At first I was skeptical, but reading the article, they do track object across video frames which for me it's the minimum a system like this should do. All previous FSD systems are just Fake self-driving.
"That proprietary AI driver identifies features in images and point clouds, groups them into objects, and tracks them across frames, time-stamped to the millisecond to account for differing frame rates. The AI thus builds confidence over time, acting on object detections that persist across several frames, rather than, say, slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame."
> The AI thus builds confidence over time, acting on object detections that persist across several frames, rather than, say, slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame.
Nice in theory but in practice they still need a ton of training data. The bitter lesson is very bitter. Tesla's end to end FSD uses occupancy networks and brake stabbing still hasn't been fully solved.
> Rivian says it will charge $49.99 a month, or $2,500 up front, versus Tesla’s $99 per month for its rival system, which is somewhat misleadingly called Full Self-Driving (Supervised), or FSD. Mercedes, meanwhile, plans to charge $3,950 for a three-year subscription for the forthcoming MB.Drive Assist Pro
If and when FSD systems become a reality and are safer than human drivers, I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars, just as they did reversing cameras, airbags, automated emergency braking, and other once-optional safety features.
Hmm, that would mean forcing every car sold to be controllable remotely by a corporation. Sounds like something regulators would indeed do, but also, doesn’t sound too great for consumers, to put it mildly
I think given how far companies like XPeng are with their systems in China. This is more a question of "when" than "if" with the when part narrowed to a time range of perhaps 2027-2029. Xpeng seems to be planning for 2027. Not in the US of course but the rest of the world is a big place.
I expect that by the mid 2030s this will be widely used across most car markets in both L2 driver assist form and L4 style autonomous taxis active in most large cities on all continents. L4/L5 level driving for privately owned cars might trail that a bit but I think the technical arguments against that are rapidly evaporating as well. The arguments are increasingly about regulation, insurance, liability, etc. I think the Chinese are a bit more pragmatic on this front and more likely to just get this done domestically by the early 2030s and will be deploying this globally by the mid 2030s. The only question real question is whether the US and Europe will do that before or after them and whether that will be with their own tech or somebody else's.
Rivian seems to have all the right tech and strategy.
If it gets too embedded into the revenues of the car companies, regulators are going to have a hard time making it required without a subscription. It could be that you just either have a car with a monthly payment or you don't.
My 2025 model 3 has driven me over 95% of my last thousand miles. I'm frankly surprised it isn't more, but I'm not the only driver of the car.
It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc
Out of curiosity, do you live in a place that gets heavy snow? I've always felt that FSD would struggle to handle heavy snow fall, roads with snow banks on the sides and difficult driving/braking conditions in the snow and on ice patches.
For any doubters: using a 2025 model is a key detail here. It's the latest hardware version of the self driving computer. The older cars on the road are stuck with significantly worse FSD software because the hardware is far too weak.
FSD 14 lite, which is now available for the HW3 (~2019-2023) Teslas, is surprisingly good. I have a HW3 and HW4, and while HW3 isn't as confident and competent as HW4, it's good enough that I don't mind it anymore. My wife was planning on trading in the HW3 for a new Model Y next year, and now she might just wait a few more years.
I have a 2020 M3 on HW3 with v14 lite and it's very good. But even v12 was pretty good. I drove an HW4 as a loaner and did not notice a significant difference. I think the big difference would be on the long-tail of edge conditions, but I'm not sure.
For a Tesla, the estimates are around $2K. For a Waymo, the same estimates are ~$25K (down from $125K!!!). There's not a clear timeline for Waymo-style kit at a price consumers can afford and in a form factor they'd accept.
(FWIW, the business story for Waymo has never been about its hardware making its way to consumers. It's always been about whether Waymo continues to run its own taxi service or leases out hardware and operations to other taxi businesses).
Not sure I'd agree that the Tesla estimate is accurate for the truly driverless versions they've started releasing in Austin. Maybe for the standard ones you can buy. There's reporting on the additional telematics packs that have been added to Model Y cars in their Robotaxi fleet, so who knows what that costs.
The God's Eye B system of BYD adds under $600 to the BoM.
The 5 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors are $100-150. LiDAR is $150-200. The 12 cameras, control unit, and 300 TOPs of computing is $150-200. This computing is comparable to what Tesla puts on their consumer cars, and the sensors suite is much more extensive. (The current robotaxis have about the same computing power as the consumer cars but a lot more RAM).
Right, but God's Eye B isn't anywhere near good enough for unsupervised self-driving. The hardware isn't the issue; the software just isn't in the same league as Tesla FSD.
You were talking about the hardware costs to support self-driving. The God's Eye B compute hardware is similar to the compute hardware in current consumer Tesla cars and the sensor hardware is a superset (more cameras plus LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonics), but adds less than $600 to the BoM, which shouldn't be a major barrier to it being mandated on new cars once the software is up to the task.
Which will pose an interesting problem; we’ll have to pay a subscription to legally be allowed to drive our car on the road. As much as I’m excited for autonomous driving I’m not excited for the legal implications that follow
That small lidar embedded into the front window glass is very sleek looking. Overall I like their design and what they choose to focus on. Their description of what is important for an LDM is is spot on, I love a boring drive without excitement or flare.
I think this article is underestimating Tesla and very much underestimating how hard Level 4 autonomy is. The long-tail of edge conditions to handle is really long, and Rivian is only at the beginning.
What Rivian is going to release at the end of 2026 is what Tesla had 3 years ago. All that time has gone to dealing with edge conditions: bike lanes, emergency vehicles, construction zones, and all the crazy one-off situations that their fleet has seen.
Tesla's fleet is an order of magnitude larger, so events that Rivian has seen only once, Tesla already has ten examples of. And rare events that Tesla has trained on, Rivian has never yet seen.
I will say this, though: Rivian is the closest competitor to Tesla (not counting Chinese cars). Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing. And the robotaxi game is going to be all about manufacturing.
> Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean but the car itself (chassis, bodywork, drivetrain) is a commodity today. If you can turn any car into an autonomous car then the car isn't worth that much in the self-driving game. Tesla's stock is propped by the promise of becoming the first to achieve autonomy not by its ability to build cars, or else VW and Toyota would be worth multiples of Tesla. They aren't because cars are a commodity. Autonomous car brains are the hot deal.
If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
It's like saying Linux will lose out to Microsoft when it comes to manufacturing. Yes, they do lose out by not manufacturing anything and yet their product is slowly taking over the market. Local loss (no profit from manufacturing), global win (core product is increasing market share).
> If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
They won't even have to (partially) buy any manufacturer - they can utilize contract manufacturers like Magna Steyr (which made the Jaguar I-Pace) or Foxconn, or lean on/expand partnerships like the one they have with Toyota.
> Compared to, say, a large language model that writes news or fiction... an autonomous-driving AI is less subjective and easier to evaluate, so there’s little room for error.
There's less gray area with driving wss the point. Legal or illegal, efficient or inefficient. And whatever gray area remains is generally "good enough" compared to human drivers on the road.
It's easy evaluate if there's no victims. Stats say there's more than 6000 injuries per day and more than 16000 deaths per year on the road.
If you choose between hitting a pedestrian and swerving potentially injuring the driver and totaling the car, what would you like the car to pick? Or any given trolley problem variation, etc
I took a fully-autonomyous Cybercab to a coffee shop yesterday; it doesn't even have a steering wheel. It was just a short drive, but it handled various complications (a garbage truck, double-parked cars, construction, unpainted speed bumps) with aplomb. The driving felt extremely smooth and human-like (better, in my experience, than Waymo, which can still be a bit jerky).
Those operate in constrained areas of a few cities though - with a control room, that's a long way from telling your car to drive across state unattended.
I see a lot of Self-driving cars hitting people vs. reckless drivers hitting people.
What I want is simple: accountability. If a human hits a human, we throw the book at them in the case of a modality of negligence. If a robot screws up, how do we remedy and discourage?
It should be 100% liability on the self-driving car. Only by doing that will there be enough incentive for the manufacturers to drive the accident rate down to zero (or in practice a low enough number that the cost to manufacturer of the remaining accidents is negligible). Less than 100% liability provides wiggle room, which car manufacturers will exploit to maximise profits over lives. With 100% liability manufacturers can still make a pile of money, but only if they have a low accident rate.
The shenanigans AI companies have been up to recently (including boasting about criminal behaviour hacking other companies) without repercussions is pretty good proof that it isn't "easy".
I see, you'd prefer to continue the prior experiment of humans flying around corners in multi-thousand-pound vehicles, over the speed limit, while sipping coffee and looking at the radio?
Current trend nowadays is watching tiktok, though thankfully I've only seen it at red lights, but that might just be because I'm not staring at other drivers when driving around at 40mph.
I was behind someone just the other week that was actively scrolling tiktok/reels while driving on a 3-lane road during rush hour with what appeared to be at least 2 kids in the back.
The difficulty in getting to an agreement on what "responsible" means, and on how a "failure" should be handled means that said experiment will never occur. Nothing is ever safe enough and no failure is acceptable -- so no test which can fail can be run.
A situation which would be in obvious conflict (negative expected value) with the goal of saving the man hours and lives currently being cost by manual driving.
So what does this mean for Timmy (16 years old) learning how to drive? Should that also be banned, lest he runs over some kid? Or does he get a pass because he's a human and not a faceless corporation? Maybe he can repay the favor in 60 years when he gets run over by another teenager learning how to drive?
I do want safer vehicles and I do see a path to get there with this technology.
What I don't want is companies training their technologies with legitimate risk to the public, with a clear pathway to profiting off of this risk and public data, with no benefit to the public _unless_ they happen to succeed, and to some degree, unless you can afford their products. Something feels off about that.
Of course, everyone benefits if vehicles are safer, but it does feel like there is an extractive factor regardless. These companies benefit from public resources, are wholly enabled by public resources, but are trying to create a situation in which the technologies they create are more or less required to be used in order to utilize the public resource. Does that make sense? I suppose it's inferred, but, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe any car manufacturer with a working FSD technology would LOVE to have that technology mandated to be on every new vehicle. Imagine leasing that to every manufacturer who didn't develop it themselves so they could continue to sell in the USA.
On one hand, safer vehicles are a MUST because we allow an absurd number of people to die due to unsafe driving every day. On the other hand, I don't feel right about private companies benefiting so much from roads the public built, while training their technology with some degree of risk imposed on the public, and with no clear desire in these companies to give back. They tend to pay paltry sums in taxes, if any. Rivian was at a net loss of over 4 billion for 2024. I understand they're trying to build something that requires massive capital, but, I also understand that these companies are experts at operating at a loss for prolonged periods of time. Amazon is a stellar example.
This definitely cuts both ways, but I'm not sure exactly where I stand. I need more information to decide, but I'm confident that there is some degree of exploitation of public data and resources here. I'm not trying to imply Tesla, Waymo, or Rivian are the only ones guilty of this either. The tragedy of the commons is a well-known phrase because it's such a typical phenomenon. I'm also not suggesting that there's a simple solution. There can't be because the fragmentation of the polities in which these companies operate and train their technology within.
Yes, he would be banned from driving if he ran over a kid. Self-driving models and the companies that create them have not been banned so far, even after they cause accidents.
>Yes, he would be banned from driving if he ran over a kid.
Realistically no, unless he was hilariously reckless.
> SMITH: There’s the case that happened with the little boy on the Upper West Side, Cooper Stock. He and his dad were crossing the street. And a driver was making a turn, and he just ran over the little boy, didn’t see him.
> SMITH: So right now all that is is a summons to the driver for failing to yield. But it does not rise to the level of any kind of manslaughter or homicide charge. There was a study that showed that between 2008 and 2012 there were something like almost 1,300 fatal crashes in New York, and there were like 66 drivers arrested.
>Smith says that New York has some of the narrowest standards for conviction in the country. It’s called the “rule of two” — you need two significant violations of traffic laws in order to bring a charge, including some incredibly reckless or criminally negligent act. Otherwise, it’s just … an accident.
And you had that one example to prove it. That settles it.
I know you want to make your point but stacking up fallacies (same in your "Timmy" comment) isn't helping [1]. Most humans grow up having personal responsibility, then at adult age the legal system puts even more on them. A lot more, on them personally, under threat of deprivation of freedom or monetary loss from their own pockets, or in the case of driving even something as small as losing the license. There are exceptions ("daddy pays" sort of thing).
Now contrast that with corporations, especially large ones, where almost every bit of responsibility is diffused behind a corporate veil that allows every single human to sidestep any personal responsibility whatsoever. Some shareholders' money take the plunge. And starting recently you can offload even more responsibility to the computer/AI.
I might lose my license if I cross a red light. Will a company lose the license to operate all autonomous cars when one crosses a red light?
[1]
> My anti-terrorism AI drone escaped the sandbox and shot up gruez's house. The drone was punished by removing its livery. What else can be done? What next, should we punish soldiers fighting terrorists too?"
> I tested my anti-cancer medication in the drinking water of the neighborhood. gruez got hit the hardest by the side effects, God rest his soul. But what can we do, ban cancer research?
When they say "narrowest", they mean that New York is one of the most difficult places to convict a driver. Right above what you quoted:
> Our neighbors have different vehicular laws than we do. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut have vehicular manslaughter statutes that punish traffic fatalities or serious injury that occurs because of simple negligence. New Jersey doesn’t have the same statute as Massachusetts or Connecticut, but even they have vehicular manslaughter statutes that encompass more behavior than what New York has, which is absolutely nothing other than drunk driving. So around the country — in Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Nevada, Kansas, California — all over the country, there are states with vehicular statutes that punish a failure to yield as a traffic fatality, that punish the driver.
So this seems to be a peculiarity of New York, I guess. Also, this is from 12 years ago on a podcast that has been widely criticized for inaccuracy and cherry-picking. I'd be curious if this was even true at the time, and if so, if it's still true or if the laws have changed.
Obviously local laws differ and I'm sure there are many exceptions, but it is very common to have your license suspended if you run over someone with your car.
Self-driving cars also operate at a far larger scale than individual human drivers. Over 300 people died in Boeing 737 crashes, but the entire aviation industry has not been shut down as a result.
the 737-max was grounded for almost two years, Boeing paid a $2bn+ fine and the CEO was fired.
To be fair, actual self-driving car business units have suffered similar fates. Uber's autonomy team was shut down after they killed Elaine Herzberg, and GM's Cruise was functionally destroyed after they contributed to a major bodily injury crash and tried to cover up their errors.
It's the level 2 consumer car companies that have mostly skated under a liability shield. Tesla FSD has been shit for a long time and paid very little price for it.
First, our current city driving environments were designed for being used by humans, so take into account human strengths and weaknesses.
Second, that kid has spent 16 years in such an environment learning how humans function there. He's got a very good model of how things work.
By the time I was 16 year old Timmy I'd spent a whole lot of time walking next to roads with cars, biking next to or in those roads with cars, and riding in cars on those roads. What was new when I was the driver was mostly learning the physics of cars and driving.
(I suppose nowadays, with the way parents can get in trouble letting kids out of their sight, we might have to worry about a generation of 16 year old Timmys who have not spent any significant time walking next to or biking next to or in roads with cars).
Third, that kid will have a pretty good model of predicting future behavior of other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists based on figuring out their intent, which can even let them make some pretty good predictions about them even when they are hidden or masked from the kid's sensors.
Fourth, Timmy has a bunch of knowledge learned from listening to other people, reading, movies, etc., that can be applied while driving. For example suppose they live somewhere where there are many cows, but no deer. If they see a cow near the road at a place with no fence, they will have an appropriate model from experience that tells them cows are generally slow moving. Be cautious when passing, maybe giving it some extra space.
If the see a deer even though they have no experience with them they likely know that deer often bolt rapidly into the road right when a car gets close due to hearing stories from people who live in deer heavy regions or from news, books, or TV/movies, so go slow and be very cautious passing that.
Autonomous cars have a big advantage in reaction time, so if a bad situation starts to unfold they are likely better at saving the day than Timmy (or an experienced human driver) would be, but at least the systems so far deployed so far don't seem to be up to Timmy's understanding of other actors and their intent. They also seem unlikely currently to have that widespread non-driving knowledge that can be called upon to understand novel situation involving things that was not in their driver training.
Civilized countries have the concept of a driving school, where you have to take 20 one hour lessons with an instructor who can override everything as well as theory lessons, followed by an independent state run exam, theory and practice.
car company != software company. Building a car gets you approximately 0% closer to knowing how to make a safe software driver. Writing AV software is exceptionally hard. We only have 2 safe functioning drivers presently: humans (debatable) and Waymo. Apple spent $7(?) billion and gave up. Uber and GM have also set billions on fire with nothing to show for it. Tesla might get there, but it could still be 5 years away.
As of August Tesla had 80+ unsupervised taxis in operation with more than 380k miles driven total, and they are required to report incidents to the NHTSA. At the rate at which they are adding miles, if they are not now safer than human drivers, we should know soon.
Rivian has actually split out the software side to a joint venture with Volkswagen Group (the group independent of the car company which the group owns with others like Audi and Porsche). I think the goal is to have a platform other brands can license
This is the move that will win. Once available at that level, it will get adopted into smaller vehicles. There would be a huge market for self-driving golf carts or similar size vehicles in gated and retirement communities.
Dear humans at Rivian. If your vehicle didn't look like a cartoon, I might consider one. It's not conformity, or even ego. It's the same reason I don't wear a clown outfit in public.
I don't own a lot of things, but they all look nice.
I don't like those headlights also. I think it's a case of when founders bring too much of their personality into the product. Otherwise great product and this self drive system at least has a sound start (track objects across video frames)
People complained about the Prius, but plenty of people drove Mini Coopers, which looked even more ridiculous and were far less functional. You can't please everybody.
I don't even really understand the complaint. I quite like the way Rivians look.
It's a fairly generic body shape, but the headlamp and grille shape is distinctively "happy" instead of "aggressive" (this is a real thing, and it's intentionally designed for in lamp/grille shapes on cars)
Personally, I don't want "aggressive" near my cars. They kill enough people already, and I'm tired by how common it is for manufacturers to push aggressive body shapes.
Google Maps, the lack of CarPlay, and the lack of amber turn signals turned me away from Rivian but otherwise I would love them. I particularly like how their brake pedals feel, although I'm not a fan of the accelerator being so far off the floor.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't really want to be just sitting in my car tapping my knees while the car drives for me.
I'd rather these guys just focus on building a Euro spec model of the R3 and getting it over here.
Tapping your knees? Is this a euphemism?
"You are right, that was a red light!"
At first I was skeptical, but reading the article, they do track object across video frames which for me it's the minimum a system like this should do. All previous FSD systems are just Fake self-driving.
"That proprietary AI driver identifies features in images and point clouds, groups them into objects, and tracks them across frames, time-stamped to the millisecond to account for differing frame rates. The AI thus builds confidence over time, acting on object detections that persist across several frames, rather than, say, slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame."
> The AI thus builds confidence over time, acting on object detections that persist across several frames, rather than, say, slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame.
Nice in theory but in practice they still need a ton of training data. The bitter lesson is very bitter. Tesla's end to end FSD uses occupancy networks and brake stabbing still hasn't been fully solved.
> slamming the brakes due to a camera blip on a single frame
Ironically, I'm sure most humans have done the eyeball equivalent a handful of times, despite our knowledge of object permeance.
> Rivian says it will charge $49.99 a month, or $2,500 up front, versus Tesla’s $99 per month for its rival system, which is somewhat misleadingly called Full Self-Driving (Supervised), or FSD. Mercedes, meanwhile, plans to charge $3,950 for a three-year subscription for the forthcoming MB.Drive Assist Pro
If and when FSD systems become a reality and are safer than human drivers, I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars, just as they did reversing cameras, airbags, automated emergency braking, and other once-optional safety features.
Hmm, that would mean forcing every car sold to be controllable remotely by a corporation. Sounds like something regulators would indeed do, but also, doesn’t sound too great for consumers, to put it mildly
I think given how far companies like XPeng are with their systems in China. This is more a question of "when" than "if" with the when part narrowed to a time range of perhaps 2027-2029. Xpeng seems to be planning for 2027. Not in the US of course but the rest of the world is a big place.
I expect that by the mid 2030s this will be widely used across most car markets in both L2 driver assist form and L4 style autonomous taxis active in most large cities on all continents. L4/L5 level driving for privately owned cars might trail that a bit but I think the technical arguments against that are rapidly evaporating as well. The arguments are increasingly about regulation, insurance, liability, etc. I think the Chinese are a bit more pragmatic on this front and more likely to just get this done domestically by the early 2030s and will be deploying this globally by the mid 2030s. The only question real question is whether the US and Europe will do that before or after them and whether that will be with their own tech or somebody else's.
Rivian seems to have all the right tech and strategy.
I think insurance companies might beat the regulators, in terms of incentivizing safer vehicles via discounts.
Which would then offset these monthly subscriptions by car companies.
why wouldn't the FSD company itself integrate into insurance? they have the error rate data which is king for insurance. seems like free real estate.
If it gets too embedded into the revenues of the car companies, regulators are going to have a hard time making it required without a subscription. It could be that you just either have a car with a monthly payment or you don't.
Or just make the car more expensive up front? That's what all the other regulations do.
My 2025 model 3 has driven me over 95% of my last thousand miles. I'm frankly surprised it isn't more, but I'm not the only driver of the car.
It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc
Out of curiosity, do you live in a place that gets heavy snow? I've always felt that FSD would struggle to handle heavy snow fall, roads with snow banks on the sides and difficult driving/braking conditions in the snow and on ice patches.
For any doubters: using a 2025 model is a key detail here. It's the latest hardware version of the self driving computer. The older cars on the road are stuck with significantly worse FSD software because the hardware is far too weak.
FSD 14 lite, which is now available for the HW3 (~2019-2023) Teslas, is surprisingly good. I have a HW3 and HW4, and while HW3 isn't as confident and competent as HW4, it's good enough that I don't mind it anymore. My wife was planning on trading in the HW3 for a new Model Y next year, and now she might just wait a few more years.
I have a 2020 M3 on HW3 with v14 lite and it's very good. But even v12 was pretty good. I drove an HW4 as a loaner and did not notice a significant difference. I think the big difference would be on the long-tail of edge conditions, but I'm not sure.
It's too cheap if it requires updates
>I would expect that regulators will require them on all cars
That assumes that suppliers are available to affordably add it.
So far Tesla is the only company remotely close to unsupervised self-driving that doesn't add $1000s to the BoM cost of the car.
> So far Tesla is the only company remotely close to unsupervised self-driving that doesn't add $1000s to the BoM cost of the car.
What makes you think it doesn't? All those cameras, the expensive chips and cooling for them, and redundancy for all the systems don't come free.
For a Tesla, the estimates are around $2K. For a Waymo, the same estimates are ~$25K (down from $125K!!!). There's not a clear timeline for Waymo-style kit at a price consumers can afford and in a form factor they'd accept.
(FWIW, the business story for Waymo has never been about its hardware making its way to consumers. It's always been about whether Waymo continues to run its own taxi service or leases out hardware and operations to other taxi businesses).
Not sure I'd agree that the Tesla estimate is accurate for the truly driverless versions they've started releasing in Austin. Maybe for the standard ones you can buy. There's reporting on the additional telematics packs that have been added to Model Y cars in their Robotaxi fleet, so who knows what that costs.
Cybercab has double the RAM and a bit more memory bandwidth, but otherwise it's the same 8 external mono RGB cameras.
It's maybe $1.5K of BoM total for the chip, memory, and cameras.
Teslas also require a couple of OoMs more interventions driving the same distance than Waymos.
>For a Tesla, the estimates are around $2K
Where are you seeing this? The estimates I've seen all land around $1K.
The God's Eye B system of BYD adds under $600 to the BoM.
The 5 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors are $100-150. LiDAR is $150-200. The 12 cameras, control unit, and 300 TOPs of computing is $150-200. This computing is comparable to what Tesla puts on their consumer cars, and the sensors suite is much more extensive. (The current robotaxis have about the same computing power as the consumer cars but a lot more RAM).
Right, but God's Eye B isn't anywhere near good enough for unsupervised self-driving. The hardware isn't the issue; the software just isn't in the same league as Tesla FSD.
You were talking about the hardware costs to support self-driving. The God's Eye B compute hardware is similar to the compute hardware in current consumer Tesla cars and the sensor hardware is a superset (more cameras plus LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonics), but adds less than $600 to the BoM, which shouldn't be a major barrier to it being mandated on new cars once the software is up to the task.
Sure. So long as I don't have to pay for it.
Which will pose an interesting problem; we’ll have to pay a subscription to legally be allowed to drive our car on the road. As much as I’m excited for autonomous driving I’m not excited for the legal implications that follow
That small lidar embedded into the front window glass is very sleek looking. Overall I like their design and what they choose to focus on. Their description of what is important for an LDM is is spot on, I love a boring drive without excitement or flare.
I think this article is underestimating Tesla and very much underestimating how hard Level 4 autonomy is. The long-tail of edge conditions to handle is really long, and Rivian is only at the beginning.
What Rivian is going to release at the end of 2026 is what Tesla had 3 years ago. All that time has gone to dealing with edge conditions: bike lanes, emergency vehicles, construction zones, and all the crazy one-off situations that their fleet has seen.
Tesla's fleet is an order of magnitude larger, so events that Rivian has seen only once, Tesla already has ten examples of. And rare events that Tesla has trained on, Rivian has never yet seen.
I will say this, though: Rivian is the closest competitor to Tesla (not counting Chinese cars). Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing. And the robotaxi game is going to be all about manufacturing.
I control+f'd LiDAR and got hits confirming they're using it, which means it's already better than anything Tesla is capable of offering
Waymo is first to market by retrofitting a bunch of Jaguars nobody else would buy. They can keep that arbitrage up for a while.
Can you elaborate why robotaxi success will hinge on manufacturing?
> Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean but the car itself (chassis, bodywork, drivetrain) is a commodity today. If you can turn any car into an autonomous car then the car isn't worth that much in the self-driving game. Tesla's stock is propped by the promise of becoming the first to achieve autonomy not by its ability to build cars, or else VW and Toyota would be worth multiples of Tesla. They aren't because cars are a commodity. Autonomous car brains are the hot deal.
If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
It's like saying Linux will lose out to Microsoft when it comes to manufacturing. Yes, they do lose out by not manufacturing anything and yet their product is slowly taking over the market. Local loss (no profit from manufacturing), global win (core product is increasing market share).
> If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
They won't even have to (partially) buy any manufacturer - they can utilize contract manufacturers like Magna Steyr (which made the Jaguar I-Pace) or Foxconn, or lean on/expand partnerships like the one they have with Toyota.
There are two factors to Teslas overvaluation I think. The first one is as you stated but the second one is the promise of humanoid robotics.
> Compared to, say, a large language model that writes news or fiction... an autonomous-driving AI is less subjective and easier to evaluate, so there’s little room for error.
That's brave. What about all the edge cases?
They're talking about verification. Was there a collision or not compared to is this story good.
I can think of scenarios that avoid collision in probably 95% of the cases while being bad choices
- Driving through an empty prairie
- Driving slowly through a crowded square, giving people enough time to jump out of the way
There's less gray area with driving wss the point. Legal or illegal, efficient or inefficient. And whatever gray area remains is generally "good enough" compared to human drivers on the road.
It's easy evaluate if there's no victims. Stats say there's more than 6000 injuries per day and more than 16000 deaths per year on the road.
If you choose between hitting a pedestrian and swerving potentially injuring the driver and totaling the car, what would you like the car to pick? Or any given trolley problem variation, etc
Isn't Tesla already there?
I took a fully-autonomyous Cybercab to a coffee shop yesterday; it doesn't even have a steering wheel. It was just a short drive, but it handled various complications (a garbage truck, double-parked cars, construction, unpainted speed bumps) with aplomb. The driving felt extremely smooth and human-like (better, in my experience, than Waymo, which can still be a bit jerky).
> Isn't Tesla already there?
Those operate in constrained areas of a few cities though - with a control room, that's a long way from telling your car to drive across state unattended.
Sooo, Rivian is a chip maker now. That's cool, I guess.
I’m surprised they allow open lid drinks in the lab. One wrong bump and poof 300K easy.
I see a lot of Self-driving cars hitting people vs. reckless drivers hitting people.
What I want is simple: accountability. If a human hits a human, we throw the book at them in the case of a modality of negligence. If a robot screws up, how do we remedy and discourage?
It should be 100% liability on the self-driving car. Only by doing that will there be enough incentive for the manufacturers to drive the accident rate down to zero (or in practice a low enough number that the cost to manufacturer of the remaining accidents is negligible). Less than 100% liability provides wiggle room, which car manufacturers will exploit to maximise profits over lives. With 100% liability manufacturers can still make a pile of money, but only if they have a low accident rate.
Point of fact: we do not treat vehicular homicide seriously in the American legal system.
Hold the manufacturer equally liable. Easy.
The shenanigans AI companies have been up to recently (including boasting about criminal behaviour hacking other companies) without repercussions is pretty good proof that it isn't "easy".
[flagged]
"Don't be snarky."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I see, you'd prefer to continue the prior experiment of humans flying around corners in multi-thousand-pound vehicles, over the speed limit, while sipping coffee and looking at the radio?
>looking at the radio?
Current trend nowadays is watching tiktok, though thankfully I've only seen it at red lights, but that might just be because I'm not staring at other drivers when driving around at 40mph.
I was behind someone just the other week that was actively scrolling tiktok/reels while driving on a 3-lane road during rush hour with what appeared to be at least 2 kids in the back.
Where did he said that? A new experiment can be done, responsibly, right?
The difficulty in getting to an agreement on what "responsible" means, and on how a "failure" should be handled means that said experiment will never occur. Nothing is ever safe enough and no failure is acceptable -- so no test which can fail can be run.
A situation which would be in obvious conflict (negative expected value) with the goal of saving the man hours and lives currently being cost by manual driving.
So what does this mean for Timmy (16 years old) learning how to drive? Should that also be banned, lest he runs over some kid? Or does he get a pass because he's a human and not a faceless corporation? Maybe he can repay the favor in 60 years when he gets run over by another teenager learning how to drive?
I'm torn on this.
I do want safer vehicles and I do see a path to get there with this technology.
What I don't want is companies training their technologies with legitimate risk to the public, with a clear pathway to profiting off of this risk and public data, with no benefit to the public _unless_ they happen to succeed, and to some degree, unless you can afford their products. Something feels off about that.
Of course, everyone benefits if vehicles are safer, but it does feel like there is an extractive factor regardless. These companies benefit from public resources, are wholly enabled by public resources, but are trying to create a situation in which the technologies they create are more or less required to be used in order to utilize the public resource. Does that make sense? I suppose it's inferred, but, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe any car manufacturer with a working FSD technology would LOVE to have that technology mandated to be on every new vehicle. Imagine leasing that to every manufacturer who didn't develop it themselves so they could continue to sell in the USA.
On one hand, safer vehicles are a MUST because we allow an absurd number of people to die due to unsafe driving every day. On the other hand, I don't feel right about private companies benefiting so much from roads the public built, while training their technology with some degree of risk imposed on the public, and with no clear desire in these companies to give back. They tend to pay paltry sums in taxes, if any. Rivian was at a net loss of over 4 billion for 2024. I understand they're trying to build something that requires massive capital, but, I also understand that these companies are experts at operating at a loss for prolonged periods of time. Amazon is a stellar example.
This definitely cuts both ways, but I'm not sure exactly where I stand. I need more information to decide, but I'm confident that there is some degree of exploitation of public data and resources here. I'm not trying to imply Tesla, Waymo, or Rivian are the only ones guilty of this either. The tragedy of the commons is a well-known phrase because it's such a typical phenomenon. I'm also not suggesting that there's a simple solution. There can't be because the fragmentation of the polities in which these companies operate and train their technology within.
Yes, he would be banned from driving if he ran over a kid. Self-driving models and the companies that create them have not been banned so far, even after they cause accidents.
>Yes, he would be banned from driving if he ran over a kid.
Realistically no, unless he was hilariously reckless.
> SMITH: There’s the case that happened with the little boy on the Upper West Side, Cooper Stock. He and his dad were crossing the street. And a driver was making a turn, and he just ran over the little boy, didn’t see him.
> SMITH: So right now all that is is a summons to the driver for failing to yield. But it does not rise to the level of any kind of manslaughter or homicide charge. There was a study that showed that between 2008 and 2012 there were something like almost 1,300 fatal crashes in New York, and there were like 66 drivers arrested.
>Smith says that New York has some of the narrowest standards for conviction in the country. It’s called the “rule of two” — you need two significant violations of traffic laws in order to bring a charge, including some incredibly reckless or criminally negligent act. Otherwise, it’s just … an accident.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-2/
Maybe it's different in europe, but I doubt that'd be the case either unless there were several aggravating factors.
> Realistically no
And you had that one example to prove it. That settles it.
I know you want to make your point but stacking up fallacies (same in your "Timmy" comment) isn't helping [1]. Most humans grow up having personal responsibility, then at adult age the legal system puts even more on them. A lot more, on them personally, under threat of deprivation of freedom or monetary loss from their own pockets, or in the case of driving even something as small as losing the license. There are exceptions ("daddy pays" sort of thing).
Now contrast that with corporations, especially large ones, where almost every bit of responsibility is diffused behind a corporate veil that allows every single human to sidestep any personal responsibility whatsoever. Some shareholders' money take the plunge. And starting recently you can offload even more responsibility to the computer/AI.
I might lose my license if I cross a red light. Will a company lose the license to operate all autonomous cars when one crosses a red light?
[1]
> My anti-terrorism AI drone escaped the sandbox and shot up gruez's house. The drone was punished by removing its livery. What else can be done? What next, should we punish soldiers fighting terrorists too?"
> I tested my anti-cancer medication in the drinking water of the neighborhood. gruez got hit the hardest by the side effects, God rest his soul. But what can we do, ban cancer research?
When they say "narrowest", they mean that New York is one of the most difficult places to convict a driver. Right above what you quoted:
> Our neighbors have different vehicular laws than we do. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut have vehicular manslaughter statutes that punish traffic fatalities or serious injury that occurs because of simple negligence. New Jersey doesn’t have the same statute as Massachusetts or Connecticut, but even they have vehicular manslaughter statutes that encompass more behavior than what New York has, which is absolutely nothing other than drunk driving. So around the country — in Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Nevada, Kansas, California — all over the country, there are states with vehicular statutes that punish a failure to yield as a traffic fatality, that punish the driver.
So this seems to be a peculiarity of New York, I guess. Also, this is from 12 years ago on a podcast that has been widely criticized for inaccuracy and cherry-picking. I'd be curious if this was even true at the time, and if so, if it's still true or if the laws have changed.
Obviously local laws differ and I'm sure there are many exceptions, but it is very common to have your license suspended if you run over someone with your car.
Self-driving cars also operate at a far larger scale than individual human drivers. Over 300 people died in Boeing 737 crashes, but the entire aviation industry has not been shut down as a result.
the 737-max was grounded for almost two years, Boeing paid a $2bn+ fine and the CEO was fired.
To be fair, actual self-driving car business units have suffered similar fates. Uber's autonomy team was shut down after they killed Elaine Herzberg, and GM's Cruise was functionally destroyed after they contributed to a major bodily injury crash and tried to cover up their errors.
It's the level 2 consumer car companies that have mostly skated under a liability shield. Tesla FSD has been shit for a long time and paid very little price for it.
That's not really a useful comparison.
First, our current city driving environments were designed for being used by humans, so take into account human strengths and weaknesses.
Second, that kid has spent 16 years in such an environment learning how humans function there. He's got a very good model of how things work.
By the time I was 16 year old Timmy I'd spent a whole lot of time walking next to roads with cars, biking next to or in those roads with cars, and riding in cars on those roads. What was new when I was the driver was mostly learning the physics of cars and driving.
(I suppose nowadays, with the way parents can get in trouble letting kids out of their sight, we might have to worry about a generation of 16 year old Timmys who have not spent any significant time walking next to or biking next to or in roads with cars).
Third, that kid will have a pretty good model of predicting future behavior of other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists based on figuring out their intent, which can even let them make some pretty good predictions about them even when they are hidden or masked from the kid's sensors.
Fourth, Timmy has a bunch of knowledge learned from listening to other people, reading, movies, etc., that can be applied while driving. For example suppose they live somewhere where there are many cows, but no deer. If they see a cow near the road at a place with no fence, they will have an appropriate model from experience that tells them cows are generally slow moving. Be cautious when passing, maybe giving it some extra space.
If the see a deer even though they have no experience with them they likely know that deer often bolt rapidly into the road right when a car gets close due to hearing stories from people who live in deer heavy regions or from news, books, or TV/movies, so go slow and be very cautious passing that.
Autonomous cars have a big advantage in reaction time, so if a bad situation starts to unfold they are likely better at saving the day than Timmy (or an experienced human driver) would be, but at least the systems so far deployed so far don't seem to be up to Timmy's understanding of other actors and their intent. They also seem unlikely currently to have that widespread non-driving knowledge that can be called upon to understand novel situation involving things that was not in their driver training.
Civilized countries have the concept of a driving school, where you have to take 20 one hour lessons with an instructor who can override everything as well as theory lessons, followed by an independent state run exam, theory and practice.
Rivian didn't do any preliminary tests with safety drivers, or on a closed course?
You don't remember your own comment? In a civilized country, Timmy would have learned how to drive before being let loose.
Yeah about that, 16 is indeed far too young but it's somehow what has been agreed upon, no doubt whole-heartedly by the automotive industry.
> We're excited to tell you that your pedestrian kids are involuntarily participating in this innovative experiment
How dare you call my kids pedestrian. They're better than that.
Experimenting only on the boring ordinary kids doesn't seem fair either.
It's only when kids play in the streets that capitalist companies are to blame.
We never blame kids playing on publicly-subsidized subway infrastructure.
edit: https://www.aap.org/en/advocacy/community-health-and-advocac...
you'll never believe how modern public transit systems were kneecapped from the very beginning by big auto industry lobbyists (many such cases, for eg https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...)
The new Waymos (blue ones with sliding doors) are a dream to ride and come with built in voice Gemini.
car company != software company. Building a car gets you approximately 0% closer to knowing how to make a safe software driver. Writing AV software is exceptionally hard. We only have 2 safe functioning drivers presently: humans (debatable) and Waymo. Apple spent $7(?) billion and gave up. Uber and GM have also set billions on fire with nothing to show for it. Tesla might get there, but it could still be 5 years away.
> Tesla might get there
As of August Tesla had 80+ unsupervised taxis in operation with more than 380k miles driven total, and they are required to report incidents to the NHTSA. At the rate at which they are adding miles, if they are not now safer than human drivers, we should know soon.
"Unsupervised" is a joke, they literally have chase cars in case of an incident.
Rivian has actually split out the software side to a joint venture with Volkswagen Group (the group independent of the car company which the group owns with others like Audi and Porsche). I think the goal is to have a platform other brands can license
This is the move that will win. Once available at that level, it will get adopted into smaller vehicles. There would be a huge market for self-driving golf carts or similar size vehicles in gated and retirement communities.
Dear humans at Rivian. If your vehicle didn't look like a cartoon, I might consider one. It's not conformity, or even ego. It's the same reason I don't wear a clown outfit in public.
I don't own a lot of things, but they all look nice.
Until then, I enjoy the tech story.
I really like the way they look. Taste is subjective and. It absolute. Some people even like the cybertruck.
> It's not conformity, or even ego. It's the same reason I don't wear a clown outfit in public.
Why would someone with no ego care about looking foolish?
Why look foolish if you don't have to?
Lmao what are you talking about? Obviously this is all subjective. They're unique looking, maybe not your taste but clown car?... so dramatic.
I don't like those headlights also. I think it's a case of when founders bring too much of their personality into the product. Otherwise great product and this self drive system at least has a sound start (track objects across video frames)
People complained about the Prius, but plenty of people drove Mini Coopers, which looked even more ridiculous and were far less functional. You can't please everybody.
I don't even really understand the complaint. I quite like the way Rivians look.
It's a fairly generic body shape, but the headlamp and grille shape is distinctively "happy" instead of "aggressive" (this is a real thing, and it's intentionally designed for in lamp/grille shapes on cars)
Personally, I don't want "aggressive" near my cars. They kill enough people already, and I'm tired by how common it is for manufacturers to push aggressive body shapes.
Cars can be a form of signalling.
I had a coworker who sold his small lexus, because it made dating weird.
Google Maps, the lack of CarPlay, and the lack of amber turn signals turned me away from Rivian but otherwise I would love them. I particularly like how their brake pedals feel, although I'm not a fan of the accelerator being so far off the floor.