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

thedriven.io

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

#191

Post by NewJazz »

ojosilva wrote: post #128
general1465 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's... Not how it would work.

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

#192

Post by sroussey »

brightball wrote: post #166
spiderfarmer wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there’s room for both points of view here. Going all in on visual processing means you can use it anywhere a person can go in any other technology, Optimus robots are just one example. And he’s not wrong that roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing. The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla…

> roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.

And people die all the time.

> The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.

Huh? Waymo is responsible for injury, so all their cars called home at the same time DOS themselves rather than kill someone.

Tesla makes no responsibility and does nothing.

I can’t see the logic the brings vision only as having anything to do lights out. At all.

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

#193

Post by moogly »

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.

> And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.

The absolute genius made sure that he can't back out without making it bleedingly obvious that old cars can never be upgraded for a LIDAR-based stack. Right now he's avoiding a company-killing class action suit by stalling, hoping people will get rid of HW3 cars, (and you can add HW4 cars soon too) and pretending that those cars will be updated, but if you also need to have LIDAR sensors, you're massively screwed.

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

#194

Post by vardump »

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…

Neato XV-11 introduced lidar in 2010. Sadly they're no more.

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

#195

Post by sroussey »

rafabulsing wrote: post #126
mrtksn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Driving in fog is the number one reason I want lidar looking out.

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

#196

Post by bruce511 »

tim333 wrote: post #105
stirfish wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people. This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work

I can think of one example where something similar works. The requirements from insurance companies on airline pilots are considerable tougher than the government ones because they are on the hook for ~$200m if they crash. A big reason car companies don't worry much about killing pedestrians at the moment is it costs them ~$0.

You clearly haven't lived in my city :).

About half our road fatalities are pedestrians. About 80% of those are intoxicated with alcohol. When you're driving at 40mph, at night, and some drunk guy chooses to cross the road, no amount of safety features or liabilities can save him.

Sure, cars can be safer for light collisions with pedestrians where the car is going slowly. Especially in the US where half the cars have a very high hood. But where I live the problem is not safer cars, it's drunk pedestrians.

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

#197

Post by SequoiaHope »

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.

I wonder how much of their trouble comes from other failures in their plan (avoiding the use of pre-made maps and single city taxi services in favor of a system intended to drive in unseen cities) vs how much comes from vision. There are concerning failure modes from vision alone but it’s not clear that’s actually the reason for the failure. Waymo built an expensive safe system that is a taxi first and can only operate on certain areas, and then they ran reps on those areas for a decade.

Tesla specifically decided not to use the taxi-first approach, which does make sense since they want to sell cars. One of the first major failures of their approach was to start selling pre-orders for self driving. If they hadn’t, they would not have needed to promise it would work everywhere, and could have pivoted to single city taxi services like the other companies, or added lidar.

But certainly it all came from Musk’s hubris, first to set out to solve the self driving in all conditions using only vision, and then to start selling it before it was done, making it difficult to change paths once so much had been promised.

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

#198

Post by sroussey »

ojosilva wrote: post #128
general1465 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mercedes explicitly accepts liability when Drive Pilot L3 is active and used as intended.

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

#199

Post by d_luaz »

tstrimple wrote: post #188
d_luaz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Considering one requires a human babysitter and one doesn’t on top of the accident rates between them it should be an easy yes.

Fair. So in a sense, the lidar vs camera argument ultimately can be publicly assess/proven through human babysitter (regulation permit) and accident rates. or maybe user adoptions.

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

#200

Post by cyberax »

dham wrote: post #179
iknowstuff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Links?

The most recent one is: https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-4889b1d1c66cddc7120...

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