Comment by voisin
2 days ago
For the uninitiated, what technologies do Waymos use that allow them to offer unsupervised FSD?
I ask because I find my Tesla Model Y FSD to be incredible, requiring effectively no intervention (only in parking lots because I am picky about where I like to park), and I often wonder if it is purely bureaucratic inertia that is preventing it from being treated as unsupervised.
The real heart of what I am getting at: will Waymo in Canada nudge the regulators to reconsider Tesla FSD or does it have something special that Tesla is lacking?
Years ago Waymo bet on a completely different self-driving approach compared to Tesla: putting a big expensive LIDAR on each car so that their self-driving model has tons of reliable 3d distance data, instead of only using comparatively cheap cameras and having the model infer everything from that. Now that testing results are in, AFAIK the conclusion is that the Waymo approach actually works (driving safer than actual human drivers) and Tesla's doesn't.
The average human driver is safe enough that a single anecdotal experience isn't a good measure of safety. Waymo has, from the start, had a very serious focus on making the system safe and reliable in a fully autonomous context, in comparison to a far more 'YOLO' approach from their competitors. Tesla, meanwhile, has been consistently trying to jazz up a driver assist approach into a fully autonomous system, and in general it just hasn't demonstrated that it's actually reliable enough there (despite many claims for years that the reason they require hands on the wheel is just for regulatory reasons, it's actually been quite important for safety. It's quite easy to lie with statistics here and Tesla is quite prone to it).
Waymo does extensive mapping/scanning of the service areas.
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