Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar | Hacker News Reader

Tesla bought over $2M worth of Lidar from Luminar

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42 pointsreteltech40 comments

In order to make vision-only depth sensing work well, you need ground-truth data. Buying a few thousand lidar to get a ton of ground-truth training data for the NN to learn distance on its own from vision is an obvious move. They're not switching to Lidar.

source: i debugged lidar and built localization and behavioral planning algorithms for self driving cars

Yes, 10 years after the initial announcement, Tesla has just now got around to ordering some LIDARs for capturing ground-truth training data. They then went out of their way to get the one LIDAR made to look palatable to end customers instead of the superior industrial ones everyone puts 8 of on their recording cars.

Not very credible.

See sibling comment, this wouldn't be a first time occurance.

> Tesla has just now got around to

What's the source that they haven't ordered from Luminar previously? They have definitely used Lidar test rigs for years.

And they've been doing this for several years already, with Luminar hardware mounted on engineering vehicles with manufacturer plates.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-y-luminar-lid...

Why would they not simply use lidar in the cars themselves?

Besides, I imagine many of the issues with vision (e.g. adverse weather) could not be addressed with training-time data.

> Besides, I imagine many of the issues with vision (e.g. adverse weather)

LIDAR is bad in rain, fog and snow.

So are cameras.

And people

Because $1000 of Lidar hardware per car would be $1.85 billion per year.

Take out of his 56B comp package

Those are stock grants which don’t directly affect the company’s net income.

They do affect net income when they vest. It is treated as an expense in GAAP.

If you make millions of them per year, lidar won't cost $1k per car. OTOH existing lidar designs are not designed for mass market manufacturing or serviceability.

If you had multiple cameras for stereoscopic vision. Couldn't you figure out the depth data vision only without lidar? I'm sure there was a good reason Tesla didn't go with a stereoscopic camera system (at least front facing) from the get-go.. they already have 3 cameras up there with 3 FOVs. Could add another camera there in a stereo setup for depth data.

Isn't human stereoscopic vision only good for something like 20 feet or so? The cameras behind the rearview mirror are even closer together than that.

$2M doesn't seem like a lot for a company the size of Tesla. Sounds like R&D.

Tesla R&D budget is $4B.

https://usnewsfile.moomoo.com/public/MM-PersistNewsContentIm...

2M? Hahaha....

>_>

They might be using them to train robots like Optimus, given Musk's statement.

Also why is the tone of the article so toxic.

The left hates Elon.

My reading is this is only for their own taxi fleet. $2M at $1000 per car = 2000 cars.

Waymo has fully autonomous self driving that actually works for their taxi fleet. Waymo uses lidar. Tesla building a taxi fleet, Tesla now needs to spring the extra dosh for a bit of lidar.

Data collections for model training.

Why would they not simply use lidar in the cars themselves?

Cost cutting.

Somewhere there is a CEO or head of engineering reading this headline thinking: I guess we are on the right track! LOL

2.1 million not exactly ‘stocking up’ for a company the size of Tesla. That’s barely pocket change.

How much Lidar does $2 million buy you? Probably, what, a year's worth of Tesla's manufacturing output?

Not even remotely close.

This is clearly R&D just to validate the images from their vision approach.

enough for one engineer's test bench, more like

They produced 1.85 million vehicles in 2023.

So a $2 million order would work out to $1.08 per car.

Or if Lidar hardware for one car cost about $500, then $2 million is not quite enough for one day's worth of manufacturing output.

At $1000 a piece which is the rumored price ; is around 2,000 units if they got a volume discount it would be 4,000 units

Musk used to argue that since humans can drive without Lidar, cars could as well.

As far as I know Musk and Tesla's position on this hasn't changed. They use Lidar for validation during R&D, they don't ship it on production vehicles.

That must clearly be true, but I'd like cars to driver better than humans and make use of all the tech that we can't. Academically vision only is an interesting feat, and as a backup mode for when sensors fail it makes sense to pursue vision only operation, but it seems to me that having more sensors should be superior.

> but it seems to me that having more sensors should be superior.

What do you do when the sensors disagree?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion

It's an interesting argument, I'm sure there are lots of reasons why it's a bad argument, but the one I think about is that depth perception isn't actually fully understood, mostly, but not fully, and, an important system that is always overlooked in that argument is that the vestibular system (among others) is also involved in depth perception. You can say binocular vision is just LIDAR, but that's not the whole story.

That was always a stupid argument because if you replicate how humans do it, you're going to replicate our failure modes too. Things like being crappy at night driving, subject to optical illusions, etc.

I can assure you that a human with LIDAR and RADAR built in would get around even better than without.

Very confused to why they're not just acquiring.

If they're representing 10% of revenue are they're doing a pilot and then considering outright buying them?

100% revenue != valuation of company if that's what you're implying.

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