Technology

This is more specific to Tesla than self driving in general, as Musk decided that additional sensors (like LiDAR and RADAR on other self driving vehicles) are a problem. Publicly he’s said that it’s because of sensor contention - that if the RADAR and cameras disagree, then the car gets confused.

Of course that raises the problem that when the camera or image recognition is wrong, there’s nothing to tell the car otherwise, like the number of Tesla drivers decapitated by trailers that the car didn’t see. Additionally, I assume Teslas have accelerometers so either the self driving model is ignoring potential collisions or it’s still doing sensor fusion.

Not to mention we humans have multiple senses that we use when driving; this is one reason why steering wheels still mostly use mechanical linkages - we can “feel” the road, we can detect when the wheels lose traction, we can feel inertia as we go around a corner too fast. On a related tangent, the Tesla Cybertruck uses steer-by-wire instead of a mechanical linkage.

This is why many (including myself) believe Tesla has a much worse safety record than Waymo. I’ve seen enough drunk and distracted drivers to believe that humans will always drive better than a ~~human~~ robot. Don’t get me wrong, I still have concerns about the technology, but Musk and Tesla has a history of ignoring safety concerns - see the number of deaths related to his desire to have non-mechanical handles and hide the mechanical backup.

A robot can theoretically drive better than a human because emotions and boredom don't have to be involved. But we aren't there yet and Teslas are trying to solve the hard mode of pure vision without range finding.

Also, I suspect that the ones we have are set up purely as NNs where everything is determined by the training, which likely means there's some random-ass behaviour for rare edge cases where it "thinks" slamming on the accelerator is as good an option as anything else but since it's a black box no one really understands, there's no way to tell until someone ends up in that position.

The tech still belongs in universities, not on public roads as a commercial product/service. Certainly not by the type of people who would at any point say, "fuck it, good enough, ship it like that", which seems to be most of the tech industry these days.

Other robots might be able to, but I wouldn’t trust a Tesla RoboTaxi get me safely across a single street.

Reddit loved that idea.

It's Austin. The traffic is so shitty you can't go fast enough to get in a wreck most of the time.

I live in the area, and can confirm anecdotal that the Teslas are bad drivers and the Waymos generally are excellent.

The AI companies put out a presser a few years back that said "Um, aktuly, its the humans who are bad drivers" and everyone ate that shit up with a spoon.

So now you've got Waymos blowing through red lights and getting stuck on train tracks, because "fuck you fuck you stop fighting the innovation we're creatively disruptive we do what we want".

Not just lower, a tiny fraction of the human rate of accidents:

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

Also, AFAIK this includes cases when the Waymo car isn't even slightly at fault. Like, there have been 2 deaths involving a Waymo car. In one case a motorcyclist hit the car from behind, flipped over it, then was hit by another car and killed. In the other case, ironically, the real car at fault was a Tesla being driven by a human who claims he experienced "sudden unintended acceleration". It was driving at 98 miles per hour in downtown SF and hit a bunch of stopped cars at a red light, then spun into oncoming traffic and killed a man and his dog who were in another car.

Whether or not self-driving cars are a good thing is up for debate. But, it must suck to work at Waymo and to be making safety a major focus, only to have Tesla ruin the market by making people associate self-driving cars with major safety issues.

Isn't Waymo rate better because they are very particular where they operate? When they are asked to operate in sligthly less than perfect conditions it immediately goes downhill https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385936888_Identifying_Research_Gaps_through_Self-Driving_Car_Data_Analysis (page 7, Uncertainty)

Edit: googled it a bit, and apparently Waymo mostly drives in

Waymo vehicles primarily drive on urban streets with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour or less

Teslas do not.