I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers?

It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...

Is there any deeper study on long term effects regarding retinal damage?

I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.

More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.

TIL!

Thanks! What a headache

iPhones have had lidar for years, have cameras been affected?

What? Please explain!

I think we’re well past the point where mass surveillance was a technical challenge. Mass oppression through autonomous violence however…

Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflict.

LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually

The minute internet became widespread it was game over.

Pros and cons. :/

It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.

Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?

Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.

The same Luminar from the Mark Rober video?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/03/17/youtub...

This is very wrong. LIDAR scanners have revolutionized surveying by enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction sites. Handhels LIDAR scanners can map the inside of buildings with incredible accuracy. This is very commonly used to create digital twins of factories.

Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.

For example this one has 120m range with 1cm accuracy and its 15 euros: https://www.temu.com/bg-en/-digital-laser-distance-meter-50m...

Sure, these are the assumptions but silicon is silicon, copper is copper and solder is solder. They don't use easy melting electronics in vacuums and hardened stuff in cars, the tech is about the same unless it is supposed to work in highly radioactive environment. The plastics are different but car interiors are full of plastics, so its unlikely that the costs of temperature resistant plastics needed for this is more than a cupholder.

As for the range, again pretty powerful lasers are sold for sub 10SUD prices on retail. I am sure that there must be higher calibration and precision requirements as the distance increase but is it really order of magnitudes higher? 120 meters laser measurer with 1cm accuracy is 15 Euros on Temu and that thing has an LCD screen and a battery as a handheld device. How much distance do you actually need?

Not only that but vibrations play a big part as well, especially on ICE vehicles.

Sounds like the quality isn't all that great but LD06 sensors look like they're about $20 and someone who works on libraries about this suggested the STL27L which seems to be about $160 and here's an outdoor scan from it: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b...

Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).

Or everyone is just tired of tesla and their stubborn camera only tech that will fail in higher autonomy cases?

No no it's the cabal...

There is no evidence of any such organised campaign. The critical comments we see against that company and person are generally from known, established HN users, and align with frequently-expressed sentiments among the general public. And the complaint is just as often made that "anything remotely critical" about that company and person is flagged. If posts about the topic are being downvoted and flagged, it's mostly because that person and company are in the news so frequently that most commentary about them is repetitive, sensationalist and uninteresting, and thus off topic for HN.

Could be lurkers triggered

If you want to compete with LIDAR, you need high resolution 4D (range, velocity, azimuth, and height) RADAR. Those are usually phased arrays with expensive phase sensitive electronics, and behind that a chip that can do a lot of Fourier transforms very quickly.

The cheap RADAR devices you're talking about usually only output range and velocity, sometimes for a handful of rather large azimuth slices. That doesn't compete with LIDAR at all.

It's fair to point out that comma.ai is SAE level two system, however it's not geofenced at all, which is an SAE level 5 requirement. But really that brings up the fact that SAE's levels aren't the right ones, merely the ones they chose to define since they're the standards body. A better set of levels are the seven I go into more detail about on my blog.

As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will run into.

I took the Waymo from San Jose airport to home on the peninsula. It took the 101 highway back for the most part, driving very conservatively at 65-55 mph, and in the right most lane. It still has a few quirks though. When there aren't any cars around it will speed up to 65 mph, but at on-ramps, it will slow down to 55 and then speed up once past. It will get stuck behind slow drivers being in the right most lane and patiently follow them a few car length behind them. On the plus side, the lidar stack field of view as shown on the internal display seems to see pretty far down the highway.

Why wouldn't you trust a Telsa, millions of people let there Tesla drive them all over USA (not geofences like Waymo) without touching the wheel from parking spot to parking spot everyday. Have you tried it?

Tesla doesnt have Lidar?

Xpeng, Wayne, aiMotive to name three. Probably many others, who claim to use LIDAR but don’t actually rely on it. Because LIDAR is perceived as a prerequisite for autonomous safety, admitting to not needing it is a bad PR move — for now.

Nope...

> Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world.

Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?

> I mean humans have Lidar sensors

Real time slam is actually pretty good, the hard part is reliable object detection using just vision. Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular, which means that its much much harder to get depth (its not impossible but moving objects are much more difficult to observe if you only have cameras aligned on the same plane with no real parallax)

Ultimately Musk is right, you probably don't need lidar to drive safely. but its far more simple and easier to do if you have Lidar. Its also safer. Musk said "lidars are a crutch", not because he is some sort of genius, Its obvious that SLAM only driving is the way forward since the mid 00's (of not earlier). The reason he said it is because he thought he could save money not having lidar. The problem for him is that he didn't do the research to see how far away proper machine perception is to account for the last 1% in accuracy needed to make vision only safe and reliable.

> Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world.

My understanding is that cyber cabs still need safety drivers to operate, is that not the case?

Humans also don't have wheels, but we build objects with wheels. It is as if we can build objects that don't resemble humans for specific purposes. Crazy...

> Yes, silly using just cameras, I mean humans have Lidar sensors, that why they can drive, why didn't new just copy that....oh wait.

Humans don't have wheels and cannot go 70MPH. Humans also don't have rear view cameras and cannot process video feeds from 8 cameras simultaneously. The point of these machines is to be better than humans for transportation. If adding LIDAR means that these vehicles can see better than humans and avoid accidents that humans do get into, then I for one want them in my vehicle.

This is a weirdly tired counterpoint that Elon and Elonstans like to bandy about as if it's an apples to apples comparison. Humans have a weirdly ultra-high-dynamic-range binocular vision system mounted on an advanced ptz/swivel gimbal that allows for a great degree of freedom of movement, parallax effects, and a complex heuristic system for analyzing vision data.

The Tesla FSD system has... well, sure, a few more cameras, but they're low resolution, and in inconveniently fixed locations.

My alley has an occlusion at the corner where it connects to the main road: a very tall, very ample bush that basically makes it impossible to authoritatively check oncoming traffic to my left. I, a human, can determine that if I see the light flicker even slightly as it filters through the bushes, that the path is not clear: a car is likely causing that very slight change in light. My Tesla has no clue at all that that's happening. And worse, the perpendicular camera responsible for checking cross-traffic is mounted _behind my head_ on the b-pillar, in a fixed location that means that without nosing my car _into_ the travel lane, there is literally no way for it to be sure the path is clear.

This edge case is navigated near-perfectly by Waymo, since its roof-mounted lidar can see above and beyond the bush and determine that the path is clear. And to hit back on the "Tesla is making cheaper cars that can drive autonomously anywhere in the world": I mean, they still aren't? Not authoritatively. Not authoritatively enough that they aren't seeing all sorts of interventions in the few "driverless" trials they're doing in Austin. Not authoritatively enough when I have my Tesla FSD to glory. It works well enough on the fat part of the bell curve, but those edges will get you, and a vision only system means that it is extremely brittle in certain conditions and with certain failure modes, that a lidar/radar backup help _enhance_.

Moreover, Waymo has brought lidar development in-house, they're working to dramatically reduce their vehicle platform cost by reducing some redundant sensors, and they can now simulate a ground truth model of an absurd number of edge cases and odd scenarios, as well as simulate different conditions for real-world locations in parallel with their new world modeling systems.

None of which reads to me as "not going well for Waymo." Waymo completes over 450,000 fully autonomous rides per week right now. They're dramatically lowering their own barriers to new cities/geographies/conditions, and they're pushing down the cost per unit substantially. Yeah, it won't get to be as cheap as Tesla owning the entire means of production, but I'm still extremely bullish on Waymo being the frontrunner for autonomous driving for the foreseeable future.

Humans cannot drive safely. Human drivers kill someone every 26 seconds. Waymos have never killed a person.

Part of that is that humans are distractible, and their performance can be degraded in many ways, and that silicon thinks faster than meat.

But part of it is the sensor suite. Look at Waymo vs Tesla robotaxi accident rates.