THE RACE TO DRIVERLESS DRIVING
Last month the three leading players in the race towards fully-autonomous cars all announced advanced testing of their driverless cars aimed at a robotaxi service for the general public.
Waymo was first out of the blocks, announcing that it is opening its driverless service to the general public in Phoenix, Arizona, starting with its Waymo One members. GM followed Waymo’s cue with an announcement that its Cruise autonomous car maker has been approved to begin testing its fully driverless cars in San Francisco before the end of the year. Not to be out done, and perhaps making a bigger splash, Tesla released the beta version of its Full Self Driving (FSD) software to select users in the last week of October, and plans to roll out the complete version before the end of the year.
Waymo and Cruise are both following the same basic approach to solving autonomous driving by using lidar (light detection and ranging) and a total dependence on geofenced locations with highly detailed GPS map generation, and tons of simulated data. Tesla, on the other hand, is following the more difficult route, but ultimately the only general solution to autonomous driving – not dependent on lidar, geofenced locations, or detailed GPS mapping. Tesla sees autonomous driving as a vision problem, and hopes to solve it with cameras and radar combined with a very powerful neural net working off its groundbreaking FSD chip, combined with billions of miles of real world data gained from what should soon be more than a million Teslas using Autopilot, and a growing fleet of FSD Teslas.
In the end, this is a race between computer-simulated data (Waymo and Cruise) and billions of miles of real world data (Tesla), and if you believe Elon Musk, then Tesla will prove that any dependence on lidar and simulated data will prove to be nothing but a fool’s errand. It’s difficult to argue with a man who lands orbital rockets on drone ships in the middle of the ocean, but regardless of who wins this race, humanity stands to win because at stake is a near zero road fatality figure as the ultimate prize, saving more lives than any vaccine could ever do.