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bob1029HNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I started digging into this rabbit hole and I found it fairly telling how much energy is being …

I started digging into this rabbit hole and I found it fairly telling how much energy is being expended on social media over LiDAR vs no LiDAR. Much of it feels like sock puppetry led by Tesla investors and their couterparties. I see this whole thing is a business viability narrative wherein Tesla would be even further under water if they were forced to admit that LiDAR may possess some degree of technical superiority and could provide a reliability and safety uplift. It must have taken millions of dollars in marketing budget to erase the customer experiences around the prior models of their cars that did have this technology and performed accordingly.

Original discussionWaymos crash less than human drivers448 source comments · at import
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LA
labradorHN

I was initially skeptical about self-driving cars but I've been won over by Waymo's careful and thoughtful approach using visual cues, lidar, safety drivers and geo-fencing. That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead like Wile E. Coyote. Beep beep. Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot

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LA
labradorHN

"It's a feature, not a bug!" I suspect it would be a major undertaking to add LiDAR at this point because none of their software is written to use it

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X1
x187463HN

I use FSD every day and it has driven easily 98% of the miles on my model 3. I would never let it drive unsupervised. I honestly have no idea how they think they're ready for robotaxis. FSD is an incredible driver assistance system. It's actually a joy to use, but it's simply not capable of reliable unsupervised performance. A big reason, it struggles exactly where you think it would based on a vision only system. It needs a more robust mechanism of building it's world model. A simple example. I was coming out of a business driveway, turning left onto a two lane road. It was dark out with no nearby street lights. There was a car approaching from the left. FSD could see that a car was coming. However, from the view of a camera, it was just a ball of light. There was no reasonable way the camera could discern the distance given the brightness of the headlights. I suspected this was the cas…

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LN
lnsruHN

Tesla sold a million Model Ys last year. So having a safety increasing part like lidar would reduce the profit by hundreds millions. Removal of ultrasonic sensors saved Tesla tens of millions. Ok, model Y is a big car and I don’t aim for tightest parking spots anymore. But basically removal of anything is very profitable for Tesla. And vice versa adding something useful is very expensive.

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WH
whamlastxmasHN

We all see our perspectives as getting quashed. I see the opposite of you - people pushing arguments that make no sense to me in terms of criticizing Tesla for not using lidar, which is an argument that seemingly deliberately glances over the very real and valid reasons for Tesla choosing not to use it

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RA
rangestransformHN

Just because Tesla uses shitty 2MP sensors of 2013 vintage (at least for HW3) doesn’t mean that robotaxi levels of safety can’t be achieved with just modern cameras and radars (plural) As someone in the industry, I find the LiDAR discussion distracting from meaningful discussions about redundancy and testing

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