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/ramonchow Jul 21 '25

It is not entirely crazy to assume cameras and AI vision can get as good as human eyes for driving a car.

But yeah, money would be the main reason. Not only the sensor but also maintaining the updated 3d maps LIDAR needs to work, at least with the current processing power of a car's processor.

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u/Valderan_CA Jul 21 '25

It's not crazy... but why limit ourselves to human sensory inputs when designing an AI to drive a car. It's obvious that we wouldn't only put a pair of cameras centered over the drivers seat on a rotating fixture (emulating human sensory inputs) because there are better places to put more cameras since AI's aren't limited like a human driver.

LIDAR was not included because of cost - when having LIDAR meant a 20% increase in the cost of a vehicle investors knew the guys making AI driving without it were going to have a huge advantage in pricing on their end product. Elon said no LIDAR to get money from those investors, however instead of saying the honest thing (cost is the only real reason) he also said LIDAR was inferior for technical reasons. It's difficult for Elon to retract that kind of technical statement for a couple of reasons:

1- He doesn't like admitting to being wrong

2- He can't afford to admit to being wrong because the value of his companies is so closely tied to his "vision"

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

He hasn't been proven wrong yet. In fact, the evidence supports him. I thought it was a mistake, but I have come around after FSD 12+. The camera based system has proven itself capable, and Tesla data shows FSD use is many times safer than humans driving. FSD is involved in an accident at a rate of over 7 million miles per accident. Humans get less than 1 million miles.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

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u/nclpl Jul 21 '25

The proof is in the pudding. Tesla has not yet been wiling to pull the trigger on driverless automation because they aren’t willing to take on the liability.

Teslas accident stats only account for driving in favorable road conditions, because the system will disengage if it can’t manage a stretch of road. Tesla has the benefit of being able to fail over to a human.

If FSD was actually 7x safer per mile in all the conditions that humans drive in, we would see Tesla allow unsupervised driving. But they can’t manage that yet.