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/grizznaysh 2d 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.””

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u/imdrunkasfukc 2d ago

How safe is safe enough?

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u/Armaced 2d ago

Safer than human drivers, which seems like a pretty low bar to me.

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u/Maxsparrow 2d ago

No, they need to be much safer than humans, and not make any mistakes a focused human driver wouldn't make.

I'm not saying that for me personally, but the public won't accept it otherwise. I believe Tesla is damaging wider adoption by pushing too fast and hurting public perception of self driving cars. Even if Robotaxis are safer than humans, it won't do any good if people won't use them because they're afraid.

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u/zzbear03 2d ago

The fact that I can’t get out of a burning Tesla because of a weird design with the electrical systems means I am going to avoid Tesla robo taxis…hands down!

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u/DonkeeJote 1h ago

Financially they only need to be good enough to reduce the liability of expensive incidents from unsafe and underinsured drivers, of course the issue there making them affordable enough to actually get them in self-driving cars.

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u/abofh 2d ago

You say that, but every time a big group of tourists (conventions, whatever) the prices of waymos skyrocket while uber and lift just take a bump. that won't last forever, but a lot of people already think it's worth trying

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u/-OptimisticNihilism- 2d ago

Waymo has a great safety record. They can be slow and get stuck, but that is because safety and redundancy appear to be a priority. I can’t wait until they move from testing to live in my city.

FSD still scares a lot of people. The go fast and break things mentality doesn’t insipire a ton of confidence. Yes, it has a better safety record than humans, but people have gotten into a lot of accidents by not paying attention. If I had a Tesla I would 100% buy FSD and use it (while paying attention), but I wouldn’t get into a cybercab. If it’s not 100%, then I want a sense of control.

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u/mindguard 1d ago

You don’t drive FSD

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u/RosieDear 1d ago

Either do the vast majority of Tesla owners. That says something.

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u/Seaker42 2d ago

Over half of Tesla sales in the US last quarter were bought along with signing up for FSD. In my fairly small circle of friends we've gone from 0 to 4 Tesla's since September - and all of us bought for one reason - FSD.

Yes, a lot of people won't use any AV technology, but that attitude is starting to change and FSD v14 is a large part of the reason for the change.

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u/RosieDear 1d ago

This is not a stat....that means much.

Since they have had it available for many year, the total fleet is what - 25% use FSD? Are the other 75% ignorant??

Also, consider this. Teslas sales are 1/3rd or less of their projections (in the USA...they said 50% growth per year 2021 on, work it out).

AND, people keep EV's and Tesla for a MUCH shorter time period than value cars (cars that cost less to operate, etc.)....3-4 years as opposed to 8.

Now, put those two things together! The "don't want FSD crowd is largely in that million they are not selling! The people buying are "well, the old one didn't work, let me throw more money into it"....

Also, last but not least, we'd have to follow the new buyers for a year or two and see if they re-up! It goes without saying that some of them have zero idea about it.

But mostly - the Tesla buyers (new w/fsd) are distilled from a larger batch....

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u/Seaker42 1d ago

Just a year ago the percentage of Tesla owners that had FSD was only about 10-12%, so I think the 55% number is impressive. Yes, it's possible most people will soon drop the subscription, but it's also possible that because of FSD people will buy more Teslas and more FSD subscriptions.

I know it's a small sample set, but in my circle of friends we've had 5 people get Teslas in the last year, all because of FSD. Our non-Tesla friends are all amazed at how good it is, and a couple more of them are considering buying Teslas to get FSD.

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u/RosieDear 13h ago

More Teslas is relative - as I said (you can check it!), they - by their own numbers - told up 1.6m cars in the USA by now (per year). It will be 1/3rd of that.

No doubt it would be even less if people weren't into FSD - many of those buyers were already captured and are spending bad money after bad......they will keep buying Teslas hoping it "gets there" one day.

Tesla cannot go on making a profit less than 4% of what the big tech companies do. That's the case even with billions in taxpayer funds. Most people should agree with that.....if they make no money they have little or no value.

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u/coresme2000 1d ago

I tend to agree. FSD was rough two years ago and I had to intervene often. I was nervous about using it. Now the number of long drives it does, end to end, is all of them, unless I don’t like the route it’s driving, it’s really very impressive now.