Tesla's approach thinks white trailers are open sky. The river comparison is not unreasonable at all.
Almost all of the startups in the space are following the Tesla approach of just throwing machine learning at the problem which means almost all work in the space suffers from novel input producing unpredictable results. This is one of the things that has killed trained and evolved systems in the past and the fact that few of the companies in this space are even trying to manage it (either by building interpretable models or by using models and using ML to do parameter fitting) is a good indicator that the whole business is either a fraud or is built on the premise that with enough data or, for the un-cautious and unaware, enough simulation, the problem solves itself.
I think what we are actually seeing is that Waymo (where, in ten years, they might have a solution) and Tesla (which is mostly worst-in-class but as a company is the master of hype) drove hype around self-driving. Then Uber and Lyft latched on (because they needed a story to paper over their terrible economics) and pushed it even higher. The Otto thing and Cruise's acquisition made VCs pay attention.
So these companies are acquisition bait for the assumed-clueless big auto companies. They will not deliver self-driving cars. At best they will deliver next-generation enhancements to emergency braking, etc.
Almost all of the startups in the space are following the Tesla approach of just throwing machine learning at the problem which means almost all work in the space suffers from novel input producing unpredictable results. This is one of the things that has killed trained and evolved systems in the past and the fact that few of the companies in this space are even trying to manage it (either by building interpretable models or by using models and using ML to do parameter fitting) is a good indicator that the whole business is either a fraud or is built on the premise that with enough data or, for the un-cautious and unaware, enough simulation, the problem solves itself.
I think what we are actually seeing is that Waymo (where, in ten years, they might have a solution) and Tesla (which is mostly worst-in-class but as a company is the master of hype) drove hype around self-driving. Then Uber and Lyft latched on (because they needed a story to paper over their terrible economics) and pushed it even higher. The Otto thing and Cruise's acquisition made VCs pay attention.
So these companies are acquisition bait for the assumed-clueless big auto companies. They will not deliver self-driving cars. At best they will deliver next-generation enhancements to emergency braking, etc.