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.
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.
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.
Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.
Unfortunately in my region highway traffic is quite congested, and so called "adaptive cruise control" is a game changer. I find it reduces fatigue by a lot. Usually the trucks are all cruising at the speed limit and I just hang with them. I only change lanes if they slow down or there's an obstruction etc.
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.
i imagine seismic has already well solved a lot of that.
you know a lot about the light you are sending, and what the speed of light is, so you can filter out unexpected timings, and understand multiple returns
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.
It's the same with his humanoid robot. Instead of building yet another useless hype machine, why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms? You have a guaranteed customer (yourself) and once you have figured out the design, you can start selling to external customers.
> why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms?
Robot arms are neither a low-volume unique/high-cost market (SpaceX), nor a high-volume/high-margin business (Tesla). On top of that it's already a quite crowded space.
The ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted this exact scenario confirmed to me he was not as smart as some people think he was. He seemed to have drank his own koolaid back then.
And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.
I think there’s room for both points of view here. Going all in on visual processing means you can use it anywhere a person can go in any other technology, Optimus robots are just one example.
And he’s not wrong that roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.
The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.
Didn't waymo stop operating simply because they aren't as cavalier as Tesla, and they have much more to lose since they are actually self driving instead of just driver assistance? Was the lidar/vision difference actually significant?
> roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.
And people die all the time.
> The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.
Huh? Waymo is responsible for injury, so all their cars called home at the same time DOS themselves rather than kill someone.
Tesla makes no responsibility and does nothing.
I can’t see the logic the brings vision only as having anything to do lights out. At all.
Yes... but people can only focus on one thing at a time. We don't have 360 vision. We have blind spots! We don't even know the exact speed of our car without looking away from the road momentarily! Vision based cars obviously don't have these issues. Just because some cars are 100% vision doesn't mean that it has to share all of the faults we have when driving.
That's not me in favour of one vs the other. I'm ambivalent and don't actually care. They can clearly both work.
I wonder how much of their trouble comes from other failures in their plan (avoiding the use of pre-made maps and single city taxi services in favor of a system intended to drive in unseen cities) vs how much comes from vision. There are concerning failure modes from vision alone but it’s not clear that’s actually the reason for the failure. Waymo built an expensive safe system that is a taxi first and can only operate on certain areas, and then they ran reps on those areas for a decade.
Tesla specifically decided not to use the taxi-first approach, which does make sense since they want to sell cars. One of the first major failures of their approach was to start selling pre-orders for self driving. If they hadn’t, they would not have needed to promise it would work everywhere, and could have pivoted to single city taxi services like the other companies, or added lidar.
But certainly it all came from Musk’s hubris, first to set out to solve the self driving in all conditions using only vision, and then to start selling it before it was done, making it difficult to change paths once so much had been promised.
> And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.
The absolute genius made sure that he can't back out without making it bleedingly obvious that old cars can never be upgraded for a LIDAR-based stack. Right now he's avoiding a company-killing class action suit by stalling, hoping people will get rid of HW3 cars, (and you can add HW4 cars soon too) and pretending that those cars will be updated, but if you also need to have LIDAR sensors, you're massively screwed.
Fair. So in a sense, the lidar vs camera argument ultimately can be publicly assess/proven through human babysitter (regulation permit) and accident rates. or maybe user adoptions.
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.
For one, no one is seriously contemplating a LIDAR-only system, the question is between camera+LIDAR or camera-only.
> Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.
Actually, given that basically every meaningful LIDAR on the market gives an "intensity" value for each return, in surprisingly many cases you could get this kind of imaging behavior from LIDAR so long as the point density is sufficient for the features you wish to capture (and point density, particularly in terms of points/sec/$, continues to improve at a pretty good rate). A lot of the features that go into making road signage visible to drivers (e.g. reflective lettering on signs, cats eye reflectors, etc) also result in good contrast in LIDAR intensity values.
It's like having 2 pilots instead of 1 pilot. If one pilot is unexpectedly defective (has a heart attack mid-flight), you still have the other pilot. Some errors between the 2 pilots aren't uncorrelated of course, but many of them are. So the chance of an at-fault crash goes from p and approaches p^2 in the best case. That's an unintuitively large improvement. Many laypeople's gut instinct would be more like p -> p/2 improvement from having 2 pilots (or 2 data streams in the case of camera+LIDAR).
In the camera+LIDAR case, you conceptually require AND(x.ok for all x) before you accelerate. If only one of those systems says there's a white truck in front of you, then you hit the brakes, instead of requiring both of them to flag it. False negatives are what you're trying to avoid because the confusion matrix shouldn't be equally weighted given the additional downside of a catastrophic crash. That's where two somewhat independent data streams becomes so powerful at reducing crashes, you really benefit from those ~uncorrelated errors.
"In the camera+LIDAR case, you conceptually require AND(x.ok for all x) before you accelerate."
This can be learnt by the model. Let's assume vision is 100% correct, the model would learn to ignore LIDAR, so the worst case scenario is that LIDAR is extra cost for zero benefit.
This is not going to be true for a very long time, at least so long as one's definition of "vision" is something like "low-cost passive planar high-resolution imaging sensors sensitive to the visual and IR spectrum" (I include "low-cost" on the basis that while SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR sensors do provide useful capabilities for self-driving applications, they are often equally expensive, if not much more so, than LIDARs). Camera sensors have gotten quite good, but they are still fundamentally much less capable than the human eyes plus visual cortex in terms of useful dynamic range, motion sensitivity, and depth cues - and human eyes regularly encounter driving conditions which interfere or prohibit safe driving (e.g. mist/ fog, heavy rain/snow, blowing sand/dust, low-angle sunlight at sunrise/sunset/winter). One of the best features of LIDAR is that it is either immune or much less sensitive to these phenomena at the ranges we care about for driving.
Of course, LIDAR is not without its own failings, and the ideal system really is one that combines cameras, LIDARs, and RADARs. The problem there is that building automotive RADAR with sufficient spatial resolution to reliably discriminate between stationary obstacles (e.g. a car stalled ahead) and nearby clutter (e.g. a bridge above the road) is something of an unsolved problem.
The worst case scenario is that LIDAR is a rapidly falling extra cost for zero benefit? Sounds like it's a good idea to invest into cheap LIDAR just in case the worst case doesn't happen. Even better, you can get a head start by investing in the solution early and abandon it when it has obsolete.
By the way, Tesla engineers secretly trained their vision systems using LIDAR data because that's how you get training data. When Elon Musk found out, he fired them.
Finally, your premise is nonsensical. Using end to end learning for self driving sounds batshit crazy to me. Traffic rules are very rigid and differ depending on the location. Tesla's self driving solution gets you ticketed for traffic violations in China. Machine learning is generally used to "parse" the sensor output into a machine representation and then classical algorithms do most of the work.
The rationale for being against LIDAR seems to be "Elon Musk said LIDAR is bad" and is not based on any deficiency in LIDAR technology.
Sorry if this is obvious, but are there actually any systems that "choose one over the other"? My impression's always been it was either vision + LIDAR, or vision alone. Are there any examples of LIDAR alone?
Roomba (specifically the brand of the American company iRobot) only added lidar in 2025 [1]. Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls), and then by cameras.
But if you use "roomba" as a generic term for robot vacuum then yes, Chinese Ecovacs and Xiaomi introduced lidar-based robot vacuums in 2015 [2].
> Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls)
My ex got a Roomba in the early 2010s and it gave me an irrational but everlasting disdain for the company.
They kept mentioning their "proprietary algorithm" like it was some amazing futuristic thing but watching that thing just bump into something and turn, bump into something else and turn, bump into something again and turn again, etc ... it made me hate that thing.
Now when my dog can't find her ball and starts senselessly roaming in all the wrong directions in a panic, I call it Roomba mode.
For full self driving sure but the more regular assisted driving with basic ‘knows where other cars are in relation to you and can break/turn/alarm to avoid collisions’ as well as adaptive cruise control lidar can manage well enough.
I think fsd should be both at minimum though. No reason to skimp on a niw inexpensive sensor that sees things vision alone doesn’t.
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.
By this logic, then we should also create a rule for regular, non-self-driving that says, if you have a car accident that kills someone, all your wealth is taken away and given to the victim's family. If we had a rule like this, then "you'd probably see much safer driving". Are you willing to drive under those circumstances? I am sure you will say yes, but it does not make your suggestion any less ridiculous.
I can think of one example where something similar works. The requirements from insurance companies on airline pilots are considerable tougher than the government ones because they are on the hook for ~$200m if they crash.
A big reason car companies don't worry much about killing pedestrians at the moment is it costs them ~$0.
About half our road fatalities are pedestrians. About 80% of those are intoxicated with alcohol. When you're driving at 40mph, at night, and some drunk guy chooses to cross the road, no amount of safety features or liabilities can save him.
Sure, cars can be safer for light collisions with pedestrians where the car is going slowly. Especially in the US where half the cars have a very high hood. But where I live the problem is not safer cars, it's drunk pedestrians.
I wonder how a Waymo would do with your drunks? Really the answer for that is probably more a different road layout so the drinking is separate from the traffic. I live near Soho in London which is full of drunk people in the streets but most traffic is blocked off there or doing 10 mph.
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.
That's a legal non-starter for all car companies. They would be made liable for every 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.
It wasn't ill timed. Any sane leader would understand both size and cost of tech always comes down rather quickly over time. He's just refused to accept having lidar uglify his cars or wait for it to get smaller. He instead fabricates about humans don't have lidars so cars shouldn't have them and sold "no lidars on Teslas" as an advantage instead of the opposite and refuses to accept the truth due to needing to feed his ego. Firing all non-yesmen didn't help either.
Some companies work on reducing the size of it so manufacturers will be able to put it inside the car behind the mirror. Innoviz is one example https://techtime.news/2025/11/14/innoviz-27/
Is that really true? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Ars cites this China Daily article[0], which gives no specifics and simply states:
>A LiDAR unit, for instance, used to cost 30,000 yuan (about $4,100), but now it costs only around 1,000 yuan (about $138) — a dramatic decrease, said Li.
How good are these $138 LiDARs? Who knows, because this article gives no information.
This article[1] from around the same time gives more specifics, listing under "1000 yuan LiDARs" the RoboSense MX, Hesai Technology ATX, Zvision Technologies ZVISION EZ5, and the VanJee Technology WLR-760.
The RoboSense MX is selling for $2,000-3,000, so it's not exactly $138. It was going to be added to XPENG cars, before they switched away from LiDAR. Yikes.
The ATX is $1400, the EZ5 isn't available, and the WLR-760 is $3500. So the press release claims of sub-$200 never really materialized.
Furthermore, all of these are low beam count LiDARs with a limited FOV. These are 120°x20°, whereas Waymo sensors cover 360°x95° (and it still needs 4 of them).
It seems my initial skepticism was well placed.
>if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar
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.
If there are single bulbs displaying red, green and yellow please give clear examples.
What do you mean by proportion? They are different data sources, and their usage is determined by system design.
eg A driving decision system needs to know object distances AND traffic light colours. It doesn't particularly need to know the source of either.
You could have a camera-only system that accurately determines colour and fuzzy-determines distance. Or you could have a LIDAR-only system that accurately determines distance and fuzzy-determines colour.
Or you use both, get accurate LIDAR-distance and accurate camera-colour and skip all the fuzzy-determination steps.
Or keep the fuzzy stuff and build a layer of measurement-agreement for redundancy.
So then the question becomes, what's your proportion when deciding whether to stop at a traffic light? Is it mostly light colour or mostly distance to other objects? Or 50/50?
> At what proportion? Is it mostly lidar or mostly cameras? Or 50/50?
What proportion of your vision is rods or cones? Depends on the context. You can do without one. But it’s better with both.
> How about when you come 4 way stop. LIDAR is useless as it wouldn't recognize anyones turn signals
Bad example. 99% of a 4-way stop is remembering who moved last, who moves next by custom and who may jump the line. What someone is indicating is, depending on where you are, between mildly helpful and useless.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Waymo already has an automated integration line, and the new vehicles from Zeekr will come partially assembled from the factory as a semi-custom design so there's no modifications in the sense that you're talking about.
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
Are you serious, a car with Lidar sensor that's not even available in Bugatti Tourbillon that cost 500x more?
Joking aside, this BYD Seagull, or Atto 1 in Australia (AUD$24K) and Dolphin Surf in Europe (￡18K in the UK), is one the cheapest EV cars in the world and selling at around ￡6K in China. It's priced double in Australia and triple in the UK compared to its original price in China. It's also one of China best selling EV cars with 60K unit sold per month on average.
Most of the countries scrambling to block its sales to protect their own car industry or increase the tariff considerably.
It's a game changing car and it really deserve the place in EV car world Hall of Fame, as one of the legendary cars similar Austin 7, the father of modern ICE car including BMW Dixi and Datsun Type 11.
I agree with every word about the BYD, in fact I just recently helped a family member buy one. But how would you pick the Austin 7 over the Model T as your example revolutionary car? Serious question, you're obviously knowledgeable if you mentioned that vehicle.
You can check the video on the early generation cars reviewed by the famous Top Gear team members [1].
Austin 7 and its derivatives (notably Dixi that kickstarted the highly successful BMW car business), dictated and popularized the modern car architecture, interfaces and controls stereotype as we know today. In order to drive old cars prior to Austin 7, we probably need a manual before we can drive them except the Cadillac Type 53 car, the original car that heavily inspired the Austin 7.
Austin 7 is the lightest car and cheapest proper car of its generation, and even by today's standard and inflation. As crazy as it sounds you can even drive it now in the UK road without any modification [2].
It become the template of modern cars, made popular in the UK, Germany and Japan, and then the rest of the world since these three countries are major manufacturers of modern cars.
The lighweight and low cost price of the baby Seagull (smallest BYD), is very similar to Baby Austin (popular name for Austin 7 in the UK) innovation criteria.
[1] Jeremy Clarkson and James May Find the First Car [video]:
I don't expect FSD any time soon. I think its bunkum.
But assistive devices are well embedded. reversing tones. rear vision cameras.
So, adding something which can do side knock, pavement risk, sideswipe, blind spot, or 'pace to car in front' type stuff is a bit obvious if you ask me, and if it's optional, then all I want is the minimal wiring harness cost amortized out so retrofit isn't too hard.
I hope BYD also continues to do "real switches" and "smaller TV dashboard" choices because I'm not a fan of touch screen, and large screen.
Llm hallucination? I want to give posters the benefit of the doubt but I didn't mention a reddit thread.
If you're just getting me mixed up with another poster, I got my stats from an electrek article supplemented by Waymo's releases: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Tesla's tech is also marketed as a full self driving autopilot, not just basic driver assistance like adaptive cruise control.
That's how they're doing the autonomous robotaxis and the cross country drives without anyone touching the steering wheel.
Sure. And Tesla doesn't have robotaxis at all, they're still playing in the kindergarten league.
So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better.
FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions. If I try to turn it on, it attempts to kill me at least once on my route from my office to my home. So other car makers quite sensibly avoided it, until they perfected the technology.
This goes against my daily fsd usage and my friends fsd usage. We all use fsd daily, zero issues, through hard city and highway environments. It’s near perfect outside of the occasional weird routing issues (but that’s not a safety issue). We all have the latest fsd on hw4. No other consumer car on the market in the US can do this (go from point a to b with zero interventions through city and highway). If there was something better then I’d buy it, but there’s not.
The issue here is that "zero issues" is something that must be based on a very large sample size. In the US the death rate for cars is a bit over 1 per 100 million miles. So you really need billions of miles of data. FSD could be 10x as dangerous as the average driver and still it would most likely be "zero issues" for you and all your friends.
I'll post the 7 billion miles of stats here (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) but then the objections will be "it's Tesla of course they lie" and the debunked "they turn FSD off right before an accident".
Sigh. FSD is OK on freeways, but it constantly changes lanes for no discernible reasons. Sometimes unsafely or unnaturally, forcing me to take over. The previous stack had a setting to disable that, but not the new end-to-end NN-based system.
In cities, it's just shit. If you're using it without paying attention, your driving license has to be revoked and you should never be allowed to drive.
Girl get real. Mercedes fooled quite a few people with their PR stunt but they have NOTHING like fsd. Drive assist pro is vaporware, as their “L3” has been for the past 2 years. You can’t order that shit but half of hackernews is glazing mercedes for it
They canceled the Drive Pilot L3, which is fully autonomous with zero driver intervention (approved by the government), because the software isn't there yet due to the hand off problem. They are still working on making it work at 130km/h on the highways. The problem with a zero driver intervention system is that the driver isn't guaranteed to pay attention when the mode is no longer applicable and the mode switch is only obvious on the highway when exiting, but the L3 system doesn't support highway driving speeds yet.
I'm not talking about some Tesla style last second bullshit where you're supposed to compensate for the deficiencies of the system that supposedly can do the full journey. I mean a route like L2->L3->L2 where L2 is human supervised autonomous driving and L3 is autonomous driving with zero intervention. You can't tell people they're allowed to drink a coffee and then one minute later tell them to supervise the driving.
For anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie. Why would you spend energy lying on HN of all places?
> anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie
I used the latest FSD and Waymo in December. FSD still needs to be supervised. It’s impressive and better than what my Subaru’s lane-keeping software can do. But I can confidently nap in a Waymo. These are totally different products and technology stacks.
I recently went on vacation and rented a 7 year old Model X and the FSD on it (v12) was better than nothing but not great, especially after having v14 on my truck drive 99% of my miles. It truly is a life-changer for people fortunate enough to have it, so it's always jarring to see the misinformed/dishonest comments online. It's still not perfect but at this point I would trust it more than the average human and certainly more than a new/old/exhausted/inebriated/distracted driver.
It also misinterprets this signal: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhZsQtN5LKy59Mpv6 It doesn't have enough resolution to resolve the red left arrow, especially when it's even mildly rainy.
Are you talking hw3 or 4? Also, the e2e FSD is recent. And FSD has gotten really good since 13, and with 14 it's really, really good. Not sure what 2015 has to do with anything. Red hands of death would be sunglare due to your windshield not being clean. I haven't had red hands since 14 came out.
Because I use them both and I can tell Teslas are really, really good at driving, and more naturally than Waymo at that. Obviously there’s a reason they’re still supervised but if they manage to climb that mountain it’s game over for waymo
What's lacking here? Waymos are driving driverless in multiple cities and Teslas are not. Robotaxis have a person with hands on button at at times for emergencies.
They might get better but how is that not evidence enough that currently Robotaxis are behind Waymos in self driving capabilities?
Is it really comparable, though? What is better a Ferrari or a Ford Ranger? That depends on if you are trying to go fast or haul 500 lbs of stuff across town. Waymo is a much better completely autonomous robo taxi in limited areas mapped to the mm, but if I want an autonomous driving system for my personal car to go wherever I want, Tesla FSD is the better option.
We being who? What is your evidence it's better? The fact all the cars stopped moving when the power went out? The fact they cost WayMore? Show the evidence for your claims. And they have remote operators as proven by the power outage.
Apologies, I was unclear with the "i.e." bit I assume, to spell it out: I think after struggling with it over years its time to call it because Waymo has a scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+.
It’s because you spam this thread so much with such aggressive language that it honestly is scary to deal with you.
You’re smart Darren, and so are other people, you should assume I knew the cars have remote backup operators. Again, you’re smart, you also know why that doesn’t mitigate having a scaled robotaxi service vs. nothing
I doubt you’ll chill out but here’s a little behind the scenes peek for you that also directly address what you’re saying: a big turning point for me was getting a job at Google and realizing Elon was talking big game but there’s 100,000 things you gotta do to run a robot taxi service and Tesla was doing none of them. The epiphany came when I saw the windshield wipers for cameras and lidar.
You might note even a platonically ideal robotaxi service would always have capacity for remote operation.
This is such a weird take when Elon Musk is still letting his Optimus robots be teleoperated for basically every live demo. If you're lenient with him, it's completely unreasonable to be strict with Waymo, which works autonomously the vast majority of time.
I was just thinking about this on my 60 mile FSD driver I just finished. Basically inevitable that I would shortly go HN or reddit and read how FSD doesn't work.
FSD is here, it wasn't 3 or 4 years ago when I first bought a Tesla, but today it's incredible.
The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors.
For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever.
Doesn’t mean they’re failing because of interfering lidar though. If it’s something like them failing due to the road being blocked or something, it makes sense they’d fail together. Assuming they’re on the same OS, why would one know how to handle that situation and another not?
I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0]
What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs.
That was autopilot not FSD. Autopilot is a simple ADAS system similar to Toyota Safety sense or all the other garbage ADAS systems from Honda, Kia, Toyota, GM etc. FSD passed this test with flying colors
But optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver.
Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
> and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset?
So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforcement force for illegal murals? I love this, I have had heath issues recently, and I have not laughed this hard for a while. Thank you.
Hell, at the last "Tesla AI Day," Musk himself said ~"FSD basically requires AGI" - so he is well aware.
Intentionally trying to create traffic accidents is illegal. This isn't an FSD-thing. If you try to intentionally get humans to crash their cars you are going to get into trouble. I don't see how this suddenly becomes OK when done to competent FSD (not that I'd count Tesla among them)
If I understand your argument correctly, then posting a sign that it is incorrect.. like a wrong way highway on-ramp sign, would be illegal? That sounds correct.
But what if your city hired you to paint a sunset mural on a wall, and then a vision-only system killed a family of four by driving into it, during some "edge case" lighting situation?
I would like to think that we would apply "security is an onion" to our physical safety as well. Stereo vision + lidar + radar + ultrasonic? Would that not be the least that we could do as technologists?
everyone uses cellphone that transmit on the same frequency. they don't seem to cause interference. once enough lidar enters real word use. there will be regulation to make them work with each other.
Completely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors.
LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.
No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code
Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly have easier ways to do it.
> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs.
For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.
I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.
Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
> For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.
I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses, as opposed to by shaping individual pulses. (I've seen systems that introduce random jitter across multiple pulses to de-correlate interference, but that's a bit different.) The issue is you really do get a hell of a lot of data out of a single pulse, and for interesting objects (thin poles, power lines) there's not a lot of correlation between adjacent pulses -- you can't always assume properties across multiple pulses without having to throw away data from single data-carrying pulses.
Edit: Another way of saying this -- your revisit rate to a specific point of interference is around 20 Hz. That's just not a lot of bits per unit time.
> Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
I can believe this is true for FMCW lidar, but I know it to be untrue for pulsed lidar. Perhaps we're discussing different systems?
I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses...
My naive assumption would be that they would do exactly that. In fact, offhand, I don't know how else I'd go about it. When emitting pulses every X ns, I might envision using a long LFSR whose low-order bit specifies whether to skip the next X-ns time slot or not. Every car gets its own lidar seed, just like it gets its own key fob seed now.
Then, when listening for returned pulses, the receiver would correlate against the same sequence. Echoes from fixed objects would be represented by a constant lag, while those from moving ones would be "Doppler-shifted" in time and show up at varying lags.
So yes, you'd lose some energy due to dead time that you'd otherwise fill with a constant pulse train, but the processing gain from the correlator would presumably make up for that and then some. Why wouldn't existing systems do something like this?
I've never designed a lidar, but I can't believe there's anything to the multiple-access problem that wasn't already well-known in the 1970s. What else needs to be invented, other than implementation and integration details?
Edit re: the 20 Hz constraint, that's one area where our assumptions probably diverge. The output might be 20 Hz but internally, why wouldn't you be working with millions of individual pulses per frame? Lasers are freaking fast and so are photodiodes, given synchronous detection.
I suggest looking at a rotating lidar with an infrared scope... it's super, super informative and a lot of fun. Worth just camping out in SF or Mountain View and looking at all the different patterns on the wall as different lidar-equipped cars drive by.
A typical long range rotating pulsed lidar rotates at ~20 Hz, has 32 - 64 vertical channels (with spacing not necessarily uniform), and fires each channel's laser at around 20 kHz. This gives vertical channel spacing on the order of 1°, and horizontal channel spacing on the order of 0.3°. The perception folks assure me that having horizontal data orders of magnitude denser than vertical data doesn't really add value to them; and going to a higher pulse rate runs into the issue of self-interference between channels, which is much more annoying to deal with then interference from other lidars.
If you want to take that 20 kHz to 200 kHz, you first run into the fact that there can now be 10 pulses in flight at the same time... and that you're trying to detect low-photon-count events with an APD or SPAD outputting nanoamps within a few inches of a laser driver putting generating nanosecond pulses at tens of amps. That's a lot of additional noise! And even then, you have an 0.03° spacing between pulses, which means that successive pulses don't even overlap at max range with a typical spot diameter of 1" - 2" -- so depending on the surfaces you're hitting, on their continuity as seen by you, you still can't really say anything about the expected time alignment of adjacent pulses. Taking this to 2 MHz would let you guarantee some overlap for a handful of pulses, but only some... and that's still not a lot of samples to correlate. And of course your laser power usage and thermal challenges just went up two orders of magnitude...
Narrow field of view LIDAR units have been moderately priced for years. Forward looking LIDAR is useful for anti-collision systems. It doesn't yield the situational awareness of full coverage needed for full autonomy, but it's good for putting on the brakes.
Keep in mind, that $25k AUD is just $16600. And for that price, you're getting a real car with driver-assist features and a reasonable crash safety rating.
US manufacturers are going to be ok as long as there are policies banning foreign cars and there are tariffs, which is going to be true for a long time.
And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.
Man, living in Canada, I wish we were allowed to import Chinese cars. If America is putting tariffs on us and threatening our sovereignty, that's all the more reason to divest from American made cars.
I had family friends visiting Australia from USA and they were surprised by the sheer number and varieties of Chinese cars on our roads. I too have a BYD Dolphin and Shark, they loved them and felt they’re missing out big time on this. Mind you we have lots of Teslas on the roads as well, but they are bleeding their lead.
Those Teslas in Australia are Chinese made too of course as are the majority of Teslas globally. USA made really doesn’t exist at all in Australia. It’s merely USA branded. Even the Ford Ranger that’s sold in Australia is made in Thailand.
> And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.
It's baffling and a complete self goal.
The GMC dealership near me is spilling full-size++ pick-ups and enormous Suburban/Tahoe/whatevers out of it's lot and onto the grass. The average sticker is ~$48K/~$750 per month and, depending on driving habits, it can cost hundreds of dollars per week to run these vehicles. That's to say nothing of insurance, maintenance and the cost of replacing those monster truck tires every 2-3 years.
Compare all that to a BYD you could realistically buy outright for $10-15K and charge in your driveway every night.
Yes we do. We have nice big wide roads. Heck, my European immigrant friends love trucks more than natives, in my experience. If you have the space for them, there are some very appealing attributes. My Lightning will carry anything I want, tow big trailers, has huge interior space for the family, will outrun most cars (even many 'fast' ones), and is more fuel efficient than a [non-plugin] Prius.
I wouldn't want to own it in a very dense city, but there are only a couple of those in the US. Most US cities even at their densest locations are fine with a half ton.
The Lightning BEV has been discontinued. The Lightning will continue to be produced, after a delay, but it will only come as an EREV configuration. Ford has been mum on the details but my guess is it will share a large part of the underlying architecture with the pure BEV version. I won't be shocked if Ford backpedals at some point in a couple years and offers both variants simultaneously.
I'm not entirely convinced Ford would have discontinued the BEV if the F150 aluminum manufacturer hadn't caught on fire a few times over the space of a month or so. Ford really needs to go for maximum margin trucks when they cannot produce all that they want, so it made sense to put the Lightning BEV on indefinite hold.
What car has that? Please do not spread misinformation.
The Lightning taillights are expensive, a couple grand directly from Ford, primarily because of the integrated blind spot radar. That is the part that needs to be re-paired to the truck if you replace it, the taillights themselves are same as they ever were. Most of the time when someone breaks a taillight they just grab one from eBay and swap over the BLIS because it wasn't damaged.
Also, expensive taillights and headlights are 1) not unique to the Lightning, and 2) not unique to Ford.
This is a bit of a stereotype. The most popular cars in the US are now SUVs and CUVs, probably because a lot of Americans are well-approximated by spheres.
BYD Dolphin is right on the edge of being a CUV. They can trivially scale it up a bit. It'll be more expensive, but not by much.
I think it's a little early to make that claim. Jim Farley is definitely paying attention, for example. He drove a Chinese EV for a year, IIRC, and on many occasions talked bout the challenges of competing with them.
I don't know what the real barrier to success will be, but I don't think it will be blindness. It may be difficulty competing on labor cost, but that's a good case for carefully applied tariffs to keep competition fair.
US manufacturers are fine because the US has a long history of economic protectionism. These cars are effectively banned in the US due to tariffs which protect US automakers.
The Holden Spark appears to just be a re-badge of a Chevrolet Spark, which was made by their South Korean subsidiary, and was discontinued three years ago [0].
Once FSD, we will make rules about the software that will have the effect of excluding Chinese companies. I seriously doubt that I'll see Chinese cars here in my lifetime.
that should really apply to all vehicles, because I'm pretty sure there isn't a new vehicle on the market in the US that doesn't have surveillance tech built in.
My impression is that Chinese consumer products haven't been hijacked by the "design above everything else" mindset. The priority is to make things work at scale.
American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.
For real? Every car has looked the same for past 10-15 years. Crossover SUV no matter the brand or big ass truck with flat front. Not to mention the monstrosity that is the Cybertruck that should never have been allowed on the road.
> In a statement, a Volvo Cars USA spokesperson added the decision was made “to limit the company’s supply chain risk exposure, and it is a direct result of Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations to Volvo Cars.”
Still not convinced of the safety of lidar. I guess all these cars with cheap lidar sensors on board will generate real world safety data over the next few years.
What if the real world safety data over time is... secret retinal damage to millions of walkers and runners, with symptoms attributed to Covid mysteries (and not obviously due to vision), and it takes years more before someone happens to get enough data, and does the right study analysis, and then there's industry with strong incentive not to be on the hook for blinding millions of people?
If the tech industry has taught us anything, it's that big money is still as irresponsible and greedy as ever.
I suppose that one small bit of hope is that one of the most obvious bad actors in general happened to be opposed to Lidar, and might like to screw competitors with a scandal. So the news might come out, after much tragic damage is done.
However LIDAR safety is currently mostly evaluated on the assumption of a single LIDAR being present. If LIDAR becomes common, with multiple systems per vehicle, the probability of multiple LIDAR beams of different LIDARs hitting your eye at the same time goes up
Everyone is accustomed to cars malfunctioning, in numerous ways.
An intuition from an analogy that should be recognizable to HN...
Everyone is accustomed to data breaches of everything, and thinks it's just something you have to live with. But the engineers in a position to warn that a given system is almost guaranteed to have data breaches... don't warn. And don't even think that it's something to warn about. And if they did warn, they'd be fired or suppressed. And their coworkers would wonder what was wrong with them, torpedoing their career over something that's SOP, and that other engineers will make happen anyway. Any security effort is on reactive mitigation, theatre, CYA, and regulatory capture to escape liability.
I'd like to think that automotive engineers are much more ethical than tech industry, but two things going on:
(1) we're seeing a lot of sketchy tech in cars, like surveillance, and unsafe use of touchscreens;
(2) anything "AI" in a car is presumably getting culture influence from tech industry.
So I wouldn't trust automakers on anything intersecting with tech industry.
Why not? And cheap is a relative term, from American point of view these sensors may be expensive because they have to buy it from suppliers, from BYD’s perspective it could be home grown given they are by far the most vertically integrated vehicle manufacturer.
People think you can just slap lidar on and poof, self-driving is solved. There still has to be a software / ML stack. You still have to know what you're doing. You still need a lot of data.
My present car is 18 years (and, other than 2 non functioning buttons that I decided I didn’t want to pay to replace), working perfectly fine.
And, I should say, I’m a terrible owner. This car had (at most) 10 maintenance checks (and oil changes) in its life. Emphasis in “at most”.
I intend to buy a new one in about 3 years and there’s no chance in hell I’m going for something shiny that breaks after 5 years like this fully made in China stuff (even Teslas are cumbersome to maintain according to statistics).
I want a car to last at least 15 years with very little servicing, not some disposable tech gadget that I can’t be sure it will work next month without some shop time.
My impression was that the state of the are was still to generate high-level data from your inputs, then react with a mixture of ML and algorithmic rules to those inputs. For example you'd use a mix of LIDAR and vision to detect that there's a pedestrian, use past frames and ML to predict the pedestrian's next position, then algorithmically check whether your vehicle's path is likely to intersect with the pedestrian's path and take appropriate action if that's the case
Under that model, LIDAR training data is easy to generate. Create situations in a lab or take recordings from real drives, label them with the high-level information contained in them and train your models to extract it. Making use of that information is the next step but doesn't fundamentally change with your sensor choice, apart from the amount of information available at different speeds, distances and driving conditions
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.
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.
I'd assume not since Waymo uses lidar and has entire depots of them driving around in close proximity when not in use.
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.
Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.
Unfortunately in my region highway traffic is quite congested, and so called "adaptive cruise control" is a game changer. I find it reduces fatigue by a lot. Usually the trucks are all cruising at the speed limit and I just hang with them. I only change lanes if they slow down or there's an obstruction etc.
Driving in fog is the number one reason I want lidar looking out.
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.
i imagine seismic has already well solved a lot of that.
you know a lot about the light you are sending, and what the speed of light is, so you can filter out unexpected timings, and understand multiple returns
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.
It's the same with his humanoid robot. Instead of building yet another useless hype machine, why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms? You have a guaranteed customer (yourself) and once you have figured out the design, you can start selling to external customers.
> why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms?
Robot arms are neither a low-volume unique/high-cost market (SpaceX), nor a high-volume/high-margin business (Tesla). On top of that it's already a quite crowded space.
Because making boring industrial machinery doesn't sustain a PE ratio of about 300. Only promising the world does that.
The ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted this exact scenario confirmed to me he was not as smart as some people think he was. He seemed to have drank his own koolaid back then.
And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.
Pride is standing in the way of first principles.
I think there’s room for both points of view here. Going all in on visual processing means you can use it anywhere a person can go in any other technology, Optimus robots are just one example.
And he’s not wrong that roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.
The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.
What Tesla self driving is that? The one with human drivers? I don't believe they have gotten their permits for self driving cars yet.
Didn't waymo stop operating simply because they aren't as cavalier as Tesla, and they have much more to lose since they are actually self driving instead of just driver assistance? Was the lidar/vision difference actually significant?
> roads and driving laws are all built around human visual processing.
And people die all the time.
> The recent example of a power outage in SF where lidar powered Waymo’s all stopped working when the traffic lights were out and Tesla self driving continued operating normally makes a good case for the approach.
Huh? Waymo is responsible for injury, so all their cars called home at the same time DOS themselves rather than kill someone.
Tesla makes no responsibility and does nothing.
I can’t see the logic the brings vision only as having anything to do lights out. At all.
> And people die all the time.
Yes... but people can only focus on one thing at a time. We don't have 360 vision. We have blind spots! We don't even know the exact speed of our car without looking away from the road momentarily! Vision based cars obviously don't have these issues. Just because some cars are 100% vision doesn't mean that it has to share all of the faults we have when driving.
That's not me in favour of one vs the other. I'm ambivalent and don't actually care. They can clearly both work.
> Going all in on visual processing means you can use it anywhere a person can go in any other technology, Optimus robots are just one example.
Sure, and using lidar means you can use it anywhere a person can go in any other technology too.
I wonder how much of their trouble comes from other failures in their plan (avoiding the use of pre-made maps and single city taxi services in favor of a system intended to drive in unseen cities) vs how much comes from vision. There are concerning failure modes from vision alone but it’s not clear that’s actually the reason for the failure. Waymo built an expensive safe system that is a taxi first and can only operate on certain areas, and then they ran reps on those areas for a decade.
Tesla specifically decided not to use the taxi-first approach, which does make sense since they want to sell cars. One of the first major failures of their approach was to start selling pre-orders for self driving. If they hadn’t, they would not have needed to promise it would work everywhere, and could have pivoted to single city taxi services like the other companies, or added lidar.
But certainly it all came from Musk’s hubris, first to set out to solve the self driving in all conditions using only vision, and then to start selling it before it was done, making it difficult to change paths once so much had been promised.
> The ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted
This had happened a load of times with him. It seemed to ramp up around paedo sub, and I wonder what went on with him at that time.
Behaviour that would be consistent with stimulant abuse.
> And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb.
The absolute genius made sure that he can't back out without making it bleedingly obvious that old cars can never be upgraded for a LIDAR-based stack. Right now he's avoiding a company-killing class action suit by stalling, hoping people will get rid of HW3 cars, (and you can add HW4 cars soon too) and pretending that those cars will be updated, but if you also need to have LIDAR sensors, you're massively screwed.
Musk has for a long time now been convinced that all problems in this space are solvable via vision.
Same deal with his comments about how all anti-air military capability will be dominated by optical sensors.
Will there be major difference in ride experience when you take a Waymo vs Robotaxi?
Considering one requires a human babysitter and one doesn’t on top of the accident rates between them it should be an easy yes.
Fair. So in a sense, the lidar vs camera argument ultimately can be publicly assess/proven through human babysitter (regulation permit) and accident rates. or maybe user adoptions.
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.
For one, no one is seriously contemplating a LIDAR-only system, the question is between camera+LIDAR or camera-only.
> Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.
Actually, given that basically every meaningful LIDAR on the market gives an "intensity" value for each return, in surprisingly many cases you could get this kind of imaging behavior from LIDAR so long as the point density is sufficient for the features you wish to capture (and point density, particularly in terms of points/sec/$, continues to improve at a pretty good rate). A lot of the features that go into making road signage visible to drivers (e.g. reflective lettering on signs, cats eye reflectors, etc) also result in good contrast in LIDAR intensity values.
> camera+LIDAR
It's like having 2 pilots instead of 1 pilot. If one pilot is unexpectedly defective (has a heart attack mid-flight), you still have the other pilot. Some errors between the 2 pilots aren't uncorrelated of course, but many of them are. So the chance of an at-fault crash goes from p and approaches p^2 in the best case. That's an unintuitively large improvement. Many laypeople's gut instinct would be more like p -> p/2 improvement from having 2 pilots (or 2 data streams in the case of camera+LIDAR).
In the camera+LIDAR case, you conceptually require AND(x.ok for all x) before you accelerate. If only one of those systems says there's a white truck in front of you, then you hit the brakes, instead of requiring both of them to flag it. False negatives are what you're trying to avoid because the confusion matrix shouldn't be equally weighted given the additional downside of a catastrophic crash. That's where two somewhat independent data streams becomes so powerful at reducing crashes, you really benefit from those ~uncorrelated errors.
"In the camera+LIDAR case, you conceptually require AND(x.ok for all x) before you accelerate." This can be learnt by the model. Let's assume vision is 100% correct, the model would learn to ignore LIDAR, so the worst case scenario is that LIDAR is extra cost for zero benefit.
> Let's assume vision is 100% correct
This is not going to be true for a very long time, at least so long as one's definition of "vision" is something like "low-cost passive planar high-resolution imaging sensors sensitive to the visual and IR spectrum" (I include "low-cost" on the basis that while SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR sensors do provide useful capabilities for self-driving applications, they are often equally expensive, if not much more so, than LIDARs). Camera sensors have gotten quite good, but they are still fundamentally much less capable than the human eyes plus visual cortex in terms of useful dynamic range, motion sensitivity, and depth cues - and human eyes regularly encounter driving conditions which interfere or prohibit safe driving (e.g. mist/ fog, heavy rain/snow, blowing sand/dust, low-angle sunlight at sunrise/sunset/winter). One of the best features of LIDAR is that it is either immune or much less sensitive to these phenomena at the ranges we care about for driving.
Of course, LIDAR is not without its own failings, and the ideal system really is one that combines cameras, LIDARs, and RADARs. The problem there is that building automotive RADAR with sufficient spatial resolution to reliably discriminate between stationary obstacles (e.g. a car stalled ahead) and nearby clutter (e.g. a bridge above the road) is something of an unsolved problem.
The worst case scenario is that LIDAR is a rapidly falling extra cost for zero benefit? Sounds like it's a good idea to invest into cheap LIDAR just in case the worst case doesn't happen. Even better, you can get a head start by investing in the solution early and abandon it when it has obsolete.
By the way, Tesla engineers secretly trained their vision systems using LIDAR data because that's how you get training data. When Elon Musk found out, he fired them.
Finally, your premise is nonsensical. Using end to end learning for self driving sounds batshit crazy to me. Traffic rules are very rigid and differ depending on the location. Tesla's self driving solution gets you ticketed for traffic violations in China. Machine learning is generally used to "parse" the sensor output into a machine representation and then classical algorithms do most of the work.
The rationale for being against LIDAR seems to be "Elon Musk said LIDAR is bad" and is not based on any deficiency in LIDAR technology.
Sorry if this is obvious, but are there actually any systems that "choose one over the other"? My impression's always been it was either vision + LIDAR, or vision alone. Are there any examples of LIDAR alone?
Roombas
Roomba (specifically the brand of the American company iRobot) only added lidar in 2025 [1]. Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls), and then by cameras.
But if you use "roomba" as a generic term for robot vacuum then yes, Chinese Ecovacs and Xiaomi introduced lidar-based robot vacuums in 2015 [2].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/627751/irobot-launches-eight-n...
[2] https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4542
> Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls)
My ex got a Roomba in the early 2010s and it gave me an irrational but everlasting disdain for the company.
They kept mentioning their "proprietary algorithm" like it was some amazing futuristic thing but watching that thing just bump into something and turn, bump into something else and turn, bump into something again and turn again, etc ... it made me hate that thing.
Now when my dog can't find her ball and starts senselessly roaming in all the wrong directions in a panic, I call it Roomba mode.
Neato XV-11 introduced lidar in 2010. Sadly they're no more.
I don't think they would be as well accepted into peoples homes if they had a mobile camera on it. Didn't they already leak peoples home mappings?
For full self driving sure but the more regular assisted driving with basic ‘knows where other cars are in relation to you and can break/turn/alarm to avoid collisions’ as well as adaptive cruise control lidar can manage well enough.
I think fsd should be both at minimum though. No reason to skimp on a niw inexpensive sensor that sees things vision alone doesn’t.
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.
> if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system
This is basically what we have (for reasonable definitions of full).
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.
But who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?
> who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?
Whoever was in control. This isn’t some weird legal quagmire anymore, these cars are on the road.
Apparently it IS still a legal conundrum: https://www.motortrend.com/news/who-gets-a-ticket-when-a-way...
And will continue to be until every municipality implements laws about it.
The point of self driving is that the car is in control. Are you going to send the car to car prison?
They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people.
If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.
By this logic, then we should also create a rule for regular, non-self-driving that says, if you have a car accident that kills someone, all your wealth is taken away and given to the victim's family. If we had a rule like this, then "you'd probably see much safer driving". Are you willing to drive under those circumstances? I am sure you will say yes, but it does not make your suggestion any less ridiculous.
> They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people.
This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work
I can think of one example where something similar works. The requirements from insurance companies on airline pilots are considerable tougher than the government ones because they are on the hook for ~$200m if they crash.
A big reason car companies don't worry much about killing pedestrians at the moment is it costs them ~$0.
You clearly haven't lived in my city :).
About half our road fatalities are pedestrians. About 80% of those are intoxicated with alcohol. When you're driving at 40mph, at night, and some drunk guy chooses to cross the road, no amount of safety features or liabilities can save him.
Sure, cars can be safer for light collisions with pedestrians where the car is going slowly. Especially in the US where half the cars have a very high hood. But where I live the problem is not safer cars, it's drunk pedestrians.
I wonder how a Waymo would do with your drunks? Really the answer for that is probably more a different road layout so the drinking is separate from the traffic. I live near Soho in London which is full of drunk people in the streets but most traffic is blocked off there or doing 10 mph.
Why are you doing 40mph in a built up area at night?
Here in the UK we have a standard 30mph built up area limit, dropping to 20mph in most residential area.
Result - a massive reduction in serious injuries and fatalities, especially in car - pedestrians collisions.
Not so much a built up area. We're talking about main roads, or even motorways.
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
Usually its capitalism, because in America, they can just buy carveouts after the fact.
That's a legal non-starter for all car companies. They would be made liable for every 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.
Mercedes explicitly accepts liability when Drive Pilot L3 is active and used as intended.
That's... Not how it would work.
It wasn't ill timed. Any sane leader would understand both size and cost of tech always comes down rather quickly over time. He's just refused to accept having lidar uglify his cars or wait for it to get smaller. He instead fabricates about humans don't have lidars so cars shouldn't have them and sold "no lidars on Teslas" as an advantage instead of the opposite and refuses to accept the truth due to needing to feed his ego. Firing all non-yesmen didn't help either.
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.
Some companies work on reducing the size of it so manufacturers will be able to put it inside the car behind the mirror. Innoviz is one example https://techtime.news/2025/11/14/innoviz-27/
Ars cites this China Daily article[0], which gives no specifics and simply states:
How good are these $138 LiDARs? Who knows, because this article gives no information.This article[1] from around the same time gives more specifics, listing under "1000 yuan LiDARs" the RoboSense MX, Hesai Technology ATX, Zvision Technologies ZVISION EZ5, and the VanJee Technology WLR-760.
The RoboSense MX is selling for $2,000-3,000, so it's not exactly $138. It was going to be added to XPENG cars, before they switched away from LiDAR. Yikes.
The ATX is $1400, the EZ5 isn't available, and the WLR-760 is $3500. So the press release claims of sub-$200 never really materialized.
Furthermore, all of these are low beam count LiDARs with a limited FOV. These are 120°x20°, whereas Waymo sensors cover 360°x95° (and it still needs 4 of them).
It seems my initial skepticism was well placed.
Good luck with that. LiDAR can't read signs.[0] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202503/06/WS67c92b5ca310c...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-beijing-international-a...
> choose vision over lidar
I mean, you have to have vision to drive. What are you getting at? You can't have a lidar only autonomous vehicle.
^ this, the article is quoting LIDAR price ($25K) from years ago.
I hate the guy, but I get the decision. A point cloud has a ceiling that the visible spectrum doesn’t, evidenced by our lack of lidar.
It's because stereo vision is "cheap" to implement, not because theoretical biological lidar has a "ceiling".
There’s no such thing as biological LiDAR.
Can lidar say what colour is traffic light?
It’s not either lifar or regular cameras. Use both and combine the information to exceed the humans
What proportion is camera data and what is LIDAR?
Must be solved problem and something you should buy already? Right?
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.
If there are single bulbs displaying red, green and yellow please give clear examples.
Have you driven in America? We have the craziest lights you've ever seen. And that's just in my state
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?
> How about turn signal vs brake lights?
Potentially as extraneous as range to a surface that a camera can’t tell apart from background.
More to the point, everyone but Tesla is doing cameras plus Lidar. It’s increasingly looking like the correct bet.
> doing cameras plus Lidar
At what proportion? Is it mostly lidar or mostly cameras? Or 50/50?
> Potentially as extraneous as range to a surface that a camera can’t tell apart from background.
I guess yeah for backside of the car you'd probably better off measuring actual actions.
How about when you come 4 way stop. LIDAR is useless as it wouldn't recognize anyones turn signals.
What do you mean by proportion? They are different data sources, and their usage is determined by system design.
eg A driving decision system needs to know object distances AND traffic light colours. It doesn't particularly need to know the source of either. You could have a camera-only system that accurately determines colour and fuzzy-determines distance. Or you could have a LIDAR-only system that accurately determines distance and fuzzy-determines colour.
Or you use both, get accurate LIDAR-distance and accurate camera-colour and skip all the fuzzy-determination steps. Or keep the fuzzy stuff and build a layer of measurement-agreement for redundancy.
So then the question becomes, what's your proportion when deciding whether to stop at a traffic light? Is it mostly light colour or mostly distance to other objects? Or 50/50?
I'd say it's 100/100.
Sounds like a solved problem and you can buy a solution with a perfect accuracy?
> At what proportion? Is it mostly lidar or mostly cameras? Or 50/50?
What proportion of your vision is rods or cones? Depends on the context. You can do without one. But it’s better with both.
> How about when you come 4 way stop. LIDAR is useless as it wouldn't recognize anyones turn signals
Bad example. 99% of a 4-way stop is remembering who moved last, who moves next by custom and who may jump the line. What someone is indicating is, depending on where you are, between mildly helpful and useless.
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.
You can't do that though. Someone will not wear it - and they shouldn't have to.
Or instead of reinventing the world you could just use cameras
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) --
-- 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 --
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Ah we found the expert here, well armchair one at least. So you have your idea of what's possible vs people doing it.
Would be nice if you had been able to take it on, but as you say you don't have the data, so it's compared to nothing.
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.
Waymo already has an automated integration line, and the new vehicles from Zeekr will come partially assembled from the factory as a semi-custom design so there's no modifications in the sense that you're talking about.
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
In what sense does Tesla use their own chips?
Let me Google that for you?
Are you serious, a car with Lidar sensor that's not even available in Bugatti Tourbillon that cost 500x more?
Joking aside, this BYD Seagull, or Atto 1 in Australia (AUD$24K) and Dolphin Surf in Europe (￡18K in the UK), is one the cheapest EV cars in the world and selling at around ￡6K in China. It's priced double in Australia and triple in the UK compared to its original price in China. It's also one of China best selling EV cars with 60K unit sold per month on average.
Most of the countries scrambling to block its sales to protect their own car industry or increase the tariff considerably.
It's a game changing car and it really deserve the place in EV car world Hall of Fame, as one of the legendary cars similar Austin 7, the father of modern ICE car including BMW Dixi and Datsun Type 11.
[1] BYD_Seagull:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull
[2] Austin 7:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_7
I agree with every word about the BYD, in fact I just recently helped a family member buy one. But how would you pick the Austin 7 over the Model T as your example revolutionary car? Serious question, you're obviously knowledgeable if you mentioned that vehicle.
You can check the video on the early generation cars reviewed by the famous Top Gear team members [1].
Austin 7 and its derivatives (notably Dixi that kickstarted the highly successful BMW car business), dictated and popularized the modern car architecture, interfaces and controls stereotype as we know today. In order to drive old cars prior to Austin 7, we probably need a manual before we can drive them except the Cadillac Type 53 car, the original car that heavily inspired the Austin 7.
Austin 7 is the lightest car and cheapest proper car of its generation, and even by today's standard and inflation. As crazy as it sounds you can even drive it now in the UK road without any modification [2].
It become the template of modern cars, made popular in the UK, Germany and Japan, and then the rest of the world since these three countries are major manufacturers of modern cars.
The lighweight and low cost price of the baby Seagull (smallest BYD), is very similar to Baby Austin (popular name for Austin 7 in the UK) innovation criteria.
[1] Jeremy Clarkson and James May Find the First Car [video]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409075
[2] Everyone should try this! 1924 Austin Seven - no synchromesh, uncoupled brakes, in the rain! [video]:
https://youtu.be/HpwSKVJptKw
Being literally the worst human rights violator makes it easy to be cheap
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
> claimed 0–50 km/h (31 mph) acceleration time of 4.9 seconds,[45] and a 0–100 km/h (62 mph) time of 13 seconds.
Aww
There are two models, the premium version has 0-100 in roughly 6 seconds, with Michelin tyres (saying from personal experience)
Not gonna lie if BYD came to the US, i'd sell my Model 3 in a heartbeat like 0 debate
That's the reason why it will never be allowed to come to the US.
“Competition breeds innovation”
American oligarchs won't put up with any competition.
I don't expect FSD any time soon. I think its bunkum.
But assistive devices are well embedded. reversing tones. rear vision cameras.
So, adding something which can do side knock, pavement risk, sideswipe, blind spot, or 'pace to car in front' type stuff is a bit obvious if you ask me, and if it's optional, then all I want is the minimal wiring harness cost amortized out so retrofit isn't too hard.
I hope BYD also continues to do "real switches" and "smaller TV dashboard" choices because I'm not a fan of touch screen, and large screen.
Disruption at its finest :)
Someone said that LiDAR is too expensive, camera is better :)
And then made the best adas on the market using cameras
By what metric? In terms of deaths, injuries, and crashes per mile their Full Self Driving at least an order of magnitude behind Waymo
Show the proof then with links to unbias articles and the numbers/math.
Waymo is not an adas. There’s nothing close to FSD 14 abilities out there for consumers.
And your stats comparing to waymo are made up and debunked in the very reddit thread they came from
Llm hallucination? I want to give posters the benefit of the doubt but I didn't mention a reddit thread.
If you're just getting me mixed up with another poster, I got my stats from an electrek article supplemented by Waymo's releases: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Tesla's tech is also marketed as a full self driving autopilot, not just basic driver assistance like adaptive cruise control.
That's how they're doing the autonomous robotaxis and the cross country drives without anyone touching the steering wheel.
Which article and what source did it use
They have someone in the driver's seat
Sure. And Tesla doesn't have robotaxis at all, they're still playing in the kindergarten league.
So Tesla is in a weird state right now. Tesla's highway assist is shit, it's worse than Mercedes previous generation assist after Tesla switched to the end-to-end neural networks. The new MB.Drive Assist Pro is apparently even better.
FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions. If I try to turn it on, it attempts to kill me at least once on my route from my office to my home. So other car makers quite sensibly avoided it, until they perfected the technology.
> FSD attempts to work in cities. But it's ridiculously bad, it's worse than useless even in simple city conditions.
This isn't even close to being right.
This goes against my daily fsd usage and my friends fsd usage. We all use fsd daily, zero issues, through hard city and highway environments. It’s near perfect outside of the occasional weird routing issues (but that’s not a safety issue). We all have the latest fsd on hw4. No other consumer car on the market in the US can do this (go from point a to b with zero interventions through city and highway). If there was something better then I’d buy it, but there’s not.
The issue here is that "zero issues" is something that must be based on a very large sample size. In the US the death rate for cars is a bit over 1 per 100 million miles. So you really need billions of miles of data. FSD could be 10x as dangerous as the average driver and still it would most likely be "zero issues" for you and all your friends.
I'll post the 7 billion miles of stats here (https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety) but then the objections will be "it's Tesla of course they lie" and the debunked "they turn FSD off right before an accident".
Sigh. FSD is OK on freeways, but it constantly changes lanes for no discernible reasons. Sometimes unsafely or unnaturally, forcing me to take over. The previous stack had a setting to disable that, but not the new end-to-end NN-based system.
In cities, it's just shit. If you're using it without paying attention, your driving license has to be revoked and you should never be allowed to drive.
Girl get real. Mercedes fooled quite a few people with their PR stunt but they have NOTHING like fsd. Drive assist pro is vaporware, as their “L3” has been for the past 2 years. You can’t order that shit but half of hackernews is glazing mercedes for it
Update, it is vaporware lol. Just announced today they are canceling it.
Links?
The most recent one is: https://media.mbusa.com/releases/release-4889b1d1c66cddc7120...
They canceled the Drive Pilot L3, which is fully autonomous with zero driver intervention (approved by the government), because the software isn't there yet due to the hand off problem. They are still working on making it work at 130km/h on the highways. The problem with a zero driver intervention system is that the driver isn't guaranteed to pay attention when the mode is no longer applicable and the mode switch is only obvious on the highway when exiting, but the L3 system doesn't support highway driving speeds yet.
I'm not talking about some Tesla style last second bullshit where you're supposed to compensate for the deficiencies of the system that supposedly can do the full journey. I mean a route like L2->L3->L2 where L2 is human supervised autonomous driving and L3 is autonomous driving with zero intervention. You can't tell people they're allowed to drink a coffee and then one minute later tell them to supervise the driving.
For anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie. Why would you spend energy lying on HN of all places?
> anyone who has or has experienced the latest gen FSD from Tesla this comes across as a complete lie
I used the latest FSD and Waymo in December. FSD still needs to be supervised. It’s impressive and better than what my Subaru’s lane-keeping software can do. But I can confidently nap in a Waymo. These are totally different products and technology stacks.
I recently went on vacation and rented a 7 year old Model X and the FSD on it (v12) was better than nothing but not great, especially after having v14 on my truck drive 99% of my miles. It truly is a life-changer for people fortunate enough to have it, so it's always jarring to see the misinformed/dishonest comments online. It's still not perfect but at this point I would trust it more than the average human and certainly more than a new/old/exhausted/inebriated/distracted driver.
I've been using Tesla since 2015. And no, it's not a lie.
Tesla FSD gives up with the red-hands-of-death panic at this spot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Cfe9LBzaCLpGSAr99 (edit: fixed the location)
It also misinterprets this signal: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhZsQtN5LKy59Mpv6 It doesn't have enough resolution to resolve the red left arrow, especially when it's even mildly rainy.
At this intersection, it just gets confused and I have to take over to finish the turn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/DHeBmwpe3pfD6AXc6
You're welcome to try these locations.
Are you talking hw3 or 4? Also, the e2e FSD is recent. And FSD has gotten really good since 13, and with 14 it's really, really good. Not sure what 2015 has to do with anything. Red hands of death would be sunglare due to your windshield not being clean. I haven't had red hands since 14 came out.
Both HW versions have problems (and I have both). FSD has been "really good since VVV" for the last 6 major versions or so.
> Red hands of death would be sunglare due to your windshield not being clean. I haven't had red hands since 14 came out.
My windshield is completely normal. Not unusually dirty or anything. It's also Seattle. What is the "sunglare"?
That’s not true at all. Tesla taxis aren’t even close to Waymo’s capabilities.
I said adas, nothing about waymo. That being said, yes they are, I ride them every day.
How can you possibly say that Tesla taxis have similar capabilities to Waymos when the former requires a safety driver to be present?
Because I use them both and I can tell Teslas are really, really good at driving, and more naturally than Waymo at that. Obviously there’s a reason they’re still supervised but if they manage to climb that mountain it’s game over for waymo
Where is the proof/evidence for this statement?
Curious how you only ask this to people who claim Teslas are bad and not to people who claim Teslas are good.
Any claims I care to learn about I would like evidence. Only anti-Tesla folks seem to be lacking it.
What's lacking here? Waymos are driving driverless in multiple cities and Teslas are not. Robotaxis have a person with hands on button at at times for emergencies.
They might get better but how is that not evidence enough that currently Robotaxis are behind Waymos in self driving capabilities?
I've struggled with this over the years, but think we can call it at this point: Waymo is definitely better.
Just too much real world data.
(i.e. scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+)
Is it really comparable, though? What is better a Ferrari or a Ford Ranger? That depends on if you are trying to go fast or haul 500 lbs of stuff across town. Waymo is a much better completely autonomous robo taxi in limited areas mapped to the mm, but if I want an autonomous driving system for my personal car to go wherever I want, Tesla FSD is the better option.
Waymo is fully autonomous, FSD is an adas for consumers.
Robotaxi is a separate product. They are fantastic at driving but until they remove supervisors it’s a moot comparison
Ah, I see. ADAS as in "assistance on a car I can buy", makes sense.
We being who? What is your evidence it's better? The fact all the cars stopped moving when the power went out? The fact they cost WayMore? Show the evidence for your claims. And they have remote operators as proven by the power outage.
Apologies, I was unclear with the "i.e." bit I assume, to spell it out: I think after struggling with it over years its time to call it because Waymo has a scaled paid service, no drivers, multiple cities, for 1 year+.
But I told you it wasn't without drivers, so where is the response there or acknowledgment of the fact they all went down?
It’s because you spam this thread so much with such aggressive language that it honestly is scary to deal with you.
You’re smart Darren, and so are other people, you should assume I knew the cars have remote backup operators. Again, you’re smart, you also know why that doesn’t mitigate having a scaled robotaxi service vs. nothing
I doubt you’ll chill out but here’s a little behind the scenes peek for you that also directly address what you’re saying: a big turning point for me was getting a job at Google and realizing Elon was talking big game but there’s 100,000 things you gotta do to run a robot taxi service and Tesla was doing none of them. The epiphany came when I saw the windshield wipers for cameras and lidar.
You might note even a platonically ideal robotaxi service would always have capacity for remote operation.
This is such a weird take when Elon Musk is still letting his Optimus robots be teleoperated for basically every live demo. If you're lenient with him, it's completely unreasonable to be strict with Waymo, which works autonomously the vast majority of time.
I was just thinking about this on my 60 mile FSD driver I just finished. Basically inevitable that I would shortly go HN or reddit and read how FSD doesn't work.
FSD is here, it wasn't 3 or 4 years ago when I first bought a Tesla, but today it's incredible.
The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors.
For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever.
I hadn't heard that criticism. You can get multiple Waymos near each other without them crashing into things.
When I see Waymos fail they usually fail together
Doesn’t mean they’re failing because of interfering lidar though. If it’s something like them failing due to the road being blocked or something, it makes sense they’d fail together. Assuming they’re on the same OS, why would one know how to handle that situation and another not?
I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0]
What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
That was autopilot not FSD. Autopilot is a simple ADAS system similar to Toyota Safety sense or all the other garbage ADAS systems from Honda, Kia, Toyota, GM etc. FSD passed this test with flying colors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g
But optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver.
Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
> and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset?
So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforcement force for illegal murals? I love this, I have had heath issues recently, and I have not laughed this hard for a while. Thank you.
Hell, at the last "Tesla AI Day," Musk himself said ~"FSD basically requires AGI" - so he is well aware.
Intentionally trying to create traffic accidents is illegal. This isn't an FSD-thing. If you try to intentionally get humans to crash their cars you are going to get into trouble. I don't see how this suddenly becomes OK when done to competent FSD (not that I'd count Tesla among them)
If I understand your argument correctly, then posting a sign that it is incorrect.. like a wrong way highway on-ramp sign, would be illegal? That sounds correct.
But what if your city hired you to paint a sunset mural on a wall, and then a vision-only system killed a family of four by driving into it, during some "edge case" lighting situation?
I would like to think that we would apply "security is an onion" to our physical safety as well. Stereo vision + lidar + radar + ultrasonic? Would that not be the least that we could do as technologists?
I did only talk about malicious attempts being punished, and the sunset mural would not be malicious
Why isn’t the solution a combination of both?
everyone uses cellphone that transmit on the same frequency. they don't seem to cause interference. once enough lidar enters real word use. there will be regulation to make them work with each other.
Completely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors.
LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.
No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code
Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly have easier ways to do it.
> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs.
For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.
I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.
Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
> For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.
I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses, as opposed to by shaping individual pulses. (I've seen systems that introduce random jitter across multiple pulses to de-correlate interference, but that's a bit different.) The issue is you really do get a hell of a lot of data out of a single pulse, and for interesting objects (thin poles, power lines) there's not a lot of correlation between adjacent pulses -- you can't always assume properties across multiple pulses without having to throw away data from single data-carrying pulses.
Edit: Another way of saying this -- your revisit rate to a specific point of interference is around 20 Hz. That's just not a lot of bits per unit time.
> Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
I can believe this is true for FMCW lidar, but I know it to be untrue for pulsed lidar. Perhaps we're discussing different systems?
I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses...
My naive assumption would be that they would do exactly that. In fact, offhand, I don't know how else I'd go about it. When emitting pulses every X ns, I might envision using a long LFSR whose low-order bit specifies whether to skip the next X-ns time slot or not. Every car gets its own lidar seed, just like it gets its own key fob seed now.
Then, when listening for returned pulses, the receiver would correlate against the same sequence. Echoes from fixed objects would be represented by a constant lag, while those from moving ones would be "Doppler-shifted" in time and show up at varying lags.
So yes, you'd lose some energy due to dead time that you'd otherwise fill with a constant pulse train, but the processing gain from the correlator would presumably make up for that and then some. Why wouldn't existing systems do something like this?
I've never designed a lidar, but I can't believe there's anything to the multiple-access problem that wasn't already well-known in the 1970s. What else needs to be invented, other than implementation and integration details?
Edit re: the 20 Hz constraint, that's one area where our assumptions probably diverge. The output might be 20 Hz but internally, why wouldn't you be working with millions of individual pulses per frame? Lasers are freaking fast and so are photodiodes, given synchronous detection.
I suggest looking at a rotating lidar with an infrared scope... it's super, super informative and a lot of fun. Worth just camping out in SF or Mountain View and looking at all the different patterns on the wall as different lidar-equipped cars drive by.
A typical long range rotating pulsed lidar rotates at ~20 Hz, has 32 - 64 vertical channels (with spacing not necessarily uniform), and fires each channel's laser at around 20 kHz. This gives vertical channel spacing on the order of 1°, and horizontal channel spacing on the order of 0.3°. The perception folks assure me that having horizontal data orders of magnitude denser than vertical data doesn't really add value to them; and going to a higher pulse rate runs into the issue of self-interference between channels, which is much more annoying to deal with then interference from other lidars.
If you want to take that 20 kHz to 200 kHz, you first run into the fact that there can now be 10 pulses in flight at the same time... and that you're trying to detect low-photon-count events with an APD or SPAD outputting nanoamps within a few inches of a laser driver putting generating nanosecond pulses at tens of amps. That's a lot of additional noise! And even then, you have an 0.03° spacing between pulses, which means that successive pulses don't even overlap at max range with a typical spot diameter of 1" - 2" -- so depending on the surfaces you're hitting, on their continuity as seen by you, you still can't really say anything about the expected time alignment of adjacent pulses. Taking this to 2 MHz would let you guarantee some overlap for a handful of pulses, but only some... and that's still not a lot of samples to correlate. And of course your laser power usage and thermal challenges just went up two orders of magnitude...
How do we know that all these lasers aren't harming people's eyes?
Narrow field of view LIDAR units have been moderately priced for years. Forward looking LIDAR is useful for anti-collision systems. It doesn't yield the situational awareness of full coverage needed for full autonomy, but it's good for putting on the brakes.
Keep in mind, that $25k AUD is just $16600. And for that price, you're getting a real car with driver-assist features and a reasonable crash safety rating.
The US car manufacturers are cooked.
US manufacturers are going to be ok as long as there are policies banning foreign cars and there are tariffs, which is going to be true for a long time.
And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.
Man, living in Canada, I wish we were allowed to import Chinese cars. If America is putting tariffs on us and threatening our sovereignty, that's all the more reason to divest from American made cars.
I had family friends visiting Australia from USA and they were surprised by the sheer number and varieties of Chinese cars on our roads. I too have a BYD Dolphin and Shark, they loved them and felt they’re missing out big time on this. Mind you we have lots of Teslas on the roads as well, but they are bleeding their lead.
Those Teslas in Australia are Chinese made too of course as are the majority of Teslas globally. USA made really doesn’t exist at all in Australia. It’s merely USA branded. Even the Ford Ranger that’s sold in Australia is made in Thailand.
True true… isn’t the LFP battery pack in model 3 and and Y supplied by BYD as well?
How’s the charging infrastructure these days?
> And somehow US consumers feel comfortable paying more for worse cars.
It's baffling and a complete self goal.
The GMC dealership near me is spilling full-size++ pick-ups and enormous Suburban/Tahoe/whatevers out of it's lot and onto the grass. The average sticker is ~$48K/~$750 per month and, depending on driving habits, it can cost hundreds of dollars per week to run these vehicles. That's to say nothing of insurance, maintenance and the cost of replacing those monster truck tires every 2-3 years.
Compare all that to a BYD you could realistically buy outright for $10-15K and charge in your driveway every night.
This can't last indefinitely. At some point, the contrast between the US-made and Chinese-made cars will become too great to ignore.
We saw that during the 80-s, with the Japanese cars.
Don't Americans like big pickup trucks? Nobody else really drives those in large numbers.
Yes we do. We have nice big wide roads. Heck, my European immigrant friends love trucks more than natives, in my experience. If you have the space for them, there are some very appealing attributes. My Lightning will carry anything I want, tow big trailers, has huge interior space for the family, will outrun most cars (even many 'fast' ones), and is more fuel efficient than a [non-plugin] Prius.
I wouldn't want to own it in a very dense city, but there are only a couple of those in the US. Most US cities even at their densest locations are fine with a half ton.
The Ford Lightning has been discontinued.
The Lightning BEV has been discontinued. The Lightning will continue to be produced, after a delay, but it will only come as an EREV configuration. Ford has been mum on the details but my guess is it will share a large part of the underlying architecture with the pure BEV version. I won't be shocked if Ford backpedals at some point in a couple years and offers both variants simultaneously.
I'm not entirely convinced Ford would have discontinued the BEV if the F150 aluminum manufacturer hadn't caught on fire a few times over the space of a month or so. Ford really needs to go for maximum margin trucks when they cannot produce all that they want, so it made sense to put the Lightning BEV on indefinite hold.
That’s not even the worst part. Imagine owning a car that has $7000 DRM tail light units if you need to replace one?
> $7000 DRM tail light units
What car has that? Please do not spread misinformation.
The Lightning taillights are expensive, a couple grand directly from Ford, primarily because of the integrated blind spot radar. That is the part that needs to be re-paired to the truck if you replace it, the taillights themselves are same as they ever were. Most of the time when someone breaks a taillight they just grab one from eBay and swap over the BLIS because it wasn't damaged.
Also, expensive taillights and headlights are 1) not unique to the Lightning, and 2) not unique to Ford.
This is a bit of a stereotype. The most popular cars in the US are now SUVs and CUVs, probably because a lot of Americans are well-approximated by spheres.
BYD Dolphin is right on the edge of being a CUV. They can trivially scale it up a bit. It'll be more expensive, but not by much.
And most of those SUVs are the same size that most pickup trucks used to be 10-20 years ago. Even the smallest US vehicles are oversized now.
I think it's a little early to make that claim. Jim Farley is definitely paying attention, for example. He drove a Chinese EV for a year, IIRC, and on many occasions talked bout the challenges of competing with them.
I don't know what the real barrier to success will be, but I don't think it will be blindness. It may be difficulty competing on labor cost, but that's a good case for carefully applied tariffs to keep competition fair.
Ford just cancelled their F150 Lightning
What is unfair about lower labor costs?
US manufacturers are fine because the US has a long history of economic protectionism. These cars are effectively banned in the US due to tariffs which protect US automakers.
Aren't you missing something? Gemini tells me that non-NA market makes up 33% of Ford's sales, and 51% of GMs.
So a better way to put it is "protects US automakers in the US." And that assumes NA manufacturers would be unaffected by declining sales abroad.
More importantly, the US will ban Chinese automation tech. Which is just fine by me. But I drive a 10 year old car.
Tariffs alone can't keep out cheap foreign products.
I heard from a friend he paid around $12k AUD for the cheapest new ICE car, Holden brand, which I guess proves the west can compete if they try?
Edit: Holden Spark.
The Holden Spark appears to just be a re-badge of a Chevrolet Spark, which was made by their South Korean subsidiary, and was discontinued three years ago [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Discontinuatio...
New? You haven't been able to buy a new Holden since '21.
Well the best comparison are the Teslas which are made in China (all Teslas sold in Australia today) vs Teslas made in the USA.
For the model 3 it’s USD$8000 cheaper like for like.
> The US car manufacturers are cooked.
Biden put a 100% tariff on Chinese cars and then Trump added tariffs on inputs.
Americans are getting screwed!
We in the US can't hide forever.
Forever is a long time.
Once FSD, we will make rules about the software that will have the effect of excluding Chinese companies. I seriously doubt that I'll see Chinese cars here in my lifetime.
That's because it's predatory pricing.
If these cars are to be sold in western markets, there needs to be strong regulation. Absolutely no digital data connections, for starters.
that should really apply to all vehicles, because I'm pretty sure there isn't a new vehicle on the market in the US that doesn't have surveillance tech built in.
How much "connected" are BYD cars, in terms of sending drivers' data to their Chinese mothership?
Probably less than what’s being sent to the “American Empire” by Teslas
Tesla is so dead.
Trade protectionism in the USA will keep it going here.
We're going to look so backwards and "soviet" after a while.
The roof mount seems very practical, but it's a look that may turn off some buyers... buyers who care about looks.
For SUVs, maybe it could be blended in with a roof air scoop, like on some off-road trucks. Or a light bar.
Where is the LiDAR on the Atto 1? In the grille? How much worse is the field of view?
My impression is that Chinese consumer products haven't been hijacked by the "design above everything else" mindset. The priority is to make things work at scale.
American product design is obsessed with appearance and finish. Products end up costing 3 times more and functionality is degraded.
Also car as a status symbol. If you look at it more utilitarian it’s not that bad as long it’s somehow compatible with a roof rack or box.
I have noticed that in Chinese web / app design philosophy as well, it’s always function over form.
i think over time tastes will change as people appreciate that function can define form, unlike the other way round
For real? Every car has looked the same for past 10-15 years. Crossover SUV no matter the brand or big ass truck with flat front. Not to mention the monstrosity that is the Cybertruck that should never have been allowed on the road.
My personal take is that if users can get used to the notch on the iPhone , they could get used to that too.
Related: Volvo drops LIDAR...
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/volvo-says-sayonara-to-lid...
Volvo had contract issues with Luminar:
> In a statement, a Volvo Cars USA spokesperson added the decision was made “to limit the company’s supply chain risk exposure, and it is a direct result of Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations to Volvo Cars.”
Their lidar implementation was burning other people’s camera sensors
Aren’t they Chinese owned?
Still not convinced of the safety of lidar. I guess all these cars with cheap lidar sensors on board will generate real world safety data over the next few years.
What if the real world safety data over time is... secret retinal damage to millions of walkers and runners, with symptoms attributed to Covid mysteries (and not obviously due to vision), and it takes years more before someone happens to get enough data, and does the right study analysis, and then there's industry with strong incentive not to be on the hook for blinding millions of people?
If the tech industry has taught us anything, it's that big money is still as irresponsible and greedy as ever.
I suppose that one small bit of hope is that one of the most obvious bad actors in general happened to be opposed to Lidar, and might like to screw competitors with a scandal. So the news might come out, after much tragic damage is done.
Lidar is incredibly low power and fast scanning, the retinal risk is probably much less than having to drive when the sun is near the horizon.
However LIDAR safety is currently mostly evaluated on the assumption of a single LIDAR being present. If LIDAR becomes common, with multiple systems per vehicle, the probability of multiple LIDAR beams of different LIDARs hitting your eye at the same time goes up
And that's if scanning never malfunctions.
Everyone is accustomed to cars malfunctioning, in numerous ways.
An intuition from an analogy that should be recognizable to HN...
Everyone is accustomed to data breaches of everything, and thinks it's just something you have to live with. But the engineers in a position to warn that a given system is almost guaranteed to have data breaches... don't warn. And don't even think that it's something to warn about. And if they did warn, they'd be fired or suppressed. And their coworkers would wonder what was wrong with them, torpedoing their career over something that's SOP, and that other engineers will make happen anyway. Any security effort is on reactive mitigation, theatre, CYA, and regulatory capture to escape liability.
I'd like to think that automotive engineers are much more ethical than tech industry, but two things going on:
(1) we're seeing a lot of sketchy tech in cars, like surveillance, and unsafe use of touchscreens;
(2) anything "AI" in a car is presumably getting culture influence from tech industry.
So I wouldn't trust automakers on anything intersecting with tech industry.
It's also typically at a wavelength that has lower risk to human eyes (ie near infrared).
Laser eye safety risk is very measurable and well classified.
Why not? And cheap is a relative term, from American point of view these sensors may be expensive because they have to buy it from suppliers, from BYD’s perspective it could be home grown given they are by far the most vertically integrated vehicle manufacturer.
See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395
People think you can just slap lidar on and poof, self-driving is solved. There still has to be a software / ML stack. You still have to know what you're doing. You still need a lot of data.
My present car is 18 years (and, other than 2 non functioning buttons that I decided I didn’t want to pay to replace), working perfectly fine.
And, I should say, I’m a terrible owner. This car had (at most) 10 maintenance checks (and oil changes) in its life. Emphasis in “at most”.
I intend to buy a new one in about 3 years and there’s no chance in hell I’m going for something shiny that breaks after 5 years like this fully made in China stuff (even Teslas are cumbersome to maintain according to statistics).
I want a car to last at least 15 years with very little servicing, not some disposable tech gadget that I can’t be sure it will work next month without some shop time.
P.S. The car is a Mazda 2.
How do you train a model to drive with LiDAR when the human drivers who generate the training data don’t use LiDAR?
My impression was that the state of the are was still to generate high-level data from your inputs, then react with a mixture of ML and algorithmic rules to those inputs. For example you'd use a mix of LIDAR and vision to detect that there's a pedestrian, use past frames and ML to predict the pedestrian's next position, then algorithmically check whether your vehicle's path is likely to intersect with the pedestrian's path and take appropriate action if that's the case
Under that model, LIDAR training data is easy to generate. Create situations in a lab or take recordings from real drives, label them with the high-level information contained in them and train your models to extract it. Making use of that information is the next step but doesn't fundamentally change with your sensor choice, apart from the amount of information available at different speeds, distances and driving conditions
Scan with LiDAR while manually driving.
Hell, you could even use slower offline 3d reconstruction of vision data for training, and still ultimately rely on runtime LiDAR.
But the driver isn’t reacting to any of the LiDAR readings, only what they can see, so what is the point?
You label the recordings that involve a crash, and use the lidar to avoid doing the same.
simulate is one way.
put the car in a video game and raytrace what the lidar would see
Why do we want CCP vehicles spying on us outside China? Did we forget everything we learned over the last decades..?
If you're a US citizen, it's far safer for the CCP to be spying on you than the US government.