Is this due to reduced processing requirements, reduced sensor costs, or what?
Lidar will likely be outlawed anyway as it burns your retina. Dare you to put your eye (or cellphone camera) next to a waymo sensor for 10 sec and see what happens.
https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safet...
Many of the class 1 lidars do damage camera sensors, is your eye really that much more resilient?
So, safe for human eyes but deadly for a camera.
HW3 has three front-facing cameras that are not only too close together to provide binocular vision with adequate disparity, but also have different fixed focal lengths making them unable to establish binocular focus even if they were far enough apart [1]. HW4 has two front-facing cameras with the same limitations.
This is of course ignoring the fact that humans with visual acuity comparable to the HW3 cameras would almost be legally blind and not meet minimum vision requirements to operate a motor vehicle in, I believe, every state. HW4 cameras are better and you would only be unable to meet minimum vision requirements to operate a motor vehicle in most states, including California and Texas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot_hardware#Tesla...
Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.
Eh, I mean I think that that’s necessary, but maybe not sufficient. Eyes are _really good_.
It's also a bit of a false analogy. Cameras don't really work like human vision. We do things like mesopic vision that simply aren't possible with current sensors. We have massively high resolution. We have async "pixels" that can respond immediately without waiting for a framing signal. Our brains process color in truly weird ways.
It's not like there's some physical law preventing computer vision from being better than human vision, but it's an incredibly difficult engineering problem that we've spent the better part of a century attacking without clearly winning.
Given the number of shortcomings of human vision why shouldn't our self driving cars be designed to have better than human vision, especially if the goal is to not get into crashes. Humans, with human vision and human object tracking skills, and human reaction times get into crashes all the time. Shouldn't we want better and more sensors, which would lead to few fewer crashes, simply because better sensors have better data available?
If you have reliable depth information, ala LIDAR, you'll be able to know that there's nothing actually there.
And there should be some criminal liability since people have died.
At the very least they couldn't they detect imminent collisions with pedestrians? walls?
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My non-Tesla has a radar for cruise control and imminant crash detection — while annoying at first, it is unfailable. As I've aged (¡perfect driving record!) my thought process has gone from more horsepower! to more safety!. Now when my car beeps at me I'm more-inclined to listen cautiously.
But humans in a car have a massive advantage over little cameras that no one seems to discuss much: we have two sensors (eyeballs) mounted on a servo (our head) that can move around and is looking through a truly monstrous aperture (the windshield), and that aperture is equipped with fancy cleaning devices (wipers and cleaning fluid spray), and the car’s operator is motivated to clean the windshield and maintain the windshield, wipers, and spray system to be able to see.
A Tesla car has little tiny camera lenses that are every bit as exposed as the windshield but don’t have all the compensating machinery.
Go stick a pair of nice cameras on a three-axis servo mount with a range of motion of a whole foot (or a camera array and no servo), stick that two feet behind the windshield, train it well (use that massive parallax!) and I’d believe the result would be competitive in performance but definitely not cost. Also the car would lose an entire seat.
Or use radar and lidar and achieve super-human performance.
Fir what it’s worth, the military was and is fully aware that lidar and similar tech can outperform human eyeballs in “battlefield conditions”, and I’m aware of old DARPA projects to do things like pulsed laser range-gated imaging to see through fog and such. (You still get attenuation and scattering, but you can mostly disambiguate the additive signal from fog from the stuff behind it.) Lidar can do something similar. Humans can move their head to acquire more data. Little cameras are at the mercy of the fog and can only use fancy image processing to try to compensate.
Most of the problems I have now are things like lane selection or turning into the wrong parking lot, which seem solvable in software given enough time, and the Robotaxi project should ramp up the urgency on that front
I don't believe this "contact" by regulators has shown that to be the case. However ultimately my point is that this "contact" happened because Tesla's taxis are failing at obeying the law and believing the regulators are out to "get" Tesla (or any company for that matter) is partly why America is facing its current challenges.
They are now operating a service where Tesla themselves is responsible for every mistake the cars make. Operating in public. Having the media and the authorities breathing down their neck.
Plus they have a clear benchmark: Growing faster than Waymo.
This should motivate everybody at Tesla to work their asses off. Including Musk.
Just two more weeks guys, two more weeks! By 2014 all teslas will ship without a steering wheel, and by 2022 we'll be on Mars!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/14/business/self-driving-cars-wa...
gerad•4h ago
lupusreal•4h ago
Spivak•4h ago
ben_w•4h ago
On the other hand, if there were a way to rent any vehicle for about the same price as ownership (not that I think Musk will deliver this, but in principle someone else might), you can rent the one with the big boot once a week for shopping, the truck once every two months for a trip to the hardware store, and the tiny cheap city car for your commute.
floxy•3h ago
In the U.S., something like 59% of households own two or more cars. 22% have three or more.
https://shunauto.com/article/how-many-people-have-a-car-in-a...
ben_w•2h ago
lupusreal•3h ago
This notion of Americans not being able to into car ownership is divorced from reality.
pebble•4h ago
sorcerer-mar•3h ago
Yes please.
derektank•3h ago
Sure, rich people will always have enough money to afford luxuries like privacy and comfort, but most people are price sensitive and will opt for the cheapest transportation solution that delivers them where they need to go in the fastest amount of time. I would wager this will be a Waymo type autonomous taxi service but time will tell.
Spivak•2h ago
The other problem is that I can't haul shit in a robo-taxi. Or drive long distances. People use their vehicles for more than just transporting bodies to and from work. And if I kill my neighbor I probably can't take his body in the trunk either. I would love to know what kind of life you and the other sibling commenters are living where a taxi service encompasses the totality of your transportation needs.
xnx•3h ago
Maybe not 100% of cars, but a very good chance that it will eat into owning a 3rd or 2nd car in a household.
olyjohn•3h ago
And also, the same reason people don't use taxis exclusively today is because you have to plan ahead or sit around and wait for a vehicle to come get you. Who is going to want to do that, when your empty driveway could house a car that pays for itself, makes you money, and is available whenever you need it?
I also don't think that taxis will be cheaper just because there is no driver. The savings is never passed down to the customer, never has been, and never will.
People who don't have cars today already manage to get around just fine, mostly due to where they live. This won't really change anything for them.
lupusreal•3h ago
As you can see in your replies, there are a lot of techies who think it will. And furthermore, Tesla's valuation can only be made sense of if Tesla investors believe Tesla robotaxis will eat whole car industry, not just the whole taxi industry.
the8472•4h ago
lupusreal•3h ago
the8472•2h ago
lupusreal•1h ago
In every other American city besides NYC, most households have a vehicle. And besides virtually every American city save one being built for cars, you also have to keep in mind that the "most people live in urban areas" statistic counts all the people living in the suburbs around cities, e.g. people who have chosen a lifestyle literally built around car ownership.
the8472•1h ago
bananalychee•1h ago
oceanplexian•3h ago
andrewblossom•3h ago
diamond559•3h ago
gamblor956•2h ago
People pay for Uber and Lyft because they're too lazy to leave their apartment. Tesla would have to be significantly cheaper than its competitors in order to justify the front-door-tax.
justinrubek•1h ago
I assume you mean food delivery, though. In my experience, it isn't about being lazy to leave the apartment. It's that the infrastructure where I live is so spread out that it'll be at least 30 minutes total of driving to get that meal, and that isn't accounting for cooking time. A 5 minute walk would be much more tolerable.