Musk Called Lidar A Fool’s Errand, Waymo’s CEO Says Good Luck Without It

Waymo’s co-CEO, Dmitri Dolgov, argues that camera-only cars can match human driving abilities but will never reach the safety levels required for full autonomy. He believes that lidar and radar provide crucial protection when cameras fail, citing examples from Waymo’s testing where lidar identified pedestrians in low-visibility conditions. Dolgov made these comments during a talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School, indirectly targeting Tesla’s autonomous-driving strategy, which relies on cameras and has dismissed lidar and other sensors. Elon Musk had previously called lidar ‘a fool’s errand’ and ‘expensive and unnecessary’. Waymo has logged 220 million rider-only miles, while Tesla reports 380,000 driverless miles. Dolgov emphasizes that the goal of full autonomy requires ‘strongly superhuman performance’, which cannot be achieved with camera-only systems. He describes autonomy as an ‘exponential ladder of nines’, where each additional nine of reliability requires roughly ten times more work than the last. While Tesla may still prove its critics wrong, Waymo’s argument is becoming harder to ignore, and only time will tell which technology will deliver truly driverless safety.