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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

#171

Post by nullhole »

pjc50 wrote: post #81
neilv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the real world safety data over time is... secret retinal damage to millions of walkers and runners, with symptoms attributed to Covid mysteries (and not obviously due to vision), and it takes years more before someone happens to get enough data, and does the right study analysis, and then there's industry with strong incentive not to be on the hook for blinding millions of people? If the tech industry has ta…

Lidar is incredibly low power and fast scanning, the retinal risk is probably much less than having to drive when the sun is near the horizon.

It's also typically at a wavelength that has lower risk to human eyes (ie near infrared).

Laser eye safety risk is very measurable and well classified.

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

#172

Post by dham »

SapporoChris wrote: post #114
dzhiurgis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can lidar say what colour is traffic light?

I believe traffic lights currently use three bulbs, red, yellow and green. Even without color a computer system can easily determine when each light is lit. If there are single bulbs displaying red, green and yellow please give clear examples.

Have you driven in America? We have the craziest lights you've ever seen. And that's just in my state

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

#173

Post by schiffern »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #5

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…

  >Lidars come down in price ~40x.
Is that really true? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Ars cites this China Daily article[0], which gives no specifics and simply states:

  >A LiDAR unit, for instance, used to cost 30,000 yuan (about $4,100), but now it costs only around 1,000 yuan (about $138) — a dramatic decrease, said Li.
How good are these $138 LiDARs? Who knows, because this article gives no information.

This article[1] from around the same time gives more specifics, listing under "1000 yuan LiDARs" the RoboSense MX, Hesai Technology ATX, Zvision Technologies ZVISION EZ5, and the VanJee Technology WLR-760.

The RoboSense MX is selling for $2,000-3,000, so it's not exactly $138. It was going to be added to XPENG cars, before they switched away from LiDAR. Yikes.

The ATX is $1400, the EZ5 isn't available, and the WLR-760 is $3500. So the press release claims of sub-$200 never really materialized.

Furthermore, all of these are low beam count LiDARs with a limited FOV. These are 120°x20°, whereas Waymo sensors cover 360°x95° (and it still needs 4 of them).

It seems my initial skepticism was well placed.

  >if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar
Good luck with that. LiDAR can't read signs.

[0] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202503/06/WS67c92b5ca310c...

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-beijing-international-a...

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

#174

Post by dham »

consumer451 wrote: post #54
jandrewrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors. For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be ass…

I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0] What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3hts…

That was autopilot not FSD. Autopilot is a simple ADAS system similar to Toyota Safety sense or all the other garbage ADAS systems from Honda, Kia, Toyota, GM etc. FSD passed this test with flying colors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g

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

#175

Post by wongarsu »

consumer451 wrote: post #104
wongarsu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver. Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing…

> and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset? So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforce…

Intentionally trying to create traffic accidents is illegal. This isn't an FSD-thing. If you try to intentionally get humans to crash their cars you are going to get into trouble. I don't see how this suddenly becomes OK when done to competent FSD (not that I'd count Tesla among them)

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

#176

Post by dham »

cyberax wrote: post #23
iknowstuff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is not an adas. There’s nothing close to FSD 14 abilities out there for consumers. And your stats comparing to waymo are made up and debunked in the very reddit thread they came from

Sure. And Tesla doesn't have robotaxis at all, they're still playing in the kindergarten league. So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better. FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even…

> FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions.

This isn't even close to being right.

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

#177

Post by dham »

cyberax wrote: post #48
durandal1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie. Why would you spend energy lying on HN of all places?

I've been using Tesla since 2015. And no, it's not a lie. Tesla FSD gives up with the red-hands-of-death panic at this spot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cfe9LBzaCLpGSAr99 (edit: fixed the location) It also misinterprets this signal: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhZsQtN5LKy59Mpv6 It doesn't have enough resolution to resolve the red left arrow, especially when it's even mildly rainy. At this intersection, it just gets confused…

Are you talking hw3 or 4? Also, the e2e FSD is recent. And FSD has gotten really good since 13, and with 14 it's really, really good. Not sure what 2015 has to do with anything. Red hands of death would be sunglare due to your windshield not being clean. I haven't had red hands since 14 came out.

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

#178

Post by rkomorn »

sampo wrote: post #156
ares623 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/arti…

> Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls)

My ex got a Roomba in the early 2010s and it gave me an irrational but everlasting disdain for the company.

They kept mentioning their "proprietary algorithm" like it was some amazing futuristic thing but watching that thing just bump into something and turn, bump into something else and turn, bump into something again and turn again, etc ... it made me hate that thing.

Now when my dog can't find her ball and starts senselessly roaming in all the wrong directions in a panic, I call it Roomba mode.

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

#179

Post by dham »

iknowstuff wrote: post #78
cyberax wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And Tesla doesn't have robotaxis at all, they're still playing in the kindergarten league. So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better. FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even…

Girl get real. Mercedes fooled quite a few people with their PR stunt but they have NOTHING like fsd. Drive assist pro is vaporware, as their “L3” has been for the past 2 years. You can’t order that shit but half of hackernews is glazing mercedes for it

Update, it is vaporware lol. Just announced today they are canceling it.

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

#180

Post by rootusrootus »

vortext wrote: post #116
rootusrootus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do. We have nice big wide roads. Heck, my European immigrant friends love trucks more than natives, in my experience. If you have the space for them, there are some very appealing attributes. My Lightning will carry anything I want, tow big trailers, has huge interior space for the family, will outrun most cars (even many 'fast' ones), and is more fuel efficient than a [non-plugin] Prius. I wouldn't want to ow…

The Ford Lightning has been discontinued.

The Lightning BEV has been discontinued. The Lightning will continue to be produced, after a delay, but it will only come as an EREV configuration. Ford has been mum on the details but my guess is it will share a large part of the underlying architecture with the pure BEV version. I won't be shocked if Ford backpedals at some point in a couple years and offers both variants simultaneously.

I'm not entirely convinced Ford would have discontinued the BEV if the F150 aluminum manufacturer hadn't caught on fire a few times over the space of a month or so. Ford really needs to go for maximum margin trucks when they cannot produce all that they want, so it made sense to put the Lightning BEV on indefinite hold.

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