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Comment by gridder | Hacker News Reader

- Tesla doesn’t offer LiDAR sensors, even if it’s clearly the best technology to use for the autopilot.

Radar is working hard to get towards higher resolution and classification quality. From what I know, it is the closest competitor because it is active sensing and complements camera properties even better than LIDAR. In adverse conditions LIDAR and Cameras have similar failure modes, which is not good.

I do agree that cameras an ML on the images seems to be stuck at the next plateau of scene understanding performance. An impressive one, admitted, but still not sufficient. For real emergency reactions with highway speeds you need to assess situations about a quarter mile away basically.

Not even close. Psuedo-LiDAR approach is the way to go and everyone knows it. Waymo and others using LiDAR placed the wrong bet and now have nothing to show for it.

Well, except not running over mannequins of kids. [1] You know, the simple stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMWERzT7SQ

This has been completely debunked numerous times in the last week. It's a total smear campaign by a competitor.

oh https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1557766646026084359

>This has been completely debunked numerous times in the last week

show us

> Waymo and others using LiDAR placed the wrong bet and now have nothing to show for it.

Waymo launched their commercial robo-taxi service in 2017. It’s still running today. Open to the public [1].

Meanwhile, Tesla is phasing out their FSD program. Beta-testers, 98 safety score, $15K cost, whatever, current Tesla owners are pissed off.

FSD is a sinking ship, just like the Tesla/Elon brand. They used to be cool.

[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2017/04/...

You obviously haven't seen the FSD upgrade that was released yesterday.

Haven't you people been saying this for 2 years now?

The update that is only to v10.69, instead of v11 like Musk had suggested would roll out now? The same upgrade that's only rolling out to ~1k FSD-enabled customers (which is only 1% of FSD Beta customers)?

Waymo hasn't killed anyone yet. I think that is probably the most important thing to show.

Waymos drive so slow, any Tesla with the same "driver" would kill anyone else.

I hope you’re not biased since you work for Tesla’s autopilot BU. Anyway I’m no expert and I’m open to learn something. With pseudo-LiDAR do you mean photogrammetry? Following your input I may say the best approach could be then to integrate both image and LiDAR technologies to create the most trustable 3d scan. Since LiDAR measures space and distance, it can correct the other photography sensors which could be prone to some errors. I understand the cost side of scale manufacturing but you cannot cut cost in this case, the risk of fatal injuries it’s too big. Also I feel Elon decided ‘dogmatically’ to avoid LiDARs and that’s why this is the only road you are considering…

You work on autopilot at Tesla. You are _the_ demonstration that Tesla's camera based approach is insufficient, has awful deficiencies and is a dangerous product. I wouldn't be saying much if I were you.

Except, you know, in parts of the world that are not sunny California. Your camera will mean nothing in the Nordics/Canada with snow/slush/dirt on the road, and the sun shining straight at you.

But sure, do tell me how you're going to ignore the laws of physics and see a road sign, a kid, or a deer when your camera is blind.

Because it is prohibitively expensive, and you get more data with multiple cameras than with one single lidar

It didn't prohibit Mercedes:

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a39966189/2022-mercedes...

https://electrek.co/2022/07/22/mercedes-drive-pilot-review/

Well yeah, if you double the price of the car you can afford to slap lidar on it. You'll sell fewer cars, however

So what's the Model S's and Model X's excuse? They've got the Mercedes EQS price tag but not the equipment.

Tesla want to offer FSD on their whole lineup, not just in their high end models

Ah, I understand. So the Model S and Model X are rip offs.

Better off with the Mercedes EQS. Or the Lucid Air for that matter:

https://www.carscoops.com/2022/02/lucids-lidar-based-dreamdr...

Not at night

> you get more data with multiple cameras than with one single lidar

Until you're at night in the snow/dirt.

Yeah, lidar famously deals well with inclement weather and low visibility conditions. Those infrared lasers just punch right through the fog and snowflakes.

Lmao.

Ah you decided to be smart and sarcastic, and inadvertently showed just how limited the tech in these "autonomous" cars is.

And that you can't just handwave these problems away.

Is this a sarcastic joke? Surely you can't mean that.

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