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by fuzzythinker 157 days ago
It wasn't ill timed. Any sane leader would understand both size and cost of tech always comes down rather quickly over time. He's just refused to accept having lidar uglify his cars or wait for it to get smaller. He instead fabricates about humans don't have lidars so cars shouldn't have them and sold "no lidars on Teslas" as an advantage instead of the opposite and refuses to accept the truth due to needing to feed his ego. Firing all non-yesmen didn't help either.
1 comments
ndsipa_pomu 157 days ago
That always struck me as a weak argument. Humans don't have wheels, so maybe he should have designed cars without wheels too.
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schiffern 156 days ago
That strikes me as a weak argument. We have vehicles with legs, but wheels are just better, practically speaking.

The argument is that humans provide a proof-of-concept that vision + neural net can drive a car, because (for some reason) some people doubt this is possible. However there's no need for a "proof of concept" that mechanical legs can be built, because everyone already know that building mechanical legs is possible.

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ndsipa_pomu 156 days ago
Similarly, vehicles using cameras and lidar are just better, practically speaking.
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schiffern 156 days ago
Maybe, but those claims have yet to be shown in the real world.

Waymo has certainly had its share of issues lately on the "practicality" axis. The cost of (actually good enough) LiDAR hardware doesn't help practicality either.

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ndsipa_pomu 156 days ago
> Maybe, but those claims have yet to be shown in the real world.

They surely have as Waymo have a much better safety record than Tesla and that's even with Tesla hiding and obscuring their crash data - probably outright lying about most crashes if Musk has any input to their processes.

The big advantage of Lidar is that it can easily pick out obstructions and that's a good ability for a driver to have, whereas Teslas can get fooled by shadows etc. It seems obvious to me that having cameras and Lidar allows for much better analysis of traffic and pedestrians.

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schiffern 156 days ago 

  >They surely have as Waymo have a much better safety record than Tesla
Tesla is already closing in on Waymo to within a factor of 2[0], and this is less than 6 months in, with Waymo having 125 million autonomous miles and Tesla having under a million. Bet on whichever horse you want, but this trend is not looking good for Waymo.

  >It seems obvious to me
Oh thank goodness! Fortunately this style of argument has never been wrong before. ;)

[0] https://mashable.com/article/tesla-robotaxis-with-human-safe...

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