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Elon Musk takes huge ambitious gambles. In this case the gamble is that good AI and the huge amount of training data from the Tesla fleet will win out over lida

Elon Musk takes huge ambitious gambles. In this case the gamble is that good AI and the huge amount of training data from the Tesla fleet will win out over lidar. It is a gamble. But if you look at other gambles SpaceX and Tesla have taken, the context changes a bit. Everyone talks about innovation, but innovating is actually a gamble.

dmix 8y ago
As part of that risk I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst Killing a bunch of people or jamming up traffic is a quick way to going out of business in the car industry, so there's far more incentives to wait for the real thing. It's not like an optional $2-3k add-on (to a $40-60k product) that turns out to be useless would be a game changer. People will just not trust them to pre-invest and wait to buy it when it's available.
- taneq 8y ago
  > I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst. Uhh... I love Tesla but current Autopilot, that they have released, is definitely not what I'd call "public-ready".[1] And they agree, which is why it's locked behind clickwrap disclaimers and warnings and described as a "beta". Don't get me wrong, I want one. But I wouldn't want my mum to use Autopilot. [1] It can't see stopped cars on the highway (!) and gets confused by freeway exits, sometimes driving directly at the gore point. Worse, this second issue was fixed and is now happening again, indicating a critical lack of regression testing. (!!)
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Speaking from a code archeology ;) perspective, there's another explanation: the previous fix has addressed the proximate problem, but also unearthed a deeper problem, which may or may not be fixable.
jfoster 8y ago
I don't think it's that he saw LiDAR as technically inferior, just expensive. They needed an approach that they could put in place with minimal unit cost.

dmix 8y ago

As part of that risk I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst Killing a bunch of people or jamming up traffic is a quick way to going out of business in the car industry, so there's far more incentives to wait for the real thing. It's not like an optional $2-3k add-on (to a $40-60k product) that turns out to be useless would be a game changer. People will just not trust them to pre-invest and wait to buy it when it's available.

taneq 8y ago
> I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst. Uhh... I love Tesla but current Autopilot, that they have released, is definitely not what I'd call "public-ready".[1] And they agree, which is why it's locked behind clickwrap disclaimers and warnings and described as a "beta". Don't get me wrong, I want one. But I wouldn't want my mum to use Autopilot. [1] It can't see stopped cars on the highway (!) and gets confused by freeway exits, sometimes driving directly at the gore point. Worse, this second issue was fixed and is now happening again, indicating a critical lack of regression testing. (!!)
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Speaking from a code archeology ;) perspective, there's another explanation: the previous fix has addressed the proximate problem, but also unearthed a deeper problem, which may or may not be fixable.

jfoster 8y ago

I don't think it's that he saw LiDAR as technically inferior, just expensive. They needed an approach that they could put in place with minimal unit cost.