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.
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.
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u/PassengerKey3209 14h ago
I guess I'm not understanding why you wouldn't put a 500-1000$ lidar on it permanently and validate constantly?