Instead of idling plants (like other automakers https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/ford-idles-f-150-plan...), Tesla decided to cut out the radar entirely.
That means cars can be produced, and sold, without these radars / chips.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/24/22451404/tesla-luminar-li...
> they’re using lidar to develop FSD.
Your comment:
> they’re just using LiDAR rigs to validate data from their vision based approach
In 2019, Elon called lidar a crutch:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...
I'm pulling this from archive.org, because Tesla has removed this blogpost from their servers.
As recently as March, they kept this pro-Radar blogpost up. Only now are they purging this data from their archives. Fortunately, the Internet Archive remembers the history, so they won't find it so easy to rewrite history in their favor.
Do you really expect, or even want, companies to go back and purge all old engineering blogs which they now disagree with? By calling out an old post as evidence that they are "pro-lidar", you're the one forcing companies to try to curate the public history of their development process.
That's not healthy. Don't do that.
Sometime between March 2021 and May 2021 (today), Tesla has deleted this blogpost. The above link is now a dead-link. I've included the original blogpost from archive.org in my earlier post, so that you can see the original content.
My expectation is for Tesla to be honest about their history, and not be ones who delete inconvenient blogposts years later. This selective picking-and-choosing of historical posts is immediately suspect, and extremely damaging to the reputation of the Tesla blog.
In any case, the _timing_ of this deletion event tells us everything. Tesla only recently began thinking about Tesla Vision seriously, which provides evidence that this is a temporary supply chain issue, as opposed to a forward looking technological innovation.