Back in August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Waymo can’t drive on highways because of the mix of sensors on the Alphabet company’s robotaxis.
Waymo’s fifth-generation autonomous driving platform has five lidars, six radar sensors, and 29 cameras.
It’s this mix of lidar, radar, and cameras, Musk wrote on X, that leads to “sensor contention” in which the information from the lidar and radars “disagree” with the cameras.
“This sensor ambiguity causes increased, not decreased, risk,” Musk wrote. “That’s why Waymos can’t drive on highways.”
On Wednesday, the robotaxi company began providing paid trips on major freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix for select users.
Business Insider demoed a freeway ride last week, taking the 101 freeway in California’s Bay Area. The route cut the commute time by 17 minutes compared to a Waymo ride without freeway access, Business Insider found. There were no notable incidents.
Musk has long been vocal about his stance against lidar — a type of sensor that shoots laser light to measure the distance to objects. While Tesla uses lidar for internal testing, Musk has said that the sensor is an expensive “crutch” that could get in the way of effectively scaling robotaxis.
“Anyone relying on lidar is doomed,” he said in 2019.
Musk, for his part, is not making up claims about sensors providing conflicting readings of the real-world environment.
Waymo employees themselves acknowledged in one 2022 research paper the need to address the “ambiguity” between the input from camera and radar sensors. However, that same paper explores a method that could mitigate — but not completely solve — the ambiguity in part by having the radar essentially double-check and refine the camera’s distance estimates.
Musk and a Tesla spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The Tesla CEO may be quick to dismiss Waymo’s progress, but he has also given the company its flowers.
During Tesla’s shareholder meeting on November 6, Musk thanked the company for “paving the path” for quicker regulatory approval around robotaxis. Today, replying to an X post from Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, about Waymo’s new highway access, Musk wrote, simply: “Congrats.”
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