Lidars come down in price ~40x.<p><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop/amp/" rel="nofollow">https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.
If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>> So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.<p>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.<p>With vision you rely on external source or flood light. Its also how our civilization is designed to function in first place.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm not a self-driving believer (never had the opportunity to try it, actually), but I'd say bad traffic would be the number one case where I'd want it. I don't mind highway driving, or city driving if traffic is good, but stop and go traffic is torture to me. I'd much rather just be on my phone, or read a book or something.<p>Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.
I'd assume not since Waymo uses lidar and has entire depots of them driving around in close proximity when not in use.
LIDAR systems use timing, phase locking, and software filtering to identify and eliminate interference from other units. There is still risk of interference, resulting in reduced range, noise, etc.
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.
Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.
That's a legal non-starter for all car companies. They would be made liable for <i>every</i> car incident where self-driving vehicles were spotted in close vicinity, independently of the suit being legit. A complete nightmare and totally unrelated to the tech. Makes would spend more time and tech clearing their asses in court than building safe cars.
Why is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?
People die in car crashes all the time. Self driving can kill a lot of people and still be vastly better than humans.
They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people.<p>If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.
We cannot even properly ban asbestos, expecting people to die first is just having a realistic perspective on how the US government works WRT regulations.
This doc from 1999 has an answer: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE</a>
Usually its capitalism, because in America, they can just buy carveouts after the fact.
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?
I believe traffic lights currently use three bulbs, red, yellow and green. Even without color a computer system can easily determine when each light is lit.<p>If there are single bulbs displaying red, green and yellow please give clear examples.
Flashing lights over rural intersections often do that. There is only one color there (yellow or red), but position is not a signal
How about turn signal vs brake lights?
It’s not either lifar or regular cameras. Use both and combine the information to exceed the humans
Something I've seen noises about is time of flight systems for traffic. I think the idea is you can put those systems on traffic lights, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians and then cars can know where those things are.
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.
I'd love to take on this challenge: the article they linked shows the cost add for LIDAR (+$130) --<p>-- but I'm not sure how to get data on ex. how much Tesla is charged for a Nvidia whatever or what compute Waymo has --<p>My personal take is Waymo uses cameras too so maybe we have to assume the worst case, +full cost of lidar / +$130
Camera's are not the issue, they are dirt cheap. Its the amount of progressing power to combine that output. You can put 360 degree camera's on your car like BYD does, and have Lidar. But you simply use the lidar for the heavy lifting, and use a more lighter model for basic image recognition like: lines on the road/speed plates/etc ...<p>The problem with Tesla is, that they need to combine the outputs of those camera's into a 3d view, what takes a LOT more processing power to judge distances. As in needing more heavy models > more GPU power, more memory needed etc. And still has issues like a low handing sun + white truck = lets ram into that because we do not see it.<p>And the more edge cases you try to filter out with cameras only setups, the more your GPU power needs increase! As a programmer, you can make something darn efficient but its those edge cases that can really hurt your programs efficiency. And its not uncommon to get 5 to 10x performance drops, ... Now imagine that with LLM image recognition models.<p>Tesla's camera only approach works great ... under ideal situations. The issue is those edge cases and not ideal situations. Lidar deals with a ton of edge cases and removes a lot of the progressing needed for ideal situations.
The issue isn't just the cost of the lidar units off the shelf. You have to install the sensors on the car. Modifications like that at the scale that Waymo does them (they still have less than 10K cars) are not automated and probably cost almost as much as the price of the car itself. BYD is getting around this by including them in a mass produced car, so their cost per unit is closer to the $130 off the shelf price. This is the winning combination IMO.
Tesla uses their own chips. Chips which you can’t skip by using lidar because you still need to make decisions based on vision. A sparse distance cloud is not enough