[zetazzed]

Ok, I appreciate that timelines in this space are long. But the opening phrase:

"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development..."

reads a bit like a parody of corporate speak about a project nowhere close to happening. Did they agree to deploy? Or reach an agreement to collaborate? No, that's too strong. They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.

[lxgr]

> They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.

Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.

[beambot]

5 years...? I bought mine with FSD in 2018, and that was years after it was "right around the corner." Worst Kickstarter of all time... Though I do like the car itself.

[ffsm8]

Yeah, FSD was promised with the release of the first model S, 2012 - to be ready by "next year"

As such, it's been roughly 12 years just around the corner for Tesla and Musk enthusiasts.

To be more specific: Musk explicitly said in that marketing event that buying anything other the Tesla wouldn't make economic sense, as they'll earn their own price back as self driving Taxis within the following two years.

Still blows my mind that people believed him anything as these kinds of unrealistic promises were at the heart of every event since the start.

Believing someone with promises like that is - from my perspective - begging to get scammed.

From that point of view, people should be glad the delivered cars were decent. Most purchases with outlandish promises end with merchandise that is borderline unusable.

[esalman]

> Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.

As an 11 years Toyota driver I agree.

[bagels]

This is at the other extreme end though. They could do nothing and call the agreement to explore satisfied. Would rather they wait till they've removed at least three of the hedging words.

[slt2021]

this is just the opposite extreme of "FSD this year"

[RandallBrown]

Doesn't Waymo already have FSD?

[vachina]

FSD is something you can BUY and USE right now. Toyota is writing an MoU. They’re not the same.

[proudestmonkey]

Waymo is something that actually drives itself and you can hail right now. FSD is not actually “full self-driving”.

[DerekL]

Tesla doesn't even call it that, there's “(Supervised)” after that. That's like calling it “Full Self-Driving (Not!)”.

[adrr]

FSD can’t self drive on any street though. Its just L2 like cruise control and lane centering.

[LanceJones]

I use it every day on every street in Vancouver. Where do you come up with your information?

[sushid]

If you car crashed while using "FSD", who would be liable?

[adrr]

You’re driving. Why you can’t watch a movie like you can on a Mercedes L3 car.

[tuckerman]

The ODD for drive pilot is so limited, I don’t think it’s really comparable. I have very little faith that their approach will scale to anything more than a traffic jam pilot gimmick.

It’s fair to argue that FSD is limited as well but I believe their approach is much more scalable.

[kevin_thibedeau]

What you're buying is not driving, by itself, fully.

[chrisguilbeau]

Mine drove me from my house to the airport without my ever touching the steering wheel so what exactly do you mean?

[xnx]

If you can't sit in the backseat and watch a movie, it's not self driving.

[brenns10]

It sounds like you're recklessly interpreting the parameters by which your "self driving" car was made available to you

Did it also drive itself back to your home empty?

[chrisguilbeau]

All I’m saying is that starting FSD from park in my driveway and having it drive to my destination with my hands on my legs and then having it park itself when it gets there seems reasonable to call “full self driving” to me. I pay for the subscription and I would continue paying if it never got any better. I do live in a rural state, so maybe that’s why it works so well.

[brenns10]

Having used cars that had that "supervised" driving feature.... Gosh, I hope you were paying 100% attention the whole time of that driving experience you described. Even the smart cruise control features I've used allowed my mind to drift, and I was glad for the beeping from the steering wheel telling me to pay attention. I don't use those features anymore.

If it's full self driving, then I assume that Tesla is paying for your insurance and taking all responsibility for any crashes it causes in your car?

[kevin_thibedeau]

Let's see it do that in the snow, heavy rain, anything that doesn't replicate ideal conditions in SoCal. You're riding on the sweet spot of a Gaussian and at some point you're going to experience an outlier when the machine makes a wrong interpretation of its inputs.

[lttlrck]

Adaptive cruise control could do that too.

How impressive it is depends on where you live.

[jdminhbg]

> Adaptive cruise control could do that too.

No, it could not.

[vachina]

Do you even drive? Or have you tried using any of the features discussed above. I think I’m going insane seeing people comparing cruise control (lol) to FSD. One is a line follower, the other is a teenage driver with a fresh license. They’re not the same.

[aantix]

Except there’s FSD videos everywhere on X with every minor release, demonstrating the progress.

[kevin_thibedeau]

They edit their videos to remove the mistakes. It's all a lie if it only works 90% of the time and you don't know when it's going to fail after being lulled into inattention.

[sofixa]

Waymo made a very good point about this, fundamentally that's the problem with a progressive rollout - drivers will stop paying attention when the software is "good enough", and the result will probably be crashes. So for them, it was all or nothing - either it fully drives itself, or it's not worth deploying.

[aantix]

They constantly highlight regressions.

[acdha]

Yes, that’s called marketing. Believe it when they do what Mercedes does and accept liability rather than trying to shirk it.

[aantix]

If marketing is a 20 min video demonstrating both progress and regressions for each minor rev, then I’ll take more of that.

[brenns10]

I'll believe it when they accept liability for the actions of their autonomous vehicles. Videos mean nothing.

[iknowstuff]

You fell for Mercedes’ marketing so that’s hilariously ironic

[acdha]

I’m sure that sounded more clever in your head but an actual legal agreement is more than marketing.

[iknowstuff]

Mercedes system is dumber in every way, they merely set the criteria narrow enough to get dibs on L3 for gullible people to repeat on the internet. It’s OBVIOUSLY more dangerous than FSD under the same circumstances.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1cpwir3/te...

So which company of the two is the one endangering people

[slg]

No, they really are no different. A legal guarantee doesn't actually mean the car is safe, it means they will pay for it when the safety features fail. Those fees paid out can just be considered a marketing expense to make the car appear safer.

[phs318u]

I'm not familiar with the facts of the matter but if it is indeed the case that Mercedes is indemnifying drivers for accidents caused by FSD, then that's far more than marketing, and your comment (without presenting any facts to the contrary) is unwarranted.

[Auracle]

The bigger difference is that Mercedes’ system only works on highways, under 40 mph, and you need a car in front of you that it essentially follows.

It’s for traffic jams, and only usable in them. There’s not a big legal liability when the biggest risk is probably a fender bender.

[adrr]

Progress would be get certified for self driving. For comparison, Mercedes, BMW, Honda etc have L3 cars on the market. Mercedes just got approved full highway speeds in EU and working on L4 certification.

[gonzobonzo]

I just checked out Mercedes, and it appears to be geofenced with a lot of restrictions[1]:

> DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone. Please refer to the Operator’s Manual for a full list of conditions required for DRIVE PILOT.

Only on select freeways and only under 40 mph (and only during daytime with good weather conditions) sounds like it wouldn't be particularly useful.

Still, the tech is cool, and moving in the right direction. It's just always hard to really tell the state of things without doing some digging, because there's a ton of misinformation that gets thrown about whenever this topic comes up.

[1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot#2

[adrr]

That’s what the government allows them to do. They got approved for freeway speeds in EU and are trying to get approved in CA. You need to prove that the car is safer than a human driver.

[ehsankia]

There's now a thing called "FSD", yes. But it's not FSD as in Full Self-Driving, as in L4. It's still an L3, the driver still needs to be at the wheel and paying attention. "Full Self Driving" implies L4. What Waymo has, with no one at the wheel, is L4.

[mynameisvlad]

FSD is Level 2. The driver must, at all times, be supervising the car. L3 implies that the car, in exceptionally ideal and limited circumstances, takes over full control unsupervised.

Even if you were to take Mobileye's definitions, it would still be equivalent to other companies at best (hands off, eyes on).

[xnx]

If progress is noticable in a 20 minute video, Tesla has a long way to go.

[spiderice]

As do Waymo and Toyota

[jannyfer]

It reads like a Memorandum of Understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorandum_of_understanding

[benatkin]

And if they don't develop a formal contract after 5 months, it's a deadMoU5

[WorldWideWebb]

This headline brought to you by the marketing department.

[pelagic_sky]

Feels more like the typical battle amongst PR, Marketing and Legal.

[AustinDev]

Say everything and nothing in less than nine words.

[skybrian]

It’s too early to be of much interest to outsiders, but impressing people likely isn’t the intention. By announcing that they’re talking, they don’t need to keep its existence secret anymore or worry about it getting into the news at some random time as a “secret project.”

[lurk2]

> They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.

Concepts of a plan

[beAbU]

Here in Ireland we often see news announcements in the construction sector that goes something like "We received the go ahead to submit an application for planning permission to commission an impact study to determine whether it's viable to survey the land for construction suitability."

[pavel_lishin]

Veridian Dynamics' "Project Jabberwocky" is gonna be great.

[owyn]

Yeah, that's pretty amazing corporate speak. And the development time lines are long. I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Even if it is just a Toyota vehicle with Waymo brains, there is a Taxi/Van in Japan called the Alphard and it's pretty nice! Toyota also has the e-pallete, which is a self driving bus for their new Woven City project. It would be great to see a new vehicle platform co-developed for those purposes because the Toyota "electrical" architecture is about 10 years behind (all CanBus). If I was them I would sort that out before building new EVs. If you look at a bz4x and pop the hood, it looks like an IC vehicle! There is no frunk, just legacy junk. It was never designed as an EV, they just put an electric motor and a battery in a Rav4 type platform and called it a day.

[hnburnsy]

>Even if it is just a Toyota vehicle with Waymo brains

Does the Waymo brain need all the Waymo hardware?

>With 13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers (EARs), our new sensor suite is optimized for greater performance...

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...

[owyn]

The new Lexus TSS which is lane keeping and cruise control and auto park and safety oriented stuff has 11 cameras I think? Plus some lasers and sonar and whatnot. 4 of them are for the cool 360 top down view. I'd love to count up all the sensors on a current production car. I googled but failed. Maybe in the manual? There's a lot.

But they probably could use less if they had better software and networking in the car. I think automotive systems tend to be built like: add 1 ecu and 1 sensor for 1 function. So they can do all the functional safety analysis for that one system in isolation. I expect they can't just keep adding all these single purpose functions and features without a central computer indefinitely but they don't have one right now. A brain like waymo (probably has?) could possibly fix that.

[xmprt]

Don't forget that this is also a PRELIMINARY agreement. So it's not clear what the terms even are.

[cryptoegorophy]

What kind of development? LiDAR on every Toyota? Would be very interesting. If every car on the road was self driving we would not need a giant chunk of code to work around human behavior

[MarceliusK]

I think this kind of vague language is pretty common when two giant companies want to signal interest without actually committing to anything risky

[reustle]

Japan is the champion of announcing the consideration of making an announcement. They did this all through covid, too.

[timewizard]

"We've agreed to let the engineering staff from both companies directly exchange information in a place and form that we would not normally allow to occur. Hopefully they work out a way to glue our two stacks together."

[lifeformed]

And it's only a preliminary agreement.