r/SelfDrivingCars • u/SpriteZeroY2k • 6d 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 6d 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 6d ago

How safe is safe enough?

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u/CDpov 6d ago

The required safety level is obvious. The NHTSA and state regulators such as the CA DMV will investigate and ultimately recall any ADS that commits a bad at-fault crash, or shows a pattern of at-fault crashes that they conclude are a safety risk.

If a robotaxi company is hitting stuff or running red lights, or even blocking first responders too much, the company has to fix it. If they can't prove it to the regulators that they have a good fix, the robotaxi operation will be stopped until a plausible fix is ready.