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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

#281

Post by machomaster »

bluGill wrote: post #269
ben_w wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 circumst…

Let me re-iterate my original caution: human drivers are really bad: more than 40,000 people die in car crashes every year! If a self driving cars makes mistakes that humans would not in some cases, but overall they would only cause 30,000 deaths per year then I want self driving required. Thus I want liability to reflect not perfection is required but that they are better than humans. Don't get me wrong, perfection…

These are marginal numbers. This would make AI worse than the safe driver.

The benefits of self-driving should be inrefutable before requiring it. At least x10 better than human drivers.

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

#282

Post by energy123 »

setr wrote: post #258
energy123 wrote: post #153

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

If you're on a desert island and you have 2 watches instead of 1, the probability of failure (defined as "don't know the time") within T years goes from p to p^2 + epsilon (where epsilon encapsulates things like correlated manufacturing defects).

So in a way, yes.

The main difference is that "don't know the time" is a trivial consequence, but "crash into a white truck at 70mph" is non-trivial.

But it's the same statistical reasoning.

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

#283

Post by roadbuster »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #245
mxkopy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Competition breeds innovation”

American oligarchs won't put up with any competition.

It has less to do with "oligarchs" and more to do with protectionism over domestic industry: retain jobs in America, preserve worker income taxes revenue, capture taxation of corporate profits, tilt the scales in favour of an American business becoming a global exporter of their products, keep development of high-tech assets under American regulatory control.

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

#284

Post by wolvoleo »

hbs18 wrote: post #268
wolvoleo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me any kind of driving is torture. I don't want the responsibility, the risk, the chance of fines if I miss a speed sign somewhere. And if my car could self drive I could spend the time usefully instead of wasting it on driving. It would be amazing. Right now I don't even have a car but for getting around outside of the city it's difficult sometimes.

I used to think like that before I started driving, it's way more structured and harder to screw up than you'd think. Avoiding potholes is the hardest part of driving, really.

I've driven hundreds of thousands of kms in my life and on both sides of the road (lived in various countries). But I still find it awful.

It's not that it's hard but I just hate it.

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

#286

Post by ben_w »

machomaster wrote: post #281
bluGill wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me re-iterate my original caution: human drivers are really bad: more than 40,000 people die in car crashes every year! If a self driving cars makes mistakes that humans would not in some cases, but overall they would only cause 30,000 deaths per year then I want self driving required. Thus I want liability to reflect not perfection is required but that they are better than humans. Don't get me wrong, perfection…

These are marginal numbers. This would make AI worse than the safe driver. The benefits of self-driving should be inrefutable before requiring it. At least x10 better than human drivers.

The AI's benefits should be irrefutable, but this isn't as simple as "at least x10 better than human drivers", or any fixed factor, it's that whatever mistakes they do make, if you show the video of a crash to the general public, the public generally agrees they'd have also crashed under those conditions.

Right now… Tesla likes to show off stats that suggest accidents go down while their software is active, but then we see videos like this, and go "no sane human would ever do this", and it does not make people feel comfortable with the tech: https://electrek.co/2025/05/23/tesla-full-self-driving-veers...

Every single way the human vision system fails, if an AI also makes that mistake, it won't get blamed for it. If it solves every single one of those perception errors we're vulnerable to (what colour is that dress, is that a duck or a rabbit, is that an old woman close up facing us or a young woman from a distance looking away from us, etc.) but also brings in a few new failure modes we don't have, it won't get trusted.

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

#288

Post by roryirvine »

mrtksn wrote: post #53
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…

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…

They're wideband EM devices, so the problem of congested spectrum can be dealt with by the same sort of techniques used by WiFi and mobile phone services.

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

#289

Post by lazyeye »

roryirvine wrote: post #288
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…

They're wideband EM devices, so the problem of congested spectrum can be dealt with by the same sort of techniques used by WiFi and mobile phone services.

Do you always get good wifi at a level of consistency with which you'd trust your life?

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

#290

Post by [deleted] »

teleforce wrote: post #88

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…

[deleted]
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