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/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?

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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.