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Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

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Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#321

Post by wyldfire »

estearum wrote: post #159
galangalalgol wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

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 acci…

> 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.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#322

Post by xnx »

peterfirefly wrote: post #264
xnx wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The cars do have at least one microphone.

Inside the car though, right? With multiple exterior microphones they could do spatialization like Waymo.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#323

Post by ck2 »

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

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#324

Post by bicepjai »

taylortrusty wrote: post #310
superxpro12 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you driven in Tesla FSD recently? If anything it’s undersold. It’s an absolute miracle. I use it everyday.

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.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#325

Post by abeppu »

numpad0 wrote: post #145
pu_pe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually

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.

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?

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#326

Post by jollyllama »

nova22033 wrote: post #316
zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

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.

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.

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."

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#327

Post by DustinBrett »

radial_symmetry wrote: post #235
zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

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.

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.

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.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#328

Post by runjake »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

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.

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.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#329

Post by Tempest1981 »

xp84 wrote: post #306
Zigurd wrote: post #268

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…

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, à la Microsof…

Do OEMs want to manage their own ride-share platforms? 10+ apps/providers?

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#330

Post by small_model »

UltraSane wrote: post #241
small_model wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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 ne…

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.

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