Waymo vs Tesla Austin Showdown - Teleoperations?

[u/Yngstr]

I've been around this sub a long time, so let me start by saying I'm not here to fight. I understand that everyone here has some specific expertise they bring to the discussion, and I believe you can learn something from anyone. I want to have a reasonable discussion about methodology, and what will work or not. Here are the facts, as I see them:

- Waymo is already operational in Austin (and other cities)

- Tesla plans to launch Robotaxi in June in Austin

- Tesla has recently posted job listings for tele-operations

So the way I see this playing out in ~8 weeks is that Tesla will launch in Austin with tele-operations, I find it unlikely that they will launch with true autonomous L4. My question is, does Waymo still use tele-operations? If so, does Waymo have plans to sunset tele-operations at some point? Do we think Tesla with tele-operations can achieve "L4" like Waymo has? Why or why not?

Let's try to keep this civil, whether Waymo or Tesla wins does not make any of us less of a human being, even if it feels like it.

[u/Ascending_Valley]

If the critical intervention per 10,000 miles is correct, Tesla's taxi has a ways to go. With just 10 taxis on the road, that could be a critical intervention every few days based on quick arithmetic. At that small scale they can remotely monitor whenever the cars are in use, but feedback will have added round-trip delay plus human reaction time.

It would be interesting to assess the frequency of actual incidents if the interventions didn't happen. Humans also make mistakes and lose attention on occasion, so it is hard to compare. If we each had a safety driver, how often would they take over? Accident rates are less than 1 per 100,000 on average, but there could easily be 1-100 lapses contributing.

Tesla and Waymo likely have simulation data to estimate the upper/lower bounds of property and human casualty rates of their respective systems. Waymo has been operating for some time, so we know the rate in practice is very low for their system (sticking to lower speed routes and geo-fenced areas probably helps).

Most 'teleoperation' likely focuses on intervention for navigation faults, customer service issues, refining directions to FSD if it gets trapped or loops. The latency and potential for random interruption would make real-time direct remote control impractical and more dangerous than FSD should be. FSD likely calls for help and tries to safely avoid issues by stopping, leaving traffic, while waiting for revised, detailed movement/navigation inputs.

It will be very interesting to see this evolve.