Vision-only is very very very far behind other techniques. Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.
Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity.
Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. The legacy manufacturers will end up licensing one or the other, a la Android/iOS.
1. Waymo costs around $120,000 and the cost is rapidly dropping with new hardware generations and vehicle platforms. They’re in LA, soon in Austin, airport rides in Phoenix and imminent highway driving.
2. Tesla and Comma are only L2, not even L3.
And Phoenix, and very soon LA, and very soon Austin. They're expanding, not staying in one spot for eternity.
> Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles.
What a coincidence, because L2 (what Tesla actually is) to L4 self driving are millions of miles away from each other.
The race is on, and if Tesla can fix a large number of small issue, they'll be able to do a massive global rollout fairly rapidly.
Maybe Tesla's approach isn't the way to go.
Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could
The levels aren’t just slapped on by the companies for vanity. They indicate liability and therefore capability.
Waymo's approach is a Level 4 system from the start, but in a very limited operating environments, and slowly expanding.
Too many sources to cite but here is Wikipedia
> Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?
Sure we do. Your options are, a as-good-as-a-human-driver for 1 unit of cost, or a better-than-human-driver at 1000 units of cost. Realistically, which do you pick?
Other tech like Waymo is good. They drive well. But it's not scalable--expensive mapping and hundreds of thousands of lines of code written to address the nuances of whatever city they specialize the solution to. Not to mention that they only operate in cities with sunny weather all year round!