[fshbbdssbbgdd]

The idea that Tesla would win the robotaxi race by not needing LiDAR died sometime between when LiDAR cost $100k and when it cost $1k. Now it’s just Elon being intransigent.

[aaronblohowiak]

can I get a lidar for 1k like the cars use?

[threeseed]

There is no reliable FSD implementation on any car right now so it's kind of an irrelevant question.

The more relevant one is what will happen first. Tesla figuring out how to make vision only work on their existing hardware. Or the price of LiDAR coming down.

[fragmede]

You're going to have to be more specific with your necessary specs, there are $100 360° hobbyist LIDAR sensors on Amazon.

[oarfish]

If you buy en masse maybe. We buy such devices on or few at a time for industrial use cases, and those will cost you 10k€ for the big ones, and maybe less for the smaller ones. lots of development happening in the space tho.

[pr337h4m]

Humans don’t use lidar, which clearly shows that a vision-only robotaxi is very much feasible.

[trhway]

Birds have to flap wings while our planes don't have to. There is absolutely no reason to limit self-driving cars in the same way our bodies are limited.

When it comes to AI though, humans are using biological neural net much more capable than any today's AI you can cram into a car. So, even if one accepts your premise of targeting human performance as a design guideline, more sensors is still logical at this point as way to compensate for the weaker AI.

Also, if you read how Tesla does vision it is very different from, and i think inferior to, how your eyes and brain build the 3d map of the surroundings. If one is limiting oneself to only vision, the first thing would be to try to get as good as possible that 3d mapping, and the vision seems to be among the simplest and most researched brain functions, ie. easiest to reproduce. As Tesla doesn't seem to be doing it - only may be couple years ago they only started to elicit the 3d model - i think they aren't on the shortest path to success when it comes to FSD.

[fauigerzigerk]

Humans don't act based on visual patterns alone though. We act based on our understanding of the world as a whole, including the intentions of other humans.

For instance, when we see a ball rolling onto the street, we know that there is probably a young person nearby who wants that ball back. We don't have to be trained on the visual patterns of what might happen next.

Of course AI can be trained on the visuals of high probability events like this. But the number of things that can potentially happen is far greater than the number of training examples we could ever produce.

[garyfirestorm]

Humans don’t have radar, or thermal cameras, or ultrasonic sensors, doesn’t mean planes and boats shouldn’t use those

[pelorat]

Humans eyes are an order of magnitude better than the cameras in a Tesla. Humans also have a database in their head and remembers how to behave in certain situations. FSD doesn't have any database of any kind.

[svantana]

That same argument can be used for all companies to fire all their employees. They are all human after all. Just implement all the needed features in hardware and software, done.

[p_j_w]

Humans use our brains to drive. Unless you're planning on popping an actual human brain or something that can perform equivalently into the car, you'd do well to consider more superior sensor suites.

[threeseed]

Humans continuously move their heads in three dimensions to infer depth.

Cars can't do this.

And not surprisingly the biggest problem with FSD is the accuracy of its bounding boxes.

[fragmede]

feasible? I want the thing to drive better than me, especially in the rain, fog, and the dark!

[BoorishBears]

I can't tell if this is satire, or if replicating 6 million years of evolution has legitimately become handwave material for Elon's supporters...

[IshKebab]

You mean "very much theoretically possible".

[falcor84]

s/feasible/possible/

[gniv]

Think of pile-ups. No matter how good a driver you are there are situations where you cannot prevent crashing. But lidar can.