That’s pretty cool! Admittedly, I don’t know much about Tesla’s.
To be honest, once I saw a man parading his AutoPilot as a near future not needing drivers in the same sentence as “no lidar,” I stopped paying attention. I see those as any oxymoron and trying to be penny wise and pound foolish. I don’t know why you would not want Lidar on your system to validate distances perceived by your camera, especially knowing some of the fatalities that could have been prevented by such a system. Apparently he’s repeated that stance in the last week too. It feels like you’d only do it as a part of an obsession of cost savings.
I don’t want to go on my anti-Tesla rant, but I genuinely am glad so many people like the product. Our company has two of them and my coworkers love to mention it. One doesn’t know we don’t have the dual motor and tells me how much faster it is than my car.
Well, my understanding is that Tesla’s CEO argued that since humans can drive without LiDAR, then surely optical cameras and software should be able to handle it. The second part of course being the high cost LiDAR sensors, especially years ago when Tesla decided to double down on cameras.
Maybe that approach would have had more merit if Tesla had reached 100% autonomous driving capabilities long ago (many projected dates come and gone). But given alll the time that has elapsed without accomplishing full autonomy, LiDAR has become much more affordable and smaller scale.
The Volvo EX90 LiDAR costs about $1000 (yet still unfortunately reminds me of the roof lights on a NYC taxi). Now BYD is saying they have a $400 sensor. Such sensors cost tens of thousands not long ago.Further developments and economies of scale will probably bring costs down further.
The optical-only Tesla system is incredibly impressive. But it seems only reasonable to add LiDAR to augment the cameras. The debate has always been presented as an either-or, but considering the costs are progressively dropping, why not take advantage of the strengths of each system by using both? It’s not like errors can be horrendously consequential in self driving cars? Typically redundancy using input types is desired for such important tasks.
Maybe it’s a cost cutting obsession (granted Tesla has included plenty of stupid features over the years that contradict. Maybe it’s an intellectual challenge to figure out. Maybe it’s an ego thing- perhaps he underestimated the trajectory of LiDAR development and so his ego won’t let him admit his prediction / bet was wrong. Who knows. Either Tesla will develop true, mainstream autonomous driving or someone else will.
But I would not be surprised if LiDAR quietly finds its way into Teslas in the future.
But I have to ask, with such a reliance on cameras and knowing how moderns car’s camera-based safety systems are affected by precipitation/inclement weather, how will Tesla Robotaxis operate in heavy rain, moderate fog, a decent amount of snow (esp at night). Tesla FSD doesn’t work. Neither does Subaru’s comparatively simple safety suite. You know, much of the world doesn’t experience SoCal weather year round.
My suspicion: the Tesla Robotaxis will either end up using LiDAR or the Robotaxi remains nothing more but a mythical concept vehicle, much like the Roadster 2. Whether or not Tesla will the leader in future robotransport remains to been.