> The cold hard truth is that LIDARs are a crutch

The hard truth is there is no reason to limit machines to only the tools humans are biologically born with. Cars always have crutches that humans don't possess. For example, wheels.

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dcchambers 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly.

In a true self-driving utopia, all of the cars are using multiple methods to observe the road and drive (vision, lidar, GPS, etc) AND they are all communicating with each other silently, constantly, about their intentions and status.

Why limit cars to what humans can do?

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mensetmanusman 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The hard truth is you are balancing cost benefit curves.

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daveguy 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The "lidar is a crutch" excuse is such a fraud. Musk is doing it so he can make more money, because it's cheaper. Thats it. Just another sociopath billionaire cutting corners at the expense of safety.

The reason this is clear is because, except for a brief period in late 2022, Teslas have included some combination of radar and ultrasonic sensors. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot_hardware

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profunctor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The reason is cost, LIDAR is expensive.

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kibwen 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

This information is out of date. LIDAR costs are 10x less than they were a decade ago, and still falling.

Turns out, when there's demand for LIDAR in this form factor, people invest in R&D to drive costs down and set up manufacturing facilities to achieve economies of scale. Wow, who could have predicted this‽

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throwaway31131 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cost is relative. LIDAR maybe be expensive relative to a camera or two but it’s very inexpensive compared to hiring a full time driver. Crashes aren’t particularly cheap either. Neither are insurance premiums.

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DennisP 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Huawei has a self-driving system that uses three lidars, which cost $250 each (plus vision, radar, and ultrasound). It appears to work about as well as FSD. Here's the Out of Spec guys riding around on it in China for an hour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g

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mensetmanusman 5 days ago | parent [-]

Huawei received over $1 billion in grants from the Chinese government in 2023.

Western countries might not be smart enough to keep R&D because Wall Street sees it as a cost center.

	▲	DennisP 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Tesla spent about $10 billion on AI training hardware in 2024.[1] They just might not be getting as much bang for the buck, due to their paucity of sensors. Huawei get similar performance without Tesla's four billion miles of training data. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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ModernMech 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You know what used to be expensive? Cameras. Then people started manufacturing them for mass market and cost when down.

You know what else used to be expensive? Structured light sensors. They cost $$$$ in 2009. Then Microsoft started manufacturing the Kinect for a mass market, and in 2010 price went down to $150.

You know what's happened to LIDAR in the past decade? You guessed it, costs have come massively down because car manufacturers started buying more, and costs will continue to come down as they reach mass market adoption.

The prohibitive cost for LIDAR coming down was always just a matter of time. A "visionary" like Musk should have been able to see that. Instead he thought he could outsmart everyone by using a technology that was not suited for the job, but he made the wrong bet.

	▲	jqpabc123 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		but he made the wrong bet. This should be expected when someone who is not an experienced engineer starts making engineering decisions.

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zbrozek 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not 2010 anymore. They will asymptotically reach approximately twice the price of a camera, since they need both a transmit and receive optical path. Right now the cheapest of the good LiDARs are around 3-4x that. So we're getting close, and we're already within the realm large-scale commercial viability.

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uoaei 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's ok, they're supposed to be. That's no excuse to rush a bad job.

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revnode 5 days ago | parent [-]

The point of engineering is to make something that’s economically viable, not to slap together something that works. Making something that works is easy, making something that works and can be sold at scale is hard.

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uoaei 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's not engineering, that's industry. It's important to distinguish the two.

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revnode 5 days ago | parent [-]

Engineering only exists within industry. Everything else is a hobby.

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uoaei 5 days ago | parent [-]

That's simply not true. Engineering can exist outside industry. "Stuff costs money" is not a governing aspect of these kinds of things.

FOSS is the obvious counterexample to your absurdly firm stance, but so are many artistic pursuits that use engineering techniques and principles, etc.

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revnode 4 days ago | parent [-]

Industry includes FOSS and artistic endeavors, anything that’s done professionally.

My intent was to exclude research efforts, which is fundamentally different from engineering, which is a practical concern and not a “get it to just work” concern.

	▲	uoaei 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's an interesting question, the question of whether engineering per se is strictly pragmatic. I personally think drawing a hard line between research and engineering is a misstep and relies too heavily on a bureaucratic kind of metaphysics.

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waldarbeiter 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If it would be easy there would already be a car costing a few million that few can afford but that has solved AD. But there isn't.

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revnode 5 days ago | parent [-]

There is no market for such a thing. At that price point, you get a personal chauffeur. That’s what rich people do and he can do stuff that a self driving system never can.

	▲	tialaramex 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		And the rich people who don't want a chauffeur like driving the car. They will buy a $10M car no problem, but they want driving that car to be fun because that's what they were paying for. They don't want you to make the driving more automatic and less interesting.