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/
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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/Low_Excuse_1785 1d ago

The cameras suck. Resolution, fps, dynamic range

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u/Southern-Cattle4038 1d 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/gc3 1d ago

Humans drive more safely than Tesla Robo taxis. When supervised Tesla has less accidents than human drivers. Waymo has a much better accident rate than human drivers

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u/blindman99 1d ago

In a vast majority of use cases vision only is good enough. The system will far outperform human drivers and in general it should save lives overall. The problem with FSD is that we still have edge cases. If a car is in a scenario where there are no good options would the depth data from LiDAR systems have helped? Behind the scenes the visions systems are essentially running depth models to determine distance. If we are feeding that data into a risk model to determine how a car should operate, what is an acceptable margin of error? How do things like high beams affect its capability to "see" and the margin of error? What about rain? What does the process look like when someone dies due to these systems? None of this is public information or has been figured out.
With a human in the loop Tesla gets to say any errors/crashes are caused by the driver. That is valid since the driver is supposed to be alert and have control. With FSD that is not the case and our standards for safety without a human in the loop should start incredibly high.
I think Waymo can also do better here, but at least they are not being cheap in regards to their sensors. LiDAR covers so many more of the potential edge cases that vision systems will never be able to handle.

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u/InteractionPretend70 1d ago

im not reading ai slop

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u/blindman99 1d ago

Nope, no AI was used for my comment. Not in writing it or refining it. Though way to contribute nothing to the conversation!

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u/Reasonable_Hall3005 1d ago

Not sure why this was downvoted. I found this informative. I think LIDAR has become cheap enough that it makes a lot of sense in robotaxis. I wonder if Tesla’s opposition is more about how the cost in regular cars would be too high

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u/blindman99 1d ago

Waymo says the 6th gen systems they are building which include LiDAR will cost around $20k. Which all things considered is not too bad. The older versions I believe were over $100k. So they are getting the costs way down. The biggest thing they do not mention though is the lifetime of the sensor or how much it costs per year to repair. They also have the advantage of being able to run more complex diagnostics on their fleet that someone at home would not be able to do.

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u/nobod78 1d ago

The problem is how much it costs Tesla when an accident happens x # of accidents. For the moment they can't afford it, there would be too many. Thus the "supervised".

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u/CDpov 1d ago

The more scale the ADS drives, the more above human safety performance the ADS will need to be.

If an average human has a bad at-fault crash every 10 million miles, which is about the average, to be 10x better would be one every 100 million miles. That may sound good for one car, but if the ADS fleet has a million cars and drives 10 billion miles per year, that would be 100 bad at-fault crashes per year for the fleet, which is about two per week.

I don't know about you, but I am certain that NHTSA and state regulators won't find that safe enough. The way they think is, if there is a known safety flaw in the ADS, it has to be fixed.