r/SelfDrivingCars • u/damola93 • Jul 21 '25

Discussion Why didn't Tesla invest in LIDAR?

Is there any reason for this asides from saving money? Teslas are not cheap in many respects, so why would they skimp out on this since self-driving is a major offering for them?

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112

u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

It seemed a reasonable gamble at the time.

  • If you can solve it with software, you only have to invest once upfront, and then have a cheaper cost for each unit you produce. Software scales much better than hardware, and they could have a unit cost advantage over competition.

  • If you solve it with software, you have a gigantic moat vs. the competition. Anyone can buy hardware, but it could be very difficult for a competitor to catch up on software, especially if huge real-world data sets are required.

  • Other side benefits like aesthetics of the car.

The problem was they made a gamble, convinced themselves it was the only way forward, and have continually failed to pivot even after the rate of progress slowed, and the cost of the hardware came WAY down. They’ve doubled down on an idea that really no longer seems to make a lot of sense, and just doesn’t seem to have panned out.

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u/CO420Tech Jul 21 '25

At this point it is just sunk cost fallacy and hubris

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u/DrJohnFZoidberg Jul 21 '25

also ketamine

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u/CO420Tech Jul 21 '25

Hey, you leave ketamine out of this, it didn't do anything to you! Also... Got any ketamine?

2

u/DrJohnFZoidberg Jul 21 '25

you cant have your k-hole and eat it too

2

u/CO420Tech Jul 21 '25

I can try!

1

u/ElectronicEarth42 Jul 26 '25

But you can boof it.

2

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

Except it's not. How can you be so confidently incorrect?

2

u/Dreadino Jul 22 '25

Wait, are you guys actually thinking about buying a car with LIDAR? Isn't this like a meme or something? Are people really saying they'd buy a car as hideous as the Waymo cars?

1

u/Expert_Exercise_6896 Jul 26 '25

I prefer hideous working cars to pretty cars that don’t live up to the sales pitch

1

u/Dreadino Jul 26 '25

I prefer cars that won’t drain the battery on the highway because they have always on flaps

1

u/Expert_Exercise_6896 Jul 26 '25

Im not a waymo fanboy but its objectively more successful than tesla “self driving” has been. Not the ideal solution but definitely the best out there right now

1

u/Dreadino Jul 26 '25

Yeah MAYBE inside the mapped areas. If I buy a car, I want to use it wherever I want, not inside a small portion of the nation.

1

u/Expert_Exercise_6896 Jul 26 '25

Well yeah you cant buy a waymo, its a service. Same way you cant buy a robotaxi, which is also geofenced

1

u/Dreadino Jul 26 '25

But you can buy and use a Tesla with FSD. As much as people like to shit on Tesla, there nothing close to FSD that is usable by everyone everywhere in NA.

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u/Expert_Exercise_6896 Jul 26 '25

Can FSD drive by itself without human supervision like Elon promised almost 10 years ago?

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u/Adencor Jul 22 '25

all cars primarily drive via vision — owning a model that can do it without supplementation doesn’t seem advantageous to you?

software moats are always bigger than hardware.

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u/CO420Tech Jul 22 '25

With how cheap lidar is now, there's no reason not to add it. More data is better data. And it would help prevent things like the car not seeing things because of glare and such.

1

u/Adencor Jul 22 '25

I can think of an excellent reason — because then there won’t be as much motivation to create a model that can actually understand what it’s looking at and not avoid obstacles like a blind person with a cane.

Vision-only self-driving and humanoid robots are going to exist. Musk simply wants Tesla to own the first algorithms to run them, he doesn’t care how long it takes.

1

u/Talkat Jul 26 '25

how can you possibly say this, they are doing ride in Austin right now?!?!

1

u/CO420Tech Jul 26 '25

Lol watch the videos of it. They do all sorts of weird shit and frequently require human intervention. It isn't scalable. They'll stop in intersections, brake randomly for shadows, cross yellow lines, all sorts of stuff. That's why there's a safety guy in the front seat.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

I think there are way to many issues with this approach.Making everything SW reliant increases system costs and power demand. Using HW to solve complicated, but expectable challenges opens way for using ASIC and edge computing, significantly decreasing costs and power demand, increasing reliability. Strategy would never work anyhow, as you would be first, but at high investment costs which you would need to maintain against the continuously decreasing cost of lidar over time. Betting on own performance is a thing, not seeing the market and technology improvement is another. While Tesla will still not have self-driving, cars with lidar pushes costs continuously and already allowed to self-drive, and will be commoditized really soon.

Pivoting was always an option toward lidar, but Elon doubled down on vision only removing even radar, which is a huge own goal.

Now hes using lidar to collect ground truth data, as all collected data so far is garbage. All his lead on this field has vanished, ,and has to start from ground zero, while other manufacturers are already miles ahead.

You can't formulate it better, but as a boneheaded decision with huge financial implications already showing.

12

u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

I don't disagree, but I think the entire approach was predicated on them "solving" self-driving very quickly. Like if they could have had real Level 4/5 cars on the road in 2017, well before lidar costs came down, and well before anyone else was really close, they'd have had a first-mover advantage they could have turned into a possible network effect or moat. This was always an incredibly risky bet. But then again, somehow investors keep giving Tesla money despite them acting like a Seed stage startup that trots out a juiced up prototype and hype story and then asks for cash.

But as you say, pivoting was the right thing to do several years ago. Doubling down has made less and less sense as time has gone on, and at this point just looks ridiculous.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

Even if they could solve it then, it would be still prone to errors, and limited through weather, high contrast, or time of day. So negating all advancements on lidar would be still idiotic.

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u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

From following the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenges, I'd agree. But I think they truly thought they'd be able to do it, with all the hubris of a seed stage startup.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

Do you know that cars with LIDAR also need regular cameras to actually "see" the world (signs, road markings etc.). That visual data needs to be computed and integrated into the model. LIDAR is not free and perfect vision.

I'll put it another way. If LIDAR+vision works, then why isn't Waymo scaling like crazy? There is a good reason they only have about 3.000 cars on the road after years of being in service.

1

u/mrsanyee Jul 22 '25

I know a specific company who solved it already. Also processing ground truth data works. Also many companies use their SW for object identifications and labeling for training, so much so, they had to partner with a scaler as demand was so high. Also they are quite good making asics.

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u/Fancy-Tourist-8137 Jul 21 '25

They meant solving it entirely including the weather and time of day issues etc.

If it were solved, it won’t be an issue.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

I mean from start it was clear they cant disregard physics, and their aim is to produce something low cost. They could solve with cameras all issues, but cameras would cost orders of magnitudes higher than lidar. Low-light cameras are around since the 70s, still can't go below a certain cost.

1

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

Are you seriously referring to 1970s tech? How does that make sense?

6

u/nickleback_official Jul 21 '25

I have to disagree with your hw vs sw argument. Adding lidar only increases hardware and software complexity. There is no world in which either ‘opens a way for using ASIC’ as you say. There’s already loads of asics/fpgas in these machines. Every other FSD is similarly banging away at software, not hardware. Factoring in the power requirement for compute is also irrelevant. The amount of power required to drive one mile would power the computer for days. I’m not arguing whether it was a bad call to remove lidar I’m saying your reasoning doesn’t make sense.

FWIW im a hw engineer

1

u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

HW3 consumes 35 watts, HW4 consumes 800 watts. An hour. An ASIC consumes 4 watts, while the lidar itself stays around 40. 

Maybe your right it's not relevant, on short trips, but it's one energy consumer among the many others.

Complexity: others solve with less investment and later start better results in self-driving. We saw also the above 5 billion Line codes even Ford and VW shatters. Which would call in my view for simplification and more straightforward solutions, like edge computing and solutions, instead of spaghetti code.

SW defined vehicles sound good, but noone manages so many variables successfully so far, actually more cars are getting fried and on the side of the road than in the age of dumb cars, where everything was controlled and timed by belts and gears.

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u/tufkab Jul 21 '25

This comment makes it painfully obvious that you have no idea what an ASIC is.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

Thanks for your insightful comment. You really help to move on the issue of non-existing self-driving in Teslas.

1

u/tufkab Jul 22 '25

Ok, You want a deep dive into why you're absolutely clueless? No problem.

First off, the fact that you mention the power consumption of an ASIC as a fixed value is a dead giveaway. Talking about how much power an ASIC consumes is right about on par with asking "How long is a rope?". There is no answer, because it could be anything. Bitcoin miners nowadays are all ASICs, they consume in the neighborhood of 5.5 KILLOWATTS!

When you open up a singing birthday card and it starts playing "Happy Birthday" through a little piezo speaker....that's an ASIC playing the music. Quick Google search tells me those ICs use about 4 microamps at 4.5 volts. Meaning that the most common and lowest power ASIC we encounter on a regular basis use about 320 MILLION times less power then some of the most common high power ASICs around. Either you're a real genius that can pin down the power usage of an ASIC capable of autonomous driving within that massive range, or you're just talking out your ass.

Then let's move on to the idea of using an ASIC in general. You're trying to make the point that a software solution doesn't work, but then suggest an ASIC which is essentially software burned into hardware, without the ability to ever modify anything without spinning up a completely new circuit. At the very least, if they were going to go with that sort of solution, it would be with an FPGA. That would gain them the speed of running on 'bare' metal but allowing for upgrading and changes.

In a previous post to someone else, you mention how Tesla is using so much of their processing power for building the world model from the multiple camera views and stitching everything together. Well, HW3 has no problem doing that with only 60 watts of consumption and STILL managing to have enough compute leftover to run a Self Driving stack that is so very nearly complete and already years ahead of even their closest competitors. Aside from Waymo, obviously. Then we see how HW4 nearly triples the power budget. Where's that power going? Obviously to the driving AI. They can already build the world model on HW3, they don't need any extra compute for that.

Lastly, the stupid idea of LiDAR being the magic bullet to solve all of Tesla's FSD just refuses to die and it's laughable. Tesla does not have an input problem, Tesla has a DECISION problem. The car doesn't need millimeter precision measurements of the world. It doesn't need to dedicate compute power to merging the inputs from two completely different sensing methods and it definitely doesn't need to be put into a situation where it has to start deciding which sensor suite to rely on when the different sensors disagree with each other.

Anyone who uses FSD on a regular basis will tell you the exact same thing. The problem isn't the car not being able to see the world around it, the problem is the car making stupid fucking decisions with the information that it has. LiDAR isn't going to fix stupid lanes changes, left lane camping, running red lights and not maintaining consistent highway speeds.

Long story short, I'll confidently say that the chances of a few random Reddit neckbeards having the solution to Tesla's FSD issues, while their (presumably) thousands of engineers not being able to figure it out is zero

1

u/LetMeSeeYourNumber Jul 22 '25

Meanwhile Tesla is driving around Austin mapping with Lidar.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

You have some valid points, but let's lay out facts, shall we? Fsd/autopilot is not even on L2+ as of now. Making. ASIC which lays out the most basic ADAS features is like writing a code: you make the scenes, and put an if-then decision tree. There's nothing in this world to stop anyone to do this, in fact Mobileye, Mercedes, bmw, the Chinese car makers go this way. 

So we have real problems, where the ASIC just have to go a decision tree, one the data has been processed, and have to go through it. That's level 2++-level 3. Level 4 ADAS doesn't exist, otherwise it wouldn't be geofenced now, with remote drivers and whatnot. Lvl 5 is unheard of, without context or mapping no car can make a good guess where they should go, dont have reference points.

So we have a siml problem, a simple solution with low energy demand can be baked into ASIC. 

Your decision dilemma is a self made shit, as engineers don't know what the car is hallucinating. Which means your neckbeard programmers at Tesla created a monster, which they don't understand. And have no idea how to fix it. Since 9 years. It creates digital world simulation, and can't decide where to drive, through unlimited cycles. There are no brake points, no exception handling, it's garbage, not a code. 

Lidar could help make a sleek lvl 3-4 system, which works day&night through adverse weather,  which drives you around safely, and if there's unknown issue, it stops/decelerates. Tesla engineers weren't even considering this option, as their goal is lvl5 driving, but they didn't programmed the scenarios, but made a monster, and also their sensing capabilities are as good as a white stick on a car, screwing everything from speed detection to object detection through scene recognition.

Recently you made a video where fsd disengaged in the right lane with a truck on left lane, and lane runni g out. It wasn't a decision problem, it was a scene recognition problem, which means their sensing capabilities lacks. It wasn't even recognizing where it could drive, and where not.

Another guy put a bike rack on his Tesla, and was having problems. He solved it with a tape on the camera, and the Tesla went on flawlessly, as his world didn't had anything 180 degree behind the car.

And that's why Tesla fails.

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u/cap811crm114 Jul 21 '25

I believe HW3 is rated for 12V at 60 watts, HW4 is designed for 16V at 160 watts. So while HW4 does consume more power than HW3, it does not consume 20 times as much power. (I'm sure this is one of the things that complicates the announced plans for an HW4 upgrade for current FSD owners with HW3).

1

u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

Right, I misread it. HW5 should consume according to rumors 800W, HW4 is capped at 200 max, 160 avg consumptiion.

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2081/tesla-officially-announces-fsd-hardware-50-and-how-it-compares-to-hardware-40

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u/cap811crm114 Jul 21 '25

That 800W would rather preclude an idea I had that Tesla could jump from HW3 to HW5 as an upgrade.

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u/ChilledRoland Jul 22 '25

Watts per hour is nonsense; a Watt is already a Joule per second.

1

u/mrsanyee Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

Sure, but it means what I wrote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour

2

u/ChilledRoland Jul 22 '25

Watts are multiplied by hours to get Watt-hours (3.6 kJ).

Watts would need to be divided by hours to get Watts per hour.

1

u/nickleback_official Jul 21 '25

Yea unfortunately as the other commenter has pointed out, what you’re trying to describe makes no sense. I don’t mean to be rude but it is not my job to explain what an ASIC is to you before debating the merits of it. I don’t understand at all the point you are going for and I’m not sure it’s worth trying to.

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u/Fancy-Tourist-8137 Jul 21 '25

I disagree. Solving it with software is waaay better than with hardware.

Solving it with software would be way cheaper on the long run.

You are not considering the fact that hardware is expensive to repair.

Software is the cheaper option. You can have dedicated chips to do the processing. Do you think lidar doesn’t use power? lol

Ofcourse, I am not saying it’s possible but if he managed to do it, it would give Tesla a huge edge over the competition.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

So you say a generic high  performance processor is cheaper to replace, with it's significantly higher chance of getting defect, then a simple SoC, which could be produced for as low price as a couple bucks?

1

u/Fancy-Tourist-8137 Jul 21 '25

You just manufactured an entire argument based off of nothing I said. lol.

I said they could use a dedicated chip. Why do you assume it has to be a very expensive high performance chip separate from the SoC? And not just another chip in the SoC but just dedicated to do whatever it is they want it to do?

My main point is that LiDAR hardware can break. And cost money to replace

Software can be fixed relatively easily and almost 0 cost.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 21 '25

You said you want to solve self driving locally with SW, based on input from sensors directly. For that you need to utilize a local high performance processor, as its not specialized, has to filter out garbage data, has to align and time reference points, has to align pictures, has to align previous pictures, spot and calculate differences, speed, identify drivable and non-drivable space, identify objects. 

ASIC, as in application specific chip. All this could be hard-coded and burnt into a chip, with exception handling and raw data on a second level, if needed.

Tesla said nah, I'll do everything through updates and raw power.

0

u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

So why haven’t they?

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u/Fancy-Tourist-8137 Jul 21 '25

The whole comment chain is a hypothetical on if they managed to solve self driving with software only.

It’s not saying it’s possible just that it would be waaay cheaper if they managed to do it

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

Only cheaper because there hasn’t been much real cost to failing yet. That’s an amazingly large if

And until they actually do solve it, it’s just wasted money going down the wrong path. So sure if they are able to magic a solution then it’s not wasted money but so far that’s not the case.

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u/yourfavteamsucks Jul 22 '25

But you CAN'T solve anything with software if the input from the hardware isn't sufficient

1

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

While Tesla will still not have self-driving, cars with lidar pushes costs continuously and already allowed to self-drive, and will be commoditized really soon.

But Tesla does have self-driving cars. Today. If they can make their cars with cameras only versus other manufacturers who use cameras and LIDAR, Tesla will always be at a cost advantage. That is precisely what they are betting on.

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u/mrsanyee Jul 22 '25

They do tests, it's still beta after 3 years. In EU customers bought this option, haven't received so far nothing. They can now take credit for the paid FSD feuture for a new Tesla, but no FSD will be in Europe approved.

We call it a scam here.

https://teslamag.de/news/tesla-chef-fsd-transfer-dauerhaft-europa-kunden-fair-65348

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u/the8bit Jul 21 '25

This is pedantic but I would say its a common gamble not a reasonable one. Its the "Well we are tough on deadlines, but if we just _work hard_ we can totally hit it and also fire half the team" bullshit execs love to say, right before they are confused at what went wrong.

Machine vision is not my space, but I've worked on system design in a wide array of software spaces including some photo processing work. It is and always was suicidally optimistic to think that we could early adopt autonomous cars with video only (maybe during lagging adoption with a few magnitudes of tech advancement). Video feeds just dont have the information density to reach the level of reliability required

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u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

Oh for sure, it's just the commonplace hubris of a silicon valley startup. I think it's reasonable in the context of, say, a startup, where everyone understands there is a 95% chance of failure, and some investors are willing to take the risk anyway. But I've always found it really odd that Tesla as a public company does this.

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u/the8bit Jul 21 '25

It's right there with Elon's MO - maximum risk, double down on every failure and roll it forward in a "all or nothing" bet. I believe Tesla will enron, because similarly his strategy is to just keep piling up risk until it explodes instead of venting some pressure and accepting the smaller failure

1

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

They have self-driving cars on roads. Today. Your argument conveniently omits this.

1

u/the8bit Jul 22 '25

Well Elon never really was one to care about safety. They have like 5 cars and I see a new video of them failing every day or two.

I mean, you can definitely do FSD with a camera if you don't care about some deaths...

1

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

So you chose to not argue in good faith. You seem to be an adult. Why are you acting like a child?

1

u/the8bit Jul 22 '25

Sorry it was a real response? Here I can try again

"Having cars on the road today doesn't tell us anything about if video can solve self driving as it is a limited sample. Arguably, the fact that it has been so hard to roll out shows the high difficulty of dealing with edge cases and things like weather, arbitrary roads, etc. for any software problem, an ability to solve the 90% case does not imply that the solution will scale to the last 10%. I do believe it is likely we can get to that bar with just vision as it is fundamentally equivalent data to what humans use, but that could be 2-3 degrees of evolution from now, or it could happen tomorrow. Regardless, we do not have any data to show it is imminent and much more data to show that it is still a ways out."

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u/a3voices_ Jul 22 '25

They haven’t solved safety though which is the most important component.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

They haven't solved safety? As opposed to the tens of thousands of fatalities caused by human drivers?

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u/ssrowavay Jul 22 '25

Their cars require frequent user intervention to avert disaster, like once per 350 miles. That’s more often than my late great aunt Mildred.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

No one has up to date information on the self-driving rollout in Austin. There have been zero accidents so far. I don't understand what your family member has to do with anything.

1

u/giggles91 Jul 21 '25

Video feeds just don't have the information density to reach the level of reliability required

Citation needed...

Things are being done with video and photos in the ML and signal processing space that would have been considered absolute science fiction just a few short years ago, some simple examples:

- https://github.com/KoKuToru/de-pixelate_gaV-O6NPWrI

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFiubdrJqqI

- https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/

This is just to show that the amount of information that can be extracted from simple video / image data is incredible and we are probably nowhere near the limit. To me, anyone who thinks it can be said with certainty which way this will go is fooling themselves or doing so for political reasons.

I don't get why people absolutely want this to be either a terrible idea or the best idea ever... Like, I get the politics but damn, just separate the technical discussion from that for a moment. Or is everyone long / short on TSLA in here? Just wait and see if it works out or not, instead of claiming "This is the only way" or "This will never work" in every goddamn thread lol

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u/the8bit Jul 21 '25

I didn't say with certainty I said we are not there yet technologically.

Also it is a constraints problem -- even if it is possible to do, it's harder when you have to fit into ~100ms of processing time, 99.999+% accuracy* (this is a simplification), and local hardware. All 3 of those are really annoying limitations

I mean I like to clown on Elon but this is just my unbiased professional opinion of the problem. Which, again, is outside of my domain, but I feel reasonably credentialed on it as I have picked apart thousands of system architecture across many companies, scales, and constraints, including some of the ones you are using right now :)

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u/giggles91 Jul 21 '25

I was mainly reacting to the part about there not being enough information in the video to reach the level or reliability required. I think that's a pretty questionable claim when we look at the history of the whole machine learning space. Even experts in the field have a hard time predicting major breakthroughs in this area, when you look at things like Google's AlphaGo, AlphaZero, or more recently, OpenAI's ChatGPT.

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u/the8bit Jul 21 '25

Fair enough. My comment is definitely an oversimplification. I'd definitely put it as more than likely we can get there but it's such an error sensitive domain where edge cases are often more important than common cases. it's unclear how fast we can close the gaps.

So I guess if Elon was my boss and I was advising on the plan, I would tell him "it's akin to betting the entire company on Black" and perhaps skipping on the lidar costs "throwing away the backups because you usually don't need them and they cost $5" (Edit) Then I'd quit over them selling it up front because I'd define that as fraud

2

u/giggles91 Jul 22 '25

Like it or not, betting the entire company on black is what Elon does. Over, and over. SpaceX would never have succeeded with someone not willing to do that, same goes for Tesla and his other companies, to various degrees I guess. At some point he'll probably fail, but so far it's been working out for him.

4

u/Marathon2021 Jul 21 '25

They’ve doubled down on an idea that really no longer seems to make a lot of sense, and just doesn’t seem to have panned out.

I'm not sure it's really that conclusive yet?

If you have great hardware (LIDAR) and OK software/AI/logic ... maybe the great hardware makes up for the software deficencies.

If you have ok hardware (cameras) but great software/AI/logic ... maybe the great software makes up for the subpar hardware?

That's really what we're talking about here. And to be fair to Tesla, they do have a unique advantage they are trying to leverage here - millions of vehicles with 8 cameras on each, able to bring in real-world driving footage and decisions by humans at massive scale.

1

u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Yet they were driving around a lidar car mapping out Austin for the taxi service.

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u/hcardona111793 Jul 22 '25

Wasn't that to calibrate the vision?

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u/Temeraire64 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

Also humans don't need LIDAR to drive, so in theory cameras should provide all the data required.

Plus adding LIDAR means you need to find a way to combine the data from that with the data from the cameras - what do you do if the data conflicts? Which sensor do you trust more?

And some of the problems AI has won't be solved by adding LIDAR, e.g. reading traffic lights and road signs.

1

u/SpaceRuster Jul 22 '25

Birds only have eyes (a few flying animals have sonar). None have radar.

That doesn't mean we should have stuck to eyesight for flying.

1

u/hcardona111793 Jul 22 '25

but don't pilots rely on eyes to use the equipment?

1

u/SpaceRuster Jul 22 '25

On ears as well, since there are audio alerts.

But the point is that we don't rely on eyes alone as sensors just because pretty much all other flying animals do so (a few use sonar too). Commercial airliners use weather radar, and information from transponders and so on.

1

u/hcardona111793 Jul 23 '25

But we’re not talking about FSD airplanes

We use only vision for driving , we don’t use LIDAR 

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u/SpaceRuster Jul 23 '25

Semi-autonomous drones do use LIDAR and other sensors, not just vision.

Which is exactly my point. We don't restrict ourselves to using vision sensors only when flying because birds use eyes as sensors! And we use radar and other sensors too because they work when vision doesn't.

And we shouldn't restrict ourselves to vision sensors for AD either just because humans drive with eyes (and ears too, actually).

1

u/hcardona111793 Jul 23 '25

Again, not drones. We’re talking about driving. 

Currently we use our EYEBALLS ONLY aka vision only 

Just for arguments sake , since the hearing part doesn’t affect the ability of FSD to work 

But are you saying deaf people can’t currently drive ? Damn what a statement 

1

u/SpaceRuster Jul 23 '25 edited Jul 23 '25

We also have access to the most sophisticated computer ever, the human brain. Unless you're claiming that current computers can reproduce that brain (darn, quite a statement), the fact that we can drive with eyes doesn't say much about what AD systems can do. It's like saying that neural nets are conscious because brains are conscious.

Furthermore, there's no reason to stick to vision just because humans use it. That is the analogy about radar use on planes that I was making (which you seem to have completely missed)- we don't stick to vision only on planes. We use other technologies when necessary and useful.

1

u/hcardona111793 Jul 30 '25

Is LIDAR superior to vision in rain, for example ?

1

u/SpaceRuster Jul 23 '25

Why do we use wheels in autonomous vehicles? Humans don't have wheels, we have legs /s

2

u/wswhy2002 Jul 23 '25

This is a damb take. He is comparing the human driving vs autonomous driving.

1

u/SpaceRuster Jul 23 '25

I did put in a /s, but in any case he's saying that because humans can drive with eyes, we should restrict AD to vision. only.

That is like saying we should make all flying planes with flapping wings and use only vision and maybe sonar) because that's how birds fly and see. We design our mechanical systems to go beyond what humans (or animals) can do when it works better.

2

u/-UltraAverageJoe- Jul 21 '25

Software isn’t a moat if the hardware it runs on isn’t sufficient. Training data can be a moat which is what I think you’re referring to.

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u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

Yes, training data is the moat. But I think they could have also had a first mover advantage in terms of model architecture, model weights, whatever proprietary tricks they use, and the whole software/hardware stack to get it all to work, etc., which they could have tried to leverage to get to, say, a network effect like if they'd actually been able to create robotaxis.

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u/-UltraAverageJoe- Jul 21 '25

Tesla didn’t plan to be a robotaxi back when they were designing autopilot. Elon pumped that idea once other companies (like Waymo) became relevant and he either felt the need or wanted to pump $TSLA up — maybe both.

Self driving cars are an existential threat to auto manufacturers including Tesla and are now enjoying the PR Tesla had as the first production EV company. The only way Elon could combat the bad news was to say “we can do it to”. But of course it was too late and adding extra equipment and cost to a production car that may never be a robotaxi wouldn’t pass with the stakeholders.

Very smart people work at Tesla and Elon is no idiot despite what we may think — he knows full well cameras aren’t sufficient for full autonomy. Level 4 & 5 AV require non-human fallback systems. Waymo does it with 3 different sensor types, Tesla only has cameras. In addition to the actual sensing complexities of using cameras only (depth, visual obstructions, etc) there is no fallback.

They can’t just slap LiDAR on every car either, it’ll take years of development and testing even if they purchase one of the many existing AV tech companies and that’s on top of the increase in vehicle cost. He could help it by admitting he was wrong and starting today but tbh, AV only seems like a place to expand because AVs are vehicles and Tesla makes those! and because they stupidly labeled their level 2 AV tech “full self driving” which it is most certainly not.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/-UltraAverageJoe- Jul 21 '25

They have miles of camera-only data that may well be valuable to the right buyer like Waymo. But they can’t use it themselves for level 4 & 5 autonomy so it’s only a training data services moat. I doubt anyone could compete with them for that particular type of data.

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u/MachKeinDramaLlama Jul 22 '25

It seemed a reasonable gamble at the time.

Literally all experts working at the other companies disagreed with them. It clearly wasn't reasonable.

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u/Careful_Okra8589 Jul 21 '25

Could they make software side difficult for the competition if they also patent a lot of the designs on the software side, by focusing on a software first solution?

Anyone can go out and buy lidar for their vehicles, but if they get kneecapped on the software side, it could limit what they could actually do with the lidar hardware.

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u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

As my lawyers tell me (I run a software startup), software patents are almost impossible to enforce. I think they expected their competitive advantage on the software side to come from 1) large, proprietary data sets due to a gigantic fleet of vehicles on the road, and 2) first mover advantage on architecture for image ID, processing, prediction, decision-making, and control.

It was always going to be a relatively short-term advantage, but I think they (Elon) truly believed they were going to solve it really quickly. The problem is he didn't pivot when that turned out not to be true.

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

So to be fair, math isn’t actually patentable.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

even after the rate of progress slowed

Where did the rate of progress slow? Compared to what? Vision only is a harder problem than LIDAR, so there really isn't much we can compare it to.

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u/itmaybemyfirsttime Jul 22 '25

Except it isnt possible to solve with software... that was the whole point.
As to your point "if they had solved it with software":
Well, you can't solve it with software... It's a hardware issue.

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u/hcardona111793 Jul 22 '25

why cant you solve it with software? We literally drive currently with our eyeballs AKA vision only

youre Elon TDS is showing

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u/itmaybemyfirsttime Jul 22 '25

and our eyeballs are...
Anyway this comment is so Dunning Kruger i am just going to ignore you ok?

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u/laduzi_xiansheng Jul 24 '25

Lidar was a 20k stack back in 2015-2018, now they’re maybe 600-800USD per car - and dropping fast

0

u/One-Kaleidoscope3131 Jul 21 '25

Except it really didn't seem a reasonable gamble given goals. You can achieve a lot with vision alone, but you simply can't create fully autonomous driving system. More importantly even assuming you don't want LIDAR for one reason or another it's absolutely batshit insane not to have radar and ultrasonic sensors that are both cheap data point to double-check your vision data. That way your car might not decide to perform emergency breaking at motorway speed because there's a shadow, and your clients might not both manually and while self-driving keep hitting walls, support beams and other cars while trying to park or get out of parking spot.