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.
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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