Oh hell yeah, we can finally stop the braindead attempts to make a safe self-driving car with just cameras.
Is there anyone using only cameras except Tesla?
Tesla is using radars as well as cameras. No one is using only cameras
Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
431–440 of 582 posts
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. My understanding is that cyber cabs still need safety drivers to operate, is that not the case?
Robotaxis in Austin are in the process of removing in car safety monitors, there is a chance you would get one today
tesla robotaxi crash rates are also currently (as in, with safety drivers) 4x higher than humans so that's not very promising
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#433Cameras alone can handle the vast majority of nominal driving scenarios, but the long tail of safety critical edge cases is where progress slows dramatically. Many of these cases are driven by degraded or ambiguous perception, which is where multi‑modal sensing, such as combining cameras with lidar, can reduce uncertainty. In adverse weather like fog or heavy rain, that reduction in uncertainty can translate directly into safer behavior, such as earlier and more confident emergency braking, even if no single sensor performs perfectly on its own
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#434Low cost, sub $200 automotive grade LIDAR sensors are already available. Cepton Technologies offers Nova [0], Nova-Ultra [1] sensors both at a sub-$100 price point [2]. These feature a 120°(H) x 90°(V) FOV at 50m, with 2.7M points per second sampling. Velodyne introduced Velabit in 2021, for $100. Boasting 100m range and a 60-degree horizontal FoV x 10-degree vertical FoV. The article claims that: > What distinguishe…
>Cepton Technologies offers Nova [0], Nova-Ultra [1] sensors both at a sub-$100 price point Where? How? I'm only seeing the Nova on ebay for between $4000 and $5000.
Cepton primarily operates B2B, as B2C demand for specialized LIDAR like this is pretty low. Anything you find on eBay is either a leftover dev kit or salvage. This is pretty much the case for MicroVision, Ouster etc.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsof…
Why sell cars to everyone? People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us still do), most now rent via cloud. Why should transportation be different?
Not a good analogy: a server is not a personal space occupied by humans. It's for the same reason people don't want to hot-desk; they prefer a personal space with their own stuff in it.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area. Maybe their navigation system will be better than the competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps users, but I don't think it'll be so much better as to be an unbeatable advantage.
They use LIDAR maps in service areas, but might be using Street View data for training? (I imagine it would be really, really difficult to build a useful simulator with just SV imagery, but probably also quite valuable to have the variety of environments.)
did you see this, they can build a simulator from sv images. https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f... even the lidar part
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#437Laser safety people: how concerned should we be about city streets full of aggressively cost-engineered Lidar emitters?
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#438Is this Human safe at these volumes? There was a time you could get your feet sized by putting them into an X-ray box at the shoe store. Removed from stores once the harm was known.
Well, the energy levels used in those devices should be miniscule, and the wavelengths used are well studies. The problem with x-rays - was lack of studies on health effects, and regulations on those effects. I think, since that time, we've studies radiation (be it light, rf or other parts of spectrum) much more. There is indeed a possibility that we're overlooking some bio-electromagnetic interaction effects; for in…
The main damage risk from LIDAR is to retinal rods and cones. You just know some jerk is going to overclock his system and we know some people just don't care about the harm they cause so long as they get a benefit. As a combo that means I'll be wearing protective eyewear outdoors the day this tech comes to the roads.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#439Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a…
>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is…
> Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city.
Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems: - cost (no longer a problem) - too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave when I think if you do it right it’s fine. As proven by Waymo. Really curious if any Tesla engin…
Just for the record though, Musk isn't blindly anti-LIDAR. He has said (and I think this is an objective fact) that all existing roads and driving are based on vision (which is what all humans do). So that should technically be sufficient. SpaceX uses LIDAR for their docking systems. I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be why I thought camera…
Sufficient if all else were equal. But the human brain and artificial neural networks are clearly not equal. This is setting aside the whole question of whether we hope to equal human performance or exceed it.