Waymo CEO: Camera-only self-driving hits a safety ceiling before it can match humans
Waymo CEO explains why Tesla's camera-only self-driving falls short
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov made the case that camera-only self-driving can't achieve full autonomy, arguing that 'weak sensing' leads to a safety curve that flattens out too early. He contrasted Waymo's multi-sensor approach with Tesla's camera-only bet, citing cases where cameras fail, like dust storms and darkness. Dolgov also discussed the 'exponential ladder of nines' and the cost argument, noting Waymo's sixth-gen hardware is getting cheaper. Tesla's robotaxi data shows a crash rate three times worse than humans, while Waymo claims 94% fewer serious-injury crashes.
If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go. But if you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.
- theshrike79
Lidar will give you XYZ (z = distance) on a single datapoint, cameras give you XY and you need to calculate the Z from multiple cameras.
Lidar is ugly and expensive, but requires way fewer cycles to calculate distances. And it works through fog and even some obstacles, nor does it care about glare or get "scared" of shadows.
If we had infinite compute in the car, cameras would be the obvious solution ...but we don't. You can get "Pretty good" with cameras, but still people find specific spots where the car is 100% sure a shadow under a bridge is a car or something stupid like that.
- tito
$60,000 for car with sensors? I'm delighted to hear Waymo may be anticipating such low price points:
"We are hearing that Waymo is close to having its entire package (car + Waymo sensor suite and driver) at around $60,000"
- marlow_congdon
Personal experience, but my Tesla Model 3 drives most trips from start to finish. If I have to intervene, it's usually because other drivers aren't letting it into a lane and I have to get aggressive. Friends I know in Dallas and Austin (simpler, friendlier streets than where I live) say they don't drive at all anymore. Maybe it's not good enough for a robotaxi service yet, but the rate of progress since my first Tesla in 2022 has been crazy to watch, especially in the last year.
Conversely, I've tried Waymo in Austin and SF many times, and while I enjoyed the experience overall (much better than Uber) it seemed to make a number of mistakes my Tesla wouldn't. In Austin they've struggled to pull up to the right pickup spot and taken very odd backroads (apparently b/c they struggle with certain intersections), and in SF a remote driver had to take over driving because my Waymo (along with another one behind me) got stuck behind a car that was double parked.
Any actual Tesla drivers want to weigh in here?
- devy
I've been a Electrek reader for almost a decade. It's interesting to see its editor Fred Lambert from super pro-Telsa/Musk when fighting EV vs. ICE cars to anti-Telsa/Musk when Musk got into politics.
Of course Musk knew multi-modality would win true Level 4 autonomous driving. It was a calculated tradeoff to work on vision first when LiDAR (components cost 10s of thousands and unreliable for continuous functioning) and Radar (components cost thousands) when Telsa was battling production hell and has real threat of not making it.
Millions of Tesla on the road and 100s of thousands supercharging stations later, LiDAR becomes more reliable and affordable (just like how Tesla made the lithium batteries affordable).
Could Tesla re-incorporate LiDAR + Radar into their sensing stack in the future. I think so! After all, just a few short years ago, Telsa threw away of their 300k+ lines of C++ initial AI software stack based of MobileEye OEM in opting in their own Deep Learning based neural network model. Now, they might still there are still room for camera/vision only assisted driving technology.
Waymo's modified Jaguar model costs $150k-$200k apiece fully loaded with 3 modalities. Tesla Cybercab production cost is below $30k. They are on DIFFERENT segment. Comparing them is like comparing Toyota Corolla vs. Feferrari for their engine output, absurd!
So, this article feels like another emotional biased hit piece of Lambert jabbing at Musk which is daily occurrence now at Electrek.
- bryanlarsen
> 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers
That is a remarkable number. You can avoid 50% of multi-vehicle crashes by being a good driver yourself, but the other 50% are caused by the other driver. To get above 50% you have to drive defensively and do a good job modelling the actions of other drivers.