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Elon: FSD Beta tweets
- Thread starter Terminator857
- Start date
I actually flew to Arizona from Seattle to test the Waymo service. It DOES work.
Sure, it doesn't work EVERYWHERE but at least it works somewhere. And at this point I don't believe Tesla _ever_ will provide anything even remotely similar to Waymo.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
Personally, I think Waymo has the right approach. But they are realizing that actually solving FSD is harder than they thought. They underestimated the edge cases. And Waymo is fully committed to fully driverless which is harder. To deploy safe driverless robotaxis, you need to solve a lot more edge cases because the car has to be able to handle driving with no back-up. And really solving FSD is not just driving from A to B without hitting anything. Ideally, you also want the robotaxi to make smart decisions when interacting with other road users, know when to be assertive and when to be courteous to other drivers, drive smoothly, and mitigate accidents caused by others. Teaching a robot to do all that well is a very difficult problem.
Good question. Short answer is that I think Waymo was not really sure what business model to use at first and they underestimated the difficulty in actually solving FSD. Basically, they started as a FSD project for Google, got some good success with the technology but was not really sure how to convert that success into a real business. IMO, Krafcik was not a good CEO. He was too optimistic with the tech. He thought the FSD was ready for scaling when it wasn't ready yet. He was more flash over substance. In 2018, Krafcik apparently wanted to do a big multi-city marketing campaign to show off Waymo's FSD:
From the quote below, it seems Waymo also underestimated how hard that last 1% of FSD is. I think they kind of fell for their own hype when they were deploying robotaxis in Chandler and then had to pull back when they realized that the FSD was not solved yet. According to this, in 2017, they were planning to expand to 9 cities in just 18 months:
Source: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
I am more optimistic for the new co-CEO's, Dolgov and Mawakana. I think they have good complimentary skills for both the tech and the business side of things. They seem to have a better grasp of Waymo's business model (ride-hailing and trucking). They also appear to be more grounded and have a more realistic understanding of what it takes to actually solve FSD. I like that they have launched public testing in SF. I think it is a good sign that they are moving forward. I am also optimistic with the 5th Gen hardware, Simulation City and other ML work on prediction and planning that Waymo is doing. I feel that Dolgov and Mawakana will be about steady and concrete results.
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it is only “the right approach” if you never ever plan to sell to consumers which makes it completely worthless to me or anyone who wants autonomous driving in their own car.
Is there really a question as to whether or not Waymo works in well mapped areas of Chandler? The safety driver thing is meaningless and mainly about regulatory cya.
Works well for one car. It is a marketing scam. From Waymo report they have had 69K fully driverless miles since 2019.
Tell us more about your theory.
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I can't wait to try it, but I'm waiting for it to exist in a place worth visiting.
Having a safety driver is meaningless when evaluating whether or not a car is capable of autonomous driving.
People equate fully driverless to success. It is much less of a success if it is a marketing scam. Yes many cars are capable of autonomous driving, but how well is it done? Getting rid of the safety driver means something to people unless they are being duped by a marketing scam.
Well, by that standard it is doubtful Tesla will ever achieve success. They aren’t even working on fully driverless cars.
Different kinds of successes:
1. Tesla will increase product clamor with unique level 2 system. Only level 2 system in the U.S. that drives itself with supervision on freeways and cities.
2. Tesla will achieve driverless success, but not in the next few years. I hope Waymo achieves financial success first, but I doubt it. Is Tesla already financially successful?
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That was before COVID and with a safety driver, you couldn't take videos/photos back then.
Elon hoping clamor for his product will increase after button. Should happen if more than a few are added.
FSD is five+ years away as in full self driving. A car that drives itself most of the time but that needs supervision is obviously closer.
FSD is five+ years away as in full self driving. A car that drives itself most of the time but that needs supervision is obviously closer.
Of course they are. The question of whether they will be eventually successful is related but separate. I'm guessing that your statement stems from the whole California DMV email discussion. Tesla did not say they are not working on, or will never have, L4 i.e.unsupervised self-driving. They said that the feature being worked on for release is currently an L2 feature and is expected to remain so through release, i.e. in the foreseeable future.
As I and others have written several times before, that is an eminently sensible approach and does not legally, ethically or morally bind them to reporting incremental development data to California DMV.
The engineering knowledge gained during this development is perfectly open to be used for a subsequent L4 release. When and if this comes to fruition, and at the time that Tesla applies for CA approval to operate such a feature, they will be required to submit a performance data set that justifies the safety and performance of the driverless feature release.
Thanks, and a couple of follow-up questions. Perhaps this should move to the Waymo thread, but oh well:
- Is there any indication, from conferences or interview answers etc., that Waymo has rethought any major part of the AV technical strategy or architecture over the last several years? In the way that e.g. Tesla has evolved their neural network architecture, examined the fusion problems of disparate sensors and the phased conversion to temporal persistence, and also the intent to move more of the stack to NN over time? Or like MobilEye with their evolved dual-perception / late fusion architecture? The thrust being that, over years of development far past the original expectation, one would expect that some pretty major rethinking would happen along the way.
- Your explanation implies that that the last CEO, Krafcik, was too much of a marketer and not enough bound to the engineering reality (probably similar to your and many others' take on Elon). However, at the time of this change a few months back, I seem to recall some people saying that Waymo actually wasn't moving fast enough toward real scaled-up deployment, and was stuck in a money-draining science-fair condition with no end in sight. These two explanations seem to be rather contradictory. I'm not asking you to reverse your position, just trying to understand if it's your own take or the generally accepted story. Perhaps I'm relying too much on one or two things I heard that weren't representative of mainstream Waymo-watcher consensus.
I agree with this, and it's what I care about also. However, beyond the unavailability of the cars to consumers, I think some people are saying the cars are simply too expensive as RoboTaxi fleet vehicles because of the awesome sensor suite, i.e. the assumption that significantly higher vehicle cost can be supported because it will be used as a RoboTaxi, may not be viable.
There was a YouTube discussion on Dave Lee's channel that covered this among other things. but I'd have to go back to that to give a fair summary (I have not dedicated myself to understand the whole RoboTaxi investment analysis; partly because I'm not a finance/investor type at heart, but also because I find the whole premise somewhat mixed in with long-failed urban-centric utopian dreams).
Based on Elon's tweets, 2 weeks from now, my car should be able to ATTEMPT to drive me from my house to work, hopefully with no interventions.
I cannot get a ride In a Waymo in my small city, and I have no idea when I will be able to. (I'd be willing to bet money thay it won't be within 2 years)
I love watching the progress by all companies pursuing AVs, but what matters to me is how much of an impact it can have on MY life. I've had great experiences with NoA, and it has made long trips much more fun and less tiresome meaning its provided actual value to my life unlike waymo. (I also haven't given waymo $7,000)
Tesla has an FSD problem, Waymo has a scaling problem. Nobody has any idea which one will solve their problem first, but I do like Karpathy's presentations showing what they're doing to solve the FSD problem. I have yet to see anything from Waymo showing how they're going to solve the scaling problem.
TLDR Version: I bet within 2 years, my Tesla will be able to do 99.9% of all my driving with no interventions (probably while still being monitored) while I won't be able to get a ride in a Waymo in my small city by then.
I cannot get a ride In a Waymo in my small city, and I have no idea when I will be able to. (I'd be willing to bet money thay it won't be within 2 years)
I love watching the progress by all companies pursuing AVs, but what matters to me is how much of an impact it can have on MY life. I've had great experiences with NoA, and it has made long trips much more fun and less tiresome meaning its provided actual value to my life unlike waymo. (I also haven't given waymo $7,000)
Tesla has an FSD problem, Waymo has a scaling problem. Nobody has any idea which one will solve their problem first, but I do like Karpathy's presentations showing what they're doing to solve the FSD problem. I have yet to see anything from Waymo showing how they're going to solve the scaling problem.
TLDR Version: I bet within 2 years, my Tesla will be able to do 99.9% of all my driving with no interventions (probably while still being monitored) while I won't be able to get a ride in a Waymo in my small city by then.
Well, the only kind of success that is relevant to this topic is achieving driverless cars. The investing section is further down.
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