
California publishes robocar “intervention” reports – Google/Waymo is far ahead - ivank
http://ideas.4brad.com/california-publishes-robocar-intervention-reports-google-waymo-so-far-ahead-its-ridiculous
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Fricken
It's very early in the game for most of Waymo's competitors, and next year's
disengagement reports will be more telling, as it will give us an indication
as to the rate of progress being made by the various players in this race.

GM's Cruise appears to be on a solid trajectory.

Tesla appears to be in a state of clusterfuck. They made the committed
decision to build expensive sensor suites and a PX drive 2 computer worth 'a
few thousand dollars' (according to Jen-Hsun Huang) into every new Tesla. This
marries Tesla to an incremental development approach that certainly good for
generating excitement and engaging users near term, but the holy grail is L4,
and Tesla is putting a whole bunch of unnecessary obstacles between themselves
and that longer term objective.

So long as it isn't safety critical, it isn't hard to demonstrate impressive
proof of concept, but what is clear by Waymo's gigantic numbers is that
mopping up those last remaining edge cases and validating their system against
them is actually a monstrous undertaking. Not impossible, just really hard.
The closer you get to the finish line, the harder it gets.

So my guess is that whatever progress Tesla makes with HW2, they will have to
set up a separate dedicated division for testing and validating a proper L4
vehicle if they wish to keep pace with the rest of the peloton. Every other
big player has abandoned any notion of taking an incremental approach towards
full _robotaxi-grade_ autonomy for good reasons.

