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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

> Elon Musk even said he wouldn't use Lidar if it was free.

I don't believe that. He ultimately has to be anti-LiDAR because putting LiDAR on every Tesla is simply not feasible nor compatible with his plan to mass gather training data, so he has to justify it somehow.

What you're missing is that it's all moot if your self-driving car does not have a 0% failure rate, or close enough to 0% that it rounds down to 0 accidents. As soon as you have real accidents, you are done. Look at Uber. The one death completely ended their self driving unit.

So yes, it may seem cool to just go with the flow and rush things, but I get the feeling that this will be like the tortoise and the hare. Eventually LiDAR will be cheap, and Tesla will be stuck with years of useless training data.

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Agreed, Tesla made these decisions in 2014(ish) which was way before it was clear that convolutional neural networks would not give satisfactory depth perception and therefore localization without some major breakthroughs that just haven't happened. I actually believe these choices by Tesla were the rational choices at the time. If you remember back to the beginning of this decade, the deep learning revolution seemed like it was going to take over every industry and turn everything upside down. That progress unfortunately stopped and Tesla seems to be holding the proverbial bag. These companies are all executing strategies in a game that will last for at least another decade if not two. Things will change, but at the moment, it seems to me that LiDAR was the correct choice (subject to change).

To me, the revolution that actually mattered the most was the cell phone supply chain revolution (if you can call it that). That is what allowed these companies to equip their vehicles with cheap cameras, radar, and eventually LiDAR.

While I’m sure Musk is stubborn and his ego is huge, he is also very technical astute and doesn’t afraid to change his mind. SpaceX had planned to use parachute for 1st stage recovery but switched to the current solution after it became clear parachute wasn’t viable. Likewise, they switched to stainless steel for Starship once they figured carbon composite wasn’t suitable for what they wanted to do. If Tesla hasn’t adopted Lidar, that wouldn’t be because Musk didn’t want to admit he was wrong.

> I don't believe that. He ultimately has to be anti-LiDAR because putting LiDAR on every Tesla is simply not feasible nor compatible with his plan to mass gather training data, so he has to justify it somehow.

Why is using Lidar not compatible with mass gather training data?

Also he recently said they wouldn't use Lidar even if it's free. He didn't leave the door open for when the price goes down sufficiently. He could be wrong obviously, but I don't think he is in denial.

He's lying because he's already said that every tesla has the hardware for self driving. People would be pissed if he said tesla's might need to be retrofitted to self drive.

Well, Tesla does claim that Tesla cars may need to be retrofitted for self driving:

https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer

I suppose they wouldn't have any problem asking for Lidar installation if that were to be required?

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