The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes.
Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.
One of Udacity's first courses was on self-driving, taught by Sebastian Thrun who later cofounded Waymo. He went through some Bayesian math that takes a collection of lidar points, where each point contributes to a probabilistic assessment of what's really going on. It's fine if different points seem to contradict each other, because you're looking for the most likely scenario that could produce that combined sensor data. Transformers can do the same sort of thing, and even with different sensor types it's still the same sort of problem.
The response to the challenge shouldn't be whittling down your sensor-suite to a single type, but to get good at sensor fusion.
We have lots of evidence of similar strategies being used in other domains, this seems like an especially life-critical domain that ought to have high rigor and standards applied.
It is pretty incredible but people will (rightly so?) hold automated drivers to an ultra high standard. If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory agency to outlaw them!
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-cras...
Why is it clearly false? It might be false, but clearly? I would definitely like to see evidence either way.
> I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average.
That sounds like you are trying to find reasons to get the conclusion you want.
If you go to the NHTSA's page regarding their Standing General Order[2] and download the CSV of all ADS incidents[3], you can filter where the reporting entity is Waymo and find 520 rows. If you filter where the vehicle was stopped or parked, you'll find 318 crashes. If you scan through the narrative column, you'll see things like a Waymo yielding to pedestrians in a crosswalk and getting rear-ended, or waiting for a red light to change and getting rear-ended, or yielding to a pickup truck that then shifted into reverse and backed into the Waymo. In other words: the majority of Waymo collisions are due to human drivers.
So either Waymos are ridiculously unlucky, or when these sorts of things happen between two human driven cars, it's rarely reported to insurance. In my experience, if there's only minor damage, both parties exchange contact info and don't involve the authorities. Maybe one compensates the other for damage, or maybe neither party cares enough about a minor dent or scrape to deal with it. I've done this when someone rear-ended me, and I know my parents have done it when they've had collisions.
If human driven vehicles really did average 229k miles between any collision of any kind, we'd see many more pristine older vehicles. But if you pay attention to other cars on the road or in parking lots, you'll see far more dents and scratches than would be expected from that statistic. And that's not even counting the damage that gets repaired!
1. See page 13 of https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/third-am...
2. https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
3. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
Tesla notes:
> These assumptions may contain limitations with respect to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to police
Given that Musk has a history of driving lower costs, it's unlikely he overestimated the long-term cost floor. He just thought we were close to self-driving in 2014.
Another factor is Andrej Karpathy, who was the primary architect for the vision-only approach. Musk wanted fewer parts, and Karpathy believed he could deliver that. Karpathy is still an advocate of vision-only.
And, less excusable, ignorant of how incredible human eyes are compared to small sensor cameras. In particular high DR in low light, with fast motion. Every photographer knows this.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fi...
He wanted (needed?) to get on the hype train for self driving to pump up the stock price, knew that at the time there was zero chance they could sell it at the price point lidar required at the time - or even effective other sensors (like radar) - and sold it anyway at the price point that people would buy it at, even though it was not plausibly going to ever work at the level that was being promised.
There is a word for that. But I’m sure there are many lawyers that will say it was ‘mere fluffery’ or the like. And I’m sure he’ll get away with it, because more than enough people are complicit in the mess.
Miscalculation assumes there was a mistake somewhere, but near as I can tell, it is playing out as any reasonable person expected it too, given what was known at the time.
This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it
They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering
(Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do better they will mandate it.
Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65
Waymo fatalities: 0
If we are just talking about smart cruise control, most cars are using cameras and radar, not lidar yet. But Tesla is special since it doesn’t even use radar for its smart cruise control implementation, so that could make it less safe than other new cars with smart cruise control, but Autopilot was never competing with Waymo.
By some measures Waymo is actually at -1 fatalities. There has been one confirmed birth of a child in a Waymo. https://apnews.com/article/baby-born-waymo-san-francisco-6bd...
They might have flipped a switch after that, causing this.
It may just be faster to make lidar cheap. And lidar can do things humans can't.
It's not fair to say that vision based models will "make the same mistakes people do" as >99% of the mistakes people make are avoidable if these issues were addressed. And a computer can easily address all those issues