Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving? Seems to be a lot of anti-Tesla folks here, put your money where your mouth is.
What Tesla has now, Waymo had back in 2012. They literally had a FSD program they were testing with certain employees, and once they found that that people quickly get distracted and stop paying attention, they gave up on that approach and went for the new strategy of jumping straight to level 4 and skipping level 3.
So either they've been doing absolutely nothing for the past 8 years until getting level 4 driverless car in Phoenix. It's only a level 4 right now, since it does not work in all conditions, but it's still far ahead of Tesla's level 3 which requires the driver's attention.
So far Tesla hasn't shown anything that Waymo did not have at least 5+ years ago.
Those are not even remotely the same... That Waymo video has been pre-mapped. To infer that Waymo in 2012-2009 can go from point A to B anywhere in the U.S. like FSD Beta is patently false.
Ever wonder why Waymo only have their fleet in a geofenced area of AZ?
There's a difference between can't and won't. Yes their operation in Phoenix is heavily mapped and fenced, that doesn't mean that their technology can't and hasn't driven in more improvised environment before, and I highly doubt the lumbar street example was mapped.
Videos recorded by the company will always be cherry picked by definition, since they would only post videos that show the technology in its optimal working state. And there's always a driver behind the wheel checking everything goes right.
The reason Waymo is operating the way it does is they realize that they need to be 120% cautious, as ONE accident is all it takes to throw all their work a decade behind, jst like one accident is all it took to completely kill Uber's self driving effort. So again, it's not that they need a fully mapped geofenced area, it's that they choose to use that for now.
Hell, Tesla themselves posted their first "A to B" video back in 2016, yet here we are 5 years later and from a high level, what they showed in that cherry picked video they posted isn't much different to an average viewer, but no one would claim that they haven't improved at all in the past 5 years.
This is basic anecdotal data vs real statistics. A video tells you nothing about where the technology is. Unless we can see real open data about miles driven and number of disengagements, there's no way to tell if Tesla is doing well or not. So far Waymo's numbers are an order of magnitude better than any competition.
> Videos recorded by the company will always be cherry picked by definition, since they would only post videos that show the technology in its optimal working state.
Except FSD Beta videos are coming from actual Tesla owners. Like the one I linked above. A pretty glaring difference.
> A video tells you nothing about where the technology is. Unless we can see real open data about miles driven and number of disengagements, there's no way to tell if Tesla is doing well or not. So far Waymo's numbers are an order of magnitude better than any competition.
I'm not sure how comparable that data is. It seems to just sum up the times where random Tesla's where in Autopilot mode:
1. Autopilot from my understanding is L3 driving, with the driving needing to be attentive
2. They are not recording disengagements, or even near accidents, only full accidents
3. It seems to be like people would use Autopilot mostly on highways and other places where it works more reliably, so it's not a uniform set of miles
By comparison, here is 21 months of self-driving data from Waymo, with every disengagement and near accidents reported [0]. It's L4 driving with no drivers at the wheel. I'm sure Tesla tests their FSD similarly, and probably tracks similar data, are they releasing that? The other ones you posted says very little.
The parameters of the bet are not well defined. Both companies probably have "working" L5 technology, it just comes down to how much they're willing to gamble on the reliability and how early they're willing to put it out there. These things will obviously never be 100% reliable, so now the question is how many 9s each company is willing to wait for.
Waymo realizes that one accident is all it takes to completely destroy their operation, just like it killed Uber's self driving division. Tesla on the other hand has shown that they are prepared to be far more reckless and release things early just for headlines. To me it's meaningless who puts it out "first" because that's not a metric of how good the technology actually is. I'm interested in miles driven and disengagement statistics, which Tesla hasn't really been openly putting out like Waymo.
All I know is that right now, Waymo is the only company with an actual publicly available L4 driving car out in the streets, that is fully driverless with no one behind the steering wheel. And they have been for over a year. Meanwhile Tesla's latest private beta still requires someone behind the wheel and paying attention, and therefore is only L3.
Absolutely. I'll even go one further: we won't actually know the exact moment that Level 5 arrives.
Cars with level 4 + remote assistance will be driving people around for a decade or more, phoning home less and less over time until one day someone notes that no car has phoned home for an entire year. Then maybe a car will phone home and the clock will start again. Decades from then, people will shut down the last remote assistance center.
But at that point, nobody will care about declaring Level 5 because we will have been riding around for decades in cars without steering wheels that we don't have to drive.
I’ll take that bet. How much? I’m not anti-Tesla but I do see Tesla as a brand more than a technology company: good for business but not good good for breaking new ground with technology — I’d put a lot against Tesla on that bet (I don’t think it matters for the business much though).
I say we do $1,000, but what did you have in mind? We will have to put the bets in escrow
We need to agree to what constitutes full level 5 self driving.
My interpretation of it is a car that can drive itself anywhere in the world, has been approved for commercial use in at least one country, AND recognized as the first to full self driving in at least 2 major publications.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, it sounds like you (sixQuarks) and the parent (vegannet) want the same side of the bet :-) ie you're both betting that Tesla won't achieve FSD L5 in 5 years.
Agree. The key to solving the problem is data and they have it, by the bucket load. The HN crowd is pretty conservative when it comes to tech it seems.
The "autonomous driving hardware" they have is about the same as anyone else. It's just that those other companies advertise it truthfully as a safety feature rather than pretending you have R2D2 as a chauffeur.
