Elon Musk makes bold claim about Waymo's autonomous technology as Tesla robotaxi lags behind: 'A crutch'

Humans don't have lidar or radar but we've managed to figure out driving based on sight alone. Tesla will be fine.

Right - the *only* sense humans possess is sight.  My god Teslarians are stupid.

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The whole text of the article was included in the post.

It’s painfully obvious at this point that both approaches will succeed and have distinct advantages.

Costs vary but a quick google search had a little something where someone mentioned on r/selfdrivingcars that this year, the cost of LiDAR on vehicles dropped like a rock from $4100 to $138 per sensor (I'm on mobile and clicking that reddit link would move me away from this thread). There are a whole bunch of price ranges for LiDAR systems but I'm not familiar enough with the hardware to determine the cost directly. Edit: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop/ the article they were referring to.

“Why bother with airbags when we already have seatbelts??”

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This is the most stupid argument - must be a member of the cult. The Austin Robotaxi launch has been a cluster-fuck totally failure. 10 cars and only paid influencers allowed access and forced to have a co-rider advisor. After 10 years of promising FSD this it what Tesla managed to show - ha ha

Human eyes are quite a bit better than the cheap smartphone cameras Musk is using, and we can 'gasp' move them! The underpowered, proprietary computer inside the Tesla is an insignificant fraction of the performance of a human brain. Robotaxis shouldn't be as good as the average driver to be viable, they should do thousandth of the accidents. Waymos work. Tesla don't. And Teslas never will with this approach. No AI model can avoid a pedestrian it can't see because cameras are blinded by glare and fog or the shirt has a pattern that fools the small classifier.

Painful indeed. Texans might be mowed down, but it's a sacrifice the Musk is willing to make.

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Human brains might be bad at numerical computation. But the complex neural network that powers our vision and motion is unmatched by any hardware or model. That's why it's hard enough for humanoid robots to stand and walk with 2 legs. Now Tesla's robots barely prove they function without teleoperation. How are those missing parts compensated for on a car?

Humans also crash their cars all the time.

Engineer who has over a decade working with machine vision in far less complicated and risky environments than public roads here. Elon doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, and all the engineers who care about their work and/or are willing to argue with the ketamine Kid have already left. Seriously, anyone honest with even a tiny bit of domain knowledge knows he is clueless. This is as laughable as his "Sub 10 micron tolerance" email, except that (probably) wasn't going to get people killed. He's not just an idiot, he's a dangerous idiot. "Hydrogen has always been way lighter than air, the Hindenburg will be fine."

Musk has lost his sense of engineering so many years ago. He's focused on hype and ideals rather than making the best use of available technology. It's obvious that today's bulky LiDAR tech won't be used in the distant future, but Tesla has *nothing* that works for the foreseeable future. I also disagree that vision will be the way of the future. Why stick with something that fails so easily in darkness and rain? Why not do better? IR mapping seems like pretty good tech to use. Tech just needs to do away with the large moving parts.

I knew he was an idiot, but when Elon said this, I couldn't believe he hadn't won a Darwin award already. The human brain is so easily taken for granted, but the sheer amount of processing it does behind the scenes just to, for example - see object1 - classify object1 as powder - identify object1 as ketamine powder - see object2 - classify object2 as a razor blade - reach for and grasp the razor blade - using the razor blade, arrange the ketamine into parallel lines of roughly equal size and shape - see object3 - classify object3 as a $100 bill - reach for and grasp the $100 bill - grip one end of the $100 bill. Wind it evenly clockwise to form a hollow cylinder - insert one end of the hollow cylinder into your nostril by feel alone - insert the other end of the hollow cylinder at the base of a ketamine line. - simultaneously: inhale sharply as you move your head and arm holding the hollow cylinder forward And that's without considering *how* you're going to classify things, or any of the autonomous stuff like balance, breathing, etc)

I work with lidar rarely, and not in cars, but I'd be surprised if any of the major manufacturers were paying anywhere close to $138 in 2025. Most probably have supply contracts stitched up half way to the heat death of the universe by now, so even if dipshit grew up and could publicly admit to making a mistake, Tesla probably wouldn't be able to secure enough supply if they wanted to.

Concerning

What's interesting to think about is if Tesla has included LiDAR back in 2019/2020. I suspect FSD would be a lot further along. Maybe even a real product. But no. Only got Full Supervised Driving.

Musk was never in his life an engineer! I hate how this myth just won't die. The guy has been a fraud his entire life. Even his physics degree is a lie.

Definitely they would be further along. But there is something fundamentally wrong with the people working on their driver aids and FSD. They have designed a system that ignores its own vision data, even on totally clear days, and crosses double lines, goes through traffic lights, cannot perform "Actually Smart Summon", veers towards oncoming cars, and many other random problems. Mostly these could actually be done with vision-only, but somehow they can't stop it from screwing up.

Disagree. Humans are able to drive at ~70mph within a couple of feet of other cars, through all kinds of weather conditions and unfamiliar terrain and situations. And we do it quite well, most go decades without any real issues.

well done

That just reminds me how J&J bought out the supply of soap pumps for 10 years to choke competition at some point haha. Or at least that's how I heard it.

I only give him credit for having a sense of engineering in the past.

Sorry what’s the advantage of not having it minus the current cost?

He's never had any engineering sense. Ever. He's always been a poser, a liar, a fraud.

Maybe the geniuses trained it on GTA V gameplay videos.

Wouldn't be surprised. It's amazing what you can do with a big enough pile of cash.

The whole point of robotaxis is to make them safer than humans (human operated automobiles are literally the leading cause of death for ppl aged 3-39). If you’re content with Tesla matching the capabilities of human drivers then what becomes the point of Waymo or Tesla’s robotaxi service?

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Tesla will end up failing! Musk has made a fatal mistake with Vision only.

Happens to everyone who abuses drugs. They lose touch with reality, some develop grandiosity and unwavering belief in their power.

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Yeah I think his best talents left the company already. Even in really obvious scenarios with clear weather, FSD makes glaring mistakes like crossing double white lines or veering into incoming traffic, or running stop signs or red lights.

Was it even a year ago? Give or take, but he was trying to say a revolution in fsd was right around the corner, and the answer to the whole thing was right in front of them. It was simultaneously at the time he was big into xai & spending all that cash on nvidia cpus… he was trying to suggest that a vision based llm-like model of self learning would solve for self driving, they just needed the compute power… the solution is all so obvious! Nowadays it is as if no one remembers this. He was even trying to coerce the board of TSLA in that they would lose out if they didn’t give over huge buy ins. What ever happened to that? Shouldn’t we be nuking mars to build a breathable atmosphere too?

Bro he created a rocket company from scratch. Do not be stupid…. he is an engineer for sure. And that too a very good one. I am not his fan but just a normal human who acknowledges brilliance.

“Sense of engineering”? Oh, I’m sure he liked a bridge once.

There’s not much difference between “Huffing brake cleaner makes me invincible” and “taking ketamine makes me the smartest man in the world”

A concept of engineering, if you will

Can only comment on HW4 - but FSD is mindblowingly good. You can see the future using it. I’m not smart enough to debate the LiDAR stuff, plenty of smart people refuted that even being an issue - missing the forest for the trees type debate. In real world application, FSD at least this year is a real world product and I’ve heard way more good than bad (which of course is emphasized more on here)

engineer is a protected title here, it means you finished certain education. Similar as MD, PhD etc. In this sense he is no engineer. Engineer makes things which say donk when they fall; bridges, cars, these days may be also software. in this sense a company is not something engineering trains for, thats MBA

> Humans are able to drive at ~70mph within a couple of feet of other cars the complexity is not 70 mph on the highway, it 10 mph crossroads with cars, pedestrians, motorbikes, cyclists, street furniture, and oblique corners

You’re right , people struggle to drive once you remove their lidar and IR vision wtf are you talking about

My car has Full Supervised Driving. It is twenty years old, and relies on my supervision to navigate effectively.

Why bother with seat belts when humans can walk around with seat belts?

He was talking about the senses humans have. Do i need to list them or are you able to name a few yourself?

Can you tell me what the vestibular system is and what it does without looking it up?

I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays, I want to smell dark matter…

Elon says LiDAR is a crutch. I’d argue having to have a safety driver in your robotaxi is a crutch 🤷🏻‍♂️

Using batteries in EVs is a crutch! At my startup, we are pioneering the technology of using unicorn farts to power electric motors. Invest now, we're the next trillion dollar company... just as soon as we find a unicorn and figure out how to get it to fart into a jar...

Love this play on words!

It starts with the right hardware in the right places (the roof also) first.

"a crutch" Waymo has a fully operational taxi service across many cities. Tesla still have a safety driver in 10 cars, in 1 city.

The car itself is a crutch . Let’s just fly . Right elon?

“Bold claim.” He’s lying.

Fsd = fully supervised driving

Not the people. The conception. Any system that relies on machine learning pattern recognition to categorize objects will fail when visual patterns that aren't in its training set appear. Shadows that look like fallen tree trunks, the underside of an overturned tanker. I'm sure that most of the engineers working on Tesla's FSD know this. But what can they do when Dunning-Kruger at the top has blind faith that a graphics chip can one day emulate a human brain with a lifetime of experience and learned models of the world.

Why bother with seatbelts when your skull and rib cage can absorb the impact

So do you consider Jeff Bezos an engineer as well? He also created a rocket company from scratch.

He isn’t an engineer. He has not got an engineering degree. He doesn’t have a degree. He is a charlatan.

Plenty of smart people. Perfect, that’s all I need to make up my mind on something

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>He's focused on ~~hype and ideals~~ Profit. That's what he is focused on.

People keep using crutch as an insult. A crutch is a useful tool!

... and snow. FSD doesn't do well in the snow because of vision problems, and regenerative braking can send you into a full-on slide in slick conditions. It seems that the FSD engineers only plan for nice weather, which I had hoped FSD would help with in inclement weather.

Creating a company doesn't make you an engineer, makes you a businessman. Creating the rockets makes you an engineer and Musk didn't build, develop or design any rocket. Thomas Muller was the lead engineer in developing the Falcon 1.

Its pretty funny the media even takes any creedence to tesla being in the “robotaxi” business. They have 10 cars, not open for public use with a safety driver. Waymo has 2,000 taxis in multiple cities. It would be like interviewing someone who makes 12 kit cars a year about how he feels his rivals ford and gm are doing “in the business” Tesla and FSD is Theranos 2.0

Sorry "bro". He never trained any form of engineering, he never practiced any form of engineering and he most certainly didn't start a rocket company from scratch. He's a lying fraud who fell upwards through money, connections and being the greatest scam artist the world has ever seen. Suggest you get some Listerine for when you're done gargling his nuts.

This is partly why there has been a major shift on the AI side away from human coded labels and into machine coded labels. It won't be able to say it's a shadow, but it can know the behavior it needs to deal with it. This was a large part of the hurdles leading up into FSD 11, was that the situations had to be kind of programmed in where as from a compute perspective you rely on the larger data set to create synthetic data to craft scenarios for it to test itself on getting to a faster level of iteration. The next question is is there enough current data to generate proper synthetic data. Will it be as accurate as a lidar system, no. Can it be a step above current human driving, yes. Can it be multiple steps above so that the accuracy loss leads to a statistically insignificant impact, maybe.

Yeah, then they wouldn't be 10 years behind Waymo. Only 5 or 6.

Brakes? A crutch! Seat belts? A crutch! And don’t even get me started on drink holders!

>In real world application, FSD at least this year is a real world product and I’ve heard way more good than bad (which of course is emphasized more on here) Full Self Driving, SAE level 4, does not exist on any Tesla. Full Supervised Driving, requiring at minimum a safety driver in the passenger seat with a button to stop the car exists on 10 Tesla's. Those Tesla's are geofenced to a small area in not even the largest US state and cannot operate in the wind or rain. Until the product promised is delivered it is not a real world product.

Huawei's self-driving uses three small lidars that cost a couple hundred bucks each.

Oh don't rule out that he is huffing brake cleaner or sniffing testers model glue out of a paper bag as a chaser to his ketamine intake.

The easiest way to understand the difference in approach between Tesla (vision only) and Waymo and most other autonomous entries (lidar, vision, radar, and more) is aircraft. Commercial aircraft and their pilots must be certified for Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) meaning besides Visual Flight Rules (VFR), they must have radar and other sensors to allow flight in inclement weather. VFR (vision only) is not allowed because inclement weather can easily lead to pilot disorientation and then a crash. IFR supplements the pilots vision with radar and multiple other sensors to allow the plane to maintain attitude and not become disoriented by inclement weather.

FSD is very good at relieving driver fatigue and making a lot of people safer drivers... if you're supervising it. It makes way too many questionable decisions to let me trust it unsupervised. Yes, there's a lot of good. The problem is that the bad can literally mean a car accident, and it just takes one bad for your life to change forever.

wtf is a “sense of engineering”

Stock up 15% on the news

Many? More like just a few. After all these years, there is something wrong with the waymo technology or how they're being ran. Putting aside anything to do with Tesla/fsd.

Waymo has scaled up to a million paid driverless rides per month, which is far ahead of anyone else except maybe in China. And they are starting testing in 10 new cities this year, while Tesla is just starting testing in their first city. So there's nothing wrong with Waymo that anyone else isn't facing, because driverless transportation is a hard problem to solve at scale.

-8.2% is up?

It goes both ways. If Tesla can decide not to use LiDAR and Radar, the market can choose to never get inside a Robotaxi.

I’d say if you can’t walk too well and need a crutch, so what. Your getting around be yourself.

Average Tesla Critic is pessimistic about FSD because Tesla doesn't use Lidar. I'm pessimistic about FSD because Teslas neural nets still don't make good driving decisions despite seeing the objects. We are not the same.

It’s not a crutch, it’s just something I lean on to get through life.

Owed two Teslas over 8 years (HW2 model 3 and HW3 performance y), bought FSD on both and never once got the ASS working at all. It could sometimes do unprotected left turns by itself, but it was generally pretty bad at city driving. Really hoping there’s a class action lawsuit, but have since sold the Tesla in favor of a company with a less-contemporaneous nazi history.

Currently, the advantage is more data collection which has resulted in smoother and more human-like behavior.

That’s not an accurate characterization of the rollout. Remember when Waymo hit the homeless cyclist? Shiz happens. Both of these systems are critically urgent life saving technologies.

Waymo has tens of millions of autonomous miles. Tesla still has zero autonomous miles. They aren't in the same businness and aren't peers. Waymo has robotaxi, Tesla has level 2 adas and is trying to figure out how to blame anyone but the level 2 adas for the crashes. Tesla only works if the legislators allow it to mow down civilians with no repercussion, because Tesla has made no progress at all to level 5 autonomy, it's stuck where it was ten years ago. No amount of technology can identify a cyclist from a camera blinded by a glare. You'd need what Waymo found out ten years ago, and Musk made fun off. Sensors that scans different ways.

When Waymo hit the cyclist, they were still using monitors. Tesla is behind waymo at this point. That’s my point; Waymo had its hiccups and so will Tesla.

Tesla needs to add lidars and sensors to be where Waymo was ten years ago.

>Remember when Waymo hit the homeless cyclist? You mean Uber? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg Meanwhile, Tesla is under investigation for at least four accidents involving FSD, including a pedestrian fatality: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-opens-probe-into-24-mln-tesla-vehicles-over-full-self-driving-collisions-2024-10-18/ And there could be many others: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ As for the Austin rollout, that had numerous questionable incidents in just the first few days, and that was with safety supervisors in the vehicles.

Well, I l learned something today. I did not know that Waymo has zero associated deaths. That’s really impressive.