Lidars come down in price ~40x.

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...

Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free.

Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision only.

So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.

Given a good proportion of his success has rested on somehow simplifying or commodifying existing expensive technology (e.g. rockets, and lots of the technology needed to make them; EV batteries) it's surprising that Musk's response to lidar being (at the time) very expensive was to avoid it despite the additional challenges that this brought, rather than attempt to carve a moat by innovating and creating cheaper and better lidar.

> So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.

They could be going for a Tesla-esque approach, in that by equipping every car in the fleet with lidar, they maximise the data captured to help train their models.

I wonder if ubiquity doesn’t effect the lidar performance? Wouldn’t the systems see each other’s laser projections if there are multiple cars close to each other? Also is LIDAR immune to other issues like bright 3rd party sources? At least on iPhone I’m having faceid performance degradation. Also, I suspect other issues like thin or transparent objects net being detected.

With vision you rely on external source or flood light. Its also how our civilization is designed to function in first place.

Anyway, the whole self driving obsession is ridiculous because being driven around in a bad traffic isn’t that much better than driving in bad traffic. It’s cool but can’t beat a the public infrastructure since you can’t make the car dissipated when not in use.

IMHO, connectivity to simulate public transport can be the real sweet spot, regardless of sensor types. Coordinated cars can solve traffic and pretend to be trains.

Between anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.

If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely?

Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.

Personally I don’t buy the argument that it has to be one or the other as Tesla have claimed, but between the two, vision is the only one that captures all the data sufficient to drive a car.

Depends on the specific lidar model. It seems that there's a wide range of lidar prices and capabilities and it's hard to find pricing info.

Could it also be about the looks? Waymo has a rather industrial look, with so many LiDARs, and the roof turret.

^ this, the article is quoting LIDAR price ($25K) from years ago.

Can lidar say what colour is traffic light?

Show the cost differences and do the math then come back to us before you can suggest what decisions were ill timed. Otherwise it's just armchair engineering.