Would it be no easier to integrate it into home vaccuums ?
Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
451–460 of 582 posts
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a saner world Teslas would be running Waymo's self-driving stack instead of the half-baked "might kill you at any time" not quite-FSD.
They are not the same. I don't think Tesla or its consumers are interested in geofenced self driving, they want to be able to use it on road trips and driving around suburbs.
I mean, Tesla gave up on quality self-driving many years ago when Elon went hard against LIDAR. He's never relented, either, and I don't foresee that changing.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans aren't using only fixed vision for driving. This is such a tiresome thing to see repeated in every discussion about self driving. You're listening to the road and car sounds around you. You're feeling vibration on the road. You're feeling feedback on the steering wheel. You're using a combination of monocular and binocular depth perception - plus, your eyes are not a fixed focal length "cameras". You're moving…
And also, even with the suite of sensors that humans have, their vision perception is frequently inadequate and leads to crashes. If vision was good enough, "SMIDSY" wouldn't be such an infamous acronym in vehicle injury cases.
For those of us not aware of Australian cycling jargon, "SMIDSY" means "Sorry, Mate, I Didn't See You".
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#454Earlier 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…
My understanding is that there's more data processing required with cameras because you need to estimate distance from stereoscopic vision. And as it happens, the required chips for that have shot up in price because of the AI boom. But I think costs were just part of the reason why Elon decided against Lidar. Apparently, they interfere with each other once the market saturates and you have many such cars on the same…
How does Waymo handle it now? There are many videos of Waymo depots with dozens of cars not running into each other.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also ignorant about how those two eyes have binocular vision, adjustable positions, and can look in multiple mirrors for full spatial awareness.
Binocular vision is not only relevant for driving (well, maybe for the steering wheel, but that's not the point).
It gives us depth perception. And moving the eyes and/or head gives the depth perception over a wide field of view.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also ignorant about how those two eyes have binocular vision, adjustable positions, and can look in multiple mirrors for full spatial awareness.
There are good arguments but this isn’t one. Many humans (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses that are watching everything all the time, when a human can only focus in one direction at a time.
I thought only the front view has binocular vision on the cars. The others are single, with no depth perception. How does it know how close objects are outside this forward cone?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fi...
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#457Earlier 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…
> and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required
The reports that Tesla submits on Austin Robotaxis include several of them hitting fixed objects. This is the same behavior that has been reported on for prior versions of their software of Teslas not seeing objects, including for the incident for which they had a $250M verdict against them reaffirmed this past week. That this is occurring in an extensively mapped environment and with a safety driver on board leads me to the opposite conclusion that you have reached.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#458Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.
I'm not an expert on ML vision, but I do have a Tesla and it seems to be able to tell how far away things are just fine. I'm not sure what would be wrong with the vision system that lidar needs to fix.
How do you explain the reports of Robotaxis running into fixed objects? If what you are saying is true that shouldn't be able to happen.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#459Earlier 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…
To do gaussian splatting anywhere near in real time, you need good depth data to initialize the gaussian positions. This can of course come from monocular depth but then you are back to monocular depth vs lidar.
Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's the reasoning. The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes. Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your acci…
Seeing the SOTA in FSD techs it is not obvious that Musk made a miscalc so far.
Nah
If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it
They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering
(Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)