[nickik]

I have to disagree.

1. They are 10s of billions deep in a hole and make no profit (or revenue) and will not for multiple years. To ever pay back that investment they basically need to become Uber. And to get there, they need many more 10s of billions of capx. Uber is not even making a profit yet.

2. Waymo approach is the classic 'solve the easiest problem first' mistake. They started and have driven most of their miles, in literally the easiest place to do AV in the world. They have created incredibly complex high resolution maps on one small and simple region in Arizona where the streets are wide, the weather is always nice, and the general upkeep of the infrastructure is done very well.

3. Reliance on hd mapping for localization is fragile approach, and it essentially requires you to continuously map the whole global road system to have a real generalized driving solution. When will they have cars that can just drive on roads they have never seen before, something that human drivers often do. Seems to me this is the wrong approach to take.

4. Waymo still needs highly specialized vehicles, even with lidar becoming cheaper, their whole stack is still a very high cost low volume stack. How they will compete against an Uber driver in a cheap mass produced car anytime soon is totally dubious to me.

Tesla clearly does not want Lidar. Elon Musk even said he wouldn't use Lidar if it was free. What they are actually doing is using next generation radar and likely next generation sonar as well. See: https://electrek.co/2020/10/22/tesla-4d-radar-twice-range-se...

[ehsankia]

> Elon Musk even said he wouldn't use Lidar if it was free.

I don't believe that. He ultimately has to be anti-LiDAR because putting LiDAR on every Tesla is simply not feasible nor compatible with his plan to mass gather training data, so he has to justify it somehow.

What you're missing is that it's all moot if your self-driving car does not have a 0% failure rate, or close enough to 0% that it rounds down to 0 accidents. As soon as you have real accidents, you are done. Look at Uber. The one death completely ended their self driving unit.

So yes, it may seem cool to just go with the flow and rush things, but I get the feeling that this will be like the tortoise and the hare. Eventually LiDAR will be cheap, and Tesla will be stuck with years of useless training data.

[foxtr0t]

Agreed, Tesla made these decisions in 2014(ish) which was way before it was clear that convolutional neural networks would not give satisfactory depth perception and therefore localization without some major breakthroughs that just haven't happened. I actually believe these choices by Tesla were the rational choices at the time. If you remember back to the beginning of this decade, the deep learning revolution seemed like it was going to take over every industry and turn everything upside down. That progress unfortunately stopped and Tesla seems to be holding the proverbial bag. These companies are all executing strategies in a game that will last for at least another decade if not two. Things will change, but at the moment, it seems to me that LiDAR was the correct choice (subject to change).

To me, the revolution that actually mattered the most was the cell phone supply chain revolution (if you can call it that). That is what allowed these companies to equip their vehicles with cheap cameras, radar, and eventually LiDAR.

[jryle70]

While I’m sure Musk is stubborn and his ego is huge, he is also very technical astute and doesn’t afraid to change his mind. SpaceX had planned to use parachute for 1st stage recovery but switched to the current solution after it became clear parachute wasn’t viable. Likewise, they switched to stainless steel for Starship once they figured carbon composite wasn’t suitable for what they wanted to do. If Tesla hasn’t adopted Lidar, that wouldn’t be because Musk didn’t want to admit he was wrong.

> I don't believe that. He ultimately has to be anti-LiDAR because putting LiDAR on every Tesla is simply not feasible nor compatible with his plan to mass gather training data, so he has to justify it somehow.

Why is using Lidar not compatible with mass gather training data?

Also he recently said they wouldn't use Lidar even if it's free. He didn't leave the door open for when the price goes down sufficiently. He could be wrong obviously, but I don't think he is in denial.

[colinmhayes]

He's lying because he's already said that every tesla has the hardware for self driving. People would be pissed if he said tesla's might need to be retrofitted to self drive.

[jryle70]

Well, Tesla does claim that Tesla cars may need to be retrofitted for self driving:

https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer

I suppose they wouldn't have any problem asking for Lidar installation if that were to be required?

[toast0]

1) Yep, Waymo is a moneypit. I don't know that Alphabet actually cares/expects it to make money. It feels like a halo PR project; attract and retain smart people so they don't work for others, and maybe some stuff will fall out of it. I'm sure the connections with automakers help with Android Auto, at least a bit, etc.

2. Solve the easiest problems first, as opposed to what? Even the easy problems are hard to solve, trying to solve everything at once is going to be floundering around with nothing to show. Is an automated vehicle that can only do the easy parts super useful? Not really, but it's somewhat useful. In a model with human controls, this is tractable, assuming there's a safe handover --- either directly with appropriate advance notification and acceptance, or by parking and switching; without a safe handover or human controls, it's pretty limiting, but some areas would have most of the year coverage, and some areas have tourist populations that overlap with fair weather, so it's something.

3. I don't think this is a big problem, if the vehicles are driving the routes, they can update the mapping. The road map is finite, and most places don't change that often. Again, safe handoff is critical, though.

4. Yep, it's expensive. But mass produced, less expensive lidar is plausible. Given this thing is still several years from mass deployment, constraining to today's inexpensive tech is too limiting. Figure out if you can do it, and figure out how you can do it with unlimited budget, and then figure out how to make a working system with less.

P.S. I can't believe I'm defending Waymo here. Usually I'm the staunch negative against automous vehicles. On the other hand, Waymo's serious errors have been more amusing than dangerous (let's try to merge into a bus at low speed, cause it'll certainly move out of out way)

[anotherman554]

"Elon Musk even said he wouldn't use Lidar if it was free."

If your mental model of how the world works is "Elon Musk always tells the truth" then this is compelling evidence, but if you have a different mental model I don't know why you would take it seriously.

[nickik]

Nothing prevented him from telling the truth, its a pure unrealistic hypotetical that he could have answered as he wanted.

The important point is that he is CEO and its well within his power to develop his own lidar system, or sign a contract for lidar. Or to do research on the topic. Yet he has not done that or shown any interest in that.

At some point you have to ask yourself, is somebody engadging in 4D chess over 10 years or is it simply his opinion.

[JakeTheAndroid]

1. They don't need to be Uber, and their path to getting cash flow is very different than Uber. They seem to be taking more of a Rivian approach, where they get to kick costs to someone else while providing the tech to allow these companies to do something new. Unsure why they would need 10b+ capx to make their business work.

2. Arizona doesn't always have nice weather. Haboobs, fog during the winter mornings/nights, monsoon season with heavy rain and hail. There are plenty of weather conditions in Arizona. And if building the visual recognition is the easy part, what is the hard part?

3. Fair, but that is already something their parent company does as another business; Maps/Earth. There is nothing to suggest they CAN'T do this on roads they haven't seen before, but it's obviously far safer to do this on roads they know.

4. They partnered with Daimler to make self driving trucks who couldn't use Uber to move shipments. They aren't competing with Uber necessarily.

As for Tesla, there is nothing to suggest they are doing it the right way. They have had numerous self driving failures.

[reitzensteinm]

Do you have a source for tens of billions? Did you confuse market cap for spending? I can't find any good sources, but that seems like an order of magnitude too much.

They just raised $3bn (the vast majority of which is presumably not spent), and piecing together other sources indicates Google put in a couple billion of their own.

This article claims they've spent $3bn on R&D:

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30857661/autonomous-car-s...

Google's approach requires a lot of mapping, yes. But they mapped damn near every road in the important markets to pursue maps, an opportunity two orders of magnitude smaller than self driving.

If their cars and software are both ready, the mapping won't be more than a small roadbump.

[petra]

2. There's no other approach to do self driving than "start with the easier problem first". Actually they might have aimed at a too difficult problem - highway truck driving seems like a much easier place to start.

3. Sure, they use maps.

But do we know that part of their algorithm there aren't map-free techniques ?