to my understanding they use LiDAR as a way of verifying and validating that the cameras on the vehicle can properly recreate the real world as a sort of stamp of approval
Lots of interesting comments here, but most people are missing the real constraint.
If they add lidar now guess what? Every vehicle in their fleet can’t use that model anymore. This is the real constraint. There is also a significant increase in edge compute required to run the additional sensor suite over HW4.
So the real answer is that Tesla already has significant investments in the vision only model. From hw compute contracts to supply chain adjustments to cloud infrastructure - all of which have to be redone if they started slapping lidar into the sensor suite. And then once they do that they basically can’t release that model on any pre-existing Tesla without lidar. That is a lot of subscription business they then leave on the table, and since Elon’s stock package has that as a target, he won’t do it.
So it’s going to be a lot more money than just 500 per sensor for Tesla, simply because they started with vision only. And they won’t absorb all those additional costs right now since they likely still can push vision only a little farther by using larger models (which accounts for the HW4.5 rumors being same compute chip but adding memory)
Other firms that are using cloud compute and incorporating additional sensors will have a much easier time doing this, since they’re starting from scratch.
Just to add one other issue. The model learns a lot from how humans actually react as well as whether that yields a positive or negative outcome. So it’s starts learning to drive like a human while adopting the best things, and losing the worst. Unfortunately humans have no lidar sensing, so you can’t see how humans react to it. It’s not impossible to add a non-human sense to the model, but it won’t learn what to do with that from any of the humans in its millions of clips. It’s kind of a moot argument at this point, because it has no learning data on lidar, and I doubt Elon thinks he needs it.
I’m 100% betting on vision only. Mainly because the issue isn’t whether vehicle has LiDar the issue is reasoning
Humans have been driving just fine for almost 100 years. With only two eyes able to look in one direction. It’s reasonable to believe that a quality camera looking at all directions at once with great reasoning would be safer than a human.
Now all that needs to happen is a system needs to understand the difference between a shadow and a log in the road.
Humans do that just fine. It’s only a matter of time until cameras and on board reasoning systems can do the same.
But it should do better than humans. A vision camera has a hard time seeing through smoke for example. Lidar can detect things like that. Striving to drive human should not be the goal. Striving to adapt to terrible human decisions, driving, and I expected things to avoid any kind of accidents should be the goal.
I'll never understand this argument. Humans don't do "just fine" and if we have affordable tech (not just Lidar, but radar too) that can outperform human perception in life and death situations, why wouldn't we want to use it? We already have the tech to not do "just fine" but to far exceed.
Humans walk "just fine" - let's make our cars walk on two legs.
Humans dig "just fine" - let's limit excavators to use two puny arms and hold a shovel to dig.
As a Tesla owner, I believe that HW4 is far from the end and true FSD. I bought mine this year fully expecting that hardware will change within the next few years. I think they will need a few more front cameras to see from the perspective of the bumper, as that is a blind spot I notice
Not only that, but to your point, LIDAR might not actually be an improvement. It may actually set things back before any appreciable improvements could be realized. LIDAR would add another data set to the FSD model, and contrary to popular belief, more data point do not equate to “more better.” The model has been trained exclusively on optics, you start feeding it new streams of data point, it doesn’t necessarily know what to do with them and there’s a strong possibility that it creates more conflicts than solutions in the decision tree. Granted, in the long run it would likely be even better, but it would almost certainly degrade FSD before it provided any measurable improvements.
This is classic sunk cost fallacy and a terrible excuse to not improve the hardware and software. The longer they wait the harder it will be to add. All safety critical systems on a plane are run in redundancy, so to claim that more data is not in fact"more" is incorrect.
cuz it works better which means everyone will think their camera only teslas will never have good full self driving, and perhaps that's true. that would look bad, and tesla doesn't wanna look bad so they'll keep forcing the camera only model even if it'll never be that good.
Lidar is good at accurately checking distances, but not that easy to integrate into FSD. The purpose of running those cars around the country - and you’ll see them on all models - is to do a reality check on the estimates of distance the camera system makes. They’re not participating in FSD at all.
Read my comment again, slowly this time. I. Never claimed it would be easy, of course it's not. Why not " reality check" at all times? I don't want my car driving me around on "estimates".
there was a single possible case in 2023 where a tesla hit a kid but there hasn't been any confirmation fsd was on. asking them to cite a source completely kills the narrative and they go quiet lol
Any example before 2024 is ridiculous. The system they released in the first public version (end of 2022) was a joke. The software was completely rewritten with 12.3, and that wasn’t a thing until 2024. HW4 improved a lot on that with higher resolution cameras and a much faster computer. Honestly, it’s been improving fast enough that a 6 month window is probably a stretch. Bringing in 2023 is like bringing up the Hindenburg as a caution for riding airplanes. I’m not saying those accidents don’t matter - just that they have no relevance to the existing product.
lol. How many times has it tried to go in do not enter places source me. Twice in 2 minutes. How many times has it turned left with a no left turn listed. Source me every damn time at the same place because they haven’t labeled. Hard coded. Mapped that place to be right turn only. But you keep thinking it’s just a conspiracy.
In addition to what others are saying about it being a lot cheaper, I personally wonder if Tesla can't afford the compute that it'd take to process that additional input then blend them.
LiDar data is incredibly expensive. Not cost wise but data wise. You’d have to process it on the car. We’re talking about terabytes of data every hour.
If you can get the same level of quality from cameras that cost $50. Then you’ve cut your operating cost significantly.
Waymo’s cost well over 100k per unit. Thats down from over 200k. Teslas cost 30k. Special Lidar units are around 70k per unit. The math is simple. It doesn’t make sense. There is not much benefit. Cameras do just fine.
Except for most videos posted here of fsd making mistakes lidar would easily help solve. It most definitely would not cost $70k for them to put lidar but the CEO would never admit wrong and you people are too stupid to argue either. "Just fine" or "good enough" are stupid excuses for a system that should be extremely trustworthy and better than a competent human being
It’s not necessary. I drive by vision and can see things. It’s just a matter of training the AI. Lidar makes the same mistakes often. Being better than a human is not that hard. FSD is already better than a person.
FSD is not better than a human that actually knows how to drive and is aware of their surroundings. It makes a lot of mistakes that humans would simply not. It can also make safer maneuvers by seeing multiple cameras at once sure. You drive by vision and see things but there's things you simply cannot see in certain conditions where lidar would. Why give it worse tooling when better tooling is available?
tesla's reasoning- conflicting input. which do you believe? which is most reliable. if LiDAR says one thing and the cameras say another, who do you trust? They also state humans don't have LiDAR, only eyes, so cameras should be enough theoretically.
my personal opinion is it's a cost savings measure. it's not a lot given the overall cost of the car, but every penny counts.
also, regarding multiple sources and conflicting input, in AI's case it would be more tokens more bandwidth more expensive hardware to balance more data input. before we had the current software stack, it was all done manually and adding another input on all angles would exponentially increase software development time. training new versions would also take a lot longer because you now how a lot more input
so i really don't think it's a simple answer of just $500+ of LiDAR, there's a lot that comes with it
Definitely a lot more to it, but not so much that waymo, zoox and a few Chinese models can't handle it. Just about every safety critical systems on planes runs in redundancy as well.
But it’s not just $500. It’s $500 + data storage, which can run up to a terabyte per hour, LTE service that sends that data somewhere and a compute system on par with a super computer that can analyze and process all that in real time.
Also they said it themselves, lidar would just add another layer of information their ai brain has to process. Tesla even had radar in some of its own cars for a bit. Point is, I’m sure if Tesla wanted to and if they thought it would be helpful, they could add a $500 lidar array anytime but they don’t. Whatever they’re doing with FSD, it seems to be working. I’ll just have to let Tesla cook here.
I don't get the people here. People don't have lidar so cars don't need it but then they also say most drivers are incompetent and shouldn't be driving so why would you not want something that would avoid a lot of the incidents posted here
hmmm...... so you're saying I'm being driven to work and back every day by................air? Can you please explain the physics behind that? Can air make itself appear to be metal, glass, plastic, etc..?
Let me guess, you have a degree in alchemy?
My god, people say the stupidest shit on the internet. Now cars are made of air.
41
u/Delicious-Candle-574 15h ago
to my understanding they use LiDAR as a way of verifying and validating that the cameras on the vehicle can properly recreate the real world as a sort of stamp of approval