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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

> Tesla has more than enough data to unlock autonomous vehicles

Many people in the automotive industry, myself included, disagree with this statement pretty strongly. Driving data quantity is not equivalent to quality and they are severely lacking in advanced sensor data.

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I'm likely biased because I spend some of my time doing perception research, but I find the "advanced sensors are necessary" argument so odd. We have clear evidence from humans that you don't need them. I expect we'll be doing this sort of thing [0] in toy dynamic scenes from monocular vision in ~1year, and in real-time on city scenes in ~2. Perception-wise, what more do you need?

Planning and control seem much harder, but that's not a sensing problem.

[0] https://nerf-w.github.io/

So is the claim by Elon Musk that current iterations of Tesla vehicles have all of the sensors and compute power needed to be fully autonomous (Level 4+ I guess?) in the future, via software updates only, a specious one?

It's hard to be absolutist on the response to that: anything is possible, and humans can drive without LIDAR.

But at the moment it seems a strange position to take: we know LIDAR data is useful in many circumstances, and we know it can solve a number of the hard parts of computer vision.

Musk also said he was taking Tesla private at $420 a share, funding secured.

He says a lot of things.

I don’t know, the existence proof is that it takes a 16 year old a few days of driving before they get it well enough...

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