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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

#151

Post by cyberax »

expedition32 wrote: post #77
cyberax wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can't last indefinitely. At some point, the contrast between the US-made and Chinese-made cars will become too great to ignore. We saw that during the 80-s, with the Japanese cars.

Don't Americans like big pickup trucks? Nobody else really drives those in large numbers.

This is a bit of a stereotype. The most popular cars in the US are now SUVs and CUVs, probably because a lot of Americans are well-approximated by spheres.

BYD Dolphin is right on the edge of being a CUV. They can trivially scale it up a bit. It'll be more expensive, but not by much.

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

#152

Post by encrypted_bird »

cyberax wrote: post #151
expedition32 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't Americans like big pickup trucks? Nobody else really drives those in large numbers.

This is a bit of a stereotype. The most popular cars in the US are now SUVs and CUVs, probably because a lot of Americans are well-approximated by spheres. BYD Dolphin is right on the edge of being a CUV. They can trivially scale it up a bit. It'll be more expensive, but not by much.

And most of those SUVs are the same size that most pickup trucks used to be 10-20 years ago. Even the smallest US vehicles are oversized now.

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

#153

Post by energy123 »

cpgxiii wrote: post #145
cameronh90 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely? Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way. Personally I don’t buy the argument t…

For one, no one is seriously contemplating a LIDAR-only system, the question is between camera+LIDAR or camera-only. > Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way. Actually, given that basically every meaningful LIDAR on the market gives an "intensity" value for each return, in surprisingly many cases you could get this kind of imaging behavior from LIDAR so long as th…

> camera+LIDAR

It's like having 2 pilots instead of 1 pilot. If one pilot is unexpectedly defective (has a heart attack mid-flight), you still have the other pilot. Some errors between the 2 pilots aren't uncorrelated of course, but many of them are. So the chance of an at-fault crash goes from p and approaches p^2 in the best case. That's an unintuitively large improvement. Many laypeople's gut instinct would be more like p -> p/2 improvement from having 2 pilots (or 2 data streams in the case of camera+LIDAR).

In the camera+LIDAR case, you conceptually require AND(x.ok for all x) before you accelerate. If only one of those systems says there's a white truck in front of you, then you hit the brakes, instead of requiring both of them to flag it. False negatives are what you're trying to avoid because the confusion matrix shouldn't be equally weighted given the additional downside of a catastrophic crash. That's where two somewhat independent data streams becomes so powerful at reducing crashes, you really benefit from those ~uncorrelated errors.

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

#154

Post by Animats »

Narrow field of view LIDAR units have been moderately priced for years. Forward looking LIDAR is useful for anti-collision systems. It doesn't yield the situational awareness of full coverage needed for full autonomy, but it's good for putting on the brakes.

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

#155

Post by aniviacat »

Tycho wrote: post #85
knallfrosch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scan with LiDAR while manually driving.

But the driver isn’t reacting to any of the LiDAR readings, only what they can see, so what is the point?

You label the recordings that involve a crash, and use the lidar to avoid doing the same.

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

#156

Post by sampo »

ares623 wrote: post #140
gbnwl wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this is obvious, but are there actually any systems that "choose one over the other"? My impression's always been it was either vision + LIDAR, or vision alone. Are there any examples of LIDAR alone?

Roombas

Roomba (specifically the brand of the American company iRobot) only added lidar in 2025 [1]. Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls), and then by cameras.

But if you use "roomba" as a generic term for robot vacuum then yes, Chinese Ecovacs and Xiaomi introduced lidar-based robot vacuums in 2015 [2].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/627751/irobot-launches-eight-n...

[2] https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4542

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

#157

Post by latch »

WheatMillington wrote: post #83
cyberax wrote: 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.

US manufacturers are fine because the US has a long history of economic protectionism. These cars are effectively banned in the US due to tariffs which protect US automakers.

Aren't you missing something? Gemini tells me that non-NA market makes up 33% of Ford's sales, and 51% of GMs.

So a better way to put it is "protects US automakers in the US." And that assumes NA manufacturers would be unaffected by declining sales abroad.

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

#158

Post by dzhiurgis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #139
dzhiurgis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about turn signal vs brake lights?

> How about turn signal vs brake lights? Potentially as extraneous as range to a surface that a camera can’t tell apart from background. More to the point, everyone but Tesla is doing cameras plus Lidar. It’s increasingly looking like the correct bet.

> doing cameras plus Lidar

At what proportion? Is it mostly lidar or mostly cameras? Or 50/50?

> Potentially as extraneous as range to a surface that a camera can’t tell apart from background.

I guess yeah for backside of the car you'd probably better off measuring actual actions.

How about when you come 4 way stop. LIDAR is useless as it wouldn't recognize anyones turn signals.

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

#159

Post by d_luaz »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #148
mft_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a good proportion of his success has rested on somehow simplifying or commodifying existing expensive technology (e.g. rockets, and lots of the technology needed to make them; EV batteries) it's surprising that Musk's response to lidar being (at the time) very expensive was to avoid it despite the additional challenges that this brought, rather than attempt to carve a moat by innovating and creating cheaper and…

The ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted this exact scenario confirmed to me he was not as smart as some people think he was. He seemed to have drank his own koolaid back then. And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb. Pride is standing in the way of first principles.

Will there be major difference in ride experience when you take a Waymo vs Robotaxi?

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

#160

Post by dzhiurgis »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #109
dzhiurgis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can lidar say what colour is traffic light?

Something I've seen noises about is time of flight systems for traffic. I think the idea is you can put those systems on traffic lights, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians and then cars can know where those things are.

Or instead of reinventing the world you could just use cameras
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