Posted by doctoboggan 12/11/2025
EDIT: another commenter mentioned that their platform is used by other companies (VW perhaps?). With that information, it might make more sense to do this.
It's absolutely fair to criticize Elon for his ridiculous FSD timeline claims, but here we are now evaluating the market: if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet.
I have. It’s wild for anyone to say this.
Waymo works. FSD mostly works, and I seriously considered getting a Tesla after borrowing one last week. But it needs to be supervised—this is apparent both in its attention requirement and the one time last week it tried to bolt into a red-lit intersection.
The state of the art is Waymo. The jury is still out on whether cameras only can replicate its success. If it can’t, that safety margin could mean game over for FSD on the insurance or regulatory levels. In that case, Rivian could be No. 2 to Waymo (which will be No. 1 if cameras only doesn’t pan out, given they have infinite money from Google). That’s a good bet.
And if cameras only works, you’ll still have the ultra premium segment Tesla seems to have abandoned and which may be wary of licensing from Waymo.
Tesla's already have similar capabilities, in a much wider range of roads, in vehicles that cost 80% less to manufacture.
They're both achieving impressive results. But if you read beyond headlines, Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years.
Iff cameras only works. With threshold for "works" beig set by Waymo, since a Robotaxi that's would have been acceptable per se may not be if it's statistically less safe compared to an existing solution.
Waymo also sets the timeline. If cameras only would work, but Waymo scales before it does, Tesla may be forced by regulators to integrate radars and lidars. This nukes their cost advantage, at least in part, though Tesla maintains its manufacturing lead and vertical integration.)
Tesla has a good hand. But Rivian's play makes sense. If cameras only fails, they win on licensing and a temporary monopoly. If cameras only work, they are a less-threatening partner for other car companies than Waymo.
The only thing LIDAR can do sense depth, and if it turns out sensing depth using cameras is a solved problem, adding LIDAR doesn't help. It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines. It can't tell if a traffic light is red or green. And it certainly doesn't improve predictions of human drivers.
The only answer I see is their goal to create global model that works in every part of the world vs single city which is vastly more difficult. After all most drivers really only know how to drive well in their own town and make a lot of mistakes when driving somewhere else.
This is absolutely false. LiDAR is used heavily in object detection. There’s plenty of literature on this. Here’s a few from Waymo:
https://waymo.com/research/streaming-object-detection-for-3-...
https://waymo.com/research/lef-late-to-early-temporal-fusion...
https://waymo.com/research/3d-human-keypoints-estimation-fro...
In fact, LiDAR is a key component for detecting pedestrian keypoints and pose estimation. See https://waymo.com/blog/2022/02/utilizing-key-point-and-pose-...
Here’s an actual example of LiDAR picking up people in the dark well before cameras: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/U8eq8BEaGA
Not to mention they’re also highly critical for simulation.
> It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines.
Also false. Here’s Waymo’s 5th-gen LiDAR raw point clouds that can even read a logo on a semi truck: https://youtube.com/watch?v=COgEQuqTAug&t=11600s
It seems you’re misinformed about how this sensor is used. The point clouds (plus camera and radar data) are all fed to the models for detection. That makes their detectors much more robust in different lighting and weather conditions than cameras alone.
I can also make “clever” arguments that are useless.
Great, you finally got there. All it took was one round of correcting misinformation about LiDAR and another round of completely useless back-and-forth about sensor count.
The words you’re looking for are necessary and sufficient. Cameras are necessary, but not sufficient.
> There's only different strategies and actual real world outcomes.
Thanks for making my point. Actual real world outcomes are exactly what matter: 125M+ fully autonomous miles versus 0 fully autonomous miles.
We’ve been hearing Tesla will “surpass Waymo in the next 1-2 years” from the past 8 years, yet they are nowhere close. It’s always future tense with Tesla and never about the current state.
I suspect that when Rivian has an L3 product, Waymo will be already offering an L4 package to car manufacturers.
Waymo's AI so far has been narrowly focused few cities. Good start, but remains to be seen who will scale out quicker. IMO both will succeed.
Right now if you want a personal car Tesla's FSD is the only option and will remain so for likely a decade. Waymo doesn't seem to be excited about their mission at all. If it moves to Google's graveyard they'll be like "meh" while it's mission critical for Tesla.
Also LIDAR has just plain dropped in price, well over 10x, while nVidia hardware (even the automotive specific variants) have not.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...
But yes, just like the dozens of other times I've read this comment for years now, I'm sure "the latest version of FSD" is so groundbreaking, and it's all about to change!
Taxi services are not low margin. A taxi typically does about 500,000 miles over its lifetime; adding $10,000 to that cost is 2 cents per mile, increasing price by about 1%.
I'm very happy with any company that clearly spells out the situations where their tech works, and the situations where it doesn't yet work.
Also, I would like to see a car company that is further down the road of full autonomy clearly describing all the long tail scenarios. It's just impossible.
Sure, you can cover everything they can think of. But there are so many cases you can't predict, or which don't have an obvious solution, and it often comes down to a human judgement call that doesn't always have a programmatically-clear right answer.
Seems like a good start to me, and I'd rather they approach as cautiously as possible.
https://www.butzel.com/alert-The-Latest-Development-in-the-S...
It will probably EVENTUALLY show up, but I'm thinking it's more like decades away at this point.
Ford BlueCruise and Mercedes Drive Pilot are equipped on some ICE vehicles, and are hands-free driving on (some) highways.
Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.
Try to find videos where people actually use it. A handful of 1 minute long promotional and car reviewers' videos. It's mostly a marketing move.
"DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone." [0]
Which is why you see it on the Mercedes ICE vehicle. Because it's a high cost vehicle to start with.
Downside is all the buttons are on a screen. But I’ve grudgingly decided it’s worth it for software upgrades.
It even comes with legal liability for the car manufacturer, that's how confident they are in the tech. None of this kind of hopium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
If it was real L3, Drive Pilot would be considered the vehicle operator for legal purposes. Mercedes would take full responsibility for any driving infringements or collisions that occur during its use. In reality, Mercedes cannot indemnify you from driving infringements, and for collisions they only promise to cover "insurance costs" which probably doesn't include any downstream reputational consequences of making an insurance claim.
Also, at some point, I'm probably going to be too old to drive safely, which will restrict my travels. Not if self driving gets to the point where that doesn't matter anymore.
So vote with your wallet. And take a bus.
By the way, I do vote with my wallet. I won't buy a car that has these features. I won't buy a car that serves me ads. I won't buy a car that charges a subscription fee. However, this is becoming increasingly challenging. Most luxury vehicle manufacturers want to pad their bottom lines by charging a premium or worse a subscription for things I (and I suspect many people) don't want.
These premium features ultimately trickle down so every new car must have a rear-view camera and many have LED lighting. Examples of two premium features that now everyone must pay for. My eldest daughter failed her driving test because she used the rear view camera when parallel parking. Yes these cameras are mandated but you fail if you use them. The tail light on an F-150 can cost upwards of $3,000 to replace. A tail light!
My first car, a jeep, came with a bikini top, no doors. the windshield actually folded down without a special tool, and I used a kerosene heater in between the seats when it was cold. Now wranglers come with touch screens, heated steering wheels and cruise control. Apparently they are difficult to find with a manual transmission. I loved mine back in the day but as you say I'll vote with my wallet and will not buy from Stellantis.
I'll happily get my kids a Slate. Of course your mileage may vary and if you want to pay for these premiums then power to you. I just don't want to subsidize your choice.
No. But hopefully one day. I don't mind if you want to subsidise my choice or not. I want self driving tech to get to the point that it is safer than manually driven cars, and I then want people who want to still drive manually to be slowly priced off the roads and then outright banned from doing it.
My preference is that you stop being allowed to drive manually, and as far as I can see, that's the future, as long as the technology works out.
Also, inflation is a thing. You can get a new Honda civic for less than 30k$ today, as well as other sedans and small cars.
You want a train.
If you don't like sharing space with other people, you want a private room on a train.
These cars and their supporting infrastructure should cost more than a private room on a train because they are less efficient and have more negative externalities than a private room on a train.
I love trains, but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
Trains are ok for mass transit. Rest of world is for cars.
Also no one has said that no one is allowed to drive ever again anywhere. I'm trying to be generous but the victim complex is crazy.
Yes it can!! Why can't a train take you to the beach?
https://www.amtrak.com/top-beach-destinations-by-train
> It can't take me camping away from civilization.
How many vehicle miles do you travel every year? How many of those are to go camping?
> It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.
Have you tried? Like really tried? https://philsturgeon.com/carry-shit-olympics/
> but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this:
> I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer.
My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.
Of your many points in various posts, this is maybe the only point I'm really on board with. Amtrak already supports this, even. My car can drive me to the train and then the train can do the long haul, and at the other end my car will drive me off the train and to the destination.
Still need waaaay more rail routes than we have now, though, so this is a dream for a century from now, not something in my lifetime.
There’s plenty of examples of guerrilla urbanism that I think align closely to the hacker ethos. Even more these problems are very solvable and can net huge gains in metrics without having to “dream for a century”.
> waaaaay more rail routes
It’s actually much simpler, Amtrak just needs right of way along with some other straight forward regulations to help balance freight and transit on America’s railroads.
Amtrak has also been doing great at incremental expansion and brining back (or increasing!) ridership just in the 5 years since the pandemic in a number of areas like Chicago to Milwaukee, and in the PNW.
The defeatist attitude isn’t what I expect from HN. You already found the best piece of actionable advice which is to look for incremental ways you can adjust your life to be different. My wife and I hardly drive anymore. Most of our trips: her work, groceries, restaurants, most leisure activities, etc are now by bike. We live in the suburbs too, a full 10 miles (20-30min drive and across an interstate) from the city’s downtown.
Cars are only perceived as necessary in America bc it is assumed that they are. There are many small and safe ways to shed the car dependence and they’ve all been huge positives to my life. We’re happier, healthier, building more community, spending less money on gas and maintenance. It’s nice.
So my options are:
1. Drive, walk, or bike with my kid to the train station in Westchester, ride to grand central, switch to subway, drop her off at school, then take the subway to my office. Total time about 90 mins.
or
2. Drive 35-45 mins.
I'll be driving.
There's talk of having one of the train lines go into Penn instead of Grand Central, with stops on the Upper West Side! But that'll be a decade or more, if it ever happens, and it won't be relevant to me anymore at that point.
I have kids who walk, ride bikes, and I do the same. There are a lot of terrible drivers out there - the average driver who thinks they are better than everyone else is still terrible (yes this includes me - I'm one of the few honest enough to admit I'm not good, but I'm about equal to everyone else)
If we really gave a shit about driving-related fatalities, there is a lot of fruit hanging way lower than replacing the average sober driver.
The product isn't necessarily "for me", but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
Sometimes I want to do something else. Maybe adjust my music, or send a text. If the car can keep me going while I do that, it would be nice.
I live with two people who can't drive. Often I have to take them to things. Tonight I'm going to spend about 90 minutes going, waiting, and coming back, so one of them can do something. It would be great if I could just put them in the car and say, have fun, see you later, and stay home while the car takes them there and back.
The hardware necessary for level 2 autonomy is estimated to cost about US$400 in a Tesla. Much higher for companies using Lidar though prices are coming down as well.
- Cars are dangerous to people not in cars - Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof) - Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc. - There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars)
What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses).
Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time.
Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall.
Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.
I'm going to take a guess here that you're in a bubble. Most people don't give more than a passing thought to protecting anybody else on the road but themselves and their own loved ones. You could say enlightened self interest means this should extend to random strangers, but I bet that as a practical matter it does not. I'd even go farther and suggest that the largest plurality of people who support public transit want it so that it will take other people off the road, not them.
There’s plenty of evidence that traffic is almost exclusively induced demand and that as you build other facilities and expand existing ones that more people use them. “Just one more lane bro”, etc.
America tends to be car-centric because that’s the only perceived option.
Big wins are: 1) stop-and-go traffic 2) long boring highway trips
infrequent but just as important - emergency braking
That said I absolutely hate that this seems to give tesla the "courage" to remove physical driver controls (like turn signal stalks, drive select stalks, full controls for wipers, lights and defrost)
EDIT: looks like model 3 only and they didn't remove it from the y?