Comment by horsawlarway

Waymo chose an approach that seems geared towards actually doing the task.

Tesla tried for the moonshot - They wanted a consumer car with cheap sensor hardware to perform the job. Trusting that computing "smarts" could solve the rest of the problem.

I'm in Atlanta where Waymos have started popping up left and right - the sensor bank on these things is HUGE. You can spot 'em from way far off... Giant sensors on top. Big sensors on the front wheel wells back wheel wells, big sensors on both front and back. Big sensors basically all over them.

I'm of the opinion now that Tesla was just way, WAY off base about what sort of requirements exist for sensing, and that they don't, in fact, have much more real world training data because their data is just garbage from the cameras.

Waymo is winning because Waymo accepted the actual requirements early. Tesla is off in lala land with a dead end solution. Lots of great marketing from tesla... but very little progress now in years. They really seem stuck in a local optimum with the camera-only approach, and it's not close to delivering the promised experience.