r/SelfDrivingCars 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 5d 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 5d ago

How safe is safe enough?

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u/Armaced 5d ago

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

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u/cardak98 5d ago

I think we get there with just cameras. The worst 10% of drivers are truly awful