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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

This may surprise, but LIDAR is a very recent innovation and virtually zero percent of cars (particularly historically) are LIDAR equipped. Binocular vision has a pretty impressive track record.

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Binocular vision as in human vision? Powered by the human brain? That's vastly different than binocular vision powered by Tesla's rudimentary "AI"

Also our binocular vision is movable unlike cars.

Which is how we determine depth when there is occlusion ie. we move our head.

And cars have multiple cameras simultaneously in 360° overlapping coverage. Plus you have motion parallax.

Neither of which completely solves the problem of how to determine the depth of objects in the scene.

We move our head to ascertain depth. LiDAR uses laser pulses.

And yet their self-driving still sucks compared to what a person can do.

Human eye has the dynamic range of 24 F-stops, and best cameras have like 14. That's a difference of several million. Also humans have hearing, and really advanced CPU.

Tesla can't tell apart a deadly bollard from a large plastic bag flying in the wind.

I didn’t think Tesla used binocular (stereoscope) cameras.

These comments seem to confirm: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/does-tesla-have-bino...

They decided to forgo LIDAR specifically though, it's not that it hasn't been out very long and they haven't adopted it yet. Other car makers have been using it for a while, just as long as Tesla could have if they truly want to be cutting edge.

It might also come as a surprise that the the lack of a LiDAR, and famously disabling the radar directly relates to Tesla’s poor self driving performance compared to the actual leaders in the area like Waymo and Cruise.

Not with electrical brains, unfortunately.

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