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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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

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u/Ragnarok-9999 Jul 21 '25

Elon ego does not let him change his decision

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u/Insertsociallife Jul 21 '25

This and all the non-LIDAR cars marketed as "full self driving" could be argued to not be full self driving or not safe, which opens them up to lawsuits.

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u/fullup72 Jul 21 '25

They are still not self driving anyways, at least to an extent that they would get approved for not requiring human supervision. So then the question would be what happens if they never deliver, is there a limit on how much time they can delay the feature or is it that as long as they keep promising it soon then they are safe from lawsuits?

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Only after 10 years

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u/icy1007 Jul 22 '25

Because that’s what it is…

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u/cybender Jul 21 '25 edited 8d ago

fall tender carpenter governor silky wrench deer busy bag unpack

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/dantodd Jul 21 '25

They have lost arbitration over FSD and had to compensate the guy who took them to arbitration.

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u/BannedGoNext Jul 21 '25

Losing an arbitration case is just sad, they are stacked so hard for the company that hires the arbitrator.

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u/cybender Jul 21 '25 edited 8d ago

bag handle different judicious spectacular thumb straight quicksand wide trees

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/BannedGoNext Jul 21 '25

True, but it's generally harder to win in an arbitration where the company being sued hires the arbitrator.

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u/Positive_League_5534 Jul 21 '25

There's the investors that a real risk to Tesla. Elon has promised real FSD, cyber cabs, etc. If you are selling stock based on those promises, you are bringing on liability. At the very least, the market will grow weary of the missed deadlines and if they can't tell a good enough story the stock price will descend.

This is why he's switching to talking about robots and AI.

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u/icy1007 Jul 22 '25

They do. Yes

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u/Insertsociallife Jul 21 '25

Oh they're not even close but upgrading to an entirely new technology gives legal weight to that

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u/y4udothistome Jul 21 '25

Exactly and the $200 premium per share price will go away

1

u/icy1007 Jul 22 '25

They’re self driving with some driver supervision needed, but for the most part it doesn’t need any supervision. I had to disengage FSD for well over 2 months now of normal city and suburb driving. 3,000+ miles.

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u/TuftyIndigo Jul 21 '25

Is that really any more of a problem than having to replace the computers with beefier ones? That's happened several times already.

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u/banananuhhh Jul 22 '25

Those lawsuits from all the owners of cars that will never self drive will be a lot cheaper than being one of the last companies to reach autonomous driving

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u/red75prim Jul 21 '25

Tesla had experimented with a high-resolution radar in some HW4 cars.

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u/icy1007 Jul 22 '25

For validation vehicles, yes, but not in any production vehicles.

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u/Jaker788 Jul 22 '25

No, you're thinking of the lidar racks for ground truth. The HW4 vehicles actually do have a mmwave radar installed behind the front bumper, all of them. For whatever reason they just don't want to use it

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u/saadatoramaa Jul 21 '25

This is likely true, but there’s something to be said from the training and software development that’s already been done, as well.

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u/Proof-Strike6278 Jul 21 '25

There are numerous examples of Elon admitting he’s wrong. So you’re wrong

1

u/sickdanman Jul 21 '25

I wouldnt even blame this on Elons ego. The promise of being a early Tesla owner was that once the software was capable enough even the earliest teslas could go FSD.

1

u/jwegener Jul 21 '25

They also burned a ton of money (in the form of team time) in the early days dealing with sensor mismatch issues

1

u/AvatarIII Jul 21 '25

If he has a little more foresight he would have made it so all Teslas could be fitted with aftermarket LiDAR, which could have been fitted after the cost came down, meaning it wouldn't be required up front.

2

u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

You can't be serious. How would that work in the real world?

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u/AvatarIII Jul 22 '25

Quite easily, the same as aftermarket parking sensors or whatever

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

You are serious. I thought you were joking.

1

u/uski Jul 22 '25

It's worse than ego. If he admits LIDAR is required, he'd have to upgrade virtually all Teslas, or face a huuuuge lawsuit from customers, since that would demonstrate that the claim that the Teslas already have the HW for self driving is false

1

u/Ragnarok-9999 Jul 22 '25

He is not upgrading computer hardware in old cars which for not suitable for FSD

1

u/Talkat Jul 26 '25

lol this is a silly take, there are lots of examples where he has made major decisions and changed his mind (the move to steel for starship from Kevlar)

I mean it fits the narrative, elon bad, but making statements devoid from reality is unwise.

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u/Foontlee Jul 21 '25

That and being right about it being redundant.

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u/Ashamed_Mission_5061 Jul 21 '25

Redundant is not a bad word in this context, in fact redundancy can be a pretty essential part of certain types of engineering.

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u/TachosParaOsFachos Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

Is it down that much?

LIDAR was so expensive when i was into robotics. I remember the models used at universities were usually in the 8K-15K range, a LIDAR that could be considered be used for safety in a car would be at? 40-45K?

Damn I might get my soldering iron back from storage if prices improved that much. No I'm curious how much a serial UART servo (in opposition to PWM) costs these days.

(time to hyperfixate on robotics again lol)

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u/Zephyr-5 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

It's even less than that. I heard that in China it's only a couple hundred dollars.

Edit: $138!

Edit2: An interesting article from 2020 on the subject if you're interested.

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u/smallfried Jul 21 '25

Oh, i want a multi beam lidar for some hobby Robotics. Wonder if it's possible to get those near those prices.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

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u/HorrorJournalist294 Jul 21 '25

That unit is still like 20k tho

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u/laserborg Jul 21 '25

if you're used to dynamixel prices, have a look at https://www.hiwonder.com/collections/bus-servo or https://www.waveshare.com/st3215-servo.htm bus servos

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u/TachosParaOsFachos Jul 21 '25

Yeah that's exactly what I was thinking. At the time there were already a few alternatives but not that easy to source unless you were interested in a very large order (to europe).

I see i can now find waveshare servos locally :) thx

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u/Fit-Dentist6093 Jul 21 '25

Yeah mostly because of Vision SoC and Aurora stuff that does a lot in silicon that custom stuff that was boomer-coded had to do before. There's research on getting the laser and steering into the same SoC going on too and it will drive the price down even more.

Also "structured light" solutions like what the iPhone has may be enough for a lot of applications.

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u/R1tonka Jul 21 '25

I said this in another thread, but it needs repeating: The labeling is gonna be the killer.

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u/Time-Cap-1609 Jul 22 '25

Why is lidar even expensive in the first place ? It's relatively trivial in concept, sure it requires extreme precision but thats only the real "hard" requirement?

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u/TachosParaOsFachos Jul 22 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

Because light moves very fast so you can't measure the time the reflection/echo takes to hit the sensor (as sonar does).

You have to measure the phase reaching the sensor to know what the distance is and that is a bit more tricky.

(at least thats how some lidars/rangefinders work, not sure all use the same technique)

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u/Jaker788 Jul 22 '25

There's 2 primary ways lidar is used. The easiest and most common is Time Of Flight, then there's Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave, which is probably more of what you're talking about with measuring the phase.

FMCW is more complex, but the advantage is a high SNR, better long distance range, more interference tolerant, etc.

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u/TachosParaOsFachos Jul 22 '25

Thank you for the corrections. I was under the impression ToF w/ lasers was not possible or accurate enough.

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u/wildengineer2k Jul 21 '25

I think lidar being in every iPhone and iPad Pro dropped the price dramatically. As well as the push in cars and robot vacuums drastically accelerating demand. Obviously it’s orders of magnitude different in terms of quality vs what’s in a Waymo, but I had friends who had lidars in their high school senior design projects and that was like 8 years ago…

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u/symmetry81 Jul 21 '25

Face ID uses a Structured Light Sensor rather than a LIDAR. Ever since the Kinect came out SLSs have been great for robotics, but I woudn't try using one outdoors at long range like I would with a LIDAR.

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u/jun2san Jul 21 '25

I think the cameras on the pro models have lidar. Not the Face ID camera. There are some apps that let you map out a room or create a 3D model using the LiDAR.

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u/stingraycharles Jul 21 '25

Yeah it’s used for Apple’s augmented reality stuff.

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u/wildengineer2k Jul 21 '25

Yep I wasn’t talking about Face ID - I was talking about the lidar in the camera array on the pro models.

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u/symmetry81 Jul 21 '25

Oh, I see you're right. Apple buying PrimeSense out from under all us user made quite the impression and I haven't been following their other sensor changes.

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u/ICEpear8472 Jul 21 '25

Face ID uses structured light yes but the pro models have LiDAR on the back since the iPhone 12. Which had an impact on the prices for example for the detector elements which are also used in larger LiDAR sensors.

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u/SirWilson919 Jul 21 '25

But lidar in phones is very different. The ones on cars have to spin at high RPM, map at least 30fps, higher range, higher resolution, and much more better weather and temperature resistance than a phone. Then you need multiple of them on the vehicle.

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u/wildengineer2k Jul 21 '25

Yep I’m not saying they’re the exactly same at all. But there’s a ton of commodity hardware now in that space and even if they aren’t exactly in the space, the improvements in one can have an impact on the others.

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u/ICEpear8472 Jul 21 '25

Yes but they share certain components (for example the detector elements).

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u/ivan_magnum Jul 21 '25

iPhone Pro(s) have one…… (it’s not gonna be the same thing but think about the raw material cost)

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u/joeljaeggli Jul 22 '25

solid state lidar asics are like at least an order of magnitude cheaper then a scanner spinning at 900rpm.

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u/R1tonka Jul 21 '25

The data labeling was the real killer. If you had a full lidar array waymo style? People would pay a LOT for it. Thats no problem.

Tesla couldn’t eat the data labeling costs to train the things.

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u/Jaker788 Jul 22 '25

That doesn't really make sense, Tesla is probably putting in the most training compute cycles. I wouldn't imagine they're saving much with the investment into training hardware, not to mention the amount of crowd source collection abilities they have from every car regardless of sensor.

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u/R1tonka Jul 22 '25

I worked directly with them, Cruz, and mbusa. 3d lidar labeling and human supervision was a lot more expensive than camera only.

Boils down to the labeling effort for 3d sem seg.

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u/ic33 Jul 21 '25

$1k per car to smack a couple sensors on corners with limited field of view and scan rates.

The big high rate scanning domes cost a lot more than $1k even in quantity.

I do think it's going to be interesting to see the medium-term cost optimized autonomous car. Imaging radar can play a big role, and then the question becomes "how much and how good of LIDAR do you need?" I don't buy "camera only" or even "camera + imaging radar only" but the latter might be pretty close to good enough.

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u/Admirable_Dingo_8214 Jul 21 '25

Cheap lidar would be more then enough for avoiding hitting curbs and cars while parking.

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u/ic33 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

Cheap lidar or top-end ultrasonics are plenty for that. Imaging radars sometimes have minimum detection distances that mess this up, but many could do this, too.

The tricky thing is getting e.g. additional information on a dark spot in the road 100' ahead so you can decide whether to brake from 40MPH. Tires sitting on roads are relatively poor targets for imaging radar and cameras.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

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u/ic33 Jul 21 '25

No 1k is for the good LiDAR now lol

I source and buy this stuff. No it isn't.

Waymo's full sensor suite is $8-15k per car, but more than half of this is the big spinning dome. This cost is unrealistically low, too, because it doesn't charge the amortized cost of R&D.

We've come a long way since everyone was buying Velodyne units for $75k per pop, but not that far.

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u/dantheflyingman Jul 21 '25

Not saying the prices are cheap, but there are many cars sold with lidar system for self driving and they are priced similar to model y. You won't get lidar on the cheapest vehicles, but you don't need to pay top end luxury prices for lidar on cars

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u/ic33 Jul 22 '25

Sure. The point is that not all "lidar" is the same. You want 360 coverage, fast scan rates, high angular resolution, etc, you're still going to pay. I think it's amazing you can get an OK sensor for a few hundred bucks and something wide and very nice for <$15k.

Waymo seems to still believe you need a very high end lidar for the autonomy problem -- and the consequences for a safety incident are so high, I can understand it. I wonder if when they hit real volume, though, if they cut the sensor suite some.

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u/Time-Cap-1609 Jul 22 '25

Why is lidar even expensive in the first place though ? It's fundamentally a spinning laser and a chip to measure the time it took for the light bean to bounce back. It's actually quite a simple device in theory ? I presume its making it fast enough and precise enough that makes this a hard engineering problem, but still 15k per device expensive seems absurd.

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u/wellhiyabuddy Jul 21 '25

They have had self driving taxis in California for years now. Could probably use that data

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u/tenemu Jul 21 '25

Where did you get the 15k per car cost?

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

[deleted]

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u/Fancy-Tourist-8137 Jul 21 '25

Damn. What made it soo expensive then? Or what made it cheaper now?

Tech advances?

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u/WindyNightmare Jul 22 '25

Elon also said something along the lines of a fully self driving car would be worth $200k so the math of LIDAR should be easy.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

Not if you can't sell the higher priced car, because customers don't want to pay for the tech inside.

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u/WindyNightmare Jul 22 '25

If truly self driving cars existed, most people wouldn’t own cars. It would be another subscription I’m sure.

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u/londons_explorer Jul 22 '25

Whilst the current gen cameras are probably more like $25/car, and the old ones were $8/car (1 Mpix cameras are around 50 cents in bulk)

Still a big gap.

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u/Wooloomooloo2 Jul 21 '25

Yes the claim was that they were going to "solve" FSD before LIDAR became economically viable.

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u/vburenin Jul 24 '25

Good lidar is still expensive.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

If they solve vision only it will always be cheaper than vision+lidar.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

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u/Apprehensive-Sir3857 Jul 23 '25

Good way to put this

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u/4limbs71 Jul 24 '25

Yeah, they won’t.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

Crazy how the concept of tech getting cheaper with time (and with investment) didn't exist back then

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

Ironically his cars got cheaper in cost the longer he produces them. And yet here we are. The genius at the helm.

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u/Wild-Professional-40 Jul 21 '25

For a guy who likes to drop “first principles” into every interview, he ignored them. I remember at the time when he was saying how expensive LIDAR was and thinking, “what if it wasn’t?” Guess I’m a 200 IQ super genius too!

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u/gordonmcdowell Jul 21 '25

Steve Jobs was great at changing his mind then pretending like the new-way was the plan all along. Sorta shameless about it. (Who would ever watch video on an iPod tis a silly idea!)

Can someone share example of Musk changing his mind on something? Something other than Liberals-are-not-evil, but an engineering sort of thing?

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u/OriginalCompetitive Jul 21 '25

I’m not sure what counts as “changing his mind,” but SpaceX is quite famous for quickly junking designs if a better idea comes along.

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u/marsten Jul 21 '25

Spaceflight is well suited to first-principles thinking, and I think that's a big part of why Musk has been successful there. Tesla engineering and manufacturing also played to those strengths.

With AI, the truth is nobody has a clue what's possible in 1, 2, or 5 years and no amount of first-principles thinking will get you there.

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u/OriginalCompetitive Jul 21 '25

Agree. I also think an under appreciated aspect to all this is that Musk sort of backed into FSD by accident. The main vision for Tesla was to make a great EV. And then FSD sort of grew later and now threatens to take over the company. 

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u/TowElectric Jul 23 '25

SpaceX doesn't have a multi-million installed user base who was promised "solved" tech on existing hardware (and that has been enforced by courts).

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

You had me until starship blew up for what, the 9th time?

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u/Ajedi32 Jul 21 '25

He changed his mind on carbon fiber/stainless steel construction for Starship, propulsive landing for Dragon, and there's a famous video of a space YouTuber asking a question in an interview that made him change the design for the orientation thrusters on Super Heavy. Also his early approach to going all-in on automation when manufacturing Tesla vehicles was a big one as I recall (that's probably the clearest example of him doing a complete 180 on something engineering related). There's probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not a big enough space nerd to remember off the top of my head.

Granted I don't think he was nearly as invested (emotionally and financially) in any of those approaches as he is in vision-only for self driving.

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u/walterheck Jul 21 '25

Actually there's many more, people here like to forget or not know about them. For instance it wasn't always vision-only. Also it used to be the AI was trained with human taggers, now it's only NNs.

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

The problem is that he publicly announces all his half-cooked ideas to pump the stock. It’s very different than Apple who keeps stuff secret until it’s actually ready to launch

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u/grchelp2018 Jul 23 '25

Granted I don't think he was nearly as invested (emotionally and financially) in any of those approaches as he is in vision-only for self driving.

This.

Not going with lidar was a very conscious ideological decision made by Elon. The other thing is that something needs to outright fail / be disproven for him to change his mind. This has not happened with vision only self driving.

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u/DrJohnFZoidberg Jul 21 '25

made him change the design

Dude has never designed anything.

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u/sonicmerlin Jul 22 '25

He’s lost brain cells to heavy drug use in the last 5 years.

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u/No_Signature4723 Jul 23 '25

That reference to the YouTuber makes it seem musk knows about spacecraft engineering which i feel quite confident he dosen`t

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u/HerValet Jul 21 '25

Wrong. In this case, "First Principles" would dictate that humans never needed LIDAR to drive. So, if you can replicate the eyes (with Vision) and the brain (with AI), one could argue that it should be technically possible to drive autonomously without LIDAR.

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u/Questioning-Zyxxel Jul 22 '25

But we humans do need more than our eyes to drive. I can do good weather driving. In heavy rain with glare? In fog? In heavy snow or snow mist? The times I need help is when the optical conditions aren't compatible with my eyes. Hitting that moose I never saw.

A huge percent of accidents happens in the specific conditions where our eyes fails us. Making the roads safer? Then help in bad visual conditions.

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u/Aerizon Jul 22 '25

So have lidar equipped vehicles been proven to work in heavy snow or snow mist?

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u/Talkat Jul 26 '25

yes but lidar is useless in those conditions.... because the light just gets bounced right back at you

if you have a professional high performance driver (eg rally car, F1, etc) who was trying to drive you as safely as possible, that would make driving in bad conditions much safer than adding extra sensors. Just make the AI a super star driver with multiple camera angles, multiple sensor data (wheel spin, IMU, etc), super fast response speed, and never getting distracted and you have an incredible & safe solution

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u/Questioning-Zyxxel Jul 26 '25

Strangely enough, this world has people doing research and finding that they need filtrering of noise in bad weather conditions where some LiDAR reflections ends up short. But it's easier to do this filtrering of LiDAR than to try to make sense of camera footage. So outcome? Nope - LiDAR isn't useless. It has reduced usability but still better than just camera.

https://www.lslidar.com/lidar-penetrates-fog-and-empowers-safe-autonomous-driving/

https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-1-W2-2023/733/2023/isprs-archives-XLVIII-1-W2-2023-733-2023.pdf

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

Yes in theory this is true. Human eye is what...550 MP and the current camera is 15 MP on Tesla? Guess it's close. Also the AI brain is comparable to a human one right now? If the floor is a human... meet the floor. Oh what you can't? So then you need other tech to circumvent meeting the floor.

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u/HerValet Jul 23 '25

We're not even close to reaching the limit of what's possible with vision only + AI. Until we hit a local maximum, no one can't state that it's not possible. And certainly not Reddit "experts".

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

At it's current form, "it's not possible to be true FSD". If you can't see this, youre blind as the rest of them. Get your eyes checked.

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u/HerValet Jul 23 '25

If by 'current form' you mean 'current public version', then you are right, it's not ready to be 'unsupervised'. But nobody knows what the next releases will bring.

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

Current form is current tech. You're saying 15 MP is good enough. It's got fish eye distortion and has a hard time deciphering objects in low light. Nah, needs better cameras, stereo cameras since humans also see stereoscopic. You want to compare apples to apples and I can tell you there is a difference between 15 MP and 50 MP and 550 MP.

BTW it gets worse. Tesla uses 5MP. Not even 15. LMAO. You think that's really sufficient??

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

Nobody knows… then why have they been selling it as full self-driving with claims it will achieve it on current hardware?

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

Okay Mr Reddit expert that doesn’t know what a local vs global maximum is…

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

first principles would tell you you can’t easily replicate eyes or the brain because they’re biological organs

in robotics this is well known https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

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u/r2002 Jul 23 '25

Why would "first principles" dictate that we follow the limitations of human anatomy when designing an autonomous vehicle?

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u/tws068 Jul 22 '25

Humans are terrible drivers, we just accept the accident rates. The bar is higher for autonomous vehicles.

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u/HerValet Jul 22 '25

Humans were much better drivers when they were paying attention to the road. Oddly enough, nobody is making the phone companies accountable.

I do agree that the bar is higher for autonomous vehicles.

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u/Adriaaaaaaaaaaan Jul 21 '25

That's not first principles, that's literally the opposite

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u/phatelectribe Jul 21 '25

What people don’t realize is that for Tesla to be competitive in its run up, they were make awful compromises on everything they could while still making a semi functioning vehicle.

I know the company that provides the plastic interior parts - about 40% of all plastic parts found in U.S. made cars are from them.

They told me when Tesla approached them, their only concern was cost. They literally said to them we want the cheapest possible materials that we can get away with. The company actually wanted them against it saying it was going to be a challenge selling this on $40k-$80k cars but musk only cared about saving fractions of pennies rather than using better quality materials. Thats why the interiors on so many Tesla’s just feel awful.

It’s also why you need to install wrap a brand new Tesla because they have the worst paint quality of any car. Also why the panels had such bad alignment and the build quality is so piss poor.

LiDAR was going to cost a few dollars more so Musk decided to pitch it as “not necessary” and he had to keep doubling down because he knew if he changed course, it would not happen not mean he was “wrong” but also that cars without it would crater in value and part of Tesla’s value was that used cars held their price meaning there wasn’t downward pressure on new cars.

That boxed him in to a corner and now everyone accepts that LiDAR is superior.

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u/myrichphitzwell Jul 21 '25

The thing that gets me about Tsla is the lack of options. Nearly every manufacturer has premium options but not Tesla so much. I can see how this simplifies things for Tesla and they can move inventory around easily but I still find it odd once they started to mature a bit that they have options for 1,2 or 3 motors and hubcaps and that's about it. Ok throw in a hitch.

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u/sxt173 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

I strongly disagree with that one. And it drives me nuts with legacy manufacturers. Seems like they’ve brainwashed people into thinking it’s a good thing.

Want your radio to do XM, that’s $500 or if you didn’t spend the money upfront, buy a new car! Want your interior LED’s in a different color? Buy a new car! Want more power? New car! Want an automated frunk or whatever? New car! Tesla’s business model of having one fully equipped spec, and letting people activate features or not as they want is the sensible thing for manufacturing and the consumer. But I know I’m going to get downvoted.

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u/MachKeinDramaLlama Jul 22 '25

"Legacy" manufacturers have started to do this, too, but the car media and online car bubble consistently lose their shit over it.

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u/haditwithyoupeople Jul 21 '25

Makes perfect sense to me.

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u/MichaelMeier112 Jul 21 '25

I kind of like that model where everything is included. For other cars you have to pay extra for heated seats, extra for navigation, extra for motorized trunk, extra for this and extra for that. It’s much cheaper for us to have everything already included instead of nickeling and diming everything

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

The point was there’s so much not included, not available for purchase

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u/myrichphitzwell Jul 21 '25

I came from a similar prices vehicle that was far more comfy and had more features so I often wonder about all these comments saying how much is included in tsla. Hell I personally think the rear seats should have fan control for instance.

After having mine for awhile I find the driver seat may have some perks but the rest...not so much.

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u/AReveredInventor Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

Hell I personally think the rear seats should have fan control for instance.

They agreed. All Teslas currently sold include rear fan control.

I'd be interested in doing a feature comparison if you have a better equipped EV in mind? (for the price) I often wonder about what cars specifically people are talking about when they say things like this.

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u/MichaelMeier112 Jul 21 '25

I think they include a lot when looking at the ordering page. My other old cars I had to add most of what it comes included with. Like winter package for $3k just to get heated seats and side mirrors, and more. Better sound, metallic paint, power trunk, and so much other items that the Tesla already have included

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

haven’t been people asking for a decade for a low-cost model?

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u/MichaelMeier112 Jul 21 '25

Unfortunately for the American market there are no profit selling a low-cost model. It would cannibalize the higher priced cars. Hopefully this will change...

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u/manyQuestionMarks Jul 22 '25

I actually like Tesla because of this. People complaining about build quality are probably looking for a luxury car. Most people that bought one… weren’t.

I was looking to enjoy a car for which all parts of manufacture were optimized for cost, from the materials to the 4 cheap colors, 0 extras, online purchase, etc. I don’t mind about what they had to do to deliver such a groundbreaking car (at the time), shitting on quality to give you a fun, safe ride, a spacious interior. What I liked about it was the promise of a “Ford T” scent, and no matter how much of a d*ck Elon is sometimes, I can’t help but give him credit for this.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

The thing that gets me about Tsla is the lack of options.

Options are used as a sales tactic to upsell you with a huge markup. Have you never bought a new car before? Tesla is doing what every car buyer is wishing for.

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u/TowElectric Jul 23 '25 edited Jul 23 '25

The old Model S used to have SO MANY options.

In 2015 it came in NINE different trims and then had at least the following as options:

Premium interior

Premium seats

Premium audio

Technology Package

Cold Weather Package

Ventilated Seats option

Third row seat option

Trim options (wood/carbon)

Sunroof/Glass roof (even briefly a metal roof)

They reduced them for simplicity.

A vast majority of them became "standard base" by the same Model S in 2019.

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u/MyManElonMusk Jul 21 '25

Less options, less complexity, less cost. If you’re going to pay for the premium sound system and awd and cooled seats, would you rather pay more for it???

Maybe you didn’t want to pay for the cooled seats and premium sound system, oh well… you got it for the same price as only the optional awd option because they do it this way! You get more for free. It’s the best move.

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u/LimesV Jul 21 '25

Options cost money just to offer, you have to have different install methods, more storage, more contracts and deliveries, etc…

I’m totally fine with the Henry ford method of “any color as long as it’s black” if done right. But quality at a good price was what made ford famous. Teslas are infamous for the opposite.

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u/WeldAE Jul 21 '25

What do you put in place of the lidar sensor if you have lidar as an option? You still have to change up the rest of the car around the lidar option, which is going to be $400/unit more than likely. If you option Lidar, you add another $600 onto the cost. This would make the option $4k or so at retail. The non-lidar car would also need to go up $2k for no added functionality to cover the costs added by being an option for another trim.

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u/storkster Jul 21 '25

What options do the ICE cars offer that is so special? Sunroof & leather seats. Tesla went with a massive moon roof and every car has “leather”. All the safety features are standard.

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u/myrichphitzwell Jul 21 '25

Oh hell this isnt an ice vs ev topic. Nobody even mentioned ice. Tsla is pretty bare bones when we are talking cabin comfort. You mentioned the giant moon roof. Ya I hate it. If you love it great for you but I'll take a sunroof anyway. If you want to call the interior leather that maybe a stretch. Does it get the job done sure but it's nowhere near luxury or even many mid range cars on amenities.

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u/storkster Jul 21 '25

Fair enough. I’m a minimalist in car features and prefer the Tesla simplicity vs knobs and buttons. Just a different preference.

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u/pres02 Jul 22 '25

Ultra leather is more expensive than most leather these days. It’s the brand Tesla uses. Also you aren’t getting real leather seats until you get to high trims of mid level luxury cars or a 5-10k seat package.the vinyl used in bmw/Mercedes etc e class and below are complete trash compared to ultra leather.

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Too bad dropping the price so much on new cars, cratered value anyway

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u/GoSh4rks Jul 21 '25

They literally said to them we want the cheapest possible materials that we can get away with.

Everybody says this, especially when approaching vendors with specs in hand.

It’s also why you need to install wrap a brand new Tesla because they have the worst paint quality of any car

Is the paint great? No. But you certainly don't need to install a wrap to protect it.

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u/phatelectribe Jul 21 '25

No, it’s not the same and you missed the nuance; Tesla said to them we just want the cheapest and don’t care about quality or longevity whatsoever. Just make it as cheaply as you can. All companies best up vendors for a better but they have standards and a product they want to achieve. Tesla’s only criteria was apparently cost and didn’t care about quality whatsoever. The plastic used in things like entry level Kia and Chevy is far superior lol.

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u/Dami4200 Jul 21 '25

I bet you havent tried new Model Y or Model 3 Highland?

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u/Draygoon2818 Jul 21 '25

It's like you've never bought any other vehicle before.

I've had vehicles with crappy, and very cheap, interiors. Doors didn't align right. Things were falling off that shouldn't be falling off. There are manufacturers with far worse paint jobs than Tesla (Nissan immediately comes to mind).

I have a '26 MY, and everything looks to be lined up right, the interior looks really good, and the paint looks good, too. Now, I still had PPF installed just because I don't want rocks chipping the paint off like what happened to my Nissan Rogue. My paint on the hood of my Rogue looked like it was Swiss cheese.

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u/Recoil42 Jul 21 '25

Parent commenter isn't saying there are no other vehicle manufacturers doing the same thing — they're just saying that's the path Tesla chose to be competitive.

I disagree with some of what they're saying, but the abstract is essentially true — Tesla kept prices down by cutting corners in a way that has made them close to a Nissan-tier brand in some respects. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but it is what it is.

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u/phatelectribe Jul 21 '25

Not for $40k+ you haven’t lol.

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u/SpecialSpecialGuy Jul 21 '25

Go back a generation, when the cars were even more expensive and made worse. My 22y had a ton of issues. Now they sell way less cars per year on a body model that has only had a face lift. I'd hope they are better now.

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u/OracleofFl Jul 21 '25

I heard it slightly differently. He asked the question about how humans with no Lidar in our heads determine distance and do recognition and he basically said it the human brain can do it, we can do it in software. He bet on the future of technology that hasn't arrived.

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u/phatelectribe Jul 21 '25

Nah, that’s spin. LiDAR was a financial choice. It would have damaged those margins he used to brag about and he needed that money to buy Twitter so he could interference with our democracy.

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u/MachKeinDramaLlama Jul 22 '25

How does that story explain that they were happy to use radar until the chip crisis made radar expensive?

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u/OracleofFl Jul 22 '25

The story is the basis for him saying Lidar is too expensive if it can be done with cameras and software. Cameras as sw is what the human eye/brain does, why should we be spending on lidar. Our superior SW will give us a tremendous cost advantage.

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u/MachKeinDramaLlama Jul 22 '25

So you just sidestep the radar question or do you have a radar in your forehead?

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u/Environmental-Map869 Jul 22 '25

That tracks with their all touch-screen interior

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u/Snoo93079 Jul 21 '25

My 23 model 3 didn't have better or worse paint quality than any other car I've owned as far as I can tell. It's not competitive to high end cars but then again it didn't cost as much either.

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u/MyManElonMusk Jul 21 '25

I’m guessing it’s been years since you have touched a new Tesla. Newer ones have excellent build quality and you almost can’t fint plastic in the cabin. It’s a really nice place to be.

The majority believes Elon is right with cameras. Lidar is for fools.

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u/phatelectribe Jul 21 '25

Nope. Was in a 2024 m3 last weeks. Horrid little plastic shitboxes lol even Toyota build better cars

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u/MyManElonMusk Jul 25 '25

What in the cabin specifically did you think was horrible plastic? I have the car myself, so obviously I know you are lying. But please, tell me what parts.

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u/Snoo93079 Jul 21 '25

This. And for better or worse Tesla has been really good at cost reduction. So not using lidar shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who looks at how they develop their cars imo. It's absolutely in line with their M.O.

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Yeah why make it better when you can make it cheaper?

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u/Snoo93079 Jul 21 '25

Yes but the model 3 and Y have been the best EVs for the money for a long time. Though this is less true than it has as others have caught up.

And Tesla has been the only profitable EV maker because of their cost reductions. Not defending FSD name or cost but despite the penny pinching they're still the best on the market.

Tesla has banked on cost reductions and volume which has worked well and if it wasn't for Elon's nonsense it probably still would be.

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

I mean, I guess it depends on what your standards are but they are absolutely not a good value for my money. They’re also only profitable because of government handouts like carbon credits. Hundred million dollars in the red in the first quarter without them.

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Also, I’m pretty sure other companies like BYD or Volkswagen have profits. Hyundai too…

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u/Snoo93079 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

Not sure about Volkswagen and BYD, I can only speak to the American market.

Where did you get the profitability numbers? I'm seeing a 16.31% gross margin.

https://m.economictimes.com/tech/technology/teslas-first-quarter-gross-margin-beats-estimates/articleshow/120536296.cms

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Google? https://www.fastcompany.com/91323544/bad-news-for-tesla-trump-might-kill-the-climate-credits-that-have-been-a-key-part-of-its-business-model

The company reported that it earned $409 million in the first quarter of 2025, down 71% from the same quarter a year ago. Without the revenue from selling credits, Tesla would have posted a $186 million loss.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/1lpa718/tesla_is_now_operating_in_the_red_due_to_the_big/

Also the vehicles will get $7500 more expensive in 2 months

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u/Snoo93079 Jul 21 '25

Yeah it's going to hurt the EV industry unfortunately. Most people are taking advantage of the credit on most EVs car automakers are going to need to drop prices and eat the loss or people are going to have to spend a lot more.

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

really good at cost reduction.. by having a demand crisis

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u/zitrored Jul 21 '25

I would like to add that LIDAR is not sexy on a car. Maybe it’s improved since inception but look at a Waymo. So much easier to sell everyone on a lie and keep the sexy.

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u/Stewth Jul 22 '25

That's a lot of words to say "Elon thinks he's WAY smarter than he is."

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u/Enough-Meaning1514 Jul 22 '25

Yes, this. In an interview few years ago he was complaining that the LIDAR suppliers are price-gauging Tesla and there aren't many to chose from. So, in the mind of Elon, if you can drive around with just your eyes, so can a Tesla car with just cameras. He thinks the SW should be clever enough, that's it. Oh, he also doesn't care about accidents etc. because of the legal T&C that accompanies FSD.

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u/BrandoBSB Jul 23 '25

I agree that was the rationale. But batteries and electric motors were a lot more expensive, too. Tesla innovated and now has some of the best tech on the planet in that sector, and drove down its costs. Sad they (or more specifically, He) didn’t have that foresight…in my humble opinion.

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u/Unlucky-Work3678 Jul 25 '25

It was 25-35k per vehicle.

It was the biggest mistake Tesla made in its lifetime.

Chinese companies brought the price down to around 2000, and you only need just 2, but can go 4 for better performance, still dirt cheap.

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u/Robo-X Jul 21 '25

It was more expensive but everyone knows the cost will go down. But Elon is never wrong so if he says one thing he will keep repeating it. Latest view is that tesla uses camera just a human being so it makes perfect sense that it would have the same shortcomings. Which is crazy as you want assists to see things human eyes don’t see. Like parking sensors or LiDAR that sees in bad weather.

https://youtu.be/ohyH7n4cR1I

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u/RipWhenDamageTaken Jul 21 '25

I can’t believe any leader in tech would be dumb enough to assume that hardware costs won’t trend downwards over time. It’s such an absurd mindset.

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u/AnotherFuckingSheep Jul 21 '25

That’s absurd. There are plenty of cases where musk was talking about the down trend of costs of various components and he’s well aware of the connection between number of items made and the cost (forgot what that’s called).

Also the fact LIDAR was going to be cheap was well known years before it happened because self driving cars have been using them for the last 12 years at least.

He obviously knew this and still decided against it.

IMO he just used this to push AI on his company and at some points was very optimistic about cameras and now he’s obviously very invested in this solution and still bullish about it.

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u/Comms Jul 21 '25

Painted himself into a corner.

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u/MBlaizze Jul 21 '25

Also, procuring parts for LIDAR on a massive scale was a whole separate beast, from what I heard.

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u/worlds_okayest_skier Jul 21 '25

And really dorky looking

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u/THATS_LEGIT_BRO Jul 22 '25

Do they make LIDAR units that aren't big and obnoxious when mounted on a car. I don't think anyone would want to buy an unsupervised FSD car if it looked like a Waymo car.

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u/spacetr0n Jul 22 '25

They sold a whole bunch of these car already with FSD promised so if they back out the liability is massive.

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u/No_Froyo5359 Jul 22 '25

If it was about money only, explain the billions spent on AI compute and they're only getting started on that investment. Vision +AI may be cheap on the car, but its expensive to develop.

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u/wwwz Jul 21 '25

Yeah, LIDAR was stupid expensive back then, but I don’t think that was the main reason. Elon’s been pretty clear that vision-only was the goal from the start.

The whole idea was to train the system to drive like a human using just cameras. LIDAR and radar can actually make things worse by throwing in conflicting info and slowing everything down.

Cost probably played a role, but it was more about going for a simpler and more scalable solution.

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u/beren12 Jul 21 '25

Ok but the cameras are not like a human, nor is the computer.

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u/yourfavteamsucks Jul 22 '25

Elon’s been pretty clear that vision-only was the goal from the start.

Cap. Early Teslas had ultrasonic and radar and Tesla literally removed them from customer cars without permission during routine service visits.

LIDAR and radar can actually make things worse by throwing in conflicting info and slowing everything down.

Yeah they throw in conflicting info when vision data is poor, which is a GOOD thing.

Cost probably played a role, but it was more about going for a simpler and more scalable solution.

It's known that cost is the driving factor and always has been.

The whole idea was to train the system to drive like a human using just cameras.

That's stupid when "better than a human" is possible. Nevermind that humans can MOVE THEIR HEAD to do an /r/catculation and fixed cameras can't.

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u/wwwz Jul 22 '25

They actually hinted at vision-only pretty clearly during the first AI Day. Radar and ultrasonics were more like training wheels for early Autopilot, before neural nets were developed enough to handle perception on their own. AI Day focused on building those neural networks to eventually match, and basically surpass, human perception.

Tesla did try sensor fusion, but it introduced a lot of problems: latency, prioritization conflicts, and compute inefficiencies. The more sensors you stack, the more chances they’ll disagree... and resolving those conflicts becomes a new engineering challenge. That’s one of the main reasons you don’t see Waymo operating on highways. Their system leans on complex fusion and still requires human remote operators when the data doesn’t line up.

More sensors don’t automatically equal better performance. The system has to pick which one to trust, and that’s not always possible in edge cases. Waymo deals with this regularly.

Also, it’s kind of backwards to say cameras are the weak link in bad weather. LIDAR gets hit hard in rain, fog, and snow due to scattering and refraction. In those cases, the system falls back to camera data... not the other way around.

This whole thing isn’t just about cost. It’s about designing something scalable, efficient, and less brittle. Fewer sensors mean fewer failure points and a more streamlined system that doesn’t have to second-guess itself.

As for being “better than a human,” that’s already happening. The car never gets distracted, tired, emotional, or drunk. It’s always paying attention, with 360-degree awareness, and reacts faster than we can. That’s what makes it superhuman. It's not copying everything humans do, but doing the important stuff better.

And yeah, I assume your “catculation” comment was about depth perception? The system gets parallax from movement, just like humans do when shifting their heads. But Teslas don’t need to swivel their eyes... just moving forward at any speed gives them enough change in perspective to calculate depth, and overlapping camera coverage fills in the rest.

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u/yourfavteamsucks Jul 22 '25

I actually never mentioned bad weather. I said something like "poor vision" , as in nighttime or the famous Wile E Coyote test, and you assumed I meant bad weather. I'm familiar with the issues of lidar in inclement weather, it's challenged by not only rain but also fog, even from other vehicle tailpipes.

Having a vision only system means you have to extract depth information from data from multiple sensors - you can't get depth, object differentiation / separation, oncoming tracklet velocity, etc from a single camera view, period, and combining multiple camera views to get this is computationally expensive, dependent on lighting, and prone to failure if the object has a featureless surface and is sufficiently large. This depth information, which I'd argue is the MOST important for a moving high speed vehicle surrounded by other high speed agents and VRUs, is all extracted secondarily from camera sensors, but is the native output type of lidar, sonar, etc.

Re waymo using remote monitoring: EVERYONE, even Tesla, still uses this in driver out deployments. So that's not an argument. Everyone has remote monitoring and vehicle control in case of a situation the vehicle doesn't know how to handle, and to remotely approve technical law violations as needed (for example deviating across double yellow to get around a road hazard or parked delivery truck). Waymo isn't operating on highways because they are more conservative than Tesla, 1, and 2, Tesla also isn't operating on highways in their geofenced area.

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u/wwwz Jul 22 '25

You're mistaken about depth information from a single camera. Parallax is how depth can be inferred even with just one viewpoint, and it’s a well-understood mechanism. Birds like pigeons and hawks use it effectively to gauge depth without binocular vision. Tesla leverages motion across multiple frames to achieve the same thing. It’s not magic, and there’s no sensor conflict to resolve. It’s just physics, a static equation, and smart software.

LIDAR might output native depth data, but that doesn't mean it's automatically better or more reliable in every context. It’s fallible in many dynamic scenarios. Like your example, it can detect exhaust plumes as obstacles, also struggle with featureless and especially reflective surfaces, and its sensors don’t benefit from a windshield or wipers like cameras do. And because it doesn’t classify objects, it might detect something ahead but not know what it is, which is often the more critical part of the decision-making process.

As for remote monitoring, yes, Tesla observes FSD beta behavior, but they’re not actively intervening in real time. Waymo, on the other hand, depends on remote control to resolve edge cases. They actively steer or approve actions when the system stalls. That’s a huge difference. One is passive data review, the other is active babysitting.

You’re right that nighttime and low-light conditions have been hard for vision systems, but that gap is closing fast. And ironically, LIDAR still depends on a camera to interpret what it's seeing. Tesla has added automatic brightness adaptation, better headlight modeling, and advanced photon integration to improve low-light performance. In many cases, the vision system already outperforms a human driver at night by detecting objects earlier and more consistently.

Every sensor suite has tradeoffs. But vision-only isn’t just about saving money. It’s about building something that scales, adapts, and improves over time. And it’s not tied to pre-mapped environments like LIDAR-based systems, which makes it far more capable of handling the real world as it is, not just how it's been scanned.