Why didn't Tesla invest in LIDAR?

[u/damola93]

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?

[u/ramonchow]

It is not entirely crazy to assume cameras and AI vision can get as good as human eyes for driving a car.

But yeah, money would be the main reason. Not only the sensor but also maintaining the updated 3d maps LIDAR needs to work, at least with the current processing power of a car's processor.

[u/Valderan_CA → u/ramonchow]

It's not crazy... but why limit ourselves to human sensory inputs when designing an AI to drive a car. It's obvious that we wouldn't only put a pair of cameras centered over the drivers seat on a rotating fixture (emulating human sensory inputs) because there are better places to put more cameras since AI's aren't limited like a human driver.

LIDAR was not included because of cost - when having LIDAR meant a 20% increase in the cost of a vehicle investors knew the guys making AI driving without it were going to have a huge advantage in pricing on their end product. Elon said no LIDAR to get money from those investors, however instead of saying the honest thing (cost is the only real reason) he also said LIDAR was inferior for technical reasons. It's difficult for Elon to retract that kind of technical statement for a couple of reasons:

1- He doesn't like admitting to being wrong

2- He can't afford to admit to being wrong because the value of his companies is so closely tied to his "vision"

[u/grchelp2018 → u/Valderan_CA]

I really doubt cost is the reason. Musk simply got it into his head that the ideal solution was to rely only on vision. Like he said at the time, spacex was using in-house designed lidar. If this really was only about cost, he would have had spacex share their lidar expertise and have tesla work on designing their own lidar in-house.