Vision-only is very very very far behind other techniques. Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.
>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.
Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity.
Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. The legacy manufacturers will end up licensing one or the other, a la Android/iOS.
Vision-only is stupid. I can't see through fog and have a tough time with glare and can't see in the dark. Other technologies aren't subject to the same limitations. Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?
You say vision-only is stupid, but Tesla FSD is the only full self-driving system deployed to millions of drivers and usable anywhere in the world, right now, at scale.
> Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?
Sure we do. Your options are, a as-good-as-a-human-driver for 1 unit of cost, or a better-than-human-driver at 1000 units of cost. Realistically, which do you pick?
Other tech like Waymo is good. They drive well. But it's not scalable--expensive mapping and hundreds of thousands of lines of code written to address the nuances of whatever city they specialize the solution to. Not to mention that they only operate in cities with sunny weather all year round!
The company decides the level. Tesla's approach is to get more real-world training data to reach a general solution, while Waymo goes slow with pre-mapping as a requirement.
Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could
Everyone’s working on a general solution, including Waymo. Everyone has large real world (and even larger simulated) training data. It’s not just Tesla despite what is widely claimed in Tesla circles. Others just choose to deploy in certain places because of market, operational and safety reasons. This notion of Tesla just ingesting training data which magically outputs a general self driving solution is nonsense.
The levels aren’t just slapped on by the companies for vanity. They indicate liability and therefore capability.
They're classifying it as level 2 because that's all the system is capable of. You can choose to call it an approach, but it's really an indicator of capability.
1. Waymo costs around $120,000 and the cost is rapidly dropping with new hardware generations and vehicle platforms. They’re in LA, soon in Austin, airport rides in Phoenix and imminent highway driving.
