[schiffern]

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.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Similarly, vehicles using cameras and lidar are just better, practically speaking.

[schiffern]

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.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> 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.

[schiffern]

  >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...

[ndsipa_pomu]

It's amusing that in the article you linked to is precisely the kind of collision that Lidar would have easily prevented.