What was their reasoning for not using Lidar?
And it would be great if it something that almost never broke as things that move a lot tend to. As far as I know static lidar are nowhere near as good.
Then if the difference in quality is not actually that great, doing the development effort once will scale to millions of cars the next few years. So we are literally talking many, many years of millions of lidars produced and integrated (and not replacing other sensors) to maybe have a slightly better outcome.
However that depends on your sensor fusion and how the lidar handles weather conditions and other complexities.
But I am sure its all ego.
Tesla has cars with Lidar on the road to check the models as well.
And who says anything about entitled, they have spent a huge amount of effort and therefore money into a solution that they think will be better.
Nobody with Lidar has delivered either so what is better is still an open question. Tesla has picked their strategy and working on it. Others do the same.
My point is simply, not that Tesla has the perfect solution, rather the idea that Tesla is operating based on 'ego' is idiotic. Elon Musk and his companies have repeatably shown that they are very willing, comically so, to throw away work and go back to the beginning if they have encountered a problem. E
lon is well known for not falling into the sunk cost fallacy. Consider the manufacturing of Model 3. Consider Starship being planned to be built from carbon fiber, and switching to stainless steel.
Do you really believe they know lidar would be better and they not changing because of what Musk said 4 years ago? That is literally the opposite of how his company have operated.
As a matter of fact, yes: self-driving Teslas have been crashing into emergency vehicles so often, they are being investigated[1]
The investigation you reference stems from previous versions of the softawre.
The broader context can't be ignored when discussing the new software, but it's reasonable to point to progress as demonstration that the chosen technology path is a viable one.
The sunk cost fallacy is stronger when it's not just R&D but thousands of people who paid 10k$ on the promise that their car had all the hardware required... Cars that shipped without a lidar.
And I believe waymo uses lidar and has, as far as I know, killed nobody. They also take a more cautious approach where bystanders are not turned into beta testers, of course :-)
Sorry, what’s your point? You need to prove that the autopilot software has killed more people than if the cars were driven by humans.
> And I believe waymo uses lidar and has, as far as I know, killed nobody.
With a footprint probably orders of magnitude smaller than Tesla. What do you want to bet is the difference in terms of miles driven by Waymo vs. miles driven by Tesla autopilot?
Keep in mind you're saying this about something that attaches to a car, which already has dozens or hundreds of parts that rotate at hundreds or thousands of RPM.
> Then if the difference in quality is not actually that great, doing the development effort once will scale to millions of cars the next few years
The adage "do things that don't scale" comes to mind. If your options are "have tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles" or "have none", I'm not sure how the second is better. And we know that hundreds of thousands or even millions of lidar units are being produced (cruise and waymo and co have multiple units per vehicle and collectively hundreds of thousands of vehicles).
In some cases it can simply not be avoided of course but you better make sure that you really need it if you are gone add it to millions of cars.
> cruise and waymo and co have multiple units per vehicle and collectively hundreds of thousands of vehicles
Waymo has vehicle count of a few 1000s as far as I know. I don't know about cruise but I don't think the have even 100k vehicles. Please show me a source.
And even if that were the case, the build those fleets of quite a long time and the cost per vehicle they currently have is nowhere near close to what would be possible for a car like the Model 3 or future cheaper models.
Margins in car industry are incredibly tight, car companies invest gigantic amount of capital to remove a few $ per car. These vehicles need to be able to be produced at a run rate of millions per year. If you are proposing to add something that cost 100-1000$ that is a absolute killer.
In addition its an additional part that can hold up your production. This current chip shortage is a perfect example where having a Lidar would just introduce a whole host of new chips that might be in a shortage.
I don't get this. You have to pay ~8000$ as an extra to get the FDA in a Tesla. Can't they charge the cost of the lidar in there? Now you have to pay 9000 dollars to get it.
Waymo and cruise especially, but even a number of others, have demonstrated better autonomy than Tesla. Musk has been claiming full self driving is 6 months away for 5 years now, and he hasn't gotten that much closer.
Have they? They have a different approach where they focus huge effort on individual Geo-fenced locations and they both are losing 100M of $ every year. Neither has given any timeline for general availability in all locations.
The race, as far as I am concerned is still open. It is not at all clear to me that Waymo is ahead at what actually matters.
> Musk has been claiming full self driving is 6 months away for 5 years now, and he hasn't gotten that much closer.
The claim they made no progress is objectively false.
Where they actually have driverless vehicles. That's the key difference. Waymo and cruise have demonstrated driverless vehicles. People get driverless taxi rides today from waymo, and I think cruise as well. Tesla doesn't. It's still sitting in driver assist land and isn't particularly better than other luxury vehicle driver assist.
> The claim they made no progress is objectively false.
Thankfully that's not what I said.
If their engineering is driven by ego (most of us think - it is) then - are they really engineers? We all know it’s coming from Top - Elon, in this case.
It was around the time he made the comment that anyone using lidar is doomed, which is much easier to dig up as it was a headline everywhere:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverle...
Hoping someone else has the link to the discussion of humans using nothing but vision, my google-fu is lacking this evening.
That doesn't make much sense to me. Tesla also needs chips for computer vision.
But Elon says it is because they don't need it.
This is not really accurate. Our brains do the distance estimation, and they use all kinds of tricks and contextual clues to do it, not just parallax (~2.5 inch parallax for objects more than ~100ft away isn't all that helpful). And this is the whole problem with vision-only autonomous driving - ML capabilities are nowhere near the capabilities of a human brain.
[0] https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimati...
So, first, this presentation we're talking about is literally about problems like that.
Second: your brain isn't nearly as good as you think it is, it's just constructing a coherent story to fool you into thinking it is. Try this on the highway sometime as a passenger: close your eyes and recite the distances to the vehicle in front of you and the one to either side. I bet you anything a Tesla is going to do that better.
Third: they pretty much cracked this already. They stopped shipping radar on US Model 3's and Y's in the spring, have shipped hundreds of thousands of them now, and there's not a hint of signal that something is off with distance measurements with the cars. My car doesn't get this perfectly (you can actually watch the animations on screen bounce around a bit as the estimates change) but I think it objectively does better than I do.
Distance/Lidar framing is old news, basically. Vision works fine. The worst bugs remaining with all the FSD Beta footage on Youtube are almost entirely pathing and planning issues. The car sees its environment just fine.
Telsa should pivot and innovate to make lidar cheaper.
But people in California probably don't get this.