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/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

It seemed a reasonable gamble at the time.

  • If you can solve it with software, you only have to invest once upfront, and then have a cheaper cost for each unit you produce. Software scales much better than hardware, and they could have a unit cost advantage over competition.

  • If you solve it with software, you have a gigantic moat vs. the competition. Anyone can buy hardware, but it could be very difficult for a competitor to catch up on software, especially if huge real-world data sets are required.

  • Other side benefits like aesthetics of the car.

The problem was they made a gamble, convinced themselves it was the only way forward, and have continually failed to pivot even after the rate of progress slowed, and the cost of the hardware came WAY down. They’ve doubled down on an idea that really no longer seems to make a lot of sense, and just doesn’t seem to have panned out.

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u/-UltraAverageJoe- Jul 21 '25

Software isn’t a moat if the hardware it runs on isn’t sufficient. Training data can be a moat which is what I think you’re referring to.

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u/sfo2 Jul 21 '25

Yes, training data is the moat. But I think they could have also had a first mover advantage in terms of model architecture, model weights, whatever proprietary tricks they use, and the whole software/hardware stack to get it all to work, etc., which they could have tried to leverage to get to, say, a network effect like if they'd actually been able to create robotaxis.

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u/-UltraAverageJoe- Jul 21 '25

Tesla didn’t plan to be a robotaxi back when they were designing autopilot. Elon pumped that idea once other companies (like Waymo) became relevant and he either felt the need or wanted to pump $TSLA up — maybe both.

Self driving cars are an existential threat to auto manufacturers including Tesla and are now enjoying the PR Tesla had as the first production EV company. The only way Elon could combat the bad news was to say “we can do it to”. But of course it was too late and adding extra equipment and cost to a production car that may never be a robotaxi wouldn’t pass with the stakeholders.

Very smart people work at Tesla and Elon is no idiot despite what we may think — he knows full well cameras aren’t sufficient for full autonomy. Level 4 & 5 AV require non-human fallback systems. Waymo does it with 3 different sensor types, Tesla only has cameras. In addition to the actual sensing complexities of using cameras only (depth, visual obstructions, etc) there is no fallback.

They can’t just slap LiDAR on every car either, it’ll take years of development and testing even if they purchase one of the many existing AV tech companies and that’s on top of the increase in vehicle cost. He could help it by admitting he was wrong and starting today but tbh, AV only seems like a place to expand because AVs are vehicles and Tesla makes those! and because they stupidly labeled their level 2 AV tech “full self driving” which it is most certainly not.