Again, I’m not suggesting this. Bottleneck has a specific meaning. It means Waymo is limited by not having the ability to collect data. Well, clearly that’s not true because Waymo already has a reasonably scaled deployment across a dozen cities that no one else has and can handle millions of scenarios.

Real world data is absolutely required, but more of it doesn’t give you magical self driving ability as Uber’s CTO suggests. If it were the case, you’d see Tesla achieve fully autonomous driving years ago.

No one is suggesting the latter.

Accidents and near-collisions are exactly the kind of scenarios perfect for simulation. You don't test them out in the real world and risk injuries/deaths. You need to have confidence they're handled before you deploy.

Of course, Waymo still has much more room for improvement. But it's much more efficient to supplement less but higher quality IRL data with large amounts of synthetic data, than to run a million data collection vehicles 24x7 because most IRL data is boring and useless.

Waymo said 6 years ago they simulate 20 million miles every single day [1]. Clearly, it's working for them given their scale of deployment right now.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...

You can’t be the CTO of Uber wanting to do AVs, and get the data collection requirement shockingly wrong.

Waymo’s bottleneck has never been data. When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

Waymo is able to deploy with less (but targeted and high quality) data collection by having world class simulation capabilities. Not that they haven't collected huge amounts of data as it's no doubt important (I've heard their onboard storage is transferred and emptied every few days), it's just not a bottleneck. They have the most efficient operation in the AV industry.

The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47946934

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137493

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Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.

So let's use a metric that unequivocally shows who is 'winning'. I'm confident Waymo will have more paid rides per week than Tesla at the start of 2027 (I'll give you 2028 if you want). No other metric indicates scale better than passenger trips. If you have more robotaxis or you are in more cities, it will show up in the trip count.

I'll give $1000 to a charity of your choosing if Tesla beats Waymo in this metric. Fully unsupervised trips only, does not include trips with a safety driver or a monitor in a passenger seat, none of the usual games they like to play.

[1] https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla

[2] https://x.com/ethanmckanna/status/2022803049551372395

Heard this for a decade now, but I’m sure this year will be different!

“13781-13644 Street, Heavy truck, No injuries, Proceeding Straight (Heavy truck: parked), 4mph, contact area: left”

> The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.

…

> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990578

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