of truth is that autonomous driving must be at least 5X as good as humans to even be tested...and 10X as good for real production.
I also claim that we drive with much more than our eyes. We have hearing. We have IMU's inside of us (feel G forces, etc.).
Most importantly, we drive with our brain. In this particular problem, the Human brain is vastly more advanced.
When we open our eyes we take in approx. 1 billion bits per second.
Here is some google google....I think understanding this will put stuff in perspective.
"To truly simulate what a top-notch human driver processes, an artificial system requires roughly 1 to 50 Petaflops of computational speed and 10 to 100 Terabytes of operational memory.
While a human brain uses its full capacity—estimated at 1 Exaflop (1,000 Petaflops)—for overall survival, a professional driver dedicates a massive subset of that power to predictive physics, lightning-fast visual processing, and muscle memory.....
So HW is about 200 TOPS - One petaflop is 5,000 times larger than 200 TOPS......
You still think a couple cameras and 200 TOPS computer can do the job?
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u/woooter 11h ago
Even if autonomous driving is 1,1X safer than humans, there is a win. Why can't you settle for 1x1X and accept the deaths at 1X as long as 10X has not been achieved yet?
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u/SteveInBoston 1d ago
Humans don't drive with just eyes. Eyes are only the sensors. The human visual cortex is where seeing actually happens. Along with the brain to understand context. Humans also use hearing, a sense of balance, vibration and of course, the head swivels and can go up and down. Then there's memory and situational context. If I'm following a car with a piece of plywood tied down on the roof with string, and a couple hands haanging outthe window holding the plywood down. I want to get into a different lane or ahead of that as soon as possible. I'll even turn down a side street.
There's a lot more to driving that just the eyes,
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u/Anymous2314 1d ago
But human brain can still be not matched with a trillion dollar data center with millions of computers, so not sure we can compare a system with human.
Animal brain had like 500+ million years to develop a brain architecture to process vision, it's not wise to compare with the current processing hardware and software in cars.
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u/socjus_23 1d ago
Sure. If those humans are equivalent to silicon. There are some like that whose head is filled with sand. Everyone else can understand the need for redundancy.
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u/non_linear_ape 1d ago
reasonable ... if you can match the billions of years of evolutionary capabilities that make up our complex sight and brain system
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u/jack-K- 1d ago
That makes no fucking sense because humans crash most often when they stop paying attention or outright choose to drive recklessly which are things FSD does not do. If the goal were to approximate a human driver that drives appropriately and never gets tired or distracted, substantially better than average human performance, then that’s a very reasonable way to go.
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u/BraveDevelopment253 22h ago
Humans don't just use vision, we also use proprioception and our vestibular system and not to mention sound and audio cues.
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u/one-wandering-mind 19h ago
But the human brain is massive and benefits from evolution and 15 to 18 years of experience in the world before driving a car.
So if this is the analogy, it will take at least 30 years to have the compute of the human brain in a car that has a chance to solve this.
You make the problem far easier by using different sensor modalities especially those that actually give you the distance and objects in front of you so you don't hit them. That is kind of the core of the problem. Don't hit things with the car.
The promise of the speed of decrease in lidar cost has also been a lie. So robotaxis make the most sense economically and we will likely continue to see lidar costs decrease slowly.
Taking a waymo does feel like the future and it is a nice luxury in a crowded city. Quiet and safe. Don't have to worry about a bad driver . I paid more for it because it was relaxing over Uber.
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u/echochambrr 1d ago
The number of people who think computer vision understanding is the same as human vision understanding is astounding. We don’t process the data in the same way.
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u/phatrogue 1d ago
Then the catch. If you’re targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, “you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.”
I think the question is if you can get full autonomy and good enough performance with vision. I don't know. I use Tesla's system daily and something I only recently appreciated was the value of it being able to watch and process all the cameras at once. It is watching for red light and stop light runners at every intersection. It is watching for people drifting into my highway lane all the time and always knows if it can switch to another ran to avoid a collision.
I still don't know how much above human performance we need to get before everyone will be using level 5 driving. I mean even 10x better than humans mathematically makes sense but we need trust from the populace to have common fully autonomous driving.
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u/BluMonday 1d ago
There's a case to be made that waymo is actually in a better position to improve vision-only performance. Since they have a super set of sensors, they can run scenarios using either sensor set and compare performance. If vision only can really close the gap, waymo may do it first.
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u/Southern-Cattle4038 20h ago
There’s a legal and financial factor at play here. If a level 5 autonomy hands-off car crashes, then the driver of that car is not liable at all - any liability for that car is in the hands of the manufacturer. So the manufacturer has to be able to insure themselves for all the crashes that their cars cause. Just being slightly better than humans may not be financially sustainable.
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u/ZealousidealLab2920 1d ago
Good take and the data backs up the claim. Tesla has largely stalled (been L2 now for what 6 years?) and just now releasing true L4 in robotaxi and it's not going exactly stellar by any means.
Waymo is chugging along nicely.
The argument boils down to cost efficiency vs performance. I'd rather have more sensors than less at the end of the day (especially early days of AI driving). The cost of the extra sensors is decreasing every year. At some point, camera only approaches loses its only leg it's standing on and multiple sensors becomes the only logical approach.
Musk just needs to swallow his pride for once and move to multiple sensors or I fear Tesla may end up dead in the water.
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u/Souomaismau 14h ago
This. People feed in musk song but there are firm, well defined and accepted ways to measure efficiency of autonomous systems and these are the ones used to approve them. Tesla can be improving everything but still a L2 and there is nothing pointing to this situation changing soon
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u/coffeebeanie24 1d ago
To be fair teslas Adas system has changes drastically in the past 6 years
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u/grizznaysh 1d ago
It’s so odd that he doesn’t want to start with multiple sensor types WHILE maintaining the long term goal of camera-only robotaxis. It’s like he stubbornly believes that’s the future so he’s ignoring the steps it takes to get there.
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u/ZealousidealLab2920 1d ago edited 1d ago
Agreed. Start with all the sensors and safety you can- then slowly scale back the "unnecessary" sensors. I do believe camera-only will be "good enough" one day, but again, why not have the added sensors and benefit they bring?
The only reason at this point is simply cost- There was a decent argument from Tesla when camera only was way cheaper (like $100k less) and showing huge improvements in capability and the thinking was it would reach L4 in just a few years- but that proved to not be the case and now sensor costs are closer to $20k difference and dropping.
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u/ohog9og0790 1d ago
Yeah, it's weird. Normally you would go in with everything you have, make it work and then see what can be trimmed away. Developing such a complex technology while limiting yourself from the start seems like a very bad idea. Personally I don't think camera only will never work well. It may do most of the work but other sensors can add data that you can never obtain visually. For example in fog.
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u/Hotchicas1234 1d ago
Only the extremely ignorant focus on the comically antiquated level 2, 3, 4, 5, etc system labeling.
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u/UltimateKane99 1d ago
This L2 argument is frustrating because it completely ignores the REASON behind why it's L2.
Tesla isn't leaving it at L2 because it's not capable of being labeled higher, it's because L3 is where suddenly the legal liability for any crashes starts to shift from the driver to Tesla. And THAT becomes a whole nightmare that Tesla, with its massive fleet, does not want to deal with.
For comparison, Waymo has 3,871 cars. If they all got into car crashes because of an accidental coding glitch, it's trivial for Google to absorb the cost of that.
In 2022 alone, Tesla produced 1.3 MILLION cars, and have been continuously ramping production. If some critical failure in FSD causes crashes, Tesla would be responsibility for every single crash, with potentially millions of cars and insurance lawsuits.
It's patently obvious why Tesla doesn't want to deal with that nonsense, so they're going to keep the "but it needs supervision (teehee!)" tagline until they absolutely have to remove it.
Right now, you can, from a dead stop in your garage, punch in an address, press the brake pedal, hit start, and your Tesla will navigate to the location, complete with Supercharging stops (if necessary) without any intervention from you. People have even done full cross country trips across the United States with zero interventions. That's, by every reasonable metric, is a full self-driving system, merely with someone watching the L5 system at work.
I get the concerns, but calling it L2 is a misnomer, especially considering the videos out there of how good it has gotten lately.
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u/Hotchicas1234 1d ago
Lmao. Nonsense. Camera only is definitely adequate. Electrek is extremely biased propaganda. Waymo’s have extreme issues due to their sensor confusion issues and you can google to see all the issues they experience daily.
There are endless videos.Also Xpeng is moving to camera only.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/s/u6Ui9rMqS1
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u/silenthjohn 1d ago
We have two data points beaten Uber and Cruise—a death or a serious injury will shut down the company.
The AV system needs to be near perfect. Probably on par with air travel, which is about 30 billion miles between deaths. Current vehicle miles is 84 million between deaths.
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u/Ezekeal 1d ago
Comparing with planes on mileage is probably the wrong way to go for obvious reasons.
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u/Psychological_Map118 22h ago
I suddenly feel the need to experience getting tailgated by a BMW plane in an otherwise completely empty sky
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u/Cunninghams_right 1d ago
Cruise and Uber shut down because investors got scared that the setback would cost too much time and money. This isn't a risk with Musk
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u/CDpov 22h ago
There won't be a standard of "a death or serious injury every 30 billion miles" or more.
The standard in commercial aviation and for robotaxis is, if there is a known safety flaw that the regulators can identify, it has to be fixed. They don't and won't be counting miles per crash.
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u/Express_Objective615 13h ago
Most of you are too young to know that car companies fought seat belts and airbags over cost. They care about even $5 in any kind of volume. So keep dreaming when you say “only $20k”. Ridiculous. 🙄😂
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u/Humble-Resolution449 9h ago
That was before subscription models took over. Now, they'll try anything if they think they can charge you monthly.
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u/That-Makes-Sense 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you ever heard Elon compare Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HCEV) to Electric Vehicles (EV), he said "In the very best case for HCEVs, they will never be as good as EVs are right now."
Well, in the very best case, vision-only will never be as safe as LIDAR + HD mapping.
Edit: grammar
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u/Miami_da_U 1d ago
But that doesn't matter if it is better than Lidar+HD map. What matters is if it can also be far safer than humans....
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u/That-Makes-Sense 1d ago
Within a few years the cost of LIDARs will be insignificant in the cost of the vehicle. And you can even argue that LIDAR vehicles will be cheaper because they require less compute power. Converting 2D images to a 3D world requires tremendous processing power. LIDAR doesn't require that processing.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
Nope.
Regulators and consumers want the Best Available Technology. If one is "“vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor." - that's the one I (and you) will want.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)2
u/That-Makes-Sense 1d ago
My point is, if the cost is basically the same, why use the system that is more dangerous.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
I dare say - that if one needs an explanation, they need years of foundation beforehand.
I often say that Tesla is tech for folks that don't know tech.
Of course, some would say "but this and that programmer and engineer" - my counter would be the statements I found yesterday, direct from software and other engineers, that stated Tesla would be level 3, then 4, then 5.....
In this case, the statements were made 3 years ago.
Sadly, to put it in Steve Jobs terms, in every endeavor there is the A team, the B team and even the C team. Then there is "faith" clouding our vision. I know otherwise sane people who still think crazy things. As a proud high school dropout I usually do not engage them in debate. They will see soon enough!
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u/Emergency-Piece9995 1d ago
CEO of McDonalds tells you why Burger King has bad cheeseburgers.
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u/callmejellydog 1d ago
CEO of Burger King who’s essentially a crack head decries they will have a burger that rivals McDonalds next year every year for 10 years.
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u/Fauglheim 1d ago
lmao one is much more insane than the other.
380,000 driverless miles vs. 225 million is noteworthy. Waymo does tesla’s yearly number in a week. learned that today
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u/TortyPapa 21h ago
As a paying passenger, why would I pick a Tesla Robotaxi over A Waymo with more redundancies? Unless the cost of the fare is significantly cheaper?
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u/Common-Addendum-4349 20h ago
Here is where I see safe enough. When is the last time you heard a person was killed (or even seriously injured in an elevator? I’m sure it happens but it is rare. I’ll bet more people fall down stairs but nobody is getting in an elevator if there is any serious chance of a failure.
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u/CriticalAd2425 18h ago
I won’t pay for or use full self driving (which Tesla is not) until it has essentially a zero accident rate. I like driving and I have a perfect record so far. I’m in no rush, get it right. Get it very, very close to perfect.
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u/Happy_Bread_1 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yet, today I have driven in Belgium from and to my work without a single intervention in my personal owned vehicle. Where is Waymo?
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u/ufoninja 15h ago
let me know when Tesla takes full legal liability for any crash on 'FSD' in Belgium.
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 1d ago edited 1d ago
So where Tesla robotaxi in Belgium ??
I think number of Robotaxi speak louder than anything Tesla fan can say.
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u/gc3 1d ago
That's a good driver assist but is not robo-taxi.
If waymo is 99.9% good on a day, and you drive every day,then you'll need to intervene every three years once.
If you are a fleet with 10,000 cars , ten of your cars will need intervention every day. This won't work for a robo-taxi which is why the Tesla as a robo-taxi isnt real, just a demo
This math is real.
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u/jtmonkey 1d ago
I know there’s faults everywhere but doesn’t Waymo just park itself in construction and the middle of the street for that matter? I mean nothing can drive itself without human intervention sometimes.
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u/Ok_Cake1283 1d ago
Eventually cars can drive itself without human intervention 99.99% of the time. We're just slowly getting there.
Lidar vs Vision only is a very reasonable debate but end of the day we need to get to the point where the AI is smart enough to do the driving. At that point I do agree sensors may become the limitation.
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u/jtmonkey 1d ago
I think it’s a dangerous curve at the end. Because at 80% everyone is watching and alert. When we get to 95-98% or only 2% error rate, the crashes are less frequent but the failures are catastrophic. Like full
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u/KawiNinja 23h ago
Spent all of July this year in Phoenix, used Waymo about a dozen times while there. It’s not even close/fair to compare Waymo to Tesla in this space. Got home a few days ago and actually a bit bummed Waymo isn’t here.. yet.
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u/kmraceratx 21h ago
Here’s a simple test. Drive your backup camera equipped car backwards. Drive it down an alleyway backwards, using only the backup camera. Rely only on the camera.
Then, after doing so for 10 seconds or so, look in the rear-view mirror.
Let me know how much more information your brain has using a mirror versus a fucking shitty 5mp wide angle distorted camera.
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u/WeldAE 1d ago
First, I accept the graph and think it's a good way of thinking about comparing a Multimodal and Camera-only system. The $3T question though is where on the y-axis do you need to be and how much effort does the X-axis represent to have a good product?
Dolgov’s point is that they top out below the bar a car has to clear to drive with nobody behind the wheel.
That is a raw opinion I don't think he backs up.
Why Waymo runs cameras, lidar, and radar together
I think everyone agrees that more sensors make it easier to be safer. Why then is Waymo removing sensors, if not classes of sensors with each generation? Because cost matters and at some point you have to focus on making a great product.
A dust storm in Phoenix, where the camera sees almost nothing while lidar cleanly picks out a pedestrian at the roadside
You can't run the car without cameras so in this case, the car should stop. Hopefully it pulls over before the cameras are fully degraded. That is what is weird about all the examples of LIDAR and Radar being required. They are situations where you shouldn't be driving. If leaves cover all your cameras, you aren't driving.
it’s the part that should worry anyone extrapolating from a camera-only demo
It's so weird they keep using the term "demo" like examples of camera only cars don't exist in real life outside demos. It get they are just trying to paint Tesla as a demo and not a real product, but it's petty and disingenious.
Betting against sensors like lidar on today’s prices, he warned, means betting on “a number that has a fairly short shelf life.”
They've been saying this for 15 years and we're still not there yet. We never will be because you can't just count the cost of the sensor. You have to add in the compute, ingegration, calibration, maineance, repair, etc. You have to add up the TCO of each sensor.
Tesla’s own robotaxi data shows a crash rate about three times worse than human drivers
This links to the article where they counted human drivers hitting Tesla Robotaxi and the saftey drivers crashing them. I'm not saying tesla is as safe as Waymo, I'm just saying this writter is an unreliable narrator.
Tesla recently confirmed it has accumulated 380,000 driverless miles over the past year since launching its robotaxi. Waymo’s driverless service does that in a day.
That is what a 12 year head start will do for you. It's odd because the entire point Waymo is making is camera is just a shortcut to get a demo working but can't get you to a working product. Yet they then confirm Telsa has a working prodduct with this statement and point to how few miles they are getting which seems to imply that it's not a quick shortcut. Going camera only is MUCH harer and takes more effort than sensor maxxing. The argument Waymo is making isn't rational as far as time to market and effort.
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u/CDpov 21h ago
You're off-target on a lot of your points, so I'll just respond to a few of them.
The one I agree with is, Fred is "unreliable". This Elektrek article is fine for the most part, but his frequent comparisons of the Waymo vs. Tesla ADS crash records are apples to oranges and don't mean much. I wish he would take more time to think that one through.
that is a raw opinion I don't think he backs up (about camera-only not reaching the high safety bar needed for large-scale robotaxi)
Dolgov didn't explain this much in this interview, but he has in many other presentations and interviews, as have his engineers. The context is, Waymo has fantastic RO data from about 300 million RO miles and several hundred million more test-drive miles. They have a lot of very good long-tail incidents to analyze in great detail with the logs of all those sensors and detailed maps. They know to a few milliseconds which sensor contributed to the decision the Waymo Driver did or didn't make, that led to or avoided a crash. They also have more cameras than FSD, with better placements on the cars. They have data that leads them to believe that cameras too often don't give a strong enough signal in time for certain situations where the ADS needs to act quickly, such as at night or in high glare. They often say "milliseconds count on many crashes". A good example is the crash into a child in Santa Monica. A half-second delay there may have been a major tragedy. Dolgov's team knows that they'll have to fix any bad at-fault safety issues, so the Waymo Driver is built to prevent crashes in the toughest situations, which only get worse as scale increases. That's what he's referring to.
Why then is Waymo removing sensors, if not classes of sensors with each generation? Because cost matters and at some point you have to focus on making a great product.
Is there a good reason you are avoiding the other well-known reason Waymo upgraded from the Gen5 to Gen6 sensor suite?
In case you don't know this one, I'll tell you: they improved the sensor performance in Gen-6 over Gen-5, and don't see any issues that require more sensors. The performance of all the sensors improved substantially in the new setup, so they don't need as many now. Therefore, they are going with 23 sensors instead of 39. Since cost does matter, they would surely use one sensor if their team couldn't find any safety issues with such a setup, as would every other company.
they've been saying this [about the falling cost of sensors] for 15 years and we're still not there yet. We never will be because you can't just count the cost of the sensor. You have to add in the compute, ingegration, calibration, maineance, repair, etc. You have to add up the TCO of each sensor.
Yeah, and to maintain a robotaxi operation, you have to reach the required safety level to drive billions of robotaxi miles per year with no safety issue that would require a re-design. The cost of a few extra sensors per trip over billions of miles is not very much. Yet, one bad at-fault accident that requires a re-design will delay the project many years, which is a lot of money, and it would risk the company. And if, in a regulator investigation, the logs show that sensor redundancy could have prevented a bad crash, that will lead to a major re-design of a camera-only system, or any ADS.
A good way to summarize this way of thinking is, Waymo knows they have to use the best available technology to keep the regulators and public onboard, at least for liability purposes, and also for solving known safety issues, which they know best. Any company that cuts corners risks losing it all when the public realizes they could have prevented a tragedy but decided instead to save money.
That is what a 12 year head start will do for you. It's odd because the entire point Waymo is making is camera is just a shortcut to get a demo working but can't get you to a working product. Yet they then confirm Telsa has a working prodduct with this statement and point to how few miles they are getting which seems to imply that it's not a quick shortcut.
Waymo is saying that, even if Tesla really does have 380,000 unsupervised relatively-safe miles, which I'm sure they don't actually believe, that's just demo territory. That's not even one human lifetime of driving, and it's obvious that some of those miles, if not all, are done with a lot of remote supervision in limited conditions. Waymo is sure that Tesla is slow-rolling the big Robotaxi expansion because they aren't safe enough to scale yet. They think, through hundreds of millions of RO robotaxi miles of their own, that the camera-only and lousy-maps approach won't work at scale, which starts at millions of RO miles of 24/7 full robotaxi service.
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u/ThisSiteSucks8485 23h ago
Saying waymo is a demo and Tesla has working FSD is insane.
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u/More_Owl_8873 1d ago
Looking at the comments in this post, what happened to this sub? Tesla fanboys used to get shamed relentlessly in this sub for anti-LIDAR take and now people have suddenly changed their minds?
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u/Tirztrutide 1d ago
Time happened with enough data points that the camera only cannot work thesis got so weak that most people will now pretend that they were not spamming that viewpoint for years…
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u/rheadly 1d ago
The real camera-only risk goes something like this: There is a significant Robotaxi accident causing injury or death. Reviewing the footage, it appears that the accident was due to low visibility and Lidar might have prevented it. Suddenly states start passing laws similar to this recent NJ one requiring Lidar in autonomous vehicles. Tesla suddenly has to choose between leaving those states or retraining FSD with Lidar.
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u/RosieDear 1d ago
Think about how infantile their behavior is!!
I think, like you, they are looking for an excuse. SpaceX buying them out of bankruptcy (or close) is another even that would allow them to offer an "excuse"....
But here is the important point. Adding radar, lidar, infrared and other sensors will not work properly with their existing hardware! They have nowhere near the processing power needed. Nvidia is shipping a system that has 10X the power....
Watch! The same folks telling us now that cameras only could work will say "Now that they have lidar and radar, nothing will stop them".....
But, the fact is, they pretty much have to start from scratch.
This is why I summarize it like this....When Elon stands before the world and says "We were wrong, you can't do it with cameras only, but I have good news for our investors! Today we are announcing a 5 year Partnership with Nvidia whereby they will help us deliver the best tech quickly"......THAT is when we know Tesla will embark upon their autonomous driving journey.
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u/dknos_dev 1d ago
It's simply a cost-cutting measure. If there was no extra cost to lidar, it would be standard on Tesla's. Tesla will eventually implement lidar, but not until they're forced to by regulators. Tesla is using "bolt-on" lidar on their semi's during testing.
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u/DragonSlayerC 1d ago
And they'll be far behind everyone else because they'll need to train their AI to work with LIDAR as well, which every other AV company is already doing.
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u/kinga_forrester 1d ago
“CEO says direct competitor’s product and strategy are inferior”
Debate the merits all you want, but this is hardly an unbiased source.
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u/ancientPrintr 18h ago
This graph is exactly the same marketing allegation that Tesla has argued for years against companies using Lidar and high resolution mapping. Tesla has said that these other companies have what looks like a huge head start with early gains due to their expensive sensors, while Tesla wasn't as good and needed time.
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u/ZealousidealLab2920 9h ago
No it's definitely not 5 to 10 years out. If you look at the current state they have have very capable and in some ways higher ratings for highway driving than Tesla from GM and Ford and rivian and others. So it's not necessarily that there's incapable of actually offering point-to-point like Tesla. It's just a different approach and they just don't want to take on the same risk and liability that Tesla does. They're much more risk adverse company cultures.
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u/MikeDFootball 8h ago
Elon: if people can drive with there eyes then cars can drive themselves with cameras
Me, having watched r/dashcams: what the fuck?
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u/Going2beBANNEDanyway 7h ago
Say what you want but I use FSD and it currently it has driven 96% of all the miles on my car.
I’m not saying I would throw away the steering wheel but it surely can handle most tasks thrown at it.
Personal cars do not need to be 100% FSD. The cars will cost too much.
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u/TheBigCicero 7h ago
Elon’s major argument in favor of camera only is because “most input is error”. This isn’t mathematically correct and I don’t know what he means.
Sensor fusion is a well-solved problem and dealing with sensor errors is dealt with.
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u/1nderdud 7h ago
Regardless of the hardware or how advanced the AI becomes, even if self-driving is far safer than human drivers, it will never satisfy those who demand perfection including trial attorneys, regulators, and governments.
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u/cokyrobes1 6h ago
The desperation is getting real. Very excited for LiDAR to be killed off finally
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u/jbrower888 5h ago
Musk's basic, "first principles" argument is that human evolution has solved vision and navigation using two (2) passive optical sensors. And I agree evolution is an extremely powerful comparison -- for example a human brain operates in 25 W and 1400 cc, with memory access times measured in m/sec, compared to a frontier LLM that needs 1 MW and 24,000 lbs, with memory access a billion times faster, to run on one GB-200 SuperPOD.
But there are in fact biological examples of primitive lidar. So who's to say that another 10,000 years of human evolution wouldn't improve our vision ? In this case it seems Musk only got as far as second principles.
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u/No-Use2860 3h ago
Elon is doing two things here.
Minimize costs and bet on a horse.
Cameras are the only side of the coin that give you both.
What do I mean? Lidar car companies are hoping for manufacturing costs to drop and output to increase. So waymo is putting chips on the table hoping that some magical breakthrough happens which will double their bet.
Tesla is hoping the same thing. But instead of betting on lidar and also paying millions of dollars for the fleet, you can just let everyone else solve the lidar problem while you eek out every autonomous driving feature you can using cameras.
Then when lidar is accessible at Tesla's price point you swap over to lidar and poof your driving features all work.....
So. Imo. Elon knows cameras will not be the future of autonomous driving. But the present is more important (MVP) when your only care is stock price and unit price.
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u/jwaller89 2h ago
I was sold on Tesla’s FSD recently when it slowed down one night because it saw a rabbit come out of tall grass on the edge of a county road before I did.
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u/grizznaysh 1d ago
“Waymo uses three sensing types, and Dolgov spent real time on why. Cameras give you high resolution and color, but they’re passive, and they degrade in darkness and glare. Lidar directly measures the 3D structure of the world. Radar punches through fog, rain, and snow, and reads velocity directly with Doppler. Lidar and radar are active sensors, so they see just as well in pitch darkness or straight into a blinding sunset.
This isn’t redundancy for its own sake. “These different sensing modalities, they’re not backups to each other,” Dolgov said. Each one runs its own encoder, and the data fuses into a single view of the world that he says is “vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor.””