Hacker News Reader

Many humans do a really bad job at driving, so I'm not sure we should try to emulate that.

And it is certain that in India they use sound sound for echolocation.

> Many humans do a really bad job at driving, so I'm not sure we should try to emulate that

Agreed, but there are still really good human drivers, who still operate on sight alone. It's more about the upper bound, not the human average, that can be achieved with only sight.

That upper bound can be pretty low in bad lighting conditions. If you have no strategy to work around that, your performance is going to be bad compared to vehicles with radar and lidar. On top of all that, Waymo's performance advantage might come in part from the staggering amount of geospatial data available to Waymo vehicles and unique to Waymo's parent company.

The second and third place companies in terms of the number of deployed robotaxis are both subsidiaries of large Chinese Internet platforms, and both of them are also leaders in providing geospatial data and navigation in China. Neither operates camera-only vehicles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com