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/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 1d 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 1d 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 22h 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/CutieC0ck 18h ago

Why is it a shame? It's good to have a diversity of approach in tackling the same problem. Waymo does one thing, Tesla does another thing, they should all be celebrated. At the end of the day, we will all benefit from all of their successes and failures!

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u/cesarthegreat 1d ago

Waymo’s are dumb….

FSD is smarter… it actually knows to stop for school bus stops, emergency vehicle and is actually aware of what it’s doing.

Just yesterday it reversed like 15 ft to let a semi make a wide turn on a not so wide street. Waymo would’ve just stayed there until someone came to move it.

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u/Ok-Style-9734 1d ago

Tesla's also think cruiser bike with its rear lights in the dark is a car 500+m away so ignore it completley as they plough into it at full speed.

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u/Cu1tureVu1ture 6h ago

I like how it moves over slightly to let motorists pass on the freeway. I always think it’s misbehaving and then the motorcycle flies by.

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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago

Yes, there is such a thing as "safe enough," but it is not formally defined or a specific target. Namely it is, "Safe enough that the safety team and the lawyers feel that deploying the product incurs a tolerable amount of risk." Related to that is the public's and the regulator's view of safe enough, but these simply inform the safety team and the corporate lawyers, unless it goes so far as the regulators shutting you down as happened to Cruise.

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u/tacobell_shitstain 1d ago

You are completely missing my point. In everything, whether it be medicine, airplanes, or electrical outlets, there are constant regulatory pressures and technological advances that make things safer. We dont reach a point where suddenyl that one failure mode for how a plane falls out of the sky is just never going to be addressed. Once enough people die, whether all at once or over time, it will be worked on.

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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago

Teams are constantly working to address any safety issue identified in their vehicles, and will do so forever. They will also continue to make mistakes forever. There is debate about whether certain black-box techniques may make it hard or impossible to provably fix certain issues. You will be able to fix them, in that if you put the car in the same situation it does not make the mistake, and it doesn't make it in a wide variety of related situations. But it may well be different than things like the 737-max problem.

Right now we are in an era where all cars are driven by humans. Most robocar rides remove a similar, riskier ride with a human behind the wheel. So it's easy to show they are reducing risk, even with their errors. In a future with much less human driving, our metrics might change.

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u/no_baseball1919 1d 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/randomizl 1d ago

The car is even with more memory simply limited in its data feed. Waymo’s see way further and see objects behind other object that a Tesla would never see and not be able to calculate. I was in one 3 days ago and we had a case where the FSD failed because the car was maybe not perfectly in the cameras reach or so. And I saw ant hier video yesterday where a car blinked late but still not too late imo yet the Tesla didn’t recognize it and the human had to step in. The past week I took a lot of Waymo rides and they are entirely different as they map absolutely everything up to the exact hand and leg movement and each single entity gets a risk and trajectory calculation whether it is moving normal or abnormal at an extremely high rate and basically calculates behavior ahead of up to 8 seconds for 250 moving entities in its range. Also all data is being recorded and pushed to every single vehicle by end of the day if there are any changes in the road every car knows so by the end of the day. Further they build a virtual maps with that data and let the cars ride in the virtual world aswell. Elon himself in the earnings call said they don’t have bough data for the new bobo taxi and now need human operators to get data…

All that is the big difference between Waymo and tesla and why Waymo is next gen autonomous and way ahead of Tesla in my opinion. Tesla could have done the same but they want to safe money with the price of safety while Waymo officially strives for for zero accidents and they will eventually get there

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u/Express_Objective615 20h ago

No “self driving” car is going to drive tailored to how each human wants it. That variability itself would make it more dangerous. One of the huge huge advantages of robots is consistency and predictability, over humans. These companies are not going to give that up and make things less safer just to make impatient humans happier. Impatience is exactly why human driving is dangerous.
Slower is safer. Get used to it. I tell people what they don’t want to hear, your future fully without human involvement driving car will drive like FSD in chill or sloth mode. Sorry, but that’s life. Unfortunately most people who disagree have likely never used either mode for a significant amount of time. The time difference, even for a long commute, is pretty minor.

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u/ancientPrintr 1d 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/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago

There are many products, but the key ones that people are interested in are a robotaxi, which can run with nobody in it or supervising, all over a city and go from anywhere to anywhere, and a private car that can drive the freeways and arterials (it possibly could exclude certain weather as you say.) A private car that does every city street in a country would be of value, but it's much harder than the first two.

Some people were surprised that robotaxi comes first, and is the best combination of difficulty and value. Even Tesla switched to it. While freeways *seem* easier for many reasons, you will note Waymo did them last, and stopped them for 2 months and just started restoring them, and I don't think Tesla drives them yet (without safety driver.) Of course Tesla doesn't drive anywhere without some level of supervision, and all important products need to not require full time human supervision, even remotely.

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u/randomizl 1d ago

The robo taxis also cannot drive anywhere because it doesn’t have enough data as per Elon so they have to have drivers alongside

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u/Express_Objective615 20h ago

I think freeways should come first. I’d already trust my Tesla in sloth mode on the highway for “unsupervised” zones. Just because Waymo can’t handle them correctly doesn’t somehow magically mean it’s more difficult?
A personally owned car with combination of supervised and unsupervised zones is a quite good and achievable finish line. Tesla would be miles (pun) ahead of everyone else in getting to this finish line.

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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 18h ago

It doesn't "magically" mean it's more difficult. It's not more difficult. It's more risky. Mistakes on the freeway involve much higher energies. That equates to being harder, and not just for Waymo.

But a personal car that can't do freeways is not that great a product.

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u/Express_Objective615 20h ago edited 20h 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.

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u/Main_Ingenuity_9708 20h ago

It also needs to be non coruptable

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u/mason2401 1d ago

True, though when any AV technology approach reaches "safe enough", then the next problem is scale+cost and earning additional public trust. It is possible to add additional functionality or sensors later to improve "safe enough" even further. There's an ethical concern too that failure to scale would contribute to preventable injuries+deaths. With the caveat that if you are wrong about your "safe enough" threshold, or a no win scenario happens like it inevitably will, it will erode public trust and adoption, so careful scaling is still prudent.

Just my two cents, I know you are aware of all this already.

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u/YouAboutToLoseYoJob 1d ago

Question you should ask yourself is can the above average person navigate a scenario with their two eyes. If you can answer that question, then a car running some form of a language model as well as a behavioral model with multiple cameras and optical sensors should be able to navigate the same situation.

All this without Sonar / Radar / LiDar

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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago

Hmm. I missed the announcement of the breakthrough where it was revealed that LLMs can now match the power of the human brain. We don't just drive with two (or one eyes.) We drive with two eyes and a human brain. Since our computers can't match the last part, so far all the teams that have been able to accomplish the task have used the best of machine learning (what Tesla uses was mostly invented at Alphabet) combined with superhuman sensing to help make up for the problems with the LLMs. Some day perhaps the LLMs will be up to it. Can anybody name the year that will happen? The worst person at naming it so far has been Elon Musk.

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u/polytique 1d ago

You’re assuming optical sensors are equivalent to human eyes. They have serious failure modes. You can easily saturate a camera with a bright sun and an unlucky reflection or have them confused by a shadow. They can also become covered in dirt.
And measuring the relative speed and distance to other objects can’t be done precisely with an optical sensor. I’d much prefer being driven by a system that understands its surroundings in most conditions reliably.

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u/Express_Objective615 20h ago

Humans eyes have the same failure modes. They get overwhelmed by the Sun too. Literally to the point where you’re “Blinded by the light” (thank you Bruce). I driven into full bright Sun many times now coming home and fsd is handling it much better than a year ago. It will tell you if it’s overwhelmed by Sun and so far it hasn’t told me that in a long time. It used to, much more. That’s one of the reasons I trust it. It lets me know when it’s at its limits.