Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.
There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.
I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me.
The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty.
> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
I would firmly disagree with that.
What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc.
The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips.
The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors.
If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now.
SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.
I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.
It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.
Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving?
As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
Human inner ear is worse than a $3 IMU in your average smartphone in literally every way. And that IMU also has a magnetometer in it.
Beating human sensors wasn't hard for over a decade now. The problem is that sensors are worthless. Self-driving lives and dies by AI - all the sensors need to be is "good enough".
(1) is true, but actually driving is definitely harder without hearing or with diminished hearing. And Several US states, including CA, prohibit inhibiting hearing while driving, e.g., by wearing a headset, earbuds, or earplugs.
I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
I think past experience shows that the US prefers a wait and see approach - owning in part I think to it federal structure, where states compete for companies good graces and money, so if State A bans something, State B will allow it and gain an advantage in that area.
Moreover, why draw a hard line on vision only when there is existing technology is available to augment it? It's not like they have to develop 3 novel technologies.
There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible.
(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
(Also former Cruise employee)
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs"
Nice abbreviation.
I loved it.
Elon in shambles
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450
Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.
I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
Because they bought a Tesla with only cameras on it.
Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving.
Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
I think his companies succeeded despite Elon. Tesla should be a $5T company and he fucked it up.
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.
There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.
I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?
Especially the part where the cameras do not meet minimum vision requirements [1] in many states where it operates such as California and Texas.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43605034
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me.
The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty.
FSD doesn't "work fine" driving directly into the sun. There are loads of YT videos that demonstrate this.
> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
I would firmly disagree with that.
What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc.
The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips.
The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors.
If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now.
SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.
His autopilot has killed several people, sometimes the owner of the car, sometimes other drivers sharing the road. It is hard to root for this guy.
I certainly don't trust anything he says 100%.
This is - to me - entirely separate from the fact that his companies routinely revolutionize industries.
If only there was a filter so we could fuse different sensor measurements into a better whole..
I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.
It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.
The terms of service probably require you to sue Tesla in that Texas district with his corrupt judge pal.
Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
> humans only use vision to drive
I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving?
As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
Human inner ear is worse than a $3 IMU in your average smartphone in literally every way. And that IMU also has a magnetometer in it.
Beating human sensors wasn't hard for over a decade now. The problem is that sensors are worthless. Self-driving lives and dies by AI - all the sensors need to be is "good enough".
Involved? Yes. Necessary? Pretty sure no.
If it makes you happy, you can read "only vision" as "no lidar or radar." Cars already have microphones and IMUs.
> hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved
Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections.
1. in US you can get a driver's license if you're deaf so as a society we think you can drive without hearing
2. since this is in context of Tesla: tesla cars do have microphones and FSD does use it for responding to sirens etc.
(1) is true, but actually driving is definitely harder without hearing or with diminished hearing. And Several US states, including CA, prohibit inhibiting hearing while driving, e.g., by wearing a headset, earbuds, or earplugs.
I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
I think past experience shows that the US prefers a wait and see approach - owning in part I think to it federal structure, where states compete for companies good graces and money, so if State A bans something, State B will allow it and gain an advantage in that area.
Moreover, why draw a hard line on vision only when there is existing technology is available to augment it? It's not like they have to develop 3 novel technologies.
[flagged]
There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).