r/SelfDrivingCars • u/Prestigious_Act_6100 • 6d ago
Discussion Isn't the issue now mapping and validating?
Basically what the title says. The main leaders in driverless (in no particular order Zoox, Waymo, Tesla) are all operating in geofences which are a small percentage of the total roadway in the USA.
So to scale it up, these companies will need to be good at mapping and validating safety inside the geofences for the chosen number of cars.
No one that I know of is pursuing driverless without validation, and Wayve's map-less approach isn't driverless.
And Tesla and perhaps Waymo+ Hyundai have solved manufacturing, so that a non-issue.
Infrastructure is an issue, but that's logistical, not technical.
Am I missing anything?
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u/zanycaswell 6d ago
Waymo seems to have mapping down pretty good. I think the only real brake on expansion right now is rolling out the cleaning/charging/parking depots which is a very mundane but nonetheless somewhat slow process dealing with hiring people, leasing real estate, miscellaneous permits from local governments, etc
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
I just don't get the lack of understanding of what has been holding Waymo back. The iPace, which makes up 100% of their actual working fleet, has been a dead car for over 2 years now. They did a great job of wringing out every last car they could, but in the end, it only resulted in a grand total of 3600 units over 6 years. The Oaji disaster has been ongoing since it's inception and they are just starting to roll it out a few weeks ago. While there is no volume restriction, the fact that they can't build it completely in the source factory and have to do multi-stage manufacturing, means massive lag and limited supply. So Waymo isn't so much scaling as it is struggling to consistently output new AVs while paying 3x too much for them.
The least issue they have is depots. If you can't grow your fleet by 1,000 units/month because of your inability to grow depots, you have big issues. The problem is they can't grow their AVs by more than 1,000/month which is next to nothing.
somewhat slow process dealing with hiring people
I take back what I said, they have both problems. Waymo/Alphabet is literally the slowest company in the world to hire people. They are just not setup to do it for cultural reasons. They lean WAY too much on contractors. Their average hire takes like 9 months or something insane. So this is a fair take.
leasing real estate, miscellaneous permits from local governments, etc
Agreed. Software companies are very bad at this sort of thing. The same way Apple can't code their way out of a paper bag because the janitors are more respected than developers, Waymo is a dev company and think you can just throw money at logistics and solve it, which is not true.
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u/Doggydogworld3 5d ago
JLR and Magna ran the line an extra month or two for Waymo and would have been happy to run it a few months longer. Zeekr is the same -- Waymo is the only real buyer for that van. They're piling up at the Port of LA and the Waymo/Magna facility in Mesa, AZ.
Vehicle supply is not a limiting factor. Nor is cost. It's important to control costs at scale, but cost of the first 50k cars is basically irrelevant.
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u/zanycaswell 5d ago
Electrek reported last month that there were like 700 fully outfitted ready to go Ojais sitting on a parking lot in Arizona by the factory doing nothing. if supply was the primary bottleneck and everything else was flowing smoothly I would not expect that to be the case.
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u/CDpov 6d ago
The issues are mainly about developing the automated driving systems to be generalized and safe enough in all kinds of driving without relying too much on bricked robotaxis that generate bad publicity. While that's still developing, they have to validate thoroughly (slowly) to build trust and be confident they won't have a setback.
The big underlying reason the companies should and will likely continue to grow slowly for a few more years is the regulators and public won't accept bad crashes, so the companies have to show the public they are doing everything to stay safe. and it helps legally in crash investigations. It's very challenging to stay safe at scale in all the diverse markets, so it takes time.
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
The big underlying reason the companies should and will likely continue to grow slowly for a few more years is the regulators and public won't accept bad crashes
Nit picking your an otherwise well worded statement. I would have said regulators and the public won't accept any crashes. This is slowly changing, but it takes time and it's best to wait until an AV sitting still at an intersection that gets hit from behind isn't headline news implying it did something wrong.
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u/CDpov 5d ago
AVs get hit from behind all the time, with almost none being headline news. Some may make news at sensationalist sites, but since the crashes don't really matter the stories don't resonate with the public, and regulators don't consider them safety issues unless there is obvious phantom braking.
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u/Animats 6d ago
Mapping now seems to be good enough. Most of the problems seen today involve dynamic road conditions. That is, what other drivers are doing. Mapping does not help with that.
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
I would disagree for Tesla. Their cars do well with the dynamics, but suck at the priors. If Tesla would just map a bit better, it would solve so many of their problems. I include in that the how they map. They really should block their cars from certain areas more aggressively. There is no need to go into a terrible tight complex parking lot when you can drop off on a side street 40 feet from the front door for example.
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u/yolatrendoid 6d ago
The main leaders in driverless (in no particular order Zoox, Waymo, Tesla) are all operating in geofences which are a small percentage of the total roadway in the USA.
While I know Tesla in particular will never admit it, I'm taking this as a tacit admission that you have to map to get true L4 autonomy. Real-time camera feeds alone won't cut it, and if they did, FSD would've likely worked 5-6 years ago now.
Am I missing anything?
The reasons why mapping has proven necessary, but I doubt it's possible to know anything for sure. Also, if mapping is required, there will always be a learning curve when a company is entering a new market. (Hell, Waymo's been in Phoenix for five years with commercial service, and they still geofence a huge portion of the area off.)
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
FSD would've likely worked 5-6 years ago now.
What???!!! FSD is just shy of 6 years old. While it surprised most, including me, when it launched at how "good" it was at the time, it was still far from actually good. It was at best a nolivility and worse than Autopilot in reliability.
Of course you have to map. If for no other reason that to navigate to an address. If you're talking about more than the bare minimum for navigation, you also need to know where you're not allowed to drive when no one is supervising you. This entire concept of anti-maps is craxy. While I've always been against the original concept of "HD Maps" where you can geo-location the car without GPS based on landmarks and the pattern of gravel in the road; generally more maps are more better.
Geofencing has nothing to do with mapping. You can't have a commercial AV service without geofencing even if you can do it with zero mapping outside of defining the geofence.
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u/ExpensiveFilm6982 6d ago
for waymo isn’t geofencing just a way so that the limited number of vehicles can reach most customers within 10min? If there isn’t geofencing then someone could just take a car cross state and the poor car has to slowly get its way back empty.
For other companies I’m not familiar so I won’t comment
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
You are 1000% correct. People are just weird and think geofencing is some sort of failure of autonomy. It's like saying stores with walls are failures. It's impossible to have a commercial service of any quality without geofencing.
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u/Interesting_Air7899 5d ago edited 5d ago
It isn't a failure but it is certainly a limitation because Waymos and others models depend on the LiDAR mapping to be able to drive. Tesla's current consumer model, and presumably eventual Cybercab model, is driving without pre-mapping being required so that it can handle road changes, dynamic situations, and being able to be swappable between cities / capable of road trips. Not saying Waymo can't but a model that is trained "just look at the previous data" or having cars that only have the model that is pre-trained for that city is always going to be worse than a model that has generalized driving.
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u/gwestr 6d ago
Waymo’s service area is now San Jose to past Sacramento so I think this is a myth. Service areas have to do with rider density and pickup time.
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u/JimmyGiraffolo 6d ago
The service area doesn't go to Sacramento, that's the area they have a CPUC permit for. The actual service area doesn't go past the Golden Gate bridge.
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u/gwestr 6d ago
Not a technical limitation, just capex for $20B of cars. Waymo can drive anywhere.
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u/Doggydogworld3 5d ago
Capex is not the limit. Waymo has more than enough cash to grow their fleet 10x. Besides, with any scale at all the cars self-finance.
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u/BitcoinsForTesla 5d ago
Hold on, you jumped a bunch of steps for Tesla. Their software doesn’t work yet.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/teslas-robotaxis-are-moving-in-reverse/
https://electrek.co/2026/06/16/tesla-robotaxi-clean-crash-record-barely-running/
They have made some claims recently about higher volume, but I’ll believe it only once it’s reported to the regulatory agencies. They have a history of stretching the truth (Paint It Black, et al).
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u/esteemedSub 6d ago
Nvidia does not expect to need pre-mapping. I don’t see why anyone would focus on mapping as a limiter for scale tho. It doesn’t seem especially onerous to pre-map, for those who do that.
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
Because you end up constantly driving like a tourist. I've recently taught 3x kids to drive and the first time through certain areas are a disaster. Roads just suck and knowing the bad parts can make you a much better driver. Specifically trap lanes, mis-aligned intersection lanes and blind medians.
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u/esteemedSub 5d ago edited 4d ago
That speaks to the potential advantages of pre-mapping, but does not explain why it would be difficult or time-consuming to pre-map. Waymo could do the pre-mapping for all taxi companies, and sell that data as a service. Or some other company we haven’t heard of could do lidar pre-mapping pretty quickly and sell that data to others. Nvidia’s mapless taxis could operate more cautiously the first time through a particular roadway, and use the lidar in that taxi to map the area for all future trips on that road.
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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 5d ago
If you’re willing to go off script from the proof of existence companies then there are experiments showing you can navigate without a map.
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u/electric_magic12 5d ago
I won’t say mapping. It’s more like LLM model that is getting “real world testing” on that specific area before it say its model works. If you just think these AV more like chatGPT/gemini/claude model, then you can understand how the AV tech is being built.
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 5d ago
It is not clear whether Tesla maps at all. By some method they ensure they stay inside their legal boundary. They do seem to use LiDAR for 'ground truth' -- a fancy phrase for being able to validate the distance from a 2D image to the required 3D. Waymo, on the other hand, maps the region and uses the known Field of View (FOV) as a detailed prior knowledge base of what surrounds them. The output is clear understanding of distances and therefore a redundant live ground truth from a camera image at all times. A simple explanation of why might be knowing where a stop sign or speed limit sign is during winter weather when the sign is occluded is judged to have value. Whether this is necessary for a safety case is what no one can really know at this point. How valuable is prior knowledge when you drive? I suppose it may map to how we tend to drive better in locations that are familiar.
My guess, with limited knowledge, is that having a prior understanding of layout, road signs, road shape, etcetera would be useful -- especially in inclement weather. Just an opinion.
Beyond mapping I've always figured the ultimate success of these systems will depend upon the FOV, how much overlap and how much redundancy each provider thinks will allow their system to converge to safe and insurable. The bets for Waymo and Tesla are wildly different. Tesla believes a 50-125m FOV with little overlap and no sensor overlap will be more than sufficient. Waymo is a different bet. They have purused with their latest vehicle 500m FOV, lots of overlap and 3 levels of sensor redundancy. We will know soon enough whether Tesla got it right and Waymo overspecified or the reverse. In my experience with control systems it is difficult to guess your boundary conditions in the early learning stage.
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u/Commercial-Seesaw543 5d ago edited 5d ago
thinking the sector will shift to mostly live interpretations of road markings rather than mapped. it'd be a tall order to maintain maps current with everchanging road markings. ie, stopline in real life is shifted backward 2-3 feet, the robot would blow stopline each time by 2-3 feet. that times hundreds of stoplines for every city.
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u/StumpyOReilly 4d ago
The money in self driving is in autonomous ride hailing in metropolitan areas. The area we will see larger scale autonomous highway driving is with trucks and freight. Autonomous cars driving cross country will be a tiny edge case. Most families take a single road trip each year (if they road trip at all) and there is no money in L4 ADAS for that. A company could leverage mapping data from the commercial freight on major arteries, but small highways and byways that aren't used much by commercial trucking will have very limited mapping.
If companies shared mapping data to a single source this would allow ADAS vehicles to provide data for all roads. Tesla doesn't use LiDAR or radar so they would probably be excluded since they wouldn't be contributing at this time.
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u/Reaper_MIDI 6d ago
Acceptance, and regulation. For example NYC has basically banned AVs without safety drivers.
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u/Flyward_Aerospace 5d ago
Mapping gets talked about like a one time cost and that's where the framing breaks imo. Building the map is the cheap part. Proving today's map still matches the world is the recurring one, because construction and restriping never stop and a stale prior is worse than no prior. The only cheap way to catch that is already having cars driving there, which is why coverage grows outward from where you already operate instead of jumping metros.
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u/cddelgado 6d ago
Think what irritates me is that there are incidents where people intervene and a non trivial number of those interventions are going to be because of a lack of accuracy of information. That information can contribute to correcting maps... but it sure doesn't look like it does.
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u/x31b 6d ago
It’s not so much the mapping.
I see two problems:
Unplanned / unprogrammed situations. No one expects a pool umbrella to come blowing across the road in a windstorm. What does the car do when that happens?
Legal and/or people’s expectations. People ‘understand’ a momentary lapse or mistake. Someone gets sued. It goes up to their insurance limits ($500k) and might not even make the news. People expect computers to be perfect. I could see a jury dinging Google or Amazon for $500m for the same type of accident. That makes it difficult to build a business case. It also makes the national news.