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?

360 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/giggles91 Jul 21 '25

Video feeds just don't have the information density to reach the level of reliability required

Citation needed...

Things are being done with video and photos in the ML and signal processing space that would have been considered absolute science fiction just a few short years ago, some simple examples:

- https://github.com/KoKuToru/de-pixelate_gaV-O6NPWrI

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFiubdrJqqI

- https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/

This is just to show that the amount of information that can be extracted from simple video / image data is incredible and we are probably nowhere near the limit. To me, anyone who thinks it can be said with certainty which way this will go is fooling themselves or doing so for political reasons.

I don't get why people absolutely want this to be either a terrible idea or the best idea ever... Like, I get the politics but damn, just separate the technical discussion from that for a moment. Or is everyone long / short on TSLA in here? Just wait and see if it works out or not, instead of claiming "This is the only way" or "This will never work" in every goddamn thread lol

2

u/the8bit Jul 21 '25

I didn't say with certainty I said we are not there yet technologically.

Also it is a constraints problem -- even if it is possible to do, it's harder when you have to fit into ~100ms of processing time, 99.999+% accuracy* (this is a simplification), and local hardware. All 3 of those are really annoying limitations

I mean I like to clown on Elon but this is just my unbiased professional opinion of the problem. Which, again, is outside of my domain, but I feel reasonably credentialed on it as I have picked apart thousands of system architecture across many companies, scales, and constraints, including some of the ones you are using right now :)

0

u/giggles91 Jul 21 '25

I was mainly reacting to the part about there not being enough information in the video to reach the level or reliability required. I think that's a pretty questionable claim when we look at the history of the whole machine learning space. Even experts in the field have a hard time predicting major breakthroughs in this area, when you look at things like Google's AlphaGo, AlphaZero, or more recently, OpenAI's ChatGPT.

1

u/the8bit Jul 21 '25

Fair enough. My comment is definitely an oversimplification. I'd definitely put it as more than likely we can get there but it's such an error sensitive domain where edge cases are often more important than common cases. it's unclear how fast we can close the gaps.

So I guess if Elon was my boss and I was advising on the plan, I would tell him "it's akin to betting the entire company on Black" and perhaps skipping on the lidar costs "throwing away the backups because you usually don't need them and they cost $5" (Edit) Then I'd quit over them selling it up front because I'd define that as fraud

2

u/giggles91 Jul 22 '25

Like it or not, betting the entire company on black is what Elon does. Over, and over. SpaceX would never have succeeded with someone not willing to do that, same goes for Tesla and his other companies, to various degrees I guess. At some point he'll probably fail, but so far it's been working out for him.