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> Nobody has demonstrated L 4/5, so all positions are ideological ones. Er, Waymo is doing a commercial L4 service. Cruise is doing pretty good. So no, they ar
by ra7 6y ago
> Nobody has demonstrated L 4/5, so all positions are ideological ones.
Er, Waymo is doing a commercial L4 service. Cruise is doing pretty good. So no, they are not all "ideological positions". Also, no one except Tesla is targeting L5 which should tell you what the realistic goal is.
> You could also argue that because LIDAR is expensive, it's hard to get billions of miles of training from LIDAR-equipped vehicles.
LIDAR is expensive was a good argument in 2015. The prices are plummeting. Waymo reduced their top of line LIDAR cost from $75,000 to under $7500 and this was in 2017. They sell their short range LIDAR (Honeycomb) for under $1000. And their 5th gen hardware costs even less now (my guess is under $5000). Which way do you think the price will go as a number of companies mass produce it?
The fact is Elon made a bad bet a few years ago and didn't anticipate how much the cost would drop. Now Tesla is stuck with his ideological stance trying make a pipe dream work.
- fastball 6y agoFrom what I've seen of Tesla's FSD beta, it could very probably be T4 if Tesla geofenced certain areas and worked out any particular kinks manually. T4 with geofencing is a far cry from T4 on any road anywhere. That last sentence seems like a strange one. "Stuck" would be if you massively invested in LIDAR and it didn't help. If no-LIDAR FSD is not as feasible as Tesla hopes, they can just... use LIDAR. And they'll arguably be in a better position tahn early adopters because they weren't investing when the hardware was expensive.
- ra7 6y ago> Waymo's commercial service is L5, no? Waymo is L4. L5 means it can take you to your favorite campground (anywhere) and handle any scenario. Waymo says it’s not a realistic goal. But yes, the normal levels are not very well defined. > If no-LIDAR FSD is not as feasible as Tesla hopes, they can just... use LIDAR. Tesla has promised the current fleet has all the necessary hardware to make it work (they couldn’t possibly know this at the time). So they can’t walk back on that without incurring huge costs for retrofitting existing cars and development cost for overhauling their tech stack. Meanwhile, they would’ve sunk money and time pursuing a much harder problem. If they had used additional sensors from the beginning, they could’ve provided much more value to their paying customers by now. Edit: Just saw your edit. > From what I've seen of Tesla's FSD beta, it could very probably be T4 if Tesla geofenced certain areas and worked out any particular kinks manually. Yes, that’s what they should have done. Make realistic promises. I mean, you’re talking about making it work on _any_ road, _any_ intersection and _any_ scenario. Without additional sensors and mapping, it’s seems pretty unlikely (if not impossible) to me. Certainly given the timeframe Elon Musk promises.