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.
LIDAR systems use timing, phase locking, and software filtering to identify and eliminate interference from other units. There is still risk of interference, resulting in reduced range, noise, etc.
Between anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.
Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn’t matter what stats are shown. You’ll dismiss it because of political reasons. You can lie to yourself and others but I use this car daily and you won’t fool me.
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
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+.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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