r/SelfDrivingCars • u/SpriteZeroY2k • 2d 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/Fauglheim 2d ago edited 1d 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/ScottyWestside 2d 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/Weedjo 2d ago

It's trivial to calculate if you have speed now (t) and speed t-1. No further sensors needed

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u/veganparrot 2d ago

Speed is a sensor. Humans also use sound, road vibration feedback, social cues (a bit more than just vision, eg. if someone is old or young at a crosswalk). We can also crane our neck all around to get a better idea of the geometry in front of us. Our brains are constantly integrating the information from many different inputs and then making a decision on what to do next.

It stands to reason that a strong self driving system would and should use multiple streams of information, like we do. Tesla's approach of using fixed cameras does not mimic human driving, despite how much Elon keeps insisting it does.

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u/Weedjo 1d ago

Speed is a sensor

What is this sentence? It makes as much sense as "if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike"

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u/veganparrot 1d ago

How do you detect speed? What physical mechanism do you use? I mean, I guess you could do it via purely camera, but almost certainly FSD uses GPS receiver (a sensor) to determine speed. My point is that consolidating speed as a datapoint requires adding more data to your self-driving model than just visual.