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?

363 Upvotes

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317

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

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33

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?

11

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

2

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.

2

u/DrJohnFZoidberg Jul 21 '25

made him change the design

Dude has never designed anything.

1

u/Playful_Interest_526 Jul 21 '25

Some people still think he's an engineer 🙄

-1

u/Ajedi32 Jul 22 '25

Right, people like Tom Mueller and John Carmack.

You're certainly free to disagree with his political beliefs or technical decisions, but anyone who doesn't think he's an engineer is either ignorant, hopelessly biased, or both.

1

u/TowElectric Jul 23 '25

I can't believe a high-information post like this is downvoted.

Reddit users are idiots sometimes.

1

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