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BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

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Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can lidar say what colour is traffic light?

It’s not either lifar or regular cameras. Use both and combine the information to exceed the humans

What proportion is camera data and what is LIDAR?

Must be solved problem and something you should buy already? Right?

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#123
post #16

Keep in mind, that $25k AUD is just $16600. And for that price, you're getting a real car with driver-assist features and a reasonable crash safety rating. The US car manufacturers are cooked.

That's because it's predatory pricing. If these cars are to be sold in western markets, there needs to be strong regulation. Absolutely no digital data connections, for starters.

that should really apply to all vehicles, because I'm pretty sure there isn't a new vehicle on the market in the US that doesn't have surveillance tech built in.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#126
post #53

Lidars come down in price ~40x. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop... Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free. Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision…

I wonder if ubiquity doesn’t effect the lidar performance? Wouldn’t the systems see each other’s laser projections if there are multiple cars close to each other? Also is LIDAR immune to other issues like bright 3rd party sources? At least on iPhone I’m having faceid performance degradation. Also, I suspect other issues like thin or transparent objects net being detected. With vision you rely on external source or fl…

I'm not a self-driving believer (never had the opportunity to try it, actually), but I'd say bad traffic would be the number one case where I'd want it. I don't mind highway driving, or city driving if traffic is good, but stop and go traffic is torture to me. I'd much rather just be on my phone, or read a book or something.

Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#127
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?

People die in car crashes all the time. Self driving can kill a lot of people and still be vastly better than humans.

But who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.

Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.

That's a legal non-starter for all car companies. They would be made liable for every car incident where self-driving vehicles were spotted in close vicinity, independently of the suit being legit. A complete nightmare and totally unrelated to the tech. Makes would spend more time and tech clearing their asses in court than building safe cars.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors. LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.

No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly…

> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs.

For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#130

Related: Volvo drops LIDAR... https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/volvo-says-sayonara-to-lid...

Volvo had contract issues with Luminar:

> In a statement, a Volvo Cars USA spokesperson added the decision was made “to limit the company’s supply chain risk exposure, and it is a direct result of Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations to Volvo Cars.”

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