Comment by observationist

Comment by observationist 14 hours ago

6 replies

Enormous complexity, safety risks, and completely unnecessary for successful level 4 FSD - the hurdle to full autonomous driving was basically jumped by Tesla this year. I don't see why lidar is even allowed in public at this point, it seems dangerous enough that you'd want it effectively restricted to highly regulated and licensed uses, like military or academic scanning, with all sorts of deliberate safeguards and liability checks.

Social media is full of little clips of lidar systems burning out camera pixels, and I'm sure big proponents of the tech have paid people off over eye injuries at this point. There've probably been a ton of injuries that just got written off as random environmental hazards, "must have looked at the sun" etc.

It's nuts that this stuff gets deployed.

AlotOfReading 13 hours ago

    the hurdle to full autonomous driving was basically jumped by Tesla this year.
Tesla doesn't have driverless operations anywhere, and their Austin fleet consists of <30 vehicles with full time safety drivers that have a far worse safety record than Waymo vehicles.

It's not nothing, but it's a long way from being a complete system (let alone the obviously superior one).

  • vardump 13 hours ago

    IIRC, Tesla's safety record is about 30% worse than Waymo. The gap has been closing rapidly. It's not that long time ago Tesla made an order of magnitude more mistakes than Waymo.

    • AlotOfReading 13 hours ago

      That's with safety drivers, a small fleet, and literally only the most recent data (since it wasn't broken out before). My experience with AV deployments is that your incident rate is significantly different once you remove humans, and small fleet sizes/deployment areas hide a lot of long tail issues.

      Waymo is operating at a much larger scale across a huge range of conditions with hardware that's generations behind their latest and still performing better.

      • vardump 13 hours ago

        Ok, I guess we'll need to wait until Tesla removes the safety drivers to see the whole truth.

    • tziki 12 hours ago

      If that was true they would've already released a full, no safety driver service. They have not.

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