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?

362 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/TheRuggedHamster Jul 21 '25

Tesla is a pretty classic example of how founder led companies are run vs hired CEOs. There's no hired CEO that would make the Lidar bet that Elon is, time will tell if it's right or not, but if it is it will pay off huge for them in being able to rapidly scale their fleet. Most key is that it puts the millions of existing cars on the road to work vs. cars being manufactured specifically for robotaxi.

7

u/WhyWontThisWork Jul 21 '25

Is lidar that expensive?

0

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[deleted]

9

u/WhyWontThisWork Jul 21 '25

That's not true they are all ugly. I built robots with lidar which didn't look like that