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This is so wild to read when Waymo is currently doing like 500,000 paid rides every week, all over the country, with no one in the driver's seat. Meanwhile Tesla seems to have a handful of robotaxis in Austin, and it's unclear if any of them are actually driverless.

But the Tesla engineers are "in the right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar data"? What?

by smallmancontrov4 hours ago|

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Tesla has driven 7.5B autonomous miles to Waymo's 0.2B, but yes, Waymo looks like they are ahead when you stratify the statistics according to the ass-in-driver-seat variable and neglect the stratum that makes Tesla look good.

The real question is whether doing so is smart or dumb. Is Tesla hiding big show-stopper problems that will prevent them from scaling without a safety driver? Or are the big safety problems solved and they are just finishing the Robotaxi assembly line that will crank out more vertically-integrated purpose-designed cars than Waymo's entire fleet every day before lunch?

by hn_acc13 hours ago|

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Tesla's also been involved in WAY more accidents than Waymo - and has tried to silence those people, claim FSD wasn't active, etc.

What good is a huge fleet of Robotaxis if no one will trust them? I won't ever set foot in a Robotaxi, as long as Elon is involved.

by kypro3 hours ago|

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There's more Tesla's on the road than Waymo's by several orders of magnitude. Additionally the types of roads and conditions Tesla's drive under is completely incomparable to Waymo.

by jamespo2 hours ago|

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Yes that was accounted for above, but this isn't autonomous apples to apples

by jasondigitized2 hours ago|

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semi autonomous

by kypro3 hours ago|

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I wasn't arguing Tesla is ahead of Waymo? Nor do I think they are. All I was arguing was that it makes sense from the perspective of a consumer automobile maker to not use lidar.

I don't think Tesla is that far behind Waymo though given Waymo has had a significant head start, the fact Waymo has always been a taxi-first product, and given they're using significantly more expensive tech than Tesla is.

Additionally, it's not like this is a lidar vs cameras debate. Waymo also uses and needs cameras for FSD for the reasons I mentioned, but they supplement their robotaxis with lidar for accuracy and redundancy.

My guess is that Tesla will experiment with lidar on their robotaxis this year because design decisions should differ from those of a consumer automobile. But I could be wrong because if Tesla wants FSD to work well on visually appealing and affordable consumer vehicles then they'll probably have to solve some of the additional challenges with with a camera-only FSD system. I think it will depend on how much Elon decides Tesla needs to pivot into robotaxis.

Either way, what is undebatable is that you can't drive with lidar only. If the weather is so bad that cameras are useless then Waymos are also useless.