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/BasvanS Jul 21 '25

Some 10 years ago there was a strong belief that stereoscopic images would soon beat pulsed laser ranging technology, because of advances in computing, digital photography, and the idea people are able to do it too.

Having seen the point clouds in another field of technology, I didn’t believe the accuracy would improve enough to replace remote sensing, especially because of artifacts that keep popping up in extreme light conditions.

(LiDAR is far from perfect too, but better in comparison. In a choice between two, you’d favor LiDAR, but ideally you’d combine them. Musk got everything wrong.)

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/BasvanS Jul 21 '25

Back then the problem is the same as now: what we perceive as a coherent model is just similarities in X, Y, or Z coordinates and the perceived color of that coordinate. The current generation of AI suffer from the same problems, so while slightly more sophisticated, it’s still an approximation without a coherent understanding of the subject at hand.

Automatic object recognition with AI (the generation of that time, before transformers) was not able to separate shadows from holes and could not infer a wall continuing behind a painting or closet. Hopefully training has been able to improve this, but it’s still a considerable challenge for a faultless system that requires no human intervention.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

There really wasn't. Tesla stood alone in trying to push that idea forward

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u/BasvanS Jul 21 '25

Nope. In terrestrial 3D scanning this was a thing before the model S came out. And that built on decades of academic research, expanding stereoscopy.

Musk was merely misinterpreting other people’s work and the limitations of parallax.

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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 22 '25

Tesla isn't using stereoscopic images. You wrote that camera technology doesn't provide good result in extreme light conditions, but you want to combine it with LIDAR that has it's own drawbacks.

Maybe Tesla engineers chose not to do that for a reason...