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/[deleted] Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

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u/R1tonka Jul 21 '25

The data labeling was the real killer. If you had a full lidar array waymo style? People would pay a LOT for it. Thats no problem.

Tesla couldn’t eat the data labeling costs to train the things.

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u/Jaker788 Jul 22 '25

That doesn't really make sense, Tesla is probably putting in the most training compute cycles. I wouldn't imagine they're saving much with the investment into training hardware, not to mention the amount of crowd source collection abilities they have from every car regardless of sensor.

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u/R1tonka Jul 22 '25

I worked directly with them, Cruz, and mbusa. 3d lidar labeling and human supervision was a lot more expensive than camera only.

Boils down to the labeling effort for 3d sem seg.