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Comment by jsemrau | Hacker News Reader

I still hold the belief that the removal of Radar and LIDAR in 2021 was only detrimental to FSD's performance.

It surely means these things will never operate safely in rain, snow or even bad fog. That seems like a pretty big issue for a taxi operation.

Yes, because somehow humans can't drive without LIDAR in the day or night or rain.

I'm not saying Tesla FSD is any good but the idea that a robot could never drive without just cameras seems to be false given 1.6 billion human drivers that drive with only eyes.

And there's a huge increase (apparently around 36%) in road fatalities during bad weather.

People have much higher safety standards for self-driving cars than they do for human drivers. Just look at how one fatality led to the total abandonment of both the Cruise and the Uber self-driving program.

Humans also have, y'know, a working brain. Not to mention parallax cues that come from sensory input other than pure vision, such as head movement.

Your eyes and your visual system are much higher performance than any camera and computer currently available for the task of driving. Tesla also has far from the best available hardware, both in cameras and compute.

Still, even with this high performance human sensor suite, people commonly get into accidents in bad weather.

The Waymo approach of using other sensing modalities in order to compensate for the ways in which the cameras/processing aren't as good as a human makes a lot of sense, and in addition, it gives them the ability to exceed human performance using lidar and radar when cameras are having a hard time.

Once we have mass produced lidars and radars, the cost will come down, and not many people are going to care about an extra $1000-$2000 worth of sensors on a car if it significantly improves the safety.

Your eyes aren't all that special. The processing system is pretty efficient at what it does though.

There's no camera that can match the dynamic range of a decent pair of eyes. Some of this is due to active control of the iris at fairly high speed, so you can argue about whether it's the eye or the brain, but the overall result is higher dynamic range than you can get even with normal HDR techniques.

not to mention when there's sun going directly into the camera: pic.twitter.com/liJGSIIHKw

Did they ever have LIDAR? I completely agree that the removal of radar was a cost-cut too far and a decision made with uneducated hubris (his deeply-flawed "humans only need vision so cars only need that too" thought process). If they ever want to actually compete in this space, I expect we'll see one of these (or both) quietly re-added.

No, they never had LIDAR.

Tesla was/is? Luminar's biggest customer [1]. So they used it for something, likely ground-truth validation [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/luminar-says-tesla-is-big... [2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-no-longer-needs-lidar-ground...

They used it on test mules to create labeled training data for their older monocular depth / Occupancy Network models (which they still use as part of the supervisory policy enforcement and active safety layer, alongside the end-to-end model).

They’ve never had LiDAR in their cars and it would not ever have been practical for them to have done so. Nobody has any mid or long range LiDAR in vehicles as the scale that Tesla sells.

They could still add it later, maybe once the solid state ones become more affordable?

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