5 ms·

What was their reasoning for not using Lidar?

Siecje 5y ago
Cost and reliability. But Elon says it is because they don't need it.
rnaud 5y ago
Too expensive + Your eyes already do the distance estimation and they are basically cameras so we can do this just as well or better.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  > Your eyes already do the distance estimation and they are basically cameras so we can do this just as well or better. This is not really accurate. Our brains do the distance estimation, and they use all kinds of tricks and contextual clues to do it, not just parallax (~2.5 inch parallax for objects more than ~100ft away isn't all that helpful). And this is the whole problem with vision-only autonomous driving - ML capabilities are nowhere near the capabilities of a human brain.
  - awal2 5y ago
    Monocular depth estimation has gotten really good recently though[0]. Not saying this one paper/method is 100% sufficient, but we're closing the gap in this one capability (depth estimation from pure vision) quite rapidly. [0] https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimation/ https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimati...
  - ajross 5y ago
    > Our brains do the distance estimation, and they use all kinds of tricks and contextual clues to do it So, first, this presentation we're talking about is literally about problems like that. Second: your brain isn't nearly as good as you think it is, it's just constructing a coherent story to fool you into thinking it is. Try this on the highway sometime as a passenger: close your eyes and recite the distances to the vehicle in front of you and the one to either side. I bet you anything a Tesla is going to do that better. Third: they pretty much cracked this already. They stopped shipping radar on US Model 3's and Y's in the spring, have shipped hundreds of thousands of them now, and there's not a hint of signal that something is off with distance measurements with the cars. My car doesn't get this perfectly (you can actually watch the animations on screen bounce around a bit as the estimates change) but I think it objectively does better than I do. Distance/Lidar framing is old news, basically. Vision works fine. The worst bugs remaining with all the FSD Beta footage on Youtube are almost entirely pathing and planning issues. The car sees its environment just fine.
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    That’s exactly what Tesla described tonight. 8 video cameras on a moving platform provide enough eyes, parallax, context, etc to build accurate 4D (!) models in real time.
- gonzo41 5y ago
  Yeah but some people suck at throwing darts. So some part of their mechanical system is bad at making judgements. Sure they can learn. But I want a 2 ton cyber truck hurtling down the freeway to KNOW how far things are away. Telsa should pivot and innovate to make lidar cheaper.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  My eyes don't get covered in salt and mud while driving down the highway. But people in California probably don't get this.
- wombatpm 5y ago
  So Elon just needs the neural acne to be working and hook up a brain in a jar to drive teslas
doctoboggan 5y ago
I think originally it was because of the cost of the equipment. Elon and team saw how expensive lidar was and thought they needed to be able to solve the problem without it. However lidar has dropped drastically in price, so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons (i.e., we claimed it was possible to get self driving without lidar in the past, so we have to continue down that path)
- dharmab 5y ago
  Also they marketed autonomous driving features as future software updates (including a discount/price hike for early/later adopters). Early adopters would be unhappy if future features required additional hardware.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Not just marketed, but sold, and for a very pretty penny.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    They upgraded hardware in the past to support FSD customers, so I’m not sure they’re completely against it. If it was, say, just a $500 decision to make it completely viable, I don’t think Tesla would hesitate. But the $500 lidars can’t do what needs to be done.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Wasn't another factor the physical size of the lidar units? Part of Tesla's schtick is making normal or even attractive looking cars (as opposed to the "alien bug" aesthetic EVs were synonymous with at the time) and that's a lot harder to do with a big lidar unit on top.
- mandeepj 5y ago
  > so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons If their engineering is driven by ego (most of us think - it is) then - are they really engineers? We all know it’s coming from Top - Elon, in this case.
Aliabid94 5y ago
Too expensive. They also removed radar because of the global chip shortage so they're all in on vision.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Too expensive. They also removed radar because of the global chip shortage so they're all in on vision. That doesn't make much sense to me. Tesla also needs chips for computer vision.
  - tim333 5y ago
    Yeah, from their talk it seemed more that it was difficult to integrate the information from the radar and visual sensors.
pcbro141 5y ago
Maybe the government's Autopilot probe will force them to change their mind on Lidar.
twiceaday 5y ago
I think Elon basically says that long term they will only need vision so they will spend all their time focusing on vision from the start. Maybe lidar will succeed first, but it will be a worse success than vision: redundant / expensive / intrusive.
babelfish 5y ago
Elon’s ego
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tw04 5y ago
I for the life of me cannot find the quote, but at some point I believe he said that if humans can judge distance/drive with nothing but vision, cars/computers will be able to as well. It was around the time he made the comment that anyone using lidar is doomed, which is much easier to dig up as it was a headline everywhere: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverless-cars-dont-need-lidar-experts-arent-so-sure/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverle... Hoping someone else has the link to the discussion of humans using nothing but vision, my google-fu is lacking this evening.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
reubenswartz 5y ago
It doesn't work well in rain, snow, fog, dust, etc. It's great in good conditions, but you either have a car that can drive only in good conditions, or you need a car that can drive safely without LIDAR. (Or someone needs to invent a better LIDAR.)
sgustard 5y ago
See, for example, Andrej's talk starting at the 6-minute mark. Lidar requires a pre-rendered detailed map of the lanes, traffic lights and obstacles. Vision can operate in any novel environment the car is not preprogrammed for and is thus more scalable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a510m7s_SVI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a510m7s_SVI

Cost and reliability. But Elon says it is because they don't need it.

Too expensive + Your eyes already do the distance estimation and they are basically cameras so we can do this just as well or better.

mdorazio 5y ago
> Your eyes already do the distance estimation and they are basically cameras so we can do this just as well or better. This is not really accurate. Our brains do the distance estimation, and they use all kinds of tricks and contextual clues to do it, not just parallax (~2.5 inch parallax for objects more than ~100ft away isn't all that helpful). And this is the whole problem with vision-only autonomous driving - ML capabilities are nowhere near the capabilities of a human brain.
- awal2 5y ago
  Monocular depth estimation has gotten really good recently though[0]. Not saying this one paper/method is 100% sufficient, but we're closing the gap in this one capability (depth estimation from pure vision) quite rapidly. [0] https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimation/ https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimati...
- ajross 5y ago
  > Our brains do the distance estimation, and they use all kinds of tricks and contextual clues to do it So, first, this presentation we're talking about is literally about problems like that. Second: your brain isn't nearly as good as you think it is, it's just constructing a coherent story to fool you into thinking it is. Try this on the highway sometime as a passenger: close your eyes and recite the distances to the vehicle in front of you and the one to either side. I bet you anything a Tesla is going to do that better. Third: they pretty much cracked this already. They stopped shipping radar on US Model 3's and Y's in the spring, have shipped hundreds of thousands of them now, and there's not a hint of signal that something is off with distance measurements with the cars. My car doesn't get this perfectly (you can actually watch the animations on screen bounce around a bit as the estimates change) but I think it objectively does better than I do. Distance/Lidar framing is old news, basically. Vision works fine. The worst bugs remaining with all the FSD Beta footage on Youtube are almost entirely pathing and planning issues. The car sees its environment just fine.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  That’s exactly what Tesla described tonight. 8 video cameras on a moving platform provide enough eyes, parallax, context, etc to build accurate 4D (!) models in real time.
gonzo41 5y ago
Yeah but some people suck at throwing darts. So some part of their mechanical system is bad at making judgements. Sure they can learn. But I want a 2 ton cyber truck hurtling down the freeway to KNOW how far things are away. Telsa should pivot and innovate to make lidar cheaper.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
My eyes don't get covered in salt and mud while driving down the highway. But people in California probably don't get this.
wombatpm 5y ago
So Elon just needs the neural acne to be working and hook up a brain in a jar to drive teslas

doctoboggan 5y ago

I think originally it was because of the cost of the equipment. Elon and team saw how expensive lidar was and thought they needed to be able to solve the problem without it. However lidar has dropped drastically in price, so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons (i.e., we claimed it was possible to get self driving without lidar in the past, so we have to continue down that path)

dharmab 5y ago
Also they marketed autonomous driving features as future software updates (including a discount/price hike for early/later adopters). Early adopters would be unhappy if future features required additional hardware.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Not just marketed, but sold, and for a very pretty penny.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  They upgraded hardware in the past to support FSD customers, so I’m not sure they’re completely against it. If it was, say, just a $500 decision to make it completely viable, I don’t think Tesla would hesitate. But the $500 lidars can’t do what needs to be done.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
Wasn't another factor the physical size of the lidar units? Part of Tesla's schtick is making normal or even attractive looking cars (as opposed to the "alien bug" aesthetic EVs were synonymous with at the time) and that's a lot harder to do with a big lidar unit on top.
mandeepj 5y ago
> so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons If their engineering is driven by ego (most of us think - it is) then - are they really engineers? We all know it’s coming from Top - Elon, in this case.

Aliabid94 5y ago

Too expensive. They also removed radar because of the global chip shortage so they're all in on vision.

tablespoon 5y ago
> Too expensive. They also removed radar because of the global chip shortage so they're all in on vision. That doesn't make much sense to me. Tesla also needs chips for computer vision.
- tim333 5y ago
  Yeah, from their talk it seemed more that it was difficult to integrate the information from the radar and visual sensors.

pcbro141 5y ago

Maybe the government's Autopilot probe will force them to change their mind on Lidar.

twiceaday 5y ago

I think Elon basically says that long term they will only need vision so they will spend all their time focusing on vision from the start. Maybe lidar will succeed first, but it will be a worse success than vision: redundant / expensive / intrusive.

babelfish 5y ago

Elon’s ego

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tw04 5y ago

I for the life of me cannot find the quote, but at some point I believe he said that if humans can judge distance/drive with nothing but vision, cars/computers will be able to as well. It was around the time he made the comment that anyone using lidar is doomed, which is much easier to dig up as it was a headline everywhere: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverless-cars-dont-need-lidar-experts-arent-so-sure/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverle... Hoping someone else has the link to the discussion of humans using nothing but vision, my google-fu is lacking this evening.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

reubenswartz 5y ago

It doesn't work well in rain, snow, fog, dust, etc. It's great in good conditions, but you either have a car that can drive only in good conditions, or you need a car that can drive safely without LIDAR. (Or someone needs to invent a better LIDAR.)

sgustard 5y ago

See, for example, Andrej's talk starting at the 6-minute mark. Lidar requires a pre-rendered detailed map of the lanes, traffic lights and obstacles. Vision can operate in any novel environment the car is not preprogrammed for and is thus more scalable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a510m7s_SVI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a510m7s_SVI