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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

#81

Post by pjc50 »

neilv wrote: post #42
DustinEchoes wrote: post #22

Still not convinced of the safety of lidar. I guess all these cars with cheap lidar sensors on board will generate real world safety data over the next few years.

What if the real world safety data over time is... secret retinal damage to millions of walkers and runners, with symptoms attributed to Covid mysteries (and not obviously due to vision), and it takes years more before someone happens to get enough data, and does the right study analysis, and then there's industry with strong incentive not to be on the hook for blinding millions of people? If the tech industry has ta…

Lidar is incredibly low power and fast scanning, the retinal risk is probably much less than having to drive when the sun is near the horizon.

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

#82

Post by JBlue42 »

protastus wrote: post #50
Tempest1981 wrote: post #24

The roof mount seems very practical, but it's a look that may turn off some buyers... buyers who care about looks. For SUVs, maybe it could be blended in with a roof air scoop, like on some off-road trucks. Or a light bar. Where is the LiDAR on the Atto 1? In the grille? How much worse is the field of view?

My impression is that Chinese consumer products haven't been hijacked by the "design above everything else" mindset. The priority is to make things work at scale. American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.

For real? Every car has looked the same for past 10-15 years. Crossover SUV no matter the brand or big ass truck with flat front. Not to mention the monstrosity that is the Cybertruck that should never have been allowed on the road.

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

#83

Post by WheatMillington »

cyberax wrote: post #16

Keep in mind, that $25k AUD is just $16600. And for that price, you're getting a real car with driver-assist features and a reasonable crash safety rating. The US car manufacturers are cooked.

US manufacturers are fine because the US has a long history of economic protectionism. These cars are effectively banned in the US due to tariffs which protect US automakers.

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

#84

Post by cyanydeez »

kelipso wrote: post #76
general1465 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.

Why is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?

Usually its capitalism, because in America, they can just buy carveouts after the fact.

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

#85

Post by Tycho »

knallfrosch wrote: post #31
Tycho wrote: post #25

How do you train a model to drive with LiDAR when the human drivers who generate the training data don’t use LiDAR?

Scan with LiDAR while manually driving.

But the driver isn’t reacting to any of the LiDAR readings, only what they can see, so what is the point?

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

#86

Post by tim333 »

kelipso wrote: post #76
general1465 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.

Why is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?

They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people.

If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.

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

#87

Post by mft_ »

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…

Given a good proportion of his success has rested on somehow simplifying or commodifying existing expensive technology (e.g. rockets, and lots of the technology needed to make them; EV batteries) it's surprising that Musk's response to lidar being (at the time) very expensive was to avoid it despite the additional challenges that this brought, rather than attempt to carve a moat by innovating and creating cheaper and better lidar.

> So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.

They could be going for a Tesla-esque approach, in that by equipping every car in the fleet with lidar, they maximise the data captured to help train their models.

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

#88

Post by teleforce »

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 selling EV cars with 60K unit sold per month on average.

Most of the countries scrambling to block its sales to protect their own car industry or increase the tariff considerably.

It's a game changing car and it really deserve the place in EV car world Hall of Fame, as one of the legendary cars similar Austin 7, the father of modern ICE car including BMW Dixi and Datsun Type 11.

[1] BYD_Seagull:

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

[2] Austin 7:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_7

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

#89

Post by tim333 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #44
senti_sentient wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone said that LiDAR is too expensive, camera is better :)

The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors. For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be ass…

I hadn't heard that criticism. You can get multiple Waymos near each other without them crashing into things.

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

#90

Post by wongarsu »

consumer451 wrote: post #54
jandrewrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors. For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be ass…

I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0] What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3hts…

But optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver.

Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift

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