Waymo CEO Explains Why Camera-Only Self-Driving Falls Short (electrek.co)
- Reference: 0184872970
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/08/05/229237/waymo-ceo-explains-why-camera-only-self-driving-falls-short
- Source link: https://electrek.co/2026/08/04/waymo-co-ceo-camera-only-self-driving-tesla/
> Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for [2]why cameras alone can't take a self-driving system to full autonomy , arguing that "weak sensing" hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. [...] Dolgov made the comments in a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School, walking through the lessons Waymo has learned building its driver over close to two decades. He put the sensor question on the table plainly: "there's been a long-standing debate about what kind of sensors do you actually need for autonomous driving."
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> His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. "Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence," he said. "If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that's a very reasonable way to go." Then the catch. If you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, "you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early."
Dolgov said that cameras, lidar, and radar are complementary rather than redundant: "These different sensing modalities, they're not backups to each other," and combining them produces a view "vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor." He said multiple sensor types also protect against physical failures, such as a leaf or branch blocking a camera, while helping Waymo climb the "exponential ladder of nines" required for fully driverless safety.
Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." He also pushed back on the cost argument against lidar, calling it "a number that has a fairly short shelf life" as hardware costs continue to fall.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~AmiMoJo
[2] https://electrek.co/2026/08/04/waymo-co-ceo-camera-only-self-driving-tesla/
Gosh Elon... (Score:2)
"Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." It's almost as if he's been studying the history of your self driving claims.
Lidar falls short too (Score:4, Interesting)
Snow, rain, fog, changes in roads, construction, flooding. There are hundreds of novel situations Waymo fails at. It is easy to trash your competitors but far harder to deliver true driverless cars.
And before the Waymo gooners show up to defend them, lets just get this out of the way: Waymo has millions of short trips, but all of their miles combined are just rounding error on the number of trips that happen in a single day in the United States. The plain fact is that they are largely unproven from a statistical perspective, especially on highway and novel situation driving
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> Snow, rain, fog, changes in roads, construction, flooding. There are hundreds of novel situations Waymo fails at. It is easy to trash your competitors but far harder to deliver true driverless cars.
> And before the Waymo gooners show up to defend them, lets just get this out of the way: Waymo has millions of short trips, but all of their miles combined are just rounding error on the number of trips that happen in a single day in the United States. The plain fact is that they are largely unproven from a statistical perspective, especially on highway and novel situation driving
You're concerned about if it's actually capable of delivering meatsacks safely to a destination.
You should be FAR more concerned with the finger-pointing corruption that will ensure anyone killed by a murderous autonomous car, will NEVER be able to face the actual entity responsible. Because 37 legal entities exist between the gas pedal and the steering wheel.
By Fuck-You design.
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> Snow, rain, fog, changes in roads, construction, flooding. There are hundreds of novel situations Waymo fails at.
You're addressing a claim that wasn't made just so you can ignore the claim that was made.
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> Snow, rain, fog, changes in roads, construction, flooding.
Humans fuck those up also. It's just that traffic fortunately tends to be light during bad weather so that our screwups have limited impact. During the last heavy rain I drove in at night I probably made 10+ traffic violations because I couldn't see the damned lines. Fortunately there weren't a lot of other cars around to be co-confused with: the wise stayed home.
And if there is traffic in bad weather, such as work commutes, one just typically follo
Re: (Score:2)
I completely agree. Waymo has a lot of work to do.
And it isn't just passenger safety - those things are a menace during civil emergencies. There needs to be both a lot of work put in to contextually proper response to exceptional circumstances - from what should be easy stuff like " [1]don't block fire trucks or drive over fire hoses [sfstandard.com]" on through figuring out how to safely get out of the way when [2]power goes out [sfstandard.com]. For reference, right now we're at the point where they still [3]confuse themselves [ktvu.com].
Of course if you
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/07/10/waymo-robotaxi-emergency-response/
[2] https://sfstandard.com/2025/12/23/wtf-happened-waymo-blackout-industry-experts-have-guesses/
[3] https://www.ktvu.com/news/waymo-standoff-san-francisco-goes-viral
Took them a long time to figure that out (Score:2)
The DARPA demonstrations made too many people too sure that multiple cameras and AI would make self-drivers cars simple to pull off. Then they followed up with tests where it's warm and dry and the weather doesn't get weird. They wanted to get investment in before things started getting interesting. What they've got now is a technology that has slowed down and needs to learn more about what to do when there's a road crew digging holes in front of them. It's going to be much more of an adventure then the opt
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Except Tesla FSD works better than humans already. I haven't had to do a critical intervention ever. There are hundreds of thousands of users daily .. no fatal accidents.
The same problem as AI (Score:2)
AI is proving to be a useful augment to skilled humans, but not a replacement. We were promised a robot and instead have invented a robotic arm. I think LiDAR based driving is headed in the same direction.
The systems they have invented are a great augment to human judgment, but not a replacement for it. I would love to buy a car equipped with Waymoâs lane and collision detection, but I would certainly not trust a Waymo in most cases and especially in serious weather.
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Just don't do that while driving into the sunset...
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Thanks for you input, Elon.
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Tesla FSD; First Snort Drugs
Humans do more then see (Score:3, Interesting)
First, humans use other senses like hearing. Second, humans use reasoning. Humans are better at making inferences to fill in missing information. Humans also use world models to help make decisions. Not a whole lot of AI approaches do this. However, the machines will ultimately win. Human performance sucks. It isn't hard to beat it. We already see this in aviation where the standards and expectations for machines are much higher for political reasons even though the autopilot is the better pilot in the cockpit
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Humans have already lost. Both Waymo and Tesla FSD have better "accident per mile" numbers than humans. By a lot, it's not margin of error it's not driving locales. They have mimicked human reasoning for nearly all relevant situations aside from highly contrived scenarios you may dream up but never see in real life. It even understands construction worker gestures and signs.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a1BlHQlaq-o
Lidar is nice, not required (Score:2)
I think the Rivian approach is the best. They're basically copying the Tesla model of having their fleet send the sensor recordings back and then using them as training data. While they're far behind right now, they'll catch up quickly, as they can copy a lot of the basic technology that's now established instead of having to invent everything from scratch and make wrong decisions along the way. The difference is Rivian is including lidar, so they just include the matched video and lidar recordings as a
I worked on self driving software (Score:2)
...years ago
I strongly agreed that lidar and radar would be necessary in addition to cameras. The projects I worked on used them.
My concerns with cameras were dirty lenses and limited dynamic range.
It's interesting that Tesla seems to be making a camera only approach work well.
I continue to follow developments, but will admit that I was wrong is the evidence shows it.
Laughable (Score:2)
Again he already admitted to Congress that when they need the vehicles to do anything more complicated than basic Lane assist driving it's a call center in the Philippines doing the actual driving. I think there is also a center in United States but they weren't clear on when or if it's gets used.
You can look it up on google. It's amazing how different their tune gets when they are under oath to Congress...
This isn't the future this is just more outsourcing and you're going to be on the road with re
Meaningless statements? (Score:3)
His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. "Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence," he said. "If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that's a very reasonable way to go." Then the catch. If you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, "you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early." Those all seem like meaningless statements to me.
Re:Meaningless statements? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's saying "do you want robot cars to be as good as humans, or safer?"
If the goal is just "as good as a human" then (in theory) we have "proof of concept" that that can be achieved (humans drive cars all the time) ...
... but, humans also get in accidents all the time. If the goal of self-driving cars is to do *better* than the humans, stopping at what humans can achieve (with "cameras (eyes) only"), safety-wise, isn't good enough. If you want "safer than human", as Google evidently does, you need LIDAR.
Double standard for bots (Score:3)
I believe the goal has to be "better than humans" because humans seem to have a double standard for bots per screwups. Bots F-ing up spread like wildfire on social media.
Maybe we are collectively bigoted against automation, but being bots probably won't lobby to correct that or fight for their (alleged) rights, that's probably the way it will stay (at least until true sentience). Thus, I agree with the premise the driving system must be better than a human driver to be accepted.
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> If you want "safer than human", as Google evidently does, you need LIDAR.
No you don't. Humans get distracted, drunk, and drowsy. Automation doesn't. That's where automation is safer than humans.
Lidar and radar can add safety, but they do not guarantee it.
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> ... but, humans also get in accidents all the time. If the goal of self-driving cars is to do *better* than the humans, stopping at what humans can achieve (with "cameras (eyes) only"), safety-wise, isn't good enough. If you want "safer than human", as Google evidently does, you need LIDAR
How about we get as good as humans first, and then we can talk about being better than humans. Sorry, even Waymo is not there yet. The claim is that safety performance is due to a lack of being able to see and more sensors is the solution. If we take that statement at face value (ie lacking data), then additional cameras could just as easily overcome the limitation as additional sensing modalities. But most accidents caused by humans are due to judgement errors, not an inability to see, so one could just as
Re: Meaningless statements? (Score:3)
All of those words have meanings and make sense as he used them. Your lack of comprehension isn't his fault.
What's crazy is imagining that a computer can definitely do what a brain does when we don't even know how the brain does it. MAYBE it can, but we have no proof of that.
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It doesn't need to do everything a brain can do. Autonomous driving doesn't need to get a boner when it sees noods for example. Maybe you're thinking of Turing completeness which is another story.
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This is true, indeed as you allude there is much that a brain does that you don't want your software to do. But you may not be able to separate all of those things away from the things you do want without going badly awry, either. Also, some of those things may be artifacts of the attached peripherals.
Meaningless statements (Score:2)
> All of those words have meanings and make sense as he used them. Your lack of comprehension isn't his fault.
> What's crazy is imagining that a computer can definitely do what a brain does when we don't even know how the brain does it. MAYBE it can, but we have no proof of that.
What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.
It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower
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They're not meaningless, they're just obvious. Humans drive using their eyes. You should be able to get a bit of superhuman performance because you can have lots of cameras, but they're not going to be able to see things cameras can't see.
On the other hand, "camera" can be a pretty broad term. There's no particular reason to restrict your cameras to the human visible spectrum, or not to equip them with IR floodlights for example.
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> Humans also drive using feedback from their ass (but really accelerometers in their ears and also the rest of kinesthetic feedback from the whole of their body).
> This is obvious, yes?
So do the self driving cars. The computer is constantly evaluating input from many sensors simultaneously
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Automation is safer because it doesn't get distracted, drunk, or drowsy, not because it uses lidar. Adding lidar can add safety, but it doesn't guarantee it.
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He's lying.
"Better than humans" is possible with cameras only, because most of the errors humans make have nothing to with their eyes. Humans get distracted, drunk, and tired. Automation doesn't.
I'm sure lidar and radar can do better than cameras alone. But lidar and radar do not guarantee better than humans.
He's just trying to justify his expensive system.
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> Humans get distracted, drunk, and tired. Automation doesn't.
It doesn't get tired. It might get into an altered state. It can definitely get distracted, and get confused about what something even is so long that it's a problem. It doesn't have infinite resources.
Using other types of sensors takes guesswork out of certain decisions. If you can measure density and depth like you can with a mix of sensors which don't even include cameras then you can reliably do AEB which overrides your beloved optical-only system and keeps it from screwing the pooch.
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You didn't read what I wrote. The claim is that camera-only automated cars can never be safer than human cars. That's wrong, because the safety comes from automation itself being a better driver than a human, even if it only has cameras . Other sensors may or may not add safety. The do not guarantee additional safety.
An automated car can also be worse than a human driver, even with a dozen sensors. But it won't be because of the sensors.
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More importantly, cameras can be better because they can have real binocular vision, no blind spots, and plenty of redundancy. No, current systems don't have that, and I am happy my Tesla still has/uses ultrasonic sensors for better distance estimation close-in. Ultimately by the point cameras are completely useless, so are humans. Get off the road and wait for better conditions!