Tesla is spending upwards of $6B/year to Waymo’s $1.5B. Only one of these companies makes an autonomous robotaxi that’s actually autonomous.
Neither do cameras, or eyeballs.
I've been in zero-road-speed whiteout conditions several times. The only move to make is to the side of the road without getting stuck, and turning on your flashers.
Low-light cameras would not have worked. Sonar would not have worked. Infrared would not have worked.
Then again, it's good that we have self-driving companies with lidar and without — we will find out which approach wins.
1) it's not cheap to produce lidars at a stable predictable quality in millions;
2) car driving training data sets for lidars are much scarcer (and will always be much scarcer due to cameras' higher prevalence) and at a much lower quality;
3) combined camera+lidar data sets are even scarcer.
also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do better they will mandate it.
The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes.
Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.
And, less excusable, ignorant of how incredible human eyes are compared to small sensor cameras. In particular high DR in low light, with fast motion. Every photographer knows this.
This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
He wanted (needed?) to get on the hype train for self driving to pump up the stock price, knew that at the time there was zero chance they could sell it at the price point lidar required at the time - or even effective other sensors (like radar) - and sold it anyway at the price point that people would buy it at, even though it was not plausibly going to ever work at the level that was being promised.
There is a word for that. But I’m sure there are many lawyers that will say it was ‘mere fluffery’ or the like. And I’m sure he’ll get away with it, because more than enough people are complicit in the mess.
Miscalculation assumes there was a mistake somewhere, but near as I can tell, it is playing out as any reasonable person expected it too, given what was known at the time.
Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65
Waymo fatalities: 0
If we are just talking about smart cruise control, most cars are using cameras and radar, not lidar yet. But Tesla is special since it doesn’t even use radar for its smart cruise control implementation, so that could make it less safe than other new cars with smart cruise control, but Autopilot was never competing with Waymo.
They might have flipped a switch after that, causing this.
“Just buy FSD” isn’t a reasonable answer to a problem literally no other automaker suffers from.
Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world based on our internal world models that goes into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability) still have quite decent depth perception compared to what you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of precision.
You can solve this by adding an emitter next to the camera that does something useful, be it just beaconing lights or noise patterns or phase synced laser pulses. And those "active cameras" are what everyone call LIDARs.
I have no proof of course and it might be coincidence, or just difference of mindset between US citizens and Europe citizens. It happened a few times already and to me looks sus.
But if they actually read and not just ctrl+f <company name>, then of course not writing the company name, but hinting at it in an obvious way is no more helpful either.
There is also flagging abuse which effectively kills the comment /post.
Human eyes do not have distance information, either, but derive it well enough from spatial (by ‘comparing’ inputs from 2 eyes) or temporal parallax (by ‘comparing’ inputs from one eye at different points in time) to drive cars.
One can also argue that detecting absolute distance isn’t necessary to drive a car. Time to-contact may be more useful. Even only detecting “change in bearing” can be sufficient to avoid collision (https://eoceanic.com/sailing/tips/27/179/how_to_tell_if_you_...)
Having said that, LiDAR works better than vision in mild fog, and if it’s possible to add a decent absolute distance sensor for little extra cost, why wouldn’t you?
Individual cameras don't have distance information, but you can easily calibrate a system of cameras to give you distance information. Your eyes do this already, albeit not quantitatively. The quantitative part comes from math our brains aren't setup to do in real time.
If this lowers Lidar costs, and Tesla has spent all this time refining the camara technology. Now have both.
Use both.
It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...
I also wonder if the smaller sensor size on phones contributes, since the energy is being focused onto a smaller spot.
Either way, for that to happen he was filming the LIDAR while active, for a decent amount of time, from right next to the car. I assume under normal conditions it wouldn't be running constantly while the vehicle is stationary?
Laptops aren't generally being used in the same areas as cars though, so you wouldn't expect to see as many cases involving Windows Hello compatible laptops/cameras.
There was someone who had his eyes damaged by sitting next to a heater.
So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.
More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.
The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were like that and that was the original breaking story.
Absorbing the laser isn't necessarily any good. Very hypothetically it could lead to cataracts.
Thanks! What a headache
* I have no way to estimate installation costs, but smartphones show that manufacturing at this scale doesn't need to increase total cost 10x more than the B.o.M.
They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.
There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power.
Pros and cons. :/
It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.
Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?
Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.
Top 5 fines:
1 - Meta - Ireland - €1.2 billion
2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - €746 millions
3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - €225 millions
4 - British Airway - UK - £183 millions
5 - Google - France - €60 millions
I wish every law barely got enforced this way.
I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.
And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.
Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother. You don't need technology for that.
Scale matters.
People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others.
Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along.
Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders?
While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. These people had way more practical day to day freedom to run and better their lives than we do now, if constrained by the fact that they had substantially less wealth to leverage to that effect.
> Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management
And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate.
You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited.
Seriously, go get in a pissing match with a municipality over just where the line for "requires permit" is and get back to me. Unless you want to do something that is more than petty cosmetic stuff and unambiguously in violation of the rules a HOA is a paper tiger for the most part (not to say that they don't suck).
Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.us...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/03/17/youtub...
The EU requires every new car to have Autonomos Emergency Braking. If LiDAR becomes cheaper than radar, this is a potential market of millions.
Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and compute, it's also not really a strict requirement.
Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres. Lidar gives you very little in these areas
We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough some long distance precision.
None of these have been instrumental in a final product; personally I suspect that many of the cars including lidar use it for data collection and edge cases more than as part of the driving perception model.
Waymo used LIDAR in the realtime control loop. It combines LiDAR, camera, and radar data in real time to build a 3D representation of the environment, which is constantly updated.
I fundamentally don't trust any level 4 system that doesn't use LIDAR
Let me guess, you heard this from Elon?
Waymo has driven tens of millions of autonomous miles with a serious injury/fatality rate dramatically lower than human drivers. The actual data shows the technology works. Tesla FSD still requires active driver supervision and is not legally or technically a robotaxi system. Comparing them as if they're at parity is wrong.
LIDAR gives direct metric depth with no inference required. Camera-only systems must infer depth from 2D images using neural networks, which introduces failure modes LIDAR doesn't have. Radar is very valuable when LIDAR and cameras give ambiguous data.
What metrics has Telsa overtaken Waymo? Deployed robotaxi revenue miles? No. Disengagement rates? No published comparable data. Safety per mile in driverless operation? No.
"people have driven coast to coast without a single intervention on FSD including parking spot to parking spot"
I find this claim very dubious. Prove it. Teslas never drive empty for a very good reason.
Writing this and linking to fake Wikipedia is actually hilarious.
They do not. They have a very small number of them open to a select number of people, not the general public. And they are limited to even smaller areas. You need to understand that Musk is NOT an engineer, he is more of a con man desperate to inflate tesla stock price. If he says self driving cars don't need LIDAR then they must actually need it.
https://futurism.com/future-society/polymarket-fortune-betti...
Polymarket user David Bensoussan has made $36,000 by betting against Musk's wildly optimistic self driving predictions.
linking to grokipedia feels like intentional rage-baiting.
Of course MicroVisiom is only claiming their LIDAR to be suitable for advanced driver assist, but ADAS encompasses a wide array of capabilities: basically everything between cruise control and robotaxis, so there's no definition of how much LIDAR you need to do the job, just however much you feel like. Tesla feels like none at all.
(Insert old man rant “Why are everyone’s headlights so gosh darn bright these days?!”)
> phased-array
I'm not well versed into RF physics. I had the feeling that light-wave coherency in lasers had to be created at a single source (or amplified as it passes by). That's the first time I hear about phased-array lasers.
Can someone knowledgeable chime in on this?
In practice, this can be done with phase change materials (heat/cool materials to change their index), or micro ring resonators (to divert light from one wave guide to another).
The beam then self-interferes, and the resulting interference pattern (constructive/destructive depending on the direction) are used to modulate the beam orientation.
You are right that a single source is needed, though I imagine that you can also use a laser source and shine it at another "pumped" material to have it emit more coherent light.
I've been thinking about possible use-cases for this technology besides LIDAR,. Point to point laser communication could be an interesting application: satellite-to-satellite communication, or drone-to-drone in high-EMI settings (battlefield with jammers). This would make mounting laser designators on small drones a lot easier. Here you go, free startup ideas ;)
NB: just my layman's understanding
There might be something cute you can do with interference patterns but no idea about that. We do sort of similar things with astronomic observations.
For lidar you transmit a pulse from a single source and receive its reflection at multiple points. Mentioning phased array with lidar almost always means receiving.
I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space. Competition might push vendors to refine the software stack as well as the hardware. HOWEVER I'm keeping an eye on how these systems handle edge cases in bad weather. I don't think we have seen enough data yet...
Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market.
In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over bumps).
On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local robotics stockist probably already has something <$400
Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-Cost+Laser+Dis... [2] https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README...
Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
No no it's the cabal...
Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.
Automotive LIDARs are like, 128x64[px] for production models or 1920x1080[px] for experimental models with GbE and/or HDMI-equivalents-of-industry outputs. Totally different technologies.
Also, range is probably a factor. In a living room, you probably need something like 20m max. You car should "see" farther.
As for the range, again pretty powerful lasers are sold for sub 10SUD prices on retail. I am sure that there must be higher calibration and precision requirements as the distance increase but is it really order of magnitudes higher? 120 meters laser measurer with 1cm accuracy is 15 Euros on Temu and that thing has an LCD screen and a battery as a handheld device. How much distance do you actually need?
Glad to see someone lowering the cost of this technology, and hope to see lots of engineers using this tech as a result.
We might even see a boom in LIDAR tech as a result
The cheap RADAR devices you're talking about usually only output range and velocity, sometimes for a handful of rather large azimuth slices. That doesn't compete with LIDAR at all.
>"This misleading article contains numerous factual errors regarding automotive lidar. Here are the most glaring:
There are multiple manufacturers, including Hesai, that use mechanical means for at least one scan axis and are already sold for a fraction of the "$10k - $20k" price noted by the author. Luminar itself built this class of scanners before going bankrupt.
Per Microvision's own website, the Movia-S does not use a phased array and also does not have a range anywhere near 200m.
Velodyne and Luminar do not even exist as companies anymore. Both have gone bankrupt and been acquired by competitors."
I mean it doesn't. If you actually look at it comma.ai proves that level two doesn't require lidar. Thats not the same as full speed safe autonomy.
whilst it is possible to drive vision only (assuming the right array of cameras (ie not the way tesla have done it) lidar gives you a low latency source of depth that can correct vision mistakes. Its also much less energy intensive to work out if an object is dangerous, and on a collision course.
To do that in vision, you need to work out what the object is (ie is it a shadow) then you have to triangulate it. That requires continuous camera calibration, and is all that easy. If you have a depth "prior" ie, yes its real, yes its large and yes its going to collide, its much much more simple to use vision to work out what to do.
As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will run into.
The SAE autonomy scale is about dividing responsibility between the driver and the assistance system. The lowest revel represents full responsibility on the driver and the highest level represents full responsibility on the system.
If there is a geofenced transportation system like the Vegas loop and the cars can drive without a human driver, then that is a level 5 system. By the way, geofencing is not an "SAE level 5" requirement. Geofencing is a tool to make it easier to reach requirements by reducing the scope of what full autonomy represents.
Note: I have not had the pleasure of riding in one yet, but from what my friend in SJ says, it’s very convenient and confidence-inspiring.
The drive was delightful and felt really safe. It handled the SF terrain, traffic and mixed traffic like trams very well.
I wouldnt trust a self driving tesla ( or any camera only systems) though!
Drivers can and do misuse adaptive cruise control systems, sometimes with fatal consequences. Memes aside, there is no strong evidence that fatal misuse occurs more frequently by owners of Tesla cars than with comparable systems from other brands.
This perception reflects the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, more commonly known as the frequency illusion. Nobody is collecting statistics for other brands, so it’s assumed the phenomenon doesn’t occur.
A similar pattern occurred with media coverage of EV fires. Except in this case, good statistics exist which prove the opposite: ICE vehicles catch fire more often than EVs.
I own a Tesla and paid about $10K for the full self driving capability a few years ago. Yeah, I would not trust a Tesla to drive me from airport to my house. There is a reason Tesla is still stuck at level 2 autonomy certification and not 3, 4 or 5.
They might not use them for autopilot, but maybe for some emergency braking stuff, when everything else failed.
XPeng system is sensor fusion. It is not camera only. Waymo is even clearer. For them LiDAR is not optional. aiMotive has now started to market camera only, but its experimental, no production deployments.
It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
My understanding is that cyber cabs still need safety drivers to operate, is that not the case?
Wait what? when did they actually enter mass production?
> I mean humans have Lidar sensors
Real time slam is actually pretty good, the hard part is reliable object detection using just vision. Tesla's forward facing cameras are effectively monocular, which means that its much much harder to get depth (its not impossible but moving objects are much more difficult to observe if you only have cameras aligned on the same plane with no real parallax)
Ultimately Musk is right, you probably don't need lidar to drive safely. but its far more simple and easier to do if you have Lidar. Its also safer. Musk said "lidars are a crutch", not because he is some sort of genius, Its obvious that SLAM only driving is the way forward since the mid 00's (of not earlier). The reason he said it is because he thought he could save money not having lidar. The problem for him is that he didn't do the research to see how far away proper machine perception is to account for the last 1% in accuracy needed to make vision only safe and reliable.
The Tesla FSD system has... well, sure, a few more cameras, but they're low resolution, and in inconveniently fixed locations.
My alley has an occlusion at the corner where it connects to the main road: a very tall, very ample bush that basically makes it impossible to authoritatively check oncoming traffic to my left. I, a human, can determine that if I see the light flicker even slightly as it filters through the bushes, that the path is not clear: a car is likely causing that very slight change in light. My Tesla has no clue at all that that's happening. And worse, the perpendicular camera responsible for checking cross-traffic is mounted _behind my head_ on the b-pillar, in a fixed location that means that without nosing my car _into_ the travel lane, there is literally no way for it to be sure the path is clear.
This edge case is navigated near-perfectly by Waymo, since its roof-mounted lidar can see above and beyond the bush and determine that the path is clear. And to hit back on the "Tesla is making cheaper cars that can drive autonomously anywhere in the world": I mean, they still aren't? Not authoritatively. Not authoritatively enough that they aren't seeing all sorts of interventions in the few "driverless" trials they're doing in Austin. Not authoritatively enough when I have my Tesla FSD to glory. It works well enough on the fat part of the bell curve, but those edges will get you, and a vision only system means that it is extremely brittle in certain conditions and with certain failure modes, that a lidar/radar backup help _enhance_.
Moreover, Waymo has brought lidar development in-house, they're working to dramatically reduce their vehicle platform cost by reducing some redundant sensors, and they can now simulate a ground truth model of an absurd number of edge cases and odd scenarios, as well as simulate different conditions for real-world locations in parallel with their new world modeling systems.
None of which reads to me as "not going well for Waymo." Waymo completes over 450,000 fully autonomous rides per week right now. They're dramatically lowering their own barriers to new cities/geographies/conditions, and they're pushing down the cost per unit substantially. Yeah, it won't get to be as cheap as Tesla owning the entire means of production, but I'm still extremely bullish on Waymo being the frontrunner for autonomous driving for the foreseeable future.
Do you actually own a Tesla? I do. With FSD. And let me assure you, you are very wrong.
Part of that is that humans are distractible, and their performance can be degraded in many ways, and that silicon thinks faster than meat.
But part of it is the sensor suite. Look at Waymo vs Tesla robotaxi accident rates.
Humans don't have wheels and cannot go 70MPH. Humans also don't have rear view cameras and cannot process video feeds from 8 cameras simultaneously. The point of these machines is to be better than humans for transportation. If adding LIDAR means that these vehicles can see better than humans and avoid accidents that humans do get into, then I for one want them in my vehicle.
Stereo based depth mapping is kind of bad, especially so if it is not IR assisted. The quality you get from Lidar out of the box is crazy good in comparison.
What you can do is train a model using both the camera and Lidar data to produce a good disparity and depth map but this just means you're using more Lidar not less.
>It all seriousness though, Tesla are producing cyber cabs now which are 10th the price of Waymo's and can drive autonomously anywhere in the world. I think we can see where this is going. (Hint: not well for Waymo)
This feels like a highly misleading claim that might technically be true in the sense that there are less restrictions, but a reduction in restrictions doesn't imply an increase in capability.
The comment about Waymo seems to be particularly myopic. Waymo has self driving technology and is operating as a financially successful business. There is no conceivable situation where the mere existence of competition with almost the same capabilities would shake that up. Why isn't it companies like Uber, who have significantly fallen behind, that are in trouble?
>Also the article is speculative 'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. One day...
And so is the comment about Tesla cyber cabs.