Comment by hahaxdxd123
3 years ago
You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but they're pretty orthogonal to each other.
You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill).
You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).
It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud.
Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it (in parallel with all the other cities). Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.
> you’re committing fraud.
Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars. They are selling only the rides which they have the ability to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like investors are deceived.
> Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it
No they won’t. That’s the entire point. It doesn’t scale from a cost perspective. The entire thing is funded by their search ads monopoly right now. They can’t pull in the revenue they need to maintain the map from ride fares alone.
> Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.
LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”
> so it's not like investors are deceived
Investors (and consumers) are absolutely deceived. I don’t really care: being a VC is risky. But these types of videos are intentionally deceiving. Only the best of many runs is shown. Editing is often used. The routes have HD mapping that won’t be collected universally (due to cost problems). How is that not deception in your mind?
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This person just has no idea how AVs work and thinks an openly shared approach to AVs is a conspiracy
https://medium.com/cruise/hd-maps-self-driving-cars-b6444720...
https://blog.waymo.com/2019/09/building-maps-for-self-drivin...
https://zoox.com/journal/putting-our-robots-on-the-map/
When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as discovering some well-hidden secret.
I literally work for an automotive OEM and have worked in computer vision for over a decade. Nice links to engineering blogs written by my colleagues.
You are a moron and I seem to have struck a nerve. Hello, salty Tesla owner or engineer.
I work at one of the companies linked.
Meanwhile working at an automotive OEM speaks to your qualifications on the subject about as much as being a mechanic at a car dealer: it doesn't.
The only person who sounds like they've had a nerve struck is the one who immediately devolved into name calling the moment they were called out.
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