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Comment by uncoder0 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the problem is Tesla and Elon refuse to acknowledge the value of LIDAR. A fused sensor approach is the only way we're going to get full autonomy. I was in this field in 2007 on the DARPA Urban challenge so maybe the state of the art indicates otherwise now however, from the NHTSA investigations into crashes from Tesla's autopilot all of them would have been fixed with even basic LIDAR.

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This baffles me as well. The technology to solve so many problems hard to approach with other tools is right there, why not use it.

LIDAR also provides more accurate data than stereo cameras could ever hope to achieve. Why not use it? Why limit ourselves to what humans have?

Cost. Tesla has to sell cars to price-sensitive consumers. Adding a LIDAR would likely increase the price significantly. Given their business model, they basically have to argue that LIDAR is not necessary.

I agree that when Tesla made their first promises of delivering FSD HW (just add SW a little bit later) reasonably priced solid state lidars were not available. So a story had to be made 'humans have eyes and they can drive, lidar is not needed'. Super hard to back now when they sold FSD to so many customers still waiting for the SW update.

I think this right here is the issue. They've backed themselves into the corner of 'We Don't need LIDAR'. When we were scrapping together on a 75k budget we bought budget lidar with a 180 degree linear sweep and it cost ~5k, 14 years ago, from SICK and it still was better than a modern 2020 model Tesla is at detecting a white van crossing the road in broad daylight.

Maybe when LICAMs become super cheap but so far, no competitor has shown a better/more advanced ADAS system using LIDAR.

Well, Waymo has demonstrated full autonomous using lidar?

I’d argue Waymo is not a competitor and offers no ADAS. They operate autonomous vehicles in confined areas afaik. Driving in traffic, interacting with humans is a different story.

Well full automatic driving is more advanced than driver assistance, and Tesla is claiming that the current system will be scaled to full autonomous driving which is what the original article is about.

The waymo car is the only actively-used car with Lidar anyway as far as I’m aware, so if you exclude Waymo then your statement is self fulfilling no matter how good or bad Tesla’s ADAS is!

The point i wanted to express is that although LIDAR could be an improvement it is not per se the „way to go“ with ADAS today. Please consider that some, eg Audi, offer ADAS using lidar and it is not nearly as capeable as Teslas system.

Costs matter.

I am very certain that Waymo has no autonomous vehicle today that mist people would be ok to go around their neighbourhood driverless. „Full autonomy“- socially acceptable- does not exist today. Whether it can be done, with or without Lidar, remains to be seen.

Lidar adds complexity and domain that's not available to humans. Humans drive without lidar, so presumably we can train a neural net to drive without it as well.

Lidar is almost like adding a hand crafted dimension to the decision making process. It makes the system more explainable, but doesn't necessarily mean it will help achieve better results. I look at ML in games like chess and go. Originally, they had a set of hand crafted features, like the concept of "eyes" in go. But later iterations removed those and the network performed better. I think lidar is the same thing where it'll add unnecessary complexity and ultimately hurt in learning.

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