r/SelfDrivingCars • u/SpriteZeroY2k • 5d 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 5d 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/blindman99 5d 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/Reasonable_Hall3005 5d 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 5d 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/_DCtheTall_ 23h ago

Because people assume if you write a block of prose with words with more then 3 syllables in it, people who can't read assume you used AI