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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

#241

Post by cyberax »

dham wrote: post #177
cyberax wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both HW versions have problems (and I have both). FSD has been "really good since VVV" for the last 6 major versions or so.

> Red hands of death would be sunglare due to your windshield not being clean. I haven't had red hands since 14 came out.

My windshield is completely normal. Not unusually dirty or anything. It's also Seattle. What is the "sunglare"?

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

#242

Post by hobofan »

imtringued wrote: post #235
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…

It's the same with his humanoid robot. Instead of building yet another useless hype machine, why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms? You have a guaranteed customer (yourself) and once you have figured out the design, you can start selling to external customers.

> why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms?

Robot arms are neither a low-volume unique/high-cost market (SpaceX), nor a high-volume/high-margin business (Tesla). On top of that it's already a quite crowded space.

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

#243

Post by amanaplanacanal »

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…

What Tesla self driving is that? The one with human drivers? I don't believe they have gotten their permits for self driving cars yet.

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

#244

Post by rsynnott »

imtringued wrote: post #235
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…

It's the same with his humanoid robot. Instead of building yet another useless hype machine, why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms? You have a guaranteed customer (yourself) and once you have figured out the design, you can start selling to external customers.

Because making boring industrial machinery doesn't sustain a PE ratio of about 300. Only promising the world does that.

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

#246

Post by ACCount37 »

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…

What "extra GPU"?

LIDAR is also straight up worthless without an unholy machine learning pipeline to massage its raw data into actual decisions.

Self-driving is an AI problem, not a sensor problem - you aren't getting away from AI no matter what you do.

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

#247

Post by ben_w »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #229
lkois wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by proportion? They are different data sources, and their usage is determined by system design. eg A driving decision system needs to know object distances AND traffic light colours. It doesn't particularly need to know the source of either. You could have a camera-only system that accurately determines colour and fuzzy-determines distance. Or you could have a LIDAR-only system that accurately determ…

Sounds like a solved problem and you can buy a solution with a perfect accuracy?

I don't read the previous comment as either "you can buy" nor "perfect accuracy".

Like them, I don't understand what you're asking by "proportion". Bits/second? Sensor modules/vehicle? Features detected by the AI?

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

#248

Post by ben_w »

imtringued wrote: post #238
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault? Whoever was in control. This isn’t some weird legal quagmire anymore, these cars are on the road.

The point of self driving is that the car is in control. Are you going to send the car to car prison?

Personally, I'd argue that if the AI killed someone due to being incompetent (as in, a human in a fit state to drive would not have made this mistake), the punishment should go to the corporation that signed off on the AI passing all relevant tests.

The nature of the punishment does not necessarily follow the same rules as for human incompetence, e.g. if the error occurs due to some surprising combination of circumstances that no reasonable tester would have thought to test, which I can't really give an example of because anything I can think of is absolutely something a reasonable tester would have thought to test, but for the sake of talking about it without taking this too seriously consider if a celebrity is crossing a road while a large poster of their own face is right behind them.

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

#249

Post by cameronh90 »

gbnwl wrote: post #137
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…

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?

Not that I'm aware of, but I was referring to the claim in the parent post that if you had to choose it would be insane to choose vision over LIDAR.

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

#250

Post by uyzstvqs »

m4ck_ wrote: post #123
uyzstvqs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely. But this has an extra layer of urgency. Their entire goal is to be able to remotely turn off all of our infrastructure, which is handy leverage if you're looking to do things like invading a certain island nation.
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