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Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

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Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#491

Post by epolanski »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #301
zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

Since 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 find it comical that people continue to go back to this rage well against "a certain company" for their vision-only approach when the truth is they have the best automatic driving system an individual can buy, rivaling Waymo and beating the Chinese brands. Why are the commenters not pissed at the dozens of other car companies who have done absolutely nothing in this space? Answer: because it's not nearly as fun to…

You're way off if you think that Waymo and FSD are anywhere close.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#492

Post by UltraSane »

servo_sausage wrote: post #476
UltraSane wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is the best current autonomous driving system and Waymo uses LIDAR. This is because LIDAR is an incredibly effective sensor for accurate range data. Vision and Radar range data is much less accurate and reliable. Waymo used LIDAR in the realtime control loop. It combines LiDAR, camera, and radar data in real time to build a 3D representation of the environment, which is constantly updated. I fundamentally don't…

Yes, I am aware of waymo... What they do is impressive. However they don't have a product that works for all highways yet, that's the space I work in, and we have no real fixation on lidar... It's nice but not a requirement, and hard to justify the cost unless you can make sales because of it (and there are some places where this is the case, but not everywhere) You don't need the mm precision of lidar very often; we…

Waymo is level 4. I think currently it is nearly impossible to make a level 4 system as safe as Waymo without Lidar. Maybe new 4d imaging radar or THz radar could change this. Sensor modalities have physics-based limitations, current camera+radar isn't sufficient for L4.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#493

Post by wombat-man »

devolving-dev wrote: post #482

I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong? I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the…

maybe? But also LiDAR just gives a more complete picture of what is around the car. I think this is supported by how many miles waymo cars run unsupervised vs Tesla.

I am skeptical that tesla has this solved but interested in seeing how it goes when as they move to expand their robotaxi service.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#494

Post by UltraSane »

small_model wrote: post #330
UltraSane wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hey have lots of Model Ys in Austin as Robotaxis right now with no drivers" They do not. They have a very small number of them open to a select number of people, not the general public. And they are limited to even smaller areas. You need to understand that Musk is NOT an engineer, he is more of a con man desperate to inflate tesla stock price. If he says self driving cars don't need LIDAR then they must actually ne…

Who should I believe a random poster on hackernews who has likely an average salary or Elon Musk who is the richest man in the world and create multiple trillion dollar companies......hard one! Whats wrong with grokipedia its a bit less woke/far left wing, more balanced.

You are just mindlessly regurgitating the lies of Musk and using an "appeal to wealth" to justify not analyzing them. He has been lying about self driving since 2016.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/08/20/elon-mus...

https://futurism.com/leaked-elon-musk-self-driving

For nearly a decade Elon Musk has claimed Teslas can truly drive themselves. They can’t. Now California regulators, a Miami jury and a new class action suit are calling him on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#495

Post by janalsncm »

devolving-dev wrote: post #482

I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong? I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the…

Some problems are simply undecideable: if for identical inputs the desired output varies wildly, you simply need more information. There is no algorithm that will help you.

Sensors or intelligence, at the end of the day it’s an engineering problem which doesn’t require pure solutions. Sometimes sensors break and cameras get covered in mud.

The problem is maintaining an acceptable level of quality at the lowest possible price, and at some point you spend more money on clever algorithms and researchers than a lidar.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#496

Post by bko »

thunky wrote: post #250
bko wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Lidar just seems like feature engineering, which has proven to be a dead end in most other AI applications (bitter lesson). https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

> Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Because we want self driving cars to be safer than human driven cars. If humans had built in lidar we would use it when driving.

Read the comment again. It's not that vision is "good enough", it's that feature engineering doesn't work

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#497

Post by wombat-man »

toss1 wrote: post #384
sroussey wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>>Why should transportation be different? Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are acceptable. But also for many, renting a car has a huge ICK factor. It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left wrappers and fo…

I think it's more comparable to Uber or Lyft. Some passengers may actually prefer to not have a driver chatting with them.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#498

Post by dbcurtis »

devolving-dev wrote: post #482

I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong? I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the…

It is easy to underestimate how much one relies on senses other than vision. You hear many kinds of noises that indicate road surface, traffic, etc. You feel road surface imperfections telegraphed through the steering wheel. You feel accelerations in your butt, and conclude loss of traction from response of the accelerator and motion of the vehicle. Secondly, the human eye has much more dynamic range than any camera. And is mounted on an exquisite PTZ platform. Then turning to the model -- you are classifying obstacles and agents at a furious rate, and making predictions about the behavior of the agents. So, in part I agree that the models need work, but the models need to be fed, and IMHO computer vision is not a sufficient sensor feed.

Consider an exhaust condensation cloud coming from a vehicle's tail pipe -- it could be opaque to a camera/computer-vision system. Can you model your way out of that? Or is it also useful to do sensor fusion of vision data with radar data (cloud is transparent) and others like lidar, etc. A multi-modal sensor feed is going to simplify the model, which in the end translates into compute load.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#499

Post by arijun »

devolving-dev wrote: post #482

I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong? I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the…

> I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem

Even if it’s an intelligence problem, it’s possible that machine intelligence will not get to the point where it can resolve anytime soon, whereas more sensors might circumvent the issue completely. It’s like with Musk’s big claim (that humans use camera only to drive); the question is not if a good enough brain will be able to drive vision-only, but if Tesla can make that brain.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#500

Post by DesaiAshu »

dymk wrote: post #378
atonse wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

In India (among others), honking is essential to reducing crashes

We often greatly underestimate / undervalue the role of our ears relative to vision. As my film director friend says, 80% of the impact in a movie is in the sound

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