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Comment by ethanhunt_ | Hacker News Reader

The difference between Tesla and Google is that Tesla actually has to ship these cars to customers right now. Wouldn't LIDAR double the cost of a Tesla right now?

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Tesla didn't have to ship a car with unusable self-driving hardware. They'll probably have to eat the cost of a retrofit package on some vehicles to make that work. Like the Roadster transmission problem, where they had to replace all the early drivetrains with the two-speed transmission.

Nobody has built automotive LIDAR units in volume yet. That's why they're so expensive. It's not an inherently expensive technology once someone is ready to order a million units. It does take custom silicon. Tesla, at 25K units per quarter, may not be big enough to start that market.

Continental, which is a very large auto parts maker in Germany, has demo units of their flash LIDAR. They plan to ship in quantity in 2020. Custom ASICs have to be designed and fabbed to get the price down.[1]

[1] http://www.jobs.net/jobs/continental-corporation-careers/en-...

Isn't it possible that by the time LIDAR is technically and economically ready for general deployment current Tesla models will have enough mileage and Tesla avoids retrofitting completely?

How could Tesla avoid retrofitting if they are unable to solve full self driving with cameras alone? Their new vehicles would have lidar, and old customers who were promised FSD in their models would seem to be legally entitled to it, given that Tesla is currently selling that feature as a product, even though it isn't functional.

Classic engineering ethics problem. Management says they have to ship "right now", but you know that if you do, 1 in a 1000 customers will die. If you wait a couple years, that'll go down to 1 in 1000000, but your company might go bankrupt.

Engineers at Takata and in GM's ignition key department made one choice, Waymo seems to be making the other.

Waymo has the benefit of not going bankrupt if they wait another couple years..

Oh? http://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-alphabet-moonshot-project...

The whole reason the car project got spun out into Waymo was to fast-track commercialization. They do not in fact have an infinite amount of money.

Cost should not be an excuse at the expense of safety. Plain and simple.

What's unsafe about radar cruise plus lane keep? People act like Tesla is shipping cars that fling themselves into pedestrians at every opportunity. Somehow we all manage to absolve the auto maker when someone with cruise control set on their 1998 Mazda rear ends someone on the freeway. Let's judge Tesla for autonomous safety when they produce an autonomous car.

What's unsafe about radar cruise plus lane keep?

It takes longer for a driver to react to a problem in that mode than to react without it.[1][2] There have been full-motion car simulator and test track studies on this. Even with test subjects who are expecting an obstacle to appear, it takes about 3 seconds to react and start to take over vehicle control from lane keeping automation. Full recovery into manual, where control quality is comparable to normal driving, takes 15 to 40 seconds.

There are now many studies on this, but too many of them are paywalled.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847814... [2] http://www.iea.cc/congress/2015/252.pdf

I am not sure why this tech is acceptable, at all.

People fall asleep even while actively driving the car. How can they be expected to maintain vigil with something like this.

But I guess Tesla is content with ending their responsibility at "Informing the user that they should be vigil at all times, even when car is driving itself", with out considering how feasible it is.

Another funny thing about it is that, earlier, with regular cars, you only had to watch the errors from the other drivers on the road. Now you have to watch other cars and also mistakes made by your own car's AI...

What could go wrong?

If that was true, nobody would ever ship anything to do with safety for less than a million dollars. We make trade-offs between cost and safety all the time. Doctors walk that line day by day, it's a big part of their job. In particular, car safety regulations walk a very fine line between safety and cost. No car regulations require every car to have all and every one of the best and most advanced safety features. If they did, no cars could be sold for less than hundreds of thousands of dollars and they'd all look and perform like blocky vans with great huge crumple zones.

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