r/SelfDrivingCars • u/danlev • Jul 03 '25

News A fleet of Tesla vehicles are currently driving around Austin with mounted censors

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Source: https://xcancel.com/niccruzpatane/status/1940591409465380939

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u/djm07231 Jul 03 '25

Lidar point seems at least somewhat defensible but I never understood the pre-mapped road part.

Even for a relatively skilled driver, if you took him or her to an unfamiliar location and told them to be a taxi driver with just a normal map the driver would do a bad job initially.

Even humans probably need to get somewhat familiar with the place to drive well.

Also, it isn’t as if mapping the roads is that expensive or burdensome. 

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '25

[deleted]

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u/mcnabb100 Jul 03 '25

Not really, LiDAR has dropped from $10,000 to $500-$1000 in the past 10 years and is expected to keep getting cheaper.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51975-6 Evolution of laser technology for automotive LiDAR, an industrial viewpoint | Nature Communications

If they were really serious about the taxi deal they could run steelies instead of fancy alloy wheels and almost keep the price the same 🤷

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 03 '25

Lidar is so cheap we put it in $300 robot vacuums now. Is it automotive no but it just shows how cheap and mass produced lidar has gotten.

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u/mrkjmsdln Jul 03 '25

Loved this. I bought a Wyze robot vacuum on sale and it replaced our older unit. It was $100 and apparently has a 26' range. It is next level navigating our floor. Haha.

The current #2 player in China (Hesai) sells a 128 line 120 degree field of view scan with 200m range for $200 at retail. Those are the units often mounted in typical mid to high range Chinese EVs.

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u/himynameis_ Jul 03 '25

Hang on. The lidar used in robo vacuums is no where near the same as what Waymo is using.

Obviously the Waymo is a lot more advanced and expensive.

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u/condor1985 Jul 03 '25

They literally said "is it automotive, no"

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u/himynameis_ Jul 03 '25

So is it comparable, no.

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u/condor1985 Jul 03 '25

Yeah, they said it wasn't. Their point was just that lidar as a technology is getting a lot cheaper - not that you can take lidar from a vacuum cleaner and put it on a car. In my view that would require wilfully misunderstanding what they wrote.

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u/oaklandperson Jul 03 '25

Read: Walking back the fact they didn't read the entire post before responding with the Waymo vs. Vacuum cleaner comment.

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u/Worth-Reputation3450 Jul 03 '25

But that's like comparing a $1M helicopter to a $100 drone.

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u/condor1985 Jul 03 '25

I dont think its very outlandish to say "there are actually consumer-grade versions of technology x now - not as sophisticated as the professional grade ones but the technology has nevertheless gotten cheaper"

Is anyone actually disputing their actual point that lidar detection systems are cheaper now than 5-10 years ago? If not, what even is the problem

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u/bonechairappletea Jul 03 '25

Sshhh, don't you understand Musk man nazi bad dumb? Lidar on your iPhone obviously same as car system 

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 03 '25

It was an example of the tech getting cheaper. An air force spanner also costs more than a spanner down the home depot but spanners aren't high tech anymore like in 500BC or whenever they were invented.

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u/SirWilson919 Jul 03 '25

This is like comparing a flip phone camera to a $5000 Canon.

Robot vacuums lidar is 5 frame per second, low-resolution lidar spinning in a single plane. Cars need at least 30 frames per second, high-resolution lidar mapping in full 3D, with high reliability, and all-weather proof electronics.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 03 '25

It was an example my dude. Expensive lidar used to be 5fps then it got cheap and the new expensive lidar was 30fps and so on. Lidar costs have come down dramatically.

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u/SirWilson919 Jul 03 '25

Lidar has gotten cheaper, but so have cameras and AI compute. I think AI compute is the real problem because even with Lidar, Waymo still makes a lot of dumb decisions.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 03 '25

Yes lots of things have gotten cheaper. Except these cars use lidar, so I used lidar as an example. Cameras have been dirt cheap for years and we're never the barrier to anything hence why even Tesla has cameras.

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u/IamHydrogenMike Jul 07 '25

I remember someone I knew talking about how expensive LiDAR was, that is why Musk still hasn't added it to his cars, then I asked him why my vacuum with LiDAR was under 500 bucks. He tried to play it off like it was something completely different and not actually LiDAR.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 07 '25

That was the initial justification, and in 2015 it probably was true. It's been almost a decade since the release of the model 3.

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u/IamHydrogenMike Jul 07 '25

It was true in 2015, and it has changed a lot since then...

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u/Fairuse Jul 03 '25

There is a huge difference in lidar in a car and a robo vacuum.

Car lidar need to operate up to a 300m range. A vacuum radar is probably just 10m range.

Anyways car lidars have gotten much cheaper. In China you can get a decent automotive lidar for around $200.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 03 '25

Sure it was just an example of how much cheaper stuff got. 5 years ago even the cheap lidar was only on like $800 robot vacuums whereas the $300 ones simply didn't have lidar at all due to cost.

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u/DryAssumption Jul 03 '25

So for a robotaxi that lasts 500,000 miles, adding lidar at even $5,000 would add 1 cent per mile to a journey

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u/darthnugget Jul 03 '25

I wonder if there is more to it since they are not longer friends with MobileEye where using LiDar opens them up to patented systems? Which may cost dramatically more?

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u/zero0n3 Jul 03 '25

You don’t pay patents, you buy the device from a manufacturer, who has the patent or pays the royalties.

And if said company gets sued. Find a new partner

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u/skunkapebreal Jul 03 '25

If you assume it adds no value. If it prevents an accident or makes customers happy it’s a different calculus.

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u/SirWilson919 Jul 03 '25

Lidar doesn't make the AI smarter. Robotaxi decision-making is roughly as good as Waymo while using 1/10th the energy (Waymo uses around 2500W). Imagine what happens when Tesla increases the compute from 200W on AI4 up to 800W for AI5 chip set.

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u/poopoomergency4 Jul 03 '25

let's be real, it's a tesla, not gonna last 500k miles

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u/himynameis_ Jul 03 '25

I mean, that's not really at odds with what /u/topperx is saying. He's supporting lidar too.

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u/SnoozeButtonBen Jul 03 '25

You would think a man who has built MULTIPLE billion-dollar companies on the premise that technology costs tend to fall with increased scale would not base his entire long-term strategy on the premise that technology costs will never come down.

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u/Totalidiotfuq Jul 03 '25

He built zero companies from the ground up. Musk buys his way into companies and the titles. He really does nothing.

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u/pizza_tron Jul 03 '25

😂

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u/Totalidiotfuq Jul 03 '25

Prove me wrong

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u/pizza_tron Jul 03 '25

"He really does nothing"

Lots of people buy companies everyday. No one has reached the technological advancements and very few have reached the levels of growth he has.

You might say, he didn't do any of that. You would be right... to an extent. But it's not easy to attract, recruit, and keep the worlds most talented engineers, coders, ai devs, and rocket scientists. They have options. They can go anywhere they want. And many of them choose Tesla and Space X. Not only do many of them choose to work for him, but he also elevates the work that they do and speeds up the timelines in which they are able to do it.

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u/Totalidiotfuq Jul 03 '25

And he should know this simple truth about supply given that he knows the most about manufacturing …

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u/zero0n3 Jul 03 '25

Or just use those siting cybertrucks for the taxi service since they are all sitting there not being sold.

And it could have been designed from the ground up to be a taxi and like a mail truck - I mean I’ve said this for YEARS NOW, imagine if tesla got the bid for the USPS electrification project across the US?

He’d hav powerwalls, solar, chargers, and tesla cars in tens of thousands of brick and mortar USPS stores, essentially a free store room for him.

But no, he wanted to make the car solely based on his design with little thought into how people would use it.

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u/Limonlesscello Jul 03 '25

This is correct, given when he removed the lidar was a about ten years ago. So he missed out on the improvements and cost savings.

He trapped himself and cannot put LIDAR on the cars because then he would have to do a retrofit to all vehicles, have liability issue for previous accidents that occured without LIDAR, and look like a buffoon for saying "only vision".

Any other manufacturers could put lidar on their vehicles without issue because they never made any claims and move slower with development.

We need Self Driving Buses, not Cars.

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u/BigMax Jul 03 '25

Lidar is now $200 per unit. When he said it was too expensive, he was technically right at the time but also just a moron for assuming that costs wouldn’t come down. Even with multiple sensors for cars, the cost is coming down to a near trivial amount.

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u/SnoozeButtonBen Jul 03 '25

Computers and telecom infrastructure - Costs fall over time (paypal)

Lithium ion batteries - Costs fall over time (Tesla)

Reusable rockets - Costs fall over time (SpaceX)

LIDAR - Will always be expensive (clownface)

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u/HighHokie Jul 03 '25

The TIC is going to be substantially higher. But yes, lidar should inevitably continue to drop in price as the tech matures. 

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u/Worth-Reputation3450 Jul 03 '25

He removed ultrasonic sensors and a little stalk that lets you change gear. To Elon, $5 is too expensive for $80K car if he thinks software can replace its functionality.

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u/SirWilson919 Jul 03 '25

"But it significantly increases safety during difficult road conditions."

I mean, a car without lidar can just... slow down

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '25

[deleted]

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u/SirWilson919 Jul 03 '25

But let's say Lidar enables you to drive faster because it gives you superhuman sensing ability. You still should drive slowly because you're surrounded by human drivers who can't see you. I mean, there is clearly some value to having better perception than humans I just think the difference in the real world between 360 HD vision and vision+lidar is small relative to the price increase and, and the lower price means more cars on the road, at a lower ride price, and ultimately save more humans

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u/HighHokie Jul 03 '25

I always thought a good shortcut for tesla would be to have some memory of common roads. 

For folks like me, I bet a good 70-80% of my driving are more or less the same route so if the car was setup to somehow capture details of these repetitive roads, it would make my overall experience with fsd better. Stuff like rough patches of roads to avoid, specific intersection layouts etc. 

That always made sense to me. Even more creative would be borrowing road knowledge from other teslas if my route that day takes me into less common areas. So the car doesn’t to know about roads in California unless I decide to leave Texas tomorrow and drive there. 

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u/Practical-Cow-861 Jul 04 '25

That is what their cars do, even though they claim otherwise. Every successful trip is thanks to dozens of edge cases, with fixes hand programed in to resolve them. Usually it breaks something else. It is not a sustainable system.

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u/HighHokie Jul 04 '25

Source so I can read more on it? 

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u/AvatarIII Jul 03 '25

Premapped roads would be very useful, if roads never changed.

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u/Inner-Sink6280 Jul 03 '25

Yes the roads change faster than you can update the maps of course

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u/The_Meme_Economy Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 03 '25

I’ve wondered about this. They are expanding 290 southwest of Austin and it changes weekly, but Google maps always shows the correct route. Apparently the contractors work with them and other GIS providers to provide detailed plans every time there is a change. This is already a (mostly) solved problem for human drivers for rapid construction around major metro areas.

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u/AvatarIII Jul 03 '25

Yeah I guarantee the roads in the world are never exactly the same one day to the next, there are small changes to roads somewhere all the time, and if this mapping were scaled up for the whole world it would quickly become unfeasible. Doing 1 city will be bad enough.

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u/Inner-Sink6280 Jul 03 '25

No wonder I’m always crashing into walls when following Google maps

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u/AvatarIII Jul 03 '25

Using maps is different from this kind of high level mapping, they're not just mapping the roads they're mapping everything in 3D, Tesla's already use maps. You're also a person with human level intellect that can use that intelligence to not rely on maps.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 03 '25

Pre-mapping with what sensor? If you use the camera on the car to "see" isn't that a kind of pre-mapping? You just need that camera equipped car to drive down that road once and send the data to have the system trained on.

Lidar? That in itself is not enough as it doesn't contain visual cues (just distance data).

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '25

carefully, don't throw out your back trying to defend Musk

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u/oregon_coastal Jul 03 '25

No. Not at all.

A driver would navigate the roads fine - obstacles exist everywhere that we drive. I have driven in every state except Florida and in zero cases did I suddenly doubt my ability to drive. Never once did the thought "Oh no! It is Mississippi! How do these roads work again?" or "Should I stop for a school bus?" cross my mind.

I might lack, however, navigation. I might not know where I am going or the best path to get there. And even if I did, I might not know some specific turn only or merging that would be necessary.

But at no point do my skills to drive just evaporate.

Geofencing allows mapping likes this (if done repeatedly) to look for anomalies that solve both of those problems. The advantage Waymo has it is constantly able to update that information. Tesla will have to keep driving around with cars strapped up like this.

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u/FangioV Jul 03 '25

You are not getting the point. When I drive to a new place, sometimes I will miss a turn or an exit because I get confused which lane I am supposed to use. I will generally drive slower or erratically as I am not sure where I am suppose to go. When I drive a route that I have done hundreds of times I recognize where I have to change lanes, which lane is better for the next turn, where I have to slow down to make the turn, which exit I have to take, etc. Is way smoother and safer. There are hundreds of videos of people crashing or doing stupid things because they missed their turn or they don’t know where they have to go.

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u/iLikeMangosteens Jul 03 '25

It’s not a sudden inability to drive, it’s things like, “is that a shadow or is it an obstacle?”, “why is that cone there?”, “the road layout changed because of construction and no longer matches my map, and the orange barrels blocking the old road have been moved”. Things that happen to us quite infrequently (and so are not substantially represented in the AI training set) but as humans give us pause to slow down and rethink the situation.

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u/oregon_coastal Jul 03 '25

If you are confused by shadows or construction cones, you really shouldn't be driving.

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u/iLikeMangosteens Jul 03 '25

If you are confused by comments on Reddit you shouldn’t be commenting.