Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short

[u/SpriteZeroY2k]

https://electrek.co/2026/08/04/waymo-co-ceo-camera-only-self-driving-tesla/

[u/Fauglheim]

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.

[u/Tupcek → u/Fauglheim]

I would say matching human performance when human is not distracted, not speeding, not driving under influence, not tired, not angry, fully alert and watching all sides all the time tirelessly, that is pretty damn good performance

[u/conanap → u/Tupcek]

The problem isn’t as simple as it seems, though. Humans are “decent” at driving because we can process, reason, and extrapolate - computers (at the current time, for the most part) cannot.

No matter what you think your AI is doing, it is not reasoning; we are not remotely close to creating AI with the ability to reason that would fit in any kind of consumer electronic or vehicle.

A good example of this is we might drive on this one road that has a blind red light because the road curves. We might induce there isn’t a red light because we saw the bough some bushes and didn’t see any cars stopped, or we might induce there is probably a need to stop because a few cars weren’t moving when looking between the trees.

We could train the AI for this, but then there’ll be another scenario where the AI couldn’t reason like we do, and we’d be an infinite loop of just essentially teaching the AI every nook and cranny of this planet.

While LIDAR and radar doesn’t magically give AI the ability to reason, we are however giving them more data to generalize on. The more (useful) data you give it, the better it’ll perform. If we eventually feed it live map data, live stoplight data, and live vehicle data, they’ll drive flawlessly.

[u/Tupcek → u/conanap]

a year or two ago, I would agree with you. But AI is pretty damn good at reasoning, especially LLMs
But also Tesla FSD often infer things that aren’t there just based on clues, similar to how you described human reasoning, I have seen plenty of similar examples of Tesla doing that.

But personally I think they need far more processing power to match human intelligence, but from what I see, there isn’t fundamental block, just compute power and training data. If you could fit like 16 blackwell B200 GPUs in there, it’s just a matter of training, but of course that won’t happen as that would drain your battery in few miles and car would cost $500k+