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Ask HN: Autonomous Vehicles and Lidar?
So I watched the Tesla speeches yesterday, and I was surprised by the lidar assessment by Elon Musk. The main reason why I was caught off guard is that Waymo seems to be run by some really sharp people and yet they went with lidar technology. Does anyone understand the technologies to explain why Elon believes lidar to be significantly inferior?
- julienreszka 8y agoHe said it's expensive and bulky. Enough to make it really ugly in his eyes.
- cromwellian 8y agoWhich is not a reason not to use it for a safety feature like L5 autonomy.
- julienreszka 8y agoIt's also unnecessary when you have both camera vison and radar according to him. Vision could be enough, radar just helps a bit.
- cromwellian 8y agoVision can't see through obstacles at blind intersections like side radars can.
- salty_biscuits 8y agoI'd say that the only rational reason would be cost, I can't speak for whatever elon actually thinks. There is a significant difference in product between waymo and tesla, i.e. taxi fleet versus consumer product that surely influences these decisions. Waymo are automating a paid driver away, which justifies spending more on sensors. Tesla are going for an incremental path of replacing the driver over time, so that constrains the cost of the deployed hardware. Saying lidar is inferior is just strange. If money, packaging and development budgets weren't a thing then why wouldn't you have it bristling with sensors. In fact you should probably just put beacons in the road everywhere and in every vehicle (maybe on pedestrians and bikes too), then you could solve autonomous driving with very old tech.