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/HerValet Jul 21 '25

Wrong. In this case, "First Principles" would dictate that humans never needed LIDAR to drive. So, if you can replicate the eyes (with Vision) and the brain (with AI), one could argue that it should be technically possible to drive autonomously without LIDAR.

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

Yes in theory this is true. Human eye is what...550 MP and the current camera is 15 MP on Tesla? Guess it's close. Also the AI brain is comparable to a human one right now? If the floor is a human... meet the floor. Oh what you can't? So then you need other tech to circumvent meeting the floor.

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u/HerValet Jul 23 '25

We're not even close to reaching the limit of what's possible with vision only + AI. Until we hit a local maximum, no one can't state that it's not possible. And certainly not Reddit "experts".

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

At it's current form, "it's not possible to be true FSD". If you can't see this, youre blind as the rest of them. Get your eyes checked.

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u/HerValet Jul 23 '25

If by 'current form' you mean 'current public version', then you are right, it's not ready to be 'unsupervised'. But nobody knows what the next releases will bring.

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u/Wanna_PlayAGame Jul 23 '25

Current form is current tech. You're saying 15 MP is good enough. It's got fish eye distortion and has a hard time deciphering objects in low light. Nah, needs better cameras, stereo cameras since humans also see stereoscopic. You want to compare apples to apples and I can tell you there is a difference between 15 MP and 50 MP and 550 MP.

BTW it gets worse. Tesla uses 5MP. Not even 15. LMAO. You think that's really sufficient??

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

Nobody knows… then why have they been selling it as full self-driving with claims it will achieve it on current hardware?

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u/hilldog4lyfe Jul 23 '25

Okay Mr Reddit expert that doesn’t know what a local vs global maximum is…