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Comment by a_t48 | Hacker News Reader

It's cost - LIDARs aren't cheap. Tesla is set up as a consumer car company first and a robotaxi company second, costs matter even more. They could jack up the price of the final product, but presumably it wasn't worth it (at least in his mind?). From a safety perspective more sensors in general are better, if integrated properly. With LIDAR prices are coming down I wonder if he will someday swallow his pride and reintegrate them.

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It's almost certainly because he dug the hole so deep in advertising. By saying "we need LIDAR", means that his promise "your car that you own right now will someday be self driving" was a lie. I can't imagine the lawsuits.

I cannot imagine how a musk-fan (at this point, I would classify anyone, who believes his claims as a fan) thinks, but it seems so weird to me to actually cling on that hope, that it should make the promise easy to break. It has been a while he made this promise, and it's nowhere near to be delivered. What does it even matter? How long are you comfortable owning the same car (the one that has more electronics in it than iPhone)? 10 years? 20 years? If he doesn't deliver FSD in that time, it doesn't really matter if it will be the same old cars that will achieve FSD. And if you can achieve FSD with better technology on a newer car, it's a win-win, it doesn't really break the promise that your 20 y.o. Tesla will achieve FSD. Maybe in 30 more years it will.

Both the Valeo SCALA and Luminar LIDAR sensors are in the $500 ballpark (at volume). Even a few times over, this seems like a petty cost to forgo on a $50k car.

Anyway, Tesla have supposedly recently bought a massive pile of Luminar sensors, so I expect them to be in one of these vehicles soon.

At that price point, you might even be able to retrofit existing cars with these for not that much money

This wasn’t the case when he originally announced no LIDAR was it?

I think the robotaxi might be the only actual viable approach to developing fsd.

You control the hardware and software, you drive in real world conditions, you can deploy regionally and control the hours and conditions you operate in letting you gradually increase when you operate as you judge it safe.

And if the robotaxi makes a mistake, well it's still in testing phase/beta.

If Tesla comes out with FSD then it has to be damned near "perfect" in all conditions, which just is never going to happen out the gate?

You can even design some type of system where the taxis can only physically go on a routed road, and then you won't have to worry about real world conditions. And then you can just integrate some sensors into the routed roads to detect the vehicles' location and then you can guarantee they'll never crash.

Oh! Oh! And then for efficiency maybe you can chain a ton of robotaxis together, so you only need one drivetrain... wait a second...

just add a ton of cameras and lidar hardware, and you have waymo

Why not have at least radar? Plenty of cars have radar for adaptive cruise control and blind spot monitoring, it can't be that expensive. Two sensor kinds would still be an improvement.

I think if you have two sensor systems with one being significantly less capable than the other, the gain from having both quickly diminishes. I believe Tesla dropped the radar because it was simply outclassed by the camera in 99% of circumstances. So the radar really just becomes a hacky failsafe for bery rare circumstances, and Musk would like to avoid such a situation, he wants a "clean" solution.

Sensor fusion could cover that though, cameras aren't good if they are obstructed by dirt, particles (fog, snow, heavy rain), don't capture enough light, and probably many other cases. Fusing camera input with a radar to cover shortcomings of the camera sounds sensible enough.

What I'm saying is that it might be the case that "capability c" (somehow measures as a positive scalar) of your fused sensor system is not the sum c = c_1 + ... + c_n of the capabilties of each sensor c_i, but more like c = (c_1^p + ... + c_n^p)^(1/p) where p is a large power. The case p = 1 is where every sensor contributes to the whole system with perfect efficiency. The case p = infinity, i.e. c = max (c_1, ..., c_n) is where really only the best sensor does all the work and the weaker sensors can not add anything useful. The case of p > 1 somewhat large represents that all sensors contribute but the real heavy work is being done by the best sensor and other sensors only have significant impact if they have roughly equal capability. So I believe that the team at Tesla has the intuition that p is too big for radar to be worth it.

If the cameras (or our eyes) are obstructed, you shouldn't drive at all.

People drive all the time in snowstorms around here in Sweden and Norway, lower speeds but outside of a major blizzard with zero-visibility people still drive and reasonably safely.

I used to drive through torrential storms in Brazil, where the highest level of the wipers was barely enough to keep water out of the windshield, never had an issue when keeping safe speeds either (even though Brazilian traffic is murderous).

Driving in a torrential rain can be terrifying. Literally can't see practically anything in any direction.

Haven't seen an equivalent snowstorm so far. Even in the worst case there's still at least 30 ft / 10 m visible range. Which is not great, but at least something.

In both cases, if at all possible, better to stay put!

I'm not sold - Cybertrucks are expensive and still sell. And if it would be really good FSD, it would sell too (even at 70/80k per car).

But they now charge $5000 per year subscription fee, and they can demand the car be bought in for some onboarding. People are ready to pay for it and do whatever it takes to make their Tesla dance, so cost is not an excuse really.

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