[mlsu]

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.

In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc

Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.

The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

[rbbydotdev]

I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.

[seanhunter]

I don't understand the sarcasm. Driverless trains for mass transit are in operation in lots of places around the world and have been for some time (eg the Docklands light railway in London) https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/dlr/

Driverless personal transportation is the unsolved problem.

[boredpudding]

Maybe even have multiple people in each pod, and on the set track, have common stops where people are likely to get on/off.

[dyauspitr]

Then have the track go to each persons doorstep. Also make sure the pod shows up within 5 minutes at your doorstep when you hail it from your phone. Each pod should be private and airconditioned. Each pod should also lay its own track when driving to remote locations.

[tim333]

They actually invented something like that called a train around 1804 and very soon when they've developed it a bit more it will solve all our traffic problems.

[lysace]

Because trains are famously awesome for the last mile(s)?

[MisterTea]

Power could be delivered by overhead catenary wire. Battery and/or ultra caps could handle if it has to go off wire.

[mlsu]

I agree. The only wrinkle is that it's impractical to build a train line from my house to the train station.

[rayiner]

Anything that isn’t point to point transit, or requires interacting with the public, is a non-starter for most people in the developed world.

Even in Japan, half of commutes are by car and that number has been growing.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

You just re-invented trollies

[05]

If automation fails on a track, there are many people dead and toxic chemicals spilled everywhere - just look at US freight accidents. With orders of magnitude more mass, 3x less friction than tire/asphalt and no way to steer, many avoidable accidents are now also fatal. Now you need grade separation so this whole thing isn't compatible with pedestrians and bikes. But sure, keep posting this tired joke.

[AlotOfReading]

Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.

[coffeemug]

From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.

Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....

[bonsai_spool]

In the Midwest, golf carts are exactly what people use to get around in small towns. It's not unreasonable that neighborhoods might be closed to large vehicles and use other forms of transit within their boundaries.

[MarkusQ]

Interesting that this seems like a slam-dunk argument for why reusable rockets and other improvements are practically impossible (e.g. "we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it's a physical impossibility"), and wouldn't matter in any case for structural reasons (e.g. "market inelasticity (cutting launch cost in half wouldn't make much of a difference)", yet in the fifteen years since it was written launch costs have fallen to a third of what they were, continue to fall, and the number of payloads to orbit has gone up by an order of magnitude or more (so much for "market inelasticity").

[harikb]

Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.

What you envision might happen in 2100+

[raw_anon_1111]

Google was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching”

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap...

https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

And the HN discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745

[fragmede]

Have you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want.

http://zoox.com

Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.

[kjksf]

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it.

Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.

Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.

So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.

And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

[dinobones]

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.

[throw-qqqqq]

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo

Tesla is far behind Waymo on all meaningful measures.

Waymo sells more than 450k rides every week. Tesla is nowhere near that number.

Waymo offers rides in six cities. Tesla does two.

According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.

[gcanyon]

> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.

Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have.

> didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware

A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.

[bobsomers]

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

Parity is not defined by how willing one is to let their robots kill the general public.

[UltraSane]

Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.

[g947o]

> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.

[WarmWash]

Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.

[standardUser]

It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.

[farresito]

> In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc

If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.

[culopatin]

I just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.

[macintux]

Failures happen. That sounds like a death trap (literally, since EVs are challenging to escape after a failure).

[zacmps]

I think what you're looking for is a bike.

[jsemrau]

I was thinking in the same direction when I wrote my 5000 word analysis on the current state of VLAMs. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/visual-language-action-model...

[thefounder]

Yeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing to just speed and turn correctly(I.e 2 params). You also seem to overestimate the inertia of the tech advantage. Being first is not always the most important thing. See google AI as prime example.

[p-e-w]

The failure of self-driving cars has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with regulation. It’s been demonstrated time and again that statistically, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars.[1]

Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4

[fragmede]

No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.

[Petersipoi]

Sure. But they can be way better than human drivers with only cameras. Visibility is rarely the cause of car crashes. Reaction time. Decision making. Follow distance. Speed. All these things are way more important to get right than "seeing through fog"

[mandeepj]

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.

[guywithahat]

When Tesla engineers/Elon talk about it it's usually pitched as a safety thing, by standardizing on one sensor they reduce "sensor contention". Famously Karpathy once described radar as a source of noise that held their vision sensors back.

I don't know who will end up being right in the long term, however I don't think this was a form choice, I think they believe a pure camera system will be more functional.

[Hikikomori]

Funny.

[nektro]

the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that

[Petersipoi]

So you hope the people keeping you safe continue to put themselves in danger for you. Got it.

[nielsbot]

Yup. I came in to ask that same question. Lot of money potentially “left on the table”.

[atonse]

Musk has been talking about this (generalizing the self driving model for their Optimus bot) for a while now.

Which is why their strategy (purely vision/photons in, controls out) seems to be more widely applicable and scalable over time.

And waymo seems to be arriving there too as they keep reducing the equipment (it would seem)

[Rover222]

The industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about.

Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.

[TulliusCicero]

This is about the opposite of reality. Tesla is way behind in actually deploying autonomous vehicles, and other robotaxi makers with real deployments besides Waymo also use lidar.

[super_flanker]

This must be a sarcasm, right?

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.

[g947o]

You might want to look up the price of lidar in 2026 before talking about affordability.

[standardUser]

Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.

[SecretDreams]

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

This yes.

> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.

This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.

We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.

[close04]

> The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment.

And regulatory capture by the incumbent. Reach the top then push for regulation behind you. Thats’s one big additional obstacle to overcome for a new player.

OpenAI was so willing to support regulating AI just as soon as they thought they’ve gained enough of an advantage over the competition and they can burn the bridge behind them.

[SecretDreams]

I think this post just got brigaded, wow.