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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

The solution is lidar but Elon refuses to use them for cost reasons and still thinks everything can be done with cameras because "that's how our vision works".

Most weird autopilot goofs and accidents stem from the car not knowing the exact distance to the object its seeing with its cameras.

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Our vision only works because of "brains" and "optic nerves".

A neural net properly trained with binocular vision should be able to estimate the size and distance of the sign and the distance of the sign from the actual intersection. LIDAR is still probably way easier to get right, though.

We don’t have AGI yet so those are not enough for a car.

Does a fly have an AGI? Or a bee?

They seem to be able to do pretty complex navigational tasks with just visual and olfactory system with a minimal power budget.

Sure it’s a general intelligence, why wouldn’t it be?

True, so Tesla is not clearing even a much lower bar.

> Most weird autopilot goofs and accidents stem from the car not knowing the exact distance to the object its seeing with its cameras.

What about crappy roads with worn markings, missing / damaged signs or out of order traffic lights? How well are these handled?

I wonder if there's some patent issue preventing them from using LiDAR and by extension preventing Musk from admitting its superiority.

I don't think lidar is the only solution, passive\smart infrastructure changes and car to car communications could overcome many issues.

I think once you get to "overhaul civil infrastructure" vs "install lidar on cars" you've lost the thread a little bit here. Those suggestions are at least an order of magnitude harder to accomplish than simply installing a better sensor suite on the car.

Lidar isn’t a silver bullet. Google has been at it for over a decade and their taxi service still gets confused by traffic cones.

The cheapest Tesla is the base Model 3 at $49,000. How much more expensive would it be with lidar? It’s already inaccessible to the masses.

I'm not sure Tesla was ever aiming to have cars "Accessible to the masses" as their initial target. They seem, at least to me, to always be aiming at the more luxury end of the market.

Regarding lidar itself not being the silver bullet, that's true. The real silver bullet will be when we have an actual AI and not just stacked ML models. The difference between parsing visual and other sensor data and using that to navigate the world and understanding that visual and sensor data is a very sizeable one and I suspect until we get a reasonably decent task-focused AI capable of understanding we're going to see lots of these kinds of shortcomings.

Well I called out the Model 3 specifically as it was supposed to have been the car for the masses. I consider it way too expensive for the masses, but it’s likely one of the most affordable pure EVs you can buy, even at the high price.

I suspect actual self driving to follow the Pareto principle. The last 20% will take 80% of the time. And I’m not even convinced we’ve hit the 80% yet, anyway.

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