I rant about Elon a lot but can someone just explain to me how this keeps going on ? FSD is almost completely a solved problem by the likes of Waymo etc. Why does anyone care what Tesla is failing to do with FSD? Is this all about, "how can we invent FSD without lidar"? Why are we bothering, because cybertruck owners don't want a dorky box on top of their truck? Does their truck already not look ridiculous?
FSD isn't just about the lack of lidar, it's the only system that can be employed everywhere, without any prior special mapping, by private owners. So far, there are no other manufacturers of vehicles available in the US who are meaningfully competing in this space.
Its the only system the manufacturer is willing to let it be employed everywhere. I bet Waymo would work better everywhere but they are safety conscious and care about liability.
> I bet Waymo would work better everywhere but they are safety conscious and care about liability.
Except you'd need to map "everywhere" in high-fidelity 3D, save it somewhere in the car, and have it accessible near-realtime. The real reason Waymo can't service "everywhere" is that their approach doesn't scale.
And don't get me wrong - it's clearly a better service where it works (at this point in time), but it'll realistically only ever work in pre-mapped cities. Which of course would remove a ton of drivers and accidents, so still a win.
It's almost entirely a product/economic gamble. Basically:
"How do we get self-driving into millions of regular consumer cars without doubling the price by adding expensive sensors and redesigning the vehicle around huge chunky sensors"
Waymo is focused on Taxis for a reason because it's likely going to be unaffordable, except to people driving Lambos. But that also may be fine for a big chunk of the public who don't want to own cars (or want to rent their own as a service).
Some consumer car companies are experimenting with adding smaller LIDAR sensors like recent Volvo Ex90 which costs ~$100k. But they aren't as sophisticated as Waymo
Is LIDAR full of unobtainium? Is there some fundamental first-principles reason that the cost of LIDAR can't go down by orders of magnitude? Isn't that kind of reasoning from first principles what Elon's genius was supposed to be about, like with cost of accessing space? But apparently he thinks a spinning laser is always going to cost six figures?
No you are right, the economics of LIDAR could turn out to be insignificant over another decade of serious manufacturing investment in China. But Elon is a naive tech optimist like many of us engineers, so 5-6yrs ago he played the risky hand hoping that vision only would work out if they invested hard into it.
Back then Comma AI did the same thing choosing cheap cameras, Geohot the founder is similar to Elon being someone who prefers bucking trends and taking risks. He made a good public argument around that time for using Cameras and betting on more data = better output. And I guess Elon thought so too. It also happened to involve less hardware engineering and let them focus on software. Which is an easier decision as a business.
If it doesn’t work out I’m sure it will die a quick death and LIDAR will take over. State regulators won’t tolerate it long.
