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Elon Musk recently said LIDAR system was just too expensive and unnecessary as he's betting on using Tesla's video cameras for their own automated driving. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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That does seem likely, considering humans don't have LIDAR...

Also Cornell University may have just proved this out: https://interestingengineering.com/cheap-cameras-might-be-ju...

If you believe that in the next few years computers will match humans on vision tasks with life or death consequences.

humans have a brain that's difficult to reproduce in an economical fashion so far; tech can't even saccade the current cameras to track moving objects with clarity

That's a nearly unique position among autonomous vehicle people. He's correct about LIDAR costs, for now. The question is: "How long is 'now?'" Unless there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of MEMS LIDAR, Musk's statement is something like "Rotating memory will never be cheap enough for X" when SSDs are coming.

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