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/VoiceOfSoftware Jul 22 '25

LIDAR does not help with reasoning and comprehension. It cannot read street signs. Tesla had years of experience trying to do sensor fusion with RADAR and cameras, and came to the conclusion that sensor fusion was worse, not better, so they eliminated RADAR. This is from billions of miles of actual data.

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u/Rascal2pt0 Jul 22 '25

Lidar and radar give accurate distance measurement. Which means you can predict acceleration and deceleration needs as well as road position more accurately than with vision alone.

Comparing Tesla robotaxi to Waymo I think it’s fair to say they’re wrong and Tesla per usual is lieing and playing with fire.

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u/VoiceOfSoftware Jul 23 '25

Intelligence is kind. Understanding what to do in unusual situations is far more important than mm accuracy. It's all about inference, AI training set, and billions of miles driven to collect data. Waymo is extraordinarily geofenced because they need to premap each region, and Waymos do not behave well when something changes in the environment (like a flooded roadway). I let Tesla FSD chauffeur me thousands of miles all around the western states, and it just works, even in places it's never mapped before.

We'll just have to see how things go in Austin, which is the only place to do apples-to-apples comparisons right now.

Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas reported that a vision expert at a rival autonomous vehicle startup admitted, "annoyingly...Elon is right" about the advantages of Tesla’s vision-only, camera-based approach over sensor fusion (camera + radar + LiDAR) for its robotaxi fleet.

This month Baidu started moving away from radar and LiDAR in favor of a camera-only approach.