[HN Gopher] Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
___________________________________________________________________
Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
Author : mhb
Score : 378 points
Date : 2026-02-19 16:23 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| bjrobz wrote:
| I saw a Waymo in Seattle, today. If Waymo can get Seattle right,
| that gives me a lot of confidence that their stack is very
| capable of difficult road conditions.
|
| Note: I have not had the pleasure of riding in one yet, but from
| what my friend in SJ says, it's very convenient and confidence-
| inspiring.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Seattle probably isn't any harder than SF, other than the
| occasional weather event where the hills ice over and we get a
| bunch of funny (and scary) videos.
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| @dang .... do these comments seem organic to you? old accounts
| with almost zero karma going out of their way to use the same
| verbiage to compliment waymo 18 minutes after an article gets
| posted? .... dead internet at work.
| small_model wrote:
| Anytime a Tesla or Elon related article is posted it gets a
| barrage of negative comments usually FUD like. Any neutral or
| positive comment gets downvoted heavily. Bit suspicious to say
| the least, very clear pattern, they are not doing it very well
| should be a bit more nuanced.
| tomhow wrote:
| There is no evidence of any such organised campaign. The
| critical comments we see against that company and person are
| generally from known, established HN users, and align with
| frequently-expressed sentiments among the general public. And
| the complaint is just as often made that "anything remotely
| critical" about that company and person is flagged. If posts
| about the topic are being downvoted and flagged, it's mostly
| because that person and company are in the news so frequently
| that most commentary about them is repetitive, sensationalist
| and uninteresting, and thus off topic for HN.
| Barbing wrote:
| What a great website. Thanks for the data! And good work
| ant6n wrote:
| Could be lurkers triggered
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Or everyone is just tired of tesla and their stubborn camera
| only tech that will fail in higher autonomy cases?
|
| No no it's the cabal...
| tomhow wrote:
| Please don't post like this. If you suspect something, please
| email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with links to specific comments.
| The guidelines are clear abut this:
|
| _Please don 't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling,
| brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion
| and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email
| hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data._
| khafra wrote:
| Oh hell yeah, we can finally stop the braindead attempts to make
| a safe self-driving car with just cameras.
| throwaway473825 wrote:
| Is there anyone using only cameras except Tesla?
| culi wrote:
| Tesla is using radars as well as cameras. No one is using
| only cameras
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Tesla actually re-introduced radar sensors in HW4.
| https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-lo...
|
| They might not use them for autopilot, but maybe for some
| emergency braking stuff, when everything else failed.
| torginus wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if this was a better solution. I
| think while radar might have a worse spatial resolution, it's
| depth perception, speed measurement capability, and general
| robustness to adverse weather might make it a better
| complementary sensor.
|
| Lidar struggles with things like rain and snow way worse than
| cameras do.
| small_model wrote:
| Yes, silly using just cameras, I mean humans have Lidar
| sensors, that why they can drive, why didn't new just copy
| that....oh wait.
|
| It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now
| which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously
| anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going.
| (Hint: not well for Waymo)
|
| Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor
| could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
| disillusioned wrote:
| This is a weirdly tired counterpoint that Elon and Elonstans
| like to bandy about as if it's an apples to apples
| comparison. Humans have a weirdly ultra-high-dynamic-range
| binocular vision system mounted on an advanced ptz/swivel
| gimbal that allows for a great degree of freedom of movement,
| parallax effects, and a complex heuristic system for
| analyzing vision data.
|
| The Tesla FSD system has... well, sure, a few more cameras,
| but they're low resolution, and in inconveniently fixed
| locations.
|
| My alley has an occlusion at the corner where it connects to
| the main road: a very tall, very ample bush that basically
| makes it impossible to authoritatively check oncoming traffic
| to my left. I, a human, can determine that if I see the light
| flicker even slightly as it filters through the bushes, that
| the path is not clear: a car is likely causing that very
| slight change in light. My Tesla has no clue at all that
| that's happening. And worse, the perpendicular camera
| responsible for checking cross-traffic is mounted _behind my
| head_ on the b-pillar, in a fixed location that means that
| without nosing my car _into_ the travel lane, there is
| literally no way for it to be sure the path is clear.
|
| This edge case is navigated near-perfectly by Waymo, since
| its roof-mounted lidar can see above and beyond the bush and
| determine that the path is clear. And to hit back on the
| "Tesla is making cheaper cars that can drive autonomously
| anywhere in the world": I mean, they still aren't? Not
| authoritatively. Not authoritatively enough that they aren't
| seeing all sorts of interventions in the few "driverless"
| trials they're doing in Austin. Not authoritatively enough
| when I have my Tesla FSD to glory. It works well enough on
| the fat part of the bell curve, but those edges will get you,
| and a vision only system means that it is extremely brittle
| in certain conditions and with certain failure modes, that a
| lidar/radar backup help _enhance_.
|
| Moreover, Waymo has brought lidar development in-house,
| they're working to dramatically reduce their vehicle platform
| cost by reducing some redundant sensors, and they can now
| simulate a ground truth model of an absurd number of edge
| cases and odd scenarios, as well as simulate different
| conditions for real-world locations in parallel with their
| new world modeling systems.
|
| None of which reads to me as "not going well for Waymo."
| Waymo completes over 450,000 fully autonomous rides per week
| right now. They're dramatically lowering their own barriers
| to new cities/geographies/conditions, and they're pushing
| down the cost per unit substantially. Yeah, it won't get to
| be as cheap as Tesla owning the entire means of production,
| but I'm still extremely bullish on Waymo being the
| frontrunner for autonomous driving for the foreseeable
| future.
| small_model wrote:
| Waymos are still making lots of errors that a human
| wouldn't (Stopping in middle of a road due to a puddle was
| a recent one https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-
| unable-to-cross-...) 17 years after betting on LIDAR, I
| think Tesla is ahead now in most respects. It's could be
| wrong though we will probably know by the end of this year.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I think Tesla is ahead now in most respects
|
| Do you actually own a Tesla? I do. With FSD. And let me
| assure you, you are very wrong.
| Rohansi wrote:
| How old? The 2023+ models with HW4 are pretty good at
| FSD. A 2021 model with HW3 was scary bad when I tried it
| about a year and a half ago.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I tried it about a year and a half ago.
|
| So, you do not own a Tesla.
| vardump wrote:
| > My Tesla has no clue at all that that's happening. And
| worse, the perpendicular camera responsible for checking
| cross-traffic is mounted _behind my head_ on the b-pillar
|
| It has a wide angle camera in front that you usually can
| never see outside service menu. It should cover that case.
| lccerina wrote:
| Humans also don't have wheels, but we build objects with
| wheels. It is as if we can build objects that don't resemble
| humans for specific purposes. Crazy...
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price
| of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world.
|
| My understanding is that cyber cabs still need safety drivers
| to operate, is that not the case?
| orwin wrote:
| Yes, but they are useless, they can't steer, hence why they
| have more accidents than humans per driven miles.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| Robotaxis in Austin are in the process of removing in car
| safety monitors, there is a chance you would get one today
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| They are just moving the safety monitor in a car that
| drives behind you.
|
| https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-
| robota...
|
| It would be funny, but tbh it's just sad.
|
| Everything for the stock pump
| culi wrote:
| tesla robotaxi crash rates are also currently (as in,
| with safety drivers) 4x higher than humans so that's not
| very promising
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price
| of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world.
|
| Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?
|
| > I mean humans have Lidar sensors
|
| Real time slam is actually pretty good, the hard part is
| reliable object detection using just vision. Tesla's forward
| facing cameras are effectively monocular, which means that
| its much much harder to get depth (its not impossible but
| moving objects are much more difficult to observe if you only
| have cameras aligned on the same plane with no real parallax)
|
| Ultimately Musk is right, you probably don't _need_ lidar to
| drive safely. but its far more simple and easier to do if you
| have Lidar. Its also safer. Musk said "lidars are a crutch",
| not because he is some sort of genius, Its obvious that SLAM
| only driving is the way forward since the mid 00's (of not
| earlier). The reason he said it is because he thought he
| could save money not having lidar. The problem for him is
| that he didn't do the research to see how far away proper
| machine perception is to account for the last 1% in accuracy
| needed to make vision only safe and reliable.
| vardump wrote:
| > Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular
|
| Notably, human perception is effectively monocular in
| driving situations at distances of 60 feet or farther. It's
| best in the area where your limbs can reach.
|
| We don't need stereoscopic vision to drive.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| Not mass production yet, but the first one rolled off the
| completed assembly line at giga texas last week
|
| Sensor fusion is not far simpler, when the sensors
| disagree, and they will often, you have to pick which to
| trust.
|
| It is amazing to see how many people here are confident
| they know the one true way to build autonomous systems
| based on nothing but wanting to confirm their biases
| s08148692 wrote:
| > Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?
|
| "mass" is a strong word but the first one came off their
| production line 5 days ago
|
| ramp to high volume will probably be extremely slow
| khafra wrote:
| Humans cannot drive safely. Human drivers kill someone every
| 26 seconds. Waymos have never killed a person.
|
| Part of that is that humans are distractible, and their
| performance can be degraded in many ways, and that silicon
| thinks faster than meat.
|
| But part of it is the sensor suite. Look at Waymo vs Tesla
| robotaxi accident rates.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > Yes, silly using just cameras, I mean humans have Lidar
| sensors, that why they can drive, why didn't new just copy
| that....oh wait.
|
| Humans don't have wheels and cannot go 70MPH. Humans also
| don't have rear view cameras and cannot process video feeds
| from 8 cameras simultaneously. The point of these machines is
| to be better than humans for transportation. If adding LIDAR
| means that these vehicles can see better than humans and
| avoid accidents that humans do get into, then I for one want
| them in my vehicle.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't understand what you're saying.
|
| Stereo based depth mapping is kind of bad, especially so if
| it is not IR assisted. The quality you get from Lidar out of
| the box is crazy good in comparison.
|
| What you can do is train a model using both the camera and
| Lidar data to produce a good disparity and depth map but this
| just means you're using more Lidar not less.
|
| >It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs
| now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive
| autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where
| this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
|
| This feels like a highly misleading claim that might
| technically be true in the sense that there are less
| restrictions, but a reduction in restrictions doesn't imply
| an increase in capability.
|
| The comment about Waymo seems to be particularly myopic.
| Waymo has self driving technology and is operating as a
| financially successful business. There is no conceivable
| situation where the mere existence of competition with almost
| the same capabilities would shake that up. Why isn't it
| companies like Uber, who have significantly fallen behind,
| that are in trouble?
|
| >Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor
| could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
|
| And so is the comment about Tesla cyber cabs.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The human brain is a product of millions of years of dealing
| with spatial problems for survival -- and most individual
| humans are the product of thousands of hours of experience
| using it to navigate the physical world.
|
| We're always getting closer at emulating this, but we're
| still a ways off from matching it.
| BenoitP wrote:
| > laser pulses
|
| > phased-array
|
| I'm not well versed into RF physics. I had the feeling that
| light-wave coherency in lasers had to be created at a single
| source (or amplified as it passes by). That's the first time I
| hear about phased-array lasers.
|
| Can someone knowledgeable chime in on this?
| MayeulC wrote:
| The beam is split and re-emitted in multiple points. By
| controlling the optical length (refractive index, or just the
| length of the waveguide by using optical junctions) of the path
| that leads to each emitter, the phase can be adjusted.
|
| In practice, this can be done with phase change materials
| (heat/cool materials to change their index), or micro ring
| resonators (to divert light from one wave guide to another).
|
| The beam then self-interferes, and the resulting interference
| pattern (constructive/destructive depending on the direction)
| are used to modulate the beam orientation.
|
| You are right that a single source is needed, though I imagine
| that you can also use a laser source and shine it at another
| "pumped" material to have it emit more coherent light.
|
| I've been thinking about possible use-cases for this technology
| besides LIDAR,. Point to point laser communication could be an
| interesting application: satellite-to-satellite communication,
| or drone-to-drone in high-EMI settings (battlefield with
| jammers). This would make mounting laser designators on small
| drones a lot easier. Here you go, free startup ideas ;)
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Interesting to see the cost curve drop ... this always changes
| the market.
|
| I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR
| units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO
| regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work
| with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one
| part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space.
| Competition might push vendors to refine the software stack as
| well as the hardware. HOWEVER I'm keeping an eye on how these
| systems handle edge cases in bad weather. I don't think we have
| seen enough data yet...
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just
| cars._
|
| Interestingly, there are already some _comparatively_ cheap
| LIDAR units on the market.
|
| In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or
| whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need
| to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-
| safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need
| more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over
| bumps).
|
| On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is
| enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local
| robotics stockist probably already has something <$400
| generuso wrote:
| Neato from San Diego has developed a $30 (indoor, parallax
| based) LIDAR about 20 years ago, for their vacuum cleaners
| [1].
|
| Later, improved units based on the same principle became
| ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and
| similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are
| sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details
| of the design.
|
| [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-
| Cost+Laser+Dis... [2] https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-li
| dars/blob/main/README...
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10
| Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near
| everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.
| oblio wrote:
| And, I guess, even more advanced surveillance.
| echelon wrote:
| The minute internet became widespread it was game over.
|
| Pros and cons. :/
|
| It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy.
| The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for
| this, and big interest donors oppose it.
|
| Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer
| something here, though?
|
| Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech
| than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be
| vigilant.
| chha wrote:
| The EU already has. GDPR and the AI Act puts a lot of
| limits on what you can do in the open space, although it
| doesn't always go far enough.
| jonplackett wrote:
| And barely gets enforced
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices
|
| Top 5 fines:
|
| 1 - Meta - Ireland - EUR1.2 billion
|
| 2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - EUR746 millions
|
| 3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - EUR225 millions
|
| 4 - British Airway - UK - PS183 millions
|
| 5 - Google - France - EUR60 millions
|
| I wish every law barely got enforced this way.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| pretty pathetic, but people keep insisting you can
| regulate capital
| Zanfa wrote:
| I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of
| poor enforcement. The largest fine is _roughly_ 0.97% of
| Meta 's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for
| somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of
| doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given
| Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| 1% of Meta's _global_ revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of
| doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even
| trying to argue here. It 's a massive fine any way you
| put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't
| been reached and non compliance is more and more costly
| by design.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Their net profit was $60billion in 2024. This is peanuts.
| It can fluctuate by multiples of this fine in a month,
| depending on whether or not they've had a bad or good
| month, nevermind year. This pretty much is just a cost of
| doing business.
| Zanfa wrote:
| It's not even 1% of their annual revenue, let alone the
| entire multi year period they've been in breach before
| and since. It's nothing to them.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| The interesting part is that it keeps going up. You seem
| to believe we have somehow reached a cap where Meta can
| just expense it as a cost of doing business. That's not
| how European law works. The fine maximum is far higher
| and repeated non compliance keeps making the fines higher
| and higher. It's a ladder not a sizing precedent.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Maximum GDPR fine is 4% of global revenue in the previous
| year. If a company has 30% profit margin then they can,
| in theory, treat is as a cost of doing business,
| indefinitely.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| It's 4% per fine. Each violation is a fine and Meta owns
| multiple companies that can be fined. But 4% of global
| revenue already can't be treated as just a cost of doing
| business. Their shareholders would murder them.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't in practice. Meta's total
| revenue since 2018 when GDPR came into force is just shy
| of $1T. Even with all the smaller fines combined, the
| total amount of GDPR related fines is in the range of
| $3B. It's a rounding error.
|
| There isn't a trend of increasing fines, nor has any fine
| even reached the cap, let alone applied multiple times
| for the recurring violations. Even more with the current
| US administration's foreign policy towards the EU.
|
| While GDPR as a law is fine, with the exception of
| enforcement limitations, enforcement so far has been a
| complete joke.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > _the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k
| / year_
|
| I don't know about you, but on that income I would
| certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing
| business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would
| it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not.
| But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel
| stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the
| future? Absolutely yes.
| Zanfa wrote:
| My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k /
| year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined
| $600. I wouldn't expect them to change much.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| Would you still do your best to avoid it if that involved
| taking a pay cut of more than $600/year?
| mdrzn wrote:
| 2775 fines for a total of EUR6.8B since July 2018. It's
| not A LOT (I would hope for A LOT MORE fines), but it's
| not nothing.
|
| https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
| jonplackett wrote:
| It's very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
|
| But also kinda weird. There seems to be a lot of fines
| for hospitals for example.
|
| Some Portuguese hospital was fined EUR400,000 for
| 'Insufficient technical and organisational measures to
| ensure information security'
| jacquesm wrote:
| Medical, banking and insurance are three industries that
| the European data privacy watchdogs are much more strict
| about because of the potential for damage.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Lidar doesn't really give you much to "see", just shape and
| distance...so I'm a bit confused how it can be used for
| invasive surveillance, do you mean when fused with vision
| input it somehow allows it to infer more privacy stuff?
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I think we're well past the point where mass surveillance was
| a technical challenge. Mass oppression through autonomous
| violence however...
| pu_pe wrote:
| LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to
| privacy actually
| clayhacks wrote:
| I'd definitely feel much better if most cameras in the
| world were replaced by LIDAR. I feel like it would be much
| tougher to have a flawless facial recognition program with
| LIDAR alone
| adrianN wrote:
| Who needs facial recognition if you can identify people
| based on gait?
| vntok wrote:
| Judicial systems where a 6% error rate is deemed way too
| high to lead to a conviction.
| 0x3f wrote:
| Gait recognition is almost entirely hype. Sure it works
| to tell the difference between n = 10 people but so what,
| you can tell the difference between a group of 10 people
| by what kind of shoes they are wearing.
| numpad0 wrote:
| People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't
| take pictures don't know what they are talking about.
|
| They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star
| Trek material-informational converting transporters.
| Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but
| that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing
| fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.
| abeppu wrote:
| I don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't the
| wavelength of the laser pretty limiting to the idea of
| just slapping a Bayer color filter on? Like, if the laser
| is IR (partly so they're not visually disrupting all the
| humans around them), the signal you get back doesn't the
| visual spectrum sections that you'd need to get RGB
| right?
| aix1 wrote:
| > LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to
| privacy actually
|
| Right, but how likely is it that there will be LIDAR and no
| cameras (especially given the low cost of the latter)?
| rfv6723 wrote:
| Humanity has never known a world without surveillance.
| Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive
| tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and
| agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan.
| Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient
| necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without
| accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of
| endless conflict.
| zorked wrote:
| That's an incredibly bullshit argument to defend the
| indefensible.
| rfv6723 wrote:
| Your reaction actually proves the point. Aggression
| thrives in anonymous spaces because the lack of oversight
| removes the weight of accountability. When people feel
| unobserved, they quickly abandon the social friction that
| once held tribes and clans together. You are essentially
| providing a live demonstration of why a society without
| any form of monitoring inevitably slides into the
| Hobbesian trap.
| donkey_brains wrote:
| Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense
| urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have
| not historically devolved into a "nasty, brutish, and
| short" existence. In fact, cities have been centers of
| culture and learning throughout history. How does this
| square with your theory?
| rfv6723 wrote:
| The 19th century was the true cradle of mass
| surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and
| institutionalized police forces provided the systemic
| oversight required to manage dense urban life. These
| administrative tools served as the analogue version of
| digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known
| and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture
| only because these new forms of visibility prevented the
| Hobbesian collapse that anonymity would have otherwise
| triggered.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| And what about all of the previous ~40-50 centuries where
| cities were centers of learning and art and not Hobbesian
| hell holes? Ur is slightly older than the 19th century, I
| believe.
|
| And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of
| thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome
| reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without
| becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.
| expedition32 wrote:
| In my country it wasn't until the late 19th century that
| someone had the balls to stop going to church on Sunday.
| It was a huge scandal at the time but it all worked out
| in the end.
|
| Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother.
| You don't need technology for that.
| macintux wrote:
| At no point in time before this era was it possible for a
| random bureaucrat to have a reasonably comprehensive list
| of everyone in a country who attended church yesterday.
|
| Scale matters.
| moffkalast wrote:
| There are already very good sub-$100 lidars, especially for 2D
| since they were made en masse for vacuum cleaners. E.g. the
| LD19 or STL-19P as they're calling it now for some reason. You
| need to pair them with serious compute to run AMCL with them,
| plus actuation (though ST3215s are cheap and easy to integrate
| now too) and control for that actuation which also wants its
| own compute, plus a battery, etc. the costs quickly add up.
| Robotics is expensive regardless of how cheap components get.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I think the difference is that these are intended for
| automotive use and have a much longer range than the ones in
| your Roomba.
| moffkalast wrote:
| True, you have to go up to $120 for the 25m version, or
| $450 for Unitree's L2 which gets 30m in 3D. That's about as
| much you could possibly ever need unless you're making high
| speed vehicles that need more reaction time. In which case
| you probably shouldn't be relying on the cheapest thing on
| the market :)
| esskay wrote:
| RIP to every single camera in existence if that happens. Lidar
| is awful with damaging camera lenses.
| hinoki wrote:
| I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How
| could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers?
|
| It turns out it's the sensors that are easily damaged by high
| powered lidar lasers.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-
| ca...
| shinycode wrote:
| There is complains that some Volvo cars damaged iPhone
| cameras. It's not even clear if Apple takes those under
| warranty. We've seen car review YouTubers that got their
| iPhone camera sensors damaged captured (by a second camera)
| while reviewing
| mikeyouse wrote:
| One such review where Marques shows how it happened to
| his phone
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=cANJDT5BLfdd9ZU
| T
| RobotToaster wrote:
| One highlight from the video, he says most cameras are
| fine, it's just iphones that don't have a very good IR
| filter. Which sounds correct, in my experience most
| cameras have pretty substantial IR filters that have to
| be removed if you want to photograph IR.
|
| I also wonder if the smaller sensor size on phones
| contributes, since the energy is being focused onto a
| smaller spot.
|
| Either way, for that to happen he was filming the LIDAR
| while active, for a decent amount of time, from right
| next to the car. I assume under normal conditions it
| wouldn't be running constantly while the vehicle is
| stationary?
| Crespyl wrote:
| Is it possible that the iPhone filters are weaker due to
| FaceID requirements? I seem to recall that FaceID (and
| similar systems, like Windows Hello) depend on IR to get
| a more 3D map of the face, so it'd make sense that they
| want to be more sensitive in that range.
|
| Laptops aren't generally being used in the same areas as
| cars though, so you wouldn't expect to see as many cases
| involving Windows Hello compatible laptops/cameras.
| vablings wrote:
| Possibly. Some models of iPhone use LIDAR for AR tooling
| as the measure app
| dmonitor wrote:
| That wouldn't make sense on the back of the phone.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > The biggest concern is not photographic cameras but
| rather the video cameras mounted on autonomous cars to
| gather crucial information the cars need to drive
| themselves.
|
| So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| The Epstein classes argument is: If youre not my
| property, why should We care?
| b112 wrote:
| If this is true, the eyes are no better. Especially as it
| can't be seen, who will look awsy? And at night, with open
| irises?
|
| There was someone who had his eyes damaged by sitting next
| to a heater.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Are the eyes really "no better" in this scenario? From
| the above article it seems we tuned the behavior to the
| eye specifically (but not necessarily image sensors):
|
| > Moving to a longer wavelength that does not penetrate
| the human eye allows new lidars to fire more powerful
| pulses and stretch their range beyond 200 meters, far
| enough for stopping faster cars. Now a claim of lidar
| damage to the charge-coupled-device (CCD) sensor on a
| photographer's electronic camera has raised concern that
| new eye-safe long-wavelength lidars might endanger
| electronic eyes.
|
| > Producers of laser light shows are well aware that
| laser beams can damage electronic eyes. "Camera sensors
| are, in general, more susceptible to damage than the
| human eye," warns the International Laser Display
| Association
|
| "doesn't penetrate the human eye" seems a bit hand wavy,
| but I take it to mean "these length pulses in this
| wavelength are tuned to have the power not be enough to
| damage the eye". Camera lenses may not have the same
| level of IR filtering/gathering area or, if they do,
| there is nothing implying the image sensor has the exact
| same tolerances as the inside of the eye. From the same:
|
| > Sensor vulnerability to infrared damage would depend on
| the design of the infrared filters
|
| A heater usually damages the eyes through drying
| out/heating up the outside layer with constant high
| intensity, not by causing damage to the retina (post
| filtering). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q12691/
|
| > Furthermore, since the eye blocks the IRR, the eye
| begins to overheat leading to eye damage and possible
| blindness. Because of this, you should not look at the
| heater for an extended period of time.
|
| Enough intensity of any wavelength is enough to damage
| any camera or eye of course, but the scenario here seems
| to be built around that question for the eye. Similarly,
| I've heard of Waymo's causing 6 mph accidents but no
| reports of eye damage from any car LiDAR. Despite that,
| in the above YouTube clip Marques Brownlee actively shows
| his camera being clearly damaged as its moved around.
| aeternum wrote:
| The next headline will be that it also damages human
| retinas.
|
| It's not safe just because it's infrared. And the claims
| that it's safe because of the exposure time is highly
| questionable, would you be okay with that for any other
| laser?
| ladberg wrote:
| iPhones have had lidar for years, have cameras been affected?
| pedro_caetano wrote:
| Is there any deeper study on long term effects regarding
| retinal damage?
|
| I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some
| form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.
|
| More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a
| standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a
| city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these
| laser sources.
| eurekin wrote:
| Some lidar units simply use the wavelength that the human
| eye is opaque to.
|
| The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little
| to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were
| like that and that was the original breaking story.
| IsTom wrote:
| > human eye is opaque to
|
| Absorbing the laser isn't necessarily any good. Very
| hypothetically it could lead to cataracts.
| eurekin wrote:
| Sun emits much stronger IR, near-IR, UV
| IsTom wrote:
| And staring directly at the sun is not recommended.
| bregma wrote:
| Absolutely, and is a major cause of cataracts. Somewhat
| near 100% of people with lenses in their eyes will get
| cataracts eventually if they are ever exposed to
| unfiltered sunlight.
| jayd16 wrote:
| That's why we don't look at it.
| jandrese wrote:
| I remember those old cellphones with weak IR filters. It
| was a scandal because light clothing turns out to be more
| transparent to IR than to visible light so they were
| acting as a sort of clothing "X-Ray" in bright light.
| Creepers on the Internet tried to start a whole new genre
| of porn but were shut down in a hurry by cellphone
| manufacturers adding robust IR filters on the next
| generation of smartphones.
|
| Shame that perverts had to ruin that for us, it was kinda
| neat to point a TV remote as the camera and see the bulb
| light up.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I suspect we can't quantify human eye-damage enough to
| easily rule-out chronic effects... until it's too late for
| the patient.
| kleiba wrote:
| Could be a gain for privacy ;-)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| we'd likely see new coatings and sensor designs that avoid
| it, not trivial but also not the end of the world
| culi wrote:
| I wish this was true. It'd immediately be the best way to
| fight surveillance systems like Flock
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| RIP to humans under authoritarian regimes?
| culi wrote:
| The short-range stuff is already $150-300 per unit. If you're
| thinking indoor robots that's already technically feasible.
| Over 25% of all Chinese cars being produced today have LiDAR.
|
| Even mid-range sensors used in ADAS systems only cost $600-750.
| The long-range stuff that's needed for trucking or robotaxis is
| $1,500-6,000
| fragmede wrote:
| It _might_ , but comma.ai proves that lidar is red herring, which
| is further supported by the fact that Waymo are able to drive
| vision-only if necessary.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > comma.ai proves that lidar is red herring
|
| I mean it doesn't. If you actually look at it comma.ai proves
| that level two doesn't require lidar. Thats not the same as
| full speed safe autonomy.
|
| whilst it is possible to drive vision only (assuming the right
| array of cameras (ie not the way tesla have done it) lidar
| gives you a low latency source of depth that can correct vision
| mistakes. Its also much less energy intensive to work out if an
| object is dangerous, and on a collision course.
|
| To do that in vision, you need to work out what the object is
| (ie is it a shadow) then you have to triangulate it. That
| requires continuous camera calibration, and is all that easy.
| If you have a depth "prior" ie, yes its real, yes its large and
| yes its going to collide, its much much more simple to use
| vision to work out what to do.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's fair to point out that comma.ai is SAE level two system,
| however it's not geofenced at all, which is an SAE level 5
| requirement. But really that brings up the fact that SAE's
| levels aren't the right ones, merely the ones they chose to
| define since they're the standards body. A better set of
| levels are the seven I go into more detail about on my blog.
|
| As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what
| radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision
| system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will
| run into.
| imtringued wrote:
| Your autonomy scale is pretty arbitrary and encodes
| assumptions about the underlying technology and
| environments the vehicle is supposed to implement and
| operate in.
|
| The SAE autonomy scale is about dividing responsibility
| between the driver and the assistance system. The lowest
| revel represents full responsibility on the driver and the
| highest level represents full responsibility on the system.
|
| If there is a geofenced transportation system like the
| Vegas loop and the cars can drive without a human driver,
| then that is a level 5 system. By the way, geofencing is
| not an "SAE level 5" requirement. Geofencing is a tool to
| make it easier to reach requirements by reducing the scope
| of what full autonomy represents.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| No one really disputes that some level of autonomous driving is
| possible with only cameras, it's a matter of how safe and sure
| you wanna be.
| small_model wrote:
| 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100
| barrier'. When an article says one day, read not in the next
| decade.
| Fricken wrote:
| Around a decade ago the nascent LIDAR industry boomed and
| dozens of startups emerged out of nowhere all racing to make
| cheap automotive grade LIDAR, and here we are.
|
| Of course MicroVisiom is only claiming their LIDAR to be
| suitable for advanced driver assist, but ADAS encompasses a
| wide array of capabilities: basically everything between cruise
| control and robotaxis, so there's no definition of how much
| LIDAR you need to do the job, just however much you feel like.
| Tesla feels like none at all.
| michaelt wrote:
| Interestingly, there have been people in the LIDAR industry
| predicting costs like this for many years. I heard numbers like
| $250 per vehicle back in 2012 [1]
|
| Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of
| scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered
| by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the
| huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low
| prices didn't materialise either.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.us...
| small_model wrote:
| Also 'Luminar Technologies, a prominent U.S. lidar
| manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025'
| LIDAR is useful in a small set of scenarios (calibration and
| validation) but do not bet the farm on it or make it the centre
| piece of your sensor suite.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a
| very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very
| useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.
| servo_sausage wrote:
| Useful but not at all required. Camera + radar is
| sufficient for driving, and camera+ USS is fine for
| parking.
|
| Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and
| compute, it's also not really a strict requirement.
|
| Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly
| navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres.
| Lidar gives you very little in these areas
| UltraSane wrote:
| All of the actually WORKING self driving systems use
| LIDAR. This is not a coincidence.
| small_model wrote:
| Like Waymo? (https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-
| unable-to-cross-...) 17 years after betting the farm on
| LIDAR the solution fails to navigate a puddle. Sorry but
| they bet on the wrong technology, Tesla has overtaken
| them with multi camera and NN solution.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Your conclusion from a single incident is a bad
| inference. One vehicle getting confused by a puddle
| (likely a sensor fusion edge case or mapping artifact,
| not a fundamental LIDAR failure) doesn't indict the
| technology. Tesla's cameras have produces vastly more
| failures.
|
| Waymo has driven tens of millions of autonomous miles
| with a serious injury/fatality rate dramatically lower
| than human drivers. The actual data shows the technology
| works. Tesla FSD still requires active driver supervision
| and is not legally or technically a robotaxi system.
| Comparing them as if they're at parity is wrong.
|
| LIDAR gives direct metric depth with no inference
| required. Camera-only systems must infer depth from 2D
| images using neural networks, which introduces failure
| modes LIDAR doesn't have. Radar is very valuable when
| LIDAR and cameras give ambiguous data.
|
| What metrics has Telsa overtaken Waymo? Deployed robotaxi
| revenue miles? No. Disengagement rates? No published
| comparable data. Safety per mile in driverless operation?
| No.
| small_model wrote:
| A Tesla wouldn't stop for a puddle. Also its not locked
| to a small geofenced area (people have driven coast to
| coast without a single intervention on FSD including
| parking spot to parking spot) when I can buy a Waymo
| vehicle that does this then Waymo would have caught up
| with Tesla.
| jamespo wrote:
| Wow, so it can cope with driving on the highway. That's
| the easy part.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Your puddle example is utterly irrelevant. Tesla's are
| notorious for phantom breaking. Robotaxis are very much
| locked to tiny geofenced areas. Some even shaped like a
| penis because Musk is such a child.
|
| "people have driven coast to coast without a single
| intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking
| spot"
|
| I find this claim very dubious. Prove it. Teslas never
| drive empty for a very good reason.
| small_model wrote:
| Err they have lots of Model Ys in Austin as Robotaxis
| right now with no drivers. I guess this is also
| 'dubious'. Look it's clear you have a huge bias I would
| urge you to read up on
| https://grokipedia.com/page/List_of_fallacies otherwise
| your emotional responses will blind you to reality.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > Look it's clear you have a huge bias I would urge you
| to read up on
| https://grokipedia.com/page/List_of_fallacies otherwise
| your emotional responses will blind you to reality.
|
| Writing this and linking to fake Wikipedia is actually
| hilarious.
| UltraSane wrote:
| "hey have lots of Model Ys in Austin as Robotaxis right
| now with no drivers"
|
| They do not. They have a very small number of them open
| to a select number of people, not the general public. And
| they are limited to even smaller areas. You need to
| understand that Musk is NOT an engineer, he is more of a
| con man desperate to inflate tesla stock price. If he
| says self driving cars don't need LIDAR then they must
| actually need it.
|
| https://futurism.com/future-society/polymarket-fortune-
| betti...
|
| Polymarket user David Bensoussan has made $36,000 by
| betting against Musk's wildly optimistic self driving
| predictions.
|
| linking to grokipedia feels like intentional rage-
| baiting.
| small_model wrote:
| Who should I believe a random poster on hackernews who
| has likely an average salary or Elon Musk who is the
| richest man in the world and create multiple trillion
| dollar companies......hard one!
|
| Whats wrong with grokipedia its a bit less woke/far left
| wing, more balanced.
| UltraSane wrote:
| You are just mindlessly regurgitating the lies of Musk
| and using an "appeal to wealth" to justify not analyzing
| them. He has been lying about self driving since 2016.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/20/elon-
| mus...
|
| https://futurism.com/leaked-elon-musk-self-driving
|
| For nearly a decade Elon Musk has claimed Teslas can
| truly drive themselves. They can't. Now California
| regulators, a Miami jury and a new class action suit are
| calling him on it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_aut
| ono...
| cheema33 wrote:
| > Tesla has overtaken them with multi camera and NN
| solution.
|
| Let me guess, you heard this from Elon?
| servo_sausage wrote:
| I work with programs approaching L3+ from L2, with the
| requirement that the system works for 99% of roads (not
| tesla before people start fixating on that).
|
| We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in
| gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough
| some long distance precision.
|
| None of these have been instrumental in a final product;
| personally I suspect that many of the cars including
| lidar use it for data collection and edge cases more than
| as part of the driving perception model.
| heisenbit wrote:
| Accidents are not normal driving situations but edge
| cases.
| servo_sausage wrote:
| Sort of; accidents are the absolute core of the product.
| They are rare, but they are the focus of the design.
|
| By edge cases I mean scenarios like the lights going out
| in an underground garage; low vision due to colourful
| smoke or dust, or things like optical illusions or
| occlusion that a human would just need to remember.
|
| Lidar can help, but not really enough to be worth it.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Lidar is by far the most accurate source of range data.
| You need to explain why Waymo and Zoox use lidar in
| direct contradiction to what you claim.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Waymo is the best current autonomous driving system and
| Waymo uses LIDAR. This is because LIDAR is an incredibly
| effective sensor for accurate range data. Vision and
| Radar range data is much less accurate and reliable.
|
| Waymo used LIDAR in the realtime control loop. It
| combines LiDAR, camera, and radar data in real time to
| build a 3D representation of the environment, which is
| constantly updated.
|
| I fundamentally don't trust any level 4 system that
| doesn't use LIDAR
| servo_sausage wrote:
| Yes, I am aware of waymo... What they do is impressive.
| However they don't have a product that works for all
| highways yet, that's the space I work in, and we have no
| real fixation on lidar... It's nice but not a
| requirement, and hard to justify the cost unless you can
| make sales because of it (and there are some places where
| this is the case, but not everywhere)
|
| You don't need the mm precision of lidar very often; we
| find that it offers nothing at speed over radar; and in
| tight manoeuvres the cameras we need for human park
| assist and ultrasonics do well enough.
|
| It in not more accurate; but it is more precise, but that
| doesn't really matter. (Radar gives you relative speed
| directly, this is more important than a very precise
| point at highway speeds).
| UltraSane wrote:
| Waymo is level 4. I think currently it is nearly
| impossible to make a level 4 system as safe as Waymo
| without Lidar. Maybe new 4d imaging radar or THz radar
| could change this. Sensor modalities have physics-based
| limitations, current camera+radar isn't sufficient for
| L4.
| UltraSane wrote:
| This is very wrong. LIDAR scanners have revolutionized
| surveying by enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of
| terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points
| per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing
| accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed
| areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod
| mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction
| sites. Handhels LIDAR scanners can map the inside of
| buildings with incredible accuracy. This is very commonly
| used to create digital twins of factories.
| jcattle wrote:
| And none of this is on the order of magnitude that consumer
| automotive would have.
|
| The EU requires every new car to have Autonomos Emergency
| Braking. If LiDAR becomes cheaper than radar, this is a
| potential market of millions.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| Also, MicroVision, the company in OP's article bought the IP
| from Luminar. This feels like a circular venture capital
| scam. Luminar originally went public via SPAC and made a
| bunch of people very wealthy before ultimately failing.
| newsclues wrote:
| Economies of scale when they are in phones?
| dnlserrano wrote:
| will Musk backtrack on the whole CV enough, that's how humans do
| it if price becomes this low?
| joe_mamba wrote:
| To be fair, Musk was only parroting what Karpathy was telling
| him so you should ask him how self driving cars are supposed to
| work with CV only.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Well he's also argued that just using CV reduces sensor
| contention and he claims it improves performance and release
| velocity, which is why they also got rid of radar and
| ultrasonic sensors. I am doubtful although it'll be interesting
| to see regardless
| epolanski wrote:
| Microvision has been saying that from half a decade, products?
| Nowhere to be found.
| brador wrote:
| Is this Human safe at these volumes? There was a time you could
| get your feet sized by putting them into an X-ray box at the shoe
| store. Removed from stores once the harm was known.
| skandinaff wrote:
| Well, the energy levels used in those devices should be
| miniscule, and the wavelengths used are well studies. The
| problem with x-rays - was lack of studies on health effects,
| and regulations on those effects. I think, since that time,
| we've studies radiation (be it light, rf or other parts of
| spectrum) much more. There is indeed a possibility that we're
| overlooking some bio-electromagnetic interaction effects; for
| instance now there is some evidence that led lights might not
| be harmless - but again, it's not the they affect biological
| structures somehow, but the lack of spectral components has
| some effects. It is an interesting topic to research. But, the
| lidar "should" be safe
| brador wrote:
| The main damage risk from LIDAR is to retinal rods and cones.
| You just know some jerk is going to overclock his system and
| we know some people just don't care about the harm they cause
| so long as they get a benefit. As a combo that means I'll be
| wearing protective eyewear outdoors the day this tech comes
| to the roads.
| thegeek108 wrote:
| What is this author even doing with these numbers?
| keyKeeper wrote:
| There are laser measurers sold for a few buck on Temu. Robot
| vacuums sold for few hundred dollars have Lidars that map out the
| room in a seconds.
|
| Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be
| expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point
| sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of
| the surroundings will be built.
| echoangle wrote:
| Probably one factor is range. The article talks about 200-300m
| range, a robot vacuum has maybe 10m best case?
| keyKeeper wrote:
| For example this one has 120m range with 1cm accuracy and its
| 15 euros: https://www.temu.com/bg-en/-digital-laser-distance-
| meter-50m...
| echoangle wrote:
| Outside in the sun against other cars or inside against a
| wall?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Most spinning robovac LIDARs are 2D. Most solid state robovac
| LIDARs are like 8x8 array of laser pointers.
|
| Automotive LIDARs are like, 128x64[px] for production models or
| 1920x1080[px] for experimental models with GbE and/or HDMI-
| equivalents-of-industry outputs. Totally different
| technologies.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Oh my god so many reasons. I don't feel like getting fully into
| it but that's kind of like asking why you can't use your
| kitchen scale to measure highway traffic as it drives over it.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was
| always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras
| only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones
| that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection
| challenges.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Just say Tesla, why censor yourself.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I have a suspicion here on HN. When criticizing big tech,
| especially Google and FB, at a certain time of the day a
| specific cohort comes online and downvotes. Suspiciously,
| that is a time when one could conclude, that now people in
| the US start working or come online. Either fanboys,
| employees or an organized group of users trying to silence
| big tech criticism.
|
| I have no proof of course and it might be coincidence, or
| just difference of mindset between US citizens and Europe
| citizens. It happened a few times already and to me looks
| sus.
|
| But if they actually read and not just ctrl+f <company name>,
| then of course not writing the company name, but hinting at
| it in an obvious way is no more helpful either.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| I have seen this happening multiple times, some to fairly
| reasonable comments with a just tiny negative tone.
|
| There is also flagging abuse which effectively kills the
| comment /post.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| It's been my experience that hn and reddit have a very high
| overlap in audience these days. The jerrybreakseverything
| crowd. Anything anti-tesla, anti-grok, is applauded.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with GP, pretty much anything that isn't
| effusively praising tesla or elmu etc will tend to get
| reflexively downvoted.
| simpss wrote:
| I know for a fact at least 1 bigger US company has a bot in
| slack that brings up any mentions of $companyname on
| hackernews...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| The reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the
| sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do.
| If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win.
| It doesn't matter if your system has fewer accidents if some of
| the failure modes are different than human ones, because the
| jury will think "how could it not figure that out?"
| estearum wrote:
| I don't think that's the reasoning.
|
| The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly
| predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than
| cameras, and _hypothetically_ that should be fine because,
| well, humans drive with only two eyes.
|
| Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how
| incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
|
| Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your
| accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even
| internally sound.
| szundi wrote:
| Seeing the SOTA in FSD techs it is not obvious that Musk
| made a miscalc so far.
| estearum wrote:
| Nah
|
| If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish
| it
|
| They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering
|
| (Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you
| should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't
| normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is
| therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| There certainly is a pretty on going miscalculation
| regarding human intelligence, and consrquentially, empathy.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| IMHO not using lidars sounds like a premature optimisation
| and a complication, with a level of hubris.
|
| This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a
| pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as
| possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if
| more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2)
| how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
|
| And, less excusable, ignorant of how incredible human eyes
| are compared to small sensor cameras. In particular high DR
| in low light, with fast motion. Every photographer knows
| this.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| And also ignorant about how those two eyes have binocular
| vision, adjustable positions, and can look in multiple
| mirrors for full spatial awareness.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| There are good arguments but this isn't one. Many humans
| (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the
| cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses
| that are watching everything all the time, when a human
| can only focus in one direction at a time.
| jeltz wrote:
| So your eye does not have an adjustable position and you
| cannot use mirrors?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Both are easily compensated for by having many cameras.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I thought only the front view has binocular vision on the
| cars. The others are single, with no depth perception.
| How does it know how close objects are outside this
| forward cone?
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure
| /fi...
| aylons wrote:
| Binocular vision is not only relevant for driving (well,
| maybe for the steering wheel, but that's not the point).
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| It gives us depth perception. And moving the eyes and/or
| head gives the depth perception over a wide field of
| view.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, I think 'miscalculation' might be giving too much
| credit about good intentions.
|
| He wanted (needed?) to get on the hype train for self
| driving to pump up the stock price, knew that at the time
| there was zero chance they could sell it at the price point
| lidar required at the time - or even effective other
| sensors (like radar) - and sold it anyway at the price
| point that people would buy it at, even though it was not
| plausibly going to ever work at the level that was being
| promised.
|
| There is a word for that. But I'm sure there are many
| lawyers that will say it was 'mere fluffery' or the like.
| And I'm sure he'll get away with it, because more than
| enough people are complicit in the mess.
|
| Miscalculation assumes there was a mistake somewhere, but
| near as I can tell, it is playing out as any reasonable
| person expected it too, given what was known at the time.
| estearum wrote:
| I think Musk is really not as smart as he thinks he is
| and this specific thing was probably an earnest mistake.
| Lots of other fraudulent stuff going on though of course!
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still
| need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams.
| Thats mainly a software problem and companies like Waymo
| have done it, but Tesla was having trouble with it earlier,
| and if you don't do it right, your self driving system can
| be less reliable.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you
| still need cameras you have to fuse the two information
| streams
|
| The response to the challenge shouldn't be whittling down
| your sensor-suite to a single type, but to get good at
| sensor fusion.
| switchbak wrote:
| I think this is the key. In theory - more information
| stream when fused together (properly) should reduce
| error. If their stumbling block is the "properly" part,
| than the rest of those justifications come off as a
| pretty weak way to sidestep their own inabilities to
| deliver this properly.
|
| We have lots of evidence of similar strategies being used
| in other domains, this seems like an especially life-
| critical domain that ought to have high rigor and
| standards applied.
| DennisP wrote:
| Sensor fusion seems like it'd be a big problem when
| you're handcoding lots of C++, and way less of a problem
| when all the sensors are just feeding into one big neural
| network, as Tesla and probably others are doing now. The
| training process takes care of it from there.
|
| One of Udacity's first courses was on self-driving,
| taught by Sebastian Thrun who later cofounded Waymo. He
| went through some Bayesian math that takes a collection
| of lidar points, where each point contributes to a
| probabilistic assessment of what's really going on. It's
| fine if different points seem to contradict each other,
| because you're looking for the most likely scenario that
| could produce that combined sensor data. Transformers can
| do the same sort of thing, and even with different sensor
| types it's still the same sort of problem.
| kevlened wrote:
| > Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR
|
| Given that Musk has a history of driving lower costs, it's
| unlikely he overestimated the long-term cost floor. He just
| thought we were close to self-driving in 2014.
|
| Another factor is Andrej Karpathy, who was the primary
| architect for the vision-only approach. Musk wanted fewer
| parts, and Karpathy believed he could deliver that.
| Karpathy is still an advocate of vision-only.
| estearum wrote:
| Right, for the reasons that I just mentioned
| naravara wrote:
| Considering he also runs a company that puts computer chips
| inside brains to augment them you'd think he ought to have
| a more sound understanding as to the limits of both.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
|
| It is pretty incredible but people will (rightly so?) hold
| automated drivers to an ultra high standard. If automated
| driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human
| rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| > If automated driving systems cause accidents at
| anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty
| quickly.
|
| This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed
| human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory
| agency to outlaw them!
|
| https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-
| cras...
| ggreer wrote:
| According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often
| than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which
| is clearly false. I think it's far more likely that
| humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance,
| and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human
| drivers on average.
| kube-system wrote:
| Definitely. I looked at Tesla's source for these numbers,
| looks like they primarily used data sourced from police
| reports, which most people only file if the incident is
| serious enough to turn into insurance.
|
| Tesla notes:
|
| > These assumptions may contain limitations with respect
| to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations
| (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only
| crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to
| police
|
| https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety
| cycomanic wrote:
| > According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more
| often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles),
| which is clearly false.
|
| Why is it clearly false? It might be false, but clearly?
| I would definitely like to see evidence either way.
|
| > I think it's far more likely that humans don't report
| most minor collisions to insurance, and that both
| Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on
| average.
|
| That sounds like you are trying to find reasons to get
| the conclusion you want.
| ggreer wrote:
| The NHTSA requires a report when any automated driving
| system hits any object at any speed, or if anything else
| hits the ADS vehicle resulting damage that is reasonably
| expected to exceed $1,000.[1] In practice, this means
| that everyone reports any ADS collision, since trading
| paint between two vehicles can result in >$1k in damage
| total.
|
| If you go to the NHTSA's page regarding their Standing
| General Order[2] and download the CSV of all ADS
| incidents[3], you can filter where the reporting entity
| is Waymo and find 520 rows. If you filter where the
| vehicle was stopped or parked, you'll find 318 crashes.
| If you scan through the narrative column, you'll see
| things like a Waymo yielding to pedestrians in a
| crosswalk and getting rear-ended, or waiting for a red
| light to change and getting rear-ended, or yielding to a
| pickup truck that then shifted into reverse and backed
| into the Waymo. In other words: the majority of Waymo
| collisions are due to human drivers.
|
| So either Waymos are ridiculously unlucky, or when these
| sorts of things happen between two human driven cars,
| it's rarely reported to insurance. In my experience, if
| there's only minor damage, both parties exchange contact
| info and don't involve the authorities. Maybe one
| compensates the other for damage, or maybe neither party
| cares enough about a minor dent or scrape to deal with
| it. I've done this when someone rear-ended me, and I know
| my parents have done it when they've had collisions.
|
| If human driven vehicles really did average 229k miles
| between any collision of any kind, we'd see many more
| pristine older vehicles. But if you pay attention to
| other cars on the road or in parking lots, you'll see far
| more dents and scratches than would be expected from that
| statistic. And that's not even counting the damage that
| gets repaired!
|
| 1. See page 13 of https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/f
| iles/2025-04/third-am...
|
| 2. https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-
| general-orde...
|
| 3. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021
| -01_In...
| Gee101 wrote:
| Musk has never been scared of vertically integrating
| something that's too expensive initially.
| bluGill wrote:
| Until a lawyer points out other cars see that. My car already
| has various sensors and in manual driving sounds alarms if
| there is a danger I seem not to have noticed. (There are
| false alarms - but most of the type I did notice and probably
| should have left more safety margin even though I wouldn't
| hit it)
|
| also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do
| better they will mandate it.
| small_model wrote:
| Very recent issue with Waymo https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-
| robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-.... This is 17 years after
| they bet the farm on LIDAR, with no signs its ever going to
| be cost effective or that it's better than multiple cameras,
| with millisecond reaction 360 degrees, that never gets tired,
| drunk, distracted, and also has other cheaper sensors and NN
| trained on Billions or real world data.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >A vehicle got stuck trying to figure out an obstacle so
| sensors with less information are better than sensors with
| more information.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| That's an example of it failing safe. I'd rather it did
| that than drive me into a sinkhole because it thought it
| was a puddle.
| small_model wrote:
| Ok so Waymo is useless in the rain then, kind of
| limiting. But at least that 0.000000000001% times it
| actually is a sinkhole you won't damage the bumper.
| criley2 wrote:
| I'd rather a Waymo be useless in the rain rather than a
| Tesla be actively dangerous and likely to kill me.
|
| Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65
|
| Waymo fatalities: 0
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Autopilot isn't full self driving (FSD), most cars these
| ship with smart cruise control (what autopilot basically
| is). Do you have fatality statistics for FSD?
|
| If we are just talking about smart cruise control, most
| cars are using cameras and radar, not lidar yet. But
| Tesla is special since it doesn't even use radar for its
| smart cruise control implementation, so that could make
| it less safe than other new cars with smart cruise
| control, but Autopilot was never competing with Waymo.
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| > Waymo fatalities: 0
|
| By some measures Waymo is actually at -1 fatalities.
| There has been one confirmed birth of a child in a Waymo.
| https://apnews.com/article/baby-born-waymo-san-
| francisco-6bd...
| aix1 wrote:
| I think the car would have to be more actively involved
| in the process for that to count. :)
| veltas wrote:
| Dude that's not a 'puddle' as the article claims, that's a
| body of water that it's not even visually obvious whether
| it's safe to drive through. Maybe I'm a bad driver but I'd
| hesitate to drive through that in a small car either.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I think the difference is the prior knwoldege a commuter
| has of that section of road. Does it always flood
| shallowly in heavy rain?
| veltas wrote:
| The amount of water will depend on the rain, so we don't
| know how shallow it is even with prior knowledge.
| devilbunny wrote:
| If you drive the road every day, you probably do. If you
| can see someone drive through it (perhaps someone who
| knows the area well and knows how deep it is based on
| puddle width), you definitely do.
| kevlened wrote:
| Even without prior knowledge, seeing others safely
| navigate the same section will lower your estimated risk.
| jeltz wrote:
| Tesla does not handle rain well either. This is not a LIDAR
| problem, it is a problem with self driving cars in general.
| ubercore wrote:
| My Tesla can't even tell if it should turn the wipers on
| consistently or correctly. Let alone drive in the rain.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Seriously. Why do people think a company that can't do
| automatic wipers could possibly do automatic driving?
| lazide wrote:
| The same people that seriously thought we'd have a mars
| base by now.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A feature that is bulletproof in other cars with a very
| boring and industry standard sensor (it's not even
| expensive), while Tesla insisted they could do it with
| just normal cameras.
| sfn42 wrote:
| People also don't handle rain well.
| WarmWash wrote:
| There is also a report from the same flooding in LA of a
| Waymo driving into a flooded road and getting stuck.
|
| They might have flipped a switch after that, causing this.
| xnx wrote:
| This is a new and flawed rationale that I haven't heard
| before. Tesla cameras are worse (lower resolution,
| sensitivity, and dynamic range) than human eyes and don't
| have "ears" (microphones).
| peterfirefly wrote:
| The cars do have at least one microphone.
| xnx wrote:
| Inside the car though, right? With multiple exterior
| microphones they could do spatialization like Waymo.
| bko wrote:
| Most accidents happen because people are human, aren't paying
| attention, are inebriated, not experienced enough drivers, or
| reckless.
|
| It's not fair to say that vision based models will "make the
| same mistakes people do" as >99% of the mistakes people make
| are avoidable if these issues were addressed. And a computer
| can easily address all those issues
| jeltz wrote:
| Which means the mistakes vision-based models for today are
| unique to them.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| It is sound to think that cameras plus an accelerometer, plus
| data about about the car and environment (that you get from
| your ears) ought to be able to mimic and improve on human
| driving. However humans general purpose spatial awareness and
| ability to integrate all kinds of general information is
| probably really hard to replicate. A human would realize that
| an orange fluid spilling across the road might be slippery,
| guess the way a person might travel from the way their eyes
| are pointing...
|
| It may just be faster to make lidar cheap. And lidar can do
| things humans can't.
| lesuorac wrote:
| IIUC, the cameras in a Tesla have worse vision (resolution)
| at far distances than a human. So while in the abstract your
| argument sounds fine; it'll crumble in court when a lawyer
| points out a similar driver would've needed corrective lens.
| spyder wrote:
| Yea, even in the case they could match human level stereo depth
| perception with AI, why would they say "no" to superhuman lidar
| capabilities. Cost could be a somewhat acceptable answer if
| there wouldn't be problems with the camera only approach but
| there are still examples of silly failures of it. And if I
| remember correctly they also removed their other superhuman
| radar in their newer models, the one which in certain
| conditions was capable of sensing multiple cars ahead by
| bouncing the signal below other cars.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Because they don't have superhuman LIDAR. They never did.
| Nobody ever did. LIDAR input is not completely reliable so
| what do you do then?
| MengerSponge wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion
| Someone wrote:
| > Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it
| was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use
| cameras only
|
| Human eyes do not have distance information, either, but derive
| it well enough from spatial (by 'comparing' inputs from 2 eyes)
| or temporal parallax (by 'comparing' inputs from one eye at
| different points in time) to drive cars.
|
| One can also argue that detecting absolute distance isn't
| necessary to drive a car. Time to-contact may be more useful.
| Even only detecting "change in bearing" can be sufficient to
| avoid collision (https://eoceanic.com/sailing/tips/27/179/how_t
| o_tell_if_you_...)
|
| Having said that, LiDAR works better than vision in mild fog,
| and if it's possible to add a decent absolute distance sensor
| for little extra cost, why wouldn't you?
| dumbfounder wrote:
| I don't like the comparison between humans and humans. Humans
| don't travel around at 100mph in packs of other humans. Why
| not use every sensor type at our disposal if it gives us more
| info to make decisions? Yes I understand it's more
| complicated, but we figure stuff out.
| larsnystrom wrote:
| Human eyes are much better than cameras at dealing with
| dynamic range. They're also attached to a super-computer
| which has been continuously trained for many years to
| determine distances and classify objects.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Let me know when you have a camera package with human eye
| equivalency.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Human/animal vision uses way more than parallax to judge
| distances and bearings - it uses a world model that evolved
| over millions of years to model the environment. That's why
| we can get excellent 3D images from a 2D screen, and also why
| our depth perception can be easily tricked with objects of
| unexpected size. Put a human or animal in an abstract
| environment with no shadows and no familiar objects, and
| you'll see that depth perception based solely on parallax is
| actually very bad.
| dymk wrote:
| > Human eyes do not have distance information
|
| Single human eyes do resolve depth perception. Not as good as
| binocular vision, but you don't loose all depth perception of
| you lose an eye.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocular_vision
| nlitened wrote:
| As I understand, lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog. So in
| the real world, where you have limited resources (research and
| production investment, people talent, AI training time and
| dataset breadth, power consumption) that you could redistribute
| between two systems (vision and lidar), but one of the systems
| would contradict the other in dangerous driving conditions --
| it's smarter to just max out vision and ignore lidar
| altogether.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Limited resources? Billions per year are being thrown at the
| base technology. We have the capital deployed to exhaust
| every path ten times over.
| nlitened wrote:
| Even if so, it doesn't mean that capital deployment
| efficiency and expected payoff make equal sense in all
| directions.
|
| Then again, it's good that we have self-driving companies
| with lidar and without -- we will find out which approach
| wins.
| kikki wrote:
| We have already found out, Waymo is SAE Level 4, Tesla is
| SAE Level 2
| heisenbit wrote:
| The Swiss cheese model would like to disagree.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog.
|
| Neither do cameras, or eyeballs.
| dsr_ wrote:
| When it's not safe to drive, it's not safe to drive.
|
| I've been in zero-road-speed whiteout conditions several
| times. The only move to make is to the side of the road
| without getting stuck, and turning on your flashers.
|
| Low-light cameras would not have worked. Sonar would not
| have worked. Infrared would not have worked.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Radar might still have worked
| bob1029 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_band
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think the weather where cameras/sensors start having
| problems is much better than zero-vis whiteout.
|
| If we could make sensors that lets an autonomous vehicle
| drive reliably in any snow/rain where a human could drive
| (although carefully) then we're good. But we are a long
| way from that. Especially since a lot of sensor tech like
| cameras tend to fail in 2 ways, both through their
| performance being worse in adverse condition but also
| simply failing to function at all if they are covered in
| ice/snow/water.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| If you have multi-return lidar, you can see through certain
| occlusions. If the fog/rain isn't that bad, you can filter
| for the last return and get the hard surface behind the
| occlusion. The bigger problem with rain is that you get
| specular reflection and your laser light just flies off
| into space instead of coming back to you. Lidar not work
| good on shiney.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why does this matter? You have to slow down in rain/snow/fog
| anyway, so only having cameras available doesn't hurt you all
| that much. But then in clear weather lidar can only help.
| nlitened wrote:
| If your vision is good enough to drive in rain/snow/fog,
| you don't need lidar in clear conditions. If you planned to
| spend $10B on vision and $10B on lidar -- you would be
| better off spending $20B on better vision.
| tw04 wrote:
| We have actual proof this isn't true. Waymo is light
| years ahead of Tesla despite spending less.
|
| Tesla is spending upwards of $6B/year to Waymo's $1.5B.
| Only one of these companies makes an autonomous robotaxi
| that's actually autonomous.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| It still infuriates me that Tesla went so long being able
| to call their feature "auto pilot." Then they had the
| audacity to call it user error when people thought the
| car would automatically pilot itself.
| tk781 wrote:
| Yes, but how much of that is due to the lidar vs camera
| choice?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If yo[u can] drive in rain/snow/fog, you don't need
| lidar in clear conditions
|
| Of course you do, you're driving at much higher speeds
| and so is the surrounding traffic. You can't just guess
| what you might be looking at, you have to make clear
| decisions promptly. Lidar is excellent in that case.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This is silly. Cameras are cheap. Have both. Sensors that
| sense differently in different conditions is not an exotic
| new problem. The kalman filter has existed for about a
| billion years and machine learning filters do an even better
| job.
| nlitened wrote:
| Cameras are cheap, but, as I understand:
|
| 1) it's not cheap to produce lidars at a stable predictable
| quality in millions;
|
| 2) car driving training data sets for lidars are much
| scarcer (and will always be much scarcer due to cameras'
| higher prevalence) and at a much lower quality;
|
| 3) combined camera+lidar data sets are even scarcer.
| afavour wrote:
| Doesn't that make it a sensible long term play to equip
| your car with $200 LIDAR and start gathering that data as
| a competitive advantage?
| jeltz wrote:
| Yeah, this is all about Musk not wanting to admit he was
| wrong.
| tzs wrote:
| 1. Automotive LiDAR is down to $350 in China already. BYD
| is starting to put LiDAR in even entry level cars. (It's
| been in their mid and high end cars for a while).
|
| 2+3. BYD collects extensive training data from customers,
| much like Tesla does. They will have no trouble with
| training.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| When you have sensor ambiguity sounds like the perfect time
| to fail safely and slow to a halt unless the human takes
| over.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Do cameras work well in those conditions? Nope. Also cameras
| don't work well with certain answer of glare, so as a
| consumer I'd rather have something over-engineered for my
| safety to cover all edge cases...
| brk wrote:
| Nothing works perfectly in all conditions and scenarios.
| Sensor fusion has been the most logical approach now, and
| into the foreseeable future.
|
| Computer vision does not work exactly like human vision,
| closely equating the two has tended to work out poorly in
| extreme circumstances.
|
| High performance fully automated driving that relies solely
| on vision is a losing bet.
| lazide wrote:
| Evidence clearly shows otherwise.
|
| Also, military sensor use shows the best answer is to have as
| many different _types_ of sensors as possible and then do
| sensor fusion. So machine vision, lidar, radar, etc.
|
| That way you pick up things that are missed by one or more
| sensor types, catches problems and errors from any of them,
| and end up with the most accurate 'view' of the world - even
| better than a normal human would.
|
| It's what Waymo is doing, and they also unsurprisingly, have
| the best self driving right now.
| Zigurd wrote:
| No, it isn't "smarter." Camera-only driving is the product of
| a stubborn dogmatic boss who can't admit a fundamental error.
| "Just make it work" is a terrible approach to engineering.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Can hatred of Musk not derail this entire thread please? I
| have a camera-only ADAS that I think works quite well, but
| having both would be better.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Shoe, meet foot.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| I don't know what that means
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_the_shoe_fits,_wear_it
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Oh, that's silly. I don't own a Tesla. I just wanna talk
| about LIDAR without people ragebaiting about Elon.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _without people ragebaiting about Elon_
|
| Hmm. Is it ragebaiting to respond to a tired and wrong
| statement by saying that it's tired and wrong and that
| the situation is merely the product of piss poor
| management decisions? People get understandably
| frustrated seeing the same wrong talking point that
| people with domain knowledge in computer vision and
| robotics have repeatedly explained is wrong in extremely
| fundamental ways.
|
| > _I don 't own a Tesla._
|
| n.b. The shoe/foot comment was not about you. It was
| about Musk. It wouldn't make any idiomatic sense for the
| expression to be about you given what you said and what
| you were responding to. If they'd said "pot, meet
| kettle", then it would have been about you. In that
| context, saying that you don't own a Tesla feels like a
| weird thing for you to insert in your comment. It
| potentially comes across as suspiciously defensive.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| suspiciously defensive??? you got me. Or maybe I just
| didn't understand their comment.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Criticism of Musk isn't hate of Musk. The point is
| completely valid and the results of this management style
| infuses all of his businesses albeit with differing
| results.
|
| It's significant that a truly hard problem like
| autonomous driving doesn't respond to a "brute force"
| management style. Rockets aren't in this category because
| the required knowledge and theory is fairly complete,
| whereas real autonomous driving is completely novel.
| philistine wrote:
| Why does that strategy absolutely require the lidar to be
| absent from the car? When was less technology the solution to
| a software problem?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| People who don't understand that sensor fusion is an entire
| field of study with tons of existing work and lots of
| expertise have been fooled by a fake argument of "If the
| camera and lidar disagree, what do you do?"
|
| It's frustrating to still see it repeated over a decade
| later. It was always bullshit. It was always a lie.
| mgoetzke wrote:
| considering cameras can create reliable enough distance
| measurements AND also handle all the color reception needed for
| legally driving roads it was always a ridiculous idea by a
| certain set of people that lidar is necessary.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in
| real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure
| distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars
| on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly
| reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions.
|
| Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras
| to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference
| about the world based on our internal world models that goes
| into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-
| perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our
| visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people
| with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability)
| still have quite decent depth perception compared to what
| you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very
| clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of
| precision.
| s08148692 wrote:
| I don't think they meant literally cameras only can create
| reliable distance measures. At the risk of putting words in
| their mouth, I would guess they meant "cameras as the only
| input to a distance model". the "model" doing all the heavy
| lifting, covering the points that you quite rightly point
| out are needed
|
| Several companies, most notably Tesla, have done this well
| enough to drive in all manner of traffic. I'm not going to
| comment about if lidar is strictly needed or not to achieve
| better-than-human safety, that's yet to be proven one way
| or another by anyone. The point is that cameras + local
| inference can do a pretty good job at distance estimation
| throwa356262 wrote:
| There are tons of evidence showing that cameras are alone are
| not safe enough and even Tesla has realized that removing
| lidar to save cost was a mistake.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Stereo cameras are useless against repeating patterns. They
| easily match neighboring copies. And there are lots of
| repeating or repeating-like patterns that computers aren't
| smart enough to handle.
|
| You can solve this by adding an emitter next to the camera
| that does something useful, be it just beaconing lights or
| noise patterns or phase synced laser pulses. And those
| "active cameras" are what everyone call LIDARs.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _' cameras can see in color, therefore lidar is unnecessary
| for self driving'_ is unconvincing
| xpe wrote:
| > ridiculous idea by a certain set of people that lidar is
| necessary.
|
| "Necessary"? Seems like a straw man, don't you think? I
| strive to argue against the strongest reasonable claim
| someone is making.
|
| Lots of reasonable people suggest LIDAR is helpful to fill in
| gaps when vision is compromised, degraded, or less capable.
|
| People running businesses, of course, will make economic
| trade-offs. That's fine. But don't confuse, say, Elon's
| economic tradeoff with the full explanation of reality which
| must include an awareness that different sensors have
| different strengths in different contexts.
|
| So, when one thinks about what sensor mix is best for a given
| application, one would be wise to ask (and answer) such
| questions as:
|
| - What is the quality bar?
|
| - What sensors are available?
|
| - Wow well do various combinations of sensors work across the
| range of conditions that matter for the quality bar?
|
| - WRT "quality bar": who gets to decide "what matters"? The
| company making the cars? The people that drive them?
| regulators that care about public safety. The answer: it is a
| complex combination.
|
| It is time to dismiss any claim (or implication) that
| "technology good, regulation bad". That might be the dumbest
| excuse for a philosophy I've ever heard. It is the modern-day
| analogue of "Brawndo's got what plants crave." Smart people
| won't make this argument outright, but unfortunately, their
| claims sometimes reduce to this level of absurdity. Neither
| innovation nor regulation are inherently good nor bad. There
| are deeper principles in play.
|
| Yes, some individuals would use their self-proclaimed freedom
| to e.g. drive without seatbelts at 100 mph at night with
| headlights off. An extreme example, but it is the logical
| extension of pure individualism run amok. Regulators and
| anyone who cares about public safety will draw a line
| somewhere and say "No. Individual stupidity has a limit."
| Even those same people would eventually come to their senses
| after they kill someone, but by then it is too late.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| It was cost wasn't it?
|
| If this lowers Lidar costs, and Tesla has spent all this time
| refining the camara technology. Now have both.
|
| Use both.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I'll preface by saying lidar should be used with autonomous
| vehicles.
|
| Individual cameras don't have distance information, but you can
| easily calibrate a system of cameras to give you distance
| information. Your eyes do this already, albeit not
| quantitatively. The quantitative part comes from math our
| brains aren't setup to do in real time.
| radial_symmetry wrote:
| I'm not an expert on ML vision, but I do have a Tesla and it
| seems to be able to tell how far away things are just fine. I'm
| not sure what would be wrong with the vision system that lidar
| needs to fix.
| tw04 wrote:
| The phantom braking issue with auto pilot tells me it can't.
| A shadow from a tree doesn't trigger your brakes locking up
| at 70+ mph when there's a lidar sensor to tell you it's not a
| physical object.
|
| "Just buy FSD" isn't a reasonable answer to a problem
| literally no other automaker suffers from.
| ubercore wrote:
| Stopped using autopilot because of the phantom braking.
|
| It's also recently gotten much worse at lane departure
| sensing, often confused by snow or slightly faded road
| markers. Not pleasant to have the alarms go off while
| calmly and safely driving.
| Phil_Latio wrote:
| Yeah it's BS. Tesla uses lidar where it makes sense: They
| have a small lidar fleet to collect ground truth depth data
| for better vision estimation. This part is long solved.
| xpe wrote:
| > I'm not sure what would be wrong with the vision system
| that lidar needs to fix.
|
| This conversational disconnect is as old as the hills:
|
| 1. Person 1 asks "what's wrong" (if it ain't broke don't fix
| it)
|
| 2. Person 2 wants to make something better
|
| My meta-goal here on HN (and many places where people
| converse) is for people to step back and recognize the
| conversational context and not fall into the predictable
| patterns that prevent us from making sense of the world as
| best as we can.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Luckily everyone else in the comments is an expert. And also
| doesn't recognize that Tesla's already drive themselves and
| did not need Lidar. They also mischaracterize the reasoning.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| How do you explain the reports of Robotaxis running into
| fixed objects? If what you are saying is true that shouldn't
| be able to happen.
|
| https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-
| cr...
| bko wrote:
| Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans
| don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can
| reliably drive. Lidar just seems like feature engineering,
| which has proven to be a dead end in most other AI applications
| (bitter lesson).
|
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
| afavour wrote:
| Self driving cars are not equipped with human brains so this
| doesn't really make sense.
|
| "We should achieve self driving cars via replicating the
| human brain" strikes me as an incredibly inefficient and
| difficult way to solve the problem.
| sebastos wrote:
| Then you deeply underestimate how difficult the problem is,
| and deeply misunderstand where all the effort has been
| spent in developing autonomous vehicles.
| afavour wrote:
| If all the effort has been spent in trying to replicate
| the human brain then I am comfortable saying that is a
| mistake.
|
| We have a tool that can tell with great accuracy how far
| away an object is. The suggestion that we should ignore
| it and rely on cameras that have to guess it because
| "that's how humans work" is absurd, frankly.
| thunky wrote:
| > Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
| Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that
| can reliably drive.
|
| Because we want self driving cars to be safer than human
| driven cars.
|
| If humans had built in lidar we would use it when driving.
| bko wrote:
| Read the comment again. It's not that vision is "good
| enough", it's that feature engineering doesn't work
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This knee-jerk reply is old and tired, and the
| counterarguments are well-trod at this point. Even if
| cameras-only can build a car that's as good as humans, why
| should we settle for "as good as" humans, who cause 40,000
| fatalities a year in the US? If we can do better than humans
| with more advanced sensors, we are practically morally
| obligated to do that.
| xpe wrote:
| Yes! The smart and nuanced panoply of replies to the GP are
| a wonderful counterbalance to people "just saying things
| that pop into their head" -- which is unfortunately how I
| view a lot of human speech nowadays :/
| elicash wrote:
| Don't cars already use a ton of sensors that don't reproduce
| human senses and ways of doing things?
| jeltz wrote:
| Humans can drive with eyes only, but we are better drivers
| when we can also use other senses like hearing. If humans has
| lidar we would use it when driving.
| a_better_world wrote:
| > we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive.
|
| Science would like to point out that rats also can learn to
| drive
|
| https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-
| taught-r...
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| yeah but not reliably, they often totally space on their
| commitments to pick you up from the airport, etc
| rkomorn wrote:
| If you had to choose between picking someone up at the
| airport or dragging a slice of pizza twice your size down
| the NYC subway stairs, what would YOU do?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| The bitter lesson I think is a great way of explaining the
| logic behind Tesla's strategy. People aren't getting it.
|
| Whether or not it'll actually work remains to be seen, but
| it's a perfectly reasonable strategy. One counterargument
| would be that the bitter lesson _can_ be applied to LIDAR
| too; you don 't _have_ to use that data for feature
| engineering just because it seems well suited for it.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| I wouldn't take too much issue with the "cameras are enough"
| claim if cameras actually performed like eyes. Human eyes have
| high dynamic range and continuous autofocus performance that no
| camera can match. They also have lids with eyelashes that can
| dynamically block light and assist with aperture adjustment.
|
| The appeal to human biology and argument against fusion between
| disparate sensors kinda falls flat when you're building a world
| model by fusing feeds from cameras all around the car. Humans
| don't have 8 eyes in a 360 array around their head. What they
| _do_ have is two eyes (super cameras) on ~180 degree swiveling
| and ~180 degree tilting gimbal. With mics attached that help
| sense other vehicles via road noise. And equilibrioception,
| vibration detection, and more all in the same system, all
| fused. If someone were actually building this system to drive
| the car, the argument based on "how did you drive here today?"
| gets a lot stronger. One time I had some water blocking my ear
| and I drove myself to the hospital to get it fixed. That was a
| shockingly scary drive -- your hearing is doing a lot of
| sensing while driving that you don't value until it's gone.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I find it comical that people continue to go back to this rage
| well against "a certain company" for their vision-only approach
| when the truth is they have the best automatic driving system
| an individual can buy, rivaling Waymo and beating the Chinese
| brands.
|
| Why are the commenters not pissed at the dozens of other car
| companies who have done _absolutely nothing_ in this space?
| Answer: because it 's not nearly as fun to be pissed at _Kia_
| or _Mercedes_ or whoever. Clearly they are just enjoying the
| shared anger, regardless of whether it is justified.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| There is certainly some truth that "some company"
| overpromised and underdelivered. They advertise "full self
| driving" but then hide in the fine-print that "oh jk, not
| really, but its still full self driving if anyone asks ;) ;)
| ;)"
|
| I think the frustration stems from the obvious falsehoods in
| the advertising, and the doubling-down on the tech, despite
| the well-documented weaknesses of the implementation.
| taylortrusty wrote:
| Have you driven in Tesla FSD recently? If anything it's
| undersold. It's an absolute miracle. I use it everyday.
| bicepjai wrote:
| Please be courteous to other drivers on the road, we all
| share it. Just make sure you're the one in charge, not
| the software. This isn't to put your argument down, but
| to offer the perspective of people involved in accidents.
| Loss of life is bad, but surviving accidents is also
| equally bad.
| array_key_first wrote:
| 1. Tesla is not competitive with Waymo, they're not even in
| the same class. Waymo is 10 years ahead at least. I
| understand you can't buy a Waymo, but still.
|
| 2. Other car companies are properly valued, Tesla is
| overinflated.
|
| 3. Other cars, even basic Hondas, have the same level of self
| driving as Teslas.
|
| 4. Other car companies don't lie to their customers about
| their capabilities or what they're buying.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Other cars, even basic Hondas, have the same level of
| self driving as Teslas.
|
| This is not true at all. Don't confuse lane assist with
| self driving. And yes I'm aware people are upset by the
| "Autopilot" product name they chose for lane assist.
| epolanski wrote:
| You're way off if you think that Waymo and FSD are anywhere
| close.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Because other car companies don't have CEOs who've been super
| confident about predicting actual full self driving either
| "this year" or "next year" for the past decade. If Ford had
| been swearing up and down they'd have full self driving
| cracked any day now for ten years, and been charging people
| for the hardware along the way, everyone would be pissed at
| them too.
|
| Surely you already know this, so why pretend otherwise?
| nova22033 wrote:
| It's not complicated. LIDAR hardware was in short supply during
| COVID. Elon obviously couldn't slow down production and sink
| the inflated stock price.
| jollyllama wrote:
| WTF was their calculus on the break-even liability point? The
| "if we do this, we save X amount of money, but stand to lose
| Y in lawsuits for cases where the usage of LIDAR could have
| otherwise prevented it."
| Phil_Latio wrote:
| April 2019: https://www.youtube.com/live/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9220s
|
| There are probably even earlier statements from him against
| lidar...
| runjake wrote:
| Karpathy provided additional context on the removal of LiDAR
| during his Lex Fridman Podcast appearance. This article
| condenses what he said:
|
| https://archive.is/PPiVG
|
| And here's one of Elon's mentions (he also has talked about it
| quite a bit in various spots).
|
| https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450?s=20
|
| Edit: My personal view is that LiDAR and other sensors are
| extremely useful, but I worked on aircraft, not cars.
| willio58 wrote:
| Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems:
|
| - cost (no longer a problem)
|
| - too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does
| anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like
| yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad
| thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave
| when I think if you do it right it's fine. As proven by
| Waymo.
|
| Really curious if any Tesla engineers feel like this is still
| the best way forward or if it's just a matter of having to
| listen to the big guy musk.
|
| I've always felt that relying on vision only would be a
| detriment because even humans with good vision get into
| circumstances where they get hurt because of temporary vision
| hindrances. Think heavy snow, heavy rain, heavy fog, even
| just when you crest a hill at a certain time of day and the
| sun flashes you
| atonse wrote:
| Just for the record though, Musk isn't blindly anti-LIDAR.
| He has said (and I think this is an objective fact) that
| all existing roads and driving are based on vision (which
| is what all humans do). So that should technically be
| sufficient. SpaceX uses LIDAR for their docking systems.
|
| I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that
| "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be
| why I thought cameras weren't enough.
|
| But then look at all the work with gaussian splatting
| (where you can take multiple 2d samples and build a 3d
| world out of it). So you could probably get 80% there with
| just that.
|
| The ethos of many Musk companies (you'll hear this from
| many engineers that work there) is simplify, simplify,
| simplify. If something isn't needed, take it out. Question
| everything that might be needed.
|
| To me, LIDAR is just one of those things in that general
| pattern of "if it isn't absolutely needed, take it out" -
| and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that
| it isn't required. It's probably a nice to have, but maybe
| not required.
| dymk wrote:
| Humans aren't using only fixed vision for driving. This
| is such a tiresome thing to see repeated in every
| discussion about self driving.
|
| You're listening to the road and car sounds around you.
| You're feeling vibration on the road. You're feeling
| feedback on the steering wheel. You're using a
| combination of monocular and binocular depth perception -
| plus, your eyes are not a fixed focal length "cameras".
| You're moving your head to change the perspective you see
| the road at. Your inner ear is telling you about your
| acceleration and orientation.
| kube-system wrote:
| And also, even with the suite of sensors that humans
| have, their vision perception is _frequently_ inadequate
| and leads to crashes. If vision was good enough,
| "SMIDSY" wouldn't be such an infamous acronym in vehicle
| injury cases.
| kelnos wrote:
| For those of us not aware of Australian cycling jargon,
| "SMIDSY" means "Sorry, Mate, I Didn't See You".
| anthonypasq wrote:
| the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes
| to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the
| visual information in our field of view, then accidents
| would probably go down a shit load.
| kube-system wrote:
| Humans have both issues. There are many human failures
| which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention
| related, e.g. misestimation of depth/speed, obscured or
| obstructed vision, optical focus issues, insufficient
| contrast or exposure, etc.
| arijun wrote:
| But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention
| could have been avoided with less idiocy and more
| defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can't see as well in
| fog, but that's why you should _slow down_
| kube-system wrote:
| Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad
| decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they _also_
| get into accidents while paying attention and being
| careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of
| their senses. These accidents are also common, for
| example:
|
| * someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception,
| bumps an object
|
| * person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive
| a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles
|
| * person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object
| (the sun, bright lights at night)
|
| * person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their
| depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of
| approaching traffic
|
| * people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a
| time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance.
| It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check
| their instruments while driving -- but it can take the
| human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal
| circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up,
| and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you
| will have travelled quite a long distance.
|
| These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor
| decision making, but of poor perception.
| saltcured wrote:
| In theory, a computer should be able to do the same. It
| could do sensor fusion with even more sense modalities
| than we have. It could have an array of cameras and
| potentially out-do our stereo vision, or perhaps even use
| some lightfield magic to (virtually) analyze the same
| scene with multiple optical paths.
|
| However, there is also a lot of interaction between our
| perceptual system and cognition. Just for depth
| perception, we're doing a lot of temporal analysis. We
| track moving objects and infer distance from assumptions
| about scale and object permanence. We don't just
| repeatedly make depth maps from 2D imagery.
|
| The brute-force approach is something like training
| visual language models (VLMs). E.g. you could train on
| lots of movies and be able to predict "what happens next"
| in the imaging world.
|
| But, compared to LLMs, there is a bigger gap between the
| model and the application domain with VLMs. It may seem
| like LLMs are being applied to lots of domains, but most
| are just tiny variations on the same task of "writing
| what comes next", which is exactly what they were trained
| on. Unfortunately, driving is not "painting what comes
| next" in the same way as all these LLM writing hacks.
| There is still a big gap between that predictive layer,
| planning, and executing. Our giant corpus of movies does
| not really provide the ready-made training data to go
| after those bigger problems.
| dcrazy wrote:
| Putting your point another way, in order to replicate an
| average human driver's competence you would need to make
| several strong advancements in the state of the art in
| computer vision _and_ digital optics.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 20 meters away motion vision is more accurate than
| stereoscopic vision. What is lidar helping to solve here?
| dymk wrote:
| Waymo claims its system, which uses a combination of
| LIDAR & vision, resolves objects up to _500_ meters away
|
| https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-
| waymo...
|
| This company claims their LIDAR works conservatively at
| 250m, and up to 750m depending on reflectivity
|
| https://www.cepton.com/driving-lidar/reading-lidar-specs-
| par...
| DesaiAshu wrote:
| In India (among others), honking is essential to reducing
| crashes
|
| We often greatly underestimate / undervalue the role of
| our ears relative to vision. As my film director friend
| says, 80% of the impact in a movie is in the sound
| wagwang wrote:
| Most of what you said has nothing to do with lidar vs
| camera
| nindalf wrote:
| > So that should technically be sufficient
|
| Sufficient to build something close to human performance.
| But self driving cars will be held to a much higher
| standard by society. A standard only achievable by having
| sensors like LiDAR.
| thfuran wrote:
| Even if they weren't going to be held to a higher
| standard for widespread acceptance, tens of thousands of
| people a year in the us die due to humans driving badly.
| Why would we _not_ try to do better than that?
| sylos wrote:
| Because that's an acceptable loss and better costs more!
| anthonypasq wrote:
| if a self driving car had the exact vision of humans it
| would still be better because it has better reaction
| times. never mind the fact that humans cant actually
| process all the visual information in our field of view
| because we dont have the broad attention to be able to do
| that. its very obvious that you can get super human
| performance with just cameras.
|
| Whether thats worth completely throwing away LiDAR is a
| different question, but your argument is just obviously
| false.
| aworks wrote:
| This reminds me of the time I was distantly following a
| Waymo car at speed on 101 in Mountain View during rush
| hour. The Waymo brake lights came on first followed a
| second or two later by the rest of the traffic.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Better reaction times only matter if the decisions are
| the same / better in every case. Clearly we are not there
| on that aspect of it yet.
|
| Deciding to crash faster, or "tell human to take over"
| really fast is NOT better.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Mentioning gaussian splatting for why we don't need lidar
| depth is a great example of Musk-esque technobabble;
| surface level seemingly correct, but nonsense to any
| practitioner. Because one of the biggest problems of all
| SfM techniques is that the results are scale ambiguous,
| so they do not in fact recover that crucial real-world
| depth measurement you get from lidar.
|
| Now you might say "use a depth model to estimate metric
| depth" and I think if you spend 5 minutes thinking about
| why a magic math box that pretends to recover real depth
| from a single 2D image is a very very sketchy proposition
| when you need it to be correct for emergency braking
| versus some TikTok bokeh filter you will see that also
| doesn't get you far.
| servo_sausage wrote:
| This is not really true if you have multiple cameras with
| a known baseline, or well known motion characteristics
| like you get with an accelerometer+ wheel speed.
| anon946 wrote:
| Sufficient if all else were equal. But the human brain
| and artificial neural networks are clearly not equal.
| This is setting aside the whole question of whether we
| hope to equal human performance or exceed it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Teslas have at least 3 forward facing cameras giving them
| plenty of depth vision data.
|
| They also have several cameras all around providing
| constant 360deg vision.
| pbreit wrote:
| Why is this getting downvoted? It's good faith and
| probably more accurate than not.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| > and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves
| that it isn't required
|
| The reports that Tesla submits on Austin Robotaxis
| include several of them hitting fixed objects. This is
| the same behavior that has been reported on for prior
| versions of their software of Teslas not seeing objects,
| including for the incident for which they had a $250M
| verdict against them reaffirmed this past week. That this
| is occurring in an extensively mapped environment and
| with a safety driver on board leads me to the opposite
| conclusion that you have reached.
| atultw wrote:
| To do gaussian splatting anywhere near in real time, you
| need good depth data to initialize the gaussian
| positions. This can of course come from monocular depth
| but then you are back to monocular depth vs lidar.
| maxdo wrote:
| LIDAR also struggle in heavy rain, snow, fog, dust. Check
| how waymo handle such conditions.
|
| It's not only failing, it's causing false positives.
| c7b wrote:
| My understanding is that there's more data processing
| required with cameras because you need to estimate distance
| from stereoscopic vision. And as it happens, the required
| chips for that have shot up in price because of the AI
| boom.
|
| But I think costs were just part of the reason why Elon
| decided against Lidar. Apparently, they interfere with each
| other once the market saturates and you have many such cars
| on the same streets at the same time. Haven't heard yet how
| the Lidar proponents are planning to address that.
| jerlam wrote:
| How does Waymo handle it now? There are many videos of
| Waymo depots with dozens of cars not running into each
| other.
| overfeed wrote:
| Lidar critics like to pretend that anti-collision is not
| a well-studied branch of Computer Science and telecoms.
| Wifi, Ethernet and cellphones all work well
| simultaneously, despite participants all sharing the same
| physical medium.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| If Waymo proven their model works, why the silly automaker
| is doing several orders of magnitude more autonomous miles?
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| The points linked repeatedly focus on cost and complexity as
| justification, even explicitly stating musks desire to
| minimise components in Kaparthy's list.
|
| They don't focus on safety or effectiveness except to say
| that vision should be 'sufficient'. Which is damning with
| faint praise imho.
|
| If that link was to try and argue that the removal of sensors
| makes perfect sense i have to point out that anyone that
| reads that would likely have their negative viewpoint
| hardened. It was done to reduce cost (back when the sensors
| were 1000's) and out of a ridiculous desire by Musk for
| minimalism. It's the same desire that removed the indicator
| stalk i might add.
| runjake wrote:
| To be clear, from a personal standpoint, I am pro-more
| sensors and sensor fusion.
|
| I assume Musk, et al are acting in best faith in trying to
| find the right compromises.
| thfuran wrote:
| Why would you assume Musk is acting in good faith? That's
| very much not his thing.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Oh, you sweet summer child..
| kappi wrote:
| Instead of betting on RADAR and LIDAR HW getting better and
| cost going down, they went with vision only approach.
| Everybody in this field knows the strengths and weakness of
| each system. Multi-modal sensor fusion is the way to go for
| L4 autonomy. There is no other way to reduce the risk. Vision
| only will never be able to achieve L4 in all the weather
| conditions. Tesla may try to demonstrate L4 in limited
| geography and in good weather conditions but it won't scale.
| leptons wrote:
| One camera can't really produce depth/distance information, but
| two cameras sure can. The eyes in your head don't capture
| distance information individually, but with two eyes you can
| infer distance.
| moogly wrote:
| You're forgetting the nervous system and the brain connected
| to those eyes (and vestibular system).
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| It was a great decision to drop LiDAR. The cars are running
| excellently without it
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| It's not that simple. Cameras don't report 3D depth, but these
| AI models can and do pick up on pictorial depth cues. LiDAR is
| incredibly valuable for collecting training and validation
| data, but may also make only an insignificant difference in
| production inference.
| pwarner wrote:
| Stereo cameras? My 2015 Subaru has them to detect obstacles
| and it works great.
| pbreit wrote:
| All of driving is designed for visual.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| TIL roads don't have rumble strips
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Certain company has 300k subscribers that rely on that
| ridiculous service.
|
| My father lost vision in 1 eye and 50% in other one something
| like 20 years ago. He struggles in parking but otherwise doing
| ok without lidar. Turns out motion vision is more accurate
| after 10-20 meters than stereoscopic vision.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Humans don't have explicit distance sensors either. When LIDAR
| sensors were $20k+ I think it made a lot of sense to avoid
| them.
| FpUser wrote:
| Below is one of the comments poster to original article, reading
| it makes me think that most of the whole article has been
| regurgitated by some AI:
|
| >"This misleading article contains numerous factual errors
| regarding automotive lidar. Here are the most glaring:
|
| There are multiple manufacturers, including Hesai, that use
| mechanical means for at least one scan axis and are already sold
| for a fraction of the "$10k - $20k" price noted by the author.
| Luminar itself built this class of scanners before going
| bankrupt.
|
| Per Microvision's own website, the Movia-S does not use a phased
| array and also does not have a range anywhere near 200m.
|
| Velodyne and Luminar do not even exist as companies anymore. Both
| have gone bankrupt and been acquired by competitors."
| 9999_points wrote:
| I wonder if this could be adapted to the vtuber market. Saw a
| vtuber body tracker being marketed at $11k recently.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Are we sure these things aren't damaging our eyes? It's lasers
| shooting all over the place right?
| btreecat wrote:
| When designed, built, installed and calibrated correctly, the
| power and wavelengths used are not considered harmful to
| humans.
| pinko wrote:
| What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the
| millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR
| designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect
| this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a
| decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that,
| but unrecognized...)
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| There's going to be an expanding market for laser-proof
| sunglasses.
| topspin wrote:
| There is an incentive to use higher power. Push the edge of
| safety limits to achieve higher performance from lower cost
| devices, for example.
|
| It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar
| detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world,
| measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be
| interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample
| thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among
| manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen.
|
| Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one
| is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification
| and compliance. No thought given to the real world of
| design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure
| modes, etc.
|
| Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are
| rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one
| manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a
| 50W pulse train?"
| btreecat wrote:
| For everyone of those safety measures to be intentionally
| bypassed or ignored, the numbers are assuredly non-zero.
|
| But is it going to raise to a level of concern? I don't
| think we're going to see a ton of cars with blinding lasers
| installed, unless they are installed to intentionally blind
| people.
|
| If you have used face I'd, or someone has used a face
| detection on modern smart phone on you, or if you've pulled
| up to a modern intersection, you've been blasted with
| lasers. It may come one day where that's the largest
| concern but today it's not my primary problem and investing
| in FUD isn't going to bring any benefits.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| That's a lot of qualifiers. And replace "humans" with
| "cameras" and I'm reminded that despite their well-
| intentioned efforts Volvo has failed there already.
| btreecat wrote:
| It really isn't though. It's how you do something
| correctly. Drill into the details of just about any system
| and you'll see there's a lot of assumptions based on the
| layers above and below.
|
| A good safety system requires multiple of these failures to
| occur together to become unacceptable in risk.
|
| This is why we create regulations and inspectors.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I get pretty ticked when people shine laser lights in my
| direction regardless of their intensity, so I'm not too
| thrilled about the idea of _invisible_ lasers hitting me square
| in the pupil without my knowledge.
| JackFr wrote:
| When every car has LIDAR will they all begin to blind each other?
|
| (Insert old man rant "Why are everyone's headlights so gosh darn
| bright these days?!")
| Maxious wrote:
| pew pew https://www.techspot.com/news/108045-lidar-great-cars-
| but-ca...
| slicktux wrote:
| That might very well be the case...I'm sure the IR beams are
| encoded uniquely per LIDAR but it might still blind them...
| good food for thought!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| There's already cases in SF where a bunch of Waymos are right
| next to each other, driving around.
| rurban wrote:
| What? You get Chinese lidar sensors for 12 EUR for a long time
| already.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's
| sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of
| thousands, that's the easy part.
|
| Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo
| also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time
| remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost
| all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised
| cars with a supervisor in a chase car. You can't even be driving
| remotely. Your driver software has to be able to drive
| independently in all cases, even those where it needs to ask a
| human how to proceed.
|
| The difference between level two and level three driver assist
| and level four autonomy is like the difference between suborbital
| flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next
| logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and
| testing.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| >Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
|
| That's true, and they have a huge headstart, but I wonder if
| all these cubesat companies can bring the price down on data
| enough that others will be able to compete.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Maybe. But Google has been there in a sensor laden car,
| overhead with an airplane, and buying all the access that is
| available in satellite imagery, and fusing that together in a
| continually updated model. Plus real time data from a billion
| maps and navigation users. I pity the fool going up against
| that.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data
| to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special
| LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area.
|
| Maybe their navigation system will be better than the
| competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps
| users, but I don't think it'll be _so_ much better as to be
| an unbeatable advantage.
| daemonologist wrote:
| They use LIDAR maps in service areas, but might be using
| Street View data for training? (I imagine it would be
| really, really difficult to build a useful simulator with
| just SV imagery, but probably also quite valuable to have
| the variety of environments.)
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| did you see this, they can build a simulator from sv
| images. https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-
| model-a-new-f... even the lidar part
| xp84 wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, but does Alphabet
| actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car
| business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be
| happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world
| where "everyone" can make a car affordable that can run Waymo's
| software, they may be happy to license all that to "everyone"
| and simply collect fat royalty checks, a la Microsoft in the
| 90s, allowing them to make a ton of incremental money without
| all the capex of making their own cars.
| scarmig wrote:
| It would be smarter to take that approach. Google's core
| competency is technology, technical infrastructure, and
| research. More mundane things like manufacturing and customer
| service are... shall we say, less of a core competency. Take
| the high value add, leave other things to automakers to duke
| it out. Also good for avoiding attracting even more
| regulatory attention.
| Zigurd wrote:
| That is one plausible outcome. Waymo is experimenting with
| partnerships with ride hailing apps on the one hand, and
| building their software into Toyotas on the other hand. So
| far they have built a few thousand vehicles in a factory run
| by Magna, which specializes in low volume vehicles. Hyundai
| wants to sell Waymo tens of thousands of vehicles. That's
| going to look different in fundamental ways.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Do OEMs want to manage their own ride-share platforms? 10+
| apps/providers?
| bigmadshoe wrote:
| I think they were referring to making personal vehicles
| self driving. Probably the rideshare market is just the
| start for Waymo.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion
| dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone?
|
| Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel
| phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because
| it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual
| customer support.
|
| Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.
|
| For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive
| for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and
| a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts
| (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is
| essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as
| Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge
| obstacle to overcome.
|
| Then, you need production. Sure, you can go to Magna or other
| contract manufacturers, or have an established large brand
| build vehicles for you, or you say you have to go the Tesla
| route and build everything from scratch. Either way has
| associated pros and cons.
|
| And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts,
| dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the
| issues that people _will_ get alone because the wide masses
| abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while
| testing, or because other people run into your cars and so
| your cars need repairs.
|
| Even being a derivative of an established car brand can be a
| royal PITA. Let's take Mercedes Benz as an example with the
| 2003-2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. On paper, it's a
| Mercedes vehicle, with a lot of the parts actually
| originating from stock Mercedes cars - but most dealerships
| will refuse to work on it. Either because they lack the
| support to even properly jack the car up, or because they
| lack the specialized tools for the AMG engine, or because
| they cannot even order the parts as Mercedes gates repairs
| for that thing to special shops. Or, again Mercedes, with
| Maybach luxury cars. The situation isn't as bad as with the
| McLaren, but their cars are challenging in another way - the
| S 650 Pullman weighs around 3 metric tons empty and is 6.50
| meters long. Good luck finding a jack even capable of lifting
| that beast, most Mercedes sports-car shops don't carry jacks
| that are normally used to lift Mercedes Vito transporters!
|
| Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two
| decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts
| logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for
| their own customers, but for _everyone_ - hit a Tesla with
| your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay
| out for months of a rental car because Tesla can 't be arsed
| to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare
| parts in any reasonable time.
|
| Established car brands however have all of that ironed out
| for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European,
| doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be
| made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a
| few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500
| B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day,
| at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number
| belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the
| accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold
| each year than actual cars.
|
| And established car brands also bring something to the table:
| their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes,
| particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that
| regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand
| in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road
| [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That
| kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and
| testing cannot be paid for in money.
|
| tl;dr: I see no way in which Waymo goes to general
| availability regarding selling cars. They will run their own
| autonomous car fleets in select markets where they can fully
| control everything, but seeing Waymo tech generally available
| will be as part of established car brands.
|
| [1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-
| fahren...
|
| [2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-
| fahren...
| toast0 wrote:
| > For one, people actually need to trust your brand to
| survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an
| investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-
| relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle
| bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized
| paperweight.
|
| Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically
| stupid. Where you'll get into trouble is when you need
| replacement computer bits; those are often tricky for
| mainstream brands, but if your niche brand ECUs all fail
| around the same time (wouldn't be the first time for a
| Google product), and the OEM isn't around to make new ones
| or make it right, off to the junkyard with all of them. If
| it's just normal failure rates, you can probably scavenge
| from totaled vehicles at junkyards even after new parts
| become unobtainium.
|
| OEM style lighting will also probably get hard to find.
| Ideally a niche maker would lean towards standard parts
| there, but that's not the fashion of the times.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was
| tragically stupid.
|
| Well... just look at Tesla. A lot of their parts don't
| come from the classic supplier-OEM delivery chain model,
| but Tesla makes as much as they can on their own. It
| saves them a bunch of money, both when it comes to the
| profit margin of the supplier, and being at the whims of
| their supplier, but it is nasty for the customers when
| there simply is no parts OEM that one could go to when
| the vehicle manufacturer goes out of business or refuses
| to support the car any further.
|
| > Where you'll get into trouble is when you need
| replacement computer bits
|
| Oh hell yes. New EU law is particularly to blame here.
| OBD diagnosis always was nasty enough, you virtually
| always need to buy expensive diagnosis software and
| hardware (e.g. Mercedes XENTRY, VW ODIS, BMW ICOM)... but
| the newest requirements enforce live digital signatures
| and anti-tamper checks. Nasty as hell. And the buses
| itself... it's no longer just one CAN bus doing
| everything, not since the Kia Boys, it's multiple buses
| of different speeds, some using encryption on the wire,
| all making diagnosis, troubleshoots and repairs much more
| difficult than it used to be.
|
| And that is before getting into the replacement parts
| issue itself that you wrote up.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.
|
| Tesla did it, and is more valuable than most other car
| brands added together. They had a novel product: a good EV
| that was fun to drive. Is that a unique situation? Could a
| truly autonomous car launch do it?
|
| Your arguments make sense in themselves, but maybe
| underestimate the revolutionary value that a level 4 car
| would provide.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Tesla did it, and is more valuable than most other car
| brands added together.
|
| Half of Tesla's value is hopium, the rest of it is pure
| trust in that the current government will continue
| propping Elon up (even if he personally ran afoul of the
| Dear Leader). A lot of the promises Elon made,
| particularly when it comes to FSD, had to be tracked back
| and I don't see them ever coming to fruition - at least
| not for the cars that don't have LIDAR hardware.
| elteto wrote:
| In a saner world Teslas would be running Waymo's self-driving
| stack instead of the half-baked "might kill you at any time"
| not quite-FSD.
| blonder wrote:
| They are not the same. I don't think Tesla or its consumers
| are interested in geofenced self driving, they want to be
| able to use it on road trips and driving around suburbs.
| elteto wrote:
| I think that was implied in my comment: that Tesla would
| use Waymo's stack for free navigation and self-driving,
| instead of not quite-FSD.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| That's true, Waymo has true Level 4 Automation, and Tesla
| Customers delude themselves about the Capabilities of
| their Level 2 System and endanger others for some clout
| videos
| gilfaethwy wrote:
| I mean, Tesla gave up on quality self-driving many years
| ago when Elon went hard against LIDAR. He's never
| relented, either, and I don't foresee that changing.
| sroussey wrote:
| Why sell cars to everyone?
|
| People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us
| still do), most now rent via cloud.
|
| Why should transportation be different?
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Why should transportation be different?
|
| Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are
| acceptable.
|
| But also for many, renting a car has a huge _ICK_ factor.
| It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who
| has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car
| before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars
| like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left
| wrappers and food debris, and who knows what else, even
| damage. Plus, most people who own cars keep a fair amount
| of stuff in the car for their specific convenience, and
| have their own settings, etc.
|
| The fact that the likes of Zipcar, Turo, and the lot have
| not entirely taken over urban transport but instead remain
| niche players shows the extent of this preference.
|
| For suburban and rural markets, it just gets more extreme.
| How quickly could a rental service be able to deliver a
| car; could it reliably do it in less than 5-10 minutes for
| people to run an errand? If not, unless they are insanely
| cheap, ppl will likely want to own their own. Perhaps it'll
| be more of a hybrid, households owning one car and renting
| the spare for specific trips?
| wombat-man wrote:
| I think it's more comparable to Uber or Lyft. Some
| passengers may actually prefer to not have a driver
| chatting with them.
| lazide wrote:
| If you use them regularly, renting is both a pain in the
| ass and quite costly. If you have atypical security (or
| even normal, in many cases) or usage patterns, it's even
| worse.
|
| A lot of folks are relearning lessons on this front in
| Cloud right now.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Moores law applies to cpus not the car that has been
| functionally the same for decades.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Not a good analogy: a server is not a personal space
| occupied by humans. It's for the same reason people don't
| want to hot-desk; they prefer a personal space with their
| own stuff in it.
| sideband wrote:
| Alphabet wants drivers on their devices looking at ads
| instead of driving.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| With the price declines in ev we are talking about 1 million
| ev even with all the waymo tech for $50 billion soon.
| approximate Annual Revenue of a private hire car is $50+k ie
| $50-60 billion a year for a million cars. But total taxi
| driver population is 350-400k in the US. I think people are
| underestimating the electric tech + ai/automation to hit
| soon.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| They'll probably operate some services and also license their
| tech to carmakers to sell to consumers. I'm sure there'll be
| a subscription involved for that too.
| StevenNunez wrote:
| Time to extend comma.ai!
| dymk wrote:
| Yeah, imagine having, say, two of these LIDAR sensors, each
| pointed towards the car's blind spots. Comma already does
| well with the car's built-in radar + vision on straight
| freeway runs, but can't reliably change lanes on its own. The
| built in blind spot detectors on most cars are a binary
| "there is/not a car present", which doesn't reliably
| determine if it's _safe_ to actually do a lane change.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in
| orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X
| or more effort, scale, and testing.
|
| But suborbital flight and payload in orbit is much less of a
| difference than you might think.
|
| The delta V is not that significantly different. Scale is
| almost the same, and a little bit more power and (second stage)
| your payload is now hurtling around the earth instead of
| falling like an ballistic missile which was what their
| suborbital predecessors are.
| mapt wrote:
| Suborbital ballistic "travel" beyond continental distances,
| is almost as expensive as orbital. If you can make it to the
| antipode, you're basically almost orbital.
|
| Suborbital "trips" straight up, beyond the atmosphere, are
| very cheap.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
|
| How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping
| versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo
| deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that
| spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to
| construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this
| needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not
| as wide as it seems.
|
| If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car
| manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to
| help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of
| making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were
| cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford
| as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more
| continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.
| ra7 wrote:
| > _Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge
| fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely
| supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of
| the city._
|
| Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year,
| the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for
| a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and
| validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup
| infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging,
| maintenance, etc.) and start service.
| julianeon wrote:
| I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and
| thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And
| you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the
| car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I,
| with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.
|
| And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect
| white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be
| perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can
| save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if
| it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.
| shireham wrote:
| Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but
| it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable
| of.
| julianeon wrote:
| The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say:
| I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively.
| But what can we do extremely cheaply?
|
| Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on
| my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can
| we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.
| yayitswei wrote:
| I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control.
| Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot
| of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.
| alkonaut wrote:
| The article is a bit muddy on what is hope and what is product.
| Can we _really_ buy a solid state lidar today? At what cost? When
| can I have it delivered?
|
| The article starts out without saying it but my takeaway at the
| end is "Not $200" and "Not in the near future"?
| ck2 wrote:
| BTW what happens when there are hundreds of Lidar signals at one
| intersection?
|
| There's no way a sensor can tell if a signal was from its origin?
|
| Guessing any signal should be treated as untrusted until verified
| but I suspect coders won't be doing that unless it's easy
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Anyone know what the ballpark total marginal cost to a consumer
| for increasing the BOM of a car for $1 is?
| torginus wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > pricing below US $200. That's less than half of typical prices
| now, and it's not even the full extent of the company's ambition.
|
| This means there are sensors available for like $500 or more. At
| 4 per car, this is still just $2000, which is a very reasonable
| cost add even for a midrange car.
|
| And with price comparisons like this, I'm sure Chinese
| competitors aren't factored in, I'm sure the Chinese have stuff
| for cheaper.
|
| So Affordable Lidar is not a limitation. Despite that, self-
| driving doesn't really exist outside of Waymo, which people take
| to assume that Lidar is their killer advantage, but with other
| cars having Lidar, I think that might not turn out to be the
| deciding facotr.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone today really thinks self driving hinges on
| the hardware. Comma does a surprisingly good job with very
| minimal hardware (in the form factor of an old Tom Tom!). The
| advantage is really the device's processing power (cramming
| enough compute in without making it crazy expensive) and the
| data that the manufacturer has about the environment and
| training data to handle edge cases. You can't just buy those
| things, because the people that have them would be your
| competitors.
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| I never understood why Tesla HAD to get rid of the Lidars.
| Expensive today sure, but can you imagine all that training data
| they missed out on? Technology has a way of becoming cheaper and
| cheaper. It seemed short sighted, even if at a loss, again, the
| training data.
|
| If the pros of having a camera are monumental, then couldn't the
| video and lidar be combined to be even greater?
| groos wrote:
| Because Tesla Clown-in-Chief asked if humans could drive with
| just visual input, why can't a Tesla? C-in-C conveniently
| ignored that, to begin with, humans have binocular vision, and
| his cars had none. Also conveniently ignored were the facts
| that human eyes have immense dynamic range, are self-cleaning,
| and can move to track objects of interest. On top of this,
| humans also have hearing, which helps gauge danger. Many of
| these things could be filled in by Lidar but since C-in-C
| apparently had a revelation from heaven, possibly caused by
| drugs, lidar had to go.
| jayd16 wrote:
| They never used LiDAR. They removed the radar.
| b8 wrote:
| I still believe in Cameras. I have a comma.ai 3x and it works
| really well. Just get a thermal camera to deal with fog etc.
| Waymo has some of the same limitations with cameras that Comma
| and Tesla does.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| There's no reason to believe in just cameras. Cameras are
| easily blinded by glare and have their efficacy drop
| dramatically when they get dirty. Having inexpensive lidar AND
| cameras is the best of both worlds. When it comes to safety and
| comfort, we shouldn't be trying to optimize for cost. If we
| figure out how to make cameras alone bulletproof in the future,
| great. But there's not where we're at today.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I think that supports most people's viewpoint though. Visible
| light Cameras alone can 'work' but more sensors is of course
| better. You infrared example for instance.
|
| The only reason not to have more sensors of different types is
| cost (equipment and processing costs). Those costs are coming
| down fast.
| sroussey wrote:
| Same limitations as radar and ultrasonic and ladar and vision
| cameras combined?
|
| Even Tesla used to have radar and ultrasonic in their cars
| until relatively recently. And they use lidar (from Luminar) in
| their mapping fleet.
| briandw wrote:
| The brains (ai models) are more important than the sensors.
| Cameras are good enough. Lidar doesn't keep Waymos from driving
| into an 18" deep puddle, or driving the wrong way down the
| street. Lidar doesn't help predict when a pedestrian is going to
| try to cross the street. Lidar doesn't give the car the common
| sense to slow down because a child just ran behind a parked car
| and will soon be coming out the other side.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I really wish that companies would just sell their products
| instead of doing the business relationship 2-step. It is an
| unnecessary waste of time to sell product.
|
| It looks like these sensors have just enough range to be
| effective for lidar terrain scanning. I would have bought a Movia
| S right now just to try it out.
| ronsor wrote:
| I hate this as well, but there are valid business reasons:
|
| - Setting up infrastructure and support for consumers is
| expensive and hard to do well, especially if that's not your
| main industry.
|
| - Some products are only economical if mass produced, and that
| requires large, guaranteed buyers.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Isn't LIDAR a high powered laser? How could they just go
| selling it to consumers like you?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| It is a Class 1 laser. I can buy a Class 4 laser online that
| I can start fires with. Laser danger is not the reason.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Low cost, sub $200 automotive grade LIDAR sensors are already
| available.
|
| Cepton Technologies offers Nova [0], Nova-Ultra [1] sensors both
| at a sub-$100 price point [2]. These feature a 120deg(H) x
| 90deg(V) FOV at 50m, with 2.7M points per second sampling.
|
| Velodyne introduced Velabit in 2021, for $100. Boasting 100m
| range and a 60-degree horizontal FoV x 10-degree vertical FoV.
|
| The article claims that:
|
| > What distinguishes current claims is the explicit focus on
| sub-$200 pricing tied to production volume rather than future
| prototypes or limited pilot runs.
|
| which is simply not true. Cepton (currently offering) and
| Velodyne (acquired by Ouster in 2023) have done this for years.
| [0]: https://www.cepton.com/products/nova [1]:
| https://www.cepton.com/products/nova-ultra [2]:
| https://www.cepton.com/announcements/ceptons-nova-lidar-named-as-
| ces-2022-innovation-awards-honoree [3]:
| https://lidarmag.com/2020/01/07/velodyne-lidar-introduces-
| velabit/
| leptons wrote:
| >Cepton Technologies offers Nova [0], Nova-Ultra [1] sensors
| both at a sub-$100 price point
|
| Where? How? I'm only seeing the Nova on ebay for between $4000
| and $5000.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Cepton primarily operates B2B, as B2C demand for specialized
| LIDAR like this is pretty low. Anything you find on eBay is
| either a leftover dev kit or salvage. This is pretty much the
| case for MicroVision, Ouster etc.
| culi wrote:
| 99% of LiDAR production is just 4 Chinese companies. Yes low-
| range systems are already at the $150-300 range, but
| MicroVision is promising to produce this in the Washington.
|
| Basically they're saying "we can catch up to China by
| 2028/2029" ||so please subsidize us||
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Just to be clear, this article is talking about the possibility
| that this might happen one day. LiDAR remains prohibitively
| expensive AFAICT.
| culi wrote:
| This is not quite true. It depends what you're talking about.
| Automotive LiDAR sensor prices typically range from $150-300
| _today_ for standard units. Mid-range ADAS systems (Ls+ /L3)
| sensors are about $600-750 and the long-range units used by
| robo-taxis like Waymos are about $1,500-6,000 or more per
| sensor
|
| https://www.fleetowner.com/technology/article/55316670
|
| The ~$75k per sensor in 2015 refers to the long-range sensors.
| 99% of production is from 4 Chinese companies: Hesai,
| RoboSense, Huawei, and Seyond.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| Cameras alone can handle the vast majority of nominal driving
| scenarios, but the long tail of safety critical edge cases is
| where progress slows dramatically. Many of these cases are driven
| by degraded or ambiguous perception, which is where multi-modal
| sensing, such as combining cameras with lidar, can reduce
| uncertainty. In adverse weather like fog or heavy rain, that
| reduction in uncertainty can translate directly into safer
| behavior, such as earlier and more confident emergency braking,
| even if no single sensor performs perfectly on its own
| neilv wrote:
| Laser safety people: how concerned should we be about city
| streets full of aggressively cost-engineered Lidar emitters?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Basically not.
|
| Biggest risk is that a beam steering element stops while the
| emitters are running. Basically impossible with a phased array
| emitter like the article discusses.
|
| And you'd probably have to be staring into the laser at close
| range while it was doing that.
|
| The laser beams usually aren't tiny points like your laser
| pointer. Several centimeters across is more typical, especially
| at typical road distances. Your pupil is very small in
| comparison.
|
| The optical hazard calculations are a very early part of the
| design of a LIDAR system, and all of this does get considered.
| Or should anyway.
|
| Biggest risks are for people involved in R&D, where beams may
| be static and very close to personnel.
| niceguy1827 wrote:
| So tiring to keep hearing this argument "humans only use vision
| to drive, so why would self driving cars need more?"
|
| This argument is inherently anti-progress. It's like saying human
| had been using sextants to navigate for hundreds of years, why
| GPS?
|
| A more sensible question is, why not?
| ingend88 wrote:
| Would it be no easier to integrate it into home vaccuums ?
| newman314 wrote:
| I wonder if Comma.ai will ever be open to incorporating this into
| openpilot.
|
| I always thought the argument that humans are adequate drivers
| and hence only cameras was not great. Why not actually be better
| than humans at sensing and driving?
| devolving-dev wrote:
| I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor
| problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that
| when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how
| the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was
| more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this
| reasoning wrong?
|
| I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-
| driving is mostly that the models aren't intelligent enough, and
| that adding LiDAR wouldn't be enough to achieve the reliability
| required. But I don't know, I don't really work in that field so
| maybe engineers who have more experience with self driving might
| say otherwise.
| wombat-man wrote:
| maybe? But also LiDAR just gives a more complete picture of
| what is around the car. I think this is supported by how many
| miles waymo cars run unsupervised vs Tesla.
|
| I am skeptical that tesla has this solved but interested in
| seeing how it goes when as they move to expand their robotaxi
| service.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Some problems are simply undecideable: if for identical inputs
| the desired output varies wildly, you simply need more
| information. There is no algorithm that will help you.
|
| Sensors or intelligence, at the end of the day it's an
| engineering problem which doesn't require pure solutions.
| Sometimes sensors break and cameras get covered in mud.
|
| The problem is maintaining an acceptable level of quality at
| the lowest possible price, and at some point you spend more
| money on clever algorithms and researchers than a lidar.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| It is easy to underestimate how much one relies on senses other
| than vision. You hear many kinds of noises that indicate road
| surface, traffic, etc. You feel road surface imperfections
| telegraphed through the steering wheel. You feel accelerations
| in your butt, and conclude loss of traction from response of
| the accelerator and motion of the vehicle. Secondly, the human
| eye has much more dynamic range than any camera. And is mounted
| on an exquisite PTZ platform. Then turning to the model -- you
| are classifying obstacles and agents at a furious rate, and
| making predictions about the behavior of the agents. So, in
| part I agree that the models need work, but the models need to
| be fed, and IMHO computer vision is not a sufficient sensor
| feed.
|
| Consider an exhaust condensation cloud coming from a vehicle's
| tail pipe -- it could be opaque to a camera/computer-vision
| system. Can you model your way out of that? Or is it also
| useful to do sensor fusion of vision data with radar data
| (cloud is transparent) and others like lidar, etc. A multi-
| modal sensor feed is going to simplify the model, which in the
| end translates into compute load.
| arijun wrote:
| > I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor
| problem or an intelligence problem
|
| Even if it's an intelligence problem, it's possible that
| machine intelligence will not get to the point where it can
| resolve anytime soon, whereas more sensors might circumvent the
| issue completely. It's like with Musk's big claim (that humans
| use camera only to drive); the question is not if a good enough
| brain will be able to drive vision-only, but if Tesla can make
| that brain.
| porphyra wrote:
| This $200 MicroVision lidar is a short range lidar that produces
| a really fuzzy point cloud. At best, it can be used for parking.
| It's unlikely to help self driving cars much at all, much less
| "reshuffle auto sensor economics".
| flambojones wrote:
| I worked in mobile robotics for a defense contractor in the
| early-mid 2000s and we had a homegrown Lidar (though we always
| called it ladar) that was large, heavy, and cost $250k to make. I
| remember a year out of college driving 2 hours to a military base
| with it in the backseat of my car and being paranoid at every
| bump I hit. These things seem like a dream.
| labrador wrote:
| Tesla is adding radar and I predict before long it will add LiDAR
| because that's the only way to get to Level 3, which is a
| requirement for moving forward in California
|
| https://www.fccidlookup.com/report/tesla-new-millimeter-wave...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Some internet comments said this was for detecting people in
| the cabin, not for detecting things outside the car.
| labrador wrote:
| They're not reading the actual FCC document then, which says:
|
| Strategy: The move brings Tesla's sensor approach closer to
| competitors like Ford, GM, and Rivian, who utilize multi-
| modal systems (cameras plus radar) for their driver-
| assistance features.
|
| Potential: This 'HD radar' could provide critical redundancy
| and data needed for achieving higher levels of driving
| automation and improving system performance in all
| conditions.
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