Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

I work in the AV field: Across all the real competitors (not Tesla) sensors are things like LIDAR, Cameras (visible spectrum and infrared), radio radars (yes radar already includes radio, but for laypeople LIDAR is confused with radar), microphones.

-

Tesla doesn't have them for two different reasons...

Claimed reason: Humans have eyes and make driving work, so cars won't need more than that.

Real reason: Tesla wants to make money by selling the package to the public today. It needs to be cheap enough to be mass produced today, and sold at an accessible cost.

And it doesn't really matter to them if the current stack will be enough because regardless of what they claim, they're not averse to screwing over current owners and releasing a new stack and abandoning people who paid for an untenable one (note: I've been saying this since before they did exactly this with HW4 a few week ago...)

The sensor stacks alone the actual AV players use are worth more than the average Tesla. That's why they're mostly initially aiming for ridesharing, where the company can own the vehicle.

> The sensor stacks the actual AV players use are worth more than a vehicle.

Not sure about that. LIDAR prices dropped to 1-2k USD.

That's not how that works.

Even if tomorrow morning a $1 LIDAR came out, it'd be a long time before you saw it in a vehicle and the costs around the integration into their stacks (even when amortized across the number of AVs being produced) would still leave them completely untenable for individual ownership.

And if your thought is "well just increase the number of AVs produced", the designs being used also aren't aiming to be mass producible on the scale of a Tesla because again, they're not artificially hobbling their approaches with that in mind.

-

And it's not just LIDAR. Specialized sensors that can't even be sourced in those kinds of numbers, compute resources, infrastructure for those resources (both on and off vehicle).

Profitably producing cars is a game of pennies completely opposed to what AVs require. Trying to integrate solving AVs into that framework is pretty much resigning yourself to not doing either particularly well... unless you're only paying lip service to one side: hence why I use the terminology "real competitors".

And to be clear, I don't think Tesla doesn't know better, or is incapable of actually trying. It's a very intentional choice. Traditional manufacturers would do terrible terrible things to extract $7500 additional dollars for a software switch (they've done that for a lot less!). EVs and AVs are a chance for them to dip into that, and Tesla's most impressive innovation has been getting ahead of the curve on it.

I think people don't realize how tough NHV is on lidars/sensors/etc - cars are a really difficult environment for computers and so on.

NHV= natural harmonic vibrations?

Noise, harshness, and vibration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com