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Incredible that this is too expense for a company like Tesla.
by juujian 2y ago
Incredible that this is too expense for a company like Tesla.
- xnickb 2y agoMoney better spent on marketing. Like that song about "him having a plan". After all car sales don't drive the stock market. Public opinion does.
- dhosek 2y agoI’ll bet a lot of Tesla investors are wishing neither of those applied these days.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- derac 2y agoThe requirements for electronics in a car are pretty extreme (temp, durability), not that I disagree, but it's not apples to oranges.
- cosmie 2y agoThat hasn’t stopped Tesla before. They have a track record of treating automotive-grade quality standards as optional when doing electronics sourcing[1]. As the article notes, Tesla conveniently “fixed” their thermals and durability issue that caused by inventing a feature called cabin overheat protection and marketing it as for people/animals overheating and not for the non-automotive-spec electronics in the cabin. If you can’t bring auto quality electronics to the car, just change the car so it avoids standard auto thermal conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows-why-automotive-grade-matters https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
- daniel_iversen 2y agoDon’t they constantly get tested as the safest car in the world? I saw it years ago in some American news and the first google result is from New Zealand last year https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/tesla-model-y-is-the-safest-car-of-2024-aa-driven-coty/#:~:text=The%20AA%20Safest%20cars%20for,its%20overall%20score%20of%2091.50. https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/tesla-model-y-is-the-s...
- lucb1e 2y ago> requirements for electronics in a car are pretty extreme + the salaries of everyone working on that stuff, not just assembly but also writing the code to support it Not that I disagree, either: at the volumes that a modest car company puts out, I'd assume it's easily worth the, say, 3% cost premium on the car's total price to have something that can actually see things you don't see and thus makes a safer system. It might even reduce costs by having lower requirements for the vision hardware and software, but that's not something I can know. There's a lot of unknowns here that I think mean we can't really do a good comparison indeed
- theoryofx 2y agoThe lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable and far more expensive.
- jsiepkes 2y agoAt this point having "something" would probably even beat having nothing. I guess it's simply a big numbers thing. If you sell lots of cars, shaving a couple of hundred dollars of each car adds up.
- xbmcuser 2y agoNot by that much current generation hardware for cars is $500-700. And some of the oem expect to bring it price down below $200 with the next generation equipment. Now that BYD put self driving in almost every car it will supercharge adoption and lidar prices might drop even a lot faster with economies of scale.
- jpk 2y agoMy (tenuous) understanding is that the challenge with lidar isn't necessarily the cost of the sensor(s) but the bandwidth and compute required to meaningfully process the point cloud the sensors produce, at a rate/latency acceptable for driving. So the sensors themselves can be a few hundred bucks but what other parts of the system also need to be more expensive?
- fragmede 2y agoWhat is the cost of a human life worth? edit: seriously, a $4,000 sensor and an extra, say, $3,000 for an upgraded computer module so your car can drive itself is just too much too afford?
- rogerrogerr 2y agoValuation of a statistical life is $5-10M, depending on who you ask[0]. So it’s too much to afford, or at least not singularly justifiable, unless more than 1 out of every 2000 cars kills someone in a way that would be prevented by LIDAR. 0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1098301521002138 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109830152...
- dx4100 2y agoThis isn't really something you'd ship in a car though. It's cool that we have such a rich ecosystem of devices that this can be made "off-the-shelf" - but for production use in a car? Not really practical.
- nisa 2y agoWhat is the HN opinion on Tesla skipping lidar? Having spent some time with computer vision in university I think it's insane to skip it - sure stereo reconstruction is powerful but lighting conditions have such an impact on results that having some robust depth data feels like a no-brainer and skipping it feels like malignant neglect.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 2y agoI can only speak for myself, but I work on this stuff in this industry: Tesla’s choice is asinine at this point. It’s one thing to claim cameras only and find that won’t work and pivot, but they are so dug in that they can’t admit they were wrong and won’t do so. So it’s asinine now.
- yndoendo 2y agoWhat do yes call a person that has only visual sensory? Disabled. Humans have sight, touch, taste, sound, smell, and vascular sensory. Only a portion of systems used in self drive automation.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoWell I haven't used taste nor smell in my driving yet. Touch only as far as vibration and steering wheel torque (both not difficult to sense with electronics). That narrows it down a bit.
- wileydragonfly 2y agoNever once smelled or tasted something funny when driving and realize you’d better pull over… like… right now? I have.
- acka 2y agoHumans also have a vestibular system[1] and proprioception[2], which I think are very important in making judgments about safe following distance, car handling, and road conditions, in particular in adverse conditions like strong side winds and slippery or icy roads, which may not always be visually obvious. While some of this can be handled by an IMU, I think humans still have a strong advantage in fusing their various sensory inputs, thanks to millions of years of evolution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
- dreamcompiler 2y agoKarpathy addressed this question at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33397093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33397093 Of course he was working for Tesla back then. His opinions might be different today given that Elon is no longer signing his paycheck.
- jdminhbg 2y agoHis opinions aren’t much different in interviews I’ve heard since, although of course that doesn’t mean he’s completely unbiased now.
- godelski 2y agoWhat a weird argument by Karpathy. He has a degree in physics. How does this dude not know that radar can see things not possible through camera vision. That argument there doesn't make any sense. That there's supply chains and things break and this makes it unsafe? Well that's true for every single bolt, every nut, ever little thing. I understand a drive to simplicity but you can't just throw fancy words in there like entropy while ignoring the literal physics that says camera + radar is less entropy than camera no radar. There is literally more (unique!) information available to you!
- qgin 2y agoThey wanted to sell “self driving ready” packages 10 years ago, when LiDAR actually was expensive. So at the time, they had to make big deal about LiDAR being unnecessary.
- mcny 2y agoBut now it has come down in price reportedly by more than a factor of ten so at some point a logical person would revisit that decision
- avsegal 2y agoThis isn't too expensive for Tesla, it's just nowhere near the level needed for an AV. Automotive lidars are 10-20 scans/second, rated for dust/rain/etc, and need a range of at least 50 meters, but 100-200 is more ideal. Not a fan of Tesla's approach, but I wanted to clarify that it's not like they can just use a lidar like this and call it a day. The specs are completely different and that really drives up cost!
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoMaybe something like this: https://linuxgizmos.com/sony-introduces-as-dt1-described-as-the-worlds-smallest-and-lightest-precision-lidar-sensor/ https://linuxgizmos.com/sony-introduces-as-dt1-described-as-... > With a horizontal field of view of 30° or more and 576 ranging points (24 x 24), the sensor supports a frame rate of 30 fps, with a reduced 15 fps mode for maximum distance operation.
- firesteelrain 2y agoDo we really need LiDAR in a Tesla? I own a Chevy Trax and it has LKAS and ADAS. Not even using LiDAR just sensor fusion with camera and radar. It’s a cheap car too. It’s car assisted driving. I have driven a Tesla once but not with the added feature.