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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

#271

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.

Apparently it IS still a legal conundrum: https://www.motortrend.com/news/who-gets-a-ticket-when-a-way... And will continue to be until every municipality implements laws about it.

> it IS still a legal conundrum

It’s not a conundrum as much as an implementation detail. We’ve decided to hold Waymo accountable. We’re just ticking the boxes around doing that (none of which involve confusion around Waymo being responsible).

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And people die all the time.

They do, but the rate is extremely low compared to the volume of drivers.

In 2024 in the US there were about 240 million licensed drivers and an estimated 39,345 fatalities, which is 0.016% of licensed drivers. Every single fatality is awful but the inverse of that number means that 99.984% of drivers were relatively safe in 2024.

Tesla provided statistics on the improvements from their safety features compared to the active population (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) and the numbers are pretty dramatic.

Miles driven before a major collision

699,000 - US Average

972,000 - Tesla average (no safety features enabled)

2.3 million - Tesla (active safety features, manually driven)

5.1 million - Tesla FSD (supervised)

It's taking something that's already relatively safe and making it approximately 5-7 times safer using visual processing alone.

Maybe lidar can make it even better, but there's every reason to tout the success of what's in place so far.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was responding to the parent who said if you had to make a choice between lidar and vision, you'd pick lidar. I know there are theoretical and semi-practical ways of reading those indicators with features that are correlated with the visual data, for example thermoplastic line markings create a small bump that sufficiently advanced lidar can detect. However, while I'm not a lidar expert, I don't believe using a com…

> For example, you could imagine a situation where the white lane divider thermoplastic markings on a road has been masked over with black paint and new lane markings have been painted on - but lidar will still detect the bump as a stronger signal than the new paint markings.

Conflicting lane marking due to road work/changes is already a major problem for visual sensors and human drivers, and something that fairly regularly confuses ADAS implementations. Any useful self-driving system will already have to consider the totality of the situation (apparent lane markings, road geometry, other cars, etc) to decide what "lane" to follow. Arguably a "geometry-first" approach with LIDAR-only would be more robust to this sort of visual confusion.

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

#274
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder how a Waymo would do with your drunks? Really the answer for that is probably more a different road layout so the drinking is separate from the traffic. I live near Soho in London which is full of drunk people in the streets but most traffic is blocked off there or doing 10 mph.

I’ve been paying more attention to Waymos recently.. and noting that it stops to let people cross that i didn’t even see first.

And sometimes at places that aren’t even a cross walk.

Im in DTLA frequently and I am almost even developing a secondary instinct to cover my brake and have an extra look around when a Waymo stops in a street.

Because it may be dropping off or picking up a rider or it saw something or someone I didn’t. Just happened Saturday in fact. I saw it do an abrupt stop when I was yielding to it at a “T” intersection and expected it to have the right of way and keep going. I didn’t proceed until I could figure out WHY it had just stopped, like “okay WHERE’S the passenger”

and then five or so people started running across the street in front of it that I would not have seen if that Waymo wasn’t there and I was clear to turn left.

As an added bonus it stayed stopped after they all crossed and I decided to be a jerk and turn left in front of it. It stayed stopped for me too. There’s no driver in it. It ain’t mad. XD

I have a good eye for spotting uber drivers who are about to load or unload too, Especially if they have some common sense and are trying to line up to do that so their passenger can get on or off curbside. A Waymo is just.. way more immediately identifiable that I can react that much faster to it or just be like.. alright. I’ll take a cue from it, it’s usually right.

And hell even if it’s wrong, maybe this isn’t a good time to pull out in front of it anyway!

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> And people die all the time. They do, but the rate is extremely low compared to the volume of drivers. In 2024 in the US there were about 240 million licensed drivers and an estimated 39,345 fatalities, which is 0.016% of licensed drivers. Every single fatality is awful but the inverse of that number means that 99.984% of drivers were relatively safe in 2024. Tesla provided statistics on the improvements from their…

No, you're making the mistake of taking Tesla's stats as comparable, which they are not.

Comparing the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions?

Or the accident stats that don't count an accident any collision without airbag deployment, regardless of injuries? Including accidents that were sufficiently serious that airbags could not or were unable to deploy?

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

#276

Are you serious, a car with Lidar sensor that's not even available in Bugatti Tourbillon that cost 500x more? Joking aside, this BYD Seagull, or Atto 1 in Australia (AUD$24K) and Dolphin Surf in Europe (£18K in the UK), is one the cheapest EV cars in the world and selling at around £6K in China. It's priced double in Australia and triple in the UK compared to its original price in China. It's also one of China best s…

Being literally the worst human rights violator makes it easy to be cheap https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...

The graph has this group which includes mostly Eastern car manufacturer:

> No demonstration of alignment (0-22 points)

What does "no demonstration of alignment" mean in this context?

Eastern companies often don't proactively demonstrate compliance beyond what's legally required, especially to Western NGOs. Does this lack of demonstration actually prove they're violating human rights?

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

#277
post #203

Are you serious, a car with Lidar sensor that's not even available in Bugatti Tourbillon that cost 500x more? Joking aside, this BYD Seagull, or Atto 1 in Australia (AUD$24K) and Dolphin Surf in Europe (£18K in the UK), is one the cheapest EV cars in the world and selling at around £6K in China. It's priced double in Australia and triple in the UK compared to its original price in China. It's also one of China best s…

> claimed 0–50 km/h (31 mph) acceleration time of 4.9 seconds,[45] and a 0–100 km/h (62 mph) time of 13 seconds. Aww

My (non-electric) car will do 0-60mph in 3.3 seconds.

The number of times I need to do this in daily driving is approximately zero.

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

#278
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is that "zero issues" is something that must be based on a very large sample size. In the US the death rate for cars is a bit over 1 per 100 million miles. So you really need billions of miles of data. FSD could be 10x as dangerous as the average driver and still it would most likely be "zero issues" for you and all your friends.

I'll post the 7 billion miles of stats here ( https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety ) but then the objections will be "it's Tesla of course they lie" and the debunked "they turn FSD off right before an accident".

How does FSD function, or will it even activate, in a Pittsburgh whiteout at 10pm in January with no visible road markings?

That's why Tesla's stats are BS. "All drivers, all conditions, all vehicles, all roads" versus "Where FSD is even functional".

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

#279
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mor…

Isn’t that also like having two watches? You’ll never know the time

It's different because the challenge with self-driving is not to know the exact time. You win for simply noticing the discrepancy and stopping.

Imagine if the watch simply tells you if it is safe to jump into the pool (depending on the time it may or may not have water). If watches conflict, you still win by not jumping.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And people die all the time. They do, but the rate is extremely low compared to the volume of drivers. In 2024 in the US there were about 240 million licensed drivers and an estimated 39,345 fatalities, which is 0.016% of licensed drivers. Every single fatality is awful but the inverse of that number means that 99.984% of drivers were relatively safe in 2024. Tesla provided statistics on the improvements from their…

No, you're making the mistake of taking Tesla's stats as comparable, which they are not. Comparing the subsets of driving on only the roads where FSD is available, active, and has not or did not turn itself off because of weather, road, traffic or any other conditions" versus "all drivers, all vehicles, all roads, all weather, all traffic, all conditions? Or the accident stats that don't count an accident any collisi…

The stats on the site break it into major and minor collisions. You can see the above link.

I have no doubt that there are ways to take issue with the stats. I'm sure we could look at accidents from 11pm - 6am compared to the volume of drivers on the road as well.

In aggregate, the stats are the stats though.

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