> Anyway, I don't think Tesla were wrong to not use LIDAR - they had good reasons to not go down that route. They were excessively expensive and the old style spinning LIDARs were not robust. You could not have sold them on a production car in 2018.

The correct move for Tesla would have been to split the difference and add LIDAR to some subset of their fleet, ideally targeted in the most difficult to debug environments.

Somewhat like Google/Waymo are doing with their Jaguars.

Don't LIDAR 100% of Teslas, but add it to >0%.

▲

ACCount37 5 days ago | parent [-]

Tesla did, in fact, use "ground truth vehicles" - vehicles that were owned and operated by Tesla itself, and had high performance LIDARs installed. They were used to collect the data to train the "vision-only" system and verify its performance.

Reportedly, they no longer use this widely - but they still have some LIDAR-equipped "scout vehicles" they send into certain environments to collect extra data.

▲

ethbr1 4 days ago | parent [-]

It seems like an own goal not to sell these to some interested and targeted customers then.

▲

ACCount37 4 days ago | parent [-]

Who would buy those and why? They don't use LIDARs for better self-driving somehow. They're just data harvesting units with wheels. And I don't think there's a large and underserved market for LIDARs on wheels.

	▲	ethbr1 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Who would buy those and why? [...] They're just data harvesting units with wheels. Tesla would subsidize them and offer them at the same price as non-LIDAR models, to select customers in target areas. And yes, you answered the second part of your own question.